Will Heaven is an English and Philosophy undergraduate at York University. Religion is far from disappearing in British culture and politics and Will argues how in a tolerant society we should not fear its presence, rather utilise it as a positive force.

Ours is the most profane generation Britain has ever seen. We are far more likely to binge-drink than to pray, far more likely to go to the gym on a Sunday morning than to church. Our society no longer demands a pretence of religiosity, and most of the New Generation would very openly admit to being atheist, or at least agnostic. But ‘religion’, or as Dawkins would argue, ‘the root of all evil’, still dominates huge areas of political discourse. Realistically, for example, the threat of Islamic terrorism is the biggest danger facing our national security. The political debate that surrounds abortion is still massively controversial for Roman Catholics (and, for the record, I am one). Laws concerning religious freedoms are among the most fiercely debated on both private and public levels. So in an apparently ‘secular’ country, why do so many people seem to care about matters relating to God? It has been assumed in politics, especially since the 60s, that God is very much dead. But looking at the evidence, I’m not so sure He is.

The 2001 Census saw Britain declare itself as explicitly Christian; a surprising 71.75% of people in England and Wales to be exact, with Islam coming second at just 2.97%. But, contrary to the situation in the US, we do not play God politics here. George Bush’s hard-line Christian evangelism would not wash in the UK, and if Ruth Kelly began passing on the teachings of her Opus Dei mentor she wouldn’t last long on the political scene. We can just about cope with the soft Anglicanism of the Tories, but that is about as far as it goes. As Alistair Campbell famously stated when Communications Director for New Labour, ‘we don’t do God.’

Tony Blair himself is a prime example of this. He has very recently converted to Catholicism, but has never been comfortable enough to discuss this in public. In an interview the former Prime Minister contrasted the UK’s political world to that of the US, complaining that “it’s difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system.” He lamented that, “if you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘yes, that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.” In other words, there seems to be an inherent fear in the UK that politics and religion don’t mix, and a belief that if they did, the results would be catastrophic - the English equivalent of Taleban-imposed Sharia.

So, should we re-evaluate the secularity of our political system? Many religious believers think ‘yes’; most secularists think ‘no, absolutely not.’ The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, spoke out in 2005 shortly before the general election saying that abortion should be a issue that helped to decide which way Catholics voted. More recently, Tony Blair was attacked by Damian Thompson, the editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald newspaper, for being ‘something worse’ than a nutter; a hypocrite. ‘Catholics have not forgotten that the former PM, although claiming to oppose abortion, consistently voted with hard-line pro-abortionists at a time when he was already attending Mass. This they regard as sickening hypocrisy.’

Evidently then, although politics and politicians don’t ‘do’ religion, religion very much does politics. Is this something to fear? If I lived in the US I would say, definitely, yes. When politicians reject scientific fact and embrace a belief that involves a radical, myth-based 6,000 year history of our planet we should not only question their sanity, but their overall ability to make decisions. If a politician cannot make sense of science-based evidence and, for example, won’t except the tenets of evolutionary theory, they should be given the boot. But then that reflects our society - as a country we are, for whatever sociological reasons, less susceptible to religious fanaticism than our counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. (According to a Harris Poll, more Americans believe in the literal existence of Hell than in evolution.) Our religious beliefs, thank God, tend to be held within the framework of post-enlightenment science. In other words, when it comes to religion, British people are less narrow-minded than Americans.

The US bible-bashers seem to get all the stick - mostly, as it happens, from Richard Dawkins. They are an easy target - loud, irrational and keen to evangelise in a way that makes most British people cringe with embarrassment. But the majority of the world’s creationists are, you will probably not have been told, Muslim. Elsewhere, religious leaders seem to be causing huge damage, sometimes on a humanitarian level. The Pope, most people think, should radically alter his position on the use of condoms in Africa in order to save lives and help ease the suffering of millions.

All these, however, are instances where religion has a direct impact on politics. In Britain there is not much danger of this happening. We are no nearer a creationist Prime Minister than we are to a Muslim one. Why, then, do we fear politicians who talk openly about their beliefs, even though we know they cannot let it impact on their political action? You could argue that it is healthy scepticism - we purposefully don’t ‘do’ God because we don’t want to end up like the US, or Iran or even Pakistan.

But the New Generation should strive for real religious tolerance. True tolerance based on understanding - so we shouldn’t pretend that religion cannot be harmful. It can, and scepticism is often a positive force. Islam, Christianity, even the cuddly world of Buddhism should not be allowed to mingle with politics. And we should be wary of politicians that say they should - tolerance does not have to be naïve. But, importantly, we should be aware that an overtly religious politician does not have to viewed as a threat - not all of them are nutters.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.