I’ve been inspired to write this article because I’m sick of Dogmatic Christians like Alan Craig blaming the ’secular liberal elite’ for the marginalisation of Christianity in Britain today. Frankly if you want to know why Christian values are been marginalised, you need to look at Christianity not secular liberals like myself. (I don’t qualify for the “elite” label). So anyway, I’d like to write this piece in defence of secular politics and explain clearly why religion has no place in government.
Religion is a set of beliefs and practices, often centred upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, (at least that’s the best definition I could find on Google.) Its not based on hard fact or even sound reasoning, its based on faith. Now this is a shaky platform upon which to base anything, but add to this the belief of religious adherents that their particular articles of faith are inerrant, and their view becomes unquestionable.
Logic, reasoning, well argued points, none cannot penetrate this wall of denial. This is a dangerous mix for a politician. OK no politician likes to admit they got it wrong, ‘U-turns’ are savaged by the press, but the secular politician is open to new information. The Fundamentalist Religious politician, goes back to his good book or scripture to look for answers which offers no solutions to new problems and new circumstances because it hasn’t been updated for the better part of two millennia.
“When the facts change, I change my opinion” Or so goes the quote and that’s a generous as we can be to secular politicians who backtrack on a bad policy decision. This doesn’t seem to apply to religious politicians who still believe in creationism or that teaching abstinence prevents teenage pregnancy, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
So we’ve established that people with fundamentalist beliefs are not exactly brilliant at reacting to new information and we need governments that are adaptive to the changing needs of society and the modern world. But what about the marginalisation of Christianity?
I started the article by saying how tired I was of hearing people like Alan Craig blaming the ’secular liberal elite’ for the marginalisation of Christianity. The argument espoused by fundamentalist Christians seems to be that secularism some how oppresses religion. It doesn’t. Secularism is apathetic towards religion, it does it no favours but neither does it interfere with religious practice or worship in society.
Christianity’s main beef is that it no-longer has the strangle hold on society it once had, politically it has been marginalised because when it had power, it used that power to impose its will and beliefs on others and marginalised other denominations. This is true of all religions, just look at Islam in Iran or Judaism in Israel, those belonging to the majority faith are protected yet those belonging to minorities are marginalised and oppressed.
Secularism however treats all faiths with equal disinterest. This gives all religions an equal footing, they can all build their churches, mosques & temples, they can preach, they can worship, they can go out onto the streets and hand out leaflets. They just don’t get any help from the government to do it.
An an atheist this suits me fine as I don’t want to see the state promote any religion and I certainly don’t want my taxes spent indoctrinating others. Equally I suspect Jews wouldn’t want to see their money spent promoting Islam, or vice versa.
Religious people complain of having secular values imposed upon them, most notably I guess this is their objection to legalisation of abortion. Or the push for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia to be made available to the terminally ill. But as I keep pointing out to people of faith. Just because abortion is legal doesn’t mean you have to go and get one!
The option is there for people who don’t share your belief in the soul and who, backed by the opinion of medical science, believe that sentience is not something achieved until well into the foetal stages of the pregnancy. If your religion tells you this is something you shouldn’t do, then secularism doesn’t force you to go against your faith.
Conversely if we had religious values promoted in politics, then this option would be lost to everyone.
Another example is where religious values from different faiths conflict. For example, I’ve always wondered how you could hold a Christian Mass in an Islamic country. Wine is central to the Eucharist, yet most Islamic states are dry. Some puritanically so. To me it makes more sense, for a government to adopt a secular approach and make no prohibition on alcohol and should Muslims choose to abstain, then good on them. At least the vicar can still get tipsy on the communion wine.
Secularism allows religion space to express itself, it just doesn’t help religions promote their cause. And this is real complaint that political-religious groups have. They worry that their flock is not strong enough to resist temptation so they want to overly sanitise society, removing the temptations, criminalising ’sin’ and ultimately attaining cultural dominance over other faiths.
But that isn’t the government’s problem, if you are not a strong enough individual to abide by the moral teachings of your faith then you have failed yourself, society hasn’t failed you.
Secularism recognises that religious values are limited to the individuals of that faith, outside of it people have different moral codes. And people must be free to move between religions or out of them at their own will, to reject the values of a particular faith in favour of a new morality.
Ultimately though secularism is religion’s best friend. The secular USA is one of the most religiously adherent countries in the western world. And secularism also prevents the oppression of religious minorities or those which have fallen out of favour. Remember history class and Tudor England? There was huge political upheaval as Britain swung back and forth from being a Catholic to Protestant country. One oppressed the other. The oppressed denomination systematically changing with each new monarch. In the end Protestantism won out and its taken hundreds of years to gain Catholic emancipation. Yet anti-Catholic bias (or fear of it) hasn’t totally been removed from Britain. We had a wonderful example of this recently with Tony Blair’s conversion to Rome just days after leaving office. Aparently he felt unable to convert to Catholicism whilst still in office. Religion represses Religion.
And here in lies the beauty of secularism, its the perfect referee, it gives each faith equal footing and promotes none, but what really grinds at religion is that without state sponsorship, its reach is diminished. Its ability to indoctrinate school children from their earliest age is lost. And its ability to control the actions and behaviour of everyone else in society is removed.
So the next time you hear someone complaining about secularism marginalising religious groups, remember that they are just pissed that they can’t tell you what to do or think any more.
