For many years, I used to give an annual lecture to theology students training to be Anglican priests at Trinity College, Bristol, on “Why I am an atheist”. One perennial response from the students was that “without belief in God, atheists can simply pick and choose which values to accept and which to reject”.
To which I would reply: “Yes, that’s true, though we don’t pick and choose values simply as individuals, or as we might pick and choose a shirt or a car, but rather as part of communities, societies, cultures, histories and traditions, and in accordance with our foundational beliefs.” But, I would add, “you as believers have to pick and choose your values, too”.
In the past, thousands of witches were burned and millions of people enslaved because it was believed that God had sanctified such practices. Today, virtually no Christian thinks that. The shift has come about not because God has changed his mind but because humans have. As societies develop, so moral values change. As social attitudes to slavery and witch-burnings transformed, so Christians came to interpret the Bible differently – which is another way of saying that they chose different values as making more sense within their religious perspective.
Today, some Christians, reading passages in Leviticus and in Paul, think that the Bible justifies the execution of gay people. Others, reading the same Bible differently, celebrate the ordination of gay priests. Similarly with controversies from abortion rights to the treatment of asylum seekers. Each side reads the Bible as they wish to fit into their own moral framework. God is not the designer of that framework but comes to be its justification. And what is true of Christians is true also of Muslims, Jews, Hindus and believers in every other faith.
I was reminded of those students as the row developed last week over justice secretary’s Shabana Mahmood’s opposition to Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill and the former lord chancellor Lord Falconer’s curt dismissal of it. “As a Muslim, I have an unshakeable belief in the sanctity and the value of human life”, Mahmood had told the Times in October, adding: “I don’t think that death is a service that the state should be offering.” Those sentiments returned to the headlines after a letter she wrote to her constituents, expressing her opposition to the proposed law, was made public. “I respect… [the] religious and spiritual reasons why she believes completely in the sanctity of life,” Falconer told Sky News. “But I do not think it should be imposed on everybody else.”
On Friday, parliament gave a second reading to Leadbeater’s bill, beginning the process of turning it into law. Falconer’s comments, though, and the debate around them, were directed not simply at this particular debate but expressed a deeper unease about the role of religion in public life and the boundaries of a secular society.
For many of its advocates, secularism requires religion to be excluded from the public sphere and from political debate. This, ironically, is an understanding of secularism not so different from that of the theology students, though viewed from the opposite end of the telescope. The trainee priests worried about secularism because they feared religion might lose its public voice. And what Falconer feared, they insisted was true: that their faith determined their moral and political views.
The reality is more complicated. Certainly, the “as a” prefix to an argument (“as a Muslim”, “as a Jew”, “as a woman”, “as a white American”, I believe that…) is one of the abominations of contemporary politics. Not only does it shut off debate by insisting that one’s identity or faith defines the limits of one’s views, it also suggests that Muslims, Jews, women, white Americans and every other identity group have, or should have, a particular set of values by virtue of their identity, a crass and reactionary sentiment.
Insisting that God mandates particular political and moral views, and so makes them unchallengeable, is equally to close off political debate and to ignore the variety of perspectives within any faith. Yet, as I suggested to my theology students, rather than their faith determining their values and politics, it is often the case that their moral and political outlook shape how they interpret religious texts or what they imagine to be God’s will. We can see this in the debate over assisted dying itself. Mahmood, a Muslim, opposed the bill, as did many Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus.
But many believers– possibly the majority according to some polls – disagree, even if they are more likely to oppose the measure than those who are not religious. The same God can speak to many moral perspectives. Mahmood is wrong to suggest that “as a Muslim” she can hold only one view on this or any other debate. Falconer is wrong to suggest that for Mahmood to express her faith-based view in a democratic debate is to “impose it on everyone else”.
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Secularism is not a space from which religion must be excluded but one in which the state neither affirms nor denies any religion, and so one in which no religion is granted privilege over any another, nor over any secular philosophy or ideology. A truly secular Britain would have no established church, no state-funded religious schools and no blasphemy laws.
Last Wednesday, during PMQs, Birmingham MP Tahir Ali asked the prime minister to introduce measures “to prohibit desecration of religious texts and targeted vilification of all the prophets of the Abrahamic faiths”. Keir Starmer’s answer should have been a simple “No. It is not the job of the state in a secular society to enforce respect of religious texts and prophets, whether of the Abrahamic faiths or not.” Instead, he replied, “We are… committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms”, refusing to take a stand on the issue or to reject outright Ali’s proposal for the reintroduction of blasphemy restrictions.
But if a truly secular Britain would have no blasphemy laws (nor “offence” laws acting as surrogates for blasphemy laws), it would also have no issue with religious believers expressing their views in the public sphere. We need to defend secular space from religions demanding privileges. We need also to protect freedom of conscience and religious expression from an over-zealous secular state.
