The new intolerance?

I went this evening to a very interesting lecture by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.

His title was ‘the Church in public life’ and he used it to make a powerful claim for the right of people of faith to contribute to public debate.

He started by acknowledging that the Catholic church had had a far from innocent history in using the instruments of the state to enforce Catholicism and said he thought that the statement by the Vatican II Council in the 1960s that it would not do so again was one of the great steps forward in this area of the last century.

But he went on to make a very strong case for the problems of the trend towards enshrining secularism, which is in danger of being what he called ‘the new intolerance’. British public debate likes to be ‘neutral’ on the question of religion in public life – but that too often that means excluding a religious view, which is not neutral but aggressively secularist – and so denies the rights of religious people to have their views as much as it does the right of anyone else to be non-religious. And as he pointed out, freedom of religion doesn’t just mean the right not to be persecuted for your religion (which as he pointed out, Catholics and Jews were in Britain until remarkably recently), but the freedom to live out those principles in your life – as long as it doesn’t harm others. And he was right too that British Christians are often somewhat shy and, well, British in asserting that right – in comparison to the ‘rigeur’ of French Catholicism he thought the British version somewhat ‘mushy’!

I think there’s a lot in what he said. Public debate is often aggressively anti-religious, seeking to exclude religion from any form of contribution to the public sphere. The whole British political scene seems to follow Alistair Campbell, as he put it, in saying that “we don’t do God”. But as he said, the purpose of politics is a moral one, and one might think it reasonable for people of faith to contribute to it from the perspective of that faith. He didn’t say this but I think a lot of the time many people find it very difficult to get beyond the quite obviously awful things that organised religions have done to people in the past – we are this week remembering some of the things that the Church of England’s missionary outgrowths did in slavery, and the Catholic church has some awful domination and exploitation in its past. But since both those denominations now share the general modern world’s view on those past atrocities, do we not think that they might have something to contribute?

Cardinal O’Connor did point out that Roman Catholic schools – which do accept non-Catholics and non-Christians – are some of the most popular and successful that exist. And there is a lot that the Churches do bring to society - as an excellent debate in the House of Lords last year showed. But as he said, society can’t ‘have the fruits without the roots’ – there is a reason why Church schools are successful, and if we think their ethos has something acceptable, popular and successful to contribute to children’s education, do we not think that this could be contributed to society at large.

It was an interesting evening, with plenty of Parliamentarians and other prominent figures present – even if most if them shall we say had their most active days behind them. But not everyone seemed to share his view – certainly the elderly couple next to me didn’t seem to share the Cardinal’s views on liberal tolerance when it came to questions being asked, talking through most of them complaining about what nonsense the question was, it wasn’t a question, and couldn’t they just generally shut up now!

I was very glad I went. I think he’s right that British politics is often aggressively anti-religious, and while the rights of atheists, agnostics, humanists and everyone else obviously are entitled to be respected, those with religious beliefs are also entitled to have the freedom and space to live out their principles in their public lives, and to contribute to the public debate.