The Phantom Laurence points me to this excellent article by Francis Beckett about faith schools.

In a weird cosmic juxtaposition last night (which, were I of lesser intelligence I might attribute to a Higher Power), after watching Munich on DVD I found myself watching the tail end of Jonathan Sacks’ BBC programme about Rosh Hashanah.

It was basically propaganda about the need for faith schools, in which he visited a Jewish school in Birmingham which accepts pupils from all denominations. All very nice and fluffy, except that this is the exact same Chief Rabbi who said the following about government proposals to ensure that at least 25% of pupils in a faith school must come from a different religion or no religion at all:

“A measure this fundamental, undertaken at such speed without adequate consultation with the parties affected, is bad legislation, bad government and bad governance. It was created in haste and will be regretted at leisure.”

As Beckett acknowledges, Sacks’ intervention - along with the Catholic church’s - proved successful.

So, here we have a man lauding the power of faith schools to bring people together, while actively fighting legislation that would actually mean it happened. On a programme about a religious festival; some would call that politicisation. And he uses license fee payers’ money to indulge in this wanton hypocrisy. Doncha just love it?

A jokey blog post of mine on Friday about a dog with two noses, questioning whether it counted as “intelligent design” resulted in the furious response “Are you planning to purge the Lib Dems of Christians?”

This rather extreme reaction is remarkably common. An article posted on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website yesterday by one Gordon Lynch makes some unflattering comparisons between Richard Dawkins and a TV evangelist on the rather tenuous grounds that he uses the medium of TV to promote his agenda. I’m not convinced his argument holds up to much scrutiny. Dawkins is promoting ideas; other than encouraging them to buy his book, he isn’t seeking to get his supporters to donate money or tithe themselves. He isn’t claiming any methaphysical authority, or suggesting that people who fail to heed his words are condemned to hell, literally or metaphorically.

As I’ve said before, I (still) haven’t got round to reading Dawkins’ latest book. In his previous books however, he has an unfortunate tendency to set up straw men and easy targets. I’m sceptical of the merits of condemning “religion” rather than looking at the power and potential abuse of ideas more generally (on which point I will lament the passing away of Norman Cohn this week, and point you to an interesting article by Peter Thompson). But his knack of inspiring the most ridiculous venom against him is quite remarkable. You may recall my response to an article by Stuart Jeffries a few months ago in which he and his interviewees explicitly drew parallels between Islamist terrorists and support for secularism as if they were morally equivalent. We were expected to swallow the idea that militant secularism, which at its most extreme means calling for things like burkhas being banned from public places, was equivalent to flying a passenger liner into a skyscraper. Gordon Lynch, similarly, wonders aloud about a “future conflict between militant atheists and religious conservatives.” The unnamed horrors that these militant atheists might commit are of course unspecified, but Lynch goes on to warn that “the rise of the atheist movement he symbolises could do more than the alternative spiritualities he disparages to threaten the fragile cohesion of our societies.” In short, we mustn’t yearn for rationalism as it might lead to irrationalism.

It’s a serious charge that surely needs to be backed up by evidence, but of course it is just a thought that is left hanging at the end of an article. Of course, you could write that about anything and anyone. While, particularly coming from an academic, it has the veneer of serious intellectual inquiry and impartiality, it is a smear pure and simple. Every time I read a silly article like this, replete with vague, unspecified innuendo about the possible consequences of what might happen if atheism becomes too popular, I become more convinced than ever that Dawkins and co must be onto something. The apologists for religion protest too much.

Presumably Sentamu and Williams will be condemning this:

Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied in Istanbul in support of secularism in Turkey, amid a row over a vote for the country’s next president.

The protesters are concerned that the ruling party’s candidate for the post remains loyal to his Islamic roots.

The candidate, Abdullah Gul, earlier said he would not quit despite growing criticism from opponents and the army.

Rowan Williams, like so many other public figures over the past couple of months, sought to co-opt William Wilberforce in a speech yesterday. In an act of stupendous logical contortion, he uses Wilberforce, an elected politician (albeit in an era of rotten boroughs) as a tool for his argument against reforming the House of Lords:

“It is important in our current debates about the Upper House of Parliament we take seriously the role of such a House in offering channels of independent moral comment”

I wouldn’t dream of claiming that Wilberforce was a secularist, but it has to be pointed out that it wasn’t the Bishops in the Lords that lead the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. And they aren’t providing moral leadership in the House of Lords today - indeed, they barely deign to show up at all. There may well be a decline of moral leadership in modern politics today, but that is helped, not hindered, by a church which desperately clings to unelected and unaccountable power and evangelises about the desirability for us to adopt an Anglican version of the caliphate. In Iran, the state (similarly lead by old men with improbable beards) religion offers bucketloads of moral guidance. Williams has yet to offer a clear reason why we should want to adopt this as our model for governance.

In truth however, I pity Rowan Williams. He seems a shadow of his former self. He has tried to mediate in the civil war going on inside the Anglican church and in striving to retain unity has ended up siding with the swivel-eyed loons who want to plunge it into medievalism.

Three years ago, I blogged about his favourable review of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The possibility of him writing something so conciliatory now is inconceivable. The reason for this appears to be, in part, that he is constantly looking over his shoulder at John Sentamu. More media-savvy, instinctively populist and less burdened with the constraints of nuance (as well as uncannily resembling Graham Norton), Sentamu has managed to turn his role as Archbishop of York into something that looks rather a lot like Prince of Wales. He’s been running a campaign for the top job almost since he got promoted, and Williams must surely be all too aware of this. Capitalising on Williams’ fear about a schism, Sentamu has been frogmarching him onto his own, somewhat demented and very dangerous territory.

The political truism “Only Nixon could go to China” sadly also works in reverse. A liberal, Williams has presided over a period of sustained de-secularism for the Church of England. We were better off with Carey at the helm. While homophobic and morally conservative, Carey was constrained by the more liberal elements in the Church to not step out of line.

If the Church of England wants to pursue a strategy of moralistic activism, it is crucial that it does so separate from the state. It can’t have it both ways. The fact that it seeks to have it so suggests an insecurity.

Equally, if it does seek to pontificate about morality, it needs to look inward. Morality, for the Church, is increasingly being define in narrow evangelical and Catholic terms: fundamentally, it’s about sex first, everything else second. Incite protests about gay rights, and make the occasional squeak about poverty to keep the lefties happy.

I find it deeply ironic that the Government is introducing something which it calls Islamic Finance at the same time that Christians are calling for more adherence to the Bible. Islamic Finance would be better termed Semitic Finance. It’s based on the Bible’s explicit ban on usury. I happen to think the Bible has a good point on this one. Yet have you heard a single Church leader point this out? In the run up to Easter, how many times did you hear a leader of the Church of England - one of the largest corporations in the UK - recount the story about Jesus throwing the money lenders out of the temple?

When did you last hear a Christian go on about Jubilee? 2000 I suspect. Yet Jubilee is supposed to happen every 7 years, not every 2,000. And it is supposed to apply to everyone, not just distant, convenient Africans. Next time you hear politicians from the Church of England pontificate about their importance as moral agents in society, ask them why they interpret this to mean getting into a lather about homosexuality, but not economic policy.

Each week, the Guardian provides a religious person a written version of Radio 4’s Thought for the Day in the form of its column Face to faith. This week it is the turn of a chap called Nicholas Buxton, who has written on the familiar subject of ‘secularists just follow a different kind of religion.’

Now, I don’t disagree that some secularist ideologues tend to evangelise with religious fervour. But where these examples of such religiosity creep in it tends to be in spite of whatever ideology, school or theory they are espousing, not because of it. Darwin is not responsible for the drivel of Herbert Spencer. Marx, famously, was not a Marxist. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. This is a stark contrast to a religious faith, it’s very raison d’etre is living your life with a wholly certain worldview.

More to the point, Buxton appears to lump ideologies, schools and theories in together. Marxism is a political ideology. Freudianism is a school. Darwinism is a theory. The latter is rooted in the scientific method, and is only a theory because it is, by definition, falsifiable. So if people are clinging to it in a faith-like way, they are rejecting the scientific method. Care to name some names?

Marxism and psychoanalysis aren’t, so far as I am aware, even that. They are approaches that people use from time to time to develop hypotheses, but what’s important is whether those hypotheses have validity, not the ideology or school itself. Both have tended to fall in or out of fashion over the years depending on their ability to explain the world. By contrast, you don’t find evangelical academics publishing papers on how Adam’s fall from grace explains why anti-social behaviour has become endemic in post-industrial western countries. Theologians aren’t under anything like the pressure to adequately explain the world, and seldom do so in a way that has any practical application.

So, ultimately, Buxton is comparing apples and oranges here. He then becomes even sillier:

One outcome of this post-Enlightenment disenchantment is that the world, indeed life itself, has become a commodity subject to economic forces that we have as little control over as the weather. With God as capital, every aspect of life gets translated into the language of economic transactions: passengers become customers, patients become clients. Where once we were souls, we are now consumers. And the problem with this is that when everything has a price, nothing has any value; especially vague notions such as human rights and dignity. In the market state, greed is good and the maximisation of profit is the only viable ethic.

In the days of the Roman empire Christians were called atheists because they did not worship the gods of the state. We have come full circle: Christians are once again atheists and heretics because they do not worship the “gods” of today’s orthodoxy. Now that atheism is the new “religion”, religion is the new “atheism”. To be a Christian in such circumstances is to be unconventional and nonconformist: it is to be something of a freethinker, espousing a radical vision of human flourishing that shows us how we can be more than what we are, rather than reducing us to less than what we should be.

Where do I start? The commodification of human life began a long time before the Enlightenment. Christians like to claim the credit for the abolition of the slave trade, but it was the Enlightenment which made it possible*. Before then, the Church was a political body which was perfectly happy to treat the hoi polloi as so much fodder to work on its land and fight and die in its wars. Trendy lefty though I may be, I’m much happier being a post-Enlightenment ‘consumer’ than a pre-enlightenment ’soul’.

You also only have to look around you to see that there are plenty of Christians who are perfectly happy to treat us as consumers. Brian Souter is hardly the poster child for corporate social responsibility. Thatcher, the vanguard of neoliberalism in the UK, was hardly famous for her atheism: Reagan and his spiritual heir George Bush are famous for their faith.

Once again, we find a religious writer seeking to blame atheists and secularists for a mess that religion is at best passively, at worst actively, complicit in. What Buxton fails to mention when he attempts to draw an analogy between the Christian experience in the 21st Century Britain with that of the early Christians’ in ancient Rome (ha!), is that those Romans tended to distort and lie about what the Christians actually believed in order to justify their attacks. As I’ve blogged before, while atheists are losing their shyness in attacking religion, the blatant distortion all appears to be coming the other way.

* Before anyone points it out, yes, I am aware that the Enlightenment would not have been possible without the Church. But I’m also aware that it was dependent on Islam. We have a rich history of religions’ support of science and reason that anti-secularists would have us ignore. The purpose of this article is not to caricature organised religion as fundamentally indefensible but rather to rebut the increasingly prevalent claims that secularism is responsible to all the ills in the world.

Given the furore I caused last week by being rude about nationalists, I was somewhat disappointed that my piece about faith groups earlier in the week didn’t elicit at least one death threat.

However, I am extremely grateful to Jim Denham for providing me with some info on the ‘moderate’ Islamic scholar Azzam Tamimi, which has lead me to this story:

At the last Stop the War event, a Palestinian born Muslim scholar, Dr Azzam Tamimi of the MAB promised to give Israel “hell” in response to its military action.

Dr Tamimi, a supporter of Hizbullah, caused controversy in 2005 when he told the BBC that he supported Hamas suicide bombing and said he was willing to carry out a suicide mission himself.

Isn’t it a bit worrying that the rhetoric of a man like that is virtually indistinguishable from that of senior Anglican clerics?

I meant to blog about this article yesterday but hey, don’t you know there’s a war on?

As a summary of the various arguments currently raging between what is often oversimplified as faith groups and secularists, it isn’t too bad. But unfortunately, it is also guilty of a moral relativism and lazy journalistic notions about ‘two sides to every story’.

To be fair, it does recover slightly from a disastrous second paragraph, but this does rather brilliantly sum up the problem with the whole:

“We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism,” says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

Excuse me? Richard Dawkins is equivalent to nutjob suicide bombers? Let’s think about this for a second. A senior member of the Church of England is suggesting that Dawkins is every bit as contemptible as someone who murders dozens of people in cold blood, purely because he got a book published. I got my head bitten off last week for suggesting that nationalism and xenophobia make uncomfortable bedfellows, yet this man is allowed to make such an astonishing claim in a national newspaper with the journalist not only not questioning it, but making it the theme of his whole article.

(I should also point out the theological nonsensity that is calling a secularist a fundamentalist. You simply cannot accuse someone of fundamentalism for believing that there are no fundamentals. How a man got to be so senior in the CofE without knowing that is beyond me).

I’m afraid this sort of nonsense pervades the whole article. There is no denying that both ’sides’ of the debate have their own extremists, but let’s have a bit of perspective here. An extremist person of faith goes around strapping bombs on him/herself (or preferably strapping them on helpful morons) and exterminating as many people as possible. Secularists, at their most extreme, think that burkas shouldn’t be worn in public. You simply cannot get away with the claim that they’re both as bad as each other.

As I’ve said before, I haven’t yet read Dawkins’ latest, although I have read virtually every sentence he wrote between 1975 and 1997. My own view is that he has a weakness for straw men, attacking creationists and other loons while failing to engage moderate religion in meaningful debate. But the man isn’t evil in the same way that any rational human being would regard any religious extremist.

Perhaps someone who has read his latest book can enlighten me: has he actually called for what Rowan Williams defines in the article as ‘private secularism’, where everyone is compelled to “silence their fundamental convictions and debate in a value-free atmosphere of public neutrality”? My reading of his earlier work suggests that while he may hate religion, he defends freedom of expression. Yet Yahya Birt of The Islamic Foundation insists that he does. If so, the man’s a fool.

But I have a suspicion that Rowan Williams’ distinction between private and “procedural” secularism, where “different groups could at least converse with each other in public discussions over sensitive questions of value and policy,” is a canard. No one rational surely disagrees with that definition of secularism. Equally, no-one rational could argue that as a result of such secularism, religious organisations seeking to provide a public service (often at the expense of the taxpayer) should be free to ignore anti-discrimination legislation, or should be allowed to run their own (again, taxpayer funded) faith schools. This isn’t secularism Rowan: this is exceptionalism. Yet again, Stuart Jeffries does not question the notions being put to him.

If I was in any doubt that there is a cynical - some would say ungodly - agenda by faith groups to shift public opinion against secularism, this article has scotched such notions. Throughout this article there is evidence of religious people using moderate language to justify extremist notions, while caricaturing “the enemy” (which is ostensibly “extremists” like Dawkins but in fact looks rather like secularism in general). As an exercise in muddying the waters, I have to give it to them: they’ve done a terrific job.

Sounds like the makings of a wedge strategy to me. Let’s take another example, that of the delightful, not at all stupid-of-face, Nadia Eweida. Much has been made of British Airways’ attempts to discipline her for insisting on wearing a cross over her uniform. What seems to constantly get forgotten in this debate is that her uniform involves wearing a cravat: in other words she was balancing her cross OVER a fucking necktie.

Seriously for a second, why shouldn’t a company that has a uniform policy, discipline a member of staff for such daft behaviour? She was clearly going out of her way to start a row. If she was a wiccan, do you think various faith groups would line up behind her right to wear a pentacle in such a way? What about a Yoda badge? More to the point, if a man had fought for the right to wear a crucifix over his tie (or worn a tie with a cross rather than his uniform issue one), would it have got the same interest?

I can’t help but suspect that the whole row was stage managed from the start. She and her lawyers must have known that her claim wouldn’t stand up in court, but her platform wasn’t really an industrial tribunal, but the media which could be relied upon to distort the real issue. The main faith groups helpfully laid in on her behalf.

Ditto the recent case over Exeter University ‘banning’ a Christian Union. Ditto the manufactured row earlier this year about gay adoption. Ditto the ridiculous stories in December about evil people trying to ban Christmas. These are all stage managed rows that make good Daily Mail headlines, but which only stand up if the public is deprived of the full facts.

The faith groups which are conspiring in this media onslaught don’t want an open debate: they want a punch up. Some individuals even go as far as suggesting this in Stuart Jeffries’ article:

Azzim Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought:

The problem is that these people [secularists] believe that they have the absolute truth. That means you have no room to talk to others so you end up having a physical fight. They want to close the door and ignore religion, but this will provoke a violent religiosity. If someone seeks to deny my existence, I will fight to assert it.

Richard Chartres, Bishop of London:

If you exile religious communities to the margins, then they will start to speak the words of fire among consenting adults, and the threat to public order and the public arena, I think, will grow and grow.

Whatever happened to turning the other cheek? These people, from mainstream faith groups, are actually suggesting that if you stand up to them, you are responsible for provoking a violent reaction?

You would have thought that the religious prohibition on violence would be stronger than a couple of harsh words written by Richard Dawkins in a book that very few people of faith will actually read, but clearly this is not the case. And again, I would remind you that these are not the words of loony nutjobs like Abu Qatada, but the mainstream. The fact that these men can come so close to inciting religiously inspired violence and yet keep their jobs tells you all you need to know.

I’m not anti-religion. I’d be much more comfortable breaking bread with a (genuine) religious secularist than a Humanist who thinks H is a quasi-religious icon. But we need to be alert to the fact that softly spoken beardy weirdies are softly, softly doing the very thing that the more harshly spoken beardy weirdies currently hiding out in Pakistani caves would do by force.

The Guardian’s ongoing war against rationality continues. After a columnist equated secularism with totalitarianism last week, this week, we are being blamed for the rising tide of nationalism:

There is a danger that the rising tide of secularism, and of narrow English and Scottish nationalism, itself often strongly secular in spirit, combined with its counterpart, the growth of various forms of fundamentalism, will erode the open, hospitable and capacious concept of Britishness in which minorities of various kinds have felt welcome.

There was a time when a “liberal” Christian would pride himself on his secularism, but clearly we have moved on (you can sense the bile rising in his gullet as he was forced to type the hated word). But is secularism truly at the heart of nationalism? Leaving aside the rest of the world for a second, if that is the case, why do nationalists concentrate so much of their energies on evoking religious purges and culls from history as justification? I’m not aware of nationalists in Northern Ireland being any less religious than unionists, but perhaps I’ve missed something (I’m sure Ian Bradley is comforted to have a liberal man of the cloth of the stature of the Rev Ian Paisley on his team). Why do Scottish and English nationalists wrap themselves in the crosses of Saints Andrew and George if they are so driven by secularist concerns? And why are the faith-friendly Cameroonies flirting with nationalism and silly notions like English Votes on English Matters (and, for that matter, religious Lib Dems such as Simon Hughes), while most people in politics associated with metropolitan liberal secularism are so sceptical?

Last time I looked, we had a Church of England, a Church in Wales, a Church of Ireland and Church of Scotland, but no “British” church. Only the former is “established” in the constitutional sense of the word. If religion, and specifically Anglicanism/protestantism, is such a unifier, why don’t they practice what they preach?

Religious anti-secularists are getting increasingly divorced from reality as they continue to make their outlandish claims in an attempt to prove that simply wanting to keep public life and private faith seperate is somehow sinister. The paranoid part of my brain suspects we are looking at some kind of wedge strategy at work.

Three years ago, I attended a friends’ pointedly humanist wedding; two weeks ago I learned that this couple was now attending church with a view to getting their daughter into the local CofE Primary School (alongside their devoutly Jewish neighbours!). A shocking ten years ago, I was writing my undergraduate dissertation on Richard Dawkins’ war with religion, back then a somewhat more obscure topic than it would appear to be now (back then, my tutor had to get his girlfriend to examine my paper as he admitted it went over his head; by contrast I suspect that thousands of undergrads this year will be writing on a similar topic).

I recall these two bits of my past because they both appear to have become quite topical in recent months. This Christmas, the tabloids were full of “PC loonies try to ban Christmas” stories, with the Archbishop of York going out of his way to blame it all on militant secularists (a claim which appears to have no basis in fact whatsoever; not that that has ever stopped Christians in York from making outrageous claims about another group before). Last week, the Guardian went a bit more potty than normal, publishing an article from “self-hating atheist” Neal Lawson and an even more zany one from Tobias Jones, equating seculatism with totalitarianism.

We do seem to be well in the midst of a backlash against secularism. Screaming about the militancy and totalitarianism of atheists is going a little far however, given that most commentators themselves are reacting against a rising tide of quite aggressive religious extremism. “Militant” secularists, at the extreme, are calling for the banning of religious clothing in the interests of integration. By contrast, draw a cartoon of a religious prophet and you are likely to be bombarded with death threats.

This week, it has become apparent quite how wrong headed articles such as Neal Lawson’s are, when he argues for a greater role of religious groups in providing public services. Those religious groups are on the march outside Parliament protesting, not about the state of public services or poverty, but in defence of their right to exclude homosexuals from any service they might provide. Polly Toynbee, unusually, is the voice of sanity in the Guardian, pointing out how vicious all this is.

On the Today programme this morning, Angela Eagle ran rings around Lord Mackay, pointing out that far from giving homosexuals extra rights, these proposed new laws merely mean that legislation defending lesbian and gay rights merely keep up with existing legislation blocking discrimination on the grounds of race and religion. Here, it seems to me, the religion-ideologues seem to be on a loser, as they tend to be the first to oppose racial hatred and were vigorous in demanding similar rights on the grounds of religion (the case for which is far more questionable).

It does seem to me that the battle for secularism is one that must be won. This isn’t a war against religion, although many ideologues on both sides seem to think it is; liberal democracies can only exist in a climate that keeps church and state apart. For many years in the UK, this has been the de facto position, but as the C of E embraces evangelism and fundamentalism, so the case for formal disestablishment has increased. In the US, a country which has the separation of church and state written into the constitution, the battle lines are different, but the overall issue remains the same.

What is at stake is a political system in which profound issues regarding morality and conscience can be debated without resorting to violence and abuse. Where moral absolutes are allowed to direct legislation, oppression is the inevitable consequence. It is up to secularists - both atheist and religious ones - to passionately argue the case.