The Queen and Baroness Warsi might disagree. But there is nothing extreme about demanding church and state be separate
No surprise that the Queen defends the established church, as she is the anointed defender of the faith. In a week of attacks on secularism she has invented a new role: "not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country." Who is threatening the free practice of any faith? Not any secularists I know.
Hers is a curiously Jesuitical justification for the CofE's uniquely privileged status, but the faiths are glad to circle their wagons round her against the unbelievers. Each has their own divinely revealed unique truth, often provoking mortal conflict, Muslim v Copt, Catholic v Protestant, Hindu v Muslim or Sunni v Shia. But suddenly the believers are united in defence against the secular, willing to suspend the supremacy of their own prophets to agree that any religion, however alien, from elephant god to son of God, is better than none.
They can all feel their victimhood now, facing what Baroness Warsi called a rising tide of "militant secularisation" reminiscent of "totalitarian regimes". Warsi on the warpath headed a delegation to the Vatican of six ministers, all agreeing the common enemy was not just the secularists but the "liberal elite", too. How the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph loved wallowing in the CofE as victim against the rise of christianophobia, as if the waspish Prof Richard Dawkins had thrown them all to the lions. But in defending religious privilege, they are on their own: Ipsos Mori found 74% of Christians consider religion should be a private matter and should not influence public policy, so even most Christians are secularists. For Cameron, Lady Warsi may be a useful canary-testing if American flag-and-faith culture wars might fly over here. Mercifully, every poll shows the answer is no. The CofE is no longer the Tory party at prayer: polls show its pews filled mainly with the liberal-minded.
The prefix "aggressive" or "militant" is now super-glued to the word "secularist", but as president of the British Humanist Association and honorary associate of the National Secular Society, I find nothing extreme about trying to keep religion separate from the state. Aggressive? You should see this week's "burn in hell" messages to the BHA attacking "that spastic Hawking who denies God", and many more obscene unprintables.
I will defend to the death anyone's right to practice any faith, if it breaks no law, interferes with nobody's rights nor claims undue public policy influence. Church bells, calls to prayer, displays of crucifixes, beards or side-locks are freedoms, alongside bare midriffs and knicker-short miniskirts. Personally, I am affronted by women in face veils, but that's my problem. I will argue against them but freedom of speech, thought and dress are non-negotiable. But so is the right to robust argument that may offend religious sensibilities, including the right to challenge the improbability of the faith itself – and the right to make jokes.
Rev Giles Fraser wielded a deft stiletto, accusing secularists of closet racism. "Attacking religious belief in general neatly fits alongside a hostility to Islam." I am hostile to any religion if it ever cuts across civic freedoms, for its own people or for anyone who challenges it. Without causing gratuitous offence for the sake of it, there is a duty to stand by brave free-speech campaigners, such as Maryam Namazie, organiser for One Law for All. An anti-Sharia meeting was broken up last month at Queen Mary College. Police were called after a man came in, filmed the audience and said he'd hunt down anyone who insulted the prophet. They campaign against Muslim arbitration tribunals, whose judgments can be applied in civil courts, nobody knowing if women suffered religious intimidation to sign away rights.
Fraser makes an engaging defence of the CofE's historic settlement that refused, in Elizabeth I's words, to make a window into men's souls. Yet it tears itself apart over women bishops, gay priests and gay marriage, despite the liberal majority in its pews. The existing 26 bishops add to an unrepresentative preponderance of the devout in the Lords who killed off the assisted dying bill, ignoring 80% public support. This is the last great personal freedom the religions conspire to deny everyone else, inflicting daily torture on the terminally ill.
Julian Baggini, writing in the Guardian yesterday took a swipe at secularism, wondering why bother with trivia like prayers at council meetings. He omits the heart of the matter, such as the right to die. Or the third of state schools run by religions, mainly CofE, oversubscribed as their results are burnished by admissions policies that consign an unfair share of poor or chaotic families to neighbouring schools. Though polls find only minority support for faith schools, the religions are rushing to set up free schools: this week the evangelical Christian Family Schools bid for 10 sites in Sheffield. Meanwhile, faith organisations are given more contracts for social services: once outsourced, clients lose Human Rights Act protection against religious coercion, harassment or discrimination. None of this is trivial.
"Faith and reason go hand in hand," said Lady Warsi. She's entitled to her view. I admire Dawkins' and Hawking's passionate devotion to the beauty of scientific proof, but it would be absurd to claim humanists are any more rational than others. Nor will we accept the jibe that unbelievers lack spirituality. Humans are only intermittently rational, living mostly in realms of hope, fear, memory or fantasy, lost in the power of the imagination.
Odder still is the religious claim to a monopoly on moral authority, as Cameron did in his pre-Christmas "We are a Christian country" speech. Religious and irreligious alike commit atrocities, but faith ferments crusade, jihad and martyrdom. Belief makes people neither better nor worse: the latest research by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations found the religious no more likely to volunteer than non-believers. As social animals, thriving through co-operation, the selfish gene vies with a collective instinct for social justice, from the day a child first protests "it's not fair". Claiming no special superiority, the view that our fate is in our hands makes humanists naturally progressive, not fatalistic. There is nothing militant about demanding that civic life and law binds us together as equal citizens, regardless of whatever peculiar ideas everyone harbours in their imagination.
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