No, Mr Blair – for all our sakes, pulpits and parliament must remain separate
Is Tony Blair — the man who converted to Catholicism when he left the office of Prime Minister and went on to establish the Tony Blair Faith Foundation — a secularist?
I ask after Mr Blair gave a speech in Milan in which he listed ten do’s and don’ts for democracies to protect religious freedom. Here is the list:
1. DO have democracy-friendly religion and religion-friendly democracies.
2. DON’T think you understand democracy if you think it’s only about elections: it’s about a culture and mindset which includes freedom of thought, freedom of expression, political and religious pluralism, and human rights.
3. DO maintain equality of treatment for different religions within the law as a core element of the secular state.
4. DON’T duck difficult conflicts involving religious and secular ideas: discuss them openly.
5. DON’T rush to legislation to solve religious conflict; instead seek first to resolve it by discussion and accommodations.
6. DON’T allow religious schools to opt out of the same national standards and core curriculum that you expect of everyone else.
7. DO listen to religious voices on social, political and economic issues, and allow people to justify their views on explicitly religious grounds if they want.
8. DO insist on religious leaders making their case by reasoned argument not by bald assertion or authoritarian claims. Insist on that for atheists and secular leaders too.
9. DO NOT allow religious voices to have dominance in the public sphere if they cannot achieve majority support through democratic means.
10. DO ensure, whether the overwhelming democratic choice is either an atheist state or one dominant religion, that the voices of religious minorities and those who have no faith are protected.
Remember that none of us are qualified to state with certainty the will of God – so humility, openness to others, and interfaith dialogue are all essential for a healthy society.
We recognise that Mr Blair had an international audience in mind when he made his list. Some of this stuff would be particularly apposite to the theocratic nations of the Middle East, but much of it applies in Europe, too.
During his premiership he encouraged religious participation in politics and unleashed, in some ways, the noisy, arrogant and demanding religious voices that we have to endure today in the political arena. We now know why his government also opened the way to the explosion in numbers of religious schools.
But maybe he has learned something from experience. And maybe he hasn’t. His speech in Italy centred on the idea that religions should meet and talk and share so as to understand each other better. Maybe then they would cease struggling — sometimes violently — for power over each other. Then in Canada this week, he said: “Not only are there tensions between different faiths, but there is also an ‘aggressive secularism’ that can prevent people from seeing the positive aspects of religion. We need to advocate faith in a way that is not threatening to others.”
He acknowledges that those who are persecuted because of their religion are generally persecuted by other people who are religious – not by secularists, aggressive or otherwise. But he feels this could be curbed if all believers got together and were educated about the other’s religion. He wants lots of religious education in schools, he wants much more “inter-faith” talking. Naturally he doesn’t agree that encouraging people to abandon religion entirely is the way forward.
He imagines that one day —when we all properly understand each other — religion would stop its murderous rampage. He says that if religion was seen as rational — at least to the extent that it could recognise that destructive warfare was not the way to settle differences — then those who are repulsed and unconvinced by “faith” might come to embrace it.
This is where I have to part company with the Blair philosophy.
Each religion is convinced of its own absolute truth. Islam and Christianity feel that it is their godly duty to bring everyone (but everyone) into their fold, by force if necessary. They have come to regard each other — and every other religion — as heretical. Most of the time they try to keep this inconvenience under wraps, but it is increasingly finding its way into politics.
You don’t have to look very far to see that there are people who will never be convinced that their religion is anything other than the divine truth that must dominate the world – even the Pope doesn’t think that other Christian denominations are authentic.
The declaration Dominus Iesus, written by the present Pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, dismisses all other Christian denominations as being wrong and illegitimate.
That said, there are people of good will from different religious traditions who have always longed for the day when all “persons of faith” can rub along together under the umbrella of democracy. These are the sensible people who don’t want to live in a state of constant war. Such good people would do that anyway without needing the exploding “interfaith” industry to prompt or motivate them.
The problem comes not from people of good will but from those who will never acknowledge that another faith could be equal to theirs and will violently make the point with bombs and guns. We see this in action in the Middle Easton a daily basis. And as the Arab Spring morphs into Arab Winter, the totalitarians of Islam will seek to eliminate Christians from their nations.
Big words about interfaith harmony are a delusion. Though I accept his sincerity and share his desire to end religious conflict, Mr Blair’s Faith Foundation is doomed to failure and his philosophy is misguided and, ultimately, dangerous. See a recent example, Also here: and here.
Blair’s secularism is of a different stripe to the version that the NSS would like to see.
We accept that religious people as individuals have the right to participate in democracy — just as everyone else has — but we do not accept that religious organisations have any intrinsic right to a special hearing. Let them speak, by all means, but let them do it from their pulpits, not from the benches of our parliament.
If they want to speak in the public square, then let them do it from the same platform that everyone else uses, without special amplification and with no exemption from criticism.
We accept, as Mr Blair points out, that religion in some parts of the world has a disproportionate and destructive influence. Religion with temporal power is always bad news. But organised religion has always sought privilege and, when it can manage it, control. That isn’t going to change.
The only real way to tame it is to ensure that the business of the state is conducted exclusively by elected representatives. Let priests, bishops and imams be satisfied with that.
See also: The religions of war