Not Ashamed

Not Ashamed is a campaign launched by Christian Concern, and backed by Lord Carey (former Archbishop of Canterbury).

It calls upon Christians to be more confident in their faith against an “attempt to ‘air-brush’ the Christian Faith out of the picture”.

I sympathise with many of Lord Carey’s concerns, as stated in the campaign leaflet. Britain does indeed owe much to the Christian faith, from the UK’s overarching morality to its educational establishments (it was Christian schools that educated the poor and the young in the UK well before the State had even the slightest concern for such things). It should also be appreciated that Non-Conformist and the Protestant traditions helped imbue Britain with a sense of religious freedom that is still visible today.

I likewise agree that there are determined efforts to remove Christianity from the public sphere. Although perhaps not all of his examples are accurate – the concern over ‘winter lights’ instead of Christmas lights leads on from repeated tabloid stories about ‘Muslims banning Christmas’. In fact, the stories are so often repeated that they feel part of the annual Christmas run-up. This year was no disappointment, with the Daily Star leading a front page story with the headline ‘Christmas ‘nicked’ by Muslims’. It goes without saying the headlines are somewhat fabricated.

But I do not agree with Lord Carey’s diagnosis of the causes for the removal of Christianity from the public sphere. He writes: -

“So, it appears that flowing from a combination of well-meaning political correctness, multiculturalism and overt opposition to Christianity, a new climate, hostile to our country’s tradition and history, is developing.”

Almost like an elephant in the room, the word ‘secularism’ seems conspicuous in its absence.

I strongly disagree that political correctness (an empty term which few take heed of) is responsible. Nor is multiculturalism to blame. Multiculturalism is widely misunderstood and offers much to this country. A simple definition of multiculturalism is the acceptance of more than one cultural tradition in the public sphere (arguing in favour of pluralism) and a recognition that there exists, alongside the individual, group identities. It is in many ways in antipathy with secularism. It may be out of vogue, but it is invaluable.

Rather, the concern to remove Christianity from the public sphere began during the Enlightenment, and Christianity alone is not the focus, but religion all together. The Age of Reason often put itself squarely in opposition to religion. In France, the values of the Enlightenment came to fruition through laicite, which has generally made slow progress in Britain, and thankfully so.

Secularism, in its extreme form, denies the individual freedom of expression, in the hope to maintain some imagined absence of religion. It is contradictory in that it abuses and infringes upon the individuals rights while claiming to defend them, and likewise removes the very moral tools needed for a free, open, just and merciful society.

I wish Lord Carey and Christian Concern well with their campaign, but if they wish to be truly effective, they should recognise that it is secularism which is infringing upon the right to faith in the public sphere.

And if they wish to successfully contest the ideals of secularism, then partnership with other faiths will be necessary.

Religion needs a Stephen Hawking

Too many people just don’t get religion. The media, politicians, authors, entertainers, policy makers and so on are all too often guilty of understanding religion in a childish, simplistic and grossly inaccurate way.

A public perception of God paints him as a man in the sky with a beard, a booming voice of condemnation, a jealous and petty punisher of humankind or on the opposite end, a good but ultimately benign force in the universe.

Among too many politicians and policy makers, religion is seen as a nice little quirk. Somewhat like the cultural traditions of some distant exotic land - interesting, amusing, but not really something to be taken too seriously.

In a documentary some time ago, Richard Dawkins asked - “how can God speak to a billion people at the same?” The question is frankly bizarre for a theist since it betrays a deep, deep misunderstanding of to whom the word God is referring. It is common to hear people, in a matter-of-fact fashion, that all religions believe all other religious followers are going to hell, another statement that is factually untrue and even notionally incorrect. And the British Humanist Association recently launched a campaign aimed at stopping self-identified Christians as listing themselves as ‘Christian’ since they failed to live up to the BHA’s perception of what a Christian should.

All of these show a society that in moving away from religion, has forgotten what it was in the first place.

So where does Stephen Hawking come in to it? Well, Stephen Hawking is perhaps most known by the laymen for authoring ‘A Brief History of Time’. The book successfully condensed some of the most advanced and complex scientific theories of the modern era into an easy to read paperback for popular consumption. He has since published similar books, such as The Grand Theory (which famously claimed God was ‘unnecessary’.)

Just like Stephen Hawking, religion needs authors who can convey the subtleties of religion to a wider non-specialist audience. Currently, the only author I am familiar with who successfully fills this niche is Karen Armstrong, yet more are needed.

Books on Christian theology are dense and unapproachable, the traditional Islamic texts are either written for a Muslim audience, or when written for a wider-audience, preachy and at times, patronising (notable exceptions are the biographies of the Prophet Muhammad produced by Lings and Salahi). How many people truly understand what ‘Hinduism’ is about beyond Diwali and sacred cows? How many non-religious people could accurately describe an Abrahamic conception of God?

And so much more importantly – is there enough understanding of the role religion plays in society today? The way it influences the human individual and then the individual in a group?

I strongly feel there isn’t.

Writers like Karen Armstrong are needed not to proselytise, but to build bridges and to cement understanding an increasingly diverse society that risks falling apart as drifts ever close to individualism and isolationism.

So religion needs a Stephen Hawking… or two.