The Queen, who is also supreme governor of the Church of England, has found herself echoing Baroness Warsi
The Queen, who is also supreme governor of the Church of England, found herself echoing Baroness Warsi, chair of the Conservative party, yesterday. Each was defending the significance of faith in British society and, in particular, the cultural importance of Christianity, against what both regard as the threat of militant atheism. When the formal and the political branches of Anglicanism take to the public podium on consecutive days, it is time to consider quite what is going on.
Baroness Warsi is an interesting politician with a perspective on faith that comes from being a practising Muslim at the heart of a strongly Christian political party. Her speech at the Vatican on Tuesday made some telling points. She talked persuasively of her own experience of faith as a living idea that is shaped by its environment, and of the capacity of different faiths to be mutually supportive rather that in conflict with one another. She also dwelt on the importance of confidence to tolerance – only to sound decidedly intolerant about militant secularism.
The Queen's remarks, made as she launched the first public event of the diamond jubilee at Lambeth Palace, followed a similar trajectory. Like the baroness, she emphasised the importance of Christianity and in particular the Church of England as Britain's defining influence. There was the now familiar reworking of a state religion as a means of defending all faiths in society. The notion of militant secularism was not raised, but the idea of it lay behind every sentence. It was the same after last week's contentious Bideford ruling on prayers at a council meeting. A simple question about the limits of the legal authority of the council, with a message about gradualism and pluralism, was treated as a head-on confrontation between two worldviews. Few people of faith will have been comforted to find Eric Pickles in the frontline of the defence.
Richard Dawkins has rattled the cage. He may have succeeded in creating just the polarisation that he was warning against. The curious thing is that it already seemed he had pushed his argument too aggressively. Baroness Warsi, and perhaps the Queen's advisers too, might have noted that when secular philosophers like John Gray and Julian Baggini had lined up against the professor it was time for the representatives of faith to take a back seat and let others do the heavy lifting.
Instead, it seems that in their explicit and implicit attacks on secularism, they have betrayed the very lack of confidence that – as the baroness pointed out – fosters intolerance. In the past 10 years, the secularists have played an invaluable part in clarifying how we live. Now it is time for both sides to lower the temperature – or risk entrenching a damaging dispute that neither side will win.