For three centuries, religious difference was the defining issue of our national life. From roughly the Act of Supremacy in 1534 to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, religion determined our conflicts abroad and tore us apart at home. In that period, Roman Catholics were cast as the religious outsider. Now, at the end of two centuries of mostly peaceful accommodation and compromise, it seems certain that Andy Burnham will be the first meaningfully Roman Catholic Prime Minister in British history. Yet Burnham will have to address freshly prominent and volatile challenges of religious difference.
We are entering a new era of national interreligious turbulence. This time the strain occurs not along Christianity’s internal fault-lines but between different religions. While Britain has been a multifaith nation for many decades and formal relations between faith groups remain strong, we are seeing alarming new fractures in community relations. Ominous religious tensions have appeared in our political landscape. Suddenly, we’re doing God again.
The right now speaks of the West as a culture rooted in Christianity and endangered by the influx of non-Christian peoples, particularly Muslims. Populists have embraced the theory of clashing civilisations popularised by the American political scientist Samuel Huntington in the 1990s. Their demonisation of religious difference mimics medieval Christendom’s anxieties about Islam as the “enemy without” (and Judaism as the “enemy within”). In March, the shadow justice secretary called Ramadan celebrations in Trafalgar Square “an act of domination and division”. Tommy Robinson’s calls for his supporters to “unite the Kingdom under God” display a style of Christian nationalism this country has not seen before. The ever-clearer message is that only cultural Christians can be fully British.
Meanwhile, domestic politics are increasingly defined by distant religious conflicts. Minority religious communities now inhabit a digital world that continuously connects them to their co-religionists overseas. Israel and Palestine were remarkably prominent in May’s local election materials and several Gaza independents now occupy seats in the House of Commons. Other international religious conflicts, notably the nexus of tensions between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs emanating from the Indian subcontinent, increasingly influence local politics.
Today, however, unlike in earlier periods of British history, we are religiously illiterate. Whereas 19th-century debates on Jewish emancipation were shot through with scriptural reference, our political culture today follows Alastair Campbell’s famous dictum: we don’t do God. And you can only address problems that you can articulate. We find ourselves unable to name or narrate interreligious conflict, let alone discuss it. Soon, we may find ourselves engulfed by a conflict we can’t even explain.
Our religious literacy atrophied under the assumption that progress and modernity would lead inevitably to secularisation and reduce religious practice to a private leisure activity. When religious issues resurfaced in the 21st century we in Britain found ourselves lacking a lexicon of religion in public life. Discussion was corralled into available categories like race and culture. In fact, multiculturalism was ultimately found inadequate precisely because it was the product of a political culture that refused to take religion seriously, or to confront the very real challenges that religious difference presents. Liberals wanted to believe that diverse theologies were merely decorative means of repackaging the core values that all humans are supposed to share. Yet we can no longer avoid the fact that divergent beliefs lead to divergent (though not necessarily irreconcilable) approaches to gender, society, foreign policy and much else.
Successive governments have sought to resolve interreligious hostilities and prejudices with new definitions of anti-religious hatred. The Equality Act of 2010 turned religion and belief into a “protected characteristic”. The same logic motivated the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in 2016 and motivates the newly proposed definition of anti-Muslim hostility. More definitions are sure to follow, yet there is little evidence to suggest they change behaviours.
There is little idea of a positive approach, or of the culture of religious expression we are trying to build as a nation. We need a language that moves us beyond fractious culture wars and narrow legalistic debates. Renewing discussions of religious liberty and shared community in Britain today could take three possible directions.
From our deep past, we have the language of “toleration”. Tolerance is a thinner concept about attitudes; toleration is structural. The Toleration Act of 1689 legitimised in concrete terms the citizenship of Protestants who dissented from the established church: it permitted them to hold public office and worship freely. Toleration as a process granted similar rights to Roman Catholics in 1829 and Jewish people later in the 19th century. Tolerance sounded insipid when it was listed among the four ‘Fundamental British Values’ introduced to schools by the 2010-2015 Coalition government. But toleration’s deep roots in British history might help us speak confidently and meaningfully about religious freedom as it is expanded to other minorities today.
In more recent times, Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, advocated for an “interactive pluralism”. This was also an updating of a familiar concept. English Pluralism is a school of thought closely identified with the Anglo-Catholic monk-scholar John Neville Figgis, born 1866, who coined the phrase “community of communities” as an anti-authoritarian conception of the nation state. Williams’s addition of “interactive” suggests a correction to multiculturalism’s liability to insulate communities from one another. We want a plural nation where communities of all faiths and none interact rather than coexist, in local forums, in practical collaborations, and informally, as their children play in the local park.
Finally, with a Roman Catholic about to enter Downing Street, and with an almost equal number of Catholics and Anglicans now in British churches on Sunday, perhaps we should also draw more explicitly from catholic social teaching. Inspired by his meeting with Pope Francis in 2023, Andy Burnham last year borrowed a phrase from the late pontiff’s encyclical Fratelli Tutti (all are brothers) in a public lecture for the religion thinktank Theos. Speaking in the aftermath of the murderous attack on Heaton Park Synagogue, Burnham reflected on the need to move from a crisis of trust to a “culture of encounter”. In the encyclical this culture is founded in “the ability to sit down and listen to others”. Such phrases might emphasise the need to face and meet religious “others”, so that no fear or distrust can grow. That kind of encounter in civic forums, citizens assemblies and shared institutions can foster relationships that hold disagreements respectfully in the context of mutual belonging and commitments. Burnham’s rhetoric of devolution offers hope that this kind of local civic resilience might once again be possible.
Renewing the ways we think and talk about religion and belief in this country will not be easy. But a significant opportunity is presented by the recent (and long overdue) recommendation of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, endorsed by the government, to embed religious education in the national curriculum for the first time. While the subject has long been mandatory, its content has varied wildly in quality and scope. Standardising the curriculum forces us to confront what we want to say about religion, to our children and ourselves.
Those who seek to divide the country are talking unabashedly about religion in caricatured and tribal ways. We have only three years at most before a general election will have to be called. All evidence suggests good reason to fear the further playing out of religious divisions and, most alarmingly, an outcome that would decimate efforts at cohesive religious pluralism for many years to come. It is, therefore that we consider religious difference as a primary political issue once again.
[Further reading: Who will it be then, Mr Burnham?]
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Subscribe here to commentHmm. Given that religion is a widespread social construct I’d be OK with “religious education” being embedded in the national curriculum provided that it was “education ABOUT religion” and not “education IN religion.” Unfortunately I suspect that the believers in imaginary supernatural beings who have co-opted the lovely word “faith” (trust) to mean “religion” – like the author of this piece – want the latter, not the former. And whilst we allow sectarian schools to exist we aren’t going to get anywhere.