In my (often enjoyable) conversations with campaigning secularists, it's not unusal to find many areas of agreement. The media narrative of "fundamentalist religious people" versus "militant secularists" is extraordinary inflated and often creates the impression of black-and-white distinctions were few exist. There is however one fault line that I am more and more convinced underlines all the true disagreements- how we deal with difference, particularly religious difference in public.
A news story today illustrates this. The Telegraph reports that Bible Society have been prevented from posting an inflatable whale on the banks of the Thames as a venue for telling the story of Jonah from the Bible. Potters Fields Park Management Trust, which controls the park in front of City Hall, turned down the request explaining: “I am afraid that under the terms of our lease we are not allowed to have any events of a religious nature".
Leaving aside the irony of the park name itself sounding very much like a reference to the Bible, we obviously don't know why the terms of the lease were written like that. All kinds of quirky examples exist within planning law and we can't, nor should we assume that secularising agenda is behind it. In one sense then the inflatable whale ban tells us very little. It's just an inflatable whale. It does however act as an all too familiar symbol of how religion in public is often conceived. Behind the desire to restrict “religious events” in public space fear often hovers. Religion in public is freighted with anxieties – anxieties that are in the main not warranted. Theos in it's very first report, Doing God by Nick Spencer addressed these in detail.
The report explores the major arguments against the presence of religion in public life; that it is inherently inhuman, inflexible and probably most relevant here, sectarian or divisive. The idea that religion cannot help but create conflict and tension is widely held, and usually behind the desire to banish it from our public spaces. And of course it seems to make sense - difference disturbs harmony, and religious beliefs are among the deepest and most irreconcilable differences.
The trouble with this presupposition is that not only is it not necessarily true but it makes us fear difference, and difference is unavoidable. Our differences will and should be evident in public even in relatively homogenous societies (unless we want to be North Korea where all men now have to have the same haircut). In a rapidly pluralising one such as ours we can't avoid getting to grips with them.
All difference has the potential to be divisive and religious difference is not unique in this. If we create public spaces in which difference is disallowed, where the rich variety of our society is flattened out and muted out of the fear of disunity then we avoid the issue, warp our public space and perpetuate the cycle of fear. We also put ourselves on a strange road. What, after all counts as a “religious event”? Worship services, obviously, but reading bible stories in an inflatable whale? If you follow through the logic of this decision and apply it everywhere, the Diwali festival would of course disappear from Trafalgar Square, but so would Indian traditional dance at events promoting tourism, drawing as it does on Hindu stories. Baptisms on the beach would be out, but would soup run by churches also cease? Could carols be sung at Christmas in shopping centres, or only Frosty the Snowman?
You may miss none of these things, and they are not currently at risk. But if we don't point out the ridiculousness of policies such as that of the Potters Fields Park Trust, the ideas behind them may become more widespread. The freedom of religious expression in public (and, it should go without saying, the freedom of expression of secular, political, issues-based and other groups) will often be uncomfortable and force us to come up against things we don't necessarily agree with. But if we don't learn to deal with this discomfort and allow space for all to engage in public it might not just be an inflatable whale at stake.
Image by .Martin. from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
