Should religious people have a privileged position in society?
Such was question posed by Edward Stourton as the Today programme drew to a close on 19th April this year. Peter Hitchens and the Labour Peer, Lord Harrison, who was initiating a debate on the topic in the House of Lords that morning, did battle for 4½ minutes. Then ‘In Our Time’ started.
What on earth, you may ask, did they have to say? The answer is obvious. No, they shouldn’t. End of debate. 270 seconds saved. Think what Melvyn Bragg could have done in that time.
Should religious people have a privileged position in British society? The question is phrased in such a way as to be subtly rhetorical. Privilege is anathema to us today. It reeks of luck, injustice and inequality. It conjures images of unearned wealth, unmerited honour, unjustifiable power. It is, almost by definition, something of which we disapprove. Of course religious people shouldn’t have a privileged position in society. Nobody should have a privileged position in society.
The real question is: what constitutes privilege? In introducing the Lord’s debate, Lord Harrison cited the selection process of certain ‘faith’ schools; prayers in Parliament; Prayer for the Day (5.45am, Radio 4); Thought for the Day (more controversially 7.48am, Radio 4); hospital, army and prison chaplains; and the lack of any ‘representative from the non-religious community’ at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day. (Is there such a thing as ‘the non-religious community’?) He might have added establishment, bishops in the Lords, blasphemy laws, the nature of the Coronation, Christmas and Easter bank holidays, the Union Jack, the National Anthem, and various laws pertaining to marriage and Sunday trading.
Since the Christian origins or content of this miscellany of cultural phenomena is so obvious, surely they constitute privilege to (a certain group of) religious people?
They may well, but to answer the question properly, to be able to identify ‘privilege’, we must have some idea of ‘right’. That which isn’t a right becomes a privilege. What, therefore, constitutes a right to be heard or to act in the public square?
The answer to this question has varied through history, touching upon our notions of God, human reason and the ‘nation’. Today it is rooted in the idea of ‘the people’. Only free and informed choice, whether exercised through the ballot box, cash register or TV remote control, affords true legitimacy. A politician, product or programme may rightfully occupy space in the public square if the public has voted for, bought or watched it in sufficient numbers. Thus, Lord Harrison argued that army, hospital and prison chaplaincies should be ‘extended beyond… the church’ [sic], justifying his case with the rhetorical flourish, ‘After all, our prisons are not overcrowded with regular churchgoers.’ We have prison chaplains because we have churchgoing prisoners. QED
The problem (for some) with this foundation for legitimacy is that it would actually give far more public space to Christian views than is currently the case. No matter how nominal or tokenistic it may be, around 70 per cent of people in the
Compare that to non-religious commitment. 15 per cent of people said they had ‘no religion’ in the 2001 Census. 10 per cent called themselves atheists the last time the British Social Attitudes Survey asked them. The membership of the various British Secular and Humanist societies numbers in the thousands. There are no figures for regular attendance.
The conclusion is a clear as it will unpalatable to those wishing to divest Christianity of its alleged privileges. If we judge legitimacy by democracy, by what the people say and do, we would hear considerably more and louder Christian voices in the public square than is currently the case.
The ‘democratic legitimacy’ argument has its own problems, however. At best, it allows only that which is currently popular or acceptable to be articulated in public, an arrangement that minimises the challenges to the status quo and can politically enervate a society. At worst, it can degenerate into the tyranny of the majority, against which liberal societies have long struggled.
Other sources of legitimacy are needed, the most obvious being the notion of ‘good’. Those things that contribute to the good, of individual and society, may legitimately demand a more substantial presence in the public square than those that don’t. Worldviews promoting fidelity, generosity and tolerance deserve more attention than those advocating promiscuity, greed and racism.
Our notions of the good, however, are haunted by ambiguity and controversy. Whose definition of the good are we talking about here? It wouldn’t be mine by any chance, would it? What a surprise!
We should not be naive about the power games at play here. ‘The good of the people’, often couched in terms of public order or security or morale, has been one of the greatest confidence tricks in history, justifying all sorts dehumanising customs and systems.
Nor, however, should we run scared. Just because we disagree about something, it does not follow that there is nothing to agree about.
Encouragingly, the emerging ‘science of happiness’ and the growing number social capital studies both provide persuasive evidence that our conceptions of the good share more that the doubters would have us believe. The good, both at individual and communal levels, is a real if slippery phenomenon. Certain things do make life better and no amount of postmodern scepticism can change that.
Unfortunately (again for some) this approach point us in the same direction as the argument from democratic legitimacy. Take the personal good, for example. Whilst the question of what should make us happy is unlikely ever to be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, we have an increasingly good idea of what does make us happy. Time and again happiness or life-satisfaction studies link point towards money (up to a certain point), interesting and flexible employment, a state of governance that facilitates a degree of meaningful self-rule, interpersonal trust, community participation, stable family life, faithful, monogamous marriage and (would you believe it?) serious, as opposed to socially conditioned, belief in God.
Frustratingly for those who would silence the religious voice under the banner of banning privilege, Christian (and indeed most religious) groups do rather well by these categories. Lifelong, faithful, monogamous marriage; family life; trust and community participation; prayer and meditation; personal commitment to the divine or transcendent: such are basic social ethics of many major world religions.
The story is similar at the level of the communal or public good. Social capital studies give some indication of which community groups contribute most to tackling those evils that most dehumanise us (such as poverty, unemployment, addiction, and breakdown) and nurturing those that do the opposite (such as cultivating trust and community participation).
Shockingly, Christian ones do rather well. In the words of the 2003 Home Office Citizenship Survey which calculated that a quarter of regular churchgoers were involved in voluntary community service outside the church, ‘people who follow a religion were significantly more likely to be trustful or to formally volunteer.’
So, the conclusion seems to be that whether one justifies presence and action in the public square by appeal to democratic consent, or by contribution to personal or the public good, the result seems to be that a substantial Christian presence is a right rather than a privilege.
This will not answer every case, of course. It will, for example, constitute a stronger argument for hospital chaplaincy than for Thought for the Day. Yet those wishing to eradicate Christian ‘privilege’ will need to explain whence they derive their idea of legitimacy. Neither public opinion nor personal or public good appears to be on their side.
The conclusion, however, is double-edged and Christians would do well not to get complacent or smug. Should a time come when the majority of the British public do not profess belief in God or, however nominally, associate themselves with the Christian faith; should a time come when it can be shown that there is no substantive link between Christian social ethics and personal wellbeing; or that there is no evidence that Christian groups deliver the goods of civil society, any supposed ‘right’ to speak and act in the public square that Christians have will vanish with them.
This article first appeared in 'The Difference Magazine.'
