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British Humanist Association: Reports

My Lords, I very much want to follow along the lines of what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has been saying. We are now a very secular society, but when it comes to issues such as life and death and the meaning of tragic death for a community, places of worship are very important. My wife and I stayed in Lincoln overnight driving between London and Saltaire the other month. As we got up in the morning, a captain who had been killed clearing mines in Afghanistan was being buried in the cathedral. The entire city stopped and the cathedral was full. This is still very much part of our national life; at the moment we have no alternative and it helps to pull us all together. As the right reverend Prelate said in his excellent speech, we need to remember that values are a matter for the community as well as for each individual. I speak as a liberal. Liberalism as a tradition grew out of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries and, on the continent, the reimposition of authoritarian rule by states closely linked to the Roman Catholic Church. Continental liberalism, as I learnt about it, was therefore strongly anti-religious and linked to the Freemasons; the revolution was as much against the Catholic Church as it was against authoritarian government. I was being briefed on liberal Judaism the other day and I was told that Napoleon opened the ghetto and thus provided the basis for liberal versions of Judaism to emerge. The Catholic Church in the 19th century set its face against modernity on the continent. The Pope not only declared himself infallible but issued papal bulls denouncing liberalism as a heresy. The Roman Catholic Church is still doing its best as a hierarchy to come to terms with a liberal and open society. In Britain, the legacy of the Civil War left us with a rather different tradition: a broad and open established church and a large dissenting tradition that enforced a degree of toleration if we were to live together as a society. Out of that, a rather different English, British liberal tradition has grown, in which the overlap between church and state has not always been entirely clear. After the Irish rebellion of 1798, for example, the then Whig Government argued the case for the provision of public funds to train Roman Catholic priests in Ireland—against strong Tory opposition for years afterwards, of course. That was so successful in training Roman Catholic priests to understand the balance that one needed between church and state that, when they were inspected in the 1860s, the Vatican delegation accused them all of Gallicanism. I strongly support provision of state funding for the training of imams in Britain on exactly the same basis today. We need to help our new religious communities to understand how their established practices of religion need to come to terms with a shared understanding of the relationship between faith and the state. At least this humanist report recognises that there are divisions in all faiths between a more liberal and a more fundamentalist or conservative approach. Liberalism as an approach, whether secular or faith-based, is something that we all need to defend. I am a liberal because as a choirboy I sat through umpteen sermons by on the whole very progressive members of the Church of England, which is how I acquired my strong political values: tolerance, respect for diversity and so on. But let us recognise that it is easier to be a liberal if you are well-to-do, secure in your identity, securely employed and within an established and secure community. Thus in the 1960s it was easy to be a liberal and easy to be a liberal Anglican. Now, in a much less secure world, fundamentalisms of all sorts—both faith-based and secular—are much stronger, just as in the 1930s the political, secular fundamentalisms of communism and fascism had a much stronger appeal. We find evangelicals within the Protestant churches and those dreadful fundamentalists in the United States, a fundamentalist tendency within the Roman Catholic Church and bitter fundamentalists within the Jewish, Hindu and Muslim communities. We need an alliance of liberals, humanists and religious liberals against fundamentalists of sorts—including, if I may say so after having been unhappy with some of the phrasing of one of these reports, against the most aggressive atheists and the most absolutist members of the National Secular Society. I take the separation of church and state as a given. I was astonished by the intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney. I thought that I remembered a text that said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s". That, for me, is one of the basic texts on the separation between church and state. Of course there is tension between public and private belief and between public and private life. I was unhappy with the way in which the report treated that tension, because it is a necessary and creative tension. Liberalism is always a set of arguments about the values on which we operate: the definition of our open society and the relationship between members of that society—the position of women, for example, on which liberalism, when it started, was pretty poor, as with everything else. We must continue to argue; that is the basis of an open and a liberal society. The question for all of us is: how do we promote public debate on underlying values and on the moral dimensions of social life, of economic life and, for that matter, of life itself? If we want to be more than a consumer society, we have to tackle what the noble Lord, Lord Graham, described as "the tide of apathy" and to debate the underlying moral issues: the moral basis of capitalism and of social life of all sorts. My father spent 40 years working for a bank that had been established by Quakers and I am very sorry that it has entirely lost any sense of moral purpose, as has much of the rest of our financial sector. Indeed, we all need to redefine the moral basis of capitalism now. There is a messy overlap between the state and society and now between the public sector and the voluntary or third sector. As public funds are cut, we will have to rely more on voluntary funds, which will make life much more difficult. I strongly agree with the report in its attack on the neo-conservative tendencies of Tony Blair in taking the American example and wanting to reintroduce a faith dimension rather aggressively into the provision of public services. We on these Benches oppose the expansion of faith schools; we want to see schools that are rooted in local communities. We recognise that a line needs to be drawn between public provision and private choice, but we also recognise that those with religious motivations do much in areas such as social care through hospices and services to old people and to street people; the Salvation Army does much for the homeless on our streets that is not otherwise provided for. Adoption is the most delicate and the most difficult area. There is also a great deal to be done in prisons and in the provision of probation. We find young men in prison without any system of values. They are completely lost and they somehow need to be helped as they come out of prison to reintegrate into society and to find a sense of purpose. It is not entirely irrelevant to our debates that many of those who are most committed to making voluntary contributions to the community have a religious motivation. The question of motivation also comes up in the humanist report. We see much too little in our current society of the motivation to do more than look after ourselves and we should not denigrate the fact that those with faith are much more likely to think that they must also work for others. In an open society, we live with creative tension about the boundaries separating the public and the private and the overlap between the secular and the religious. We live with a monarchy—a remarkably absurd thing in many ways, but we have it—and with an heir to the throne who says that he wishes to be a defender of all faiths. I attended the 50th anniversary service of the Queen’s coronation in Westminster Abbey, and there, under the lantern, were representatives of Britain’s other faith communities: Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian and Baha’i. I thought that that was a splendid and wonderful thing to have. It was inclusive and it recognised that Britain is a society of many diverse communities. We want all of them to contribute to the common good. That is what we should be working towards.