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Let’s stop pretending all faiths are equal
Following the national news can be bad for the blood pressure. According to a press leak, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) - Labour’s favourite think tank and one which has the ear of power - is to publish a report saying Christmas should be downgraded to improve race relations.
In the interests of “evenhandedness”, the report says, and “if we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas - it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life, even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too”. Presumably that means marking them equally, because “we can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one”.
This all sounds familiar, of course. We have become used to absurd stories of British Christmases being renamed Winterval, or children’s carols being stopped for fear of offending minorities - many of them true. We all know that the Christian Tony Blair and most top politicians send “season’s greetings” instead of Christmas cards. It is unabashed, yet guilt-ridden, decadent multiculturalism.
Sure enough, Ben Rogers and Rick Muir, the authors, do indeed call on the government to launch an “urgent and upfront campaign” to promote “a multicultural understanding of Britishness”. They rehearse the old arguments: different communities should not be expected to integrate but should be allowed to maintain their own cultures and identities; immigrants should learn some English and something of British culture, “if - but only if - the settled population is willing to open up national institutions and practices to newcomers and give a more inclusive cast to national narratives and symbols”.
Meanwhile, national ceremonies, civic oaths, parliament and the monarchy must be recast in a more multi-religious or secular form. Parents should be made to attend a public state ritual of citizenship for their new babies when registering their birth; “parents, their friends and family and the state [would] agree to work in partnership to support and bring up their child”. Presumably this would include an undertaking not to celebrate Christmas “inappropriately or exclusively”.
How the heart sinks. One can imagine a municipal babyfest, under a large portrait of a grinning Gordon Brown, in which social workers stand in for aunts and godparents and the parents swear to oaths they secretly resent; I wonder what would happen to refuseniks. What I want, passionately, is for the state to keep away from my children and let me decide for my family what to do about Christmas (or indeed Eid or Sukkot or Diwali). I don’t want the state interfering with ancient customs, expunging Christmas or punging something else in its place. What I want is to escape the clutches of the multiculturalist zealots.
I was beginning to think this country had recovered from its disastrous obsession with multiculturalism. All kinds of race relations pundits have recently changed their minds about multiculturalism and come to realise that an insistence on difference weakens the ties that bind a diverse society. It isolates people and makes them less willing to cooperate with - or pay benefits for - people they perceive as aggressively other. These new revisionists have finally understood that it was dangerous for the host culture to feel belittled and exploited by multiculturalist supremacists.
Trevor Phillips, head of the new equality quango, famously said that we were sleepwalking to apartheid. Even Brown keeps trying to manipulate our shared Britishness, if only in his own political interest. However, the tired old donkey of multiculturalism refuses to lie down and die. This irrepressible ass is still alive, in the person of the IPPR, and kicking the government. The question is, why?
One of the answers must lie in confusion - in the confusion most of us seem to feel about religion, culture, human rights and respect. There are a lot of internal contradictions and confusions in that list; the liberal western point of view, as expressed by Cherie Blair in her Chatham House lecture last week, is riven with contradiction. She appeared to be making the courageous point that religion and culture should not be used as excuses for denying people - that is, women - their universal human right to equality.
I feel that just as strongly as she feels it. Religions and cultures that deny women basic equality, or exploit and abuse them, are, as far as I am concerned, a bad thing. I don’t feel the slightest obligation to respect them or to allow them to bring their practices into this country. However, the problem for Cherie Blair, not least during the visit here of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, is that in the western liberal agenda we are supposed to offer equal respect and equal rights to all cultures and all religions, and to people’s universal right to live according to them and to practise their faiths as they understand them. But you simply can’t. You can either have universal human rights, or you can have the universal human right to ignore them for cultural or religious reasons - not both.
If a culture or a religion does not share Cherie Blair’s absolute belief in universal human rights, then how can she respect it? And, for that matter, why should she expect them to respect her opposing beliefs? She spoke on Radio 4 of honouring people’s religious beliefs, when freely adopted, but why? Incidentally, as for Islam being freely adopted, a large proportion of young British Muslims think that the penalty for abandoning the faith should be death. There is not a great deal of freedom in Islam which, after all, means submission.
My point is not particularly to criticise Islam. It is rather to criticise this long-standing liberal article of faith that all religions are equal, equally deserving of respect, and believers should be equally free to practise them. In truth, nobody believes that - whether Muslim, gentile, Hindu, Jew, wiccan or heathen. Nor in terms of Christian and post-Christian British culture is it true. We have been misled culturally by trying to pretend it is true and we have damaged our society in the process. The IPPR and Christmas deniers are still being misled and are trying to mislead the rest of us. “Bah, humbug!” as Scrooge would have said.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 04, 2007
