The Duty to Integrate
Yesterday, I did something that I have never done before. I downloaded and read the transcript of a speech made by the Prime minister. I did this, because I wanted to be sure that he had said what he was reported to have said before making a response to a number of points, which had been highlighted in the media.
The talk, entitled The duty to integrate: shared British values, addressed the growing clamour about the direction of multi-culturalism in this country in the wake of the bombings on 7th July and other tensions that are emerging in some localised situations.
His intention was to calm the storm and lay out some ground rules with which the Government intends to manage developing phenomenon of pluralism in our society. In particular, he seems to have wished to confront the violence of the very few, which is, none-the-less devastating both to the lives of those on whom it explodes and the attitudes of many more.
In so doing, I believe that he crossed the line, which demarcates the proper territory of a politician and whilst I do not for a moment disagree with his contention that violence of any sort is not a legitimate form of self-expression in our present context, some of the arguments he used to buttress this assertion are heavy with foreboding. It is also true that in outlining, as he did, what British people must believe in, he contravened article nine, section one of the European Convention on Human Rights, which asserts the absolute freedom of religious, intellectual and philosophical belief.
Near the beginning of the speech he said that, “Christians, Jews, Muslims [and others] have a perfect right to their own identity”; he then went on to start the next paragraph, “But when it comes to our essential values …”. In other words, he elevated the cohesion of the state to the highest claim on our loyalty. Here, he has missed the point that for people of genuine religion, their religious beliefs and values are essential. It is these values that inform our attitude to society and the conduct of our lives. Suggesting that they are second division ethics that only have validity insofar as they conform to the interests of the state, is incompatible with the true nature of religious conviction.
If we move, now,
to consider two of the articles of national faith, which he prescribes, we begin
to illustrate the problem. It might seem that such a presentation of his
position is snide, but I think it is quite fair, since he encourages us to
believe in, inter alia, democracy and the rule of the law. This is
more than saying that we should accept that this is how things are done. The
phrase, echoing Christian creedal formulae, equates our commitment to these
concepts to that which we profess of our commitment to God suggesting absolute
trust and confidence. Democracy and the Rule of Law are given quasi divine
status. It is hard to think that a clever man with a strongly Christian
background stumbled unaware into such a position when addressing religious
themes and communities.
To take democracy first. For Christians, and, I would think, Jews, Muslims and others, democracy cannot be the highest form of government. It might well be that, in practice, it is the highest achievable mechanism of administration in our fallen and frail world; but that is something rather different. Surely those who believe in a personal God, consider His pattern of government to be supreme. There is no democracy in the Kingdom of God, since the wisdom, indeed perfection, of the King’s will is infinite and there is no need or place for debate or discussion.
Such a situation is absent in the ephemeral government of human society and so a system in which everyone has their say may well be the next best thing; but believing in that system in the same way that we believe in God invests it with a dignity that it cannot sustain. Democratic decisions are not uniformly perfect. As the Prime minister himself pointed out, the same democratic system a generation ago, sheltered many of the attitudes, which we now find unacceptable. Democracy can be the tyranny of the majority and almost all modern codifications of the democratic principle offer something less than the equal voice of every individual. So yes, British citizens, at least for the moment, should accept that this is how we are governed, but we should not be required to elevate that reality to the status of an absolute value. Christians, certainly, hope for something different – something better – a time when we are ruled by absolute and perfect truth rather than the partially informed wish of the majority.
And so we come to the connected concept of the Rule of Law. There is no single clear cut opinion as to what constitutes the Rule of Law. For some people it comprises natural justice, against which specific legal provisions are judged and, if found wanting, invalidated. For others it is those laws themselves and their administrative processes that provide the standard.
Such a corpus of regulation is of human creation and, therefore, vulnerable to the frailties of human error. The concept of natural justice moves us some way, but its inference from empirical observation, also, is subject to the partiality of those who define its content. This does not invalidate the concept of law; but Christians ultimately look beyond worldly codes to the perfect law, which comes from God, of which our earthly versions are pale reflexions.
Once again, human society needs a legal framework, which is observed and supported by its members and what we have may be the best that we can achieve; everyone has to accept that in a pluralist society there will need to be an element of compromise. However, we should not elevate our humble best to the status of absolute; and it is perilous indeed to invest the rule of human law with a quasi infallibility. Miscarriages of justice and abuse of process illustrate its limitations and human legal systems can be subverted and there comes a point when unlawful action is legitimate in opposing a greater evil.
Much more could be said on this matter, but we shall move on to cover one further point.
The Prime minister announced that government policy would direct funding at those religious organisations, which promote cohesion and integration. I hope that such will also be the case in funding secular organisations. It is a myth – indeed a lie - that secular organisations are value-free or neutral: some of them are deeply antagonistic towards people of faith and, therefore, divisive. The government will be guilty of religious discrimination if it fails to put the same tests to all organisations, which he told us would be applied to those of faith motivation.
More broadly, secularism is just one of the competing philosophical world-views in the market-place of ideas and should not, therefore, be conceded a privileged place even as first amongst equals and certainly not the norm against which all others are judged or the default position when agreement is elusive.
The Prime minister’s speech was, to my mind, misconceived. It set out with the perfectly reasonable intention of telling us that there are no grounds for the divisive and violent activities of a small number of people in this country at the present time. However, it stumbled into statements, which should send a shiver down the spine of anyone with a sense of history. He endeavoured to subordinate God to the state, elevating the status quo in the UK to a quasi religious principle in its own right. It is probably true that people of faith, certainly those of the Abrahamic religions, should not find the generality of British Rule so objectionable that they descend into violence or unlawful activity, but. his speech went well beyond such a point-of-view, incardinating into a notion of Britishness absolute belief in our institutions and processes as self-justifying and self-validating.
These institutions and processes are constantly developing – and no more so than under his government. Who is to say that there will not come a point when they become unjust or immoral? Human governance is not self-referential, it is measured against higher values and it cannot be right to say without qualification, as he did, that “the duties [of obedience to the Rule of Law, democratic decision-making and other things] take clear precedence over any religious practice.”
Rather than reach into the traditions of those religions and argue the case for Britain’s political settlement from their own tenets of faith, he has, as it were, established an opposing army of ideas and principles to which all religions must defer. Ironically, he may prove to have enfeebled his endeavour by belittling religious conviction and appearing to set up a new god of which his government is preacher and priest.
Home page: http://stmatthewsnewcastle.org.uk/