Is Britain a Christian country?
by Capel Lofft, Artillery Row:
The UK has an established religion alright — the worship of the self.
You’re a middle-aged man who sports an embarrassing attempt at ‘designer stubble’. You enjoy telling everyone how much you enjoy the music of Radiohead slightly more than you actually enjoy listening to the music of Radiohead. You have recently purchased a Zoe diet kit and are now boring everyone senseless about your gut bacteria. Among your many other deadeningly predictable opinions is this: that religion is a relic of the past that should be confined to oblivion and certainly should have no role in public life. As one Twitter user put it, ‘The fairy tales of supernatural religions, and their morals made by men in the medieval Middle East have absolutely no place in the governance of anything.’
No doubt, then, despite your misgivings about anyone associated with the Daily Mail, you gave a hearty like and retweet to columnist Sarah Vine this week when she opined ‘Religion is a personal choice which I respect, but it has no place in politics. Britain is a secular liberal democracy, and the vast majority of people want it to stay that way’. Get off our personal autonomy™, you theocratic monsters!
As many people immediately pointed out, the simple fact is that the United Kingdom is, in fact, not formally a ‘secular liberal democracy’. We have an established Church, some of whose bishops sit by right in the upper house of our legislature. Our head of state, the King, is the “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England”. His coronation was a religious rite (some might say the eighth, or perhaps the third, sacrament), in which he was anointed as God’s chosen ruler.
If we’re honest, however, this objection rings a bit hollow. It’s technically true, but Sarah Vine was closer to the spirit of the truth, if one defines religion narrowly to mean one of the established faiths that is widely considered to be a ‘religion’. On that basis, the majority of the population probably agree with her.
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