Religion is a blind spot for too many British policymakers and journalists
by Georgia L Gilholy, Conservative Home:
Of the week-long Jewish festival of Succot, in which Jews eat and may sleep in temporary huts in commemoration of the Israelites’ years of wandering in the desert, the late Jonathan Sacks wrote:
“I think of my ancestors and their wanderings across Europe in search of safety, and I begin to understand how faith was their only home. It was fragile, chillingly exposed to the storms of prejudice and hate. But it proved stronger than superpowers and outlived them all.”
Surely even the most dyed-in-the-wool Dawkins devotee should admit the obvious fact that religion has, is, and will continue to be an irreplaceable pillar of human civilization. In some cases for good, in others for ill.
All faiths, whether or not we subscribe to them, undoubtedly provide overarching systems of values with tremendous implications. They promote encounters with transcendence and history. They can also provide, as the obviously did for the late Chief Rabbi, a psychological and social safety net desperately lacking in an atomised world.
Today’s chattering classes are, in contrast to their equivalents throughout the rest of human history, uninterested. Christianity especially, and often Judaism too, are perceived as fusty old curiosities, or fundamentalisms to be ridiculed and silenced.
Other faiths are poorly understood. The impact of all of them on British society is generally ignored, beyond the odd think piece about how faith schools must be abolished and the free expression of pro-life activists silenced because, after all, it is the “current year”.
This is particularly true when it comes to confronting our past. How can one accurately study the transatlantic slave trade and its defenders and retractors, for example, without grappling with the ancient doctrine of “natural slaves”? The evangelism of the abolitionist Clapham Sect? The Catholic scholasticism that underpinned the debates of sixteenth-century Spain?
We inhabit an impoverished media landscape marked by outrageous soundbites and ahistorical canards, as much as regards the present as the past.
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