For three centuries religious difference was the defining issue of our national life. From roughly the Act of Supremacy in 1534 to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, religion defined our conflicts abroad and tore us apart at home. In that period, Roman Catholics were cast as religious outsiders. Now, at the end of two centuries of accommodation and largely peaceful compromise, it seems certain that Andy Burnham will be the first meaningfully Roman Catholic prime minister in British history. However, Burnham will have to deal with the emerging and volatile challenges of religious differences.
We are entering a new era of interfaith national turbulence. This time the tension is not along the internal faults of Christianity, but between different religions. While Britain has been a multi-religious nation for many decades and formal relations between religious groups remain strong, we are seeing alarming new breakdowns in community relations. Ominous religious tensions have emerged in our political landscape. Suddenly, we’re making God again.
The right now speaks of the West as a culture rooted in Christianity and endangered by the influx of non-Christian peoples, especially Muslims. Populists have embraced the clash of civilizations theory popularized by American political scientist Samuel Huntington in the 1990s. Their demonization of religious differences mimics medieval Christendom’s anxieties about Islam as the “enemy without” (and Judaism as the “enemy within”). In March, the shadow justice secretary called the Ramadan celebrations in Trafalgar Square “an act of domination and division”. Tommy Robinson’s calls for his supporters to “unite the Kingdom under God” display a style of Christian nationalism this country has never seen before. The increasingly clear message is that only cultural Christians can be fully British.
Meanwhile, domestic politics is increasingly defined by distant religious conflicts. Minority religious communities now inhabit a digital world that constantly connects them with their co-religionists overseas. Israel and Palestine featured prominently in May’s local election materials, and several Gazan independents now hold seats in the House of Commons. Other international religious conflicts, particularly the nexus of tensions between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs emanating from the Indian subcontinent, increasingly influence local politics.
Today, however, unlike earlier periods in British history, we are religiously illiterate. While 19th-century debates over Jewish emancipation were elaborated with reference to scripture, our political culture today follows Alastair Campbell’s famous dictum: we do not make God. And you can only address the problems you can articulate. We find ourselves unable to mention or narrate interfaith conflict, let alone discuss it. Soon, we may find ourselves embroiled in a conflict we cannot even explain.
Our religious literacy atrophied under the assumption that progress and modernity would inevitably lead to secularism and reduce religious practice to a private leisure activity. When religious issues re-emerged in the 21st century, we in Britain found ourselves lacking the lexicon of religion in public life. The discussion was divided into available categories such as race and culture. In fact, multiculturalism was ultimately found inadequate precisely because it was the product of a political culture that refused to take religion seriously, or to face the very real challenges that religious difference presents. Liberals wanted to believe that various theologies were merely decorative devices for repackaging the core values that all people are supposed to share. However, we can no longer avoid the fact that divergent beliefs lead to divergent (though not necessarily incompatible) approaches to gender, society, foreign policy, and much more.
Successive governments have sought to resolve inter-religious animosities and prejudices with new definitions of anti-religious hatred. The Equality Act 2010 made religion and belief a “protected characteristic”. The same logic motivated the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism in 2016 and motivates the newly proposed definition of anti-Muslim hostility. More definitions are sure to follow, however there is little evidence to suggest that they change behaviour.
There is little idea of a positive approach, or of the culture of religious expression we are trying to build as a nation. We need a language that moves us beyond bitter culture wars and narrow legalistic debates. The renewal of discussions about religious freedom and the common community in Britain today can take three possible directions.
From our deep past, we have the language of “tolerance”. Tolerance is a finer concept for attitudes; tolerance is structural. The Toleration Act of 1689 legitimized in concrete terms the citizenship of Protestants who opposed the established church: it allowed them to hold public office and worship freely. Toleration as a process granted similar rights to Roman Catholics in 1829 and Jews later in the 19th century. Tolerance seemed meaningless when listed among the four “Core British Values” introduced in schools by the 2010-2015 Coalition government. But the deep roots of tolerance in British history can help us speak with confidence and understanding about religious freedom as it is extended to other minorities today.
More recently, Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, advocated an “interactive pluralism”. This was also an update of a familiar concept. English pluralism is a school of thought closely identified with the Anglo-Catholic monk-scholar John Neville Figgis, born in 1866, who coined the phrase “community of communities” as an anti-authoritarian concept of the nation-state. Williams’s addition of “interactive” suggests a corrective to multiculturalism’s compulsion to isolate communities from each other. We want a pluralistic nation where communities of all faiths and none interact rather than coexist, in local forums, in practical and informal collaborations, while their children play in the local park.
Finally, with a Roman Catholic about to enter Downing Street and almost equal numbers of Catholics and Anglicans now in British churches on Sunday, perhaps we need to draw out Catholic social teachings more clearly as well. Inspired by his meeting with Pope Francis in 2023, Andy Burnham last year borrowed a phrase from the late Pope’s encyclical All brothers (all are brothers) in a public lecture for the religious think tank Theos. Speaking after the murderous attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue, Burnham reflected on the need to move from a crisis of faith to a “dating culture”. In the encyclical this culture is based on “the ability to sit down and listen to others”. Such phrases may emphasize the need to confront and meet religious “others” so that fear or mistrust does not grow. This type of encounter in civic forums, civic assemblies and joint institutions can foster relationships that hold disagreements respectfully in the context of belonging and mutual commitments. Burnham’s devolution rhetoric offers hope that this kind of local civic resilience may once again be possible.
Renewing the ways we think and talk about religion and faith in this country will not be easy. But an important opportunity is presented by the recent (and long overdue) recommendation of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, approved by the government, to include religious education in the national curriculum for the first time. While the subject has long been compulsory, its content has varied enormously in quality and scope. Curriculum standardization forces us to confront what we want to say about religion, to our children and to ourselves.
Those who seek to divide the country shamelessly talk about religion in cartoonish and tribalistic ways. We have only three years until the general elections are called. All the evidence suggests good reason to fear a further game of religious divisions and, more alarmingly, an outcome that would destroy efforts at cohesive religious pluralism for many years to come. Therefore, we once again consider religious difference as a primary political issue.
(Further reading: Who will it be then, Mr. Burnham?)
