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The Times - Awakenings
Faith is returning to the centre of public debate

As the Archbishop of Canterbury argues in our pages today, anyone, particularly any clergyman, returning to Britain in the past few days would be surprised by how religion, and not football or politics, dominates discussions. What is often seen as the most secular country in Europe has become obsessed by religious issues: all the talk in pubs, television studios and by ministers is of veiled women, the wearing of crosses and whether faith schools should be obliged to accept pupils from other faiths. Is British society, Rowan Williams wonders, in the midst of a new religious war?

He found the uproar all the more striking as he had just returned from China, where religion has been officially suppressed for 57 years, and where, as a result, political leaders now worry about the moral vacuum in a society that has encouraged a capitalism that has fostered a driven and selfish climate. [cough] The Chinese, like the Russians earlier, are finding that state-sponsored atheism cannot eradicate religious beliefs deeply embedded in national culture and tradition.

Dr Williams was allowed to meet only those church leaders officially sanctioned by Beijing (and he earned himself some criticism for accepting this limitation). He identified, nevertheless, a yearning for a spiritual dimension in Chinese society. What he has found on his return is that this yearning is not peculiar to China. If the 20th century was an age of fiercely competing secular ideologies, where communism, fascism, socialism and nationalism focused people’s ideals and energies on the political struggle, this century has seemed like a throwback to an earlier age in which the great issues of the day are those of belief, faith and spiritual identity. Secular politics have become boring to many people, evoking apathy rather than fervour. And where there is still a passionate engagement — in the environment, animal liberation or anti-globalisation — the cause has been embraced with quasi-religious fervour.

…But it has meant that the political debate is framed by issues of faith placing a new onus on religious leaders such as Dr Williams. It is a challenge he obviously welcomes.

The Times - A society that does not allow crosses or veils in public is a dangerous one, by Rowan Williams (Archdruid of Canterbury)

COMING BACK from a fortnight in China at the beginning of this week, into the middle of what felt like a general panic about the role of religion in society, had a slightly surreal feel to it. The proverbial visitor from Mars might have imagined that the greatest immediate threat to British society was religious war, fomented by “faith schools”, cheered on by thousands of veiled women and the Bishops’ Benches in the House of Lords. Commentators were solemnly asking if it were not time for Britain to become a properly secular society.

The odd thing was to come into this straight from a context where people were asking the opposite question. Wasn’t it time that China stopped being a certain kind of secular society? The political and intellectual world that is emerging in the new China is having to cope with a vacuum where cohesive social morality ought to be, a vacuum shaped by the past 50 years of Chinese history.

The culture of total state provision collapsed during and after the Cultural Revolution; under Deng Xiaoping, the new tolerance of capitalist enterprise fostered a driven and selfish climate; the one-child policy designed to save China from demographic disaster resulted in an ageing population, a generation of children both indulged and crippled with expectations — and a record of forced abortion and sterilisation. Frustrations about not having the “ right” to a male child intensified a contempt for women’s dignity among the uneducated public. …

Few places have tried as systematically as China to set this in stone; and now there is a tacit admission of defeat.

Here in the UK, the daily reality of faith in ordinary communities is bound up with the maintenance of civil society, with enabling citizens to ask constructively critical questions of the State and to co-operate with statutory bodies to meet urgent needs. We could do with some common sense and realism about this. It would be something of a paradox if we had to look to the emerging China to find it.