'Britain no longer Christian' ?

Lady Butler Sloss and her colleagues on the impressively-named ‘Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life: community, diversity and the common good’, had their fifteen minutes of fame shortly before Christmas when they published their report which asserted that Britain was no longer  Christian country so we should stop pretending otherwise.

Who appointed them to carry out this report?

Well, they did. This ‘commission’ has no official basis. As in so much of public life, it consists of self-appointed busybodies.

So  who are the members?

Apart from the expected collection of superannuated Anglican bishops, including old beardy himself, the Very Revd Rowan Williams, there are the chief executive of the British Humanist Association; Shaunaka Rishi Das, director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Hindu chaplain at the University of Oxford; Dr Jagbir Jhutti-Johal, lecturer in Sikh Studies University of Birmingham; Professor Maleiha Malik; Professor Tariq Modood ; Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, community imam in Leicester; and assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain; Professor Lord Parekh; Rabbi Dr Norman Solomon, former president of the British Association for Jewish Studies; with a Secretariat led by Mohammed Abdul Aziz.

We are not told what this disparate collection of atheists, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Jews can contribute to expanding our knowledge and understanding of Christianity in modern Britain.

Representation from non-conformist Christians seems to be absent – Methodists, Baptists, Plymouth Brethren, Wesleyans, Evangelicals, the Salvation Army, not to mention Buddhists and Jedi.

The conclusions are a curious rag-bag of rather disconnected issues.

Without actually calling for their abolition, the Commission clearly does not like ‘faith’ schools. We are not told whether this is confined to the Christian faith or whether it includes the many Jewish and Muslim faith schools. The conclusion must be that Christianity is on its way out and we must help it on its way by keeping young people ignorant.

Then it makes a curious diversion into the House of Lords. It wants to reduce the number of Lords Spiritual and replace them with members of other faiths.

There are only 26 Bishops in the Lords. There are more than 60 peers of Asian origin out of a total of active (sort-of) members around 790. Assuming that most are Muslims, representation already looks quite adequate for a group that forms 5% of the population.

The Commission totally fails to understand why bishops sit in the legislature. Simple: ‘We’re here because we’re here!’ The justification disappeared years ago, but nothing will change except in the highly unlikely event of democratisation of the Upper House. So the justification for admitting people of other faiths  is incomprehensible, merely perpetuating a constitutional anachronism .

Even more astounding is that it wants to alter the format of the Coronation Ceremony to accommodate ‘other faiths’. Why? The Monarch is head of the Church of England, the ‘established’ church. Anything other than an Anglican ceremony that reflects the position of the Crown would be an illogical travesty.

The simple truth is that whether or not the English are practising Christians or even believe in God we have been imbued with Christian culture over nearly 2000 years.

The latest census tells us that almost 60% of the population describe themselves as Christian, with 25% don’t knows .

Christopher Howse, the Telegraph’s chief religiosi, points out that 13 million people will go to Premier League football games over the year. There will be over 100 million church attendances by Anglicans and Catholics, a figure that will be quite heavily increased by non-conformists, evangelicals and the multiplicity of minor sects. And a pretty good measure of our inherent Christianity, whether we are church-goers or not, and of our adherence to Christian rites is that Church weddings remain the norm, many people have their children baptised and almost all of us will be buried according to Christian rites.

The response to the report by the Church of England was the usual flatulence, confining itself almost entirely to the issue of faith schools.

It could have made an almost unanswerable case for showing that this self-important Commission was ‘all hat and no cattle’, as the Americans say. It could have quoted Cromwell.

‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that thou mayest be mistaken’.