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Daily Mail
April 23, 2014
When David Cameron agreed to write a mild piece in favour of Christianity for last week’s Church Times, he can hardly have expected that he would stir up a major controversy.
A collection of 55 writers, broadcasters, scientists and academics have penned a furious letter to the Daily Telegraph accusing the Prime Minister of fostering ‘alienation and division in our society’ by asserting in his article that we live in a ‘Christian country’.
They claim that ‘repeated surveys, polls and studies show that most of us as individuals are not Christian in our beliefs or our religious identities’, and suggest that Mr Cameron is in danger of fuelling ‘enervating sectarian debates’.
Wow! You would have thought he had called for compulsory church attendance, whereas he wrote a harmless piece that will surely have offended no one except for a few metropolitan liberal atheists who reveal themselves as being astonishingly intolerant and — to borrow their word — divisive.
Mr Cameron’s declaration that we live in a ‘Christian country’ is irrefutable. Our constitutional arrangements are bound up with the Anglican Church — a fact dismissed by the angry letter-writers as being of little importance.
The Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, 26 of whose bishops sit in the House of Lords.
But the connections go far deeper than that. This country — and here I mean Britain, not just England — has a Christian heritage. In common with other Christian countries, our laws are largely based on Christian values.
Much of the painting, literature and music of our nation and continent has been profoundly influenced by the Christian story.
I am not referring here to antiquated works of art that may seem to have no relevance, but to those which still offer joy and enlightenment, and can only be fully understood in a Christian context.
You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate an oratorio by Handel or John Milton’s Paradise Lost or a painting of the Crucifixion, but you do have to grasp that they were inspired by Christian faith. They are part of a Christian culture.
Of course, it is perfectly true that in recent years church attendance has fallen sharply in Britain — more so than almost anywhere else in the Christian world. But it doesn’t follow that we have suddenly become a non-Christian country.
The 55 signatories are wrong to say that polls and studies have all shown that those with Christian beliefs are now in a minority. According to the comprehensive 2011 census, very nearly 60 per cent of the population in England and Wales describe themselves as Christian.
Admittedly, this marks a decline of some 10 per cent from the 2001 census, but it still represents not very far from two-thirds of the country.
I could offer a few tentative explanations for the drop in church attendance and decline of Christian belief: poor or non-existent religious education, the virtual disappearance of religious broadcasting, and the failings of the Church of England, which can sometimes appear introspective to the point of self-obsession.
Yet notwithstanding these powerful developments, the fact remains that around 60 per cent of people in Britain still regard themselves as Christian, even if most of them seldom or never go to church.
Scientists are meant to respect facts. The letter’s lead signatory is the Iraqi-born scientist and President of the British Humanist Association, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, while the distinguished Nobel prize winner Sir Harold Kroto also put his name to it.
How can men of science solemnly declare that Christians are now in a minority in this country when by far the most authoritative recent survey indicates that they remain, by a significant margin, in the majority?
The only explanation I can think of is that some at least of the signatories are zealots who, despite their scientific training, can be far more emotional and extreme in their thinking than the religious believers whom they hold in contempt.
