Like this? Share it on social media. Join our monthly e-newsletter to keep up to date with our latest research and events. And check out our Friends Programme to find out how you can help our work.

In 21st Century Britain, so the oft-repeated mantra goes, society is ever more secular and religion increasingly irrelevant. The current London mayoral battle reveals a problem with that idea. Religion is being used as part of the campaigning and as a tool to undermine the candidates. Repeating that religion is irrelevant is not helpful – it sweeps under the carpet the nastiness and danger of what is actually happening.

It is worth noting the context that London is a very unusual city, a true outlier to most British statistical norms. It is disproportionately young, disproportionately educated, disproportionately international – with fully 37% of Londoners born outside the UK and 22% not having English as a first language. It is also disproportionately religious – Christianity is growing in London with church attendance up 16% between 2005-2012 and other faiths are growing too – Tariq Madood thinks that in ten years as many as one in four adult Londoners will belong to a minority faith.

Given these facts it is perhaps easy to take for granted that Londoners will soon pick between a mayoral candidate (Sadiq Khan) who is a Muslim, born in London to a Pakistani family, and a candidate (Zac Goldsmith) who comes from a Jewish family, born in London from a truly international family. Only in London would such a contest be largely considered unremarkable.

Also given those facts one might assume that London would be the city in which candidates from minority faith backgrounds might find it easiest to be accepted. If there is one election in Britain in which one would have thought that being a minority would be unproblematic it is surely the London mayoral contest.

Sadly things are not always so easy. London may be more diverse and on the whole more open to liberal values, support for immigration, and support for religion, but that doesn't mean that in practice relations between ethnic and religious groups are always easy. In April the author Ben Judah will be speaking at Theos on his book that looks at the remarkable ways in which London has changed, and continues to change, including the at times fraught relations between different immigrant groups and white British Londoners.

Clearly those tensions, and particularly the status of London's Muslim communit(ies)y carry political weight. Sadiq Khan must certainly be feeling their impact. A Mehdi Hasan article last week has drawn attention to a nasty undercurrent of attacks on Khan. The explicit ones have come largely from the rightwing press (usually trying to link him, with varying degrees of strained credulity, to Islamic extremists). Conservative politicians seem to have preferred innuendo, using terms like “radical and divisive” which don't quite explicitly mention Khan's faith, but use language that certainly hint that way.

It is important to note in this a distinction. Were the criticisms of something that Khan actually believed – a tenet of his belief that would be problematic in public office say – they might have been fair. In practice though it is not Khan’s personal beliefs that have been criticised (his liberal credentials are strong) but instead opponents have resorted to trying to damn him by vague association with other, scarier, Muslims. This is where the nasty innuendo of the campaign comes in; despite his own beliefs clearly not being those of an Islamic extremist, by virtue of being a Muslim at all it’s possible to hint, nudge and suggest that maybe, just maybe, a Muslim can’t be trusted as mayor.

The Labour campaign, meanwhile, so far as I have seen has not really said anything on Goldsmith's religious roots – but Twitter has not been nearly so reserved. Mention of Goldsmith as “the Jew” and often linking his Jewish roots to his wealth are sadly not difficult to find. Anti-semitism is alive and well, though at least it seems to have been driven under the surface – it, unlike Islamophobia, in Baroness Warsi's memorable expression doesn't pass the “dinner table test”.

Mehdi Hasan's article laments this trend and wonders if the liberal Khan cannot win as a Muslim, what Muslim can? Perhaps another question to ask is whether the right wing attackers are correct when they think that this sort of dog whistle attack on Khan's faith will work. Probably it will never be provable how many people did or did not choose to vote for Khan simply because he was a Muslim (or indeed how many did or did not choose Goldsmith simply because he was Jewish).

Clearly, however, there is a belief somewhere that it will work – and that it will work in London, for all its diversity and apparent tolerance. London is a modern city, and the capital of what we are told is an ever more secular society in which religion is irrelevant. The signs of the London mayoral campaign is that this diagnosis is not only premature, but actually dangerous. It is clearly not irrelevant if a candidate can be attacked and have their chance at political office damaged on the basis of their faith (or family faith background). Pretending that these identities are irrelevant is to fail to take seriously that anti-religious political attacks are happening, that they have an impact – and that they are not acceptable.

Ben Ryan is Researcher at Theos @BenedictWRyan

Image by Steve Punter via wikipedia available in the public domain