Should religious people have a privileged position in society? No.
There you go. That was easy. The Current Debate settled in a word. You can go away and read something else now.
The question is phrased in such a way as to be ingeniously rhetorical. Privilege is abhorrent to us today. It conjures images of pomposity, self-importance, and undeserved honour. Of course religious people shouldn’t have a privileged position in society. Nobody should have a privileged position in society.
The real question is: what constitutes privilege? Establishment? Parliamentary prayers? A presence in the House of Lords?
Thought for the Day is a good example. 150 seconds of unchallenged (and, it must be admitted, often unchallenging) devotional reflection, mystifyingly preserved at peak time on Today. Surely that is privilege?
It may well be. But to be able to identify ‘privilege’, you need some idea of ‘right’. What constitutes the right to be heard in the public square?
The answer, which has, of course, varied wildly throughout history, is today bound up with the idea of ‘the people’. Only their free and informed choice, exercised through the ballot, cash register or TV remote control, affords true legitimacy. A politician, product or programme may stand in the public square if the public has voted for, bought or watched it in sufficient numbers. If not, we stray dangerously close to those modern sins of elitism, discrimination and privilege.
The ‘problem’ with this foundation for legitimacy, at least in relation to our title question, is that if taken seriously, it would afford more air time to Christian views than is currently the case. No matter how nominal or tokenistic it may be, around 70 per cent of people in the UK call themselves Christian, and around 4-5 million people are active churchgoers. Compare that with non-religious adherence – 15 per cent of people said they had no religion in the 2001 Census and membership of the various British Secular and Humanist societies numbers in the thousands. The result is as clear as it is unpalatable: if public opinion is the mark of legitimacy, we would hear rather more and louder Christian voices in the public square than is currently the case.
The ‘public opinion’ argument has its own problems, however. At best, it allows only that which is currently popular or acceptable to be articulated in public, an arrangement that minimises challenges to the status quo and can politically enervate a society. At worst, it degenerates into a tyranny of the majority, against which liberal societies have struggled for years.
Other sources of legitimacy are needed, the most obvious being the notion of ‘public good’. Slightly unfashionable as it may seem today, and in spite of all the pragmatism, big tent politics, and supposed death of ideology we have enjoyed over the last 15 years, political and social thinking is still driven by notions of public good. Without them, politics dies.
The problem with ‘the public good’, however, is that it is cursed by ambiguity and controversy. Whose definition of the good, are we talking about here? It wouldn’t be mine by any chance, would it? What a surprise!
We should not be naive about the power games that operate beneath talk of the ‘public good’. But nor should we run scared of them. Social science, in particular the emerging ‘science of happiness’ and the growing number of social capital studies of recent years, suggest that there is greater commonality in our conceptions of the good that postmodernism would have us believe. Certain things make life, both individually and corporately, better and no amount of postmodern scepticism can change that.
Life-satisfaction studies, of different people in different places, repeatedly link our happiness with money (up to a certain point), meaningful employment, state of governance, interpersonal trust, community participation, stable family life, faithful, monogamous marriage and – would you believe it? – serious (as opposed to socially conditioned) belief in God.
Social capital studies, operating with different objectives, give some indication of which community groups currently contribute most to tackling those evils that most dehumanise us (such as poverty, unemployment, addiction, breakdown) and nurturing those that do the opposite (such as cultivating trust and community participation).
Frustratingly for those who would silence the religious voice under the banner of ‘banning privilege’ religious groups do rather well by these categories, preaching (and sometimes even practicing) many of the life habits that make for personal happiness, and contributing enormously to civil society. The concept of public good, like that of public opinion, affords considerable legitimacy to the Christian voice in the public square.
This conclusion – and doubtless this whole piece – will be criticised as self-serving. ‘A public theology think tank argues that there should be a stronger Christian voice in the public square. What a surprise?!’
Yet to come to another conclusion requires you to derive your idea of legitimacy (and with it your concept of what constitutes a right and what constitutes a privilege) from somewhere other than ‘public opinion’ or, contested as it is, ‘public good’.
Such a conclusion should not, however, leave religious believers feeling smug, for it has a quid pro quo. Should there come a time when the majority of the British public do not, however nominally, associate themselves with the Christian faith; or when studies show no link between traditional religious practices and life-satisfaction; or when Christian or other religious groups no longer deliver the goods of civil society, any supposed ‘right’ to be heard will vanish with them.
Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.
