The recent British election campaign was marked by a noticeable step change in religious, and especially Christian, political engagement. Statements and initiatives cascaded forth from many quarters: from Anglican dioceses and other denominational bodies, including the Roman Catholic Church; from ecumenical or interdenominational groupings; from faith-based organisations and think-tanks; and from ad hoc networks springing into action for the occasion, like that producing the Westminster Declaration.
New surges of political activism from any minority community – and that is what Christians are – typically present a challenge both to the receptivity of the democratic system itself, and to the political judgement and competence of the newly assertive group.
Any new voice questioning conventional political wisdom or confronting tacitly accepted reigning nostrums can be distracting or disturbing to dominant opinion. When such a voice is also religiously inflected it faces the additional hurdle of the de facto public secularism of British political life. By that I don’t mean active hostility to religion; I’m not one of those alleging that British Christians are “persecuted”, a claim which debases the term for those elsewhere who really are. I simply mean unfamiliarity with religion’s capacity to generate substantive public insights, and unease at the arrival of voices which seem to speak in a foreign political accent.
In such circumstances, those whose intellectual formation and political experience have protected them from any real exposure to public religion (and that includes some Christians), are taken into quite new territory. They are challenged to revisit their inherited assumptions about the modulations of acceptable political speech and the scope of legitimate democratic aspirations.
Adherents to default public secularism are understandably disconcerted at the appearance of religious communities unashamedly bringing their own faith commitments to bear in democratic discourse. This is especially the case if they are unaware that their own political views are shaped by unstated faith-like commitments. They face the demanding task of engaging in what the secularist philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls the “self-reflective transcending” of their secularism – taking critical distance from their underlying philosophical commitments and coming to see them as only one of the plausible options available in an irrevocably plural society.
This is a momentous challenge to the secular mind, and religious citizens need to exercise patience while public secularists make the necessary mental and emotional adjustments. Transitions from political monism (in this case default secularism) to pluralism always encounter resistance and are inescapably unsettling for the hitherto dominant community. British Christians – especially Anglicans – need only recall how demanding it was for their own forebears to come to terms with the loss of their dominance in the public realm.
If that is the test facing adherents to public secularism, an equally stern test faces religious groups seeking to up their political game – or, in some cases, to flex their democratic muscles for the first time. Their challenge is a double one.
The first step is to strive to acquire the deliberative and communicative skills required for genuine public speech. This doesn’t come automatically. By “public speech” I mean something like what Christian philosopher Christopher Eberle has termed “the ideal of conscientious engagement” – a serious commitment to try to persuade as many of one’s fellow citizens as possible of the public benefit of one’s policy proposals. That doesn’t require speaking secularly but it does involve speaking intelligibly about recognisable – albeit disputable – components of the public good. Theologian Nigel Biggar’s recent article on assisted suicide in Standpoint magazine is a good example.
The second part of the test is formulating strategic ambitions which reckon with and treat fairly – even if they do not celebrate – society’s irrevocable religious and moral diversity. In my view the recent campaign has only further confirmed that calling for government to intervene legally to protect
As the post-election dust settles, both secularists and Christians might profitably engage in a period of critical self-assessment about how to improve their performances next time round. They might even talk to each other about it.
Jonathan Chaplin is Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics and a consultant researcher for Theos.
