Baroness Sayeeda Warsi – Britain’s first female Muslim Cabinet member – opened a proverbial can of worms in a speech on Islam and national identity at the University of Leicester last week.

The Baroness argued that anti-Muslim bigotry could now pass the ‘dinner-table-test’, with a mix of religious illiteracy and hostility creating a climate in which Islamophobia is now widely accepted.

At the front of a long queue of critics stood those Tories who already saw her as ‘a disaster waiting to happen’, and ‘a bit of a liability’. Now they had their proof: she is guilty of the cardinal political sins of indiscipline and ‘talking down’ to the British public. Off with her (political) head!

To be sure, there’s a lot to disagree with in the speech, though that in itself is indicative of the way in which Warsi steered clear the platitudes that have beset the debate around Islam and national identity. Her rejection of the language of ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ attracted much criticism, not all of it unjustified. But at least she has tried to crack open the assumption that people of faith can only be accepted into the body politic if they don’t take their faith too seriously. This invidious idea is corrosive of the virtues needed in a plural civic space, an intolerance-lite whereby you only have to accept and talk with people who don’t act, think, talk, or look too different.

Her key move was to draw historical parallels between historical anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism, and the present place of the Muslim community, and thereby implicitly suggest that the Muslim community now represents ‘the other’ in the national consciousness.

Now, there are several ways in which the analogy is false. First, it breaks down when it gets to statute, law and constitution. Muslims suffer no particular legal disadvantage. Indeed, given the Act of Settlement, Catholics arguably still occupy a worse position.

Second, it is hard to make the case that the broader activity of Government has particularly disadvantaged British Muslims. Indeed, one of the criticisms of Prevent – the programme launched by the last Government to tackle ‘radicalistaion’ – was that it has simply subsidised ordinary, run of the mill activities amongst in Muslim communities.

Third, the place of Islam is a uniquely complex issue. Poverty and poor social outcomes, class, ethnicity, foreign policy controversies, and the ideological chasm between prevailing social libertarianism and the social conservatism of Islam all overlay the narrow issues of religious identity and practice. Resolve one and the rest are still there, militating against cohesion. The integration of the Muslim community is not just a knotty problem, it’s a knot of knotty problems.

The nub of the issue, according to Warsi, is how we resolve divided loyalties. Here she relies much on the Catholic case:

"Deep down, it all boiled down to this: Whether a Catholic, whose ultimate allegiance was thought to be to the Papacy, could still be a loyal servant of the British Monarchy. The problem with Catholicism, as the Protestant establishment saw it, was that it transcended British sovereignty. Ultimate loyalty wasn’t to the King of Britain but to the Papacy, which meant being Catholic and British were two irreconcilable identities."

Historically, the Baroness has it just about right. The perception of a domestic Catholic threat was indeed in its alignment to foreign powers; thus William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (circa. 1765): ‘while they [Catholics] acknowledge a foreign power [the Pope], superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects.’

The United States, argued Warsi, has managed to achieve a pragmatic acceptance of diversity so that you can, for instance, ‘be proudly Irish or Italian or Christian or Muslim – and still American’, the key being the break from the tradition of absolute religious conformity. Once again, the Baroness is broadly right – but there’s also something more to be said. To be Irish-American is to have made one half of that identity malleable, cultural rather than political. According to some theologians, and depending on what being American commits one to, a similar (and in their mind unacceptable) compromise has to be made by the ‘Christian-American’, notwithstanding the way in which the United States has evolved its own brand of civil religion with a strong resemblance to Christianity. No matter how much we want them to, multiple identities – religious or national – do not sit easily alongside each other. For people of faith, who are not prepared simply to soften their religious identity and mould it around their national commitments, the process will be necessarily and naturally difficult.

Christians have not always successfully sustained this paradox. Too often, we have simply re-described the commitments of faith and made them synonymous with the interests of nation. But Christian theology does provide some space, some room for manoeuvre. First, it renders the Christian’s ultimate loyalty to a kingdom ‘not from this world’ (John 18.36). The Kingdom of God is of a different order and kind to the ‘kingdoms’ in which we live, and though it challenges them on many counts, it does not seek to replace them.

Second, with an account of power that simultaneously allows ‘the authorities’ a proper role, including the right to ask for a particular kind of obedience, while at the same time declaring that they act under the aegis of God himself and are so ultimately accountable, Christianity denies the state any legitimate claim to total authority or total obedience, and thus has been a progenitor, among others, to contemporary political liberalism.

Sean Oliver-Dee argues in his Theos report, Religion and Identity: Divided Loyalties?, that these theological resources have allowed Christianity to flourish within different cultural, national and political contexts. Christianity and Islam are not ‘the same’ in this regard but similar resources, he claims, are available within Islam, should British Muslims wish to take advantage of them.

Religious and national identities can be reconciled, though often only provisionally. But the way to reconcile them is not to plead for ‘moderation’ among the faithful of any religion, where that is synonymous with indifference regarding the concrete commitments of that faith. Rather, the task is to give believers the space to mine their own tradition for resources they need.

Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.