The made-to-order responses from Terry Sanderson and Andrew Copson to David Cameron’s speech on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible suggest that they have read the headlines but not the text itself. Much of the speech was simply a factual recounting of the substantial historical influence of the Bible on the values underpinning British politics and society and of the contemporary contributions churches make, alongside people of other faiths or none, to the welfare of society today. His claim that ‘Britain is a Christian country’ was largely descriptive, although historians and sociologists will no doubt want to press him for more a more nuanced account of how that influence operated and still operates in particular instances.
Cameron didn’t assert that Christianity is the sole source of core British values or even that it is more important than other sources in sustaining those values today. He didn’t call for any kind of public privileging of Christianity. What he actually claimed can be reduced to three important but hardly controversial propositions: first, that Christianity has been the principal de facto feeder of British culture and values and that we shouldn’t shy away from at least acknowledging the fact; second, that an attitude of moral relativism disables us from confidently invoking any public values at all and so from effectively confronting social ills; and third, that the church – and especially the Church of England whose clergy he happened to be addressing – should redouble its efforts to shore up core values wherever they could.
Admittedly the speech contained confusions and provoked questions. His conflation of moral relativism with ‘secular neutrality’ didn’t help, since many proponents of such neutrality are committed to one or other variant of moral universalism. The content of the ‘muscular liberalism’ he again invoked needed a lot more spelling out than he yet seems to have realised. And his repetition of the claim made in his Munich speech in February that a misplaced tolerance has ‘allowed segregated communities to behave in ways that run completely counter to our values’ suggests the need for rather more careful thinking about multiculturalism than he has so far offered. But to claim, as Copson did, that Cameron was trying to ‘make Christianity and Christian beliefs the foundation of British values or a social morality’, or as Sanderson did, that he was remotely supposing we could ‘force people to believe what they have reasoned to be untrue’ or convince people ‘that religion is the only route to morality’ is just tendentious.
Critics like Copson and Sanderson have missed the low-hanging fruit in Cameron’s speech, namely its characteristically platitudinous account of ‘British values’. I say ‘characteristically’ not to finger Cameron in particular: the last dozen or so official reports on ‘social cohesion’, ‘integration’ or ‘citizenship’ show that while many of our politicians and policy-makers frequently insist on the importance of such values, few have much idea about – or the nerve to venture a stab at – their substantive content. Cameron’s list actually goes somewhat beyond the usual candidates, and includes ‘responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities.’ But the problem for secularists (actually for all of us) isn’t that Cameron claims these values have Christian provenance, but that he isn’t prepared to tell us what they actually mean.
In calling these values platitudinous I am not at all saying they are unimportant. On the contrary, they are fundamental to the sustenance of our social and political life. But the problem with issuing mere check-lists like these is that in a society marked both by increasing atomisation and relational collapse and by deepening and widening moral, philosophical and religious fragmentation, the actual content of these words is increasingly opaque or, when approaching sufficient clarity as to be discussable, profoundly contested. What, exactly, are we ‘responsible’ for? What particular concrete acts does ‘compassion’ enjoin and to whom? Does ‘self-sacrifice’ mean resigning ourselves to the draconian consequences of the government’s austerity programme while incompetent bankers retire on obscene personal fortunes? What, precisely, does ‘the common good’ mean for climate change policy? Might one of the ‘social obligations’ we have towards our families be to pause our careers to care for elderly relatives? What, in any case, is a ‘family’? – a controversy Cameron has himself stoked up by supporting same-sex marriage. And who, in any case, are ‘we’ – individuals, households, civil society institutions, government?
If politicians like David Cameron are serious in their rejection of moral relativism and not just busy serving up some crowd-pleasing rhetoric , they must step up to the plate and put some specific , ‘muscular’ content into the ‘British values’ they ritually invoke. Vigorous – and sometimes acrimonious – debates will no doubt ensue. But that will be a lot healthier for British society and for democratic politics than the evasive shadow-boxing of which this speech is merely the latest instance.
Jonathan Chaplin is Director, Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (KLICE), and author of Multiculturalism: A Christian Retrieval (Theos, 2011).
