There is a growing gulf between religious culture and national culture in England today.  Increasingly, the national mood neither respects nor understands the role of religion as a participant in civil society.

By "culture" I mean a sense of the ties that bind:  a common history, a shared set of symbols, consensus on the moral order.  In our post-modern age it would be controversial to argue that in addition culture requires a metanarrative, but, deconstructionism aside, it would seem to be essential for religion, and also for national culture.  That is to say, people need a story or tradition giving a sense of where they have come from in the past, as they orientate themselves towards the future.[1] In the definition of culture offered here, religious and national cultures overlap.  In England, however, the common ground between religious culture and national culture seems to be fading.  There is less and less comprehension of religion in the consciousness of the nation.[2]

This has been noted by the sociologist Linda Woodhead who said recently that in England,

Christianity has become a counter-cultural world … what goes on [in the churches] is strange to the majority of the population, and [the churches] are self-consciously counter-cultural;  the sermons often talk about standing against the culture.

…..

young people are now more likely to have heard of feng sui, tai chi and yoga than the Trinity, the Ascension and the Resurrection.  In everyday discourse, Christian concepts have become rare.[3]

Of course, we may wonder when Christian doctrines have been everyday discourse.  It might also be objected that a strong co-relation between religious and national cultures never existed, except in some fondly imagined golden past.  But evidence for the intertwining of religious and national cultures of the various national cultures of Britain is plentiful.[4]  It was sometimes argued that the Church of England both expressed English characteristics and helped to shape these.  Keith Robbins says of the Church of England:

Its ethos was the essence of the English ethos.  It was comprehensive and dogmatically generous, with an apparently instinctive capacity for compromise and conciliation.  The English church suited the English character and the English character had made the English church.[5]

A Jew, a Catholic, a Dissenter or a secularist might want to question this account of religion and national character.  But this religious self-understanding, almost purposefully vague, had its appeal.  As late as the 1930s, a politician like Conservative Prime Minster Stanley Baldwin could increase his electoral support by appealing to basic religious virtues as expressed through Englishness. 

In manufacturing a "spiritual glue" which evoked "Englishness," rural harmonies, Christian or ethical values, and the Elect Nation, and which called for the moralization of industrial relations and bound all sides to their best constitutional behaviour, Baldwin struck so many chords that he became a national institution.[6]

The appeal of Christian tradition as a touchstone of national character continued at least well into the 1950s.[7]  Since then, national and religious cultures have been drifting further and further apart and the gap is now growing rapidly.

To give the reasons for this would be beyond the time allocated for this short paper and would raise difficult questions of secularisation.  I want, rather, to give some evidence of what I consider to be the results of this trend in England today.  It will be necessarily impressionistic.

1.  There is a growing inability to recognise the spiritual element in life

This is an astonishing claim to make, especially when many commentators have noted the spread of secular rituals, notably to do with mourning, with, for example, cards, flowers, and teddy bears left near sites where people have died.  And of course I do not mean that people in England today are without values, ideals or morals. 

Yet I think there is evidence that in the broader culture, these things are no longer seen as linked with religion.  Take, for example, a recent story about the growing number of private schools for poor people.  There have always been private schools for the rich, but almost from nowhere there are now 276 private schools – mostly in urban areas – for those from working-class backgrounds.  These schools are often associated with evangelical Christianity, many are linked with black-led Pentecostal churches.  They are used by parents despairing of inner-city state schools.  A recent article by the author of a book on this subject highlighted how inner-city state schools were becoming ‘academies of crime’.  Black parents were increasingly alarmed and some had sent their children to new schools run by Pentecostal churches.  There the children had learned discipline, self-respect and consideration for others.  The success rate academically was remarkable.  Yet when the parents were asked if this was "all to do with the religious aspect of such schools," they said that this was not the case:  "They just want their children to be well-behaved and well-educated."[8]  We may wonder whether either the interviewer or the parents have failed to spot some disjunction here.

Overall, there is considerable concern in England today about younger people growing up without the sense of discipline, purpose and social conscience that would have characterized earlier generations – generations that grew up within a broadly Christian culture.  Yet in the anguished debates about purposeless, drifting youth, the element of religion is never mentioned.  Here is a newspaper’s defence correspondent summarizing recent Ministry of Defence research:

Recruits joining the army are increasingly self-absorbed and undisciplined, the study revealed.  They come from backgrounds that have suffered from the decline of the traditional family and leave school without any set of moral values.

Socially immature, lacking mutual respect and having led self-indulgent, materialistic lives, they are all too easily shocked by the close confines of military life.[9]

This report does not require a mention of religion, yet it drifts there in the background, unacknowledged, the missing element in the equation.  The decline in religion has diminished recognition of the spiritual element in religion, and its role in English culture. 

Recently the government, in the form of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, has proposed changes to the national curriculum for high schools.  An existing requirement is that pupils be taught to "work for the common good."  It is now proposed that this should be deleted.  Also proposed for deletion is the requirement that schools should give pupils "knowledge and understanding of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural heritages of Britain’s diverse society."  This would be replaced by helping them "understand different cultures and traditions and have a strong sense of their own place in the world."[10]  The new clause is different in being value-free, a key component in the secularizing approach that dominates in England today.

Sometimes a certain humourlessness goes along with this attitude.  As in the US, Christian programmes tried out in prisons have had encouraging results in cutting the rates of recidivism, but these have been discontinued after permission for them was withdrawn.  Without, I think, her tongue in her cheek, the prison area psychologist who drew up a report on the programme said that the programme believed that the root of offending was in individual sin and this had ‘no basis in specific scientific research’.[11]

2.  Where religion is recognised as part of national culture, its influence is regarded as deleterious

Recently a coalition of religious leaders and senior hospital consultants defeated a move to introduce physician-assisted suicide via a bill in the House of Lords.  The day of the bill, journalist Polly Toynbee wrote: 

Today at 5pm a cabal of bishops, rabbis, imams, Catholics, evangelicals and other believers is organising a coup against the assisted dying for the terminally ill bill … Today is the day when the forces of superstition will try to cut off any further debate  …[12]

This is good knock-about stuff, from a journalist and columnist who likes to hammer theism, but it is interesting in the careful sweep it gives of religious leadership, to insist that all religion is deleteriously superstitious.  Moreover, there is the language of secrecy ("cabal," with antisemitic overtones) and of religion organizing itself to seize power ("organizing a coup").  Toynbee only articulates more forcefully a wider unease, that religion is inherently harmful.

I have not seen it commented on anywhere that one result of this mood in England is a widening of the gulf in understanding between the UK and the US.  Reportage of George W. Bush in England routinely mocks his evangelical Christian faith.  London journalists sometimes ask the same question that was asked of John F. Kennedy when he was running for president in 1959, namely whether his faith meant that he would be open to manipulation by religious leaders.[13]  Similarly, when Ruth Kelly was Education Secretary in the UK it was asked whether this meant that she would be a cipher for Opus Dei, of which she was a member, pressing its agenda.  The Catholic faith of the Blair family is also criticised, and the news that Mass was occasionally celebrated in the prime minister’s official residence was greeted with astonishment. 

Much of this is hardly unique to England today.  Many western countries have their own variations of the culture wars.  Looking further back, the history of France in the second half of the 19^th century is marked by a strong anticlericalism which sought to roll back the power and influence of the Catholic Church.[14]  Yet as Owen Chadwick points out, the 19^th century desire to limit the power of an obscurantist religion sometimes co-existed uneasily with liberal principles of democracy.  William Lecky, for example, writing in 1896, said that the power of the Catholic Church meant that ‘When a large proportion of the electors in a nation submit to such dictation, that nation is very unfit for representative institutions.’[15]

There is a similar schizophrenia here in England.  On the one hand, there is unease, perhaps dislike, of religion on a wide scale in popular culture.  On the other hand, the government, aware of educational failures and social exclusion, is keen to expand the number of faith schools, since these are seen as offering better education, and in fact better preparedness for life.  Similarly, agnostic or atheist parents seek to enroll their children in such schools still rail against the religious culture of those schools, and fear that their children will be indoctrinated.  This prompts a question:  Can you maintain the ethos that makes these schools special without the religious culture that enables this ethos?

(I ought to acknowledge in passing that the government move to increase the number of faith schools has been widely criticised on the grounds that it will lead to increased cultural segregation.)

3.  In terms of popular culture, it is the poorest element of society who are least likely to relate to religion.  And in this they are different from new arrivals.

Christian religious practice in Britain tends to increase with income.  That is to say, it is the middle class, and especially upper middle class (professional/managerial) elements of society who are more likely to go to church and regard themselves as having a religious affiliation.  In no social group do the majority practice, but it is more likely among the better off.  The poorest elements of the population vary from indifference to hostility to religion.  Where there is an element of urban geographical segregation ("council estates" – I think "projects" in US parlance) religious affiliation is especially rare.   In Latin America this group would be strongly involved in Catholicism, often a folk Catholicism, or pentecostal churches; in the US they would be frequenting store front churches or charismatic congregations. In the UK their alienation from religion is profound.[16]

Unlike the US, where I read that the middle classes are being squeezed, in the UK the middle class has expanded as prosperity is shared. We have a very rich sliver at the top; a big middle class; and about 10% of the population who never seem able to make a go of things. The poorer people are in Britain, the further they tend to be from any kind of faith.  Hence the phrase ’social exclusion’ which is so popular among our leaders today. 

Against this we have to place evidence of immigrant success.  If poor people are excluded from success by structural factors, why is it that even new immigrants are able to forge ahead?  I am more and more impressed by how our most recent immigrants are able to grab opportunities and hoist themselves up the ladder. When Poland and Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004, the UK government predicted that only around 13,000 workers would leave Eastern Europe to seek work in the UK.  The actual figure who did so is 400,000 – and since this only represents those who have registered with the authorities, the true figure is likely to be higher.  Eastern European presence in the construction and hospitality industries is particularly marked.

Why is it that recent immigrants can succeed where a longer-established indigenous populaton cannot?  One part of the answer may be religious faith.  Faith is surely linked to optimism:  to belief in the possibility of personal change, belief in the world as a providential place, and belief in a future.  Belonging to a religious community can also offer important networking.  Recent immigrants tend to come from religious cultures:  Catholics from Eastern Europe, Catholics and Pentecostals from Latin America, main-line Protestants, Catholics and Pentecostals from West Africa.  (The phenomenon of self-start, Black-led churches is quite marked.  Some of them are heading to mega-church status.)

The puzzle in the mixture is that of Muslim communities, where the evidence points both ways.  Recent events, especially bombings in London on July 7^th 2005, have focussed attention on, inter alia, Muslim integration.  The variegated nature of the Muslim community itself, however makes any conclusions difficult.  There seems to be both some degree of alienation and some degree of integration with attendant economic success. 

However, the rise to importance of the Muslim community has called into question the whole multi-cultural enterprise.  Many of the commentators on religion – I am tempted to call them cultured despisers – were happy if religion was contained within the vague realm of ‘ethnic practice’.  Sometimes this was applied to Christianity itself, with, for example, the former Cabinet minister Clare Short (among others) describing herself as   ‘A Catholic by culture, not by faith’.  Ethnic religion was ‘safe’ religion because it was seen as expression of culture rather than faith.  Yet is this really acceptance of the religious Other?  The hidden element here is, paradoxically, that these religious ethnic people are ‘not us’ ie not part of a secular worldview.  However, there is considerable uncertainty over this corralling of religion into ethnicity, since there is concomitant uncertainty over where multiculturalism goes from here.  Questions arise over whether all value-systems can be regarded as equal.

Conclusion

I have suggested above that there is a growing gulf between religious culture and national culture in England today.  Does it matter outside, say, Christian self-regard or even self-importance?  The UK today is a liberal society in the sense of citizens and groups of citizens making choices according to their preferences, the state moderating between the different claims, supervising trade-offs etc.  But there is growing frustration as our society becomes more complex ethnically, and its competing claims and preferences become harder to monitor.  There are competing claims, too in the framework of the social democratic state, over community versus individual, freedom versus equality.  Can the state be the arbitrator without a shared sense of the good to which public appeal can be made?  That would seem to depend on what is, at its most basic, a religious viewpoint in which we are not people made by our preferences but made by our moral intuitions seen to derive from a morally ordered universe.