A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the NCF

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BATTLING BELIEF

The Right should embrace secularism, writes Guy Stagg

Some arguments are whispered when they should be shouted. If the Right criticises multiculturalism, too often they are satirised. Equally, when conservatives speak out against religious extremism, their concerns are drawn in cartoon. Both arguments are lost to caricature, made to sound like the Carlton Club choir warming up for a verse of Rule Britannia.

These criticisms, these concerns, are real, yet perceived by many as ideological prejudices. But there is another language in which they may be articulated, one free from political parody. That language is secularism.

From a secular perspective, multiculturalism discourages the integration of immigrant communities. In promoting ethnic disparities, it deepens ethnic divisions. In celebrating spiritual differences, it intensifies them. The Right can agree that the basic principle of multiculturalism – that immigrant communities can be defined as homogenous groups that are fundamentally different – is a mistake.

But crucially, religion is the means by which this mistake is enforced – and secularism is the strongest position from which to expose this fact. Therefore, when local funding is organised along religious lines, and sponsors faith schools and faith-based community centres, authorities propagate this mistake. When the Archbishop of Canterbury claims that Sharia Law is both inevitable and desirable in this country, he threatens to enshrine the mistake.

However religion holds a protected position in debate which prevents these grievances from being fully addressed. Religion expects a level of respect that we afford no other intellectual position. Indeed, it is doctrinally demanded. When criticism is equated to blasphemy, all manner of sins – misogyny, homophobia and abuse – are privileged with immunity.

With extreme religion this becomes not a matter of academic theology but of political policy. But until debate frees itself from the rhetoric of reverence, the political process will be hampered. Moderate religion has a responsibility here. Moderate religion, in failing to confront its more prejudiced bedfellows, gives them unvoiced acceptance, and even provides unintended support. And yes, Islam is most culpable in this respect. Yet so is the Left, which for the sake of tolerance condemns not the perpetrators, but the victims of extremism. Too few Conservatives expressed disgust at those on the Left who proposed that the US was responsible for the terrorist atrocities on September 11th.

Indeed, the Left’s relationship with secularism is surprisingly fraught. Socialism was once considered the breeding ground for secularism, and to this day it is the left-wing press that gives atheism a platform. But for the likes of Christopher Hitchens their condemnation is frequently turned against the Left, against what Johann Hari characterised as the ‘tolerance of the fanatically intolerant’.

On the other hand, the historical yoking of the Tories with Anglicanism means that Conservatives feel they should support religion, at least in its politest forms. So atheists on the Right stay quiet: arguing that religion is a comfort to others, and the values it teaches are a benefit to society. Such silence is both cowardly and patronising.

There is a chocolate box picture of England which would be incomplete if the pint of warm beer and the figures on a cricket green did not have a village church as their backdrop. And there is a monument to Toryism somewhere in the imagination of Middle England built on the pillars of God, King and Country. But Conservatism in this form slides from sentimentalism to intellectual sloth. Religion is not fundamental to the Right, as Hume realised two and a half centuries ago.

At the last Conservative Party Conference Baroness Warsi blamed a state-sponsored secularism for the ills of multiculturalism, and proposed more religion as the solution. This was an extraordinary confusion of the disease for the cure, and yet passed without comment. Conservatives need a strong secular voice to correct multiculturalism and to protect us from extreme religion. The time has come for atheists on the Right to stand up for what they don’t believe in.

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To the Barricades!

It looks like the theatre is gearing up nicely for a General Election early next year.

The Royal Court in London's Sloane Square will be showing Posh, a new play by Laura Wades, from April 9th to May 22nd.

'In an oak-panelled room in Oxford, ten young bloods with cut-glass vowels and deep pockets are meeting, intent on restoring their right to rule,' goes the description. 'Members of an elite student dining society, the boys are bunkering down for a wild night of debauchery, decadence and bloody good wine. But this isn’t the last huzzah: they’re planning a takeover...Welcome to the Riot Club.'

Ms Wade, 32, has said that staging the play during an election campaign would "undoubtedly raise questions" about the Tories' ability to govern.

Daring new writing? This sounds almost charming in its quaintness. Who said that the theatre is running out of new ideas?

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Hey Good-Looking

Are we witnessing a genuine transition from an era of ugly self-absorption in the visual arts to one of beauty? Yes, argues Alastair Sooke in the Daily Telegraph today.

'Every now and then, a dramatic shift in the arts becomes perceptible, as the tectonic plates that underpin competing cultural trends groan and crunch into one another. As we move into the second decade of the 21st century, one such change is becoming apparent. The brutality and cynical pessimism that characterised much of the output of the Young British Artists in the late Eighties and Nineties is beginning to recede. Desire for work that displays craft and skill is reasserting itself...

'Artists, and the audiences for their art, do not exist in a vacuum. It's only natural that their work bears the stamp of the times in which they live. Moreover, when the world is convulsed by forces that threaten to uproot the foundations of society, then artists, just like writers, performers and other creative types, react accordingly.

'Over the past couple of years, the economic crisis has almost brought about the end of capitalism. The effects have been profoundly unsettling for all of us. It is only natural, when we feel surrounded by darkness and chaos, that we yearn for things that are luminous and orderly – or, to put it another way, for works of art that are beautiful. This is why, more than a millennium ago, the Anglo-Saxon poets rhapsodised about twisted gold and firelight, because such things offered a comforting contrast to all the monsters they believed were stalking the hostile wastelands outside.

'Art can be many things, but one of its most important functions is surely its capacity to console in times of crisis, to lift the spirit and inspire people to carry on. This, I believe, is what we are experiencing today. There is a greater thirst for beauty than there has been in recent years, and this is the result of an increased appetite for art that offers an antidote to doom and gloom.'

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