Though Cowards Flinch

Tony Blair’s speech last night on faith was a masterpiece of bland, recycled comments on the role of religion, how it must be rescued from the fundamentalists and all the rest. I cannot help but be reminded by Blair of the comment Robespierre made to those who decried the death of innocents beneath the guillotine. “Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face or I shall believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”

Far be it from me to place Blair at the end of a long string of radical leaders; truthfully Blair was anything but. Yet his consistent desire to argue in favour of a role for religion, and the rather specious arguments he used to support his view, worry me. The British state is officially religious, with religion being taught in our schools, and the law mandating prayer for school children. Not to mention the queen as the head of the church. Yet we are, as a people, notoriously secular.

I think it was this impulse to ridicule that which most people hold up as sacred which begot such cornerstones of British culture as Monty Python’s Flying Circus. What Blair seeks is the negation of that impulse. He clearly sees moderates as a force for reigning in the fundamentalists; indeed this is what government policy has been. Support the moderate religionists, with all their vices, because they might have a chance, through force of prestige, at controlling the extremists.

The creation of that prestige is a violent act. It is violence against reason. It is the objective violence which forms the background, to the subjective outbursts of violence which we see on the streets as a result of Danish cartoons, or abortion clinics. This unseen violence is systemic; it is of a kind with the violence which underpins our economic and social existence. It is no accident that many people, confronted with the objective violence of our social and economic system seek refuge in an another violence – religion.

Ironically, the founders and sponsors of religion are often the ones who so aptly phrase what I have just stated. Jesus of Nazareth said that those who live by the sword die by the sword – violence begets violence. The Jews have something similar on the subject of violence. Even people confronted with immediate, subjective violence, turn to the objectively violent solace of religion – soldiers in the field are a classic example. Such stories as this return from the men serving today in Iraq.

The concept of objective violence is not a new one. That the underpinning of the state is the monopoly of legitimate force is a truism, established from the time of Hobbes and Locke. Subjective violence, the extreme outbursts, is the visible proportion of the violent spectrum. Objective violence is the background, the dark matter, which we must perceive properly in order to explain exactly how subjective violence works. This is not what Tony Blair envisions – far from it.

Rather than understand the objective violence of religion, in order to combat the subjective outbursts, Blair would like to raise on a pedestal precisely the one which sustains the other. Blair is wrong that within each religion there is a noble fragment, which may be extracted. His thesis is not the same as saying, “there are things to admire about all religions.” Indubitably the latter comment is correct. What Blair is saying is that this noble element can be separated from the ignoble, base, fundamentalist impulses.

He is, of course, mistaken. Fundamentalist religion is pure religion. It is religion stripped of the humanism which, over the centuries, has come to ameliorate the objective violence contained within each religion. Much preferable to supporting a diluted religion, we should instead support a religion-free humanism. That should be the answer of all people to the outbursts of extremist, religious fundamentalism. Blair mistakes the values of humanism for the values of religion, clothed in humanism.

Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society said it the best when he said of Blair’s new faith foundation, “Mr Blair’s call for religion to play a bigger role in world affairs is like trying to douse a fire by showering it with petrol.” This is an attempt to drown out subjective violence with objective violence, ignoring the connection between the two. It would be laughable if it weren’t so outrightly dangerous.