In secularism we trust

Since his argument was that religious rituals would interfere with the police’s duties, there is even more reason to ban Christmas activities, since these also involve drinking and feting and so, as one of his senior officers demonstrated last week at Queen’s Hall, are even more inimical to policing.

My own hope is that the CoP will be consistent. The issue of how far religion should be allowed into State organisations is very pertinent to social progress. I myself regularly make a small statement by refusing to stand for prayers at non-religious functions hosted by government and private organisations. I think it is wrong to have prayers at conferences, lectures, or panel discussions. It is also disrespectful to those few individuals who do not believe in any religion.

More importantly, the lessons of history and contemporary experience suggest that limiting, rather than expanding, the role of religion in political affairs is crucial for a country to develop. Europe learnt this early, for it was the religious wars and intolerance of the 16th and 17th centuries which lay the foundation for the secular state. However, it was in the second half of the 19th century that secularism really took root in Western civilisation, beginning in France. French intellectuals began the anti-clerical movement, with the scholar August Comte, who invented the term "sociology", pitching his version of a secular religion, called Positivism. Comte argued that human history had three stages — the Theological ("in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting no proof"); the Metaphysical ("characterised by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities"); and, finally, the Positive stage which is "based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case".

His ideas became popular in Britain in 1851, when Harriet Martineau translated and condensed his six-volume work into two. In 1873, an ex-priest named Leslie Stephen published his Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking, which made him a famous doubter and popularised the term "agnostic." This was the label used by American Robert Ingersoll, the son of a minister whom historian Jennifer Hecht in her book Doubt describes as "the best known doubting lecturer in the United States."

In fact, the US, thanks to its founding fathers, became the first nation to encourage dissent and ensure the right to doubt. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God, because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear." Two centuries on, however, Jefferson’s advice is more and more ignored in the nation he helped create. Church-goers in America have risen from 25 to 65 percent in the past 70 years, and a survey by American researcher Gregory S Paul, published this year in the Journal of Religion and Society, found "evidence that within the US strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction —the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STDs, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularisation, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms."

Cross-national data reveal a similar pattern. In their book Rising Tide, political analysts Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris write, "Societies with widespread literary, education, affluence, security, and access to multiple sources of information from the mass media tend to be the most secular. By contrast, the poorest and least developed nations, such as Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ghana and India are the most religious in their values, beliefs, and behaviour." Nearly all the world’s theocracies are located in the Middle Eastern Muslim nations. A 2002 UNDP report noted that this region has the lowest freedom score in the world in respect to civil liberties, political rights, independent media, and government accountability. The GDP of Spain alone equals that of all 22 Arab nations. The correlation between Islam and socio-economic backwardness is thus very strong.

By contrast, East Asian nations have long followed belief systems which allowed secularism. The core influence in China is Confucianism, which is a religion in the sense that it is concerned with morality, has revered texts, and is deeply based on practices as well as theory. Confucianism, however, has no God nor is it supernatural. Moreover, in modern times, China saw its most serious social and economic decline when it adopted the Communist religion with Chairman Mao as its saviour in 1949. (Communism is a religion because of its articles of faith about historical progress, dialectical materialism, its authoritarian practices, and its Armageddon of capitalism’s prophesied collapse.) That nation’s recovery has come about in tandem with the Chinese government’s dismantling of socialist policies in favour of market forces. Japan also provides an object lesson, with Buddhism being a religion without a Creator.

Of course, correlation is not causation. But one might reasonably argue that the religious mindset retards social development in three ways, (1) Religious belief discourages an analytical approach to social problems, since blame is attributed to "evil forces", including music and movies, and solutions are based on prayer and other rituals. (2) Religiosity undermines ethical standards since, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell once noted, people who believe they are moral feel less obligated to act morally. (3) Religious lobbies stymie political decisions that catalyse progress — eg outlawing capital punishment and corporal punishment by the State. It therefore seems that instituting secular values and systems is an essential part of creating economic prosperity and social health. And, if this is so, all those religious bodies and spokespersons who oppose this process are actually aiding and abetting the evils listed by Gregory Paul. Which, in my view, is an unsurprising irony.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

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