There was a rather cheering moment on Desert Island Discs when Dame Anne Owers was asked whether she wanted a return to what the interviewer Kirsty Young rather peculiarly described as the \u201cMethodist ideology\u201d that \u201cwe are all capable of sin but all also capable of making the choice not to sin\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dame Anne, the former chief inspector of prisons \u2013 who had been extolling the virtues of her childhood in a small North East mining community with no fewer than three separate Methodist chapels \u2013 refused to accept the premise of the question. If only more radio interviewees would do that.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not about rules, she said. \u201cIt comes the other way round. It\u2019s about people belonging somewhere, and that creates bonds of responsibilities and rights. I\u2019m not a great fan of Thou Shalt Not.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, persisted Ms Young, hadn\u2019t Thou Shalt Not worked quite well?\u00a0 To which Dame Anne replied: \u201cIndividuals and communities need clear boundaries. But there also has to be the recognition that within families and communities you owe things to each other, you support each another. Simply the negative isn\u2019t going to achieve that; there\u2019s got to be the positive as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is always refreshing when you hear someone side-step a pigeonhole (if you\u2019ll pardon the mixed metaphor) and insist on defining an issue for themselves. It\u2019s what, in a limited way, we have been asked to do with next month\u2019s national census. Not everyone approves.<\/p>\n
The British\u00a0Humanist Association in the run-up to the 2011 census launched\u00a0a campaign to persuade people to tick the box that says they have No Religion. They are still smarting from the 2001 Census, when 72 per cent of people in England described themselves as Christian. \u201cIf you\u2019re not religious for God\u2019s sake say so,\u201d BHA posters will proclaim, kicking against the time-honoured \u201cif none, write C of E\u201d formula, for fear that another high census figure will mean more public funding for faith schools, hospital and prison chaplains and the like.<\/p>\n
When you debate with aggressive atheists it is striking how they insist on defining what it is you believe so they can dismiss it. Now, it seems, they want to do it for the entire population.<\/p>\n
But, there is a lot more to religion than what people believe. Religious belief, behaviour and identity are not necessarily connected.\u00a0 You can believe and not go to church, just as you can go to church and not believe, or not believe everything. You can participate actively in a faith community or you can just pray and pay. You can be what the sociologists call \u201cunchurched\u201d and still see Christianity as integral in some way to your cultural identity.\u00a0 You may just like the idea of living in \u201ca Christian country\u201d.<\/p>\n
All this explains why the 2001 census had 72 per cent of the population as Christian, as did the 2008-9 annual Integrated Household Survey, while the British Social Attitudes survey put the figure at 51.2 per cent. \u00a0And that is not counting the \u201cvague faith\u201d category of those who regard themselves as \u201cspiritual but not religious\u201d but whose beliefs have a Christian hue. There is also a campaign for such folk to put themselves down as \u201cholistics\u201d on the census form.<\/p>\n
The truth is that there are as many, if not more, reasons for ticking Christian as there were for ticking Jedi on the last census form \u2013 as was done by many campaigning atheists, practical jokers and genuine devotees of Star Wars.<\/p>\n
The joy of the census \u2013 unlike the plan to collect such data in future by merging the Inland Revenue, Passport, DVLA and other official databases \u2013 is that it allows us, however-partially, to define ourselves rather than having others do it for us. Those keenest on definitions are fundamentalists, but then I suppose that the New Atheists are fundamentalists in their own way.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was a rather cheering moment on Desert Island Discs when Dame Anne Owers was asked whether she wanted a return to what the interviewer Kirsty Young rather peculiarly described as the \u201cMethodist ideology\u201d that \u201cwe are all capable of sin but all also capable of making the choice not to sin\u201d. Dame Anne, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,39,37,41,38],"tags":[293],"class_list":["post-3603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-culture","category-politics","category-religion","category-society","tag-census"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3603"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8007,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions\/8007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}