Religion and Belief: British Public Life

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the initiative of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, in bringing this debate to the House. I shall pull back from the question of the role of the churches and look more broadly at the question of religion and belief because some mistakes have been made in our understanding of these matters.

At the time of the Enlightenment and afterwards, many liberal intellectuals thought that a few generations of education would mean that religion would effectively disappear. They also thought that we would all begin to get on together and aggression and violence would be managed and controlled by education. It is quite clear that although people of that disposition thought they were informing themselves through rational thought, it was much more about romantic wish fulfilment because the truth is that religion has not gone away and nor has violence and aggression. Indeed, even in countries where religion was effectively banned for a period, once that ban disappeared, we saw an enormous growth. In Russia, the development of the Orthodox Church is not only a question of numbers; it is massively affecting Mr Putin’s politics. The Financial Times recently reported that the factory that has produced more Bibles than any other in the history of the world is not in the United States of America as you might have guessed, or even—less likely—in Europe, but in China, a country where religion was not available to many people for a long time.

It therefore seems clear that religion is an essential component of the human condition and a group phenomenon. It is not something that is simply a matter of what individuals believe. A community may have a religious identity, while quite a large number of individuals may not have a particular religious proclivity, because it is part of the identity of the community. Once that identity starts getting shaken up in various ways, it can become very unpleasant indeed.

It seems also that this business of religion is not just a question of belief and here I point up and quibble with the wording of the Motion. Religion is, of course, about belief and faith but it is also about the way people behave—about rituals and structures. All these things grow and develop. Many social scientists now talk about the evolution of religion as part of the evolution of society. We know that these matters do develop: we move from simple, concrete ways of thinking about these things to more metaphorical ones. We do this in our ordinary lives as well. We move from rather simple, black and white thinking as children to more metaphorical thinking when we are older. If you do not appreciate that, you get into terrible trouble. For example, if I ask a nice young lady out for dinner I do not do so because I think she looks thin, underfed and famished: I want to spend time in her company. The food is, of course, still real and an important part of it but there is a metaphorical component as well. When individuals regress through illness they sometimes go back to more simplistic ways of thinking and cannot see the metaphorical. This happens in society as well so that as people developed a different way of thinking about religion—a broader, more thoughtful, more tolerant, more metaphorical one—it became possible to see different religious approaches as not being entirely antagonistic.

We have a problem here which impinges on society. When an individual or society comes under existential threat—when it believes that its group identity or future is under threat—it regresses to simplistic, black and white, dangerous, threatening ways of functioning in which the complexity of a society, with all its different components, disappears. This is true for the individual and for society. Amartya Sen talked about reducing back to a singularity. This is a very serious problem for a multicultural and multi-identity society such as ours. One of the difficulties about a Government who see all issues of religion merely as matters of private faith and belief, and who famously said they did not “do God”, is that they do not tend to give enough attention to the importance and complexity of these things, which are becoming more important to ordinary people, to thoughtful people and to societies as a whole.

We are finding an appearance of increasing fundamentalism, which is becoming radicalised into dangerous action as well. I welcome this debate, because I hope it also represents an increasing focus by the Government on the need to understand the complexities of religion, both in its more advanced forms and those of regression and dangerous fundamentalism.