The Tablet Blog

Keeping faith convictions shut away in the temple?

As The Tablet reports this week, equality chief Trevor Phillips said that making an exemption in laws for Christian-run institutions is the equivalent of allowing Muslims to adopt sharia law.

Sir Trevor said at a debate at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall that "the law stops at the door of the temple as far as I am concerned", explaining that it was only inside a church or religious institution that believers could apply their own rules.

This sweepingly assumes that convictions held by people of faith will not benefit the whole of society. Discounting religious extremists - who so obviously do not represent a mainstream faith that it is a point hardly worth making - what of the many believers who strongly believe their faith makes them better, more responsible, more honest, more trustworthy people? After all, one of the core beliefs at the heart of the monotheistic faiths is the value of one's neighbour, the inherent dignity of each human person, and the belief that one's wrongdoing has serious consequences.

As Pope Benedict said to the great and the good gathered in Westminster Hall during his 2010 state visit to Britain, there is a "two-way" process by which religion and reason should be allowed to purify each other.

I would like to simply list here a quick list of historical developments that were pioneered by people of faith who felt compelled to take their convictions outside the temple and into the marketplace, where they found a great need of them.

1. The Abolitionist movement, which fought for decades for the end of trans-Atlantic slavery and was pioneered by the Clapham Sect of eighteenth-century Evangelicals

2. Social reform, the cause of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, whose broad-ranging concerns included education, public health and labour conditions for the poor

3. Archbishop Oscar Romero, who in 1980 was shot while saying Mass for speaking out against El Salvador's repressive regime

4. The Anti-Apartheid movement, championed by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and backed by all the main Churches

5. The Hospice Movement founded by Dame Cecily Saunders, a devout Christian, who pioneered palliative care

Then the countless missionary nuns and priests who risk their lives working in remote areas because they believe people who are disadvantaged should not be forgotten, and even here in the UK, the thousands of volunteers whose faith compels them to help out at homeless shelters or run clubs for the elderly.

Clearly, non-believers are capable of all these things and many great people have not been people who publicise some sort of faith identity. But surely people of no faith would still want their consciences respected, so is Trevor Phillips saying that people of faith somehow have less right to such treatment?

Abigail Frymann is The Tablet's Online Editor.

       

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