Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

A free market in religion

If Christianity is not the one true religion, why be a Christian? Why not be a Buddhist? Mary Wakefield puts the question to Keith Ward, the liberal theologian

At nine in the morning, Cumnor in Oxfordshire looks like the setting for a Miss Marple mystery. Cotswold cottages run around the outside bend of a narrow high street and on the other side a grassy bank rises up to a graveyard. Nothing moves except the tops of fir trees growing among the tombstones.

Standing in front of St Michael’s church I can see the roof of the Reverend Keith Ward’s house. Cumnor isn’t quite the sort of parish you’d expect to find the former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, a liberal intellectual whom the Archbishop of Canterbury calls ‘a much loved and admired thinker’. In his book The Case for Religion Keith Ward says that it is imperative that all religions accept that other faiths contain truth too. I wonder how that goes down during the Sunday sermon in St Michael’s.

Two minutes later, I’ve rung his bell, Keith Ward has answered the door and we are sitting opposite each other in his sitting room. Despite his age (66) and a grey beard he looks young, lively, bright-eyed. He must, after all, be quite used to proving the existence of God to yawning strangers first thing in the morning.

‘The most hopeful sign for the future of religion is that religious experience is more common than we realise,’ he says. ‘Have you heard of Marghanita Laski? She was a humanist and an agnostic who wrote about ecstasy and transcendental experiences. She claimed that when you actually ask people, everybody admits to having had a spiritual experience of some sort. And that’s my impression too. But in Britain, people don’t want to connect them to an institution like the Church.’

So why do the British feel so uncomfortable with organised religion? ‘It’s an interesting question,’ says Ward, ‘and I don’t know if I can give you the correct answer.

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