Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

False idols | 6 September 2012

September 11 shook up how people thought about faith and politics. But now it’s time to think again

It is widely agreed that 9/11 had a silver lining: that frightening day prodded us into thinking about religion, into taking it seriously. It nudged us away from our embarrassed evasion and forced us to admit that religion is a huge cultural and political force, even in Britain. It helped to bury the myth that gradual secularisation was making religion less important each year, something that sophisticated people could safely ignore or sneer at. It led us to begin a loud, boisterous, but also serious and nuanced, debate on the place of religion in public life.

But did it? Is it true that we began to think more clearly about our complex religious inheritance? That we now honestly and intelligently grapple with the fundamental issues around religion’s relationship to politics?

I say no. There may have been more religion discussion over the past 11 years than in previous decades. But more does not mean better. In this case it tends to mean worse: the heightened emotion following 9/11 caused certain conceptual knees to jerk, simplifications to harden, and clichés to take root. And the particular complexities of our national religious tradition were forgotten.

This process began in the days immediately after 9/11. Our religious and political leaders began to insist that Islam was a religion of peace. I am not saying that this was the wrong thing to say; it was perhaps a diplomatic necessity. But it subtly affected the nature of subsequent debate. It implied that it was not quite legitimate to discriminate between religions, to treat them as discrete entities, so that one might be in favour of religion A but deeply wary of religion B. It implied that religion must be considered as a whole. Some might worship Christ in a church, others Allah in a mosque, but these are variations on a theme, different expressions of the same phenomenon.

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