Yes, Britain is a Christian country

I can’t say it was a great surprise to read a letter from a group of well-known authors, academics, comedians and politicians in the Telegraph earlier this week complaining about David Cameron’s description of Britain as a ‘Christian country’. As a general rule, any acknowledgment of Britain’s Christian heritage has members of the liberal intelligentsia reaching for their keyboards and angrily typing out words like ‘sectarian’, ‘alienation’ and ‘division’.

As Harry Cole argued in a blog post for The Spectator, the evidence that Britain is a Christian country is overwhelming. We have an established church, our head of state is also the defender of the faith and 59 per cent of us define ourselves as ‘Christian’. So why does the secular left feel obliged to deny this every time someone points it out?

No doubt it has something to do with a concern for the 41 per cent of Britons who don’t see themselves as Christians. They’re worried that worshippers of other religions will be discriminated against in some way — or, even if they’re not, that they’ll feel as if they are. For the Prime Minister to acknowledge that Christianity is more intimately bound up with our history and identity than, say, Islam, is to offend against the dogma of egalitarianism. Equality before the law isn’t enough. Non-Christians must regard themselves as equally respected — and so the secular left has done its best to make any disrespect of other religions a criminal offence.

I don’t wish to get into the rights and wrongs of this doctrine here, only to point out that it owes a great deal to Christianity, as does the secular left in general. Indeed, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe the Labour party as a Christian political party.