Yet more on England, Religion, and Public Culture

Responding to my posting earlier today about my recent visit to the UK, Brian Bix (Law and Philosophy, Minnesota) writes with some interesting remarks:

"While everything you said today in your blog posting regarding some of the advantages of UK life was correct, the overall picture might be a bit more balanced (at least from my eyes -- as someone who lived in the UK for five years, and has visited regularly since, most recently last March): e.g., on religious matters, England still has an official state church (however poorly attended), children in public (in UK terms, 'comprehensive') schools still have mandatory prayer (C of E prayer, frequently imposed even in schools that are 80+% Islamic) -- though there have been some moves of late to get rid of that; there are still some restrictive rules on what can be open on Sundays (though far less restrictive than when I was first there in the mid-1980s); and one learns to value the simple secularized 'Season's Greetings' of the US when it is hard to find a card or public announcement in the UK in December that does not say 'Merry Christmas.' In many ways, the US is far more sensitive (at least in urban/suburban areas outside the south) to the presence and feelings of minority religious views than they are in the UK (I know of no similar reaction in the US to the uproar in London when the orthodox Jews wanted to place an 'Eruv' -- a string around a large area, using telephone polls, to allow them to carry things on Saturday).

"(And that is just religion; don't get me started on the class system, the monarchy, the House of Lords, and the tabloid press -- all, of course, less horrible than they were even a generation ago, but all still quite present (though the Lords may finally be entirely on its way out)."

Any other thoughts from UK readers or those who have spent time there? I've opened comments. No anonymous postings, as always.

Comments

[Todd Gak]

Brian wrote:

"...the public culture is utterly non-religious and utterly devoid of crypto-fascism of the American variety (no Michael Savages, Ann Coulters, Bill O'Reillys, Tom DeLays, etc.)."

This statement is absurd. I suppose he's never heard of the UK Independence Party, to name just one example.

[C.E. Petit]

When I lived in England in the 80s, I spent a couple of years in relatively rural Suffolk and the rest in London. Although the physical distance is less, the cultural distance between Ipswich/Norwich/Lowestoft and central London is at least as far as that from Montgomery/Birmingham to Broadway.

And, as far as "religious tolerance" goes, I was there (fortunately, not on the scene) during the riots in Bradford over HM Government's refusal to apply the blasphemy laws to Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. So far as I can tell, those laws are still on the books; and I have a great deal of difficulty assuming religious tolerance from a head of state constitutionally obligated to be the chief defender of the CofE. In practice, it has of late worked out; but it very well might not have, particularly if Edward had not abdicated.

[Brian Leiter]

I have heard of the UK Independence Party; does it even have representation in Parliament? It is a fringe phenomenon, is it not. Contrast Tom DeLay, the most powerful Republican in the United States House of Representatives. The worry is that what is "fringe" in the UK is in many cases mainstream here.

[Chris Jenson]

I am from Utah, but I spent a year at the University of Sheffield graduate program. My impression was much like Brian Leiter's. I found the culture in England to be a refreshing change.

I had a conversation with Christopher Hookway about the existence of a state religion in England. He suggested that having a state religion in a modern western industrialized country has, ironically, caused people to be less religious. The religion gets so watered down because in such a society a government really couldn't get away with imposing much on its citizens. Watered-down religion just isn't very appealing.

For an interesting example of this effect, just look at how Theodore Olsen tried to water down the concept of God in the pledge of allegiance when he was making arguments in the Newdow case.

A state religion in England may look bad on paper, but in my opinion the reality is that Brian is right.

Todd Gak mentions the the UK independence party, but my impression was that such groups were far more marginalized in English Culture than characters such as Ann Coulter and Michael Savage are in the United States.

[jdsm]

Just a couple of points:

1) Yes Britain does have an official state church but it has no effect on life. The Queen is also head of state and technically has supreme power though in practice she has none. If the question is how it feels to live in Britain, in terms of religion it feels overwhelmingly secular.

2) All the shops are open on Sundays.

3) Personally, I think the UK is extremely tolerant of minority religious views and is especially an easy place for Muslims to find a home. For heaven's sake, this is the place where they allow first generation immigrant Muslim extremists to stand on a street corner and say openly that they want Britain to become a Muslim state and that they support terrorism to this end. Compared to France or even to Finland, where it is illegal to circumsize a baby, the UK is a paradise.
I think if you compared the number of ethnic minority MPs in Britain to almost any other country, Britain's would be higher (though I don't know).

4) The class system and the tabloid press are beyond awful. The tabloid press imparticular is not better than it was ten years ago. It's not better than anything actually.

5) The monarchy has popular support as a freak show and no power. Repeated economic studies have shown that the UK would lose out financially if we were to replace them. I would still get rid of them but it's not something to "get started about".

6) The House of Lords has abolished hereditary peers and for all its faults is an extremely effective second chamber. It should be remembered that the Lords can only slow down legislation, it cannot stop it.

On the other side, the undemocratic voting system does permit the balance of power to be only tenuously related to the popular vote. The government can even be formed by the party with a minority of votes. I'm sure our readers from the cradle of democracy itself will find such a concept unthinkable!!! :.)

7) UKIP is an anti-EU party which got a few seats in the EU elections in which there was a turnout of some 30%.

Jonathon Martin
Lived in UK 1977-2000

[John Kozak]

Agree with jdsm, with some buts:

The UKIP positions itself to the right of the Tory party and picks up their "natural" voters who feel the Tories are too soft on immigration, crime beneath the bluster and old-bufferishness I think there's some genuine nastiness. Anyway, parties like the UKIP tend to do well in elections in the middle of a parliamentary term. They now have some presence in local government and at least one MEP (Member of the European Parliament(!)), a former BBC chat-show presenter sacked for an anti-Islamic rant published in a tabloid.

The tabloids are indeed ghastly; worse than the obvious "red-top" titles like "The Sun" are notionally up-market hate-sheets like the "Daily Mail", not least because Sun readers tend to know their paper is wildly unreliable, whereas Mail readers seem to believe every word.

The House of Lords still has some hereditary peers sitting, but they're clearly on the way out. There's a terrible missed opportunity here, because their replacements will be Prime Ministerial appointments, when clearly they should be directly elected. However, the utter awfulness of the class system is something I'm less convinced about: after all, UK social mobility is slightly better than the US, isn't it?

Religion has little place in public life, though it's unlikely we'd have a declared atheist PM. Our decidedly non-atheistic PM is encouraging the teaching of creationism in some, semi-state-funded, schools which is depressing, though he's done much worse. Anyway, a friend described the Church of England as "an innoculation against religion", which is about right.

[david]

I've never lived in the UK, but I think this discussion is interesting. I consider most of the issues Bix raises to be utterly inconsequential. Most obviously, I think it's just piddling to worry about the prevalence of "Merry Christmas" greeting cards in the UK.

In America, I'd argue, those who want to lessen the effects of religion on public life have concentrated their efforts on tiny details such as these. The result has been to leave intact the essence of public religion while creating a secular facade. On the other hand, Leiter's first post on this topic describes an *essentially* secular public life. I personally would gladly trade in all the "Season's Greetings" cards in the US for, e.g., the type of homosexual civil rights advances Leiter claims are prevalent in the UK.

It might be that the trappings and frills of public life are largely independent of the fundamental issues of Enlightenment culture: civil liberties, freedom of expression, reason, etc. If so, reformers have a choice: Attack the public trappings of religion, which on its own will only create an illusion of secularization without substance; or try to effect real change, at the cost of leaving some of the trappings intact.

It might turn out that in the US, reformers have taken the first course, while in England they have taken the second. This might explain the impression I get from Bix and Leiter's posts: that the C of E remains a (mostly unattended and ineffectual) state institution, while American Christianity has become a nominally private institution with huge effects on public policy.

[jam]

The UKIP, which is crypto-fascist, and the British National Party, which is openly fascist, between them got 25% of the vote in the EU elections.

The degree of surveillance that exists in the UK is shocking. The extent to which the Home Secretary (a political position which doesn't exist in the US) can modify judicial sentences has also caused comment. Police power is greater than in the US (if more quietly exercised). Civil liberties are much less valued and therefore more frequently overridden.

It is not simply that the class structure is more entrenched in the UK. It is that class markers are ubiquitous, and more are being constructed all the time. Track suits and sneakers are now (lower) class markers. They would not have been thirty years ago.

A consequence of the ubiquity of class markers is that one tends to live in a bubble surrounded by members of his own class (or the class into which, as a visitor, he has been assimilated): "the reasonable, default assumption in almost every encounter is that the person you are speaking with is also a non-believer" may not be universal.

[Les Green]

Brian Bix, in replying to Brian Leiter's posting, has gravely mistaken form for substance in British politics. There is indeed an Established Church in England (and a different one is Scotland)-- but it has little political influence or effect on anyone's life; the United States has a (blurry) separation of church and state yet it is de facto impossible for a confessed atheist to attain major public office. (Indeed, under the Texas constitution, it is also *de jure* impossible--though unenforceable.) God-talk is *everywhere* in America, and it saturates the jurisprudence on a number of issues; in England it is a sign of bad manners to even mention a deity in pubic. In the U.S. there is the First Amendment, and an utterly supine and monotone daily press and national broadcasting. In the U.K., there is more regulation of speech--and libel chill--but also a more vigorous public debate. And Bix's intimation that the English class system is somehow more maligant on account of the laughable and irrelevant House of Lords (to say nothing of Betty Windsor and her kin) is a deep misunderstanding. Whether you take the Gini index of inequality, or the Hope-Goldthorpe index of social mobility, or most familiar indicators of public health and well-being, the class-structure in the U.S. is more ossified than it is in England, and more damaging to human well-being than the are remnants of British social snobbery. And I'm pretty confident that Bix has *not* in fact seen on "Merry Christmas" seasonal cards in England; the normal greeting there is "Happy Christmas."

[jdsm]

"The UKIP, which is crypto-fascist, and the British National Party, which is openly fascist, between them got 25% of the vote in the EU elections."

Which appears to imply a quarter of the voters in Britain are racist or fascist. In fact, UKIP, which is as you would think, the "independence" party got its vote as a result of euro-scepticism and not crypto-fascism. Its vote was 16.1%. The BNP, which is not openly fascist but which is in practice, got 4.9%. Furthermore, the turnout was 38.2% so in actual fact UKIP got 6.1% of all potential votes and the BNP got 1.9%.

I'm sure if you looked hard in any country you could find 1.9% are on the far right. You could certainly find 6.1% in any European country that is anti-EU.

Jonathon Martin

[Ian Darling]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the preference of many "middle class" British families to send their children to the religious (read, CofE and Catholic) schools that are state funded.

But this isn't a religious choice, instead a pragmatic one - the religious schools get to choose a certain number of their pupils based on "faith", and generally speaking will choose to educate those children they think are brighter and less troublesome. The notion here is that if you get your own child into a religious school, they'll be better educated and not have to be educated alongside troublemakers.

Failing that, many "middle class" families have been known to move house just to get into the catchment area of a school with a good reputation.

This has been an issue of contention recently, as there are only a handful of Muslim state funded schools, and the "Academies" can be set up by any group with an agenda for just a couple of million (10-20% of a years funding) - which is how the Vardy Foundation got their "creationist" schools like Emmanuel College. At least one of the schools definitely did get good results though, mostly because you still have to teach the National Curriculum (which features evolution to some extent) and this sort of thing is checked during OFSTED reviews.

IIRC, the Emmanuel College OFSTED review was performed by a Jehovahs Witness!

[Robert Allen]

Prof. Leiter:

You insinuate ("co-exists") but do not establish that there is a causal connection between being religious and tolerating injustice and moral depravity. In fact, such things are anathemas for the truly religious person. Your view, held also by Prof. Dennett, that religious beliefs retard the development of civic virtues is based on a biased sample. To support it, you hold up individuals, such as GWB, who are not truly religious or fail to understand the religious views they profess. The religious person would draw a different conclusion here: these persons are hypocrites.

[Brian Leiter]

Your reading more in to the remarks than is there. I don't hold the view that religion retards the development of civic virtue; I have no informed view on how civic virture is developed, or retarded, period. I just find it ironic that the level of public morality is higher in the non-religious UK than in the religious US. (Irony is not insinuation of a causal connection.) And GWB was not mentioned. Visit the World Magazine Blog to see a rich array of examples, especially in the Comments section, of ordinary religious individuals affirming their morally depraved vision of matters. Without a doubt, they do not speak for all those who are Christians, but surely we can not seriously say that "they are not truly religious at all."

[Robert Allen]

Prof. L.:

I'll have to take your word that you did not mean to suggest that such a causal connection exists. I meant that you (and others) tend to focus on hypocrites, an example of which is GWB. I will bite the bullet and insist that the folks at WMB miss the point of Christianity.

[Andy Streich]

From 2001 to 2004 I spent about a third of my time working in Edinburgh, Scotland, to all accounts a "worldclass" city and a very prosperous one. What I found disconcerting for someone who has primary worked in Silicon Valley was the entirely white, nearly all-male staff. Perhaps it was an anomolous; the staff I discussed this with didn't think it was.

More troubling was the treatment of women, who generally held less responsible jobs, and the blatantly sexual banter of the men. For me, it was like going back to the US workplace of 20 to 30 years ago.

That said, Edinburgh was, at the time, the fastest growing city in Europe.

[jam]

A couple of responses to jdsm:

1. It's invalid to assume that those who don't vote have a wildly different belief pattern from those who do.

2. "Which appears to imply a quarter of the voters in Britain are racist or fascist" Racist, anyway. Or at least public services are. Before I moved to the US, I lived in a section of Leeds which was predominantly South Asian (we didn't call them South Asian then, of course). I had the hardest time getting my garbage picked up. Even after I'd made enough fuss that the garbage truck made its appearance, it only picked up my garbage. There have been many studies of the racism of various police forces across Britain: "institutional racism" is now an established phrase.

More generally:

I had misremembered the EU numbers. When I saw them, it was not so much the exact numbers which struck me as that they seemed to fall into four approximately equal groups: LD plus Greens, Labour and Respect, Conservative, UKIP plus BNP. I thought this a very bad sign for British politics. For a party system to work without excessive factional rancour, there needs to be a considerable degree of agreement between the parties. They need to agree on goals, they need to agree on most strategies to accomplish their shared goals, they should differ on the best tactics to accomplish their shared strategies. Under such circumstances, which have held in the UK for the past 60 years at least (goals have shifted over that time, as have strategies, but so have the parties), adherents of one party can regard publications of the other as "still recognizably within the space of reasons and evidence." But it is very hard to find even goals shared between UKIP and the LDs, let alone the Greens and BNP. If these groups between them represent nearly half the electorate, then politics in Britain may turn as nasty as US politics has.

For it is, I think, the breakdown of the shared worldview that characterized American politics from the US entry into WW II up to perhaps the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that has brought us to this point. I did not care for the shared worldview, it was clearly more conservative than I liked. Gore Vidal wrote many polemics referring to the left and right wings of the Property Party. But while it held, political discourse across party lines was possible, as it still is in Britain, despite its many faults.

[ainge]

"I think if you compared the number of ethnic minority MPs in Britain to almost any other country, Britain's would be higher (though I don't know)."

the percentage of ethnic minority members of the house of commons is 1.8% (though around 9-10% of the cabinet). in canada, it is 5.8%. i tried looking up stats for france and italy as a comparison... but this is taking far too long.

[James J Celluci]

England's Muslim population, however, is very religious, and is growing by leaps and bounds both through immigration and a very high birthrate, so England will not remain so secular for long.

[Voltaire]

How would one get rid of the class system in Britain?

Is it possible in any way?