In David Cameron’s Christian nation – Church Times Editorial
Welcome to the panto season. Is Britain a Christian country? Oh yes it is! Oh no it’s not! David Cameron’s Oxford lecture last week, in which he praised the centrality of the King James Bible in the nation’s history, has prompted debate about what a Christian nation looks like, and how closely the UK resembles this image. The speech has been interpreted in some circles, bizarrely, as a reprimand to Dr Williams for criticising the Government’s policy in the New Statesman in June, and latterly in his article on the riots in The Guardian. There is a hint of this, but by far the largest part of the lecture is directed at the secularist who wishes the country to shrug off its ancient cloak of transcendence and fend for itself in a thin vest of utilitarianism.
Mr Cameron, as so often, is half-right and half-wrong in his definition of a Christian nation. He is right to discern the liberal openness that exists at the heart of Christianity. Jews, Muslims, and secularists ought to feel safe in a society framed by Christianity. As he put it: “The tolerance that Christianity demands of our society provides greater space for other religious faiths, too; and because many of the values of a Christian country are shared by people of all faiths and, indeed, by people of no faith at all.”
Where Mr Cameron’s view of the Church errs is in his desire for it to act as a guardian of the nation’s morals, telling people (as Mr Cameron likes to do) when, as in the riots, they are misbehaving. But the Church is not a transcendal branch of the police force, and Christianity is not merely a moral code. For those who have received the grace of a glimpse of Christ and the heavenly realms, it is a destination, a place both to exist and to aspire to, a person to respond to. And in that aspiration and that response is the energy to behave better. Without that experience of Christ, the trappings of religion hold no sway over people.