Seeing the other side

The latest series of British Academy debates took us into rather different territory from previous topics: in dealing with faith, we explored a less tangible but deeply controversial and personal area of society. For good or ill, religious faith remains one of the main drivers of human happiness (and unhappiness) in the world today. Indeed, far from fading away and becoming a picturesque irrelevance (as many quite sensible and well-informed western academics believed half a century ago), it might be seen as the dominant and growing motive force in most human societies. In China, Christianity is expanding at such a rate that some think that it may become the largest single religion in that vast country. Equally, the annual Muslim Hajj in Mecca has no competitor as the greatest single gathering of human beings on the planet. Wars in the 21st century have taken partisan religious guises, especially in Africa and the Middle East, in a fashion that Europeans have tended to see as gathering obsolescence since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

Faith is easy to ignore in the public life of the United Kingdom. In our various traditional national cultures, the expression of religion in church-going or the observance of public liturgy has become a minority pursuit. The risk with this undoubted truth is that it can produce a curious blindness among analysts and policy-makers as to the crucial importance of religious belief and practice in the rest of the modern world. If policy decisions are made in Britain in relation to one of our trading partners, or if we send aid or aid-workers abroad, without understanding the nature and history of religions that our efforts will encounter, that vacuum of understanding is as dangerous and as counter-productive as not understanding the economic structures or the transport network.

Likewise, we need to realise just what it means to say that, in the United Kingdom, we live in a multi-cultural and irreducibly diverse collection of islands. The UK’s majority traditions have been Christian for 1,400 years, yet it boasts more than three centuries of continuous Jewish life, and it now includes other vigorous faith communities, particularly Hindu, Sikh and Muslim. Virtually all our cultures, particularly those most recently arrived, live their lives amid religious rhythms, and shape their identities through them. We are a society both secular and not secular; we even maintain an Established Church in the largest part of the United Kingdom (a status which seems to meet with a surprising degree of approval from most other faith communities in England), and the ghosts of such establishment still have more than spectral substance in Scotland and Wales.

We need to reflect on these characteristics of UK society fully and with maturity, and there is no better institution than the British Academy to do this. The engagement of the humanities and the social sciences with religion is vital, not only to understand the force of it, but also to help the best of it flourish. Our Academy is dedicated to the proposition that curiosity is one of the most civilised and civilising of virtues. We research; we question; we describe and account for difference and variety without finding them necessarily threatening or deplorable. One of the chief dangers to human happiness is that in many world polities and cultures, it is being taken as culturally commendable not to tolerate difference and diversity, social, political, sexual or religious. If we explore our own problems and opportunities in relating faith to a supposedly secular society, we are providing resources for the faith communities in our midst to reach out to their co-religionists in the rest of the world, and we may help them understand the value of the diversity which we so prize in the United Kingdom.

Such has been the Academy’s purpose in exploring issues of faith, centred on three debates in three cities of the United Kingdom, all of them providing a significantly different background in terms of local attitudes to and experiences of faith. We have drawn both on the expertise of Fellows of the British Academy and on those who speak with authority beyond it, and various other events and activities have accompanied these discussions. We hope that the conversations started here will spread very widely in public and academic life over the next year.