Making Religious Identity Paramount Will Lead to Disaster

An editorial comment from the National Secular Society - I support this article...

It was widely reported last week that Muslims in Britain suffer by far the most social deprivation in terms of housing, education and employment. The information came from a report from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Review of Evidence Base on Faith Communities, which can be read HERE

The reports shows that although Muslims live in the most overcrowded households, and are least likely to have jobs or qualifications in higher education, this is not true of all the “emergent faith communities” (as we now have to call them). Hindus, for instance, are doing relatively well with high educational achievement, more house owners, much more employment in white collar jobs, and more of their women in employment.

So, if Hindus and Sikhs can succeed, what is standing in the way of Muslims? It is a difficult question and one that this report appears to ignore.

What this report also fails to address is the government’s continuing insistence on putting so much emphasis on people’s religion as an identifying factor. As the report points out, people used to be identified by where they originated or by their racial characteristics. Now, we are all members of “faith communities” even those of us who have no religion. The report also points to the danger of defining people so narrowly. Even within the different religions, there are countless different sects and traditions. Muslims and Christians come from all over the globe they cannot be unified into a convenient “community” defined by a religious label. What, for instance, has the old lady who bakes buns for the church fete in Upper Chirping got in common with the Nigerian Christian who likes to scream, shout and violently expel demons from ‘possessed’ children? They both belong to the “Christian community” by the Government’s definition, but their cultural identities couldn’t be further apart. Why should it be any different for the “Hindu community” or the “Muslim community”? Does a Bosnian Muslim really share the same cultural needs as a South Indian Muslim?

It is clear, though, from a Home Office study, that many people from a Muslim background want to make religion their primary identifying characteristic. This is a political act as much as a religious duty. Others, though, prefer to still imagine that they are simply people living in the British Isles together with others who might be of different colours, opinions and religions but who are, in the end, their neighbours.

But the government has fallen into the trap set for them by the Islamist agitators. By forcing us all to identify with a “faith group”, a wedge is driven between people who should, for all our sakes, be encouraged to unite under the banner of a national identity. There is nothing that the politicised clerics like better than to put religion at the head of every queue, to create a banner around which their flock can assemble and then special privileges can be demanded and superiority claimed. By going along with this dangerous agenda, the government is creating the opposite of the “social cohesion” it is aiming for.

If all Muslims are bunched together as, apparently, sharing the same opinions about everything, then the stereotyping that is so useful to racist groups like the BNP is handed to them on a plate. “The Muslims” that monolithic block become a threat. This labelling allows the racists to assure us that because some Muslims are terrorists, they all must be.

This ODPM report is a glaring example of the ongoing process of creating separate identities and separate communities that live in parallel with each other rather than together. The majority population (who are now, apparently, the “Christian community”), look on with bemusement at the money being poured into religious projects and feel uncomfortable with the prominence given to clerics as spokesmen for whole classes of people some of whom may actively oppose their views.

The response from the government should be to take the spotlight off religion as an identifying trait. Let people individually define themselves as Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, humanists, atheists or whatever, but don’t allow those identities to dictate official policy.

Social deprivation is a terrible thing, and is bound to lead to resentment. But why does it have to be that most volatile of all resentments, religious resentment? People should be entitled to a decent life whatever their religion, and if one religious grouping is suffering disproportionately in a country like Britain which is, in the main, indifferent to religious affiliation, then that group must ask questions of itself, as well as blaming the surrounding culture.