A report on a secular conference debating rights and free speech
‘To thine own self be true.’
In a room reminiscent of a large 19th-century Non-conformist church with balcony and wooden panelling, this gold-embossed line from Hamlet was written above the pulpit, as a conference called ‘Religious Freedom and the New Repression’ took place last November.
Exploring competing rights
It was sponsored by Spiked, the online, off-message news site filled with commentary from a broadly libertarian perspective and edited by Brendan O’Neil (he who appeared before the Commons Select Committee opposing the ‘equal’ marriage Bill1). The conference explored competing rights between groups in society that fall under the protected characteristics, and questioned whether we should be free to hate in a free society.
Speakers included Peter Tatchell, defending the right of Ashers Bakery to decline to decorate a cake with a pro-gay marriage message. He said that the ruling against them was a defeat for freedom for everyone. He disliked the element of compulsion via legal threats.
Joshua Rozenburg, journalist and legal commentator who can be heard frequently on the BBC, noted that although both sets of rights in the Ashers case were worthy of respect, the ruling was correct and they should just stop baking cakes to order. Some wondered why the complainants couldn’t just ‘go to another shop’.
Although this smacks of the ‘no blacks, no Irish’ signs of the 1950s, it is more akin to saying ‘get another job’ and highlights the problem of competing rights. In this particular case, no person was being discriminated against; not until the ruling took place and then the McArthurs were. He disputed the proposition that the ruling on this one cake meant that everyone else would now have to print/make/promote a view with which they disagreed. This seemed naïve, since many Christian employees, with a few notable exceptions, are taken through the court system and, like dominoes, fall one by one, pushed by the weight of this kind of reasoning.
Reasonable accommodation?
The well-worn phrase of ‘liberal elite’ (a replacement to ‘politically correct’?) was used frequently as both sides of every argument tried to distance themselves from being the cause of the strife between groups and ideals in society. Arguably, the entire conference was filled with those drawn from some kind of ‘elite’. Although Spiked itself also uses this phrase as if projectile vomiting the ‘elite’ away, it is itself a part of this nebulous group. For many, ‘liberal elite’ means those who support, for example, LGBT rights over the rights of Christians, which would put every political party and every author of workplace policy into that grouping.
The speaker from The Christian Institute tried in vain to encourage the use of a ‘reasonable accommodation’ in law to allow people freedom of thought and action at work. One imagines that this was ignored as it challenged the particular atheistic brand of freedom that was being promoted.
Libertarian arguments were rife. Frank Furedi (sociologist and husband of British Pregnancy Advisory Service chief executive Ann) was keen to support the right of Christians to hold and practice their views – as long as Christians also recognised that total freedom of abortion laws were logically part of the same agreement. Equating killing a 38-week gestation baby with saying ‘I don’t want to bake your cake’ seemed crass and lacking in logic: one is about freedom of thought, the other freedom to breathe.
Cards revealed
Furedi also suggested that Christians set up their own schools, hospitals and so on, as done in the USA, so that moral decisions can be taken in line with the belief of those funding the institutions. It was here that the cards were revealed: ‘Opt out of society. Use your taxes to isolate yourselves from the rest of us … and then we’ll stop you operating under your own rules. Or have you just blocked your ears to the laws which are being brought in about how you educate your children in your own schools and churches?’ It was an argument both slick and deadly.
Common ground
Where most common ground could be found with Christians was on the issue of ‘hate speech’. Much of what is being defined as ‘hate speech’ is in fact just things with which one doesn’t agree. (Though a robust argument was made as to why hatred isn’t a problem!) It was noted that the belief that marriage is between one man and one woman has gone from normal, to narrow, to hateful in the space of five years. And that was said by a non-believer.
The advent of ‘no platforming’, ‘safe spaces’ 2 and the banning of religious/ethical groups from university affiliation was expressed as something deeply worrying. The weakness of society in its constant desire to resort to the courtroom, rather than listen to and put up with things we don’t like, was seen as a moral failing. Equality law is now protecting people’s self-esteem, and we have become lazy as people resort to the police rather than argue for themselves.
A moment of comedy
The ever-expanding empire of hate crime means there is more hatred and it takes on an exotic allure. (A moment of comedy was provided by the Home Office whose Counter Extremism Strategy is ‘for all forms of extremism, and for future extremism that we can’t even imagine’.) But the suggested response wasn’t enough. Legalising everything (with a line drawn at inciting imminent violence) isn’t the direction to go. Pornography, violence, total legalisation of abortion, many things which Christians would see as damaging to society, would be lumped in with ending any censorship of religious belief.
Out of our ‘echo chambers’
Many questions from the floor came from Catholics who could ‘smell the rats’ in the duplicitous arguments. A massive challenge to many Christians was for everyone to get out of their ‘echo chambers’ and have better quality disagreement. Which, coming from an atheist, was a secular call to listen to people and evangelise! This is where every Christian needs to become better equipped at engaging with people and their beliefs.
This writer was met with an incredulous look when stating that every urban non-Christian in my circle of friends supports equal marriage publicly and loudly. And living in the countryside doesn’t make one immune from the (perhaps) metropolitan views which have steadily crept out.
Feeling ‘safe’ in a ‘sound’ church doesn’t mean that everyone is on the same page with regard to freedom of belief. In a very well-taught church, a Christian solicitor said: ‘They know the law. They just need to get another job or keep quiet’, concerning cases such as Ashers. That solicitor was advocating the leaving of faith and conscience at the door to work. Who would want an employee who never acted on her conscience as a doctor? Only someone who wanted an employee such as Mengele 3. And if society doesn’t want that, then surely Christians shouldn’t advocate that thinking.
And for our own gold-embossed verse? We could return to Hamlet, but tweak it: ‘To yourself we will be true, O Lord’.
To listen to the full conference, of which Roger Trigg’s contribution is highly recommended: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/enemies-of-the-state/19062#.WE6qV4XXJFo
FOOTNOTES
1 His objection was that it is not the Government’s role to redefine marriage. A change such as this should have been brought about by a grassroots campaign, but it was rootless, originating with the political classes. February 2013
2 Banning speakers who are seen as extreme or objectionable due to their views (Germaine Greer has been ‘no platformed’ for her view that trans women are not women). BBC Newsnight, October 2015
3 Mengele, a German doctor and SS officer who performed experiments in concentration camps, including personally killing 14 twins in one night via a chloroform injection to the heart as part of his investigations. Gerald Astor . Last Nazi: Life and Times of Dr Joseph Mengele (1985)
