The place of people who profess no religion in society

Debate opened by Lord Harrison of Chester (Lab)

The Archbishop of York:

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, has described me as having a harsher voice, but I can assure noble Lords that they will not hear a harsher voice.

Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere House. Every inmate was asked to declare his religious affiliation, and four young men were registered as having no religion. One Sunday, all the inmates were offered the chance to go to worship.

The four young men with no religion declined the offer, while their fellow inmates on the A wing took up the offer. The prison officer, not wanting the four men to remain locked up in their cells, asked them to clean the toilets on the wing. The following Sunday, our four non-religious young men took up the offer to go to worship. The prison officer was puzzled why they had opted in this week. "Why are you going to chapel?" he asked. The four replied, "Sir, we didn't like the 'No Religion' place of worship". Crudely as they put it, those four young men were saying in their naivety that we are all essentially religious. The question is not whether we worship, but rather one of who or what do we worship. We give allegiance to something, and during my time at Latchmere House we persuaded everyone to volunteer to clean the toilets.

In a study called "Spirituality" among randomly selected primary school children in Nottingham and Birmingham some years ago, the researchers said that they did not come across a child who did not have an inherently spiritual perception of life. For me, religion is a narrative we all inhabit that makes sense to us of what would otherwise be nonsense. Time does not allow me to speak at length, but let us be clear: dogmatic assumptions also underline non-religious world views—Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, capitalism, secularism, humanism and so on. Those are clear dogmatic positions.

For me, this is not a human-centred universe. Religious and non-religious people need to recognise the absolute mystery of existence. By mystery, I do not mean the unexplained, but the question that persists beyond the possible explanation. Wittgenstein put it wonderfully when he said:

"Not how the world is, is the mystery, but that it is".

Beyond all the explanations the question persists: why should there be anything at all rather than just nothing? For me, belief in God, whose face I have beheld in Jesus Christ, means not only that he makes me see things in a new light but that he sets me free to do things in a new way. Why? Because for me he is not only a model for life, like birds for the aeroplane, but a living presence who helps me to live as he lived. He is not just a great teacher who lived, or simply a person to be studied in a book, or a perfect pattern or example.

"We can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common line is that we all inhabit this small planet. We breathe the same air; we all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal".

So said J.F. Kennedy in his commencement address at American University on 10 June 1963, and I agree with him.

How are we to do this? I suggest we do it by not polarising the claims of law and freedom. For me, the greatest danger we face in this country is the ethical and spiritual problems associated with the concepts of law and freedom. It is a problem for society, which can scarcely hope to survive without the delicate balance between them. If we do not delicately balance them, we will be in trouble. It is a problem for the individual, who swings uneasily between the seemingly old-fashioned moral imperative of a higher authority and the seemingly legitimate demands of their own physical and moral nature. As one of my predecessors, Archbishop Stuart Blanch, said:

"Long before we perish of pollution or civilisation goes up in some nameless holocaust we may die the death of those who, in the pursuit of freedom, undermine the law, or in the name of the law extinguish freedom—unless, that is, we are prepared to learn from the past and take more seriously than we sometimes do the accumulated wisdom of a peculiar gifted people—the people of the Bible".

For me, any society that forgets its memory becomes senile. Balancing the rule of law and freedom has been the greatest gift this nation has offered the world. I trust, therefore, that we will not give away that birthright for the very thin stew of social justice. The sure-footed way of keeping our birthright is the,

"maintenance of true religion and virtue",

as we say in the prayers. How? By maintaining the intermingling of religion, morals and law. The severance of law from morality and of religion from law has,

"gone much too far. Although religion, law and morals can be separated, they are nevertheless still very much dependent on one another. Without religion, there can be no morality, there can be no law".

So said Lord Denning.