Will We Abandon The Enlightenment? by Les May

ON the first Easter Sunday we were together my wife rushed into the garden to tell me that the Pope was just about to give his address ‘Urbi et Orbi’, to the city and the world. I was baffled at her enthusiasm. Our mutual lack of understanding was because she had been brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition and I in the Anglican. It has not stopped us living in peace and harmony for 46 years. Nor has it meant that our ideas have remained fossilised in the past. But it’s a difference that had people imprisoned, tortured or burned at the stake 500 years ago.

The Reformation*, when Henry VIII broke with Rome and established himself as the head of the Anglican church, is seen by some as one of the most significant events in English history. But at this distance a more realistic appraisal is that it merely exchanged one form of intolerance for another; an insistence that one set of beliefs was the one true way, for another.

For the next 150 years the insistence that they, and they alone, knew the truth about how to worship their God drove those who happened to be in power at the time to impose their beliefs on the populace. Burning at the stake was in vogue during the reign of ‘Bloody Mary’, as she was called in my history book, but not that of my wife. During the heyday of Puritanism in the mid 17th century dancing and Christmas celebrations were forbidden, a bit like Jehovah’s Witnesses refusal to celebrate today, or the Taliban’s ban on pigeon flying.

And then it stopped; not all at once, not everywhere in the world, not even everywhere in Europe, but slowly this thing we call ‘The Enlightenment’ came into being. It wasn’t a single thing, but included a range of ideas centred on, sovereignty of reason, empirical investigation and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge. It advanced ideals such as individual liberty, constitutional government, separation of religion and state, and toleration, including religious toleration. The countries where these conditions still do not exist are too well known for me to need to enumerate all of them; three will suffice, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Although The Enlightenment has dethroned religion as the sole arbiter of truth and knowledge its ideals of individual liberty and of religious tolerance has ensured that those so inclined can hold and practice their beliefs without persecution by the state, and the state will act to ensure that they are able to do so. It is no coincidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury has said; ‘We have to speak freely, I’m much more towards the US end of the spectrum on freedom of speech than I am elsewhere towards the other end. I think we have to be open to hearing things we really dislike’.

Even if many of a religious persuasion do not, Welby is aware that his Anglican faith benefits from that ideal of tolerance which those of us who do not share his beliefs attempt to give meaning to. Tolerance of other peoples’ beliefs and their practice of them does not mean that they should be immune to critical analysis or criticism. I believe that any claims about the existence or non-existence of transcendental beings or deities have no meaning in the absence of any empirical test to determine their veracity. But it does not stop me defending the rights of Christians to express their views on God’s opinion on homosexuality, even though I think they are nonsense, or defending Asia Bibi against persecution in Pakistan.

In other words the freedom that the followers of Islam, including those who reside in Batley and are demanding that the teacher who did something they dislike should be sacked, have to practice their beliefs in this country rests firmly upon ideals of The Enlightenment. Insisting that we in the UK abandon those ideals and adopt their own stance of intolerance towards those whose views we disapprove of will not serve them well. Anyone for banning Halal slaughter?

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EDITOR'S FOOTNOTE:

* Dating the Reformation

Historians usually date the start of the Protestant Reformation to the 1517 publication of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses.” Its ending can be placed anywhere from the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, which allowed for the coexistence of Catholicism and Lutheranism in Germany, to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The key ideas of the Reformation—a call to purify the church and a belief that the Bible, not tradition, should be the sole source of spiritual authority—were not themselves novel. However, Luther and the other reformers became the first to skillfully use the power of the printing press to give their ideas a wide audience.