Atheists for the Church

Concern is growing among humanists about the state of Richard Dawkins’ soul. At the Hay Literar y Festival he announced ‘I am a secular Christian if you want to call me that’. Perhaps this explains why he didn’t sign the letter from 50 atheists objecting to the fact that David Cameron called Britain a ‘Christian countr y’. Another atheist to come out in favour of religion, and the C of E in particular, is David Marquand, former Labour MP, friend of Roy Jenkins, founder member of the SDP, politics lecturer and public intellectual. Speaking recently at the Royal Society for the Arts, he praised the C of E as one institution that Mrs Thatcher had been unable to influence. In his new book ‘Mammon’s Kingdom’ he says we have as much to learn from religious traditions as political ones. He attacks modern critics of religion as ‘children of moral individualism’ and as ‘victims of a collective amnesia that is unable to learn from the past’. He criticises the ‘intolerant tolerance’ of the New Atheists and accuses them of failing to see the value of religion. To refuse to pay attention to religious traditions, Marquand tells us, ‘is to deny ourselves the chance to mine some of the richest seams of our increasingly variegated culture’. ‘To say that religion should be confined to the private sphere’, he comments, ‘is to say it should cease to be religion’. Don’t expect an enthusiastic review in the ‘New Humanist’ but hear Marquand at St Paul’s Cathedral on June 17th.