Acts of faith are no business of those with none

Circumcision may turn the stomachs of the secular, but it sits at the fulcrum of many devotees’ piety

Wars on religion inevitably turn into a war on the religious. Because human beings really do believe in this stuff, and when you try to snuff out God, you snuff them out, too. That’s why the battle against the circumcision of male children is so ominous. It’s oppression of people under the false flag of ‘elf and safety.

There’s a bill before the Icelandic parliament to make it a criminal offence to remove any part of a child’s sexual organs for non-medical reasons, and British activists are now putting pressure on our doctors to take the same view. Stephen Evans told Radio 4’s Moral Maze that circumcision of male infants is so wrong that it might be grounds to call the police under the Offences Against the Person Act. Mr Evans is chief executive of the National Secular Society, the church militant of atheism. Like all extremist organisations, it’s a coalition of the ignorant and the spiteful.

Let me address the ignorant first. I get it: male circumcision sounds weird, even offensive. In the Jewish case, a mohel removes the foreskin of a baby on the eighth day after his birth, a decision taken by adults that the boy has to carry for the rest of his life whether he believes in the Almighty or not. It sounds like it contradicts some of the basic tenets of a liberal society: children’s rights, bodily autonomy and choice.

But choice is a complicated thing. Parents do stuff to their kids all the time – pierce their ears, feed them Mcdonald’s – that we don’t ban because we don’t want the state to take on the role of parent. Why?

Because that would subvert another very important kind of choice: the right of mums and dads to raise their children how they wish. Across the world, they make the free choice of male circumcision without controversy. The World Health Organisation estimates that about a third of men aged 15 or over have gone under the knife; it’s probably the vast majority of that demographic in the United States, where it became popular post-war. The health impact is an unsettled question (the WHO thinks it might slow the spread of HIV) and the pros and cons for sexual performance have been debated ad infinitum in the pages of GQ. There are adult men who hate it, men who swear by it – and the rest of us feel jolly awkward whenever they bring it up.

What we’re not discussing here is a procedure in the same category as female circumcision, which causes lifelong pain and suffering. Female genital mutilation (FGM), as it’s more accurately known, is entirely sadistic. It is designed to control a woman’s sexuality, almost to de-sex her, and is cultural in justification rather than religious.

The distinction is important. One can outlaw FGM without hindering the practice of Islam because it’s not intrinsic to Islam – it’s just something done by a few backward tribes that happen to be Muslim (Christians and Animists do it as well).

Male circumcision, by contrast, is an established part of the Islamic tradition and arguably essential to Judaism. In the book of Genesis, the Lord tells Abraham that he and all his male heirs must be circumcised, and that any Jew who is not has broken this covenant and “will be cut off from his people”. In other words, for religious Jews this is a non-negotiable part of their identity. Outlaw it and you make it impossible for them to raise their children in this country. I’d call that religious discrimination, which I was under the impression is illegal.

So, why campaign for a ban? Because the “secularism” being pushed by activists today goes much further than secularism in the old-fashioned sense of separating church and state. They want to impose their way of life on all of society. They imitate religious fanaticism in that they cannot tolerate others doing something they disagree with. Just as some religious conservatives cannot suffer the notion that two men or two women are in love, so the liberal fundamentalist cannot accept that a church might believe itself to be incapable of “marrying” them.

The goal is not only to keep religion out of the public sphere but to regulate its private spaces – even the most intensely personal issue of circumcision – to the point where religion is limited in practice to gatherings in small cellars, illuminated only by whispered prayers.

The funny thing is, that’s where religion flourishes best. This is not the first time the world has turned on the faithful and the experience usually strengthens the identity that the authorities tried to shatter. The Shiites regrouped in Persia; the Israelites fled Egypt for the promised land; the blood of the martyrs, as the Catholics like to say, is the seed of the church. Call it kinky, but part of me welcomes these debates about religion in modern life because they crystallise how faith defines and transforms the life of the believer. I’m sure that many Jewish men never thought much about their own circumcision. Now it’s being debated on morning TV shows, expect the mohels to be inundated with bookings for their own newborn sons.

In persecution, we learn who we are. We are different. We have faith. And we don’t go down without a fight. FOLLOW Tim Stanley on Twitter @timothy_stanley; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion