God forbid, I nearly agreed with a Bishop...

Whilst helping my son shovel a sloppy mess of mashed-up Weetabix in milk into his face this morning, I was half-listening to Radio 4's Sunday programme. A group of interviewees (mostly pious types, but including a token non-God-bothering philosopher) were discussing Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali's recent pronouncements about the decline of Christianity leaving a vacuum which is being filled by radical Islam.

In my opinion the good Bish, like most people whose entire career consists of telling anybody who will listen about their invisible friend, is a bit of a nut. But I did have the momentary charitable thought that, on this occasion, the nut may have (inadvertently) contained a kernel of truth. After all, the Church of England behaves rather less frightening way in its own back yard than Islam does in states where it has some authority.

The C of E may prevent the reigning monarch from marrying a Catholic and have seats set aside in the House of Lords where Bishops can sermonise at everybody, even those like me who have politely declined to be preached at by the simple expedient of never darkening the door of a church when I can possibly avoid it. However, on the credit side, the C of E has not, in recent years, seriously debated whether apostates should be killed and even their recent "bishops split by gay sex" didn't actually involve either side actually advocating the murder of homosexuals. Although we have a bench of Bishops, they don't vet which political candidates we can vote for, nor do the Church of England operate a squad of religious police charged with intimidating the insufficiently God-fearing. The General Synod do not dictate how women should dress, whether they should be allowed to drive, issue death sentences on novelists, or agitate for the killing of cartoonists who they deem to lack respect, or call for the murder of Jews and the annihilation of the state of Israel. Probably best to not to introduce this particular brand of religion into our legal structures, as advocated by Archbish Rowan Williams a while back.

So yes, Bishop, the brand of religion represented by the Church of England is a distinct improvement on the authoritarian drivel routinely spouted by the current generation of militant Islamists wherever they have got their hands on real temporal power. Where I differ from the Bish is in his conclusion that the reason why things here are so much better than in , say, Iran or Saudi Arabia is that our Church is inherently superior and, if we could just be that bit more religious, things would get even better and less like some oppressive middle-eastern theocracy.

I would say that the values which make our society better than one ruled by clerics are those which tend to weaken the vice-like grip of any religious establishment and go hand in hand with the weakening grip of the established Church.

Enlightenment values, an evidence rather than faith-based way of looking at the world, the rise of democracy - rule where the views of the demos, the people counts for more than that of any priesthood, a system of civil, rather than religious law, an eduction system which has a large proportion of non-sectarian schools as opposed to church schools or madrasas. In the past much of life here in Britain was once under the watchful eye of the Church and many crimes were committed in the name of faith - crusades, the burning of heretics, the persecution of atheists or of those who had some form of religious faith which didn't conform with whatever the state-sanctioned variety at the time was, witch-burning. But, fortunately, we're over that now. Religion no longer has the power to intimidate.

So yes, Bishop, the Church of England is a sign of hope for those of us who don't want to live under intolerant, oppressive religion. But the hopeful thing about it is that it is weak, in decline, irrelevant. It's a sign that we no longer live in fear of religion. So, when you say that the answer to one intolerant religion is to revive another religion in opposition to it, I'm almost tempted to say God forbid. Or I would be, if He showed any convincing sign of existing.