Once again, the impression has been created that secular values are a) the embodiment of civilisation and b) value neutral. Both assumptions are mistaken.
A senior English judge, Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division, has rejoiced in his view that Christianity no longer informs the judgements handed down in the courts, which now must serve a multicultural community of many faiths.
Judges, he said, must not weight one religion against another. The courts had now
‘by and large moderated their claims to speak as the defining voices of morality and of the law of marriage and the family’
because there was no longer one definition of right and wrong in the wake of the sexual revolution. He observed:
‘Happily for us, the days are past when the business of judges was the enforcement of morals or religious beliefs.’
The learned judge does not seem to realise that – as he himself unwittingly demonstrates – today’s judges see it as very much their business to enforce secular beliefs.
The idea that ‘oppressive’ Christian morality and ethics have been replaced – hurrah! – by a nirvana of freedom and tolerance is very wide of the mark. Traditional moral codes have merely been replaced by the modern religion of human rights, of which the English judiciary is its high priesthood.
For far from secularism being value-neutral, it promotes hyper-individualism. And far from expanding freedom, this diminishes it. For it sets up a perpetual fight for supremacy between interest groups, arbitrated in the courts by judges promoting secularism.
This actively and aggressively destroys the common bonds of history, tradition and morality that keep a society together. And it means that the weakest groups, of whom Christians are paramount, often find that their rights to uphold their own religious traditions are trampled down. For as a former Lord Chief Justice once remarked, human rights law inescapably favour minorities over the majority, which is seen (wrongly) as innately oppressive. Thus blind justice is replaced by a culture of human wrongs.
The reality – counter-intuitive as it may seem to some – is that individual liberty is only upheld and safeguarded by legal, social and cultural traditions embedded in the ethics of the Bible. Indeed, western liberty is unique in the world precisely because of those biblical roots.
Contrary to Sir James’s implication, the courts never acted as if Britain was a theocracy. But they did play a vital role as informal guardians of that Biblically-based western culture, helping transmit the common values which, as everybody understood, bound society together and helped form its identity.
If the courts have abandoned that role and are promoting instead the creed of secularism which divides rather than unites, social cohesion will inevitably fracture and the identity of a shared culture based on individual liberty will disintegrate. And onto that vacated terrain will come another creed altogether – one bent on cultural colonisation and the destruction of human rights – which will seize its opportunity to use secularism as its Trojan horse.
This is already happening. Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced that Britain would become the first western country to issue a government-backed, Shariah-compliant ‘sukkuk’ Islamic bond.
Like Gordon Brown before him, the Prime Minister David Cameron has said he wants London to become the global centre of Islamic banking. All these men can see are the £ signs dancing before their eyes. As the FT reports:
‘The government hopes the £200 million Sharia-compliant bond or sukuk will enable the City to grab a major slice of the Sharia investment market which is estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion globally.’
But this money comes with a price. And that price is Britain’s identity as a western country. For ‘sharia-compliance’ is not like, say, compliance with health and safety rules. Sharia is the Islamic system of jurisprudence which does not acknowledge any legal authority other than itself and demands adherence to its own precepts.
‘For the Sukuk to remain Sharia compliant, it necessarily surrenders itself away from the jurisdiction of the UK civil courts to the Islamic courts.’
As Paul Goodman has so aptly observed on Conservative Home, sharp and urgent questions and concerns aired in Parliament when the power to issue such bonds was first mooted have never been addressed. Those questions and concerns were aired by the then Conservative opposition to a Labour government which seemed indifferent to the fact that it was proposing to sell Britain to Islam. Now those Conservatives are in power and are proposing to do just that – and their own questions still remain unanswered.
As Paul Goodman has so aptly observed on Conservative Home, sharp and urgent questions and concerns aired in Parliament when the power to issue such bonds was first mooted have never been addressed. Those questions and concerns were aired by the then Conservative opposition to a Labour government which seemed indifferent to the fact that it was proposing to sell Britain to Islam. Now those Conservatives are in power and are proposing to do just that – and their own questions still remain unanswered.
Maybe Sir James Munby would maintain that his secular courts would see off any such threat. But what odds would you give Sir James Munby and his fellow judges against the forces of shariah?
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