Religious faith cannot be allowed to make us unequal before the law

I’ve just re-read one of my favourite Iris Murdoch novels, A Fairly Honourable Defeat. To describe the plot does this astonishing book an injustice, but it mainly concerns the machinations of a scientist, Julius King, who sets out to destroy the marriage of his friend Rupert, because Rupert’s faith in the power of love – his belief that there exists a Platonic thing, love itself – irritates him in its imprecision.

One of the most powerful passages in the book is when Rupert, referring to evil’s “unfathomable depths”, suggests that “good” has “heights” which we should strive to attain. Julius turns on him: “Let’s keep your up and down picture, it’s convenient and traditional. My point is that the top of the structure is completely empty. The thing is truncated. Human beings have often dreamed of the extension of goodness beyond the pitiful level at which they muck along, but it is precisely a dream, and a totally vague one at that.”

My teenage self found this passage almost unbearable, because reading it coincided with the inability to maintain my childhood belief in God, one that I’ve never recovered. I had tried to imagine God into existence as some sort of “extended sense of goodness” but, as Julius predicted, I couldn’t sustain the image, let alone make it real. The top of the structure did, indeed, feel totally empty. And so I lost my faith: my search for goodness became more local.

Which isn’t to say I don’t admire those who do sustain their belief, and of all the religions on offer, the one that most appeals is the tolerant, self-questioning Church of England.

Recent behaviour by some of its adherents has challenged that appeal, however: last week the European Court of Human Rights began to consider the demands of four British Christians. Their case is that the Government failed to protect their religious liberty, after their employers wouldn’t accommodate their religious conscience. It sounds harmless. I think it’s totally wrong‑headed.

Two of the plaintiffs are Nadia Eweida, whose employers told her to remove a small silver cross on a necklace, and Lillian Ladele, the registrar who didn’t want to officiate at civil partnerships in north London. The first irritation is the conflation of the silly with the serious: the necklace, and the civic registrar. These issues are not of the same category, let alone the same importance, and lumping them together undermines the Christian case, that an advancing tide of secularism is driving out the state’s religion.

It is indeed ridiculous that a woman was told to remove the cross she wears on a necklace. But her employer, exposed to the ridicule of public opinion, backed down. That is how it should be: cross-wearers require neither a law nor supra-national court ruling to protect them. And even on the (philosophically shaky) ground of their secular opponents, Christians could demand such a “right” (to wear a necklace, for heaven’s sake), on the basis of the modern pseudo-religion of “equality”.

But if the cross-wearer’s employer should be told to get a life, any registrar with an aversion to civil partnerships should be told to get another job, because it’s a registrar’s duty to perform them, regardless of personal opinions about their worth. At the point when the registrar’s religious conscience comes into conflict with the demands of the job, it is the conscience that must give way.

Not because of equality law – such an outcome would lead to some citizens creeping around town halls, hoping to bump into registrars willing to enact their Parliament-ordained right, which is a sufficiently repulsive image to render the proposal unacceptable – but, and this is not intended to be offensive, because that unjust consequence could be defended only by reference to that “religious conscience”; that is, the registrar’s understanding of his or her religious duty.

If that religious duty could be demonstrated to have a basis in something real, it would have force. But, as Julius argues, the top of the structure is empty: just because religious faith can lead to a virtuous life doesn’t mean that it always does so, from which it follows (surely?) that it’s an insufficient basis on which to bend the laws of the land.

We took a wrong turn when we began to implement rules that made a mockery of the only equality that matters (our equality in front of the law) when we invented categories of human to which special rights were attached. That some Christians have been treated badly in recent years is not an excuse to make the cats’ cradle of exemptions and dispensations more complicated. How could you run a business if the religious duty of all employees had to be taken into account?

For that reason alone, fondness for Anglicanism notwithstanding, I can’t help but hope that the case before the Strasbourg court is defeated. A defeat; but a fairly honourable one.