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HISTORY

A HISTORY OF SECULARISM IN THE UK

The concept of the secular is normally thought of as standing in opposition to religion yet many are unaware that it originally developed within a religious context. Rather than an atheistic conspiracy to undermine Christian civilization, secularism was originally developed for the sake of preserving peace among Christians. The idea of secularism can be found as early as the Christian theologian Augustine, who developed a systematic division by distinguishing between two "cities," one that ordered the things of the earth (civitas terrenae) and one that was ordered by God (civitas dei).

The final push towards widespread secularisation was not caused by anti-Christian secularists but by devoted Christians who were shocked by the devastation caused by the religious wars sweeping across Europe in the wake of the Reformation. This forced a reduction of explicit references to specific Christian doctrines. In the long run, this meant that the Church became increasingly excluded from political affairs as the people found that they appreciated having a realm of thought and action where they could be free from ecclesiastical influence and authority. 

British secularism was greatly influenced by German philosophical thought, for example Hegel (1770-1831). Like Kant, Hegel stressed the importance of intellectual freedom, but he limited this freedom to the pursuit of godhead through absolute knowledge as transcendent self-realization. David Strauss (1808-74) also closely followed Hegelian theology, writing the pivotal study Leben Jesu (Life of Christ). Strauss's final book, The Old Faith and the New (1873) was no less controversial as his final and incredibly honest testament upon having converted to atheism in response to the Darwinian theory of evolution. Strauss showed that he was able to explain the metaphysical implications of current scientific findings with as much facility as he had the metaphysical implications of Biblical inconsistencies. Many others voiced their opinions in the years to come: Feuerbach (1804-72), Ludwig Bu"chner (1824-99), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

But British secularism can be most readily attributed to Bentham (1748-1832), the founder of Utilitarianism, who wrote over 650 pages of anonymous tracts opposed to religion. As a close friend, James Mill (1773-1836) shared Bentham's views on religion but without having published anything to assert them. Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiography that his father considered religion to be "the greatest enemy of morality: first by setting up fictitious excellences,--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human-kind,--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues." 

Richard Carlile (1790-1843) went to jail for nine years for publishing Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, a vigorous critique of the Bible. He then fell into the early leadership of England's increasingly visible populist freethought movement. He was succeeded in this role by Robert Owen (1771-1858), George Holyoake (1817-1906), and Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891), each of them taking a more radical stance than his predecessor in his rejection of religious orthodoxy. As an uncompromising atheist, Bradlaugh was the most controversial, and he can be credited with the most publications supportive of atheism. He is arguably one of the main contributors to the development and evolution of secularism in Britain as we know it today.

At the age of twelve he became an office boy in the company where his father worked. As a young man he came under the influence of the ideas of Richard Carlile, the man who had been sent to prison for blasphemy and seditious libel in 1819. Like Carlile, Bradlaugh began to question the truth of Christianity and this led to arguments with his father. In 1849 he left home due to religious differences with his family and in 1853 he found work in a law office. Bradlaugh was now a committed republican and freethinker and in 1860 joined Joseph Barker, a former Chartist from Sheffield, to establish the radical journal, The National Reformer. He wrote a series of pamphlets on politics and religion and by the early 1860s was recognised as one of the leading freethinkers in Britain. In 1866 he helped to establish the National Secular Society, an organisation opposed to Christian dogma. He met Annie Besant and the two of them became close friends. Bradlaugh employed Besant on The National Reformer and over the next few years she wrote many articles on issues such as marriage and women's rights.

In 1877 Bradlaugh and Besant decided to publish The Fruits of Philosophy, Charles Knowlton's book advocating birth control. However they were charged with publishing material that was "likely to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences". In court they argued that "we think it more moral to prevent conception of children than, after they are born, to murder them by want of food, air and clothing." Both were found guilty of publishing an "obscene libel" and sentenced to six months in prison, however, at the Court of Appeal the sentence was annulled. The authorities attempted to obstruct the activities of Bradlaugh and other freethinkers. Pamphlets on religion were seized and on several occasions they were excluded from using public buildings for their meetings. In 1882 the staff of the journal, The Freethinker, were prosecuted for blasphemy, and two of them were found guilty and sent to prison.

Bradlaugh had tried several times to be elected to represent Northampton in Parliament. He was eventually elected in 1880, but as he was not a Christian he asked for permission to affirm the oath of office. The Speaker of the House of Commons refused this request and Bradlaugh was expelled from Parliament. William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, supported Bradlaugh's right to affirm, but he had upset a lot of people with his views on Christianity, the monarchy and birth control and when the issue was put before Parliament, MPs voted to support the Speaker's decision to expel him. Bradlaugh then mounted a national campaign in favour of atheists being allowed to sit in the House of Commons. He gained some support from some Nonconformists but he was strongly opposed by the Conservative Party and the leaders of the Anglican and Catholic clergy. When he attempted to take his seat in Parliament in June 1880, he was arrested by the Sergeant-at-Arms and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the Conservative Party, warned that Bradlaugh would become a martyr and it was decided to release him.

On 26th April, 1881, Bradlaugh was once again refused permission to affirm. William Gladstone promised to bring in legislation to enable Bradlaugh to do this, but this would take time. He was unwilling to wait and when he attempted to take his seat on 2nd August he was once forcibly removed from the House of Commons. His supporters organised a national petition and on 7th February, 1882, he presented a list of 241,970 signatures calling for him to be allowed to take his seat. However, when he tried to take the Parliamentary oath, he was once again removed from Parliament. Gladstone's Affirmation Bill was discussed by Parliament in the spring of 1883. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Manning, head of the Catholic Church, argued against the right of atheists to be MPs and when the vote was taken in May 1883, the Affirmation Bill was defeated. In 1884 Bradlaugh was once again elected to represent Northampton in the House of Commons. He took his seat and voted three times before he was excluded. He was later fined £1,500 for voting illegally.

He decided to try again to take the oath on 13th January, 1886. The new Speaker, Sir Arthur Wellesley Peel, did not object, arguing that he had the authority to interfere with the oath-taking. Bradlaugh now had the right to speak and vote in the House of Commons, and over the next few years he supported Irish Home Rule and the redistribution of land. He continued to argue for republicanism and was a fierce critic of pensions. He was also a strong critic of Britain's foreign policy and opposed the military involvement in South Africa, Sudan, Afghanistan and Egypt. He died on 30th January, 1891. His funeral was attended by 3,000 mourners who saw him buried in unconsecrated ground.

Successors influenced by Bradlaugh included George Foote (1850-1915) and Chapman Cohen (1868-1964), successive editors of the atheist journal Freethinker, as well as J.M. Robertson (1856-1933) and Joseph McCabe (1867-1955), two dominant freethought scholars. Foote succeeded Bradlaugh as chairman of the National Secular Society, and Robertson remained closely linked to this group as well as being an active member of Parliament, a well-published Shakespearean scholar, and Britain's leading authority on free trade. In contrast, McCabe played an increasingly divisive role and was finally ostracised by the free thought movement in 1928.

English romantic poets sympathetic with the French Revolution and therefore freethinkers included Wordsworth, Coleridge, and later Byron, Shelley, and Keats. However, Keats avoided the issue, and Wordsworth, whatever his early beliefs, had become an orthodox Christian by the end of his life. In his later years, Coleridge (1772-1834) enjoyed the reputation as one of England's outstanding conservatives, but his theism was inconsistent and he occasionally fell into arguments supportive of free thought. In Aids To Reflection (1824), for example, he said, "He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

By the mid-nineteenth century the tide of opinion in England dramatically shifted from Christian orthodoxy to freethought. The ultra-conservative Oxford Movement had collapsed by 1841, Strauss and Feuerbach’s impact, once translated, was substantial, and continental Europe's 1848 Revolution terminated the anti-democratic idea behind Metternichian diplomacy, and, not least, Darwin's Origin of the Species, published in 1859, finally gave evolution a credible explanation based on the principle of natural selection. As a result, many respectable Victorian authors and poets were drawn into the freethought movement on a relatively casual basis.

For example, the novelist Dickens (1812-70), confided in a personal letter, "As to the church, my friend, I am sick of it.” George Eliot (1819-90) asked the rhetorical question, "Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, what will be the remainder?" And the novelist and poet George Meredith (1828-1909) confessed, "When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks. . . . But I have never since swallowed the Christian fable". The overall trend among poets, and in fact in literature as a whole, was toward secularization.

As England's dominant mid-century philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) tried to avoid religious issues, and he mostly ignored the philosophical implications of Darwinian evolution. However, in On Liberty (1859), Mill did stress the importance of continuous debate; otherwise, Mill argued, orthodoxy sets in, and idea degenerates into received opinion, which he described as hereditary creed that does nothing for the mind or heart "except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant”. By the late nineteenth century there was a broad shift among British freethinkers to identifying themselves as agnostics. The trend seemed to be that of the young Cambridge mathematician, William Clifford (1845-79), who argued in his most influential essay, The Ethics of Belief (1876), that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." 

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was England's dominant and most celebrated philosopher during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, having joined Alfred North Whitehead in writing Principia Mathematica (1910-13) as a synthesis of logic and mathematics that permitted the integration of science and philosophy. Russell also published many dozens of books and articles that featured both materialism and epistemology (the two dominant foci of freethought in ancient Greece) as well as various political issues. In his more popular writings, Russell time and again rejected orthodox religious belief. Similarly to two other eminent philosophers, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) and John McTaggart (1866-1925), who also challenged orthodox religion.

Logical Positivists including Carnap (1871-1970), Neurath (1882-1945), Schlick (1882-1936), and Nagel (1937 ) took a scientific approach to religious issues with an emphasis on verifiability. Their most famous member, A.J. Ayer (1910-89) generally accepted the assumption that God's existence could neither be proven nor disproven, and could therefore be ignored. The gradual progression from strict religious orthodoxy to general free thought is clear, but it has to be noted that throughout history there have been brief periods of enlightenment interrupted by recourse to widespread religious adherence both in and outside the home.

These controversial but brave freethinkers have contributed to the abolishment of many laws that were in favour of the religious authorities, for example the Blasphemy law, which is a notion that goes back centuries, as faith was seen as being the heart of society, to challenge or offend it was thought to threaten the very fabric of society. This law was based on decisions made by nineteenth century courts. In an 1838 case it was restricted to protect the "tenets and beliefs of the Church of England". The last man to be sent to prison for blasphemy was John William Gott. In 1922 he was sentenced to nine months' hard labour for comparing Jesus with a circus clown. In Scotland, there has not been a public prosecution since 1843. In 1977 moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution against the Gay News for publishing a poem, The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name, depicting a centurion's love for Christ. Some British Muslims unsuccessfully called for author Salman Rushdie to be tried under the law after the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. But the law only recognised blasphemy against the Church of England.

In January 2008, a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the Government would consider the abolition of the blasphemy laws during the passage of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. The Government consulted with the Church of England and other churches before reaching a decision. The move followed a letter written to The Daily Telegraph at the instigation of MP Evan Harris and the National Secular Society and was signed by leading figures including Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who urged that the laws should be abandoned and in March 2008 Peers voted for the laws to be abandoned. On May 8 2008, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 abolished the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales, with effect from 8 July 2008.

Other spheres of society have also been greatly influenced by religious belief and have, throughout history affected the ability of government to make objective, rational decisions regarding homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion, stem cell research and so on. Another recent move towards more objective decision making is the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill of 2008. It was drafted because of a feeling the existing law was increasingly out-dated and irrelevant to scientific advances made in the last 20 years. But several of the key issues caused bitter divisions of opinion and Prime Minister Gordon Brown was forced to offer a free vote on three controversial areas in order to avert a rebellion by Catholic MPs. These were hybrid embryos, the need for a father figure, and the deliberate creation of saviour siblings (babies born because they are a tissue match for a sick older brother or sister with a genetic condition).

The Bill updates current regulation of assisted reproduction and embryo research in the light of developments in technology and society's attitudes. It should ensure regulation is fit for purpose, and will help maintain the UK's position as a world leader in reproductive technologies and research. The main elements of the 2008 Bill are:
- Ensuring that the creation and use of all human embryos outside the body - whatever the process used in their creation - are subject to regulation
- A ban on selecting the sex of offspring for non-medical reasons
- Retention of a duty to take account of "the welfare of the child" when providing fertility treatment, but removal of the reference to "the need for a father"
- Provisions to recognise same-sex couples as legal parents of children conceived through the use of donated sperm, eggs or embryos
- Altering restrictions on the use of HFEA-collected data to make it easier to do follow-up research
- Provisions increasing the scope of legitimate embryo research activities, including regulation of hybrid embryos

However, this Bill is not going unchallenged by the religious community. Religious leaders attacked the Prime Minister's endorsement of the Bill and said the legislation had not been debated fully enough. Cardinal Keith O’Brien, famed for denouncing work on human-animal embryos as a form of “Frankenstein Science” made a joint attack with the leaders of the Catholic Church in England and Northern Ireland. 14 leaders from other Christian denominations, including three senior bishops, came together to voice their opposition to parts of the bill, including the creation saviour siblings.

The Prime Minister, whose son Fraser suffers from cystic fibrosis, a condition that could benefit from the research, attacked critics of the Bill. “I have deep respect for those who do not agree with some of the provisions in the Bill because of religious conviction,” he wrote in a national newspaper . “But I believe that we owe it to ourselves and future generations to introduce these measures, and in particular, to give our unequivocal backing within the right framework of rules and standards, to stem cell research.”

Dr Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, said opposition to the bill was not confined to Catholic consciences. A letter signed by bishops, clergy and the heads of national Christian organisations said: “We would like to make it plain that as people from other Christian traditions we are completely opposed to the creation of animal-human hybrids, saviour siblings and the removal of the obligation on IVF clinics to consider the child's need for a father.

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