Pope Benedict XVI warned that Britain faced a threat from ‘aggressive forms of secularism’ when he visited in 2010.
Last week, cabinet minister and Conservative Party chairman Baroness Warsi went to the Vatican to relay exactly the same message.
She told the training academy for papal diplomats that a ‘militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies’. She also criticised attempts to separate religion from politics by a ‘well-intentioned liberal elite’.
Her comments followed a High Court ruling earlier this month that prayers at council meetings were unlawful, an action brought by the National Secular Society.
The group is also campaigning for Church of England bishops to be removed from the House of Lords, where they sit unelected.
The words of Baroness Warsi – the first female Muslim to serve in the cabinet – were well received at the Vatican, where she was literally preaching to the converted, but reaction in Britain was mixed.
The debate over Britain’s slow eradication of some religious customs as it has moved toward a secular society has always been bubbling under but why is it suddenly springing to the surface?
‘It’s coming to the fore increasingly because people are struggling to find what joins them in a liberal democracy apart from just their economic well-being,’ said James Conroy, professor of religious and philosophical education at the University of Glasgow.
‘And, as we’ve seen from events over the last three or four years, economic well-being on its own isn’t enough. We put all our faith as a nation in the markets and clearly the markets were not fit instruments to invest that much faith in.’
Prof Conroy said Baroness Warsi’s comments pointed to a sense among religious people that they were not as well represented as liberals.
He accepts the criticism aimed at traditional religious trappings such as bishops sitting in the House of Lords but suggests these practices have little impact. ‘It’s not true that there’s no religion in public life,’ he added.
‘But those who are religious would say those are just kind of residual hangovers from the 19th century and they don’t really have all that much traction in modern British political life.’
Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said Baroness Warsi’s views were misguided. ‘She’s buying into a fantasy that’s been perpetuated by these evangelical religious groups that religion is somehow under attack or suffering some kind of disadvantage,’ he claimed.
‘The head of the state is a prominent Christian, the prime minister says he’s a Christian, most of the cabinet say they’re Christians. The idea that religion is somehow disadvantaged in this country is loopy.’
Mr Sanderson said people had a right to practice their faith but society was changing rapidly.
‘We’re not a branch of Dawkins Inc, we’re not here to try to persuade people to give up religion,’ he said. ‘All we’re saying is there’s a time and a place for it and it’s safer for everybody if that place is separate from the political process.’
Prof Conroy, however, warned against the dilution of people’s faiths in an attempt to accommodate everyone.
‘Tying tolerance together with sameness is a huge mistake,’ he said. ‘People can be tolerant and hold on to their differences and be able to have permission to express those differences in the public space. I don’t see a problem with that. In fact, I think it’s a condition of liberal democratic politics.’
Mr Sanderson said he was glad the debate had been provoked but that much of the contributions had been ‘ill-informed’.
‘It didn’t really have to be this great big confrontation between the two things,’ he insisted.
‘We should all be able to agree that equality for everybody is a desirable thing, it’s not something that means Christianity is being sidelined, it just simply means that Christianity has got the same rights as everybody else and no more.’
The government appears to be taking tentative steps away from Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell’s assertion in 2003 that ‘we don’t do God’, with prime minister David Cameron last year insisting Britain was a Christian country.
But the average Sunday attendance for Church of England services has dropped to below 1million.
Prof Conroy accused politicians of sending out mixed messages.
‘The government on behalf of society has to have a much clearer policy on what is and isn’t the role of religion in a liberal democratic society,’ he said.