Oddity

Rowan Williams would meet most people's criteria for categorisation as an eccentric, even an oddity. As a Welsh-speaker, he is also at least arguably a member of an ethnic minority. But he is right. Our Political Class simply assumes that religious belief in general and Christianity in particular are peculiar to foreigners (they treat serious Christianity as for more foreign than Islam), weirdoes and ethnics.

Yet seventy-two per cent of people told the last census that they were Christians, to the surprise of no one who lives in Britain rather than in the strange country inhabited by politicians and their media courtiers. If that really was a reaction against Islam, then that figure will be higher, not lower, next time. All three political traditions derive directly from Christianity, yet all three parties, though especially the Tories, have a particular horror of anyone's mentioning that fact.

Meanwhile, however, there just don't any longer seem to the stories about primary schools refusing to put on Nativity Plays, or councils refusing to put on carol services, or what have you. They were in any case always peculiar to areas odd to the point of virtual foreignness. For example, most non-Catholic village primary schools in the old mining areas are County rather than C of E, but the old Methodist tradition keeps them singing Hark, The Herald Angels Sing, a Wesley hymn after all.

The integration of most ethnic minorities required nothing more than giving their children certain stereotypical parts, such as Asian boys as Wise Men, satirised in a sketch on Goodness Gracious Me. But one ethnic minority, by far the bitterest and the most fiercely separatist, was unassimilable. I refer to the secularists. They have not actually been assimilated. Quietly, out in the country at large, they have been defeated. When will the Government, and others such as the BBC, notice?