Religion in a broken world

This post is even longer than the previous one. See here for an explanation.

“Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

T.S. Eliot – The Journey of the Magi

In the course of a single day a person might catch the train into work, phone some state agency (perhaps to find out her National Insurance number, or to enquire after a passport) during her lunchbreak, and return home in time for Shabbat dinner with her family. In the space of 24 hours she has played three roles: as an employee, a citizen, and as a private individual. In her first role she stands in a relationship to her employer of a sort that is fundamental to the organisation of production in capitalist society, and which is regulated by the state by means of employment law. After the swift lunchtime scene change, she now plays a citizen, dealing with the state directly, in this case as a consumer of its services; in other cases she might interact with the state at the ballot box or at the end of a police officer's truncheonⁱ. Finally she enters the domain where, many would have us believe, she can at last be herself; she is now improvising rather than acting to a script. What she does in private is her own business, and she in fact chooses to spend her time on the day in question engaged simultaneously in two characteristically private pursuits, family life and religion.

If Jaques was correct to declare all the world a stage, the men and women only players, our experience of modernity is like that of some dizzying piece of fringe theatre, where the audience are battered in quick succession with play upon play upon playⁱⁱ. Against claims sometimes still made to the contrary, I do insist that our society remains modern, at least with respect to these crucial divisions, which is to say that it is still bourgeois society. The politics of modernity, instanced by the policing of the boundaries of these divisions, has surfaced, amongst many places, in the standard liberal response to the Charlie Hebdo massacres of January 2015. What one could see as an obscene, culpable, killing spree nonetheless produced by the contradictions of modern society becomes when refracted through the prism of 'Je suis Charlie' a case of failure to respect private freedom. Freedom of speech is something we all have and freedom of speech includes freedom to cause offence. On the insistence of this point turns the inviolable freedom of the sovereign individual. Those less persuaded of the dominant conceptual framework might query the sense of the word 'private' in which the capacity to make available racist cartoons in every corner of the world is a private capacity.

To say that the shattering of our lives into disconnected fragments is modern is, amongst other things, to say that it would not have made sense to anyone who lived before the renaissance. When Aquinas argues that the Church has the power to remove infidel rulers simply because of their lack of faith, he doesn't give the impression of recognising a distinction between persons-as-citizens and persons-as-religiousⁱⁱⁱ. In the Summa Theologica, whilst discussing the question whether judgement is perverted by usurption, he considers the objection that 'spiritual power is distinct from temporal', and whilst acknowledging the distinction in a certain sense, replies that 'the secular power is subject to the spiritual, even as the body is subject to the soul.'^iv The force of this claim is prone to be misunderstood unless one grasps what Aquinas means by 'the soul'. To post-Cartesian ears the phrase invites thoughts of disembodied minds, as distinct from the body as chalk is from cheese. Yet, for Aquinas, following Aristotle, the soul is the form, the essence, of the body. It is that in virtue of which matter constitutes a life. To speak of the soul is simply to observe that matter can be meaningful. And so his claim about the spiritual and temporal powers amounts to an assertion that the Church lives through the Christian realms of this earth, bequeathing them with sense, rescuing from the abyss of meaninglessness that later philosophers would call nihilism. It is not the kind of stuff that would go down well at New Humanist magazine.

What goes at the level of society applies also at the level of the individual. The medieval European is not a Christian, and a husband, and a vassal in any way which involves these roles being purely externally related. It is not as though he might easily be one but not the other. Rather, his religious commitment is expressed both in his marriage (which is understood as a sacrament of the Church) and through his fidelity to the feudal bond. These states-in-life, in turn, constitute and constrain his religiosity. Not without reason, albeit a somewhat ethnocentric reason, does an archaic usage of the word 'Christian' mean simply 'human', and when Shaftesbury writes in his Characteristics of 1711 that 'The word Christian is in common Language us'd for Man, in opposition to Brute-Beast, without leaving so much as a middle place for the poor Heathen or Pagan' he embodies a modernity becoming self-conscious^v. What could be taken as given is no longer so, those roles that once composed an organic unity are now increasingly related in a merely accidental, external fashion. A similar story can be told about the passage from medieval Islamic society to the kind of gulf state where the Adhan sounds through the hotel window whilst an oil executive employs the services of sex workers over a gin and tonic. The attempt to repair the rupture in society and self that goes by the name of fundamentalism identifies correctly a tension here. It is just that, as with so many political remedies, the medicine on offer is much worse than the disease.

The birth of modernity, then, is traumatic. It involves loss and displacement; it gives rise to a new form of polity and a new sort of subjectivity only through imposing deep cleavages at the heart of both. 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned', as Marx and Engels describe the impact of the capitalist social relations that are the motor of this giddying tumult^vi. In admitting that the coming-to-be of the age we inhabit involved genuine loss and well as undoubted gain we ought not, of course, to sign up for the kind of faux-sophisticated medieval revivalism that has been perpetrated in continental philosophy of religion under the label Radical Orthodoxy – a movement whose actual radicalism should be assessed in full awareness of the fact that, by means of its acolyte Philip Blond, it has fed directly into the policymaking of the British Conservative Party^vii. Rather, we should acknowledge that there is a genuine cost in the kind of disorientated, diffused, experience of self, and the alienated practice of politics of our current order. At the same time this very wrenching apart of unities brings in its wake the possibility of feminism, LGBT rights, religious pluralism, and many other manifest benefits. Tragically, however, these very real gains are brought about by, and so inseparable from, the equally real losses of the transition to modernity. Just as the surgeon's knife both wounds and heals, and does one through doing the other, so the social supremacy of the bourgeoisie brings with it new possibilities and novel fragmentations, bound tight as fibres of a single thread.

So there are real contradictions^viii in the kind of society we inherit. Our lives as citizens, workers, and 'private individuals', and thus as religious (or non-religious) persons, exist apart from each other. Within each broken part of the social whole lie further estrangements: crucially, our economic life is characterised by the condition of alienated labour^ix and our political life by the fact that our collective life as political animals confronts us as something apart from us, and oppressive of us – the state^x. In the private sphere, so called, our confrontation with gender roles shows how problematic the designation of this part of existence as 'private' actually is: in the most intimate moments of our lives we are ruled, consciously and otherwise, by monsters of society's making.

Religion too, feels itself pulled apart, not only because many of these contradictions, especially those around gender, manifest themselves in it in a particularly sharp way here, but also because religion typically makes a claim on the whole person, structuring her life, and bequesting it with meaning as a narrative unity. Yet when religion exists in a society which relegates it to one particular subdivision of life, banishing it from the rest, whilst also calling into question, intellectually and practically, the very notion of 'the whole person', tensions are inevitably formed. The politics of religion in modern society consists in the attempt to negotiate, abolish, or transcend these tensions. The psalmist's question, 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?' is the major query confronting this politics from the religious side of the fence. Amongst the characters on the other side, the dominant ideology is represented by the liberal, whose anxiety-ridden response of sorts is 'How shall we keep political justice safe from unreasonable conceptions of the good?'^xi The leftist who finds herself prone to align herself to the liberal here should at least be aware that socialism, as classically conceived, in being unwilling to sign up to the platitudes of Rawlsian justice, is likely to find itself classed as every bit unreasonable as politicised religion.

The dominant view on religion and politics, therefore, is not simply wrong in speaking of a division between religion and the rest of society. Yet whilst not simply wrong, it is at least wrong, for at least two reasons. First, whilst human life as lived typically lacks the kind of unity of which religion speaks, there remains a desire within us, as the kind of language-using, story-telling, creatures that we are, to lend it that unity – a unity that we can sometimes glimpse, either in the corners of reality that the scythe of capital has yet to harvest, or by negation, through terror at the sheer inhumanity of things as they are. The dominant view lies in as much as it denies possibilities. Second, whilst religion is set apart within the social totality, in being so set apart it remains part of the totality, albeit that this is a totality riven with contradictions, constituting a whole as does a pain of cracked glass. Indeed, the isolation of religion within society is itself the product of a historically specific social configuration; it is social to the core. The observation that the dominant view is both wrong and not wrong, in distinct yet connected senses, identifies it as ideological, a legitimating production of a social reality riven with contradiction, misleading insofar as that reality itself produces the illusions that sustain it.

The production of the practice of religion

The dominant view of religion as non-social acquires a modicum of plausibility if religion is understood as a species of belief^xii. For, one might suppose, there is something intrinsically private and first-personal about belief. Beliefs are, it might further be imagined, pre-social, both in the sense that I come to the business of society-making already in possession of some beliefs, and in that whilst I might very well be deceived about the existence of other people – perhaps I am the victim of some cruel Cartesian deceiver – I can be secure at least in the knowledge that I exist as a believing subject. Now, even in its own terms there is a lot wrong with this line of argument, not least that it ignores the integral relationship of thought, and therefore belief, to that most social of practices, language. Nevertheless, that religion should be understood as belief is a popular supposition. The modern European religion par excellence, Protestant Christianity, is noteworthy for its focus on belief, and for effecting a shift away from the orientation towards bodily practice of medieval Catholicism. At least part of the disquiet about Islam amongst Western liberals is surely traceable to the fact that it dissents from religion's decreed function as a system of (private, non-manifest) beliefs^xiii. While Islam certainly does emphasise belief, as evidenced by the centrality of the Shahada, it does so alongside four other 'pillars' that are visible and practical. Potentially – in the cases of fasting and prayer – they cut into that part of the adherent's time that the modern division of life has set aside for wage labour. Islam refuses to be simply a matter of the mind, of holding certain metaphysical beliefs about which educated people might reasonably disagree. It has this in common with Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism, both of which have also had not a few civilised detractors.

Religion is a social practice: it involves people coming together, performing rituals, charitable acts, wearing certain clothes, fasting, feasting, convening administrative committees, painting icons, lighting candles, spending time in solitude.... These actions, which are intrinsically communal (even deliberately separating oneself from a community, as does the religious hermit, is communal insofar as the action's meaning is communally bestowed), embody beliefs, constitute beliefs, and form subjects as believers. Belief and practice exist in symbiosis, as any adequate theory of ideology admits.

In recognising that religion is a practice, we admit that it is material, and therefore constrained. In particular, it is conditioned by the material and social circumstances in which it finds itself situated. This does not mean – to pre-empt a likely misreading – that religion is determined by more fundamental social realities, so that all those prayers and homilies are no more than epiphenomena, say, of the economy. It is, firstly, to make the mundane, but often ignored point, that if one is going to sustain a religious organisation for any length of time, its members need to stay alive, and so need to eat, find shelter, be kept safe, and so on. The conditions for the material reproduction of religious people form boundaries of possibility for religion. If, not being in possession of sufficient surplus wealth for my disciples to live without toil, I form a cult that demands that its members spend every waking hour in prayer in a society where the means of sustenance can only be obtained by performing labour in exchange for money, my new religious movement will be stillborn. The history of religious development is littered with modifications of religious practice in accordance with the needs of production, and with conservative backlashes against these modifications.

That religion is, at any given time, a product of a whole society follows also from the equally mundane observation that religious people – the odd cultist aside – do not live in isolation from the world. However much our society might compartmentalise our lives, a tattered unity remains, and whatever internal contradictions and tensions she might wrestle with, the ideas someone takes to Mass on Sunday morning are in part the products of conversations at the pub the night before, the article she read in Friday's newspaper, and much else besides. Religious practice and doctrine assert themselves in response to, or in reaction against, currents in the 'secular world'. The inane fixed grin on the face of Nicky Gumbel, the closest thing Britain has to a televangelist, might resemble that of an insurance salesman, but the similarity here is more than superficial. The nauseating upwardly mobile form of religiosity pushed by his Alpha course wears on its sleeves the individualism and lifestyle-orientation of neoliberal society, and its evangelism looks like nothing more than network marketing^xiv. In a much darker sense, the would-be theocrats of Christian Voice acknowledge actuality in the very act of reacting against it, no less than do Hizb ut-Tahrir. We make religious history, sure enough, like any other kind of history, but not in conditions of our own choosing. Not even God could bring about a liberal synagogue in the fifth century BCE.

Religious change and religious stasis are produced in a social context. This does not somehow magically cease to be the case when the religious phenomenon whose genesis we are considering is violently oppressive fundamentalism. Nothing raises the heckles of a certain kind of conservative commentator more than the suggestion that the rise of ISIS might be explicable, partly at least, in geopolitical or economic terms, or the preparedness of unremarkable young British men to go and fight for them in terms of Western foreign policy, and of the absence of any credible domestic alternative challenging that policy. These conservatives seem to suppose that in explaining these things, we would be excusing them. In fact, the opposite is the case. To offer social explanations for the murderous activities of a self-professed holy warrior is to show how he might suppose himself to have reasons for his actions, however crassly inadequate those reasons might be. Actions without reasons are not free, on the contrary they are psychotic, and presumably therefore not culpable.

What explanations also often imply, and this may well be the unacknowledged motivation for much conservative opposition, are routes towards change. If, for instance, the palpable injustice of the starvation and frequent bombing of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip creates a context where deeply reactionary forms of religion get a hearing, one obvious remedy might be justice for the Palestinians. Another result of recognising the social roots of even the most disturbing sorts of religion, vital to emphasise in the current global context, is that it undermines the claim that there is something peculiar to Islam that gives rise to indiscriminate violence – a claim that has been aired not only on the far right, but also by 'New Atheist' authors such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and is insinuated by far more^xv.

Quite apart from the undoubted fact that the ideological lens of states and media emphasises the Islamic allegiance of murderers when it might fail to mention, say, the substantial amount of Christian fundamentalist theology swimming around the Pentagon, it is unsurprising that a form of religiosity that provides a framework within which sense can be made of the desire to hit back against oppression indiscrimately attracts followers in contexts where that oppression is a live issue. Nor, sadly, is the desire to enforce religiously sanctioned boundaries and absolutes unexpected in a social reality that seems to admit neither, even when the proposed absolutes are viciously patriarchal and uncompromisingly xenophobic. Nothing follows in either case about the nature of Islam as such.

In fact, the perpetrators of violence in the name of Islam are often deeply ignorant of even basic aspects of the religion whose name they claim. Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed were convincted of terrorism offences at Woolwich Crown Court in July 2014, after fighting in Syria for an al-Qaida linked group. It turns out that in the run-up to their trip they had ordered copies of “Islam for Dummies” and “The Koran for Dummies” from Amazon^xvi. This shopping list is not that of two Quranic scholars, driven to murder by taking the text to its logical conclusions. Rather, it speaks of a certain form of religion providing a framework after the event for pre-existing discontent, the roots of which must be looked for in society as a whole. Lest this be thought cowardly leftist apologism for terror, here is what an MI5 briefing note had to say in 2008: 'far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.'^xvii

The influence of religion

As we have seen, religion is part of a social totality, a practice that occurs in the context of wider society. This does not mean that religion is simply a reflection of 'deeper' social phenomena and does not itself have any influence beyond its own allotted domain. It would be absurd to claim that the history of the Christian movement from its first century beginnings, through the middle ages and reformation, up until the present and its encounter with secularisation (and, indeed, post-secularism, if there turns out to be any such thing) is simply the story of ancient society, feudalism, and capitalism at one remove. Religion feeds into this history, moulding it, giving millions of ordinary women and men the controlling narrative of their existence, and inspiring rebels and tyrants alike. This remains the case even if one wants to claim, as well one might, that in the last instance religion is not the dominant explanatory factor. Historical materialism, in any sense in which that phrase names a doctrine with any plausible claim on truth, entails that Michaelangelo couldn't have painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling were there not a sufficient surplus production to allow some members of society to subsist as artists. It does not entail that the painting is nothing more than the representation of nascent bourgeois social relations in the form of art, whatever the adherents of some more anorakish left-wing sects might claim.

It is a banal point that the impact of religion in society has been variously good and bad. However, banal points are sometimes worth making – especially in contexts where they are, incredibly, not taken on board. As Eagleton comments of Richard Dawkins,

Such is [his] unruffled impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has ever flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.^xviii

With this falsehood a good number of leftists concur.

One reason for this is that it is patently apparent that religion is very often a force for ill. The Madgalene Laundaries in Ireland, the preparedness of some religious Zionists to justify theologically the crimes of the IDF, and the brutality of the Wahabi regime in Saudi Arabia are hardly adverts for religion's benefactions to humanity. The leftist tempted by this line of thought to dismiss the adherents of these three religions, in their billions, as write-offs as far as emancipatory politics are concerned should pause to consider the liberation theologians of Latin America, the role of religious Jewish youth organisations in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Islamic Socialism that exerted a considerable influence in the Middle East during the mid-to-late 20^th century. Irreducibly religious movements can have, and have had, impacts of a kind that the left ought to applaud.

The ambivalent critic – religion as questioning modernity's fault-lines

This chapter began by observing the fragmentation of human existence in the kind of society we inhabit. Religion, on the face of it, cannot rest content with this fragmentation, since it is in the very nature of religion to totalise, to weave a narrative that encompasses all that it is to be human, and much else besides, and to do so whilst making demands on its adherents in terms of this narrative. It has this feature, at least, in common with Marxism, as both the archbishop of Canterbury and the central committees of numerous communist parties will be unhappy to learn. Someone is a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and may very well believe herself to owe to that identity a loyalty surpassing any to the state, or to her employer. It is not difficult to see that the religious believer is likely to feel pulled in several directions at once given our society’s relegation of what she holds to be the organising component of her life to the private sphere; the thing that she might very well profess as unlocking the meaning of her entire existence is a spare-time activity, acceptable insofar as it does not interfere with her duties as a good citizen.

One response on the part of the religious believer, of course, is to concede to modernity its division of social reality. Someone might practice their religion within societally acceptable bounds; they may or may not feel the contradiction, if they do they learn to live with it, as we learn to live with so many other contradictions. Or they might lapse, either absolutely, or whilst clinging to the religion as part of their ‘heritage’, a somewhat quirky pick from the smorgasboard of cultural options served up within late capitalism^xix. Again, they might profess themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’; there is no longer any tension here with the existing order. The odd bit of meditation is the perfect lifestyle supplement to the discipline of work and the frenzy of consumption, as Žižek has noted in discussing ‘Western Buddhism’^xx, hence the current fad for ‘mindfulness’ in corporate offices, and even in the NHS^xxi.

There are collective counterparts to these individual coping strategies. The Protestant Reformation, in its Lutheran and Anglican manifestations, as well as in Calvin’s Geneva, may be viewed in terms of religious accommodation to the nascent bourgeois order. Not all of its heirs were happy with this new concordat by any means – the histories of the Anabaptists and the Levellers, to name but two groups, speak elegantly of the refusal to compromise the new Jerusalem in the cause of a deal with Babylon. It is a refusal which resurfaced in the 20^th century in the Confessing Church’s resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany. These, however, are the exceptions. All religious groups of any size in the modern period have contained significant currents of accommodation. Within Christianity in particular, which was confronted with modernity at its intellectual and material beginnings, this peacemaking with the powers that be assumed theoretical shape in the form of liberal theology. As we will see, theological liberalism in no way provided an inoculation against support for violence, which is one reason to be suspicious of the current fashion for cheering on moderate religion against the excesses of the extremists.

But we should not allow the moderates to have the last word in this chapter. There remains a tension between religious affiliation and the fault-lines of modern society. A natural thought for those through whose lives these fault-lines run is to attempt to repair them by means of politics. There are two basic strategies available here. One seeks to repair the damage it sees by returning to a time before modernity – this way lies the politics of religious reaction, of theocracy. Of course, one can no more undo the impact of modernity by an act of political will than Canute could still the tide by regal command; so the religious forces of anti-modernism, if they achieve any level of political success, invariably find themselves armed to the teeth with the death dealing tools of the social order they despise, which find themselves turned against the society that gave rise to them in a kind of collective Oedipal display. The Luftwaffe flattened Guernica in the cause of Catholic Spain; ISIS post videos on Youtube denouncing ‘the West’, whilst making good use of US-made weapons to bring about the only kind of cessation of progress within their power, mass slaughter.

The alternative is a politics that aims to transcend modernity whilst preserving its undoubted gains. The choice between this option and that of the religious reactionaries is a stark one, it is in essence the same dilemma posed by Rosa Luxemberg: socialism or barbarism. It is in no way inevitable that the sincere religious believer opts for barbarism. She might very well feel in a particular way, because of her faith, the fissures of the capitalist order, but respond to that by committing herself to a politics that aims at freeing all human beings, regardless of religious particularity, from our current alienation and fragmentation, and looks forward to them flourishing together, without abolishing difference^xxii. Whether she does respond in this way depends to a large extent on the circumstances in which she finds herself. Other people, and their behaviour towards her, form a good proportion of those circumstances. This provides an excellent motion for the left to shed the unsophisticated hostility to religion in general that still dominates its organisations.

iA certain sort of republican trainspotter will insist that UK nationals are subjects not citizens. Loathe though I am to pass up an attempt to call for the abolition of the monarchy, I doubt this distinction matters for present purposes.

iiShakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, scene vii.

iiiAquinas, De regimine principum, Ch. XV.

ivAquinas, Summa Theologica, IiaIIae,60.6

vShaftesbury, Characteristicks III Misc II ii. 87

viMarx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 1.

viiThe magnum opus of this movement is John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory : Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). For Philip Blond see The Red Tory (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) . On the impact on Tory thought see Richard Seymour, The Meaning of David Cameron (Ropley: Zero, 2010), pp. 73-8.

viiiA note on the usage of the word 'contradiction', which I use in accordance with the broad critical theoretical tradition from which I am writing, running through Hegel, Marx, and 'Western Marxism'. I intend by the word to indicate a tension integral to some social phenomenon that is at once integral to that phenomenon and destructive of it. Contradiction, in this sense, tends to lend a dynamism to human societies. The acceptance of real contradictions in this sense needn't imply the acceptance of true contradictions in the sense of 'contradiction' which has dominated the mainstream of Western logical theory since Aristotle: a sentence, or thought, or proposition of the form 'P and not P'. I think that tying the critical theoretical usage to the Aristotelian one, and therefore accepting true contradictions, makes radical thought unnecessarily hostage to incredulous stares. See Alex Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 54.

ixMarx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan (Mineola, NY: Dover), pp. 67-83.

xFrancisco Suárez writes in 1612 of the delegation of popular sovereignty as absolute and 'a kind of alienation' (quasi alienatio) – see Quentin Skinner, 'The State' in Terrence Ball, James Farr and Robert L. Hanson (eds.) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 368-413.

xiThus John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia, NY.: Columbia University Press, 1993).

xii 'Belief' here means belief that something is the case. I believe that two plus two equals four and I believe that David Cameron is successfully waging class war against working people. Arguably a focus on belief that, widespread though it is, misconstrues many religious belief claims. 'I believe in God' seems to have something in common with 'I believe in my partner' – which isn't simply a profession that I have some opinions about my partner.

xiiic.f. 'In an Islamic religious faith which appears to subsume art, morality, culture and politics, the West can gaze at an image of its own earlier condition, before the great divisions of spiritual labour which characterise modernity set in'. Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, Co.: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 201.

xivThe Alpha phenemenon, particularly apparent in the CofE in London, represents a spread of fundamentalism (of a particularly irritating variety, at once dumbed down and slickly marketed) that would have provoked howls of media concern were it not the preserve of white middle-class professionals within the Established Church. Revealingly, a piece on this movement 'Anglican churches rebrand to draw Londoners back to the fold' was written by the FT's enterprise correspondent: Financial Times, 25^th July 2014.

xvAtheists Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris face Islamophobia backlash', The Independent, 12^th April, 2013.

xvi'Birmingham terrorist's mum handed his 'goodbye' martyr letter to anti-terror cops', Birmingham Mail, 9^th July, 2014. Mehdi Hasan, 'What the jihadists who bought “Islam for Dummies” on Amazon tell us about radicalisation', New Statesman, 21^st August 2014.

xviiQuoted in Hasan.

xviiiReason, Faith and Revolution. p. 97.

xixA sense of the prevelance of these options in contemporary Britain can be had from the surveys at http://faithdebates.org.uk/research/

xx Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 12.

xxi http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/pages/mindfulness.aspx . Accessed 10^/03/15.

xxiiA reader worries that my invocation of 'human flourishing' smuggles in a notion of 'human nature' by the back door. In actual fact, I'm quite happy for that notion to enter by the front door, and think that across-the-board opposition to any concept of human nature, often supported by a thoroughly confused debate around anti-essentialism (see below on the Theses on Feuerbach), is one of the biggest intellectual weaknesses on the contemporary left. But that's a debate that needs to be had somewhere else.