After a week of absurd headlines declaring that “militant secularism” is endangering religion, Eric Pickles has acted to overturn the High Court ruling against council prayers. The Communities Secretary rushed through the implementation of “a general power of competence”, which allows councils to do anything an individual can unless specifically prohibited by law.
Pickles declared:
By effectively reversing (the High Court’s) illiberal ruling, we are striking a blow for localism over central interference, for freedom to worship over intolerant secularism, for parliamentary sovereignty over judicial activism, and for long-standing British liberties over modern-day political correctness.
The National Secular Society, which launched the legal challenge to council prayers, has responded by questioning the legality of Pickles’s actions,
Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the NSS, commented:
A number of senior lawyers have expressed doubt whether the Localism Act will, as Mr Pickles hopes, make prayers lawful, and the Act was clearly not passed with that express intention. His powers to pass legislation are not, as he implies, untrammelled. Council prayers increasingly look set to become a battle between the government and the courts at ever higher levels.
The legal ambiguity points to the need for a clear and unequivocal separation between church and state. Religious believers who oppose such a move should look to the US, where faith has flourished despite the country’s secular constitution (the legal basis for the ban on school prayers).
Indeed, in an interview with the New Statesman in 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (who went on to famously guest-edit the magazine) suggested that the church might benefit from such a move:
I can see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh synod, it didn’t have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that.
In an increasingly atheistic and multi-faith society, a secular state, which protects all religions and privileges none, is a model to embrace. Now is as good a time as any to do so.
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