Source: The Guardian

Britain is a Christian country, David Cameron has taken to asserting each Easter. In terms of sheer numbers, this is not true. There are more people who identify as something other than a Christian than who tick the box marked Jesus. But the numbers are pretty tight – 51%:49% – and nobody likes a pedant.

More problematic than the fact that Cameron’s central premise is untrue is the surrounding text of these speeches, wedged with nonsense like expanding foam round dodgy plumbing. Trying to describe Christian values, he identifies“responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion and pride in working for the common good”. Look, I would love it if the world of religion genuinely offered choice, if there were a temple I could visit to worship fecklessness, selfishness and narcissism. But until James Delingpole launches his own cult, that religion doesn’t exist.

All religions share the prime minister’s “Christian values”. Speaking as an atheist (since we don’t have a key text, any of us are allowed), we too share them. It’s so obvious that Cameron goes on to acknowledge it: “They are also values that speak to everyone in Britain – to people of every faith and none. And we must all stand together and defend them.”

Even in the era of the television soundbite, when all sentences in politics have been reduced to a length from which it would be unreasonable to expect a meaning, this does not work. Either these values are Christian, or they are universal. To assert a set of values as universal but mainly Christian is no more or less than an assertion that Christianity is the superior faith; not because its components are superior, but rather because Cameron says so.

Having established by diktat that Christianity is more important than any other religion, the prime minister then sees it as self-evident that unbelievers and members of other faiths would want to stand together to defend it. It’s the sloppiness of the argument that’s really insulting. The casual Christian supremacy has no internal logic and no factual foundation; a serious Christian would feel as alienated and patronised by it as an atheist. But that’s no problem, since the Easter message is not really aimed at serious Christians.

Faith in political rhetoric is predominantly a proxy for ethnicity; if Cameron sounds confused and muddled, it’s because he’s finding it hard to say what he means. “You people, who are white and have lived here for generations, and have names like Edward that we can all spell and pronounce – you are this country; we should be able to stand up and declare our pride in you. We shouldn’t be intimidated by foreigners and critical thinkers. We should be able to clasp you by the shoulders and give you the lion-hearted hug of patriotic fellowship, which we’ll take care to disguise first in a threadbare cassock.”

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