Tom Holland: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. First of all, Islam is in no way the most influential religion in Britain. Islam has been radically christianized in Britain. Muslims, like Jews, like Hindus, like Christians, indeed, have freedom of religion. But what that means is that they are essentially obliged to see themselves as belonging to a religion — in the case of Muslims, it’s belonging to a religion called Islam. Classically, that is not how Muslims understood what Islam was. Islam was an entire way of life. Islam was not something to be siphoned off from something called the secular and ghettoized in that way. Au contraire, it was something that saturated everything. But this is the legacy of that little acorn that I was talking about when I was talking about Jesus saying render unto Caesar. This idea that there are two dimensions, a dimension that today we call the secular and the religious — this is a legacy specifically of Christianity. Muslims living in Britain to that extent are secularized. Of course, there are Muslims who resent this. These are Muslims who tend to be categorized as extremists, as people who reject this idea that Islam should be just a religion, who want to see the whole of Britain become subject to an Islamic state, but these are a tiny minority. Most Muslims have internalized the idea of the secular in exactly the way that Jews have done, or Hindus have done, or, indeed, Catholics have done, or Protestants have done. To that extent, I think that Muslims have been radically Protestantized. Now, it may be that this is precisely the problem for the Church of England, that everything that made it distinctive, everything that made it the foundation stone of the English and then British state — it became no longer necessary. You don’t need the Church of England for it. I think you could say, more largely, that this is a problem for Christians in Britain, and maybe in America as well — that in a way, they’ve won too comprehensively. People don’t need Christianity anymore to do all kinds of things. By and large, it was the Church of England that was responsible for education, often for healthcare, often for the provision of charity. In Britain, all those have basically been nationalized. We have the state now. It organizes education, healthcare, benefits. So, what’s the Church for? That’s an existential problem for the Church. It was clarified for me by the experience of the Queen’s death and funeral, and the mourning period for her, that I think suddenly people — not everyone; there were lots of people who were very annoyed by it — but lots of people were surprised by how moved they were by those whole two strange weeks and actually quite liked it. They quite liked the sense of the weird that those two weeks opened up. d by it — but lots of people were surprised by how moved they were by those whole two strange weeks and actually quite liked it. They quite liked the sense of the weird that those two weeks opened up. The body of a queen, who’s a lineal descendant of Alfred the Great and Odin and Adam — if her line of descent is to be trusted — lying in state in a Parliament, in the Great Hall built by the son of William the Conqueror, the great ceremony in Westminster Abbey built by Edward the Confessor. The transfer of the body laid in state in the chapel at Windsor, where Henry VIII and Charles I’s bodies lie, that this sense of communion with the Christian past, the royal past — even republicans [laughs] quite enjoyed it. I think the fact that only, say, I don’t even know if it’s 5 percent — you were quoting me, probably; I’m sure you got the figure right; I’m surprised it’s actually that high — going to church. It’s an estimate.…

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