COMMENTARY | If it had been anyone else, pundits would yawn and go back to their fancy lattes. But when Richard Dawkins exclaims, “Oh God!” we sit up and take notice. Never mind that it is a common, almost unconscious epithet muttered by devout and godless alike to express extreme surprise, dismay or strong emotion. I have to say, the Feb. 17 Holy Post blog post got me to click with that headline. When I get to Scott Maniquet’s post and read, it is Rev. Giles Fraser (formely of St Paul’s Cathedral) and Richard Dawkins (famous evolutionary biologist and author of “The God Delusion”) discussing and disagreeing on the meaning of the results of a recent Ipsos Mori poll conducted for the Richard Dawkins Institute. Maniquet focuses on what I consider to be trivial, while losing the whole point of Dawkins’ poll and its results, which overwhelmingly show that the majority of UK Christians are secular in their attitudes toward practice, public policy and educational issues. The whole blog became a simple exercise in making Dawkins look bad, while dealing with none of the salient facts.
Basically, the questions in the Ipsos Mori poll had to do with characteristics of belief, policy opinions and social philosophies of Britons who identified themselves as Christian in the 2011 Census. So, Rev. Fraser tried to illustrate what I consider to be a rather vacuous point with regard to the answers given in the poll. According to the results, 64 percent of respondents couldn’t name the first book of the New Testament, while 60 percent had never read the Bible at all. Fraser riposted by asking Dawkins to name the full title of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In the midst of verbal stumbling and generally messing it up, Dawkins muttered, “Oh God,” and went on to fumfer some more. Fraser is trying to illustrate that people can reasonably self-identify as Christians, even if they aren’t conversant with the Bible, as illustrated by Dawkins’ colorful failure to identify the precise title of one of the seminal works of his own field.
Sure, Fraser made Dawkins look bad, and, taken in isolation, the ridiculous spectacle of the High Pope of Atheism stumbling over the title of Darwin’s masterwork makes a great sound bite and talking point for Christians the world over. But this bit of trivia draws attention away from Dawkins’ original intent in commissioning the poll, one that draws a valid concern in Britain, where 26 of the seats in the House of Lords are reserved for Anglican bishops, the “Lords Spiritual.” Dawkins’ poll shows that the majority of constituents who identify as Christian are in favor of religion being a private, not a public or governmental, matter.
Professor Dawkins insisted that the poll results “told us an awful lot” because it casts doubt on the place of Christian practice in public society, while Rev. Fraser responded that “there are all sorts of ways to express Christianity” and that we should not be “purging religion from the public square.”
Just for taste of the suggestive numbers Dawkins’ poll yielded on public policy questions, get a load of these numbers:
* 74 percent of respondents believe religion should not play a role in public policy, while only 12 percent believe it should.
* 79 percent strongly agree with the statement that governments should not interfere in religion, while only 8 percent either strongly disagree or tend to disagree.
* 46 percent oppose the UK having a state-sponsored religion, while 32 percent support it.·
* 32 percent oppose the aforementioned reserved seats for bishops in the House of Lords, while 25 percent support it.
The poll covered many areas, not just the public policy ones mentioned here. There were questions of education, general social attitudes and individual habits of religious practice. Interestingly enough, the poll showed that 6 percent of respondents claim no belief in God, while 4 percent doubt Jesus existed. So it seems atheists can be Christians now if they merely tick the box? I think that is the point Dawkins was trying to make when Fraser derailed him on trivia. It seems that those who self-identify as Christians do not do so for the same reasons, and their demographic has become so scattered that it would be a dishonest act to tie public policy to such a loosely-defined group. “Christian” can mean anything these days, even extending to atheists who want to “fit in” on a census sheet.