Theocracy V Liberty

Defender of the faith Peter Hitchens made an extraordinary claim in a recent interview on youtube that the British people had to decide whether to re embrace Christianity or succumb to Islam.He said that they might suppose  rejecting Christianity would result in a more free society but they would be sorely mistaken and the far more likelier outcome would be the UK becoming a muslim nation.

Leaving aside his vested interest in the matter - in the words of the great philosopher Mandy Rice Davies 'he would say that wouldn't he?' - and his transparent attempt at desperate theological irridentism to recover lost ground to the secularist forces, his argument is clearly absurd as practically no one in this country even believes in the British establishment's soft feeble eviscerated version of Christianity and are hardly likely therefor to fall into the arms of totalitarian Islam.

The main  reason the threat of an emboldened Islam in the UK is even broached is because it is itself  a defacto theocracy with a State religion via the Church of England which makes it impossible or extremely difficult to challenge and defeat Islam. One can hardly muster an argument against theocratic Islam if one is living under a system of theocratic Christianity. No argument of principle can be made against the idea of a State religion if one is compromised by having  it entrenched in one's own political system in the form of a national church and religion - even if it does exist  chiefly by force of the inertia of tradition.

Those who protest most voiciferously that the UK is not a theocracy are the first to argue that this is a Christian country with a Christian heritage which has informed our art,literature music and law so they cannot have it both ways.

The only solution to the threat of Islam is not to embrace another primitive religion but to have a clear separation of Church and State and let the C of E fight its cause in the market place as churches do very successfully in the United States which is clearly not (alas) suffering from any consequent dearth of religious sentiment and fervour.