The desire of the Prince of Wales to be seen as a defender of faith and as the prince of faiths is no doubt based on the best of all possible intentions. Otherwise his wish is naive. Would he, for instance, wish to defend the faith of the Saudi ambassador to the Court of St James in London - Prince Charles's own address, incidentally - who has written a poem of praise for Palestinian suicide bombers who die "to honour God's word"?
His Excellency Ghazi Algosaibi actually had the effrontery to have his verses published last week on the front page of a mass-market Arabic newspaper based in London. In praise of the first woman suicide bomber he wrote that the "doors of heaven are opened for her". What kind of faith is that?
More to the point, does Prince Charles really wish to endorse it? And does he wish to defend the beliefs of those British Muslims - and there are some, maybe many - who share the startling religious beliefs of this quaintly undiplomatic ambassador?
No doubt it takes great religious faith to blow oneself to bits in order to kill lots of defenceless civilian infidels, even if one can expect a substantial heavenly reward thereafter, but it is surely not a faith that should receive the three feathers of the Prince of Wales. What better example could there be of the thoughtless folly of western liberalism generally?
It is an article of modern liberal faith that all religions deserve respect, and equal respect. That is the belief that lies behind the prince's new project Respect, aimed at increasing the understanding between faiths, which he intends to launch later this month. It seems to me a dangerous assumption that all faiths deserve respect. Religions are not all the same. Faith is not necessarily good in itself. Adherents of the same religion do not necessarily all hold the same faith; the result is endless squabbling, often bloody, about what is the true faith. Self-appointed defenders would hardly know which bit or which person to defend.
Admittedly, it is not difficult to understand how those who have grown up in the gentle, undemanding and aesthetically delightful embrace of the Church of England, like Prince Charles, have come to feel that faith is something nice but vague and that religion does not have to amount to anything awkward - or to anything much at all, necessarily. This is the church of St John Betjeman, which I love myself, even though I am an agnostic.
One of the greatest achievements of western civilisation is a church that is agreeably free of rules or faith - the via anglicana. In this tradition of extreme tolerance and private devotion, it is easy to forget how many people died in agony in the reformation to achieve it and to divorce religion from politics and the public sphere. In fact, most other religions affect every aspect of life.
It has been easy in the post-reformation world to make the ignorant assumption that all faiths are pretty much the same underneath, give or take the odd cultural quirk; this was the homogenised, brown Windsor soup view of religion, which reduces all differences to a featureless sludge. It ignores the unmentionable truth that faiths differ fundamentally and are not all equally worth of respect.
If one has any strong beliefs oneself - religious or not - it is absurd to express respect for opposing beliefs or practices that seem ignorant or barbaric. One might show respect for the people holding those beliefs, or tolerance for their beliefs, but this sentimental scramble for universal respect is in reality no respect at all. It is also at odds with self-respect.
One cannot truly respect religious laws that permit the exploitation of women and require flogging or amputation or execution for adultery. There was a case recently in Nigeria where a woman was sentenced to be buried up to her neck in sand and stoned to death, under Islamic law; the wretched victim herself did not question the justice of the law, merely its application to her.
One cannot respect the views, however sincere, of those religious extremists who claim that God has granted them Judaea and Samaria and that they have a divine right to settle there. It is hard for a westerner to think of anything good about the caste system, which is enshrined in religion and which to this day condemns millions of untouchables to lives of filth and misery in their traditional role as bearers of pollution.
It is impossible to have much time for Christian creationists who ignore all the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution in favour of a world view that is quite indifferent to any evidence at all, other than the word of God, which is not what rational people consider evidence.
People of faith tend to have a cavalier attitude to evidence, as seen in pogroms and autos-da-fé. In my days in BBC television's religious programmes I used to be shocked and amazed that educated Christians in prosperous leafy suburbs would pray to God for specific items, such as a dishwasher for their leader, as marks of divine favour. Somehow they were never disappointed, whatever the outcome.
Evangelists are actually allowed to advertise miraculous healing in the western world, although in years of research I have never found a single substantiated example of it. It is hard to have any respect for such deception and self-deception in the name of faith, least of all among educated people.
Then there are what you might call the disorganised faiths. A mutilated body was fished out of the Thames recently; the dead child was allegedly killed in a voodoo ritual, performed, no doubt, by people of an extremely powerful faith; you would have to have quite strong beliefs to kill a child for them. One can only wonder whether members of the voodoo faith would be included in respectful interfaith celebrations.
Perhaps, in these non-discriminatory, non-judgmental times, druids, pagans, witches (white and black), and perhaps even Satanists would have to be invited as well. Oh, and of course the present Saudi ambassador, with his belief in God's reward for suicide bombers and the "darkness" filling the White House. What hell those interfaith celebrations would be.
One television news bulletin is - or ought to be - enough to show that most of the miseries and atrocities in the world today have to do with religion. People all over the planet have enough faith, or think they do, to kill and maim and bomb and rape and rob. It may be that humans simply use religion to justify what they would do anyway, for good and evil; it may be that religion is not directly to blame for the evil that is done in the name of faith. But looking at the world today it would be unwise to bet on that.
Meanwhile, the less said in defence
of faith the better. It might be good for people to understand each other's
faiths better, although familiarity does not always breed respect. But
the Prince of Wales is wrong if he thinks he will find a useful feelgood
function in the highly inflammable, highly politicised confusion that is
faith in a multiracial society today. A brief conversation with the Saudi
ambassador might help to demonstrate this point.