It’s St. Valentine’s Day and I think I’m falling in love with Baroness Warsi. Okay, I haven’t sent her roses, nor yet wandered listlessly into the woods and carved Sayeeda in an old oak. But she is developing a very becoming capacity for speaking beautifully about religion.
The co-chairman of the Conservative Party is leading an unprecedented Government delegation to Rome for an audience with Pope Benedict XVI and will today deliver a speech at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy (why don’t we have think-tanks like that?) in which she will warn of the dangers to Europe of ‘militant secularisation’.
Perhaps, the most welcome part of what she has to say, as a Government minister and writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, speaks of ‘nations not denying their religious heritages. If you take this thought to its conclusion then the idea you’re left with is this: Europe needs to become more confident in its Christianity.’
At a time when the saying of prayers has been banned, for the first time in centuries, from the opening proceedings of a local town council in England, Warsi steps up to the plate and says ‘I will be arguing for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity.’
This is not the first time that the good Baroness has said what we feared had become unsayable on the subject of religion. About a year ago, she declared that Islamophobia had ‘passed the dinner-party test’ in Europe. And she was right: There was a creeping, social assumption that all Muslims were potential terrorists and a growing and dark sense that this was the new equivalent of the casual and ugly anti-semitism in Britain before the Second World War.
In the event, alarmist commentators who declared that we were headed for a civil conflagration sparked by the threat of Islamism were proved spectacularly wrong when the riots of last summer had precisely nothing to do with a clash of faiths or cultures - in fact, the only public voice of Islam to be heard was that of a Muslim father, tragically bereaved in the Birmingham riots and heroically calling for an end to the violence.
Warsi was right then and she’s right now. Britain and the rest of Europe need to stand up for our Christian heritage. It’s in our national DNA, the way we conduct our national and local government, in our policies for education and health and in our social structures. It makes us who we are.
The trouble with this observation is that it all too often leads to reactionary extremes. We should not, we are told, embrace any modern attitudes but return to ‘traditional’ Christian ways of behaving. What, like the crusades and burning people at the stake?
No, as the Holy Father Baroness Warsi and her delegation are visiting knows only too well, we fought a Reformation to explore what the nature of the Christian faith means in the changing world in which we live.