BY STEWART SLATER

There was, as there so often is, an irony. For barely a week before the census revealed that England and Wales are no longer majority Christian, the nations’ footballers (in alliance with other European teams) decided to mimic their religious forebears by declaring their beliefs universal and attempting to impose them on the recalcitrant natives of a far-off land. It was no doubt to the Qataris’ relief that Kane, Bale and co. proved to be slightly less committed to following through on their faith than Cortes, Pizarro et al. had been.

For while the religion’s relationship with homosexuality is, let us say, complicated, its connection to the notion of universal human rights is utterly central. Scholars usually trace the concept to the Dominican Friar Bartolome de Las Casas who argued in his book In Defence of the Indians,

“Christ wanted love to be his sole commandment. This we owe to all men.”

To the priest, God had made indigenous South Americans every bit as much as he had made Europeans, and therefore they were due the same treatment as their conquerors, an argument the Spanish found convincing enough to at least pay lip service to by passing the Law of Burgos enshrining native rights.

As a form of argument – God made people, God gave people rights, therefore people have rights – this proved remarkably persuasive. John Locke talked of God-given rights to “Life, Liberty and Property”, an idea which, the eagle-eyed will have noted, was taken up almost wholesale by some rebellious colonials a century later. The execution may often have been lacking, but the reasoning was impeccable.

Underpinning it, however, lay a number of assumptions…

Firstly, God must exist. For if he does not, then he cannot have given anyone rights. As a result, for many in the atheist tradition, we don’t simply have them. Jeremy Bentham described the notion of universal human rights as “nonsense on stilts”, while to Bertrand Russell, if you believe in evolution, they must be “condemned as unbiological”.

Secondly, there should be only one God. For if there were two or more, they might have given their creations different rights.

It would have been hard for the ancients to think that their beliefs were universal since there were often new gods discovered – Dionysus, for example, suddenly appeared in Thebes and announced himself as the son of Zeus, having grown up in Turkey. Even when the cast was stable, it could be hard to tell what they wanted – the Olympian pantheon they recognised spent most of its time squabbling, like a family in Eastenders. If a major event such as the Trojan War could not bring them to agree, instead, splitting into groups and cheering on their side with an enthusiasm which would embarrass any of the paid fans in Qatar, then the notion that they could agree on a set of common rights for mankind, a species they often seemed to regard as no more than a source of entertainment, would have seemed highly unlikely to any believer of ancient religion.

It is notable that polytheistic societies tend to be as keen to absorb the beliefs of their neighbours and subjects as they are to spread their own. Cities in Roman colonies might have had temples to the most recently deified emperor, but the capital’s matrons were assiduous in their worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and its soldiers were fervent devotees of the Persian god Mithras. With the exception of Christianity, the Romans were perfectly happy for their subjects to follow their own beliefs and practices as long as they paid their taxes and did not rebel.

The final step is to believe that God made everyone equal and gave them the same rights, a step which has often been the hardest to take. From the British Israelites of the 19th century who believed they were the chosen people to the Singaporean taxi driver who informed your author that he was better than me because he was Chinese (he may well have been, but I still knew he had got us lost) mankind has generally been reluctant to believe in equality between peoples. Monotheism is no barrier to this. Judaism sees its adherents as the chosen people while Islam accords different rights to Muslims, People of the Book, and followers of other religions. It is Christianity’s most distinctive belief – there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ – that all are inherently equal.

Even before we get to the exact content of the rights we think we have, then, it is hard to see how any society save one steeped in Christianity, could, or would have wanted, to evolve a doctrine of Universal Human Rights. But if they derive from the Christian God, and he no longer exists, why do we have them?

Akin to the Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons who frantically tries to shore up his position when he eventually realises he has run over a cliff, some seek to argue that human rights are transcendent entities, existing beyond time and space, waiting patiently through the long sweep of evolution to be discovered by Enlightenment Europeans, an idea fairly described by the historian Tom Holland in his excellent history of the impact of Western Christianity as “quite as fantastical a belief as anything found in the Bible.”

But it is not just human rights for which the decline of Christianity poses a problem. The whole of the West’s moral system derives from the religion. Secular humanism, which Holland argues, convincingly, is really a Christ-free version of Protestantism – consider how rarely if ever, its ethical conclusions differ from those of its predecessor – lacks both the ultimate rationale and the carrot and stick provided by God. In their absence, it can be difficult (beyond an appeal to long run societal health – an ethical version of “trickle down” economics) to see why the particular things we believe to be good or bad actually are, and why we should follow our principles to their conclusion. The Netherlands, generally quick to proclaim its fidelity to the current mores, is Europe’s leading provider of euthanasia, offering it to children as young as 12. Canada, so right-on it serves as an answer to the question “What would San Francisco look like if we turned down the temperature?”, seems increasingly to use the procedure as an instrument of social policy, drawing the ire of the U.N. Secular societies may still proclaim that all lives are equal, but they find it disconcertingly easy to act as if some are more equal than others.

It is a commonplace to talk of doctors “playing God”, but in an irreligious world, society as a whole will do so, having removed the one thing which stops us being the most intelligent creatures in the universe. Anyone with a vague grasp of the results of the history of human overconfidence – for example, gain of function research into viruses (cough, Wuhan, cough) – might not see that as an entirely good thing.

But beyond intellectual overconfidence, the decline of religion will foster moral overconfidence. In Christianity, we might all be sinners, but in most other religious or philosophical traditions, it is clear that we are not perfect. Enlightenment is a realistic possibility for all Buddhists, but the overwhelming majority will fail to achieve it in this lifetime. Stoics can become sages in theory, but it is unclear whether anyone has ever pulled it off in practice. Muslims, like Ancient Egyptians before them, need to wait for the Day of Judgement to discover whether they have been good enough to reach Heaven.

By making Man the measure of all things moral, we allow Him to decide he is good and, as Adam Smith wrote, “Virtue is more to be feared than vice because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience”. A glance at the various victims of cancel culture suggests a society which is perfectly willing to inflict suffering on others in an effort to bolster its moral self-regard. Whereas earlier societies could take comfort in the fact that God would bend the arc of history towards justice, an irreligious culture must constantly do so itself lest, by allowing the slightest injustice, it be forced to consider itself unjust. As General de Gaulle stood between the Senate and the Seine, God stands between us and the purity spiral.

More than just requiring some constitutional tinkering by dis-establishing the Church of England, and some political innovation to encourage niceties such as marriage, a post-religious society needs to find a new account of its place in the universe, and the purpose of life to keep its baser instincts in check.

We have, probably, been here before. Britain had been reasonably Christian under the Roman Empire but, when it withdrew, the invading/immigrating Anglo-Saxons, hailing from beyond its frontiers, brought their paganism with them, pushing the faith to the Celtic margins of the island. The subsequent Dark Ages, for all their recent revisionism, were far from the country’s finest hour. It would be almost 200 years of poverty, disease and violence before Gregory the Great decided to re-evangelise the islands, sending Augustine to re-found the church in England. Compared to then, however, modern Europe is every bit as secular as Britain. America is still more religious (even hippy-dippy California would rank as the third most religious country in Europe beaten only by the Orthodox bastions of Romania and Greece), but it too is on a seemingly irreversible path to irreligion. More importantly, science has replaced paganism as Christianity’s competitor to explain the world, and physics and chemistry pose a sterner challenge than mistletoe and sacred groves ever did.

As one whose beliefs might most accurately be classified as agnostic Daoism, mourning the decline of a religion I do not believe in might seem hypocritical. But while not desiring to become a Christian myself, I fear I will be given good reason to wish that everyone else were.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.