Start the Week

18/10/2010

In a special programme, Start the Week discusses morality, religion and politics. The philosopher Mary Warnock, in her latest book, Dishonest To God, argues that religion has no place in politics, and that it's a mistake to believe that religion has a monopoly on morality. To debate these issues Andrew Marr is joined by Stanley Hauerwas, named 'America's Best Theologian' by Time magazine, the philosopher, humanist and former Professor of Geriatric Medicine Raymond Tallis, and the former Conservative MP John Gummer, now Lord Deben, who converted to Catholicism in 1994.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 18 Oct 2010
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, a special programme today about one of the most important battle lines in public thinking. Nothing to do with the spending review, or not directly, not about left and right. Instead, it's about religious faith and politics, from the assisted dying argument through stem cell technologies, abortion and even the burqa. The dividing line between religious demands and secular society has become complex and inflamed week after week, it insists on being scratched. Mary Warnock, Lady Warnock, the philosopher and ethicist, has written a book called Dishonist to God on Keeping Religion Out of Politics, and she's joined today by Stanley Howles, who's been named as America's Best Theologian, by Raymond Talis, the writer, humanist and former professor of geriatric medicine, and by John Gummer, now Lord Deeban, the former Conservative Minister and Roman Catholic convert. And because, above all, this is about morality and where it comes from, I wondered whether we'd just start by asking everybody where their sense of morality they think originates from Mary Warnock. Well, I think you introduce children to the concept of morality by introducing them to sympathy with other people, putting themselves in other people's shoes, because my belief is that we absolutely need morality because the human predicament is rather awful. We are precarious, we're subject to horrible disasters, both the hands of nature and the hands of other people. And if we don't think about other people as just as important as ourselves, we shall all sink, we're all in the same boat and we don't have, we have not to rock it. But it is a social concept. So I think that's where morality comes from. It's a social concept. It's a social concept, in my view. John Gummer. Well, I suppose my sense comes from a very deep understanding that my father had, as a matter of fact, about being a steward, that nothing in this world is mine. I have been given it, I haven't created any of it, I may have done things about it, but therefore I have a duty to look after it, to hand it on in a better condition than I've received it, that I ought to be grateful to God for it, and that therefore the heart of my morality is that rather unhappy in some sense, because it drives you to do things, which is about protecting what I have been given, which is why I'm so passionate about climate change and the environment. It's not any of us. I worry a bit about the very phrase concept of morality, because I think that that was a gift from the 18th century, once Christianity had been displaced as a form of life that determined how people actually lived. Aristotle thought his, when he wrote the ethics, that it was just the prelude to the politics. So the very assumption you can separate ethics from politics is already a deep problem from my perspective, and that's why the language of virtue is so much more important than duty as first and foremost. I mean, Aristotle thought that one of the most important questions morally you could find about someone is how they laughed and what they laughed at. Now I think those kinds of questions need to be put back on the front burner, because the question is how do you form people to be ready to accept life as gift, and that's not just about morality, that's about the most fundamental questions that you can raise about how we live. That seems to me to have some relation to what von Gummel was saying about stewardship as well. Yes, I would search you and stewardship are not, are not so distinct. Absolutely. I don't have a comment with the question suddenly at all, and I admire what Aristotle said, because what he was saying is morality is a normative sense. We laugh when we see the difference between perhaps how things are and how they ought to be. It seems to me, I find my morality exactly where Mary finds it and beautifully sets out in her book, that it is in our imagination, in our ability to empathize with others, our compassion, our love, our feeling that the other person is like oneself, that woman, that man, is me, and I think that must be there, as it were, the primordial sentiment that underpins any morality, and as a humanist, I would feel that any attempt to attach your morality, for example, to religion is going to be doomed. In fact, morality needs religion like a hole in the head. Well, a short gasp around the table at that one. Let's go back and look a little bit at the background to this debate, because in the book, Mary Warnock, you itemize a whole series of moments when religious morality and religious ideas have appeared to clash with a secular world view in the House of Lords and in the courts. So, just set a little bit of the background for us. We're talking, presumably, about things like the assisted dying and the dying predicate and so on. Yes, I started with... I mean, I wrote the book because I was struggling with religious concepts in the arguments about assisted dying, but I went back and thought about the abortion debates, which were very stark, because they were some of the earliest debates, where religion unacknowledged very often, but nevertheless, did play an enormous part and still does. And all the debates about invitrofertilization, which uses and destroys embryos, and the debates about stem cells again, because of the number of embryos used. All these debates seem to me to sometimes to acknowledge, but often not to acknowledge, a kind of religious concept of human life being sacred. And the word sacred, I think, does suggest that it is a religious concept ultimately, because the sacred is the mysterious, the otherworldly, something you mustn't encourage on. It's the tabernacle, really. But if you take a secular analysis of where morality comes from, as you described before, and if, as it were, the technological surroundings are changing all the time, then isn't it the case that those people of faith who say this is all a slippery slope are absolutely right? We are never to be honest. I mean, I do understand that fear. The fear of total relativism in morality, and that anything goes, if you're going to have religious absolutes and principles to fall back on. I understand that argument, but I actually don't think it's a good argument, because I believe that human nature is curiously uniform. I mean, I know we change on the edges of the periphery. Our attitude to women is totally different from the attitude to women. In the Christian era, I say, to speak on the first century, and the attitude to women east and west is different. So in that sort of respect, of course, they're a different concept of morality. But otherwise, I think, I believe what King Siamis said, that nice things are nice as a narcissist, and that goes for everybody. Everybody hates to be dispossessed with our property. Everybody hates to be murdered or to be under threat of murder. Terrorism and the kinds of techniques that terrorists use are horrible. And I don't think there's any denying that. And that is true for all human beings. One of the things that Mary Wannick says in her book, I'll put to the table, he says, which is that by definition, what is a matter of faith cannot be proved or disproved argument is therefore an inappropriate tool with which to confront it. Yeah, I do not use the language of religion, because religion is a name for opinion that cannot be argued about. And I believe that there is nothing more rational than theological claims about the kind of God, Christian's worship. So I don't want to relegate to the notion of religion. That's one of that these are things that are just subjective and we can't make any progress on. I think that the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition, which I know a bit are the most intellectually demanding traditions that we continue to inherit and that it was silly to separate a person's strong convictions from how they understand the world. So the very ability to name what we take to be significant would be a mistake if we ask them to say, "Oh, all that you believe about God and Christ is just subjective opinion." I find that very difficult, because it seems to me that secular humanists have just as fixed opinions in many areas as Christians do. And Mary Wannick, for example, made that point that really we all have a kind of common view. And it's very much opposed to the idea that there is a slippery slope. But let's just take that slippery slope. I mean, the fact is the issues that she has fought for, she is now prepared to say, as she did say, that about people with dementia and Alzheimer's, that they were wasting the lives of others and the resources of the NHS. Now, as a Christian, you start by saying that a baby that could be born tomorrow can be killed in the womb, but you can't kill it afterwards. Then you find that Virginia Ironside and other people who think, as Lady Warnock does, says, "Well, actually, I'd smother one if I thought that they were too ill." And then we move on to saying that people who are demented or have Alzheimer's, and I had a mother like that, that they then, because it isn't convenient, I think there is a very real issue here that secular humanists also have a commitment to a kind of morality, which is just as strongly biased, if that's the point to say, as mine might be said to be, except it isn't transcendental. Well, now then, that means that both of us have got to argue it out. And morality, religion without rationality, descends into superstition or fundamentalism, and rationality without religion-- Sorry, just to jump in there, you would say that there was, as it were, a fundamentalist utilitarianism underneath it underneath the-- Absolutely, and therefore you do get, and more and more people ought to be frightened out there about the public safety element of humanists having a say without there being a balancing view. That is a serious issue. Mary Walnut, do you want to come back in there? I think that the element of sympathy and compassion has been left out of what we've just heard. I don't think that rational humanists or humanists are necessarily rational. My belief is that the whole concept of morality comes not from reason, but from sympathy, which is an emotion, not reason. So really, rationality is neither here nor there. And utilitarianism, the greatest, good of the greatest, number or however you define it, must always be tempered by the good being defined in terms of your sympathy with other people. Are they going to-- Are they enjoying their lives? Are they using their lives the way they would have wanted to use their lives before they became ill? This is a kind of question one needs to ask, not that it's convenient or inconvenient to have them alive. But isn't-- I mean, the question for me is, you have a baby who is 24 weeks and could have gone to be looked after, and you say that that baby, I am going to decide whether that baby has a right to live or not. Now, I find that a very curious position about life. Now, I'm not talking about the same sanctity of human life, although I hold that. But the real issue is the irrationality of saying that I can draw a line, which means that when the baby comes out of the womb, I mustn't kill it, but even immediately before I can kill it. Now, there is a real issue here, and all I'm saying is, not that Christians have to be accepted as right, but that we do have a perfectly proper position to discuss. That's all. And Mary Warnock's book suggests that our position must be excluded. No, it's easy. There are three connected points being sort of conflated here. The first is whether or not one can indeed argue against people of faith. And I think you can often argue against people of faith on the basis of consistency. For example, take the sanctity of life doctrine. It applies, from your point of view, equally to a handful of 14 cells as it would to a full grown person, that sort of sanctity of life. And that seems to me already to extend it beyond what the term had the term's meaning. But also, it's a bit pick and mix because there are many religious people who do not shrink from supporting judicial execution or in supporting just inverted commas wars. So already, there's an inconsistency built into many religious doctrines as they apply to morality. And that seems to me to a place where argument can get a toehold. I do need to talk a little bit about the slippery slope because it is so important. It's something that comes up again and again in relation to any kind of liberalizing legislation. Mary and I may disagree, but I have a very clear idea what, for example, the scope of assisted dying would be. It will be for terminally ill people who have their symptoms, have not been controlled, and who do have made it very clear they wish assistance to die and would seek other methods if they're not available in the UK. Now, that is a very small subgroup of people. Now, is that, as it were, the top of the slippery slope? The answer is it most certainly is not. We have to ask Bernard William's question. Let me challenge you on that because many people would say the trouble is it then changes the atmosphere. It changes the moral climate and it imposes a little bit more pressure on those people who may be very ill and guilty about those looking after them. And, you know, at the edge, things start to change. Well, let me jump in on that because it seems to me that that is you can argue that in part of principle or a matter of empirical fact. On a matter of principle, it seems to me when you respect someone's wish to die, who's got a few weeks or few days of life remaining living in intolerable circumstances, I don't think you're devaluing human life. You're not devaluing their life. You're accepting their valuation of what is an utterly miserable end of life. You want them to have as they want a good day. You have people looking out of the corner of their eye, across the kitchen, at a relative who is extremely ill and there's just something in the atmosphere which has changed. Well, that in a sense becomes an empirical question. Let's look at other countries where there has been liberal legislation. And have we gone down a slippery slope? The answer is not. In Oregon, for example, the number of people receiving a sister dying hasn't changed significantly. Since the legislation introduced and what is more the kinds of people who avail themselves of this approach actually are typically people who are feisty and who are used to getting away. Actually, in Oregon, the number of people so affected has gone up by four times in 13 years. I must come back on that. Basically, it's gone up from 15 to 60 in the initial period of take up of the law and then it's remained below 0.2% since then. I think you will find that the figures show that in Oregon, it has increased very much. And if we did what the Dutch do, we would have 10,000 assisted deaths every year in Britain. If you have the narrow view that you have put forward, that's a very reasonable view. But let's remember about what happened in abortion. Abortion was going to be very early on. It was going to be in very specific circumstances. It is now available for everybody, for as long as you like, right up to the point at which a child can be born. I'm merely making not a moral question about that, but it is always true that when you start down this line, what David Steele said is now entirely untrue because of what has happened in the change in attitudes. I want to raise questions about the very language of sanctity of life. God is holy. Life is not. So the question is, how do you receive life as a gift in terms of how we relate to one another over our lives in a way that we do not, in the name of compassion, do terrible things to one another to relieve what we think is suffering? Now my own view is that there are very important distinctions to be made between putting to death and not prolonging death. And those kinds of distinctions can be developed in a way that can help us be with those who are dying in a manner that we don't ask them to abandon us because we haven't abandoned them. One of the problems that I mean, in the States, when convorkian came along, who was, of course, a pathologist who always liked this, this was the sort of when he came along. I mean, that was, I mean, he was a pathologist, so he always preferred his patients to be dead. But the part of what was happening there is in with the increasing medical ability to keep people alive, then you got a technological solution to a technological problem to say, oh yes, now that we can keep you alive, we will also put you to death. Now what, I think that there are some deep problems with that, in particular internal to the medical profession, which is deeply committed to doing no harm, and that those are the kinds of things that need to be argued about in ways that we can make some reasonable distinctions. Mary Woonock. On the question still of assisted dying, my great friend Gerald Joffe who has struggled for this thought that the church was the greatest obstacle to getting the legislation changed. I disagree with him. I think it is the medical profession that is the greatest obstacle for the very reasons that they now are so much committed to keeping people alive for so long that they cannot face that they should, as part of their duty, help people to die well. I've never met a doctor who's willing to say your sister, in my case, well, your sister is dying, so let her die as well as she can. Instead, they treated her, she was 101 when she died, they treated her as though she were a middle age person recovering from an illness and they will get her better and so on. I knew they wouldn't, I knew she was dying, she knew she was dying, she wanted to die, but she was kept alive. Now this seems to be imposing one morality, one set of moral principles on people who don't want it. Why should one be forced to receive a gift? Yes, but why should one be forced to keep it when one wants to hand it over? I entirely believe in the notion of life as a gift in that, in the sense that it's something one didn't choose, with something for which one can be grateful, but when one can't be grateful for it anymore, then I think one should be allowed to give it up. Well, it's the only use that moment of brief rhetorical consensus because there isn't a deeper kind of suspect on this matter to move on a little bit. I don't want this to be all about assistive dying and to ask, raise something that Stanley Howers has talked about, which is actually, when we talk about religion and politics, we tend to talk about sex and reproduction and dying and we don't talk much about the rest of the religious firmaments of ideas, particularly about issues such as greed. Right, well, I think that the church is concentrated on lust because we think we know when you get it wrong. It's interesting we seldom say anything about greed because it's not clear what it would look like. Two SUVs, I mean, what would greed actually, and of course, we have trouble naming in what way greed possesses our lives and I use that language advisedly because I think greed is a power that possesses your life because as a matter of fact, modern economies depend upon us being greedy. So exactly one of the great tensions for Christianity is how it is accepted in modernity and understanding of life that is shaped by greed in a way that if we had challenged it, we would be even less popular than marijuana would like us to be. It was very interesting, wasn't it, John Government, when the Pope was here, all the controversy was around issues like contraception and abortion and there was very little controversy, very little discussion about materialism, greed, the shopping culture, visa cards and all the rest of it. Yeah, except what he talked about was very much in that area. I mean, he was talking very fundamentally about that and with Mary Warnock, I'm entirely on the side about what she was saying because actually that is what the church is teaching compared with the doctors that you shouldn't strive to keep alive. So there is an area there where one is on the same side, but I do think these are issues which won't take the Iraq war. I voted against the Iraq war because I thought it was morally wrong. When did I get that view of the morality? I got it from the teaching of the just war. Now manifestly, you have to have some understanding of times in which a war may be justified. The war against Nazism seems to me to be a justifiable war because we don't live in a perfect world, but you do have to apply some very clear moral concepts. I'm sure that I'm using words that our theologian would feel I'm using loosely, but they do have to do that. And I find that one of the issues that is very difficult in Britain is a hidden one, which is that you hardly dare talk about the springs of your position. So if you hear someone talk about this, you say I think it's immoral, I think it's illegal, and I also think it was stupid. So what do you do? You talk about the stupidity. The same is true about that. It's easier. It's easier. It's easier because it's easy and the same is about greed. It's much easier to talk about the the the the stupidities of greed, the shopping, the dreadful financial times thing called how to spend it, and that whole attitude, much easier to talk about that than the fundamental issue, moral issue, about the accumulation of things as being so that's much more difficult. But you think of the church itself as a massive accumulation of things. It's a great heap of mammon of such sizes would leave many poor people envious. And we got to think of the history of most churches, which is they put all their sentiments behind their poor, behind the poor, and all their power behind the rich. They've never distance themselves from greed. They've been part of it. And I think Stanley sets that out very well when he talks about how unhealthily close churches in America are, as it were, to the American project, patriotism, the American dream, and so on. I think you yourself feel somewhat disillusioned about the church's distancing or failing to distance itself from greed. Yes, but God judges us, and that's a great thing for our accommodation to that. Indeed, I mean, interestingly enough, the war in Iraq is seldom named to keep gas prices down in America in order to, for America to be able to be pursuing its greed. But actually, when it comes to a lot of these more fundamental questions, it seems to be, it's not a question of faith versus non-faith, because the debates, for instance, on the environment in the States, you've got a form of Christianity, which says we have been given this planet by God to use as our resource, and we can use it just as aggressively and speedily as we wish, and God would like us to suck it all up and burn it as quickly as possible, and a rival form of religious environmentalism, which is exactly the opposite, we're holding it in trust, we're holding it as stewards. Right. To go back, I mean, all of this about war, September the 11th was the defining moment, and as soon as George Bush comforted the American people with the phrase war against terror, then our fate was set, because what happened at September the 11th was not war, it was murder, and that the very failure of just war people, and I'm a pacifist, to call into question the description, war against terror, gave us a world in which we now have what America wanted, a war without end. You can't have a war against an emotion, you can't have a war against a metaphor. I mean, in many ways, this illustrates my problem with religion both feeding into and shaping morality, on the one hand, and feeding into and shaping politics and the other. The terminology of religion is such that it cannot, as it were, translate into good policy, into good morality, and that's the problem, and I think the example you've given of the war on terror, yes indeed, there is an opposite view of the concept of the just war, but that's pretty muted, and I suspect within the United States, the churches were not in their mass ranks marching against, for example, the Iraq war. I think that's probably right, if you think just the recent debates about the World Trade Center and the mosque being built within two blocks, when I was called up to ask about that, I said, how did that, how did the World Trade Center become a sacred site? I mean, how crazy, I mean, that's American civil religion, and you need to say that the people that died at the World Trade Center were not martyrs, they were victims. Now, part of, I take it that is incumbent upon those of us who are Christians, is to try to say the truth, and that seems to me to be the truth, and that the fact that we underwrite the general American presumptions about these kinds of civil religion concepts seems to me to be part of the problem. And if you think about Christianity and public, the problem with the established church in England is it turned out to be a very good way for the state to control the church in America. In America, we didn't have to have establishment because the identification between America and Christianity was so exact, that we ended up legitimating America as the church. City on the Hill. Well, I mean, I agree about establishment. I mean, the establishment was meant to politicize the church. That was the whole purpose of it, and it's why in the end I cease to be an Anglican because I do think that that relationship is unacceptable. But let me come back to my problem with Mr. Talis, it's a very clear one, and that is that he is upholding a view, which is very much like the Presbyterians about the rest of Christianity when Puritans ran it, and when the Church of England was in charge about the rest of the people that somehow or other people with views different from his own are excluded because they don't translate his word. What that really comes down to is that there is only one way of looking at the world, which is this religion called by many words, but humanism, which doesn't allow for a transcendental view. Now, Christians have wrongly taken the opposite view, which is to say that if you don't have a transcendental view, then you have nothing to contribute to the debate. All I'm saying is that we both have something to contribute to this debate. We sometimes find ourselves on the same side, and sometimes we don't. But in a sense, not to have to someone who challenges Lady Warner and says, "I do not believe that people are necessarily to be treated as an expense to the National Health Service, or that they should, in fact, be you should think about them as wasting the lives of others because they have dementia." And that's all that I'm saying is that I think there is an alternative, and that is an alternative view which we can put and argue rationally. Well, I certainly wouldn't disagree with that. I'm very much -- it sounds ridiculous, but I'm very much in favor of religion, and this is why I never call myself a humanist, although I do believe, as I've said, that morality derives ultimately from human nature. And that religion is -- any religion is a construction of the human imagination, but it has immense appeal and immense power, and for many people, it is that which gives our life a point and a meaning. And I don't deny that at all. All I deny is that religious people have any superior right to dictate what is and what is not a law based on morality, that is, on the concept of human nature. And it seems to me that a religious view, which rigidly said that abortion is in no circumstances to be carried out, disregards many of the features of human nature. But I'm sorry, I'm not against religion at all, and I'm not against religious people taking part in politics, obviously. But what I am against is that supposing that their face gives them an entitlement, which the rest of the people who don't have face, don't have, to express moral opinions, they shouldn't be permitted to treat themselves as moral experts. And I think that there is a great danger, partly because of our having an established term. But don't you treat yourself? Can I just ask -- I think it's really -- if it's wrong to view that abortion in all cases is wrong, is it not also an equal comment to say that if abortion in all cases is acceptable? No, I never said, nor did any humanist that I know ever say that abortion was in all cases. When we mobilise principles, we sometimes have to -- we have to nuance them. And in all our ethical decision-making, we often have to dichotomise along a continuum. And that's the problem for whether you're religious or not religious. But I mean, I too, like Mary, I'm very glad for religion, and I'm very glad I would like it to be in the past where it is proper location. On Saturday night, I listened to some Matthew Passion in Bath Abbey and was completely overwhelmed. I thought how mighty are the works of man. It was such abstract. Religion, as Mary expressed it in her final chapter, is a great expression of the spirit of man. It doesn't mean, John, that I'm without transcendence. My last book, Michelangelo's Finger, was a study of everyday transcendence, the transcendence of normal human consciousness, of normal human sympathies. That, to me, is transcendence enough. I have to say, I represent a form of Christianity that is called non-constantinian. Most of Christianity in recent times, well, since Constantine has thought it needed to rule. I represent what I call the peasant view of Christianity. I just want to know who's ruling me and how I can survive them. In the process, I hope to make a contribution to those that rule. One other area I just want, because we're running out of time quite soon, one of the areas I just want to ask you all about, which has popped up from time to time on the edges of it, I put it on the table gingerly because there are no Muslims in the room, but the extent to which the argument between politics and religion has been changed by the arrival of Islam as a substantial community in, certainly, in European countries, perhaps less so in the States. I think it has been changed to this extent that if fun is looking for the possible dangers of a geographic state, then we don't now have very far to look. There are many, many Muslims who are deeply horrified by what happens, what has happened now, what is going to happen in the future, but the fundamental point is that theocracy is not a form of government that we can even contemplate, and it's more obvious even than it was in the case of the Pope, in the head of a state, it's more obvious than I used to be. Do you think, John Gummer, that secularists use Islam to beat you lot up? Well, I don't know whether they do or not, and I don't look at life in that way. What I would say, though, is that Islam in the sense you've been talking about, it has this fundamental difference, which is that rationality, a rational conversation about these issues, is very, very much more difficult. Let me put it in that form, and it is the nature of the Quran, and the nature of the Muslim faith, that this is much more difficult. Now, Christianity has passed through periods in which rationality has been very much put down, but in its history, and I have great sympathy with the theological position which you hold in talking about a peasant marriage, and I constantly, if I myself asking in a serious sense how Jesus fits into this issue, and what he might say about it, but Islam, to talk to Islam in rational terms, is very much more difficult. There are plenty of them who disagree with that. Well, they are, but I'm merely saying that as a matter of objective sense, it is much more difficult. I hope those who think differently will win, but I doubt it. But crucial, I mean, crucial, it seems to me, I mean, I have great regard for Islam, but it doesn't have a distinction between church and society. Yes, that's when you said you're post-constantinian or anti-constantinian, that's what I was thinking about. And exactly, that turned out to be a crucial distinction for how we understand our lives in the West. Yeah, Roman Thomas. I mean, I think Mary's book is written out of fear of theocracy, and I think the last sentence says we must make sure that theocracy never encroaches on our lives. I think that's exactly right. But I just wonder what's special about Islam, that respect. I suspect it makes explicit what actually is implicit in some of the, to me, unwarranted powers of churches throughout the ages, including even the apparently powerless Church of England. We see that when it comes to issues being debated in the House of Lords and so on. But I think the fear that's come from Islam is it puts up front what it is ambitions are, which is to establish a theocratic state. Final thought, because we, this is a strange time in many ways, that we have three party leaders. None of whom would say that they are orthodox Christians. We have got in Ed Miliband, an acknowledged atheist, same with Nick Clegg, and the Prime Minister David Cameron describes his form of Christian faith as being intermittent, like the coverage of magic FM radio station in the Chilton's, which is a hardly a sort of religious viewpoint. Does that make any difference to the world that we inhabit, that we've got three party leaders who aren't religious? I don't think it makes a difference. I think it's a sign of the times. Well, it's only a recent sign of the times, because the last time we had three party leaders, two of which were Roman Catholics, and then one became a Roman Catholic. So I don't think it's a sign of the times in that sense. But I'm always interested to see that if you're a Roman Catholic people consider that is perfectly reasonable to say there must be something wrong with your judgments, because you're a Roman Catholic. Whereas if you're an atheist, evidently, that's perfectly okay. I just think you have to recognize that this is part of the judgmental mechanism which people have, and their views will arise from what they believe, and it's quite wrong to think otherwise. It's the only house. It wouldn't happen in America, would it? When George Bush was president, I said I was sure he was sincere a Christian, but it just shows you how little sincerity has to do with being a Christian. But I think what's interesting is how they became so confident that they knew what being an atheist was. I mean as a Christian, and given what it means to worship God, I always find it very strange that people are so clear they know what they're denying when they deny God. Quick one in response to that. As an atheist, I don't think I know what it is to be an atheist. I'm exploring the whole business of what is to be a human being. I think we've hardly started the great human adventure of understanding atheism. But coming back to situation America, it seems that they've got sort of theocracy light in a way where every leader has to claim to have some kind of profound religious belief, even if it involves fipping a bit. I think it's fantastic that at least two out of our three leaders have admitted they are what many people I suspect in the States are go for office are actually atheists. A final thought, Mary Warnock. I just would like to make it absolutely clear that I repeat what I say. That I think the Christian religion is one of the most wonderful imaginative constructions that has ever been. But I don't think that anybody is obliged to confess to the Christian religion if they don't believe in it. We Christians agree, since as a matter of fact, to coercively ask someone to worship God would be a denial of the very character of God. I totally agree with that except that I would say that if Christianity is the most wonderful thing and is actually based on a fake, then it is the most damaging and dangerous thing that happens. Because Christianity is true that it's important absolutely. That's a wonderful thought to end on. Thank you to all my guests today, to Raymond Talies, John Gummer, to Stanley Hawass, who will be talking about his memoir, Hannah's Child at an Event tonight at King's College London, and of course to Mary Warnock, whose book, Dishonored to God, formed the backbone for today's discussion. Next week, the Scottish writer and artist, Alistair Gray, the director, Josie Rourke, the architect, Alan Berman. We don't often talk about architecture and the historian, David Starkey. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.