In the first of two articles, Roy Brown looks at the increasing influence of religion in public life in Europe.

Where are we now in Europe?

The history of Europe is the history of a long struggle by ordinary people to free themselves from oppression - oppression by their rulers and by religion. The Church fought the ideas of the Enlightenment – the ideas of equality, democracy and human rights – every step of the way.

When you next hear some religious leader sounding off about morality, or Europe’s “moral compass”, remember that when these people had power, you could be sentenced to death for failing to remove your hat when a religious procession passed by, or suffer house arrest for life for turning your telescope to the sky and reporting what you saw. Remember too that for centuries the Church supported the institution of slavery and opposed its abolition.

For centuries the Church vilified Jews as Christ-killers. And it was that Christian tradition that led directly to the Holocaust.

Yet despite all this, and despite the great leaps in our scientific knowledge that have falsified so many religious beliefs, the power and influence of religion actually seems to be increasing. How is this possible?

Part of the answer, of course, is money, and money equals influence. In several European countries including Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland, the government funds religion through the imposition of Church taxes. The German church tax, for example, brings over 8 billion Euros into church coffers every year. And charity law right across Europe has created the world’s biggest tax-haven. To live tax-free all you have to do is register your operations as a religion or a religious charity.

Secondly, many European States have concordats with the Vatican which give the Catholic Church unique powers in relation to the state, such as the right to provide Catholic-only indoctrination in schools and the right to demand exemptions for Catholics from laws on the grounds of conscience (i.e. in the basis of  Catholic dogma). See www.concordatwatch.org  for a host of fascinating detail, country by country. What is most revealing is the way in which the Vatican continues to negotiate concordats, often behind closed doors, with friendly European states – and even with some that are not so friendly.

It may come as a surprise that many concordats negotiated with the Fascist regimes of the early 20th century are still in place, including Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and Alsace-Lorraine. A more recent concordat has given the Church extraordinary influence in Poland since the fall of Communism, and an attempted concordat with Slovakia that led to the fall of the government in 2006 has not been scrapped but put on hold pending the return of a more Vatican-friendly government. 

These concordats are based on the anomalous status of the Holy See as a sovereign state. Between the seizure of the territory of the Papal States by Italy in1870, and the Lateran Treaty of 1929, the Holy See was a state without any territory. But that did not prevent it from establishing diplomatic relations with a further 13 countries during that landless period. Governments around the world collude in the Vatican's surreal claim to be a state and therefore entitled to privileges such as diplomatic immunity. It gave rise to the UK Government's invitation to the Pope to pay a state visit to the UK – which caused a huge protest because of the implication that the UK would have to bear most of the cost of the visit.

Statehood gives the Holy See, unique among all religious institutions, the right to evade justice for crimes committed by anyone it chooses to shelter. The Banco Ambrosiano scandal on the 1980s could never be fully investigated because the bank was controlled by the Holy See. Today, the Holy See harbours Cardinal Law of Boston wanted by the US authorities for assisting child rapists evade justice. Pope Benedict XVI – when Cardinal Ratzinger – was also clearly implicated in the world-wide conspiracy to enable child molesters to evade justice, but as head of a sovereign state for life he can never be brought to trial.

In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords still has 26 unelected bishops of the Church of England able to sway – and defeat - government equality legislation. In the European Union the Catholic Bishops Conference are able to discuss and “tone down” impending legislation with the European Commission before the members of the European Parliament are even aware that that such legislation is pending.

In many European states, governments are enabling and funding religious indoctrination in state schools and even funding faith schools, while enabling religions to run their businesses tax-free.

We are seeing politicians from Poland holding seminars in the European Parliament arguing for the teaching of creationism as science in Europe’s schools. Tony Blair, when UK Prime Minister, failed to condemn the teaching of creationism in government-funded faith schools because “children need the widest possible exposure to ideas”. But do they need to be exposed to nonsense? Isn’t that a form of child abuse?

And what about Islam?

Since the Iranian revolution of 1979 Islam has become far more assertive world-wide. And there are two reasons for this. First, the Iranian revolution showed the Muslim world that Muslims could shake off the “yoke of western economic imperialism” and become the masters of their own fate. But secondly, and more importantly, Saudi Arabia suddenly woke up to the threat on their doorstep.

I spoke about money earlier, and money is also the key to the new Islam. Many Islamic institutions now benefit from charitable status and the tax breaks that this brings. Some receive grants from governments for working towards social cohesion and integration. But these sums pale into insignificance compared to the billions poured into Islamic institutions all over the world by Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi regime is kept in place through a bargain struck with the Wahabis, the dominant sect in Saudi Arabia. The deal is simple: the family can enjoy their jet-setting western life-style, but the quid pro quo is that they spend much of the nation’s oil wealth on promoting Islam – Wahabi Islam. According to estimates we saw back in 2004, Saudi Arabia spent between 60 and 100 billion dollars on this project between 1980 and 2004 – a process that someone – quite accurately in my opinion – called “stealth jihad”.

First they poured money into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (the OIC) which represents the 57 Islamic States, and has become the most influential power block at the United Nations where they have succeeded in silencing any criticism of human rights abuse in the Islamic world.

In December 2005 the OIC set out its agenda for the next ten years, and it is indistinguishable in substance – although not in tone – from the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood¹.

The Programme of Action does not, of course, speak of jihad, but an example of their zero-tolerance approach to any perceived insult to Islam was their orchestration of the violent international response to the Danish cartoons. Those events were not a spontaneous outpouring of rage by a deeply offended Ummah, but a planned series of attacks on Danish and other Western embassies following a decision taken at that same OIC Summit in Mecca in December 2005².

Since the early 1980s the Saudis have been supporting local and national Islamic organisations around the world. They support the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR in the United States and Canada, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Geneva Islamic information centre, home of the Ramadan brothers, and a myriad mosques and Islamic information centres around the world.

But most insidiously of all, they have been using their money and influence to replace liberal, moderate leadership in mosques by hard-line imams. Over half of the mosques in England are now controlled by the Deoband – a hard-line Islamist cult that originated in India. Over half the mosques in France are now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and their sympathisers. I heard just this week in Geneva that over the past 20 years the Saudis have been quietly offering financial support to mosques in India provided they changed their imams to someone approved by them. I have no information on what has been happening in Scandinavia but I would be very surprised if things here were very different. 

Europesince World War II

World War II cast a long shadow over Europe. It taught us that incitement to religious hatred, just as much as incitement to racial or any other kind of hatred, can lead to genocide.

When the curtain was finally lifted on the gas chambers and the murder of six million Jews the civilised world was horrified, and resolved that never again would untrammelled hatred be able to stalk our streets. Our reaction was to adopt laws against racism, and against incitement to hatred of any kind. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established the absolute right of everyone to freedom of religion or belief, but limited the right to freedom of expression by banning expressions of hatred and incitement to violence. Above all, it taught us to respect the right of everyone to live their lives the way they choose.

But then something went wrong. Our right to live our lives as we chose morphed into the right of community leaders to govern their communities the way they chose, without interference; to re-introduce ancient, oppressive social norms; to treat women as second-class citizens; to dictate to their children whom they should marry. The liberal left, mindful as ever of where intolerance might lead, accepted and indeed supported the right of these community leaders to re-impose their traditional values, and we saw cultural relativism used to defend the failed experiment of multiculturalism.

So supine have we now become in the face of this new intolerance, that the liberal left, the traditional guardians of our freedom, have been complicit in helping deny the human rights of vast numbers of our fellow citizens, those who happen to have had the misfortune to be born into minority communities.

Politicians and religion

The continuing power and influence of organised religion has its roots in the idea that religion is, on the whole, benign. This belief is fostered not only by the religions themselves but by many of our political leaders. How often have we heard our political masters – including former US president George W Bush, who one would have thought of all people would have known better – claim that Islam is a religion of peace?  Incredibly this idea persists despite the almost daily scenes of Islamist demonstrators calling for death to democracy and for freedom to go to hell.

But political support for religion – any religion – is not new. It was explained over 2000 years ago by the Roman statesman Seneca. He said:

        “To the ordinary citizen all religions are equally true,

         To the philosopher, they are all equally false,

         And to the rulers they are all equally useful.”

Eleven hundred years ago, the Arab scholar Abu Bakr al-Razi(865-925 CE) attributed the hold of religious belief on society to our propensity for imitating and copying others; to the close alliance between the clerics and political rulers; and to the fact that when religious ideas become accepted wisdom through familiarity and habit they cease to be questioned.  

Not much has changed in 2000 years.

Islam-ism is getting a free ride in Europe because it has succeeded in presenting itself as mainstream religion, and as a religion it is therefore out of bounds for criticism in polite society. The reality of course is somewhat different. In the words of Amir Taheri, Islamism is “a political system masquerading as a religion”. Hard-line imams preaching hatred of the West are given free access to our prisons to poison the minds of young Muslims with tales of victimhood and oppression. And of course these lessons are reinforced when they get out of jail and find that - just like many other ex-cons - they can’t get a job.

Would our politicians - at the height of the Cold War - have been willing to give Soviet agents free access to our prisons to indoctrinate young prisoners with communist ideology? I don’t think so. But the fact that these hard-line imams are given free access illustrates the extent to which the Islamist ruse has succeeded.

Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism have been quick to learn from the Islamists – that the squeaking wheel gets most grease. Leaders of all three religions have recently been protesting about what they claim to be discrimination against them, but what they are really complaining about are reasonable restrictions on their ability to discriminate against others.

Englandrepealed its centuries-old blasphemy law in 2008, but part of the reason was that it was no longer needed to discourage insults to religion. In 2006 it had been replaced by a new religious hatred law which it seems is now being used as an even more pernicious form of blasphemy law.

In April this year, a self-described “militant atheist” was given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, and banned from carrying religiously offensive material in a public place for five years, after leaving some religiously offensive cartoons – including one from the Times newspaper – in a prayer room at Liverpool airport.

Compare this case however, with that of a Muslim man who, in December 2009, daubed a war memorial in Burton on Trent with the words

“Islam will dominate the world – Osama is on his way”

 and

“Kill Gordon Brown”.

He was given a conditional discharge despite the incitement to kill, expressly forbidden in English law, because in the opinion of the prosecution his crime “was not religiously motivated”.

--Roy Brown

This article is an edited version of Roy Brown’s opening speech to the Gods and Politics conference held in Copenhagen, 18 to 20 June 2010. Part 2 will appear in the next edition ofInternational Humanist News