Joan Bakewell: The God Wars are gathering strength

While we attend with dismay to the slaughter and mayhem of the world's wars, we're neglecting to notice something else. The God Wars are gathering strength. As the debate gets fiercer, conducted in the seemly context of books and debating halls, so actual incidents crop up daily, making life miserable for the protagonists and stretching the tolerance and limits of the country's legal system. The time has come to draw the line more clearly. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God that which is God's": Jesus left his instruction suitably ambiguous. But it's time we decided where we stand.

The latest flurry of confusion concerns a bull sacred to the Hindus that is part of a herd in Wales, and has tested positive to a routine TB check. The animal is due to be slaughtered and the Welsh Assembly's veterinary department has refused an exemption. The Hindu Forum of Britain - which claims to speak for the country's 700,000 Hindus - is up in arms and threatening a human shield to stop what they see as religious desecration.

The six-year-old Friesian named Shambo has at some point in its short life been designated a sacred temple bull by the community that worships at the Skanda Vale Temple in Carmarthen. Once religious people have designated a specific place, an object or a living thing as of sacred significance to them, while it has no such meaning for the secular community, in a society as mixed as ours a clash is inevitable.

The will to endow objects with supernatural power and identity is born in the minds of believing individuals and their communities and can have no external verification. These are matters of faith. If they say Shambo is sacred to them, then indeed he is. But that does not make him sacred to you and me.

I am not one of those who want to see these beliefs and their attendant rituals wiped from the face of the earth. I have done puja in India, thrown lumps of butter at a statue of the god Vishnu at Madurai; I have stood with some trepidation at the gates of a temple sacred to rats whose courtyard was a seething mass of vermin. I have encountered cattle wandering on railway station platforms and not turned a hair.

The customs of the country, their country and their ways. And observing the customs of people whose beliefs I don't share gives me a moment's pause to consider the variety and riches of the human imagination from which, I believe, religions have evolved.

But secular law - Caesar's concern - is another matter. Now that so many religions live side by side, there is continuing tension between the tolerance of religious observance and the law of the land as endorsed by a democracy. The Irish case of a 17-year-old pregnant with a foetus that scans show has no head demonstrates the mess you can get in when a ban on abortion is actually part of the nation's constitution.

Ireland's decision to enshrine such a ban was at one with its long history as a devout and Catholic nation, and the pressures put upon it by the church to safeguard what it regards as human life: the foetus in the womb. But it is having odd consequences. It was, of course, fully within the law of Ireland to refuse the girl an abortion.

But what has followed is an entirely secular matter. The Health and Safety Executive sought to prevent her from leaving the country. Ireland's police was asked to stop her from going abroad, where another legal jurisdiction would allow her the operation. The law was being invoked to withdraw her right to travel. The judge in the high court has ruled that the right to travel takes constitutional preference.

We live in times when across the world religions are keen to enforce the control which they once took for granted among believers. The Catholic Church is getting tougher. Pope Benedict XVI is expected to threaten those having abortions with excommunication. The Malaysian government has just banned an interfaith conference between Islam and Christianity, presumably to endorse the superiority of its own state religion, Islam, in a country with a 40 per cent non-Muslim minority. The gradual encroachment of specifically religious values on populations that don't believe is a growing threat.

The issues of the sacred cow and the Irish abortion are both concerned with medical matters and medical judgements. These should be made and sustained on strictly secular and legal criteria. We can expect more such challenges in future: stem-cell research, cloning, body part surgery - all have their opponents who argue on religious and quasi-spiritual ground. The frontiers of our judgements need to be defined. It will call for leadership and clarity - perhaps Gordon Brown's - to set out where both the secular and the spiritual have their limits.

How ironic then that this Government continues to put its weight behind religious division. The growth of religious schools teaches children they are born into a specific mindset, and committed to certain beliefs. But that is no longer true. Religions once endorsed the burning of widows, the genital mutilation of girls, the arranging of marriages. The first two are illegal in this country, and the Government is belatedly moving against the third.

There are also plans to have children from faith schools swap around so that each knows how different the other is. How crazy is that! Surely if there was to be a U-turn when Gordon Brown takes over, he could start by abandoning the muddled thinking that Blair has brought to religion.

joan.bakewell@virgin.net

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