Thought for the Day, 25 January 2007

The Rev. Joel Edwards

Good morning

Religion has an ambiguous reputation at the moment. So no wonder a journalist asked me recently whether religion was 'friend' or 'foe'.

Well there's nothing particularly shocking about that. This reservation about religion goes back a long way.

The New Testament writer, James spelt it out like this: 'Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.'

A difficult balance sometimes.

So I've been really intrigued by the mounting debate over the Regulations which could oblige Catholic adoption agencies to place children with gay couples. But it's not so much the heated debates about exemptions which has drawn my attention. It's the version of events which gives the impression that a clandestine conspiracy between Cabinet Catholics and the Cardinal has been rumbled by an astute press.

Thankfully, the conspiracy was seriously holed yesterday by the backing from the nations' most senior clerics in Canterbury and York.

Behind the headlines was an assumption that religious belief should not influence our views on public policy. So that if a number of people in public life are bound together in agreement about what is right, then they become co-conspirators because of their religion.

But religion does that. In fact the word 'religion' means something which binds people together in common purpose. Our values are inseparable from public policy - because all of us atheists and secularists, Muslims and Christians take our convictions with us into public life.

Religion can be friend or foe. But religion is inseparable from public life.

No one in their right mind expects politicians to vote like evangelists. But the idea that religion can be privatised behind closed doors is a social and political illusion. The theologian Paul Tillich reminds us that God is the very ground of our being.

To resist religion is still to touch it.

So the question isn't whether religion belongs everywhere: it is to ask what we do about the fact that it is everywhere.

Religion embraces the whole of life.

And no one can care for the orphan, widow or distressed without stepping into the public square. It's what the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, calls the Politics of Hope.

And it's what Catholics mean by working for the Common Good.