faith in public

The British news has been abuzz this week with news of a nurse who was suspended from work after offering to pray with one of her patients, and having the offer declined. Evidently, the patient wasn't upset by the offer, but did mention it to the nurse's superiors, who responded with the kind of over-reaction that only middle-managers can summon.

It's a storm in a tea-cup, seemingly, and the nurse is now back at work without a reprimand. It proved to be a cue for some militant folks to argue loudly that faith should be kept to the private sphere, and should not intervene in public life, still less in professional work. That argument seems to be founded on two falacies.

One suggestion is that faith is just a personal thing, and shouldn't spread too widely. Of course, quite the opposite message comes from just about every faith community: faith is to affect the whole of one's life, to have an impact on all kinds of interpersonal relationships and professional standards too. Indeed, faith is manifestly a communal thing: all of the large world faiths impact not just homes, but schools, hospitals, charities, voluntary groups, hospices, and much else beside. Not only would society be the poorer without those things, it would also be considerably more grey. Tony Blair complained that he could not be seen to make a big thing of his faith while he was in office, for fear of being branded a nutter. What a retreat.

But it's worth than that. If you take this view that religious faith should not be privileged - indeed, should be actively suppressed in certain fields - then you have to decide what kind of belief might be involved. Should one mention one's vegetarianism in public? One's socialism? One's commitment to free trade? Some things are religiously coded, but need not be: plenty are "pro life" without offering a divine reason; should they keep that quiet? Should no one ever let on, in a professional context, which political party they may vote for?

The problem seems to be that we have allowed the creation of something we call "secular society", and unthinkingly allowed a certain set of things, attitudes, words, to be included within it, and many other things be excluded. I have the sense that American society has, in some ways, travelled much less far down this road than we have seen in Britain (or Europe?).

The trouble is, of course, that such an approach does not lead to an absence of ideology from the public sphere, but instead leaves room for others to define it. The age of a privileged narrative may be over, but that is no excuse to abdicate all responsibility for offering a narrative to every part of life. That, it strikes me, is what Jesus would do :-).