The Cambridge Unitarian Church—a target for Zia Yusaf and Reform UK’s proposed, and potentially incendiary, statutory use category for churches?
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| The Cambridge Unitarian Church on Emmanuel Road |
I’ve just heard the jaw-dropping announcement made in a speech this morning by Zia Yusaf (Reform UK’s current spokesperson for Home Affairs). He said:
“We will defend our culture because a nation without a culture is not a nation at all. It’s just an economic zone, a shopping mall with a flag waiting to be exploited. That’s why we will protect the Christian heritage of Britain. We will end the incendiary practice of converting churches into mosques or places of worship for any other faith. I’m proud to announce that a reformed government will immediately grant listed status to all churches and create a new statutory use category for Christian places of worship to ensure these historic pillars of our communities can never be converted into places of worship for any other faith.” (Watch/listen to it here at 33:34–34:14).
Whilst his first two sentences seem to me defensible statements (in certain contexts), the rest of this section of his speech is, to be frank, incendiary in itself.
Now, although there will be lots of commentators making the (bleeding) obvious point that there is absolutely no reason on God’s earth why, in a liberal, secular democracy, disused churches shouldn’t be used for the worship of other faiths or, indeed, converted into pubs, clubs, cinemas, theatres, music venues, community centres, and so on, here, I want to point to something else.
As a minister in the Unitarian and Free Christian tradition, serving the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, a central aspect of our liberal, free-religious faith is the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today. This means that, although the Unitarian movement started in the sixteenth century as an expression of Christian faith (albeit one often described by some as unacceptably heretical), many of its churches today no longer hold to what can straightforwardly be called “Christian faith”—certainly not Christian faith as Zia Yusaf’s attenuated, one-dimensional definition appears to frame it.
(In passing here, but importantly, remember that the Unitarian movement has played a vital part in the development of “British culture”—something Zia Yusaf and Reform UK are obsessed about—and it has included amongst its members Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph and Neville Chamberlain, Adrian Boult, and that the Guardian newspaper had its beginnings in the Unitarian movement.)
Anyway, here in Cambridge, for example—although the Charity Commission demurred at allowing it to be officially adopted—we as a congregation have proudly come to describe the aim of our community as being about:
“The advancement of a free and inquiring religion based on the Liberal Christian heritage, which draws also on Radical Enlightenment philosophies, religious naturalism, other religious traditions and humanism; the celebration of life through service to humanity and respect for the natural world; and the promotion of religious and racial harmony, inclusivity, equality and diversity.”
The point I am (proudly and loudly) making is that, in Cambridge, our faith is no longer Christian per se. Instead, it is something proudly free-religious and syncretic: valuing liberal Christian insights alongside—and equally with—liberal religious insights gratefully received from many non-Christian traditions, including those that do not believe in God, or are avowedly non-theistic (or even atheistic) in some fashion.
Is Reform UK now fantasising about slapping a statutory law upon us at the Cambridge Unitarian Church telling us that, somehow, we cannot use our own building to live out a free faith because it has boldly claimed its freedom to be tomorrow what it was not yesterday, or indeed, what it will be tomorrow? Is Reform UK going to take away your religious community’s freedom to be tomorrow what it is not today?
Good Lord, Zia Yusaf: please pay attention to the realities of religious faith and belief in the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland, and stop talking utter (and potentially incendiary) nonsense.
—o0o—
If you are at all interested, I wrote something about the Cambridge Unitarian Church’s attempt to write a new charitable object, and you can read at the following link:
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