Archbishop: If You Don't Want to Clean Toilets, You're Religious

In an effort to either defend their religion against criticism, or justify the very fact that they are religious, some believers insist on clinging to the myth that all human beings are "essentially" religious in some sense. They claim that religion is somehow fundamental or necessary to human beings, hoping that if people believe this then they will be less likely to accept arguments against religion — as if religion would be in any way justified by their claims.

The Labour Humanist reports on comments made by the Archbishop of York during a debate on the place of non-religious people in society:

"Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere House. Every inmate was asked to declare his religious affiliation, and four young men were registered as having no religion. One Sunday, all the inmates were offered the chance to go to worship. The four young men with no religion declined the offer, while their fellow inmates on the A wing took up the offer.

The prison officer, not wanting the four men to remain locked up in their cells, asked them to clean the toilets on the wing. The following Sunday, our four non-religious young men took up the offer to go to worship. The prison officer was puzzled why they had opted in this week. “Why are you going to chapel?” he asked. The four replied, “Sir, we didn’t like the ‘No Religion’ place of worship”. Crudely as they put it, those four young men were saying in their naivety that we are all essentially religious."

I sincerely can't understand how a man could rise to the level of "archbishop" and still find arguments like this to be convincing — unless, of course, he recognizes the this little tale is completely lacking in logical value but is so contemptuous of his colleagues that he is confident none of them will notice. I didn't see any negative reactions to it, so maybe they didn't.

If a person really believes that preferring religious worship services to cleaning toilets is evidence that "we are all essentially religious," then their standard for being "religious" is so low that there's no need for atheists to criticize it anymore. I can't imagine making any stronger denunciation of Christianity than a Christian chaplain needing to attract congregants in prison because the alternative is toilet scrubbing.

Particularly interesting about the above is that right after insisting that everyone is essentially religious, the Archbishop then goes on to admit that what he just said is false and that non-religious worldviews exist — but even then, he can't help but misrepresent them as all necessarily being dogmatic:

For me, religion is a narrative we all inhabit that makes sense to us of what would otherwise be nonsense. Time does not allow me to speak at length, but let us be clear: dogmatic assumptions also underline non-religious world views—Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, capitalism, secularism, humanism and so on. Those are clear dogmatic positions.

It's true that a non-religious belief system can be dogmatic, and it's also true that Marxism or Freudianism can be held dogmatically. What isn't true is that all non-religious belief systems or even that all of the above are dogmatic. Darwinism isn't even a belief system, it's simply an inappropriate label for evolutionary biology — the scientific study of how life evolves. If the Archbishop of York can't be trusted to do even a modicum of research necessary to know what he is talking about when it comes to subjects like humanism or capitalism, how can anything else he says be trusted? It's not as though these are difficult subjects — indeed, a man in his position should have learned about capitalism, secularism, humanism, and the others long ago.

Lest you imagine that the Archbishop of York was simply naive or something, consider these comments from Lord Harrison which started the entire debate:

It is time to speak up, especially as a more strident note is now sounding. The Anglicanism of my youth, more sedative than stimulant, now gives way to the harsher tones of those like the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, who describes us as “illiberal atheists” and “aggressive secularists”. We learn that to combat this perceived intolerant public atheism, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish leader will meet this summer in a holy alliance to plot the counterstrategy—a less than ecumenical approach. Indeed, it seems to me that the religious today do not lack leaders but they lack leadership.

Religious belief continues on its long-term decline in Britain, as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York recently acknowledged on the “Today” programme. However, his remonstration of us non-churchgoers as the authors of this steepening decline is neither warranted nor deserved.

Oh, the religious do have leadership — it's just a leadership that is willing to make nice with traditional religious rivals in order to better confront an increasingly secular society, not to mention increasingly vocal atheists. Where there was once just the "Christian community," because all other religions could be safely ignored, there is now the "faith community," with all theistic and supernaturalist religions brought unwillingly under one umbrella. How long will it be before other traditional outsiders, like gays, are suddenly found acceptable in order to fill up their ever-dwindling ranks?