It’s more than week since the death of Lee Rigby in Woolwich. These events will gradually fade from the national consciousness as the media circus moves on to the next child abduction, horrendous murder or natural disaster.
Meanwhile, as a Woolwich resident, I can see that the town has and now will keep an unhappy power to gather the discontented. The BNP have been prevented from marching here on 1 July – an understandable decision (especially so for anyone who wants to spend any time here) but one which will feed the heroic outsider narrative – truth tellers precluded, ignored and silenced by a negligent liberal establishment. The BNP and the EDL will be back, as will others with an axe to grind. The sheer horror of the events (unwisely relayed in real time by the media) has affirmed their worldview and reinvigorated their ailing organisations – they have no interest in ‘moving on’, only in prodding, poking and picking at the wounds.
Like the English riots, in which Woolwich was also badly affected, these sad events are generally used to prove whatever point people want proved. AC Grayling or the EDL – take your pick. Let us all be wary of raking over the grief of the families, friends, colleagues and neighbours of Lee Rigby for the sake of our respective ideologies. Like Job’s comforters, we run the risk of being right but completely without compassion.
I worry that fewer and fewer people than ever are persuaded that this is ‘nothing to do with Islam’. This is a perspective which I largely share, and I can fully understand why public figures are eager to restate it. But in the light of a handful of conversations with normal, sane and largely secular people, it seems to me that the argument is not convincing everyone. If we wish to avoid a real hardening of opinion amongst the general public, we need to think more clearly about how to account for misdeeds publicly carried out in the name of whichever god. For many, it seems at best inconsistent and, at worst, hypocritical to argue on the one hand that it is religious belief which motivates acts of humanity and compassion but that it does not motivate acts of misanthropy.
What to do then? Scepticism and secularism, contra Grayling, is not sufficient. The white supremacist ‘Christianity’ of the Klu Klux Klan was neither prevented nor turned back by secularism (though, of course, the US kept a strongly secular constitution) but by the richly theological, richly hopeful, persevering Christianity of people like Martin Luther King. The best way to undo bad religion in not no religion, but good religion.
I visited Greenwich Islamic Centre this afternoon for tea and biscuits (though tellingly, this was organised not by the mosque but by the think tank British Future). Given time, I believe that even in the face of real evil these simple acts of neighbourliness have a real chance of strengthening bonds between communities. But they do need to be authentic, more than a PR stunt. They also need to draw in not only those that are inclined or even eager to engage with others (like those who were there today) but those who are alienated and angry. Everyone who gathered in Woolwich today had already decided that their Muslim neighbours are good citizens, that there is nothing inherently violent about Islam. In short, they weren’t the people who needed convincing.
In an upcoming Theos report, we will call for a more practical turn for multiculturalism. Intellectual arguments will only help us go so far, for many they will go no distance at all. Unless people find themselves spending time with each other, working and acting together for the good of their community, then a greater sense of solidarity is unlikely to emerge.
Paul Bickley is Director of Political Programme at Theos
Image by Finn Fahey via wikimediacommons
