This is as robust a defence of the claim of religious faith to be heard in the public square as one could wish. The stance is orthodox Christian; the voice is the voice of sanity and calm reason. The book is an antidote to the unthinking political correctness with which we are regaled day by day by government ministers and sections of the media. It is truly a tract for our times. In previous publications, Roger Trigg has turned his attention to religion, science and morals, arguing for a moderate realism in these spheres. Our theories or beliefs are not convenient fictions that serve a pragmatic purpose; they have a purchase on reality. There is much that we cannot know and our existing knowledge is fallible, but beliefs or theories are cognitive in intent and demand to be subjected to critical scrutiny (Trigg's theological equivalent in this respect is Wolfhart Pannenberg). In this courteous but devastating polemic against the privatisation of religious faith in the historic democracies, Trigg engages with developments in France, Canada and Australia, as well as in the United Kingdom and the USA. He exposes the self-contradictory character of the prevailing public doctrine that privileges the individual and his or her rights at the expense of the common good, while ignoring the fact that our lives rest upon enduring traditions that give a community its identity.

Trigg shows how, in our culture, science is assumed to be objective and religion subjective; science is thought to deal with truth or fact, while the currency of religion is held to be opinion or preference. Science therefore belongs in the public realm and can be appealed to in public discourse, while religious faith is banished to the private sphere and its contribution to public discourse is gagged. This stereotype is a travesty of real science, which is fraught with disagreement and sometimes factional in nature. Like any set of doctrines, it depends on traditions, which are engaged with within a community: ‘Disagreement is the life-blood of science’ (p 203). The expansion of knowledge occurs when protagonists debate under conditions of freedom. (We see what happens to science when freedom is denied in Vasily Grossman's epic novel of Stalinist Russia, Life and Fate: it becomes the worst sort of power-serving fundamentalism.)

Like science, religion is commonly treated as a generic phenomenon, but all expressions of religion – the particular religions or ‘faiths’ – are deemed to be equally irrational and often somewhat silly. Of course there is no smoke without fire and the Church sometimes deserves the mockery that it receives at the hands of the mass media. However, the fact remains that religions make truth claims and this can be seen as their prevailing characteristic. But religious assertions cannot go unchallenged: they invite criticism and assessment at the hands of reason (pp 184–185). This cannot happen when religion is excluded from the public realm. It is dangerous for religion to be banished to the dark corners of private life, for there abuses and fanaticism will flourish unchecked. Religion needs public exposure, but for this to happen its tenets must be taken sufficiently seriously to be discussed and argued about. ‘Public reason’ (p 199) should not, as it does at the hands of John Rawls and Robert Audi, default to secular values: it is the true locus of religious claims. It is unacceptable to assert that, in public argument (such as in a legislature), appeal cannot be made to religious traditions that are believed to be grounded in divine revelation, but only to arguments that all can accept – in practice, secular ones.

Political correctness assumes the value of freedom and toleration but has nothing on which to ground it. The de facto relativism that underpins consumerist individualism is incoherent because, in the end, it has simply to assume that something is true (equal rights to self-expression, for example). Such relativism is an intellectually nugatory basis for the values of equality and freedom that it espouses. The notion that the state should be neutral with regard to religion is equally incoherent. It is irrational to be neutral about religion but not about ethics, to adopt no stance with regard to religion but to be committed to certain ethical values. Every state claims some kind of ethical legitimation and all governments like to adopt the moral high ground and to sway the electorate with their ‘moral vision’. It is self-evident that a state purporting to hold no specific beliefs cannot uphold equality, freedom and toleration: these depend on what is believed to be true about human nature, the wellbeing of society and the claims of intellectual conviction. By the same token, rampant pluralism – in the form of divergent communities of belief that are unwilling to communicate with each other – and unthinking ‘inclusivism’ that never makes a value judgement are both threats to the proper functioning of democracy (p 148).

A state that is honest about its ethical and religious principles will not be ashamed to give recognition to that body or bodies (church or churches) that promote and uphold them. All public bodies require some degree of recognition by the state (that is why I have argued elsewhere that establishment in modern societies is a matter of degreeFootnote ¹), but such recognition can be given only in concrete, particular forms: churches (or religions) are established, not theologies. In the interests of its moral integrity, the state will have to show a preference and this inevitably gives rise to what are seen as ‘privileges’ and acts of discrimination. We hear much less about the privileges of establishment from the Free Churches these days, but the terms of the Act of Settlement are said (sometimes by Roman Catholics, as well as by the liberal press) to be ‘discriminatory’ and to have no place in a modern democracy. The logic of Trigg's argument is that sometimes choices have to be made – you cannot have all values simultaneously in all circumstances – and that proper discrimination is salutary. Interestingly, Trigg believes that secular objections to establishment are fuelled by Christian disunity. Of course they are, because divided churches rob the gospel of its credibility.