No longer are the words ‘law’ and ‘religion’ for use in separate spheres. Today, they are found together in the lives of many practising lawyers, not just the ecclesiastical specialists. What was once arcane is now mainstream and these words are juxtaposed on the front pages of most newspapers most weeks, not to mention their prevalence in the ever spreading forest of online blogs. So a scholarly but practical book is very welcome. Don't be put off that this was first written for a legal encyclopaedia: it is a practical book for the practitioner.
Religion is at the heart of life in the United Kingdom, for those who profess a faith and for those who do not. Recent national censuses confirm that many people can still be identified in part by reference to their religious beliefs. Such beliefs have in the last few years brought increasing numbers of citizens up against the legal system that many thought was there to protect the rights they sought to exercise. Some have succeeded and some have failed; the cases are here in this book for the reader to brief himself or herself on the facts and outcomes. The changing scene is helpfully analysed in the early pages, after a useful historical background, noting that, in a post-Human Rights Act environment, there is ‘an abrupt shift from passive religious tolerance to the active promotion of religious liberty as a basic right’ (para 20). This conclusion offers a nice irony when set against the thought that, in a world where rights are so fragile they need statutory protection at unprecedented levels of intensity in modern times, some established norms of behaviour – previously receiving both public and private backing – are apparently challenged on all sides. The unsuccessful applicant in the employment tribunal will probably not feel much religious liberty.
The writers suggest (para 149) that the UN instruments on religious freedom have affected the United Kingdom by providing a model that has been emulated by the Council of Europe in the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECHR, leading to the Human Rights Act, has had a huge impact and influence upon religion law in the United Kingdom – but is there more or less ‘religious freedom’ as a result?
The text notes the steadily changing legal scene, for example in relation to civil partnerships (para 36). What might seem steady to some is a tsunami of change when set against the sweep of recent national and legal history. There is sufficient detail in this work for the practitioner to be pointed to some of the apparently contradictory decisions and the sometimes baffling contrast between major principles and how they work out ‘on the ground’. For example, you do not need to be an international law specialist to be fascinated by the chapter on how international law affects religious communities.
The Table of Contents is an odd place for praise but this one deserves it, as it enables a modestly sized work to be helpfully detailed and very quickly useful. The range is very wide and this is just what the practitioner needs, especially for the first quick look, to set him or her on the right course of enquiry or research. The reader can range through topics relating to marriage, schools, the influence of religion on politics, church finances, and penal law and religion.
It is instructive to reflect that religion has already proved itself more powerful than the law, even of powerful states and rulers. The most well-known personal quotation from England's martyr Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, is that which reminds us that faith will always have the upper hand, whatever the legislators or the lawyers might do – regretting the human frailty that led to his recantation, Cranmer went to the stake in Oxford with the words: ‘This was the hand that wrote [the recantation], and therefore it shall suffer first punishment’.
The reader has to wait until paragraph 491 to get to the section headed ‘Religion and public debate’ – I know that this is a law book for practitioners but isn't that section the most dynamic and interesting part of the book's subject matter? I would have welcomed more here from these able authors. It will be in public debate that minds and hearts are challenged and perhaps changed. Through public argument – as St Paul found and proved time and again – a mind can be engaged and sometimes won over, with the heart rushing after it. The legal abolition of the slave trade came only after heart-rending intellectual battles, public challenge and debate. May we have another volume please, all of it on this aspect.
