Ah, the familiar dance. Beijing cracks down on an underground church, and Whitehall unsheathes its moral sabre, demanding religious freedom. How predictable, how tedious, and how utterly self-regarding. As a student of history, I find it impossible to ignore the grotesque irony. The nation that once burned its own cathedrals, that forced the Oxford Martyrs to the stake, that subjected Ireland to centuries of penal laws, now pontificates from on high about the tyranny of a foreign power. It is not the Chinese state that embarrasses me here. It is my own government’s stunning amnesia.
Let us examine the facts. China, a country that has long treated religion as a potential threat to social order, detained a group of underground Protestant leaders. The charges: illegal assembly, tax evasion, or some other bureaucratic nicety. The British response was immediate and shrill: a Foreign Office statement about fundamental freedoms, a summons to the Chinese ambassador, and the usual twittering from MPs who mistake their own outrage for moral authority.
But step back. The British state regulates religion. It has an established church, complete with bishops in the House of Lords. It funds faith schools but only those that conform to its secularist curriculum. It has banned extremist preaching and prosecuted street preachers for hate speech. So when London lectures Beijing about the absolute separation of church and state, one must stifle a laugh. The difference is one of degree, not kind. China’s control is suffocating; Britain’s is merely managerial.
Yet here is the real point. The Western demand for religious freedom abroad is often a mask for something else: a desire to export a specific model of liberal individualism that presupposes a weak state and a strong consumer marketplace of faiths. This is the logic of the Reformation taken to its ultimate conclusion: every man his own pope. But China does not share that history. It never had a Reformation. It had the Taiping Rebellion, a horrendous Christian-inspired civil war that killed millions. Is it any wonder that the Communist Party views autonomous religious movements with deep suspicion? The state sees a potential Taiping in every underground pastor.
We in the West, meanwhile, behave as though our own religious wars are ancient history, safely buried. Yet the fault lines remain. Northern Ireland was a sectarian bloodbath a generation ago. The United States still seethes over abortion and the culture wars. We have not solved the problem of religious violence. We merely exported it and now congratulate ourselves for our tolerance.
The British government would do well to remember that its own religious settlement was born not of enlightenment but of exhaustion. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 gave us the Toleration Act, but only for dissenters who accepted the Trinity. Catholics were left out. Jews were left out. The principle was not freedom but a fragile compromise between elites. That compromise worked because it was enforced by a strong state. Now we pretend that China can be shamed into adopting a model that took Britain three centuries to achieve. It is smug, it is historically illiterate, and it is ultimately unhelpful to the persecuted Christians themselves.
I do not defend the Chinese government’s actions. The detention of clergy without fair trial is authoritarian and repulsive. But the British response is not about defending Christians. It is about defending a self-image. We are the righteous, they are the persecutors. History is a wardrobe of costumes, and we dress ourselves as protagonists in every drama.
Let us drop the pretence. Religious freedom is a luxury of stable states. China is not yet stable enough, by its own lights, to afford it. Britain should focus on its own decaying freedoms at home: the shrinking space for public worship, the erosion of conscience rights for medics, the banal persecution of the religious by the secular. But that would require self-criticism, and the one thing a modern British politician cannot do is admit that we, too, have a state church that can be as jealous as any party.
So by all means, issue the statements. Summon the ambassadors. But do not delude yourself that you are acting out of pure principle. You are acting out of habit, out of a need to perform virtue for a domestic audience. History will judge this moment not as a defence of the faithful but as another petty skirmish in a perennial war of civilisations. And the faithful themselves?They will be caught in the middle, as they always are.
