Royal girlfriend converts from Catholicism to marry a royal

Yesterday I wrote about the debate at the RSA held to mark the launch of a new group, British Muslims for Secular Democracy. During this debate the journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown made the point that Britain is not yet a proper, religiously neutral secular state.

And what better way to illustrate the absurd, established state we live in than by turning to our distinguished royal family? You see, according to the Sun (yes I'm linking to the Sun) the girlfriend of someone from the royal family has made, in their words, a "dramatic" 11th hour conversion from Catholicism to the Church of England in order to ensure that her beau doesn't lose his vital position as 11th in line to the throne.

As any self-respecting secularist should know, the 1701 Act of Settlement declared that any royals who married Catholics would have their names stricken from the line of succession, and that piece of legislation still stands to this day.

However, anyone concerned that the girlfriend may have received an unfriendly nudge in the right direction from senior royals shouldn't worry too much – Buckingham Palace insists it was all her own decision and that "She was welcomed into the Church of England some time ago."

[Names withheld from this article due to irrelevance]

Prince Charles fond of "proper fundamentalism"

Yesterday's Sunday Telegraph was kind enough to draw our attention to a previously private letter in which Prince Charles expressed his favourable views towards religious fundamentalism.

Writing in 1996 to Mahathir Mohamad, the then prime minister of Malaysia who later expressed the view that Jews "rule the world by proxy", Charles said he understood the "frustrations" Muslims experience "as a result of apparent Western misunderstanding and misrepresentation. I have, for a long time, despaired of the ignorant and thoroughly evil 'role' of the tabloid media in deliberately misrepresenting Islam and reducing everything to the level of the absurd."

He followed this up by declaring that he saw the appeal of "proper fundamentalism" in "a world, in my part of it at any rate, which is increasingly without meaning, without roots, without a spiritual dimension and which worships the God of Technology."

The letter ends with the words "There is much to be done", which only serves to make one thankful that Charles isn't actually in a position to do anything.

Back from holiday, but what did we miss?

So, the holiday is over and most people are returning to work. As the New Humanist Blog storms back into action, it's worth asking ourselves what we missed over the festive break.

Well, no one stole Christmas, for a start. This seemed to worry many people in the run up to the big day (including such luminaries as Vanessa Feltz and Stephen Green), but I checked on the 25th and everything seemed to be in place. Not that this prevented outbreaks of seasonal bad will, least of all in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where rival broom-wielding Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic priests brawled over Christmas cleaning rights inside one of Christianity's holiest shrines.

Back on these shores, Rationalist Association honorary associate David Starkey "angered royalists" (i.e., the Sunday Express) when he suggested that the Queen is poorly educated and uninterested in culture, telling the Guardian: "I think she's got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture. You remember: 'Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.' " Naturally these comments angered the right-wing press, the Express, which devoted its leader to a dismissal of the historian that in earlier times would surely have involved a call for his head. Unfortunately it seems they don't publish their leader's online, but here's the accompanying article, unsensationally entitled "Historian Nazi Slur on Queen".

Meanwhile, the NH blog has continued to be overrun by members of the Strong City cult, after we ran a post about Ben Anthony's documentary The End of the World Cult. The cult's leader Wayne Bent, AKA Michael Travesser, AKA The Messiah is unhappy with the way Ben represented him in the documentary, and has subsequently dispatched his followers to flood message boards where the cult is being discussed. You can see what has been left on our blog by reading the comments on this earlier post. Some seem to be from Bent's young followers, which is a little disturbing to say the least.

Finally, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto seems to have further confirmed the grim forecast for Pakistan's future made by Maruf Khwaja in our September/October issue. With January elections looking increasingly unlikely and violence continuing across the country, we can only hope that Maruf was wrong in his prediction for the nuclear-armed state: "If the slide continues, Pakistan hasn't much mileage left".

And with that I wish all our readers a sincere, if slightly unfortunately positioned, happy new year.

Rowan Williams: Charles should only be defender of the Anglican faith

In a major interview with the Daily Telegraph this weekend, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams insisted that, on becoming king, Prince Charles should continue the monarch's role as "Defender of the Faith", i.e. the Anglican faith, rather than taking on the title "Defender of the Faiths".

Charles first expressed a wish to represent the multitude of faiths in 1994, and has since suggested that his coronation should be a "multi-faith" ceremony. Williams dismissed this idea, saying: "The acts of worship we perform have their integrity. I don't want to see amateurish messing around compromising what's going on".

Dr Evan Harris, MP for Oxford West and Abingdon and a prominent secularist, condemned the archbishop's comments: "When Rowan Williams defends the role of the monarch of Defender of the Faith, he is not defending religious freedom in general, but instead trying to cling on to vestiges of an intolerant, anti-Catholic, Protestant fundamentalist and rather savage era of British history."

Of course Harris is correct to condemn the current status of the monarch as the "defender" of one faith, but do we really want Charles taking on the enhanced title of "Defender of the Faiths"? Surely we've already got enough clerics and self-appointed faith leaders speaking up on matters of religion and the state without King Charles wading in as well? From the humanist/secular perspective, perhaps the real issue here is that it's time the monarch ceased to have any involvement in matters of religion? It ties in with the argument for why we shouldn't have bishops, or any other religious figures, automatically represented in the House of Lords. I refer you back to Jake Bromberg's excellent discussion of this from the May/June issue of New Humanist.

Princess Anne's son to lose place in line to the throne

Leaving aside for one moment the wider question of monarchy, the archaic Act of Settlement has this week reared its ugly head as a result of a fairly obscure royal, Peter Phillips (off with my head if I'm wrong, but I'd never heard of him), getting engaged to a Catholic.

Phillips, who is Princess Anne's son, was 10th in line to the throne but now, thanks to the establishment of the Church of England, he will have about as much chance as I have of becoming King of England.

The 1701 Act of Settlement prohibits monarchs from becoming or marrying Catholics, so poor Peter will have to relinquish his place in the line when he marries his Catholic fiancee Autumn Kelly, unless she gives up her religion.

Obviously monarchy itself poses plenty of difficult questions for a democratic society in the 21st century, but if that's the system we're going to have then the least we could do is ensure that our head of state doesn't by law have to come from the Church of England. Surely it's time the Act of Settlement was erased from statute books? You never know, with that toppled all the other dominoes of establishment might begin to fall. Well, we can dream anyway...