Thought For The Day - 15 June 2007

Yesterday saw the publication of the report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion in Britain. It had good news and bad. The good news was that we are doing pretty well. 79 per cent of people say that in their area people of different backgrounds get on well. The bad news is the 21 per cent who don’t. There are parts of Britain that suffer from social tensions, ethnic, religious, cultural, economic. And the report is full of good ideas of how we might make things better.

There’s one idea I think doesn’t appear in the report, quite rightly because it isn’t for governments to do. But it’s something that religions know all about, and that is, telling a story. It’s what Jews do on our festivals, what Christians do on Christmas and Easter, in fact what all religions do on their holy days. It may even be why religion has returned to the contemporary world, because it does what politics doesn’t do. It tells us who we are. Not where we are; what rights we have; what laws we must obey. Stories shape identity, and social cohesion depends on shared identity. Not our identity as Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or for that matter as atheists or agnostics. But as Britons sharing not just a land and language, but also memories and hopes, aspirations and ideals.

I was the first member of my family to go to university so I had to learn its story and make it my own. I did the same about a part of London when we bought our first home. There are lots of stories to do with places, regions, institutions and nations, and often we don’t need to know them. But when cohesion is a problem, we do. Which is why religions tell stories. Religion comes from a Latin word meaning: to bind. And stories bind people together in a community of meaning and memory. That’s one of the differences between religion and philosophy. Philosophy teaches truth as system. Religion teaches truth as story. In fact Elie Wiesel once said: God created human beings because God loves stories.

There are many wonderful stories about Britain: stories of freedoms fought for, liberties won, injustices remedied, wrongs righted. There are stories of how people from many different places and faiths came here and added greatly to our collective life. Britain now needs a story, inclusive and hopeful, because sharing a story is the best way of creating shared identity and a sense of the common good.

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