Furore has clattered into the public sphere of twitter over the announcement that, to commemorate the anniversary of the first publication of the King James Bible, the government is to despatch copies of the Bible to every single school in the UK. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, is to write a foreword to the edition. 

This initiative has immediately sailed into the middle of the interminable struggle between those who believe in religion and those who do not. In a sadly familiar display of total inability to tolerate the other side, despite both sides endless preaching of the virtues of their particular construction of personal philosophy, there has erupted a nasty spat over whether this is a worthy thing to spend money from the hard-pressed public purse on; whether this was the right thing for the state to do. The National Secular Society, with a fine sense of hyperbole, has said that our schools are “awash” with Bibles and called for additional public money to be spent on sending out copies of The Origin of Species on Darwin Day, as though the additional capital spend will somehow wash away this original sin. 

Ultimately, I do have some sympathy for the National Secular Society - books and reading more generally are something we should work hard to promote in our schools, Sure Start centres and other public offices of state. It would be nice for hordes of books to be sent out every year for free to every home in the land by some benevolent entity. But politics is a matter of dealing with the world that we have, not the world that we want, and the King James Bible is not something we can unpick from our history because religion makes our personal philosophy inflame with righteous anger. Indeed, religion is not something that we can unpick from the national tapestry. 

We face in this question a wider issue - how, exactly, do we teach children about the religious dimension of the world of yesterday and today? Some would probably prefer a version that revels in the blood-soaked banners of the Crusades and the witch burnings of the Reformation. Others may well tend towards a saintly, pious history of works of charity and purity clad in the shining armour of heavenly righteousness. As a Liberal, I feel it my duty to expose the tyranny of vested interests, including organised religion. As a believer in God, I feel it my firm duty to fight against a persistent bent against those who share such a belief in many quarters of thinking, especially on the left. 

We have to get away from persistently arguing religion is a pure or pathological thing. It is as individual as we are; it is as complex and powerful as we are and it, like history as a whole, completely refuses to be simple or readily bundled this way or that by those with a lie to peddle. We live in a land where our laws, our language and even the seating pattern of our legislature have been shaped by the hand of religion - whether we like that or not, whether we believe or not and whether we think faith a pure or pathological thing we have to come to terms with these cold historical facts. The King James Bible is as much a towering feature of our history as the cathedrals that dominate our cities. If we are to understand the bloody, seemingly interminable struggles over faith that marred these islands in the 17th Century; struggles that eventually gave birth to the beginnings of the modern constitutional settlement, including our current political party structure; we must understand the story of faith in these times. That includes the story of the King James Bible - just one of the many tales we can draw from these pages.

I am disheartened by the reaction to this news for these reasons. I do not think that we need to be religious to be right; but I do not think that sneering at faith as a pathology does anything to make one more intelligent than any other. We are falling into the same lazy traps about this debate over and over - this is a relatively small issue; but when it comes to education, money or war, these mistakes can mar or even take away life. A movement towards an understanding of religion that does not rely on cold condescension towards believers or insufferable grovelling at their feet needs to start somewhere; I’d rather it be here, in a debate between the Education Secretary and the National Secular Society, than out there in some darker field between rather more brutal actors.