Sir Michael Tugendhat says attitude to religion among some secularists is similar to that of Elizabeth I
Efforts to banish the expression of religious beliefs from the public square represent a “form of oppression” nearly as bad as the Tudor-era persecutions, a former senior High Court judge has said.
Sir Michael Tugendhat, the top libel and media judge in the country until he retired last year, suggested soaring numbers of lawsuits involving religion pointed to an increasing denial of genuine human rights rather than the defence of them.
He blamed the phenomenon on the misinterpretation of the meaning of secularism, saying that the concept should guarantee a neutral space but instead was being used as a pretext for hostility towards religion and religious practices.
He said the changes came when a succession of equality legislation was passed without giving adequate protection to the religious convictions of Christians, leading to a succession of complaints of harassment and unfair dismissal.
One of the most high-profile cases involved Nadia Eweida, who was told by British Airways that she could not wear a cross on her uniform, while the Catholic Church was forced to close or hand over about a dozen adoption agencies because it could not meet the statutory demand to assess gay couples as adoptive parents.
Sir Michael said that the attitudes of those who were pushing aggressive secularism were just as intolerant as the Elizabethan authorities who had Catholics hanged, drawn and quartered for celebrating Mass and who burned and imprisoned Puritans and evangelical Protestants for dissenting from Anglicanism.
Rising intolerance, he suggested, marks a regressive step in the English revolution in human rights that began with the Magna Carta in the 13th century.
“When I started my professional career, lawsuits involving religion were absolutely unknown,” Sir Michael said. “In the last 10 to 15 years they have become increasingly frequent.”
“Secularism comes in different forms. It can be neutral, as it usually is in the United States and sometimes is in France, but it can also stand for hostility to belief in the ‘super-human’,” he said.
“Those who are hostile to belief in a super-human being or to religious practices, I am afraid, sometimes exhibit an attitude to freedom of religion and freedom of speech which are as restrictive of that of Elizabeth I or Burghley [her chief minister].
Burghley, Elizabeth I's chief minister
Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief minister
“They seek to limit those freedoms to the private sphere but that is a denial of the rights that these freedoms enshrine and that is what the Jesuits and the Puritans fought against,” he said. “Their fight was ultimately successful, as we all know, but at enormous personal cost.”
He added: “The terrible story of the Tudor-Stuart religious divisions should be a reminder that freedom which is confined entirely to the privacy of a person’s home is a form of oppression.”
The former judge, 70, made his comments in a speech at Tyburn Convent, the London mother house of an international community of enclosed Benedictine nuns that stands just yards from the site of the Tyburn Tree, the three-sided gallows upon which 105 Catholics were executed between 1535 and 1681.
Sir Michael, who was educated at Ampleforth College, a Benedictine-run independent school in Yorkshire, said that the Jesuit priest St Edmund Campion, one of the most famous of the Tyburn martyrs, should be seen an early human rights activist because he fought for freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.
He said the open faith of Campion and his subsequent torture, trial and execution in 1581 showed that he also stood not only for freedom of religion but also for the right not to be oppressed, not to be tortured, not to incriminate oneself, and for a fair trial, rights which are now universally accepted.
The Jesuit’s vital contribution enabled celebrated nonconformists such as the Leveller John Lilburne and William Penn, the Quaker, to develop the understanding of human rights in the following decades, he said.
He said: “It is time to recognise that the English revolution in human rights began with the Magna Carta at least if not before 1215 and continued for centuries thereafter.
“The recognition grew throughout the subsequent period to the present day and that was so whether governments infringed them or not.
“If coming to recognise this history we also come to recognise the contribution that the Jesuits executed at nearby Tyburn made to that history then that is no more than a belated recognition of what Campion and his companions deserve.”
Auxiliary Bishop John Sherrington of Westminster, giving the vote of thanks, reminded an audience of more than 150 invited guests that the fight for freedom of religion and conscience was far from over.
“The right to religion must never be limited to the private arena,” he said. “The Jesuit and Puritan histories remind us that both thought that the right to religion would be in the public space, that it is a public right, and that is something we should continue to develop and argue today.”
Sir Michael was hailed as a champion of free speech when he ended the era of the super-injunction, in which wealthy celebrities used the courts to stop newspapers publishing stories about their indiscretions.
The landmark moment came in 2010 when he dismissed a claim for super-injunction brought by England and Chelsea footballer John Terry, involving an affair.
Sir Michael then reinterpreted the rules to say that secrecy could only be used where “strictly necessary”.
He also dismissed a succession of libel cases against newspapers before he finally raised the bar for such lawsuits to prevent further trivial claims.
His son, Tom Tugendhat, was elected to the Conservative safe seat of Tonbridge, Edenbridge and Malling on May 7