 Well, good morning. This is your morning wake-up paper. Is everybody feeling really, come on, a little bit of enthusiasm? Yeah, well, we'll soon beat that out of you. Don't worry about that. What I'm talking about today, don't mention the Bible, religion and identity in contemporary Scottish politics. It's perhaps what you would call the Sherlock Holmes, the dog that didn't bark, kind of story. You know, the important thing is the dog doesn't bark in the clue. And here we've got, I think, a story of where the absence of the Bible actually means something. So, I want to begin by showing you three pictures. I can do it with a clicker, actually, David. I think. First picture. The great Scottish reformer John Knox in the courtyard of New College, Edinburgh. There he is, the great reformer in some ways a kind of metonym of Scottish Christianity, gesturing to the heavens with his Bible firmly classed. Second, and you're not going to get away today with that, a lot of this, President Donald Trump taking the oath of office as 45th President of the United States of America. And thirdly, oh no, there he is, he's actually swearing, as you probably know, on two Bibles, because one's not enough. One belonged to Abraham Lincoln in the red box. The one on top is the Bible, his Scottish mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, who was born Gaelic speaking on the Isle of Lewis, gave him on his ninth birthday when he graduated from Sunday school. There's a story I was reminded of that I might get around to telling you about that, but there you are. There he is showing off his holy Bible, neurovised version, so obviously not infallible, but still he does hold to it. And there, in case we ever need to know, is all you need to know. The Bible is the most special thing, according to Mr. Trump. Our third picture is, anybody know that wonderful lady? Yeah, Nicholas Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland, being sworn in as First Minister. And I think when we compare the three pictures, there's something interesting going on. As I said, Knox and the Presbyterian Reformation of the Scottish Kirk are a kind of metonym for many people of what Scottish identity is, grim Presbyterianism. But that's both a misleading account of what it means to be a Scott these days and it's a misreading of Knox. There he stands, clutching his Bible. What Bible is he holding? In all probability, the Bible he used and preached from and which he was in part responsible for translating into English, the Geneva Bible. And note that it was translated into English, not into Scots, which at that time was beginning to emerge and certainly there were writers in Scotland at that time who regarded it already as a separate language. It was never translated into Scots and quite programmatically because this is the rallying call of international Calvinism, this Bible. And we'll look at the long political and linguistic consequences of the lack of a Scots Bible. I mentioned about Mr. Trump, but the main thing I wanted to look at was the contrast because there's Mr. Trump with two Bibles, Nicola has none. She stands right hand up raised, no Bible in sight, no reference to the Bible in the ceremony. So, the absence of the Bible here, is that a mark of the accelerating secularization of Scotland? The absence of the Bible being a measure of its irrelevance to Scots politics? Or is it conversely a sign that the Bible continues to be not only active but positively dangerous in Scottish politics and therefore cannot be admitted to this moment? Absence can mean several things. Actually, this mode of taking the oath of the raised right hand without the presence of a Bible is not a post-Christian modern invention. It has a very long history. In British legal parlance, it's known as the Scottish Oath, or the Oath in the Scottish Manor. And some of it moved over to the States with the Bible, the raised right hand. It reflects ancient custom, no doubt, but it was reinforced by a culture that took its Bible and therefore the biblical injunction swear not at all entirely seriously. Far from showing indifference or disrespect to the Bible, this practice derives from respecting the awful authority of the text, which is too dangerous, too important, too powerful to be sullied by the sordid human business of oaths, laws and politics. Jesus does say, you know, don't swear. You take the Bible seriously, how can you swear on it? So the Bible may be absent from this kind of political moment, not because it's been discarded or ignored, but because it continues to be too potent and dangerous to be admitted. And I want to say that the rather striking absence of the Bible from contemporary Scottish political debate is an example where both explanations are correct at the same time. Absence is a double-edged, double-sided coin. The Bible's irrelevant and dangerous, outdated and all too prophetic. The epitome of one definition of Scottishness and the antithesis of another modern Scottish identity. So the example of Scotland may remind us that even in its absence, the Bible can be an unsettling, unreadable element in contemporary political discourse. Talking about the absence, well, I think it's probably as often best illustrated by the exception to the rule. The Scotsman newspaper on 28th December 2013 thought it worth putting this headline in the Scotsman, which is one of the major Scottish universities. Scottish independence Bible tale cited by SNP MSP and MSP is a member of the Scottish Parliament. Even the article below this, you know, this is newsworthy, shows just how hard they were trying to find the Bible in the debate over Scottish independence. The article begins, SNP MSP John Mason has suggested the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel could be used as an argument for Scottish independence. Now, wow, but the reference comes from an article where Mason, who is a well-known evangelical Christian, was interviewed along with another Christian MSP who is opposed to independence for a small evangelical magazine, in-house evangelical magazine, and asked about the Christian response to the independence debate. And he wrote, I would maintain there is no one Christian line to take on Scottish independence. However, there is a principle from the time of the Tower of Babel that God split the peoples up as too much centralization was potentially a dangerous thing. So it could be argued that we should be wary of larger national units and supportive of smaller ones. So this great bringing of the biblical tale into Scottish independence was in answer to a specific question about that. It appeared in this small niche publication and it could hardly be more hedged with caveats. This is no great Christian proclamation of the truth of Scottish independence. The fact that this was thought newsworthy enough to plaster on a national newspaper is itself evidence of how low even an evangelical Christian MSP was to appeal to biblical authority in the biblical political sphere and how hard someone was looking for this to happen. Now of course, things were not always so in Scottish politics. The great symbolic document of Scottish independence sometimes read as the first declaration in European history of something becoming recognisable as modern nationalism and also by others taken as a precursor to the American Declaration of Independence is the declaration of our growth which was sent by Scottish nobles to Pope John the 22nd in Avignon to assert the rights of Scotland in the face of the claims to sovereignty over Scotland by Edward II of England back in 1320. Scottish politics is like that, 1320 is only yesterday. It's filled with biblical illusions and imagery and I've given you a sort of redacted copy of it, there's a lot in it that is a bit irrelevant to this. The Scots are given a migratory history like the Jews and the Romans in this case from Scythia. That's what the Scots say, we started out in Scythia and we ended up in Scotland. There's a bargain for you. And their claim to their land is made on grounds recognisable from the book of Joshua. As you can see, one of the things that the Scots nobles are claiming is that they totally exterminated the Picts who lived there before. There's nothing like a genocide to establish one's God-given right to a particular territory. In addition, they claim a priority within Christendom, having been among the first nations to be converted and that not just by anybody but by Saint Andrew, Peter's brother. And the link to Saint Andrew politically is always a subtle move as he's traditionally not only converted before Peter, he runs to get Peter so Peter comes second but also beat him in the race to the empty tomb. It's not for nothing that Russia and Greece and Scotland all with their various problems over the authority of the successor of Peter adopt Andrew as their saint. Now, Robert the Bruce, Scotland's king who, as you will remember, no doubt, at that time was under a ban of excommunication from the Pope. So this is a slightly complicated thing. They're trying to write to the Pope saying tell Edward to keep out of it on behalf of a king who himself has been excommunicated because of a murder in front of the altar in Dunfermline Abbey that he just happened to commit. But he's compared to Judas Maccabeus or indeed Joshua. He has done what they did. But interesting too is the clause that makes it clear that Robert the Bruce's position as king depends on his fulfilling the wishes of the people particularly in relation to freedom from England. He is our king, they say, but if he doesn't shape up, we'll have another king because what's important is our freedom. Now, though the implications of all this are much debated by historians and it's very possible and many people do to read far too much into this, Scottish commentators have seen this as a breakthrough in medieval politics, sovereignty residing in the people, the king ruling by their consent. You look hard to find an earlier document that so starkly claims that. And however true that is, the principle becomes central to the political theology of John Knox, the great reformer. He was of course a friend, disciple of Calvin, but he went much further than Calvin ever did in asserting that although Paul may enjoin obedience to the authorities, that obligation can never override obedience to God. And it's the church, the Presbyterian church, not the king, not the civil authority who determines what God's will might be through its assemblies and the presbyteries of ministers' laity. And the people not only have the right but the positive duty to overthrow oppressive and corrupted rulers. There's quite radical politics, you see, why he wasn't very popular with Mary Queen of Scots. But Knox was ambivalent over the Scottish aspect of this identity. His aim, along with all the other Presbyterian reformers, was the conversion of the whole of Britain to Presbyterianism. Who cared about little Scotland? It's England that's the prize. This is symbolised by the fact that although the vernacular Bible was so important to his thought, he never offered any defence for a Scots version of the Bible. The Scots could just about read English and that would have to do with them. And the Bible becomes a symbol of this British dimension to the Calvinist Revolution. It's a Bible for the whole of Britain. In his The Construction of Nationhood, Adrian Hastings points to the decision of the reformers not to produce a Scots Bible as a key moment that's left Scotland in this strange, always ambivalent is it a country, isn't it? Is a state, is it not? Is it a nation or isn't it? His overall thesis is a development of that aspect of Benedict Andersen's notion of the imagined community, where the perception of a shared literary tradition is an important element in the formation of a national consciousness. Hastings points out that certainly within Europe and often beyond, the key text in this regard is the Bible and that the history of Biblical translation runs parallel to the history of the rise of nations. In his words, while it would be a great oversimplification to regard the vernacular Bible as the sole catalyst for language unification or to claim that the development of a national consciousness could not be achieved through other means, nevertheless, as a matter of fact, the correlation between Biblical translation and what one may call a national awakening is remarkably close across most of Europe and quite often for other parts of the world as well. So on this argument, again, the lack, the absence of a Scots Bible is going to be clearly politically significant. It was, of course, the Scottish King, James VI, later VI and I, who on his ascension to the English throne programmatically took over this idea with the promulgation of a new translation of the Bible which would be read in every parish of his new United Kingdom. The King James Bible is a programmatically unionist document in that sense and though it took much longer in Scotland than in England to oust the Geneva Bible from the pulpit, the fact that the Bible in the Kirk was British rather than Scottish later contributed to the Church of Scotland slightly schizophrenic identity both as a marker and guardian of Scottish distinctiveness but also as a bulwark of the Union with England. Contemporary Scottish Protestantism retains that ambivalence. However, to read the influence of religion and the Bible on Scottish civic and political life nowadays merely through the lens of the Church of Scotland and Noxi's Reformation is deeply misleading. Let's see if the right thing comes up. And just look at religious affiliation in Scotland. This is from two censuses, 2001, 2011. 42% claim Church of Scotland but we have to remember that for many Scots that's the kind of default position just like people in England claiming Anglican identity. It doesn't mean that they ever darken the door of a church. By 2011 that's down to 32%. Trend that has accelerated of anything. Roman Catholic, 15.9, steady. No decline in Catholic numbers in Scotland. Other Christians, other religions. No religion from 27 to 36. The other way include also people that refuse to answer. You can see that to see the Church of Scotland 32% probably mostly nominal if that's not a bit unfair as the be-all and end-all of Scottish church life is rather different and the place of the Roman Catholic Church is really quite interesting. Actually it's interesting to compare that let's go to this one with the UK. This is 2015 a little later but not so different. This is for the whole UK 42% of people call themselves Christian whatever they mean 17% Church of England other Christian Roman Catholic 8%. What people forget is Scotland is a more Catholic country than the UK as a whole. It's not a more Protestant country it's more Catholic. Non-Christian faiths unaffiliated as well. Scotland is in line with the rest of the UK slightly behind but in line with it in this rising trend for people not to identify with any religious tradition. And this is interesting because the single most important trend in Scottish politics in the last couple of decades led to the fact that there are now only one Scottish MP who is not from the Scottish National Party in Parliament is that Scottish Catholics are now voting for the Scottish National Party. That's a change in the last 20 years. And the figures for the independence referendum which I think is that one are quite interesting. This is maybe a little hard for you to say but blue is no, orange is yes. Now they've done this rather peculiarly we don't really need to bother about that though it's interesting. Here are religious denominations Protestants 59% voted no. Roman Catholic 44% voted no 56% voted yes. Interesting. Church of England well that's a load of nonsense because what it probably means is the Scottish Episcopal Church and saving anybody's presence that it's not a large denomination by anybody's standard and it's got in there because people are doing this with a British rather than Scottish view of the thing it doesn't really matter what they do because there's hardly any of them. It's interesting also more women more women. The other demographic that's very interesting is that voting for independence clearly depends on age. Young people are far more likely to vote yes for independence than people in older age groups. So why is it that this has happened because Scottish Catholicism used to be absolutely heartland labour territory. It's the change that's happened in Scottish politics that involves that Catholic community. So we need to understand a little bit about that Scottish Catholic community. With the exception of a very few Highland and Hebridean parishes most of the Catholic community presently living in Scotland is the result of immigration of Catholics from Ireland to the west of Scotland predominantly. Attracted at the end of the 19th, early 20th century by the growing industrial wealth of the Scottish cities and their active canvassing for cheap labour. Something like half a million people arrived from Ireland into Scotland within a relatively short time. And that caused tensions with the existing communities as it would anyway exacerbated by the fierce anti-Catholic rhetoric that had characterised the Scottish reformation and still continued. And of course this Irish Catholic community had to react by defending its own traditions notably an insistence on maintaining separate Catholic schools. And if you ever want to get into an unhappy argument start an argument about separate Catholic schools in the west of Scotland. It will end badly, whoever you're talking to. Because the Church of Scotland for its own part took as one of its distinctive contributions to world civilisation, it's not modest its insistence on the provision of a school in every parish from the 17th century. So arguments about who could educate properly are going to be nasty. Now in 1923 their notorious report was received by the Church of Scotland, that means the Assembly of the Church of Scotland accepted this report. It was referred to the menace of Irish immigration. It contains sentences like this. They cannot be assimilated and absorbed by race. They remain a people by themselves, segregated by means of their race, their customs, their traditions and above all their loyalty to their church and gradually and inevitably dividing Scotland racially, socially and ecclesiastically. There's a great deal more in that vein that I'm sparing you, that certainly with hindsight echoes anti-Semitic and racist very closely. The report goes on to bewail what it says is an unprecedented situation where the progressive and educated Protestant Scots are emigrating to spread their industry and moral property around the world for the good of mankind while being supplanted in their own land by the degraded and immoral Irish as the Vatican rubs its collective hands in glee. Saving present circumstances. That was an official report to the Church of Scotland in 1923 and until the outbreak of the Second World War the church demanded an annual report on the progress of Irish immigration. That's far from the stance of the contemporary Church of Scotland. It's not hard to see how the memory of such rhetoric endorsed by the National Church would lead the Catholic population to be a little apprehensive of what might happen if Scotland became independent at the time when the Church of Scotland was in the ascendant. At the same time we shouldn't underestimate the Protestant self understanding as an increasingly beleaguered outpost of the rationality and morality of the Reformation and a bitter assault from both secularism and a resurgent Catholicism. Both communities felt beleaguered both with varying degrees of ambivalence found consolation in some way in the Union with England. To this day the more extreme Protestant groups in Scotland seek security in asserting the unbreakability of the Treaty of Union in 1707 under which the sovereign guarantees the position of the Church of Scotland and the reformed faith. It's one reason that certain Protestants will give for their maintenance of the Union is the way to maintain reformed faith. Catholics on the other hand preferred the relative tolerance of Catholicism within the United Kingdom as a whole to being trapped into dealing in a little independent Scotland with a Presbyterian establishment in Edinburgh. And they found solidarity sometimes it has to be said with a disapproval of the Catholic Church in the labour movement. Now this history of sectarianism in Scotland is painful. It has not yet run its course and yet something has changed. Now Catholics will vote SNP. I can't give the definitive description of this. I haven't got the knowledge and I haven't got the time. But there are some interesting factors where the Bible does play a role contributing to the success of the Scottish National Party. One key factor is Northern Ireland. Scotland and Northern Ireland are only 20 miles apart at their nearest approach. Both Protestant and Catholic communities in the west of Scotland have strong cultural and family ties that cross the Irish sea. However the dynamics of the two situations in the west of Scotland and the north of Ireland are very different. Catholics and Protestants on the island of Ireland has a significant Catholic majority. In Scotland the built-in majority is Protestant both within Scotland and within the United Kingdom. So the Irish community in Scotland the Catholic community could be both fiercely supportive of the independence and reunification of Ireland while resisting any moves towards Scottish independence. Both parties however are also very aware of the need to avoid it possible importing the violence and intractability of Northern Irish politics to the Scottish mainland. The role of the Bible in the rhetoric of Northern Ireland Protestantism is not something that any mainstream politician in Scotland has ever wished to imitate. When it has surfaced in Scottish political life it's been swiftly suppressed by all parties. The danger of the Bible in Northern Irish politics is all too obvious. However the development of the peace process allowed a relaxation of tension in Scotland. Now while this is happening the decline of the Church of Scotland means that its political hegemony has all but gone. The advent of a devolved Scottish Parliament spelt the end of the slightly bizarre situation where the one forum of national debate of policy in Scottish public life was the general assembly of the Church of Scotland. I remember as a child people don't always believe this from elsewhere when the assembly the Church of Scotland's Presbyterian assembly was televised live throughout in the days when there was only three television channels that was what you viewed for a week in Scotland was ministers debating Church of Scotland minister debating nuclear power, the installation of nuclear weapons in Scotland, no other forum to debate it but the Church of Scotland's assembly there wasn't anything. But now we have the Scottish Parliament it's even been suggested so doneically by the veteran Scottish author Alan Massey that the SNP is the new Church of Scotland a remark not intended as a compliment to either but if it is so the SNP is a church that's taken very seriously the potential dangers of any appeal to the Bible in Scottish politics. In Scotland the Bibles are divisive rather than unifying text identified with unionism and Protestantism and a definition of Scottishness that is grounded on both. In political terms it's both irrelevant and dangerous. Now just a couple of minutes but one thing I did want to mention this might seem a very parochial discussion of little interest outside Scotland however I was given pause for thought by an article written by one of our beloved government ministers in his day Michael Gove in the times of March the 9th Mrs May is our first Catholic Prime Minister In essence Gove argues that Mrs May was exposed to Anglo-Catholicism in childhood which means she's been tainted with Catholic social thought thus giving her an unlikely appeal to a certain kind of Catholic Labour voter he goes on as follows it also exposes the government to a longer term risk Britain's path to preeminence in the past followed our break with Catholicism and embrace of the reformation we pursued a global maritime buccaneering individualistic liberal destiny the spirit of our capitalism was infused with a very Protestant ethic now that we are once more freeing ourselves from a conformist continent to make our own way in the world the question of whether we need to be more radical to maximise opportunities or more cautious to reassure and protect is central to our politics really rather extraordinary stuff from a government minister you could question that on all sorts of grounds but there may be something to think about in British politics anyway and then in European politics the wider Brexit vote was conducted in a background where there may be almost unconscious cultural and religious assumptions about what it is to be British English, Scottish, European that float around in our culture the tension between Protestant identity and Catholic identity that is such a running sore in Northern Ireland or has been that might seem a mere aberration a kind of fossilised survival in this remote northwest part of Europe thankfully elsewhere is dead and gone or is it more like the last irritable patch of eczema which serves as a reminder that the body is always vulnerable and in times of stress to break out into an uncontrollable rush Scottish politics has become very adept at not mentioning the Bible but that does not mean that its residual effects are unimportant after all just because you can't see the Bible isn't there