Last month the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, announced that he would be seeking parliamentary backing for a law which would make it a crime to incite religious hatred, in the same way that the law already criminalizes incitement to racial hatred. The reaction to the proposed legislation was instructive. On the one hand there were those such as Trevor Philips, the Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, who welcomed it as an important way of protecting individual believers, of whatever faith, from the results of hate campaigns which abuse a particular set of religious beliefs in order to incite violence against adherents of those beliefs. On the other hand many working in the arts and media objected on the grounds that such legislation would inhibit free speech and might outlaw, for instance, films such as The Life of Brian, the Monty Python team's irreverent satire on the way in which religion is presented to the masses.

I shall follow the debate about the proposed legislation itself with interest; but what strikes me most forcibly about the comments I have heard so far is the assumption that seems to be implicit in the views of many who oppose the legislation: that religion is essentially a private matter, something of importance to the individual but of no real consequence for the public sphere. This assumption arises, in part, from western Europe's apparently ineluctable (and, from a global perspective, atypical) slide into secularism and the consequent sidelining of religious commitment as nothing more than a lifestyle choice or a consumer good - one more 'thing' that can be selected from the bulging shelves of our post-modern hypermarket. The truth is different. For Christians, as for members of other faiths, religious belief is about commitment not contentment, exploring and sharing rather than acquiring and keeping, the whole of life not simply 'my' life. If we have failed to convey that truth collectively to our wider society it might be because we have failed to live that truth ourselves.