It is commonly said that since a religious believer chooses to adopt a certain set of beliefs, he or she is responsible for the consequences, which may, as every believer well knows, include strong disagreement or even repugnance from others. But this assimilation of belief to a plain matter of conscious individual choice does not square with the way in which many believers understand or experience their commitments. For some – and this is especially true for believers from outside the European or North Atlantic setting – religious belief and practice is a marker of shared identity, accepted not as a matter of individual choice but as a given to which allegiance is due in virtue of the intrinsic claims of the sacred. We may disagree; but I do not think we have the moral right to assume that this perspective can be simply disregarded.

It is one thing to deny a sacred point of reference for one’s own moral or social policies; it is another to refuse to entertain – or imagine – what it might be like for someone else to experience the world differently … The uncomfortable truth is that a desacralised world is not, as some fondly believe, a world without violence, but a world in which there can be no ultimate agreement about the worth of human or other beings.