Schedule - Hatred against persons on racial or religious grounds
Racial and Religious Hatred Bill
4:45 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
The subject of exorcism has a mainstream track record in Christian faiths. The Catholic Church will still, in exceptional circumstances, practise exorcism, although I do not think that it involves beating people to death in order to achieve it. However, there is a belief that people may be freed from spirits. The Anglican Church would still recognise that as a possibility. As I understand it, the criticism made by the police is of Christian sects, not voodoo culture religion, although some may be influenced by animist faith in arriving at their position. There is a long tradition of animism running alongside Christianity from the cultural origins of the people concerned.
All that illustrates the complexity of the problem. Many think that the practice of exorcism is unjustified in any event. Some think that even if it can be justified, because it is just saying a prayer and hoping that somebody gets better, rituals that may be terrifying to a child, perhaps physically endanger a child or even, as we seem to have discovered recently, kill a child are matters of huge abhorrence. Many would take the view that they would be entitled to hate people—or intensely dislike them; I suggested to the Committee yesterday that that is what hatred means—who practise such things. We could easily have added exorcism, and Christianity would have been slotted into both categories.