Over on Pharyngula PZ Myers wonders whether he should move to Britain, following a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that the ‘dominant opinion’ of 3,500 Britons polled is that religion is a ‘social evil’.

The United Kingdom has a state religion, and people take religion seriously – in their own quiet way. Thus arises the paradox that even though the UK has an established church, it is, for all practical purposes, a far more secular state than the US, in which the formal severance between church and state tends (from my limited perspective) to be honored more in the breach.

However, it would be truer to say that rather than being avowedly secular, Britons (with exceptions) tend to wear their religion lightly, making the UK a country of unusually high religious tolerance. People of different religions do generally get on very well together – most Brits ignore fundamentalists (of any stripe, including atheists) except to poke fun at them, or to ask them politely if they’d not mind shouting so loud, as other people are trying to sleep. The exceptions to this get a lot of headlines but are in fact minuscule.

The British tradition of pragmatism and tolerance is exemplified by the story of how the Jews were readmitted to England in 1656, after centuries of exclusion.

The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 by a decree of Edward I, after which the only Jews in England were extremely occasional traders who were just visiting. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, a sizeable Jewish community had become established in the Netherlands (many of whom descended from the explusion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal a little later). That period saw a thriving cross-channel trade, with more Jews appearing in major ports such as London. The Dutch Jewish community thought that it would be convenient were some of their number to be able to live in England, if only to have a kind of toehold.

Thus it so happened that rabbi and trader Menasseh Ben Israel was despatched to England to ask whether Jewish residence in England might be possible. It was perhaps fortunate that England at the time was enjoying, if that’s the word, its one and only episode of Presidential government (if you discount Tony Blair), in the form of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

Now, when Jews sought admission into any country, the response was usually a deeply qualified ‘yes’. Jews would be allowed in, but only if they accepted a long list of formally mandated strictures on where they lived, what jobs they did, how they would be taxed, and even what they could wear. Jewish representatives were quite used to this, which is why Menasseh Ben Israel was nonplussed by Cromwell’s equivocal response.

In December, 1655, Cromwell convened what has become known as the Whitehall Conference to discuss the readmission of Jews to England. The conference could not make up its mind except on one thing – that since Edward I’s expulsion was a royal decree rather than a statute, there was no formal reason why the Jews could not be readmitted. The final outcome was the kind of pragmatic fudge that seems so characteristically English. His advisers unable to agree on whether Jews should be admitted or not, Cromwell made an executive decision: he told Menasseh Ben Israel that Jews could come and live in Britain and do more or less what they liked, provided they were quiet about it. Menasseh Ben Israel was not asked to pledge good conduct in the form of some declaration or formal statute. Ever since then, Jews have lived in Britain according to an unsigned covenant of understanding that has since applied to any religious community in Britain – that people of all religions are welcome to live in Britain provided they do it quietly and with respect for the mix of people already in residence.

This is why, were there any screening of Expelled in Britain, the majority of the populace would probably not give it a moment’s thought, except to wonder if it was a sequel to St Trinian’s.

I should end this possibly contentious post with the customary picture: