British Judge Traces Change In Role of Religion In Family Courts

British media are giving significant coverage to Tuesday's address by a senior judge, Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division, to a Law Society Conference. His remarks, titled Law Morality and Religion in the Family Courts, trace changes in the role judges assign to religion:

In recent years we have witnessed enormous changes in the social and religious life of  our country. A century ago, a judge could pray in aid the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer as an appropriate statement of the public policy to be applied by the courts. Today we live in a largely secular society which, insofar as it remains religious at all, is now increasingly diverse in religious affiliation. 

At the same time as the judges have – rightly – abandoned their pretensions to be the guardians of public morality Christian clerics have, by and large, moderated their claims to speak as the defining voices of morality and of the law of marriage and the family.