This means that Dawkins must come from some pretty awesome stock to say they had to go back 270 years in order to find someone truly embarrassing.

Adam Lusher, the guy who wrote the article, argues that the Dawkins estate was purchased by this ancestor, thus giving Dawkins some added responsibility.

The head of the Anglican Church is the queen of England, and she only wishes one had to go that far back to trace an embarrassing source of wealth. She got a fair chunk of wealth from Queen Victoria and the results of the Boer War. I don't think we can really blame her for her ancestor putting people in concentration camps.

In Lusher’s interview with Dawkins he apparently tried to insinuate that there would be something like a slavery supporting gene, saying "Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

Rape was pretty common amongst American slave trade; to the point were a lot of African Americans descended from slave owners.

I don’t think they would appreciate the idea that approving of slavery is genetic.

The Daily Mail, which also ran the story, is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust, which is chaired by the Viscount  of Rothemere Harold Harmsworth. He shares his name with his ancestor, a supporter of the British Union of Fascists who penned the infamous article "Hurrah for the black shirts." I don't think accusing the current Viscount of a genetic approval of Nazism would be particularly correct.

In other words, the article is really a desperate and transparent smear, but why is this happening now?

It's about the power

The Richard Dawkins Foundation commissioned a poll to find out exactly how religious British Christians are. The results weren’t positive for the bishops in the House of Lords.

Only 28% said they answered Christian because they actually “believe in the teachings of this religion”.

49% reported not going to church in the last month. 32% hadn’t attended a church service that wasn’t a funeral or a wedding in ten years. 24% hadn’t ever attended such a service.

Question 33 shows a greater percentage of UK Brits oppose bishops in the house of lords than support them.

6% strongly support the bishops, 20% somewhat support the bishops giving us 26%. 

This is opposed to 17% who tend to oppose the bishops, and 15% who strongly oppose them. That gives us 32%.

The rest pretty much don’t care.

46% feel the UK shouldn’t have an official religion and 74% of the people polled believe policy should not be influenced by religion.

This isn’t particularly surprising, the American separation of church and state started in Rhode Island’s constitution – which was largely driven by a theologian called Roger Williams. Secularism is a government philosophy that owes a lot of its founding principles to a theologian. It isn’t an “atheism versus theism” issue; it is an issue over what kind of power the state should have, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of the state having the power to dictate your beliefs.

That said, secularism is highly inconvenient to people who have political power because of their religion, like those bishops in the House of Lords or the Pope. It is inconvenient to people who want to make the UK’s government “Do God.”

And revealing the actual nature of UK Christians – that UK Christians are not interested in theocracy – is not something newspapers which try to sell fear of secularism or politicians who run more on values than policies are really happy to see happen.