President Macron's government has decided that it is a visible statement of religious affiliation -- in this case, Islamic. As such, it cannot be tolerated in the rigorously secular French education system. The hijab was forbidden on similar grounds some years ago. The majority of the French population find this restriction of individual liberty entirely reasonable. In a French state school, only one community can be visible: the state itself. Any group that displays loyalty to a different ideal, even a religious one, is a threat to the Republic.

To most British observers, this is aggressive assimilation, and bewilderingly authoritarian. In spite of having a sovereign who is obliged to swear to defend the rights of two "national" churches in Scotland and England, we are used to schools which are unperturbed by clothes that are demonstrably Sikh, Muslim or Jewish. For us, these are issues of tolerance and individual freedom. But it would, I think, be wrong to dismiss the French position. Alien it may be, but it is based on a profound political insight: that a shared faith and the rituals that accompany it are among the most powerful forces imaginable for forging a community -- and then for energising it to action. Only nationalism can match it.

The truth of that proposition can today be seen all round the globe, for religion is once again centre stage in world politics. It shapes events in Israel, Turkey and Tibet, among the Christian Right in the US, the jihadist movements in the Sahel, and the Hindu nationalists of India. It is impossible to understand the world without taking account of the power of faith to affirm identity -- and foster violence.

Yet this is a truth that much of a now de-Christianised Western Europe struggles to acknowledge. Our secularisation has been so rapid and far-reaching that religion plays no part in the lives of most ­citizens. We seem to have forgotten that faith is not just about private abstract belief, but about how you live with other people. It is widely assumed that people whose view of society is shaped by religious convictions are at best irrational, and in some cases unhinged.

It is a way of thinking that cuts us off from our national history, making our own country unintelligible. The politics of each state in Europe are still shaped to a striking degree by their response to the Reformation. It is what makes England, Scotland and Ireland such different societies -- and the relations between them so complex. Which is why the opening of the Faith Museum, at Auckland Castle, long the palatial residence of the bishops of Durham, is such a welcome event. For the first time, England will have a museum devoted solely to exploring the role played by faith in shaping our national life.

There could hardly be a better place for such a venture. The very existence of the castle raises every uncomfortable question about the enduring role of the Church as an arm of state power, and its flickering record as servant of the weak. From the Norman Conquest to the 18th century, the bishop of Durham played a key part in ruling England, as much territorial magnate as spiritual leader. This was a church ­mili­tant -- the bishop holding quasi-royal power over large territories, in return for defending against the frequent incursions of the Scots. Here you understand why in chess the deadly piece moving diagonally to protect the king is -- in English -- called the bishop. And why for centuries the bishop of Durham has sat in the House of Lords, and played a significant role at the coronation of every sovereign from Richard I to Charles III.

But 12 pictures in the castle tell a very different story of the relation between faith and politics. Painted by the 17th-century Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán, they are powerful full-length "portraits" of Jacob and his sons, the fathers of the tribes of Israel -- astonishing things to find in an Anglican bishop's dining room. They were bought in the 1750s by the then bishop, Richard Trevor, an energetic champion in the Lords of a bill to secure full civil rights for British Jews, finally carried into law in 1753. Here was the established Church using its political clout to defend not just other faiths, but the rights of recent, extremely unpopular, immigrants. It was a high moment of Enlightenment toleration. But it was short-lived. The Tories condemned the Act as under­mining traditional Christianity, there followed a wave of anti-Semitic public protest, and a year later the Act was repealed. British Jews -- like British Catholics -- had to wait. But the pictures remained, evidence of Trevor's hope, and witnesses to the obstacles -- then as now -- to building a multifaith Britain.

That the Zurbaráns are still in the castle today is due to the conviction of one man, Jonathan Ruffer. Dedicating his fortune made in the City to help the regeneration of the north-east, Ruffer set up and funded the Auckland Project, which saved the Zurbaráns (when the cash-strapped Church Commissioners were about to sell them), renovated the castle, and founded the new Faith Museum.

This is housed in a serene structure beside the castle, designed by Níall McLaughlin Architects. Its shape is inspired by a medieval tithe barn -- the storage place for crops the peasantry were compelled to surrender to the Church every year. It is an appropriate architectural metaphor for the contradictions of a Church built on privilege, but which also campaigned successfully for our social welfare system -- a church that shaped not just medieval England, but post-1945 Britain. It is a complex story that we need to know, in order to understand ourselves.

Beside the impact of Christianity in these islands, the museum aims to show the major faiths practised in Britain today, and how these inform both the daily lives of their followers and their view of our society. That is a serious challenge. Some of the greatest works of art were made for churches or temples, but few objects used for domestic worship are of great beauty. It is rather the rituals or prayers that the objects support which help people to live a good life. It will be intriguing to see how far the displays can take us into the daily faith-worlds of our fellow citizens.

The opening of the Faith Museum coincides with its appeal to acquire what is unquestionably a great artwork, and which Ruffer hopes will be one of its star exhibits: a tapestry, designed in the 1530s by the Antwerp artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Woven with gold and silver threads that flash and glisten as they catch the light, it shows the episode in the Acts of the Apostles when the Greek and Jewish inhabitants of Ephesus, converted to Christianity by Paul's preaching, bring their books of magic and burn them. It is a stupendous piece, the burning books seeming to set the tapestry itself on fire, the smoke billowing out into our space.

It was one of a set of tapestries the artist designed illustrating scenes from the life of St Paul. ­Francis I of France had, in the early 1530s, bought a set of seven scenes; in 1538-39, Henry VIII (always keen to outdo the French) received a set of nine. Two extra tapestries were added for the English royal set -- a Stoning of St Stephen and this Burning of the Books at Ephesus.

On aesthetic and historical grounds, the Burning of the Books tapestry would be a fine acquisition for any museum. It was recently rediscovered in a private collection in Spain, and is subject to an export ban there -- though the Spanish government has agreed to lift it if a suitable UK institution can be found. It would have a uniquely energising part to play in a museum designed to show how faith has shaped our history. The monarch who owned this scene, who separated the Church of England from Rome, liked to compare himself to St Paul, whom the tapestry shows vigorously opposing false doctrines. And to promote St Paul was, of course, pleasingly to diminish St Peter, the fount of papal authority.

This object takes us to the heart of the English Reformation. And that means to the creation of the modern English state, whose rulers used religious difference, and the rejection of foreign jurisdiction, to define the country politically against its Continental neighbours. It was striking how many of the arguments of the 1530s about the English Church resurfaced in the Brexit debates of the 2010s.

What of the subject? The burning of books, with its echoes of 1933 Germany, sends a chill through any modern viewer, but the bishops of Durham knew a thing or two about it. In 1526, Cuthbert Tunstall, then bishop of London, later of Durham, ordered all the copies of William Tyndale's translation of the Bible into English to be bought and publicly burnt. As the German poet Heinrich Heine observed: once you start burning books, you end by burning people. In 1536, Tyndale was strangled and burnt near Brussels.

In this context, Henry VIII's tapestry takes on a disturbing reson­ance. In the Bible, it was not Paul but the zealous converts themselves who destroyed the books containing the false beliefs they had ­dis­car­ded. Sixteenth-century com­­­m­en­t­ators -- Protestant and Catholic -- turned the story round, to justify the authorities burning books of which they disapproved. Around the time he received this tapestry, Henry -- determined to control the Church he now governed -- issued a proclamation prohibiting the "unlicensed printing of scripture". At the same time, he was authorising the burning of many people -- among them Protestant heretics, and especially the Anabaptists.

This exquisite tapestry reminds us that the Church of England was made with murderous brutality. In the Faith Museum, its presence would challenge comfortable Anglican assumptions of its moderate traditions. It would make the jihadists of today seem less strange: like the Tudor monarchs, they too are certain that scripture authorises destruction, and that unbelievers must be eliminated.

But any discussion of this tapestry should end on a brighter note. At the right-hand side stands a man wearing a turban, who would in the 1530s surely have been recognised as a Muslim Turk. This outsider from another faith is the only ­person in the scene not apparently endorsing the frenzied destruction being perpetrated by the newly converted Christians. The artist had travelled extensively in the Ottoman world and recorded it with sympathy. In this figure, is the artist inviting us to consider how disturbing our own convictions might appear to others? That would be a good starting point for a museum that seeks to build understanding and tolerance.

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