Christians and Politics

I think that the Archbishop of Canterbury must have read my blog last week, for within twelve hours of posting it, he was on television news saying that the suggestion that politics could fall into the hands of a neathandral Christian Right was stuff and nonsense. He went on to affirm, smiling benignly upon Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, into whose private garden he seemed to have stumbled, that Christians should become more involved in politics.

I’m certainly not one to gainsay the Archbishop on the latter score. I too believe that Christians should be far more involved in politics, but then of course, I mean my kind of politics. I want to see Christians engaging in Kingdom politics, out in the streets proclaiming that we stand for Kingdom values which are utterly opposed to the values of the advanced capitalist state. Jesus fearlessly spoke out against the religious, political and economic establishments of his day. He condemned the religious authorities as false teachers preventing people from entering his kingdom. He said that those who had attained riches and power in this world have already had their reward and unless they were prepared to divest themselves of these encumbrances they would not be entering the Kingdom. And he strode into the precincts of the Temple, which served as the national bank and state treasury, and drove out those engaging in financial dealings which subvert the religious spirit. In his preaching that in the Kingdom the first shall be last and the last shall be first, he established God’s preferential option for the poor, and in healing people whose diseases and disabilities excluded them from their community, he demonstrated a spirituality and politics of inclusion.

So I’m all for Jesus’s brand of politics, although I suspect that we won’t be hearing much about those politics from the Archbishop or the Cardinal in the run-up to the General Election, which has not yet been announced but which the entire nation thinks is going to be on May 4th. Rather, religious leaders will babble on about topics such as that the Cardinal and Archbishop both want to turn into a political issue – abortion. And lest you gain the impression that I am pro-abortion, let me disabuse you. I am totally pro-life - but I mean life. That is, I believe that if it is morally wrong to ‘take the life’ of an unborn child, it is morally wrong to take the life of child in Iraq, an adolescent in Sudan, an adult on death row in the United States, or an aged person in a South American slum. I have little patience with those pro-lifers who restrict their campaigning to the foetus alone, but would justify the taking of life in a wide range of other circumstances including war, capital punishment and endemic poverty.

As for the Cardinal’s suggestion that Britain would benefit from a more American approach to issue-led politics and the Archbishop’s dismissal of the Christian Right constituting a danger for politics, I believe both are wrong. It is a particular form of evangelical and fundamentalist piety, funded by large private charitable foundations, which underpins President Bush’s aggressive and triumphalist foreign policy. The Christian Right’s theological and biblical allusions can be detected in almost every utterance the President makes. This lobby has now become so powerful that it is trying to change the American Constitution so that it no longer maintains the separation of church and state. It would like to see the school curriculum faith-determined by having Creationism replace evolution as the dominant paradigm for the teaching of science. It is bringing pressure to bear for a constitutional amendment which would make same-sex unions illegal. It would like to see abortion similarly forbidden by law. This all makes for a style of politics which is exclusive rather than inclusive, combative rather than conciliatory, and destructive rather than enhancing of human dignity.

So in my view the Archbishop and the Cardinal would better facilitate a greater degree of Christian involvement in politics in Britain by cautioning against rather than welcoming American-styled religious politics here. By all means provoke a public discussion, not just about abortion but on the ending of human life, but do not let that be to the exclusion of discussing what many of us see as the real crises, the increasing poverty of the world’s poor, the failure to stem the advance of malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS amongst the poor, and the bleak future confronting our environment. And let our religious leaders clearly enunciate both a political and a religious agenda that guarantees justice, peace and the inclusion of all.

Bad Press for Roman Catholics

Last weekend saw Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day TV spectacular to raise millions of pounds for the alleviation of poverty principally in Africa, but also within the UK. Community groups including schools engage in all kinds of fun activities to generate revenue for this charity and its work. This year however, the Roman Catholic Church tried to dissuade children in Catholic schools from participating in the event by claiming that Comic Relief was funding abortion programmes. This turned out to be absolutely untrue and the Church somewhat shamefacedly allowed its children to take part. But it was a reminder of the power that the Church exerts in the community and its ability to jump to wrong conclusions.

This ability throughout history was wonderfully illustrated in the BBCTV’s Wednesday night reconstruction of the trial of Galileo in 1633. Galileo had been forbidden by the Church to advance Copernicus’s views, but thought he had found a creative way around the situation by publishing a dialogue between three people, one advocating Copernican science, one contesting it, and the third clearly representing the Church. Nevertheless, the idea that the sun and not the earth was the centre of the universe remained anathema to the teachings of the Church which held that God had created the earth, and if there was any motion in the planets, this was due to God deciding to put things into motion, and certainly not due to any natural or scientific law. The TV programme followed Galileo through his trial, and showed how the Inquisition, even though some of its members accepted the truth of Galileo’s findings, found it necessary for the sake of the Church’s authority, to make him recant of his assertions. It would be another two hundred years before people could read the dialogue for themselves.

The Roman Catholic Church has of course, apologised since for its error of judgement over Galileo. One would think it would learn lessons from history and be more cautious in telling the faithful not to read certain literary and scientific works. But no, on the same day that the Galileo programmed was aired in the UK, Cardinal Bertone, formerly an official in the Vatican’s office on doctrinal orthodoxy and now Archbishop of Genoa, urged Catholics neither to read nor buy Dan Brown’s runaway best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. Insisting that the novel is profoundly anti-Catholic the Cardinal was aghast that even Catholic bookshops are stocking it. The work certainly highlights the Church’s penchant for harbouring powerful secret societies, but one suspects that its chief offence is in its allusions to the ancient myth that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that their descendants live on in our day. This makes for a highly entertaining story about the nature and location of the Holy Grail, but one has not noticed large numbers of Christians agitating for the myth to be included in the Nicene Creed. Adult Christians are perfectly capable of forming a view on such matters. It is tragic that there remain Church leaders who regard it as their duty to protect people by censoring or controlling their reading matter.

As the issue of abortion began the week, so it ended the week when Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor made an ill-judged foray into British politics in the run-up to the General Election in May. Announcing that the Labour Party could no longer rely on the traditional Catholic vote, he heaped praise on Michael Howard, the Tory Leader, for saying that he would vote for the legal time in which it is now possible to seek an abortion to be reduced to 20 weeks. The Cardinal’s comments appeared inept because in the British political system, weighty matters like abortion have never been regarded as party-political issues, but are voted upon by parliamentarians, not on party lines, but on the basis of personal conscience. The Cardinal would subsequently attempt to clarify his views by insisting that he was not trying to make abortion a party political issue, but rather arguing that Britain might benefit from American styled politics where, as in the recent Bush/Kerry election, the issue of abortion received a good public airing. This was rather a case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ with citizens quick to point out, that American styled politics so heavily influenced by conservative religious extremism, would not fare well with either the great British public, nor its political system.

So all in all, the Roman Catholic Church attracted to itself a lot of bad press this week.

The Politics of Deception

B-Liar is one of the posters currently being carried on UK street marches. It reflects a certain public perception that Prime Minister Tony Blair has been economical with the truth over the war in Iraq. The fact that no weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq is the least of his problems. The question of exactly what advice he was given by the security services and by the Attorney General rumble on. Today it looks as if the Attorney General’s advice warned the Prime Minister that the war could be illegal, and that there have been persistent attempts to obscure this advice from the public. Another line of enquiry is suggesting that Blair had agreed twelve months in advance of the attack to support President Bush’s warmongering agenda.

So when this week the Government brought hastily conceived legislation before Parliament to enable it to place suspected terrorists under ‘control orders’ to limit their movement, phone calls, access to the internet and so forth, I allied myself with those Members of Parliament and members of the House of Lords who were disinclined to accept Blair’s statements at face value.

Thus through Thursday and Friday we saw both Houses sitting through the night and engaged in a head-to-head battle on the proposed new legislation. For some what was at stake were the civil liberties of the entire population as it was felt that the new measures of house arrest and a lowered burden of proof, could be applied far more widely than just to suspected terrorists. We could all become subject to them. Others felt that the decision to grant new orders should not be a political decision in the hands of the Home Secretary, but should be a legal instrument approved by a judge. This was one of the major concessions the opposition parties won.

But it was also argued that the legislation was deeply flawed because there had been so little time for parliamentary committees to examine it. It had to be hastily concocted when the High Court decreed that the terrorist suspects interned without trial for over three years, had to be released on bail this weekend. And so elements of the opposition argued for a so-called ‘sunset clause’ which would see the proposed legislation lapse in November and provide the space for better thought-out provisions to be advanced to replace it.

Both the House of Commons and the House of Lords sat all through Tuesday night in a stalemate, with the proposed legislation passing back and forth from House to the other, each House waiting for the other to blink first. In the end Blair and the House of Commons accepted an amendment which they claimed was not a ‘sunset clause’ but which opposition parties insisted was a sunset clause in everything but name.

What struck me from what I saw of the debates, was the way in which both Blair and Home Secretary Clarke kept adopting a ‘trust me on this one’ attitude. Both kept reiterating that the Security Services and the Commissioner of Police had advised of the current seriousness of the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom, and both had insisted that the proposed legislation was necessary for our safety. The Commissioner of Police had announced that he estimated there to be some 200 potential terrorists at large on Britain’s streets. In Blairspeak this rose to ‘several hundred in this country … engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts’ although security officials interviewed by the Press said there was a ‘serious’ to ‘moderate’ threat from no more than twenty to thirty persons. I dismissed most of the Government’s claims as scare mongering, given Blair’s propensity for reaching decisions on the basis of dodgy terrorism, or it might be argued, on the basis of no ‘intelligence’ whatsoever.

I did not hear anyone raise in the debates the fundamental question of why the United Kingdom has become such a priority target for international terrorism. What has rendered us so is Blair’s adulation of Bush and his War on Terror, and his committal of British troops to Iraq. Through this error of judgement Britain, for the better part of a century perceived as a friend to Arab nations, has overnight become along with the United States, their enemy. There are old memories which feed radical Muslim convictions that the West is engaging in a new Crusade with the object not this time of liberating the Holy Places, but under the banner of ‘regime change’ substituting suspect western democratic values, for traditional Muslim values. Sadly this is not a temporary hiccough in British-Arab relations. Blair’s folly has both undone a century of patient diplomacy and goodwill which can never now be restored, and rendered all of us who live in Britain far more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

A Plague Upon Both Your Houses

Last week the Anglican Primates (these are Archbishops not monkeys!) met in Ireland to discuss whether or not the Anglican Communion can survive the crisis prompted by the ordination of a gay Bishop in the USA and the authorization of same-sex Unions in a Diocese in Canada. The battle is between self-styled ‘orthodox’ Anglicans (an unhelpful term because most Anglicans when asked would describe themselves as orthodox) and those of a more progressive disposition. It’s probably better to see it as a contest between Traditionalists and Progressives. The former are a rather odd combination of traditional Anglo-Catholics who are wedded to the maintenance of Catholic order, discipline and tradition (and paradoxically have a significant proportion of homosexuals amongst their clergy), and Evangelicals who are committed to the primacy and often the inerrancy of Scripture.

Everyone had been expecting some kind of a fudge to emerge, because that is the way the Anglican Communion has generally proceeded on such matters. Anglican experience suggests that instant decisions are frequently unreliable, and that one must take time to discern the mind of the Church on weighty and contentious matters. So last Friday’s Press Release pleased nobody. The American and Canadian Churches have been asked to voluntarily and temporarily withdraw from the Anglican Consultative Council, a body whose significance is doubtful, and which meets only every three years. But then the Canadians and Americans were immediately invited to the next meeting of the Consultative Council so that they can explain their views!

There were a few crumbs offered the Progressives, particularly that a process urged upon the Church at the last Lambeth Conference (the ten-yearly meeting of all Anglican Bishops) that churches should listen to the testimony of gay and lesbian Christians, should be pursued with some urgency. While some of the Western Progressive churches have addressed this process seriously (my former diocese of Oxford is a good example) the Traditionalist dioceses, particularly those in Africa and Asia have consistently failed to do so. This is because many refuse to recognise that their congregations include gay Christians in a situation where homosexuality is still spoken of in terms of being ‘the white man’s disease’ and in cultures in which homosexuals, if recognised, are treated brutally.

Progressives could also take heart from the pledge in the Press Release that dioceses would ‘would neither encourage nor initiate to cross-boundary interventions’ pending further discussion on the issue. This refers to the way that African bishops have taken under their Episcopal authority congregations in the USA dissatisfied with their own bishop’s stance. This proposal was rendered dead in the water, when in a prior statement Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria had declared that asking him to desist from such activities was colonial arrogance, and that he would continue to offer his services to Anglicans everywhere.

The Traditionalists appeared cock-a-hoop at the temporary suspension of two of Anglicanism’s major churches (and sources of finance) from the Consultative Council. USA-based Virtue Online, which claims to be ‘THE Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism’ trumpeted ‘Conservatives Win!’ At mass on Sunday, something the preacher said reminded me that in these situations there are no winners or losers but everybody loses.

The sermon, addressing the event in John’s Gospel where Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at a well, pointed out that both the Jews, whose religion focussed on the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Samaritans, who had built a rival Temple on Mount Gerizim, were absolutely convinced that they and they alone possessed the truth. But Jesus’s teaching was about something quite different; that religion governed by place and by tradition, was making way for a new situation in which religion is to be freely embraced in spirit and in truth.

It is a tragedy for Anglicanism that neither the Traditionalists of Mount Zion, nor the Progressives of Mount Gerizim have thus far understood the implications of Jesus’s innovation.