Weekly Comment

Redefining Self Defence

2006-07-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

This week, in addition to its murderous campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the so-called Israeli Defence Force has attacked Lebanon, bombing the country’s International airport, blockading all shipping and wreaking havoc with its infrastructure. As I write 50 civilians have been killed and dozens more injured. The General in charge of the action claims to be killing Arabs in order to protect Israeli citizens. The West as usual refuses to make a moral stand and refuses to condemn the reign of terror that Israel has perpetrated against Arab communities for more than fifty years. President Bush, visiting the neo-con German Chancellor, no doubt with an eye to wooing her and Germany into a closer alliance with US global ambitions and policies, said on BBC lunchtime radio news that “Hamas don’t want peace; Hizbullah don’t want peace, but the US stands with all those who do want peace”. Given that Bush and his puppet Blair are single-handedly responsible for the enormous escalation of violence in the Middle East by determining to attack Iraq whether or not weapons of mass destruction were discovered, such a statement beggars belief.

As a social scientist I am well aware of the limitations of public polls on controversial issues. They are not necessarily objective or definitive, but they can indicate trends in thinking and behaviour. My internet provider AOL regularly runs reader polls on its daily news items and on Thursday it asked two questions about Israel’s behaviour.

In response to the first question Are Israel’s attacks justified? Thirty-five percent of respondents agree that they are, but 65 percent assert that they are not. That figure remained constant throughout the day.

In response to the second question, of the 40,000 people who voted on whether they think that Israel’s actions will provoke a wider conflict across the Middle-East, eighty-two percent say that it will, and only eighteen percent think that it won’t. Throughout the day these figures too remained remarkably constant. All we can say of this poll is that those United Kingdom AOL readers who choose to take part in these polls seem firmly of the view that Israel is not justified in its actions and even more firmly convinced that the middle-east crisis will escalate. Should such statistics turn out to be the view of the majority of the UK’s citizens, let alone world citizenry, then Israel could not avoid being labelled as a rogue state.

And what are these two conflicts ostensibly about? The return of one kidnapped Israeli soldier in Gaza and two kidnapped Israeli soldiers in Lebanon. The logic which believes that the massacre of innocent lives in these areas will ensure the safe return of the soldiers is misplaced. These are professional soldiers who expect to come under fire and be ambushed: that’s how skirmishes are conducted. The exaggerated Israeli response mirrors that of the Coalition’s campaign in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When six British soldiers lost their lives within a few weeks in the former, its soldiers went out and killed ‘a hundred’ members of the Taliban, although we know that soldiers don’t always stop to confirm that those in the gun’s sights are in fact Taliban. And in yet another abuse of human rights under investigation in Iraq, US soldiers are alleged to have massacred a large number of civilians in retaliation for the death of one of their comrades. The impression we are given is that this is how soldiers operate. The accompanying moral argument is that they are justified in doing so.

Massive and inhumane retaliation seems to be the order of the day. No matter how much the Israelis, the Americans and the British maintain that they are carefully selecting targets to minimise civilian casualties, the statistics speak otherwise. In the Israeli case the bombing of Lebanese highways, the port area, the international airport and power stations, brings suffering to the whole population. In Gaza the destruction of water and fuel supplies, as well as the general supply routes has created a humanitarian disaster. Lebanon has for most of its history served as the arena for other people’s battles and the Israeli destruction of its infrastructure, patiently rebuilt over the past ten years at huge cost, should be recognised as a crime against humanity. Israel’s ambitions are clearly to wage economic warfare on its neighbours to make certain they will always struggle to survive.

We are all aware of Israel’s ability to remove its enemies by assassination, a policy supported by the United States. Its agents operate all over the world. Some months ago three agents were apprehended in New Zealand in a passport scam which would no doubt have seen Israeli agents posing as New Zealand citizens visiting Arab countries. So why doesn’t Israel employ its very effective assassination policy in this instance? Perhaps it is because the world finds the assassination of an eighty year old paraplegic as happened ion Gaza, morally repugnant, but the killing of civilians more acceptable on the grounds that Blair and Bush and their cronies advance of the right of any state to defend itself.

But there may also be another reason. Hamas and Hizbullah are not simply movements which have sprung out of situations in Gaza and in Lebanon. Their backers and political masters are in Syria and in Iran. The problem is a far greater one than simply dealing with its local manifestations. To really resolve these crises on its borders Israel would need to launch a war against both countries. Many believe that this is Israel’s ultimate ambition, but one imagines that behind-the-scenes pressure from the US and its allies advocates against such a reckless act recognising that the entire Middle-East would erupt in a conflict that could have damaging results for the West, and in particular the supply of oil upon which its economies are dependent. How much easier, and morally, politically and economically safer it is for Israel to reduce Lebanon and Gaza to ruins.

There can be no doubt that no matter how much the tactics of Hizbullah are to be criticised, the opening of this second front on Israel’s northern border has to be recognized as an act of solidarity with the suffering population of Gaza. Bush and Blair’s various pronouncements about road maps to peace have proved to be nothing more than empty political posturing. If the West lacks the will to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it will necessarily be left to radical Muslim movements to fill the vacuum. Little wonder that 82% of those polled by AOL this week believe that the conflict will engulf the Middle East.

Animal Welfare

2006-06-11T00:34:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago a young man was mowing hay on the family farm. About to make the last two cuts in the centre of the field, he checked to see that all wildlife had escaped the area. He failed to notice a brown hare crouching in the golden grass. And his last sweep with the tractor mower severed the hapless animal’s legs. The hare lay writhing and screeching in agony until the youth, unable to bear that sight and sound, took a spade from his tractor and with a single blow killed the animal. He was overwhelmed with a sense of loss and grief, remembering that it was only a couple of decades earlier that the men had hand mown the hay with huge hand scythes and how much more protective of wildlife that mowing had been compared with contemporary intensive farming mechanisation.

One of the documentaries as part of a week long series on climate change from the BBC last week, featured David Attenborough, the doyen producer of all those brilliant nature programmes which have brought oceans, deserts, forests, mountains and an incredible range of animal life and behaviour into our living rooms. Through his passion for wildlife many of us have watched spellbound as he has revealed to us the way that great apes fashion and use of tools, male seahorses give birth to the their young, and the complex community life of those lovable meerkats. An old man now, Attenborough has undergone a conversion. His engagement with so many features of life on our planet has made him aware of the catastrophic effects of global warming. He expressed regret that even the very making of his wonderful programmes, through its consumption of fuel and other resources has contributed to the crisis of the animal kingdom to which he is so obviously committed.

The issue of animal welfare was the subject of another news item this week. For several years now Oxford University has been trying to complete a new building to house its extensive animal testing programme. The building programme has been subject to widespread disruption by demonstrators opposed in principle to testing new drugs and medical procedures upon animals. The opponents’ sustained and very effective campaign led Oxford University to some time ago seek an injunction limiting protests. Last week the University applied for an additional injunction to further limit protest activities in the city. The injunction was granted even though it places severe limits upon Britain’s long protected rights of protest. It seems bizarre that the rights of humans should be curtailed in order to help promote the allegedly cruel treatment of other species which evidently have no rights.

One of Oxford’s eminent scholars, brain scientist Professor Colin Blakemore, head of the Medical Research Council, who is an outspoken supporter of animal testing, buoyed perhaps by the University’s success in legally limiting opposition to testing, proposed that the eight year old British ban on using apes for medical testing, should be lifted. Admittedly Professor Blakemore was cautious in his advocacy of relaxing the ban, arguing that in the case of a massive pandemic, it might be essential to experiment upon apes which share 96 per cent of their DNA with humans. But still he would like to see Britain join those nations, Japan, the United States and the Netherlands, which permit medical experimentation upon great apes.

Sir David Attenborough was among those who responded in opposition to the use of apes in invasive medical research. The conservationists’ arguments are that the apes share with us characteristics such as compassion, empathy, self awareness and a sense of mortality which we regard as fundamentally human. Their social, mental and emotional similarities to us, along with their incarceration in cages in medical laboratories raise fundamental moral questions. Given that the UN Environmental Programme has concluded that all great ape species are facing the probability of extinction within the next fifty years, our focus surely needs to be on ensuring their survival rather than hastening their demise.

Another Oxford academic with very different views from those of Professor Blakemore, is Professor Andrew Linzey who holds a post in Ethics, Theology and Animal Welfare, the first of its kind. The writer of many books including Animal Theology, Linzey is concerned with the way that humans relate to animals arguing that while animals are an integral part of God’s creation, historically Christianity has failed to address practically and theologically how animals should be treated. Far from being a maverick, Professor Linzey stands in an honoured theological and historical tradition which sees concern for the animal kingdom as springing from the very fundamentals of Christianity. As Cardinal John Henry Newman put it 150 years ago “Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God”. Thus in his book Christianity and The Rights of Animals Linzey argues:

"Since an animal's natural life is a gift from God, it follows that God's right is violated when the natural life of his creatures is perverted. Those who, in contrast, opt for the welfarist approach to intensive farming are inevitably involved in speculating how far such and such may or may not suffer in what are plainly unnatural conditions. But unless animals are judged to have some right to their natural life, from what standpoint can we judge abnormalities, mutilations or adjustments? Confining a de-beaked hen in a battery cage is more than a moral crime; it is a living sign of our failure to recognize the blessing of God in creation."

Linzey promotes a theology of creation which as he puts it “rejects the idea that the rights and welfare of animals must always be subordinate to human interests, even when vital human interests are at stake”. This is for him the fundamental moral issue. He insists that the “Christian paradigm of generous costly service” should be applied not only to human society but to the entire natural world. He further argues that Christians who claim to model their behaviour on that of Jesus Christ should, in the exercise of human dominion over creation, follow the example of Jesus in whom we see power expressed as powerlessness, and strength expressed in compassion.

The building of Oxford’s new laboratory for animal testing is justified by many on the grounds that without it, medical research which will benefit humans will be set back decades. Professor Linzey maintains that the Christian Generosity Paradigm, means “that humans must bear for themselves whatever ills may flow from not experimenting upon animals rather than sanction a system of institutionalised abuse”.

But it’s not only the issue of animal testing which is of concern, for across the globe intensive mechanised farming and forestry is doing untold damage to wildlife habitats. As it is the case that one person’s death diminishes me, so the needless destruction of natural life, diminishes the beauty and integrity of creation. And in case you’re still wondering who the youth on that hay mower all those years ago was, that was me.

Iraq Revisted

2006-06-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

Matthew Herbert is a British pop musician, better known as Dr Rockit, who delights to meld pop with politics and creates music which makes unusual connections between apparently unrelated things, like battle tanks and food. In an interview published last weekend the musician says:

“There’s a war on imagination at the moment led by the US government, a war against imaginative and complex responses to things. There were imaginative and complex responses to the Iraq situation from everyone from church to academics, but they chose to ignore them and go to war. Mind you, in one way you have to admire Bush. He is actually himself a radical and imaginative president. He’s imagined the world as a worse place, and made it so”.

The simplistic world view that Bush and Blair have embraced not just in Iraq itself but in terms of international security, becomes daily more of a nightmare. Last week two UK national dailies front-paged the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The Independent instead of the usual front-page picture carried the following text in large letters: “Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale. The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s”. The paper’s editorial, noting that 1.85 million Iraqis have been issued with passports over the last ten months, highlights the ‘brain drain’ as middle-class Iraqis emigrate. It also opines that the presence of Coalition troops is making no difference, and the question of whether troops leave or stay is no longer relevant to the unfolding civil war.

The same day’s Guardian took a similar view. With reference to the swearing in of a government of national unity in Baghdad, the front page says, “much will be made in London and Washington of the fact that this completes a democratic transition that began in December with the election of its parliament. But the reality encountered during three weeks behind the barricades of Baghdad’s increasingly bloody sectarian conflict has more in common with the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Balkans than the optimistic rhetoric to be heard on the manicured lawns of the embassy compounds and in western capitals”. Inside the paper, a two-page spread documents the horror of Iraq’s ‘hidden war’.

Yet still Bush and Blair want to assure us that things are under control and that progress is being made. But both were discomforted during this week’s summit in Washington where Blair did not pick up his Congressional Medal of Honour awarded to great applause in 2003. The fact is that had he accepted it and further demonstrated himself to be the lackey of US foreign policy, his days as Prime Minister, already numbered, would have been dramatically foreshortened. Both men religiously recited their mantra about ‘democracy’ with Blair adding that he had arrived hotfoot from Iraq where he had seen “a child of democracy struggling to be born”. Both are seemingly oblivious to the way that what they understand by democracy has unleashed a reign of terror and oppression, which matches anything that Saddam managed to achieve in that arena. The Bible’s description of the sequence of events in this kind of tragedy is ‘sow the wind; reap the whirlwind’.

Yet both men, for the first time acknowledged that mistakes had been made. With the ratings of both of them being so low in the polls of their respective nations, deep down they must realise that the game is up, and that all they can do is to salvage what is left of their reputations. George Bush admitted that his “tough talking” and his taunting of Osama bin Laden were mistakes but, clearly trying to apportion more serious blame elsewhere, said he thought the greatest mistake had been that of abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. Tony Blair admitted that they had underestimated the challenges that the invasion would throw up, and in an apparent criticism of US policy said that it had been a mistake to have barred members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party from government after the fall of Baghdad. He thus echoed what a number of pundits have said: that the Ba’ath Party managed to foster the most secular regime in the Middle East and could have played a vital role in preventing the current descent into sectarianism. But both men however, must now be aware that the fundamental mistakes were to invade Iraq in the first place and to try to justify invasion on the grounds of the detection of weapons of mass destruction, rather than being honest about the real objectives, the securing of oil supplies and execution of the policy of regime change.

As I write, news of the death of more British soldiers has been broadcast and the investigation into the massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha by American troops revealed. Lest we forget Afghanistan and the continuing fight against the Taliban, there have been riots on the streets as news broke that an American army convoy had killed a number of civilians. John Simpson, the BBC’s senior political journalist appeared on TV news today to announce that fifty people have died in Iraq today. That includes soldiers, journalists and civilians. According to Simpson the situation is daily getting worse, but the West appears to have lost interest in what is happening.

Only Bush and Blair seem to have a heart for this war. Yesterday’s TV news highlighted an organization established by British soldiers opposed to the war which is hourly receiving e-mail and telephone calls from combatants who no longer believe they are fighting for a just cause. To date over one thousand British soldiers have deserted and 800 of those have not been tracked down. When those on the ground can no longer commit to the battle, it is left to the leadership to perform absurdly the roles they believe history has conferred upon them. Meanwhile hundreds of civilians die because of the hubris of ideologically driven political leadership and we are left to beg the question of whether the current violence, oppression and ethnic cleansing in Iraq is not every bit as oppressive and dehumanising as that perpetrated by the former Ba’athist regime?

Codes and Conspiracies

2006-05-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

In his Easter Day sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a veiled reference to the media frenzy which The Da Vinci Code has prompted, warned people against participating in the plethora of conspiracy theories in which contemporary society tends to delight. I was one of that post-War generation brought up to believe that our national leaders were trustworthy and morally upright people, and that the policies and programmes of government were accountable and transparent. When I went to university in 1956 to study history and politics these views were hardly challenged, apart of course from learning about wicked old Machiavelli and the corrupt nature of politics in mediaeval and Catholic Italy. But he of was a foreigner, and the British don’t behave like that! I considered myself to be a child of a much more enlightened free and democratic polity immune to political conspiracies.

My disenchantment began when undertaking postgraduate studies in the USA during the Viet Nam War, where it became apparent that the leadership of the so-called Free World was manipulating the media to obscure the truth of what was happening. They justified it later as necessary propaganda to keep up the morale of the nation. Since then experience has taught me to be increasingly distrustful of politicians and the way they handle information. Lately, with both George Bush and Tony Blair having been economical with the truth about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq, and with the securing of oil supplies and ‘regime change’ now apparently having been the true motivations for the disastrous war in Iraq all along, who can blame a sceptical public for being acutely aware of conspiracy theories? They are of the essence of the way we are governed today.

The release of the film of The Da Vinci Code this week has prompted a flurry of media attention. There have been countless TV documentaries looking at aspects of the background to the novel, from the non-Canonical Gospels, to the Knights Templar, to the Roman Catholic society Opus Dei. There has been a flood of letters to the editors of newspapers, and a spate of organizations springing up to persuade people either not to see the film at all, or to employ its ‘false teachings’ as an opportunity to proclaim the True Faith. Typical of these ad hoc groups is the US based Interfaith Coalition Against the Da Vinci Code which maintains that the book and film defame Jesus Christ, undermine people’s faith in the Church, and celebrate paganism and satanic rituals.

There appears to have been a sea change in the Roman Church’s perspective on the film. With that Church, particularly in Italy, initially taking an extremely negative attitude with one Cardinal urging Roman Catholics to boycott the book and the film, the Church now seems to have succumbed the view that any publicity is good publicity. It is now being suggested that the controversy the book and film have aroused present a wonderful opportunity to set the record of Jesus straight and to proclaim the orthodox position that he lived and died a chaste and celibate man. English critic A N Wilson, a former Anglican ordinand, sees this as a crucial moment in the Church’s history and suggests, I suspect rather tongue-in-cheek, that the Church has been forced into the position of making a forceful response, otherwise its authority will be eroded for ever. Even Opus Dei, that conservative and largely secret organisation upon which The Da Vinci Code’s Priory of Sion is allegedly based, is admitting that what was originally taken to be negative publicity has had the beneficial effect of making the organisation much better known and even attracting people to joining it. So much for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s warning that we should be wary of conspiratorial theories and organizations. Apparently ever more of us are rushing to embrace them.

All this publicity may have placed the Roman Catholic church centre stage but by no means all publicity this week has been good publicity. Firstly came the news that the Vatican will continue to keep a tight lid on historical documents from the Pontificate of Pius XII, of whom it is alleged that he appeased the Nazi regime. The argument that the Church does not engage in secrecy and conspiracy instantly evaporated. Then Tony Blair, having been forced by his image as a lame-duck Prime Minister to make a radical reshuffle of his Cabinet, filling it with loyal Blairite New Labour supporters, has moved prominent Opus Dei member, Ruth Kelly from Education to a portfolio which embraces issues of equality and inclusion. Tackled by reporters eager to expose her conservative religious views, she consistently refused to say whether gay and lesbian citizens should be afforded equal treatment. Nor would she say whether homosexuality is a sin, although her Church teaches it is more than just a sin, rather a disorder and “tendency towards intrinsic moral evil”. The media was quick to point out that Ruth Kelly has absented herself from all Parliamentary votes on gender and sexual orientation issues including the controversial new legislation approving civil partnerships. She maintained under questioning that her personal religious views were not carried over into her government work. Given that one of the basic tenets of Opus Dei is that members must reflect their Christian convictions in their work and workplace, this has placed her in an untenable situation and there have been calls for her resignation.

The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy O’Connor, tried to support Ruth Kelly’s position by insisting that the Church had always had an inclusive view of homosexuality. This prompted a flood of letters to the papers, especially in The Times, from people who posed such questions as whether it is possible for a person who believes homosexuality to be morally evil to honestly defend the rights of gay people. And the Cardinal’s intentional language was a few days later betrayed by his personal behaviour when it was revealed that his one-time Press Secretary had been dismissed from his post on the grounds that he was gay and that it was not appropriate that a gay person should hold such a post within the Roman Catholic Church. Such highhanded behaviour within church circles which patently pay no respect to inclusion or rights continues to fuel the beliefs that first, the Church is a very secretive organization, protective of its image, and secondly that there is an enormous gulf between what it says and what it does. And this is the stuff of which conspiracy theories are made.

Most of the reviews of the film of The Da Vinci Code are not very complimentary about it, and it may not achieve the blockbuster status of the novel. This fictional work does however prompt us to reflect upon the way that throughout history much of the Church’s life has been compromised by social and political conspiracies. We might join the Archbishop of Canterbury in wishing otherwise, but so long as we inhabit a political and economic culture which abounds in deceit, secrecy, crime, manipulation, propaganda, corporate raiding, asset stripping, industrial espionage and sleaze there is little chance that people will stop putting their faith in conspiracy theories.

A Meddlesome Priest

2006-04-30T01:45:00.000-07:00

“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” are words which Henry II is alleged to have used in reference to Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. They may well be words that have sprung to the mind of the present Archbishop of Canterbury as he contemplates the role that Lord Carey of Clifton, his predecessor as Archbishop, has been orchestrating for himself in the Anglican Communion. Everyone is aware of the precarious position that Archbishop Rowan Williams is in as he tries to hold the Anglican Church together in it's struggle to resolve enormous internal tensions. His leadership has been consistently undermined by Lord Carey, who in his retirement has been offering comfort and support to dissatisfied evangelical Anglicans. Many conservative American Anglicans, openly disparaging the efforts of Rowan Williams, fete Carey’s visits as if he were still the Archbishop.

Lord Carey’s leadership as Archbishop helped create the turmoil that has engulfed the Communion. It was for example, his personal intervention during the last Lambeth conference that helped engineer the resolution on human sexuality that has split the Church. His appointment to Canterbury from being Bishop of Bath and Wells was unanticipated, and rumour at the time had it that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, when handed the traditional list of two names, was so ideologically opposed to the first and obvious name, allegedly that of the then Archbishop of York, that she plumped for Carey. The new Primate, a novice to the international politics of the Anglican Communion, set about promoting his evangelical agenda which included his over-hyped announcement of a Decade of Evangelism. Far from revitalising the Church of England’s fortunes, this mammoth effort saw membership of the Church fall below 1 million for the first time. It also spawned an air of conspiracy amongst the bureaucrats of Church House who would publicly proclaim the decade to be a success despite their private knowledge that it was a singular failure.

When the time came for Archbishop Carey to retire, he did this less than gracefully with the press highlighting his attempts to manipulate the situation to ensure that his successor was someone of whom he approved and who would build upon his evangelical legacy. The one person he didn’t want to succeed him appears to have been Rowan Williams, a hero of the liberal wing of the Church. Again the press suggested that there was a feud between the two men, dating from Carey’s blocking of a proposal that Williams, at the time Bishop of a Welsh Diocese, should be translated to the English diocese of Southwark.

In his retirement, Carey has consistently proclaimed his ministry to be that of a reconciler. His actions say otherwise. Some will excuse those actions as being naive. But it is difficult to believe that a person who has held such an important and demanding post as Archbishop for such a period of time, did not developed a certain sophistication when it comes to Church politics. The consequences of his behaviour will not have gone unconsidered. So we must assume his actions to have been deliberate. Amongst the many examples of his meddling, several stand out.

Firstly there was his widely reported lecture at a College in Rome in 2004. Speaking it is to be noted on the eve of a seminar of Christian and Muslim scholars in New York led by Rowan Williams, he launched what the Telegraph called “a trenchant attack on Islamic culture saying it was authoritarian, inflexible and under-achieving”. He went on to criticise not only suicide bombers, but the absence of democracy in Islamic countries, and also suggested that Muslim faith and culture had contributed little of major significance to world culture for centuries. The timing of his lecture speaks for itself, and the thought that this intervention was intended to be a form of reconciliation defeats the imagination.

A year later The Telegraph openly voiced criticism of Lord Carey’s behaviour. An article on May 30th begins: “Lord Carey of Clifton seems unaware of the convention that former archbishops of Canterbury do not implicitly criticise their successors or interfere in ecclesiastical affairs. Either that, or he has decided to ignore it”. The particular reference is to a sermon Lord Carey preached in London in which he argued that the Church of England should appoint bishops who have worked ‘at the coalface’ (presumably like he himself had done in Durham), rather than those who have spent most of their lives as academics (which is in fact the case for Rowan Williams). The article goes on to criticise Carey for his perception of himself as “the Church’s Henry Kissenger, attending the Davos World Economic Forum and advising multinational corporations on ethical business practice”. It concludes by noting that in his retirement David Hope, Archbishop of York, has returned to the role of a full-time parish priest, and recommends that Lord Carey if he feels so strongly about ‘the coalface’ should similarly return to ‘digging’ rather than ‘stirring’.

A final example is but one of the many instances in which Carey has on his US tours aligned himself with self-styled ‘Orthodox’ Anglicanism as opposed to what they refer to as ‘Revisionist’ Anglicans. In March 2006 he wrote a letter endorsing a questionnaire seeking to revisit the issues of the election of a gay bishop and the advocacy of same-sex unions sent out by an Orthodox group to the US House of Bishops. Virtue Online, which purports to be the voice of Anglican Orthodoxy, reported that Carey “commended this initiative of concerned lay Episcopalians who wish their church to remain faithful to Orthodox Christianity”. Carey is entitled to his views, but seems oblivious to the boundaries he is traversing, and to the fact that his American followers increasingly regard him as an alternative centre of unity for the Anglican Communion.

This week’s religious news in the UK press has focussed upon a letter initiated by a friend of mine, the Revd David Wood who is a priest in the Australian diocese of Perth and to which clergy around the world, myself included, have become signatories. It is an open letter to Lord Carey asking him to observe the conventions of being a retired Archbishop and to stop interfering in the affairs of the Anglican Communion. Responding in a radio interview Lord Carey claimed that his actions have been misunderstood and that the signatories of the letter should have first approached him to establish the facts of the matter. But the facts are that he has clearly and deliberately set out his stall in opposition to Rowan Williams and expresses no apology for doing so. In the interview he urged the signatories of the open letter to reflect and repent, exactly what the open letter is urging him to do. Meanwhile he continues to serve unapologetically as an advocate for those determined to create division within the Church, all the while proclaiming himself to be engaging in a ministry of reconciliation.

Memories of Cuba

2006-04-23T01:41:00.000-07:00

In this year which marks the eightieth birthday of two world leaders: the British Monarch and Fidel Castro, I chanced upon an article by Richard Gott, author of Cuba: A New History. Gott argues that the legacy of Castro’s revolution depends upon its constant reinvention and paints a picture of a man cast not so much in the mould of an ideologically driven communist bureaucrat, but in that of a leader who has been able both to accommodate and promote change. Castro’s political life was launched when as a middle-class law student he became president of Havana University’s student union. He would subsequently become first a revolutionary guerrilla with the dream of creating a new society, and after the revolution had succeeded and the USA had placed Cuba under an economic embargo through which it hoped to strangle the country into submission, he retrospectively adopted a Marxist-Leninist stance which endeared him to the Soviet Union and ensured a basic level of economic survival. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and some extremely difficult economic times, with Cuba’s economy today recovering, he still describes himself as essentially a socialist and even as a green campaigner. His revolution, constantly innovative, serves as a model for other poor Latin American countries and as testimony to the inability of its USA neighbour, a mere ninety miles away, despite being the most powerful country in the world, to consign Castro and his revolution to oblivion.

The article reminded me of my own visit to Cuba in November 1979 as a participant in a World Council of Churches’ consultation “Education for Development: Action for Justice”. In those days one of the two air routes into Cuba was via Mexico City, and because of a national strike by airport workers, I had to spend a few days in that city waiting for flights to resume. One of the guests at the hotel was an American who had arrived in a big black limousine accompanied by several bodyguards in black suits and sunshades and a bevy of beautiful young women. I imagine he was a mafia boss, and when one evening I was invited to join him at the bar and told him I was en route for Cuba he became practically apoplectic and raved on about ‘those commie sons of bitches’. He told me however, that he had been speaking to Washington that very week, and that the American administration had assured him it already had boys working in Cuba to engineer the collapse of the Cuban regime and that the country ‘would go democratic before the year’s end’. He clearly hankered after pre-revolutionary Cuba which had become under mafia domination a centre of widespread and often illegal business in drugs, booze, money-laundering, gambling and prostitution. One of the worst examples of American imperialist sentiments, the country was awash with money going into the pockets of a few while the majority of the indigenous population lived in poverty.

I won’t pretend that Cuba in 1979 was a paradise on earth, but compared with other Third World countries I and my colleagues at the consultation were familiar with, Cuba had made extraordinary progress in terms of providing for its citizens’ basic needs in social housing, superb medical and hospital facilities and schools. For the week prior to our actual meeting we were guests of the government and travelled to a range of these projects, as well as to cooperative sugar farms and cattle ranches. And we met with various community organizations charged with the responsibility of defending the revolution. While we didn’t actually meet Fidel Castro himself, we did have meetings with the Minister for Higher Education and with the Secretary for Religious Affairs. In a country whose revolutionary achievements were constantly under attack from its powerful neighbour, we were conscious of the propaganda battle being waged both by Cuba and the USA. The important thing was we were conscious of it!

When on my return to New Zealand I was asked what had most impressed me about Cuba, amongst the many good things I had seen one struck me particularly. That was the way in which an adult literacy project had been launched and staffed from within the churches – Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Anglican (The Roman Catholic church was still at that time involved in its ridiculous charade of being persecuted by the State and driven into silence). With seventy-five percent of the Cuban peasantry illiterate, volunteers from the churches, most of them young people, went out into the countryside to share the lives of the poor, and to teach them to read and write. To this day UNESCO rates this as one of the most effective literacy campaigns ever to have been conducted. The real significance for me lies not in its measurable success, but in the way that these churches understood that the revolution was initiating positive changes for the Cuban people and they wanted to make a significant contribution towards the revolution rather than to be perceived as resisting it.

In two very important ways my visit to Cuba has had a profound impact upon my life. The first relates to my political analysis. My experience in education for development had made me acutely aware of the way in which market-driven capitalism with its ‘trickle-down’ theory was a major obstacle to development. But I voiced also lots of questions about the way that the Cuban revolution was being institutionalised and how, following institutionalisation, the almost missionary fervour of the revolution could be maintained. Cuban ideologues were clearly uncomfortable with my persistent questioning and it all came to a head when one Cuban official told me: ‘You have as many questions to voice about socialism as you do about capitalism. You are an obstacle to the Marxist-Leninist revolution. You are an anarchist’. My initial reaction was one of bemusement, but I subsequently thought that if that is how people see me, I’d better find out more about this anarchism. I embarked upon a programme of reading, and quickly discovered strands of anarchism which had developed in Christian thought and practice from the Middle Ages onwards and which continue now to inform my political perspective.

Secondly, when worshipping in Cuban churches I became acutely aware of the way in which sermons were couched within what I perceived to be Marxist categories and constructs. Was this not a form of political domestication of the Gospel? It was only upon my return home, when I began analysing sermons there more consciously that I became aware that in my culture, the Gospel had equally been taken captive by capitalism. Thus began a period of study, reflection and teaching which continues to this day.

That uniquely Latin-American forms of socialism are alive and well today can be gauged by the level of hysteria that emanates from President Bush and his cronies. Having singularly failed to discredit Castro and the Cuban revolution, America views the growing current leftist mood in Latin–American politics with alarm. And Fidel is for Latin Americans as Richard Gott puts it, ‘one of their most popular and respected and figureheads, recognised by new generations as one of the great figures of the twentieth century’. Happy birthday Fidel .

The Rehabilitation of Judas

2006-04-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve always had rather a soft spot for Judas Iscariot. Given that Jesus had indicated that he was travelling up to Jerusalem where he would be betrayed and, having reached the city, making it clear that the betrayer would be one of his trusted inner circle, the Bible account suggests that the betrayal of Jesus was an essential element in God’s master plan for the salvation of the world. It seems rather ungracious of the Church to have vilified Judas for his pivotal role in the drama of the Passion down through the centuries. Had Judas not fulfilled the role prophesied for him, we might still be awaiting salvation!

The Bible attributes the basest of motives to Judas. On the one hand we are told that the Devil had put it into his heart to betray Jesus, and on the other much is made of his initial acceptance and later rejection of the blood money, those infamous thirty pieces of silver. When I studied theology in the revolutionary days of the 1960’s some biblical scholars were arguing that Judas’s real motives may have been entirely honourable in that he was a member of the revolutionary Zealot movement, which wanted to see the end of Roman occupation. Judas wanted to crystallise the revolutionary moment by provoking the arrest and trial of Jesus whom he regarded as King of the Jews and the focal point for Jewish resistance to the Roman state. That seemed an entirely feasible argument in those days when the politicisation of Christianity into anti Viet Nam war and pro Civil Rights movement stances prompted a radical re-examination of scripture.

It seemed appropriate that during Holy Week when the events of the final week of Jesus’s life are dramatically re-enacted in the Church’s liturgies, that Judas Iscariot should feature in the media headlines. This time it was because of the publication of the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, an ancient text which purports to give Judas’s side of the story. The history of the discovery of the papyrus, the damage it suffered and its patient reconstruction, reads like a mystery story. Scholars date it to the third century, although because it is mentioned by Irenaeus in 180 AD it must have been written prior to that and its suggested date is between AD130 and 170. This restored version is assumed to be a third century Coptic copy of the original work.

The discovery of new Gospels, albeit fragmentary, is not unusual. Scholars suggest that there are some fifty works which purport to be Gospels, and that 21 of these can be dated to the first and second centuries. Some works that have been cited by others seem to have totally disappeared. The Gospels of the Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus are cases in point. But others have been reconstructed so that we now have substantial parts of, for example, the Gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Judas Iscariot.

If there are so many Gospels around, why does the Bible contain only the four familiar ones? The history of the early years of Christianity is characterised by debates and contestations over what could and could not be defined as orthodox Christian beliefs and doctrines, with the losers of these debates being declared heretical and excluded from the Christian community. One of the key tests of orthodoxy was to do with the writings about Jesus and the early Church which could be regarded as authentic. Various councils of the Church like that in Rome in 382, Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 and 419, reached decisions on which documents would thenceforth be regarded as comprising the canon of Scripture, and which were unacceptable. Among the criteria used for reaching that decision were whether the book had been prepared by an Apostle or under the direction of an Apostle, whether the book was recognised and used by the Church, and whether the doctrine it embraced tallied with that of books already regarded as authentic. On the basis of these kinds of criteria there was no chance that declared heretical writings could be recognised as being within the canon.

One of the heresies proponents of Christian orthodoxy were determined to reject was that of Gnosticism which laid claim to special or secret knowledge to which the adherent had access. The combination of Gnostic and Christian belief proved to be a heady mix, which the defenders of orthodoxy were determined to marginalize. And one of the tactics in achieving this was to ensure that Gnostic influenced writings like the Gospels of Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot would never be regarded as part of the canon. Despite this defeat, these extra-canonical books are still valuable insofar as they represent an alternative voice within the early Christian communities.

The Gospel of Judas Iscariot portrays him as a hero. Far from being the rejected disciple, he is the most trusted of the disciples to whom Jesus has alone given the inner secrets about the nature of the Kingdom. And far from betraying Jesus, Judas does exactly what Jesus expects of him. Jesus tells him that he will exceed all of the other disciples “for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me”. The Gospel suggests that by assisting Jesus to rid himself of his physical flesh, Judas becomes the instrument through which Jesus’s true spiritual self is liberated. And though he comes to an ignominious end, Judas’s role has been to sacrifice himself for his master. As Jesus puts it, “you will be cursed by the other generations – yet you will come to rule over them”.

It is amazing that Gnostic texts like these continue to pose an enormous threat to Christian orthodoxy. Orthodox Anglicans sent Bishop John Pritchard of Jarrow out to bat for them. “This document”, he said, “is an interesting piece of evidence about how one part of the early Church, in all its diversity, tried to understand Judas’s treachery, but it isn’t going to tell us anything more about either Judas or Jesus”. His sub-text appears to be that Christian orthodoxy must remain impervious to the challenge of diverse understandings.

The Vatican rolled out the biggest gun of them all, no less a personage than the Holy Father himself, both in his present role and his former, a noted proponent of orthodoxy. Preaching on Good Friday in the Basilica of St John Lateran, the Pope was clearly arguing against any rehabilitation of Judas. Reasserting the orthodox view, the Pope pictured Judas as a greedy liar whose lies had thrust his life into a downward spiral, and said of him “He became hardened, incapable of conversion, of the trusting return of the prodigal son, and threw away his ruined life”.

I’m suspicious of those who insist on defending orthodoxy at all costs. It seems to me that most of the problems facing both political and religious establishments these days derive from their commitment to the non-negotiability of orthodoxy. A good draught of heresy – religious, economic or political – is an excellent and necessary tonic for the closed mind.

The Power of Prayer

2006-04-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

I was reminded this week of Laurie Brown, who held the distinction of serving as Professor of Psychology at three Antipodean universities, and who in retirement became a teaching colleague and a delightfully entertaining friend in Oxford. A practicing Anglican he was primarily interested in the psychology of religion and wrote many books on the subject. I recall attending a lecture he gave on the psychology of prayer in which he examined a particular controlled experiment in which the researchers appeared to have discovered that prayer in certain circumstances is indeed efficacious. I also remember that he supervised the dissertation of a student in our Theology department who was the doctor for the Bahamas’ Olympic Team. This student argued in a most convincing way that pre-event prayers enabled his athletes to achieve much higher performances in their chosen discipline. So for fifteen years now my understanding of the outcomes of prayer has been heavily influenced by the notion that even science, that old adversary of theology, provided a degree of evidence of the power of prayer.

Yet I retain a certain personal ambivalence about the subject. On the one hand my experience as a priest has taught me that when it comes to prayer there are some mysteries which I am unable to explain rationally to people. I think of the occasions in my South London parish when people felt their home was possessed by the spirit of a departed family member, and how I was just as surprised and at a loss for an explanation as the family was when the Church’s prayers of exorcism were instantly and permanently effective. Of course I could offer the Church’s theological explanations as to the nature of spirits, why they sometimes become earthbound and how the rites of the Church enable them to make the transition to their intended abode. But I can’t begin to provide a scientific account of how that process works. The same can be said for my brief experience as a hospital chaplain, subsequently confirmed by many priest friends, of the efficacy of the rite of anointing the sick with holy oil with on occasion, apparently miraculous reversals of disease which the medical profession is unable to explain. Here again one can provide a theological explanation but not one to always satisfy the scientific mind.

On the other hand, there are forms of prayer, which I simply cannot abide. I’m referring to that free and informal style of intercessory prayer which involves continual use of the word ‘just’, as in ‘Lord, we just want to thank you, and we just want to bring before you. . .’. Some forms of this prayer involve a lengthy description of the state of God’s universe presumably predicated upon the belief that God has ceased to be omniscient and is no longer aware of what is happening in the world. Other expressions seem to have the objective of self-glorification with the ardent disciple earnestly impressing his or her personal piety upon the rest of the group. And at its worst it becomes a vehicle for sanctified gossip as in ‘Lord, we just want you to be with Tom and Mary whose marriage is breaking down’. For three years I was pastor for an ecumenical congregation greatly given to this means of communicating confidential information about other people, and I came to regard this mode of praying as an abuse of trust and at times, the victimization of persons.

This week one of my mature students, himself a priest, recounted a story about being in a clergy meeting where this style of prayer was being used and where it quickly became obvious that every member of the group was expected to contribute. There was no escape. So when his turn arrived he began as was expected, ‘Dear Lord, we just thank you for bringing us together this morning, and just bless you for all your gifts to us. We just thank you for giving us Jesus, and we just thank you too for his mother Mary’. Here he paused for breath and continued, ‘in honour of whom we say together, Hail Mary full of grace . . .’ as he launched into that time-honoured prayer which is a feature of catholic worship but anathema to many of an evangelical disposition. The serious point to this story is that it addresses what we might call a culture of prayer which is imposed upon all irrespective of one’s personal understanding or preferences. Of course it could be argued that most public prayer can be construed in the same way, although at least in most forms of liturgical prayer one is not being coerced into participating.

How effective then is prayer? People were shocked when a priest I know said that to his knowledge not a single intercessory prayer of his has yet been answered. In the church’s daily offices for example, I pray daily for peace, but all the evidence shows that the world is a less peaceable place now than when I began seriously praying fifty years ago. It’s got worse, not better. On the other hand there is a good deal of reputable scientific evidence affirming the power of personal prayer, those habits of mindfulness, of meditation or contemplation, and the use of spiritual exercises, in establishing a real sense of personal peace and equilibrium.

Scientific examination of the efficacy of intercessory prayer, praying for others, hit the news this week and prompted this reflection when the results of the largest ever study into the relationship between prayer and health were reported. This research suggests that rather than improving the condition of those who are ill, prayer may instead make them worse. The decade-long study in the USA, where, let me remind you, two thirds of the population claims to pray regularly, discovered that patients undergoing heart surgery did no better when prayed for by a group of people unknown to them than those who were in receipt of no prayers at all. On the other hand almost sixty percent of people told they were being regularly prayed for developed complications. One of the possible factors in this scenario may be, as one of the researchers explained, the impact upon a person about to undergo major surgery of being told they were being prayed for. This may have had the effect of reinforcing in the patient a sense that their condition was dire, and thus raising anxiety levels, which hindered their recovery processes.

As might be expected where matters of faith are concerned, religious groups quickly attacked the findings on the grounds that science is incapable of illuminating questions of personal religious faith. And of course some scientists weighed in as well arguing that the study trivialises religion, which seems to me to be more a faith statement than a scientific statement, and claiming that the research has to be suspect because the experiment did not trace and measure the amount of prayer the 1800 patients ‘received’, which is very much an argument from science.

That this piece of scientific research will not be the final word on the efficacy of prayer, we can be sure. Meanwhile I wonder whether intercessory prayer, like cigarettes, should now convey the warning that it may be a danger to health?

Siege Mentality

2006-03-26T04:27:00.000-08:00

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Reform Rabbi and Professor of Jewish Theology at Lampeter University who is a prolific writer on Jewish and Palestinian issues, has recently published a new work, The Paradox of Anti-Semitism. His thesis will shock many people, Jew and non-Jew alike because he argues that anti-Semitism has had positive effects which have ‘led to the enrichment of the Jewish heritage’. Anti-Semitism, which he clearly deplores, has caused Judaism to become introspective and this in turn has had the positive consequence of prompting Jews to value and reaffirm their traditions. The paradox he refers to is that without anti-Semitism, Jews may be unable to survive the conditions of the modern world. “Jews need enemies in order to survive”, he says and “in the absence of Jew-hatred, Judaism is undergoing a slow death”. Indeed he asserts that without anti-Semitism Jews may be doomed to extinction.

In an interview published in The Independent on Sunday, Cohn-Sherbok elaborated on this argument. The interviewer records the Professor’s views in the following way. “Historically it was the barriers imposed by anti-Semitism that helped Judaism survive. In the ghetto, Jews studied the Talmud, kept kosher and observed the commandments of the Torah. In earlier times, when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, it was the institutions that were created because the Jews had no homeland that bound them together”. The problems he identifies are those forms of assimilation in which Jews are accepted and valued, and in taking on the trappings of the host culture, lose contact with those essential observances and beliefs which make a person Jewish. He posits no solutions for this dilemma and indeed suggests there may be no ultimate answer. “If we’re hated we’ll probably continue as we did in previous centuries, and if we’re loved, we may be loved to death”.

Is the fact that many Jews now possess a homeland and are no longer forced to live in the Diaspora one of the causes of the erosion of traditional beliefs and practices? For one of my Israeli friends this was certainly the case. He was fond of saying that when living in his native New York he had constantly to be seen as being Jewish, whereas in Haifa there was no expectation that he be an observant Jew. But leaving the homeland question to one side, is it the case that in order to maintain their cultural, religious and political identity, Israeli Jews need to be hated by the world at large? If this is indeed so, it would go some way to explaining why the Israeli political establishment rejects international criticism of its human rights abuses in its treatment of Palestinians, and its employment of tactics which, while they cannot be described as ‘holocaust’, are certainly ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Friday’s Guardian carried two articles about the Israeli situation. One was news of a poll of attitudes amongst Israeli Jews which has exposed widespread racism. The poll reveals that two-thirds of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab; half would not allow an Arab into their home; 41% want entertainment facilities to be segregated; 40% say that the state should encourage Arab emigration; 63% consider Arab Israelis as a security and demographic threat; 34% believe Arab culture to be inferior to Jewish culture; and 18% said they experience hatred when hearing Arabic spoken. Commenting on these results Bacha Ouda, director of an academic centre opposed to racism said that in Israel “racism is becoming mainstream” and Taleb-el-Sana, an Arab member of Israel’s parliament said that while anti-Semitism overseas is greeted with a frenzy of Israeli denunciations, there is no will to address home-grown racism. Another Arab politician claimed that racism has moved from the streets into parliament where it is now an acceptable stance. If this endemic racism becomes as is likely, translated into even more separatist and repressive social, economic and political ‘solutions’ we will be confronted with an Israeli variation of apartheid. And perversely, the storm of overseas criticism that this would provoke would, if Cohn-Sherbok’s thesis is true, have the positive outcome of consolidating Jewish cultural and religious identity.

In the political comment section of the same paper, the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, commenting on last week’s bizarre Israeli raid on a Palestinian prison in Jericho, says that Israeli indifference to outside opinion reflects the ‘endlessly popular’ Israeli song The Whole World is Against Us. His view is that the liberal establishments of the West had a romantic view of the humanitarian and democratic socialist principles upon which the State of Israel was founded, and that this romanticism obscured the fact that the new State was necessarily predicated upon a form of ethnic cleansing which saw in Moshe Dayan’s famous words Jewish villages built in place of Arab villages so that “there is not one single place that did not have a former Arab population”. In other words, we of the West have through our false perceptions and lack of critical awareness have allowed the development of the Israel contra mundum mentality.

Of course the sad side of all this is the disastrous effects in terms of the health of the community, of the souls and of the minds of Israeli citizens. In another recently published book, The People on the Streets: A Writer’s View of Israel, Linda Grant describes a ‘bubble society’ in which life seems normal as long as one continues to live within the bubble. But beyond the bubble lies something else. Israel, she writes is “a society floating on boiling anger, fear, anxiety, post-traumatic shock, aversion, brutality. You saw it in the road rage, in the domestic violence, in the rape, the desire to build walls not just against suicide bombers but your own neighbours . . . Suspicion, fear, exploding psycho-dramas detonating whole families. I would be woken in the night by terrible screams, the raised voices of husbands and wives, the sound of objects smashing against walls, the police sirens. Or on the street, screeching tyres, sickening metal collisions, tirades of fury between drivers”.

She describes a society under siege, a society which is not coping, a society which cannot imagine an accommodation with its Arab citizens, a society which, as Cohn-Sherbok suggests, cannot afford to be accepted and loved without losing both its identity and its life. And that is a tragedy for all humanity.

On Forgiveness

2006-03-15T05:16:00.000-08:00

Forgiveness featured large in the media this week. Dear old Emily Bishop, doyen resident of Coronation Street, the UK’s longest running soap opera, had become a misery as she battled with her inability to respond positively to a plea for forgiveness. The gunman who had killed her husband forty years ago, having completed his prison sentence and become, like Emily, a pious Christian, had returned to the Street in search of her forgiveness. As Emily relived traumatic past events, her bitterness began to dominate her life to the extent that she became a virtual recluse. Earnest conversations with her vicar who urged her to forgive fell on deaf ears and compounded her resistance and she abandoned the practice of her faith. There was to be a happy issue out of her affliction when in a face-to-face meeting with her husband’s murderer Emily summoned up from the depths of her alienation the ability to offer a kind of forgiveness. The release for both these deeply troubled spirits was instantly manifest.

I don’t know whether it can be called a case of life imitating art, but television news featured an item about the Revd Julie Nicholson, vicar of a parish in Bristol who has announced her resignation. Julie’s daughter Jenny, a talented musician, was one of the victims of the London bombings on July 7. In the interview, Julie said that she was unable to forgive the man who planted the bomb, and that she daily pronounced his name, Mohammad Sidique Khan, as a reminder of his crime. “I rage that a human being could choose to take another human being’s life”, she said. “I rage that someone should do this in the name of a God. I find that utterly offensive”.

Julie finds it impossible to express forgiveness and says she will leave the matter of forgiveness in God’s hands in whatever follows this life. But her inability to express forgiveness this side of the grave has raised both spiritual and theological dilemmas for her. “It’s very difficult for me to stand behind an altar and lead people in words of peace and reconciliation and forgiveness when I feel very far from that”, she says. Her bishop defended her resignation from parish ministry saying that while Jesus indeed urged his followers to forgive their enemies, Jesus also had hard words for a religious establishment that exhibited hypocrisy and inauthenticity. “People want clergy to be honest rather than hide the truth”, he said as he questioned whether the road to holiness did not in fact imply “being more fully human and honest”.

Julie could be said to have demonstrated great integrity. For years there have been calls for clergy, including bishops, who claim no longer to believe literally in key doctrines of the Church like the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, to resign their ministries. But this phenomenon of religious doubt has not stopped such people from daily practising the fundamentals of Christianity which give high priority to forgiving one’s enemies, forgiving people their trespasses. This may suggest that in the last analysis Christianity is primarily about the practice of compassion and forgiveness than about orthodoxy of belief. One of the many factors in the decline of religious belief currently is the image the Church projects of being far more concerned about pursuing obscure theological arguments which appear to have no relevance to contemporary life, rather than embodying those practices of human compassion and care which materially address for example, the crisis of world poverty. In resigning her post as vicar, Julie prompts each of us to consider the extent to which, in a religious or indeed secular sense, we are practitioners of what we preach.

Television also this week also brought us a series of three programmes in which Archbishop Desmond Tutu, drawing on the practice of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, hosted meetings between victims and perpetrators of the endemic violence in Northern Ireland. While that sad part of the United Kingdom stands in dire need of a process of this kind, one of its tragedies is that it possesses neither the imagination nor the willpower exhibited by South Africa to initiate a process of forgiveness and reconciliation. Instead it takes an individual from a distant country and the vision of the BBC to create this kind of opportunity for people to communicate with one another. One of the insights that the programme gave me was of the complexity and moral ambiguity of some of these situations, as in the section where a grieving widow confronted her husband’s killer who reiterated an argument frequently heard at the Nuremberg trials, that he was a soldier in an army fighting for Ireland’s freedom, who followed orders to remove nominated targets. I retain as well the image of that widow recoiling from the gesture of reconciliation offered by the paramilitary and fleeing the studio. Above all I have an abiding image of the diminutive prelate treating all participants with compassion and acceptance, listening carefully to their stories and declaring how humbled he was by the whole experience.

Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist, wrote that in the Tutu programmes there appeared to be subtle pressure placed less on the perpetrators to show contrition than on the victims to exercise forgiveness. In Christianity of course both these responses are sought, but Freedland raises the question of the extent to which in contemporary society forgiveness is regarded as a psychological term which, through expressing feelings of empathy or even love towards somebody who has hurt you, one is enabled to move on.

In response, Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Oxford dismissed the idea of loving the person who has harmed you or your family as morally perverse. Feelings of loss and anger cannot coexist with love, he says. Such an understanding of forgiveness is nothing more than “cheap Christian rhetoric”. For Giles Fraser forgiving a person is to vow that you will not retaliate in kind, not take revenge. This is a position I elaborated fifteen years ago in my book Freedom, Justice and Christian Counter-Culture. In the violent milieu of the culture in which Jesus lived, where every act of violence then and largely still today calls for retaliation and vengeance, Jesus’s admonition to ‘turn the other cheek’ makes a radical break with the spiral of retaliatory violence. The foregoing of retaliation is also an act of empowerment as we witnessed in the positive outcomes of non-violence in achievements as different as those of Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in the USA.

In the Coronation Street saga this is precisely what happened. Emily Bishop’s desire for revenge became her consuming passion and it was only when in a very dramatic scene she renounced revenge that she became free, and the gunman experienced forgiveness. They parted not as friends, nor with any commitment to ever meet again but as two human beings now able to live with themselves. I hope that the Revd Julie Nicholson watched that episode, and read Giles Fraser’s words in the paper, for both will help her appreciate that Christian forgiveness lies not in being forced to love the person who has wrecked your life, but in determining that you will never yourself retaliate to seek revenge or to respond violently towards another.

Seeds of the Earth

2006-03-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

My father was a great gardener who liked to keep the family supplied with fresh vegetables. Some thirty years ago, he ran into a problem. For many years he had grown a variety of runner beans which he reckoned to be the best. He harvested a few beans for seed each season, but this particular year he needed some extra seeds. When he tried to purchase them was told that they had been withdrawn from the market. Upon investigation he discovered that a number of ‘traditional’ varieties were no longer available through the seed merchants, who instead encouraged people to buy their new hybrid varieties, which were designed to produce well but if harvested, the harvested were sterile. From then on my father harvested plenty of seeds for the next season and I can remember the large purple-and-green mottled beans lying in a tray in our basement awaiting their spring planting.

My father had stumbled upon the early days of a project through which multinational companies would exert ever greater control over the ownership of the genetic base of seeds, would see many traditional varieties disappear, and remains with us today as the use of genetically modified crops. His harvesting of traditional varieties’ seeds and his willingness to share his saved seeds with family and friends gave me an idea.

I was at that time working for an ecumenical church agency which through development education was promoting issues of development, justice and peace. One of our international links was with a joint Roman Catholic and World Council of Churches agency SODEPAX established following the more ecumenical and development conscious encounters which emerged from Vatican II. This jointly staffed agency was prophetic to such an extent that it was far in advance of the thinking of its sponsoring churches, and as the Roman Catholic church retreated back into its traditional conservative mould, it was axed.

In the meantime a number of initiatives sheltered under its umbrella and my agency was happy to launch a project of its own. We had become aware that many farmers were becoming concerned about the unavailability of traditional seeds and the promotion of hybrid varieties. Then we came across a project which was launched in Canada. Calling itself Seeds of the Earth, it encouraged people to establish seed banks in which traditional varieties could be stored so that their genetic base was not forever lost. Amongst the alarming statistics they spoke about was the fact that of more than 300 varieties of corn that grew naturally around the earth, less than ten had survived into the mid nineteen-seventies.

So under the SODEPAX banner we launched a Seeds of the Earth campaign in New Zealand. I travelled to towns in the country’s farming heartlands amazed by the number of farmers who turned up to public meetings to discuss the issue. Many of them were already saving traditional seeds so required no convincing. I can’t say whether any community seed banks were established as a result of our work, but certainly public awareness of the situation was raised, and individuals took action appropriate to their circumstances. There were many testimonies to what was occurring in the industry shared at our meetings. I particularly recall a tomato grower describing how he was tied into one particular company from which he purchased his hybrid seed stock, the fertilizer to ensure strong growth, the sprays required to combat pests and blight, as well as the spray which turns green tomatoes red so that they can be ‘ripened’ overnight in order to meet market demands. And that company is one of the major oil companies which continues today to post some of the biggest profits of any multinational enterprise.

I was reminded of this small initiative when I read in this week’s news that British Government ministers are suggesting that the international agreement banning the most controversial of genetically modified crops be scrapped, and that crops be assessed on a case-by-case basis. The technology has become more complex and the problem more acute since our project in New Zealand, but still at its base lies the determination of large companies to maximise their profits. Today the discussion focuses on two kinds of technology. One is ‘terminator technology’ developed by the US Department of Agriculture in partnership with a seed company, which sterilises seeds so that they cannot be harvested and re-grown. Before being offered for sale the seeds are treated with a chemical which activates a gene to germinate normally first time around, but which subsequently prevents seeds of that crop from germinating. Then there is ‘traitor technology’ concerned with the trait of a plant in which the genes governing traits like germination and growth can only be activated when sprayed by a chemical which is of course, sold separately.

Environmentalists argue that through cross pollination, the ‘sterility’ of genetically modified seeds can easily spread to plants and crops which have not been subject to modification, thus destroying even more natural varieties while at the same time of course increasing the control of biotechnic companies over the seed industry. Now there is pressure orchestrated by the USA and involving Australia, New Zealand and Canada which are seen as pro-GM crop nations, to lift the moratorium imposed under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The Seeds of the Earth campaigns in Canada and New Zealand appear to have had no lasting impact upon government thinking.

While GM technology may suit the aspirations of these and other developed nations, if it becomes standard practice, it would have a disastrous effect on Third World farming and inevitably lead to increased starvation. One and a quarter billion poor farmers who rely on saving a portion of their crop for next season’s seed, would have to buy new seeds every year from biotech companies. Michael Meacher, the former Minister for the Environment in the UK who largely brokered the present UN Convention, said “For the first time in the history of the world, farmers would be stopped from using their own seeds”.

I read recently of a GM development which is destined to have a huge effect upon coffee producing countries like Kenya. A coffee bean has been modified so that the crop is of a uniform size and ripens simultaneously. This means that the crop can be totally harvested at one time, rather than picked over by workers over the course of the ripening season. Secondly, the crop can be mechanically harvested which makes the pickers redundant. That means greater profits for the biotech companies, the growers and the processors, but loss of jobs, incomes and dignity for a huge number of the world’s poor who already barely manage to survive.

Words Out of Season

2006-02-27T01:09:00.000-08:00

Some months ago I wrote about London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s late night verbal spat with an aggressive journalist who happened to be Jewish and which saw the Mayor under investigation by the Commission for Standards in Public Life (Standards in Public Life, October 22, 2005). I said then that this Commission looked like it had come straight out of George Orwell’s vision of a technologically repressive society in 1984. Non-British perspectives on British events interest me and this week a columnist in Al-Jazeerah wrote of the Mayor having “dared to insult a Jew. He neither referred to any Jewish characteristic the journalist may have had, nor did he refer to the reporter’s ethnic origin. The Mayor was just insulting a man who happened to be a Jew. In politically correct Britain this is unacceptable”. This week the three-man tribunal announced its finding that the Mayor’s behaviour was not consistent with maintaining standards in public life, suspended him from his job for four weeks from the beginning of March and hit him with costs of £80,000.

The brouhaha which has erupted following the Commission’s findings looks like knocking the Mayor’s behaviour into a cocked hat. Critics and friends alike have rallied to his support with much of the comment in the newspapers, whether of right or left wing sentiments, commenting on the impropriety of members of an unelected body having the power to remove a democratically elected politician from office. Many have pointed out that Members of Parliament who are regularly given to words and actions far more inflammatory that those of Ken Livingstone, may as a result of this judgment also find themselves victims of the Commission and suspended from office. The Mayor is to appeal the judgement to the High Court and commentators agree that there are very important political and democratic principles at stake here, and that it is ultimately the responsibility of London voters, if they really are all that concerned by the Mayor’s behaviour, to democratically remove him from office in the same manner as they put him in to office. Even Sir Anthony Holland, Chair of the Standards Board, has embraced the debate the Board’s decision has triggered, and says he would welcome changes to the way the Board polices the code of conduct in respect to elected representatives.

The mayor’s mention of the holocaust and insinuation that the reporter was acting so aggressively that his behaviour was akin to that of a concentration camp guard has been deemed to be offensive to all Jews. Some members of that community have labelled the mayor’s language as “anti-Semitic” although most Jews seem to have taken the more moderate line represented by a spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews who intimated on TV that their brief was not to punish the Mayor in the way the Commission has done, but merely to seek an apology or an expression of regret from him.

That there is a great deal of sensitivity about what one is free to say about Jews and the holocaust was again demonstrated this week when the erstwhile British historian and Hitler apologist David Irving was jailed for three years by an Austrian court for seventeen years ago in a lecture in Austria denying that the holocaust had ever taken place. Despite the fact that Irving claims to have revised this view, and his admittance on British TV covering his trial that millions of Jews had died in the gas chambers, he has been convicted for many years ago espousing a view that is abhorrent to most civilised people. The issue here is whether freedom of speech includes the freedom to promulgate ideas which the majority of people find abhorrent?

Both the British and Austrian instances indicate that we are moving on to dangerous territory here. It is almost as if it is now being implied that words like ‘gas chambers’, ‘holocaust’, ‘concentration camp’ and ‘Nazi’ provoke such a sensitive reaction amongst some Jews that they constitute anti-Semitic sentiments and must therefore never be employed in case they cause offence. This is beginning to look even more like 1984.

On Monday one of my friends, Canon Paul Oestreicher, had a comment published in The Guardian. Paul, a German émigré, lost his Jewish grandmother in the holocaust and records how as a child who had fled Nazi Germany for Britain he was the butt of anti-Semitic jibes. His family made their way to New Zealand where he was eventually ordained an Anglican Priest. Most of his ministry has been spent in the UK and probably the most significant aspect of that was when he joined Coventry Cathedral as a Canon and Director of its international ministry of reconciliation. Paul cherishes both his Jewish and Christian heritages and has consistently worked to bring about international understanding, reconciliation, justice and peace.

In his Guardian article which was addressing the British Chief Rabbi’s complaint over the Church of England withdrawing its investments in the Caterpillar company (See my Blog Poor Housing of February 11, 2006) Paul challenges the view that any criticism of Israel and presumably also of individual Jews is always anti-Semitic. He writes that he wishes to “nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel’s betrayal of its true heritage. When world Jewry defends Israel’s policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel but against all Jews. I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible”.

Paul tells me that the day following publication of his article, he received 250 E-mails from around the world, some of them as we might expect abusive, but many very positive. Meanwhile it looks as if the Ken Livingstone drama will move to the High Court which may well reach a conclusion about the propriety of an unelected body removing elected officials from office, but is unlikely to resolve what is my view is the more important matter of whether describing someone’s behaviour as akin to that of a concentration camp guard constitutes anti-semitism.

Guantanamo Bay

2006-02-18T08:55:00.000-08:00

Guantanamo Bay is never far from the headlines these days as European nations become increasingly concerned by allegations of torture of the so-called terrorists incarcerated there, as well as by the fact that there appears little willingness on the part of US authorities to allow those in custody to proceed to a fair trial.

The US facilities at Guantanamo Bay are themselves an anomaly. The base which covers 45 square miles was first established as a coaling station for American shipping in 1898 when the US seized control of Cuba from Spain following the Spanish-American War. The treaty signed at that time gave jurisdiction and control of the port to the USA while Cuba was recognised as retaining ultimate sovereignty. In 1905 following a Cuban uprising, the USA occupied Cuba for three years and the island became to all intents an American colony. An agreement in 1934 added a requirement that termination of the lease of the base requires the consent of both governments, or the abandonment of the site by the US. Under US influence the island became a haven for drug running, money laundering, prostitution, and other activities promoted by American gangsters, who because they were not on the American mainland were left relatively free by the authorities to pursue these interests. Fidel Castro’s retrospectively Marxist revolution put an end to all forms of American exploitation as it set about re-establishing Cuban identity and dignity. A series of tit-for-tat measures saw the American government establish an embargo upon all things Cuban in an unashamed and unsuccessful attempt to use economic muscle to re-establish US hegemony over the island and its people. The Cuban government continues to strongly denounce the Guantanamo treaty on the grounds that article 52 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties declares a treaty void if it was procured by either the threat or the use of force.

Given what has transpired at the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities one can only conclude that the transportation and imprisonment of US prisoners to Cuba from places as distant as Afghanistan and Pakistan was a cynical strategy because the lack of legal representation, the withholding of human rights and the torture of prisoners on such a large scale would not have been permitted on mainland America. The fact that Guantanamo is on foreign soil, and to the American mind what is even worse, communist soil, has rendered it less likely that American citizens would object to what is being perpetrated there.

This week however, the world’s condemnation of the Guantanamo Bay regime as one of the instruments of President Bush’s War on terror, became more strident. First there was the report issued by five inspectors for the United Nations’ human rights commissioner alleging that US techniques used on Guantanamo prisoners such as shackling, hooding, forcing detainees to wear earphones and goggles, unacceptable interrogation techniques and excessive violence used to force-feed prisoners who are on hunger strike were all unacceptable. True to form the White House’s press secretary dismissed the allegations as a “rehash of old allegations” and a discredit to the UN. Insisting that the prisoners were being treated humanely he added, “Remember these are terrorists”. This classification of people as “terrorists” rather than as “alleged terrorists” is a consistent ideological ploy of President Bush’s War on Terror. Everyone is regarded as guilty until proven innocent by judicial processes which are denied them. Even the UN’s General Secretary spoke out on this occasion, saying he was opposed to imprisonment “in perpetuity” and insisting that sooner or later the Guantanamo camp would have to be closed.

Meanwhile in the UK both the legal profession and the Church added to the controversy. A British Judge, Mr Justice Collins, hearing an appeal against the refusal of British ministers to request the release of three British citizens languishing in Guantanamo Bay, did not mince his words. “America’s idea of torture is not the same as ours”, he said, “and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations”. In speaking thus he was echoing the law lords judgement reached last year by Lord Bingham who, when at his home in Wales, attends our Cathedral here in Brecon. He judged that US techniques such as sensory deprivation and inducing a perception of suffocation, would be defined as torture in British law. And Britain’s Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith has insisted that the military tribunals Washington has proposed to try detainees within the prison at Guantanamo do not amount to a fair trial “by standards we would regard as acceptable”.

The real problem apparently is over the definition of what constitutes torture. As we might expect the Bush regime defines torture differently from Justice Collins’ civilised nations. The American administration’s understanding is a particularly narrow one establishing criteria of intense physical injury and organ failure. But as every schoolchild is aware, there are forms of physical torture which leave no scars, and forms of psychological torture which can ultimately be more damaging than physical measures. It is presumably on the basis of this narrow US definition that Secretary Condaleeza Rice can confidently assert that the US never engages in torture.

The newly installed Anglican Archbishop of York, once a victim of Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda was similarly outspoken. In an interview with The Independent Dr Sentamu urged that should the US fail to respond positively to the recent Human Rights Commission Report, then the Commission should take legal action against the US through the US courts, or the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The latter suggestion is a non-starter because isolationist America does not recognise the legitimacy of international courts. Dr Sentamu, in his earlier life a lawyer and a Judge, recommended also that the Commission should seek a writ of habeas corpus, to compel the US to bring the detainees to court to establish whether they have been imprisoned lawfully.

The Archbishop continued “The main building block of a democratic society is that everyone is equal before the law, innocent until proved otherwise, and has the right to legal representation. If the guilt of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay is beyond doubt, why are the Americans afraid to bring them to trial? Transparency and accountability are the other side of the coin of freedom and responsibility. . . . .The events of 9/11 cannot erase the rule of law and international obligations . . . . To hold someone for up to four years without charge clearly indicates a society that is heading towards George Orwell’s Animal Farm”. Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of South Africa similarly claimed that he was alarmed that arguments used to sustain the apartheid regime are now being used by the US to justify anti-terrorist measures.

Meanwhile British citizens are being tortured by Americans in Guantanamo Bay. One of them is a Moroccan, Ahmad Errachidi, who has been a cook in London for eighteen years. He was arrested in Pakistan and is said to have been sold to US forces. Held in solitary confinement for two years, the Americans accuse him of participating in a terrorist training camp in July 2001. There is both documentary and witness proof that he was working in a London kitchen at that time. My guess is that the Americans are reluctant to bring Ahmad and many of his fellow prisoners to trial because their innocence will constitute a further stain on that country’s already discredited system of justice.

Church Housing

2006-02-11T02:10:00.000-08:00

For a second week in a row the news transported me back to the late 1960’s when I served as parish priest in a deprived working class area of South London. This era was hailed as one of social progress (some considered it social engineering) as old three-storied slum housing was demolished to make way for vast new estates of buildings ranging from maisonettes to huge tower blocks. The architecture was modernist, the construction modular based on huge slabs of concrete fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Most parishioners were glad to move into a new home with all modern conveniences, despite some social drawbacks. The most controversial of these was that whereas three generations of a family could live together in the old housing, thus establishing a strong family identity and providing childcare facilities enabling young couples both to be employed, in the new provision, the grandparents were housed in designated housing for the elderly which could be some distance away from the rest of the family. In time some of the new housing would prove socially disastrous, and today most of the tower blocks celebrated in the sixties have been demolished to make way for user-friendly low-rise accommodation.

There was no private ownership of housing in my parish, or those that it adjoined. The major landlord was the local Council to whom the tenants paid their rent. The only other housing was in smaller estates provided by charities of which the Peabody Trust, the Guinness Trust and the Church Commissioners are the best known. The Church Commissioners are the body which includes parliamentary appointees, who manage the Church of England’s financial, business and investment interests.

In addition to being parish priest of St Christopher’s Church, I was also Warden of Pembroke House, a large building attached to the Church. The House and Church together constituted a mission founded by Pembroke College Cambridge in the nineteenth century, at a time when many Oxford and Cambridge colleges developed a concern for those living in abject poverty in the great cities. The principle of these foundations was to provide accommodation so that undergraduates could spend part of their time living amongst the poor and addressing their spiritual and social needs. A vestige of this practice still remained in the sixties, but more importantly, Pembroke House provided one of the rare places in which professional people like teachers and social workers who had a real commitment to the locality and wanted to share in the local community’s life could be accommodated. The only other possibility living out this kind of commitment was by renting accommodation in the nearby Church Commissioners Octavia Hill Estate.

This Estate, named after a woman who was a tireless worker for better conditions for the poor of this locality, has been in the headlines recently. The Church Commissioners have put the Octavia Hill Estate, along with several other estates in South London, up for sale. The Commissioners are arguing that they are not realising a sufficient profit on their investment in social housing, so want to sell out and invest elsewhere. The proposal has met with fierce local opposition, from existing tenants, from the local council and from Members of Parliament, including Simon Hughes who featured so prominently in last week’s blog. Local churches are also opposing the sale and I would like to think that the members of St Christopher’s church, in the spirit of some of our 1960’s campaigns, are just as involved today. When questions were raised in Parliament about both the Christian and social implications of the proposed sale, the response from one of the Commissioners was to suggest that the Commissioners needed to get the best return possible on their investments, so that they could continue to support provisions like the Clergy Pension Fund.

The Church Commissioners have had quite a chequered career in my time. It was while I was at Pembroke House that an enormous scandal developed around housing in Paddington which was one of the Commissioners’ investments. It transpired that this housing was in a ‘red light’ district and that many of the houses were being used as brothels. Such was the outrage that the Commissioners had to sell its Paddington houses and invest elsewhere, but controversy broke out again when several years later it was revealed that the Commissioners had invested in enterprises linked to armaments production. This raised further moral issues and prompted talk of the need for ethical investments. It would be several decades before the resistance of the Church Commissioners, who still maintained the argument for realising maximum profits, could be overcome and ethical investment became an acknowledged principle. There was an instance of this policy this week when the Commissioners announced they were withdrawing their £2million investment in the earthmoving equipment firm Caterpillar, because of the firm’s complicity in providing equipment to Israel to the detriment of Palestinian homes and lives. Despite some advances, a few years back the Commissioners became involved in an even greater fiasco, by investing in land near Ashford which they believed would be a prime development site when the channel tunnel project was realised. These development hopes were dashed, and the Commissioners lost hundreds of millions of pounds on the deal. It was this particular piece of mismanagement which so affected the stand-alone Church Pension Fund that today individual diocese are having to make an increasing contribution towards the support of their retired clergy.

The present controversy over the Octavia Hill Estate turns the spotlight once more on to the degree to which the Church should be involved in social housing as an aspect of its ministry of social justice. In one sense the Church in the UK is deeply involved in this kind of provision, both through the enterprises of individual parishes making land available for such developments and through the work of Christian housing associations, and this is to be applauded. The Commissioners’ proposals raise questions of a different order concerning the degree to which housing originally provided to address the needs of the poor should more than a century later be regarded primarily as a source of revenue for the Church.

The provision of low-cost housing in an age in which a spiralling market render it difficult for young couples in poor communities to secure decent accommodation is an almost universal phenomenon and it is a tragedy when the Church is seen to be contributing to this problem. Some years ago, when I was working in New Zealand, the appropriate use of some vacant land belonging to the Cathedral was debated in diocesan synod. The then Dean who happened to be Chair of World Vision which tries to address the issue of world poverty, argued against the site being developed with low-cost housing on the grounds that professional housing ‘would attract more cathedral-type people into the area’. How’s that for a symbol of the Church’s commitment to social justice?

Politics and Sex

2006-02-04T01:48:00.000-08:00

Politics and Sex have always been a heady mix. I still recall the great scandal of the 1960’s which, it was claimed, rocked the foundations of western society to their very core. John Profumo, by all accounts a gracious and charming man serving as the British Conservative Government’s Minister of War (this very designation being a product of the Cold War, but subsequently altered in line with later ideological priorities to Minister for Defence) was exposed as using the services of the same call girl, Christine Keeler, as a Russian named Eugene Ivanov, a naval attaché and spy. What state secrets might the Minister of War have whispered into Christine Keeler’s ear, which she may have subsequently whispered into Eugene’s ear? Profumo, having lied to Parliament about his relationship with Keeler, exited in disgrace, the butt of many anecdotes, and as I recall, the subject of an hilarious radio skit performed by Peter Sellers, Joan Collins and Anthony Newley, in which, to the background of opening and closing doors, frantic entrances and hurried escapes, Profumo and Eugene end up in bed together whispering directly into one another’s ears. Profumo incidentally, would late in life earn a degree of rehabilitation and win public recognition for his tireless voluntary work amongst the poor communities of East London.

A few years later, I would become parish priest in a very deprived area of South London which was solidly Labour in its politics. Our Member of Parliament was a conservatively-minded Labour politician named Robert Mellish who would serve in Parliament for thirty-seven years. Mellish was very much a local institution, known affectionately as ‘Our Bob’ and regarded as having the interests of the poor of Bermondsey at heart. Such was his influence and authority in the community that it was often sufficient to curb anti-social behaviour by threatening to report the matter to Our Bob. However, a decade after I left that parish the Bermondsey constituency was to become the battleground for another issue of sexuality and politics.

In 1983, disenchanted by the leftist lurch of the Labour Party under the leadership of Michael Foot, and having as it turned out being recruited by the Conservative Government to the Board of the London Dockland Development Corporation, Our Bob resigned thus forcing a bye-election. To the shock and horror of many of its constituents, the local Labour party selected Australian born Peter Tatchell, a young local activist who also happened to be gay, as its candidate. This prompted the most openly homophobic political campaigning in British history, with male supporters of the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, sporting badges saying ‘I’ve been kissed by Peter Tatchell’ and their electioneering pamphlets describing the Liberals as ‘the straight choice’ or asking ‘Which queen are you going to vote for?’ this latter sporting photographs of Queen Elizabeth and a made-to-look effeminate Tatchell. In an unprecedented reversal the huge Labour majority became instead a Liberal victory, which has turned out to be something rather permanent as Simon Hughes remains Bermondsey’s Member of Parliament to this day. And one of the great ironies of this piece of history is that Bob Mellish who actively campaigned against the Party’s candidate Tatchell because he way gay, and was a married man with a family of four, was later outed as bisexual and having himself pursued gay relationships.

Why drag up this piece of history today? Because the Liberal Party which these days call themselves the Liberal Democrats, are currently in the throes of selecting a new party leader and one of the leading candidates is Simon Hughes of Bermondsey. Indeed, many people considered him, on the basis of his exemplary parliamentary career and personal qualities, the front runner. But the Bermondsey campaign of 1983, has returned to haunt Simon Hughes and diminish his chances of securing the leadership. This turnaround was prompted by revelations that another of the candidates in the leadership stakes, Mark Oaten, married man, had been visiting a Rent Boy. When this news became public, Oaten withdraw his candidacy. Meanwhile it has long been rumoured that the unmarried Hughes is also gay, but until recently he has never publicly addressed that issue, claiming that politicians’ private lives must remain private. However, with the inevitable press references to his party’s tactics in the 1983 Bermondsey campaign, and the withdrawal of Oaten, he was placed on the spot, and in replying to questions from the press corps, he was initially equivocal in his responses, but later confessed to being bisexual and having had relationships with both women and men. Little wonder his ratings began to plummet.

So it was that last week, another piece of the jigsaw that has been described by one senior Labour politician as the ‘most wretched and hateful’ of political campaigns, fell into place. In Bermondsey in 1983 the gay labour candidate Peter Tatchell was pilloried both by the outgoing bisexual Labour stalwart Bob Mellish, and by the incoming admittedly bisexual and probably gay Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes. Well, well, isn’t political life full of sexual surprises!

And lest you should think that sexual shenanigans in politics are the preserve of the British, there was last week news of an equally bizarre public announcement from the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is gearing up for a general election in April. Arch-conservative and ally of Tony Blair, Berlusconi is frequently criticised for his intentional use of sexual innuendo and his recounting of sexist jokes. All this is ignored by the Italian Right because the Prime Minister is a staunch defender of ‘family rights’ and an equally staunch opponent of so called ‘gay marriage’, stances which endear him to the Roman Catholic community. At a political rally in Sardinia Berlusconi was blessed by TV preacher Father Massimiliano Pusceddu. In a grand political gesture the Prime Minister in return publicly promised ‘two and a half months of complete sexual abstinence until April 9’. This may not prove too difficult a task for a man about to turn seventy, but this piece of religious cynicism will no doubt capture a few extra votes. Personally I would regard it as a significant political act were he to abandon his intemperate sexual innuendo and sexism permanently, rather than forego sex for two months.

Creationism as Intelligent Design

2006-01-30T08:22:00.000-08:00

Just before Christmas, John Jones, a Federal Court Judge in Pennsylvania, reached an historic judgement. In response to a claim by parents of students at Dover High School, to the effect that a decision by the since ousted School Board to include intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution in the curriculum was unconstitutional, Judge Jones agreed.

The parents had argued that the proposal to raise intelligent design to the level of a scientific theory was a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution which prohibits the state establishment of religion. The Judge’s decision demonstrated beyond question that what its advocates refer to as ‘intelligent design’ is in fact a supernatural explanation of the natural world which relies on religious faith and asserts that the hand of God created our world. It is ultimately an attempt by creationists to obscure the religious basis of their intentions and to dress their religious convictions in the clothes of scientific theory.

Thirty other States are lining up to include intelligent design into the school curriculum so one suspects that Judge Jones’s ruling may not be the last word on the matter. His judgement nevertheless contributes an element of common sense to a debate which is not of interest to America alone, but to many other countries as well. Thus the debate about science and creationism has become a major issue for New Zealand, and it was significant that the New Zealand Herald’s sole editorial for Boxing Day addressed the US judgement and was headed “Intelligent Ruling on Creationism”. Like the USA, New Zealand was founded as a secular state in which religion has no official status, but New Zealand has on the one hand been far more strict in maintaining the separation of Church and State in the legislative process while on the other being far more liberal in allowing for example, schools to include prayers at morning assembly if that is consistent with the school’s ethos.

While Christian fundamentalists make a lot of noise in New Zealand, unless they elect a Christian fundamentalist party to power, they have no significant voice in government. At the last election under New Zealand’s system of proportional representation in which governments are frequently coalitions of parties, their representation in Parliament went from tiny to miniscule after the leader of the major Christian party was jailed for sexual offences. So the current situation that pertains in the United States, where there is ostensibly a separation between Church and State, yet through the Christian fundamentalist ascendancy within the Republican Party there has developed during the Bush presidency a virtual Christian fundamentalist State, is simply not possible in New Zealand.

The Herald editorial took the view that a victory for the creationists “would limit the horizons of Western civilization”. I imagine their argument is that the Enlightenment project with its gift of rational enquiry which has prompted the diminution of superstitious explanations for reality, would become fatally flawed, and human experience and progress retarded should the creationists have their way. Their long campaign through the US court system from the 1920’s onwards has revealed the objective of placing curbs on human knowledge and turning science into a religion. In the Pennsylvania case their submission was that intelligent design is a science even though it fundamentally contradicts scientific method. The Herald is encouraged that while the creationists may have had the better of the earlier court battles, the recent trends has been for the courts to have taken the view that creationism violates the constitution.

I have also followed the debate about evolution and creation within the UK closely. There it is a focus for serious academic debate and I have enjoyed reading books by one of the leading Oxford Darwinists, Richard Dawkins. His works can be at the same time compelling and irritating and in respect to one of his recent books, The Devil’s Chaplain, Richard Holloway, the retired Primus (Archbishop) of the Scottish Episcopal Church, declared that it ought to be required theological reading. There are extraordinarily poetic passages in Dawkins’ works, and I read him in the same way as I read the Bible, not as literally true, but as appealing to the human spirit, to our imagination, and to the power to transform our lives. But his Darwinian theories are no more ultimate explanations than the Genesis view that the world was created in six days. Paradoxically both are also ‘true’ in that they are true to the human quest for meaning in the world we inhabit.

I am encouraged by the Pennsylvania court case not because I believe that science can provide all the answers, for science has in my view significantly failed to provide for example, solutions to world poverty. Nor do I wish to deny genuine creationists the opportunity to freely propagate their views as there is no reason that high school students should not be encouraged to discuss the relative merits and disadvantages of creationism in their classes. But I am committed to an open society in which theories can be created, debated and tested, while as an anarchist I cannot ultimately subject myself to a theory. Such an act of subjugation would cede authority to something which may be fallible. Rather I affirm the words of Bukanin who said that he was a lover of liberty which is the only condition under which all latent human talents and attributes may be developed in their most complete form. And if you were to press me further I would offer an essentially religious allusion: that we have a model of humanity in its most mature form in the personality, intentions and actions of the man Jesus.

The Spoils of War

2006-01-21T00:04:00.000-08:00

In pre-modern society wars were frequently small-scale affairs in which one tribe or clan would do battle with another and the victor would ritually humiliate the vanquished, often by raping the loser’s women, and then march home with as much of the loser’s wealth and possessions as they could carry, the spoils of war. While the scale of warfare in our day has altered dramatically, the other features seem to have remained pretty much the same.

For those of us opposed to the war in Iraq, the catalogue of deceit and disaster seems endless: the faulty intelligence on which the US and its coalition partners justified going to war; the arrogance of their not bothering to secure United Nations support for the venture; the adoption of the moral high ground by morally bankrupt people; the failure to find amongst Saddam Hussein’s armaments a single weapon of mass destruction; the inordinate number of civilian casualties among the Iraqi population; the large-scale abandonment of the principles of the Geneva Convention; the dehumanising and violent cultures of US managed prisoner facilities in occupied territories at Abu Ghraid in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba; the use of white phosphorus gas against a predominantly civilian population in northern Iraq; the practice of ‘rendition’ – flying suspects via European communities without the latter’s knowledge, to foreign prisons where torture is permissible; the imposition of US instruments of democratic government upon a region and culture to which these are alien; and many, many more.

In our day, the concept of dividing up the spoils of war is equally complex. We witnessed the spectacle of governments supporting the Coalition bidding for lucrative reconstruction contracts, and we saw those governments jockeying to secure favourable positions in respect to the ‘safeguarding’, for which we should read ‘control of’ Iraq’s vast oil reserves. We learnt that one of the biggest players and beneficiaries in this field was the American firm Halliburton, long associated with Vice-President Cheney, another morally bankrupt action which confirmed for many that the primary motivation of the war was less the removal of one tyrant amongst many for the sake of world peace and prosperity, than the energy requirements to fuel the American industrial economy. And probably the most lucrative contracts of all will prove to be the re-arming of the new Iraqi forces, many of the weapons previously sold to the Saddam regime by the Americans having been destroyed by the Americans. When in the eighteenth century, at a time when the shape of warfare in Europe was shifting from private militias to national armies, William Blake declared that ‘war is the health of the state’, he was pointing out the political and economic benefits of warfare. Four centuries later it can be justifiably be argued that the economies of a significant number of industrialised nations are dependent upon the manufacture and sale of increasingly sophisticated weaponry – another aspect of the spoils of war.

Is there no crumb of comfort to be gleaned from this disastrous venture? Perhaps there is. We know that modern warfare is a complex phenomenon, with the battle being as much ideological as it is physical, and that in these circumstances the tools of propaganda become crucial. We are equally aware that in order to discover the truth of what is really happening on the ground, we need to look beyond the statist media which peddles official press releases and statistics, to alternative media organisations. Initially for many of us this proved to be al-Jazeera , the Qatar based Arabic organisation, which beamed to the world images of the war which the US and European media were not permitted to show us. This service, exposing the contrived nature of the Coalition’s propaganda, became such a thorn in the side of the Americans that as soon as the initial democratic Iraqi puppet government was set up, they had Al-Jazeera excluded from filming or reporting from Iraq. And it is now being reported in the media that President Bush even had plans to bomb al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, notwithstanding the fact that Qatar is an American ally, and notwithstanding the oft-proclaimed democratic principle of the freedom of the press.

It is often said that the Internet has democratised information. Anybody can say anything they like, and anyone can have access to it. This is perhaps less true than it was five years ago in that autocratic regimes are discovering ways of limiting or inhibiting citizen access to the World Wide Web. But certainly I am free to express my views about the war and to consult the numberless websites, personal and corporate, which also do so. Amongst these are the two hundred or so websites which US serving soldiers have set up as blogs or internet diaries and which they update directly from the battlefield via the Internet cafes which have been provided in virtually every American military camp. Whereas in previous wars soldiers would have their letters home censored and families would have to wait many months to receive them, now soldiers can address us directly and speak about their experiences and their hopes and fears for the war. Some of the soldiers record the details of incidents when they were under fire, others speak of a growing resistance in some quarters to the US operation.

Independent journalists are now able to scour these sources for stories. In fact the journalist who first aired claims that the US had used white phosphorus in the attack against insurgents in Fallujah is said to have discovered this information on a serviceman’s blog. The journalist also recorded that subsequently his source had been ordered to close his blog and not to send or reply to e-mails, and the army is becoming more strict in insisting on compliance with its policy memorandum on websites which requires soldiers to have official approval before starting internet postings. But such is the anarchic nature and the power of the Internet that some are willing to risk punishment in order to tell their truth.

So one good thing to emerge from this war may be the fact that war propaganda and media control can no longer prevent us from learning immediately and at first hand what is happening on the ground. This has to be good for humanity and for democracy in that propagandists can no longer treat us as if we do not deserve to know the truth, and we now have access to accounts of human experience which can usefully inform our personal and political views and actions. And one of the ironies of this must surely be that one of the side-effects of the development of ever more sophisticated computers to control our weaponry has been the increasing ability of our desktops and laptops to allow us to freely access information and to network with one another in creating and maintaining an opposition movement.

Dreaming of a New World

2006-01-14T16:22:00.000-08:00

One of my nieces, knowing that I enjoy reading, and that my first degree was in history and politics, gave me a very large book this Christmas. Called Frontier of Dreams it is a volume published to accompany a Television New Zealand thirteen-part documentary of the same name. The particular name was chosen for the series because every shipload of colonists and each subsequent generation of New Zealanders has articulated its own vision for the country. I embarked on a journey through the lavishly illustrated work, mindful that all four of my grandparents were amongst those early settlers who came from Scotland, Ireland and England, to forge a new and better life for their families.

All went well until I reached the final chapter ‘Breaking Free, 1984-2005’ which focuses on the social and economic restructuring, largely at the hands of the Labour Party’s ‘libertarian young things’, which amongst many other advances provided new freedoms for Maori and gays. These freedoms which had long been sought by both communities were welcomed enthusiastically by both – or so I thought. And then I came across the caption accompanying a photo of the annual gay Hero Parade in Auckland, which says that the Maori Bishop Whakahuihui Vercoe, deeply respected within the Maori community and now Archbishop, Primate and Metropolitan of the whole Anglican Church in New Zealand “dreams of a world without gays”.

You could say that I was gobsmacked. As a person who knows Archbishop Vercoe reasonably well, and aware of his history of championing the rights of the poor and dispossessed, this utterance was unexpected. My immediate thought as a person who has been a long-time supporter of Maori rights was that if I were a racist and publicly stated that I dream of a world without Maoris, I would immediately be hauled before Joris de Bres, a former colleague who is now Race Relations Conciliator, rightly forced to make a public apology to all Maori, and perhaps have to face a court case as well. So why shouldn’t Archbishop Vercoe be hauled before the Human Rights Commission and asked to apologise to the entire gay community?

I turned to the newspaper interview which elicited the Archbishop’s comments in The New Zealand Herald of June 5, 2005. Here he allegedly told the reporter that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’ and an ‘abomination’ to the dark races. He thinks that in the future society will find homosexuality unacceptable. “It may not come in our time, but it will come”, he says. “There will be a strong reaction for later generations; we will suddenly discover a morality, a new morality”. This sounds like a call to return to an older morality which saw not only gays, but all those regarded as different, at best a blight upon the community and at worst deserving of eradication.

We are here confronting a sensitive and difficult area, that of the traditional beliefs and attitudes of indigenous peoples and behaviours regarded by them as culturally appropriate. In terms of the gay issue some Maori have adopted the typical post-colonial response that homosexuality was unknown in their communities prior to colonisation. I have frequently heard in Africa the claim that homosexuality is a ‘white disease’. But I also recall that when this kind of argument was raised in a meeting of Maori to discuss the decriminalisation of homosexuality, one of my Maori colleagues bravely took the floor and asked people to look back through their genealogies – the rehearsal of which is fundamental to Maori culture – to recall heroes from pre-colonial times whose orientation was homosexual. ‘We all have gays in our tribes and families as far back as we go’, said Hone.

Archbishop Vercoe certainly admits that there are gays in his extended family. “I have relatives who are gay. They’re still my relatives, they’re still my blood, my kith and kin. They have every right to call on me for help and also to be included in my relationship with them and other members of my clan” he says perhaps in an allusion to the supposedly Christian adage of condemning the sin while loving the sinner. The Church’s mission, he says, is “to go and seek out the poor, the lame, the blind, the unfortunate, the landless, the homeless, the foodless, and identify with those people completely. Always look after the underdogs and the underprivileged. Just love them to death”. Asked whether this list includes the gay community, he responds “Absolutely”. He does not indicate what kind of justice he has in mind for the gay community, nor how he will embody it, but loving people to death is an ambiguous activity. And sadly his remarks on homosexuality will probably have driven far more people out of the Church than his long ministry has managed to attract to it.

The interview provoked wide public discussion and a flood of letters to the editor. Many found it strange that a person with such a radical political agenda should also articulate such a conservative social agenda. Cultural questions were posed in many instances. The Anglican Dean of Auckland opined that the comments arose purely out of a cultural context and that Maoris find the issue of homosexuality culturally difficult. Dr Leonie Pihama, a project researcher, responded to the Dean saying “Such statements are colonial and Victorian views that merely seek to oppress certain sectors of society and have no basis in tikanga Maori”. Describing the Archbishop’s view of a world without gays as ‘holocaustic’, she insisted there is no tradition within Maoridom for hatred towards a particular group in the community. Dr Clive Aspen, who heads up a Maori sexuality research project said that statements like the Archbishop’s threatened long-term and permanent damage to young people grappling with their sexuality. He too insisted that research shows that Maori had always had an open and embracing attitude towards sexual diversity within social networks.

In defence of his views, Archbishop Vercoe insisted that everybody had a right to say what they believe. “I’m a Maori”, he says “and can’t be anything else. I have to be true to what I am”. Yes, of course this is so when one speaks in a personal capacity. Amongst previous Archbishops of New Zealand have been three friends of mine, one of them a Maori, who always took great care when representing the Church to convey the generally liberal mind of the New Zealand Church, rather than their personal opinions. Archbishop Vercoe it seems has abandoned this understanding of inclusivity and consensus in favour of speaking out of both his ethnic and tribal perceptions. And in this case he has succeeded only in resurrecting attitudes and condemnations from the past which are, in the words of the internationally renowned gay Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, “very, very punitive, very patriarchal, very homophobic and very sexist”.

Hopefully the Archbishop will wake up to the fact that the scenario he imagines is a nightmare rather than a dream, and substitutes for it the more adventurous vision of communities and cultures which don’t discriminate against but welcome otherness.

Responding to Violence

2005-12-31T17:05:00.000-08:00

In New Zealand there never seems to be very much news on Boxing Day, just page after page of advertisements offering 50% discount on Boxing Day sales in the major department stores. But there were a few news items which stood out, some of which appeared to run totally counter to the spirit of the previous Christmas Day, while others captured the essence of the day’s message.

First, there is the brouhaha which has enveloped over the release of Stephen Spielberg’s new film, the geopolitical thriller Munich. The film recounts the aftermath of the kidnap and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, and Spielberg has described it as “a prayer for peace”. The film recounts the way that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, sent agents to track down and kill those whom it believed to have a degree of responsibility for the outrage, something which has been standard practice for that agency. But as in all instances of this kind of response, moral ambiguities begin to emerge, over the precise degree of personal responsibility and whether perpetuating the cycle of violence can ever produce a peaceful and just resolution.

Spielberg seems to have hoped that these historical events would prompt debate both within the United States and beyond, about the moral legitimacy of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. But the film has touched an extremely raw nerve, both amongst conservative Americans and the Jewish lobby within Israel and in the Diaspora. It is the suggestion of moral ambiguity which enrages both the American administration and the Israeli Government. The latter has recycled its standard response, that there can be no moral equivalence between those who have been designated “terrorists” and those who are mandated to hunt them down and kill them. But what that response never addresses is the first order question of who decides who are terrorists and who are freedom fighters. I imagine that had these terms been in use in the eighteenth century, the American colonists fighting for independence from Britain might well have been designated freedom fighters by the colonists and terrorists by the Crown. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Israeli commentators have often resorted to the Jewish Bible’s revengeful exhortation of ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’, a principle which I have also heard reiterated by many Christians who clearly have forgotten what Jesus in the New Testament had to say about violence. Despite the fact that Jewish colleagues in the religious studies department of my university would not interpret these words literally, there are many people more than willing to do so. Two other pieces of news this week attest to this. The first was confirmation of something many of us had in any case assumed, that Israel has all along been offering assistance to US troops in Iraq in the hunting down and assassination of those who under any definition might be designated ‘enemies’. The second was the boast of a group of Holocaust survivors known as the Avengers who, disguised as American and British officers at the end of the last war, indiscriminately poisoned Nazis who were being held in American prisoner-of-war camps. Geneva conventions apparently count for nothing in such circumstances.

Amongst the many Christians down the ages who have spoken about the need to find alternative responses to violence was the Latin American bishop Dom Helda Camara, one of whose books was called The Spiral of Violence. Jesus lived in an age when the notion of violent retaliation, particularly to protect family honour, was endemic. He saw what needed to be done. Jesus said in effect, ‘Don’t retaliate. Don’t fulfil the enemy’s expectations of you. Respond in unexpected ways’. When people respond non-violently a number of things occur. The cycle of violence is unexpectedly interrupted; one’s enemy is in a very real sense disarmed; and new values and behaviours are being established. One of my mentors, Paulo Freire, used to say that we cannot build a just, free and peaceful society employing tactics and strategies that do not embody these goals. It is impossible to build a peaceful society by using violent means. Of course a non-violence renders one vulnerable, but if the Christmas message is about anything it is about the vulnerability of a baby born in a stable.

The good news on Boxing Day was embodied by two Prelates. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch for the Holy Land, made mention in his sermon at midnight mass in Bethlehem of the new political landscape beginning to emerge in that region. He said, “Leaving all violence, all vengeance, freeing political prisoners, and putting the past behind, can create a new land”, one in which Israelis can feel secure and Palestinians can feel free. With elections amongst both Palestinians and Israelis scheduled for the new year, and Ariel Sharon attempting to break the mould of Israeli conventional politics, we can hope that such a scenario becomes more a reality than a possibility.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Christmas sermon in Canterbury Cathedral made special mention of two families who, in response to senseless violence, spoke not in terms of retaliation, but of forgiveness. In a reference to Abigail Wichells who remains paralysed after a frenzied knife attack, he noted that Abigail’s mother upon learning of the suicide of her daughter’s attacker said ‘his death is the real tragedy in this story’. Williams said that the mother was “not making light of her daughter's terrible ordeal or denying the complex evil of the action, but simply making space in her heart for someone else's fear and pain". He also commented on a moment many of us witnessed on television news in the UK when the mother of Anthony Walker, a Liverpool teenager murdered in a racist axe-attack “told us that yes, she forgave her son's killers and yes, her heart was still broken. What made this so intensely moving was the fact that her forgiveness was drawn agonisingly out of her, without making her loss easier. She could not have been who she was if she did not recognise that forgiveness was laid upon her; her life and her dead son's would have been nonsense if she did not forgive”.

One of the greatest tragedies of our human condition is that we all too often opt for the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye notion of vengeance in both our personal and political relationships, rather than the New Testament’s vision for the creation of just and compassionate relationships based on our capacity for forgiveness.

Christ Born Across the Sea

2005-12-28T13:58:00.000-08:00

This Blog brings my Christmas greetings to those of you – numberless or few, I know not – who visit my site. This is supposed to be the season of both good will towards as well as good news for the poor and dispossessed of our world.

Undoubtedly the biggest disaster of the past twelve months – apart from the continuing disaster of the Iraq War of course - was the tsunami which devastated so much of coastal Asia. These sad occasions afford the opportunity for the rest of us to dig deep into our pockets and our resources of humanitarian care, to try to alleviate suffering and loss on such an immense scale. In addition to the hard-working staff members of international aid and relief agencies, catastrophes of this kind also attract a host of do-gooder individuals who, operating from a mixed bag of motives, some honourable and others less than honourable, travel under their own resources to the stricken region to help out however they are able.

James Garwood appears to have been just such a person. An American, and one time heroin addict, who encountered Jesus while in prison, James set off for Thailand’s Khao Lak coast, armed with good intentions and a big bag of balloons with which he aimed to entertain the thousands of refugees in that area. Now twelve months later James is leader of a Christian Church which he has named ‘Life in Action in Thailand’. He holds regular services for recent converts to Christianity from Buddhism, insisting that he did not come to start a church but “felt God tugging at my heart” and claiming that “hundreds and hundreds” of local people converted to Christianity following the tsunami. James is not the only evangelical preacher to have descended upon this area which prior to the tsunami was Buddhist in faith with not a single local Christian church. As could have been predicted, the majority of these new churches have been set up by US-based evangelicals supported by apparently inexhaustible funding from US evangelical congregations.

Given the history of Christian missions I was not surprised to learn that some of these converts converted for material rather than spiritual reasons. Said one former Buddhist “Christians are very good to me. That’s why I converted”. There are echoes here of the ‘rice Christians’ of India, or of those conversions in Africa which appeared to have more to do with job opportunities in the colonial administration than religious impulses. As both a student and teacher of missiology, as well as having myself been a missionary in the Middle-East, I have longed for the day when Christian mission would forever divorce itself from economic, political, cultural and ideological accoutrements of its sponsoring churches. While on the whole the older churches have learnt lessons and adopted approaches much more sensitive to cultural realities, it remains a feature of many of the ‘younger’ expressions of Christianity that they remain blissfully unaware of the contents of the baggage they carry with them.

This seems to be particularly the case in respect to American evangelical groups. One of the PhD dissertations I recently had to examine was submitted by an American Evangelical who had spent twenty years as a ‘missionary’ in Europe, half of that time in a Catholic European country, and half in a former Eastern European nation that has Orthodox and Catholic communities. His primary mission seemed to be to replicate the kind of Church order and governance which his US sponsoring Church claimed to have been directly handed down to it by God. He was oblivious to the fact that this governance mirrored the USA’s political and ideological aspirations including the US's particular and peculiar understandings of democracy. The American theologian Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about this phenomenon which he describes as enculturation. He uses this term to describe the way that the ethos and activities of many American churches cannot be separated from the values, behaviours and aspirations of that country’s dominant ideology. This not only affects the way that such churches operate in a missionary context, it more importantly in his view renders them incapable of offering any critique of the culture of which they are a product.

One of the problematic areas of missionary concern then becomes that the Jesus who is being proclaimed to the unbeliever is not at all the Jesus of first century Palestine but the Jesus who ‘in the beauty of the lilies was born across the sea’, who is a product of American history, experience and imagination. In many contexts there has been a rejection of Jesus as a cultural product in favour of an indigenised Jesus. Some years ago I heard the current Anglican Archbishop and Primate of New Zealand, Whakahuihui Vercoe, claim that we ought not to assume that Jesus was incarnated into only Palestinian culture, but rather at the moment of birth was incarnated in many if not all cultures. Thus the Maori people had encountered Jesus within their own cultural and religious traditions long before, in the Archbishop’s words, “the British missionaries introduced us to a white Jesus whom we did not know”.

So what we see happening in Thailand today mirrors that Maori experience. Buddhists are introduced to an American Jesus, powerful and equally importantly, wealthy, who apparently has at his command infinite resources for rebuilding shattered and dispirited communities. Phra Viroth Titaphoonyo, abbot of the Wat Laem Pom Buddhist temple laments the influx of American money and values the missionaries bring with them, and the nature of the material help on offer. He sees Buddhism and Christianity responding to the situation in quite different ways, one spiritual and the other material. “If you are a Buddhist”, he says, “when the people jump in the water and ask for help, a Buddhist teaches you how to swim. A Christian just gives them a hand a pulls them up”.

So if this Christmas you were tempted to complain about the gross commercialisation of the festive season, please include in your complaint the equally gross materialism of some manifestations of Christian mission.

The Facts of War

2005-12-16T18:09:00.000-08:00

This week the United States’ Administration has made two startling admissions. President George Bush, with his ratings plummeting dramatically, went on the offensive to claim that given everything that has happened in Iraq, he would still have made the decision to declare war because the removal of Saddam Hussein has been a good thing. Some weeks ago in my blog “Messages from God” I noted that the lowest estimates of civilian deaths in the continuing Iraq War were just over 24,000. In the course of his argument for supporting the War the President admitted publicly for the first time that American sources put Iraqi civilian casualties at 30,000. Given my experience of American announcements of casualties during the Viet Nam War when I was a student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I personally believe that the actual number of deaths at this juncture of the war will ultimately turn out to have been significantly higher.

The President’s defence of his warmongering was made while I was travelling back to New Zealand for Christmas. One of the national dailies, The New Zealand Herald, has a column on ‘numbers’ and yesterday’s numbers relate to the Iraqi situation and make for interesting reading:

The cost to the US of the war to date: $204.4bn
World Bank estimate for reconstruction: $35,819,000,000
Allied troops killed: 2339
US soldiers wounded in action: 15,955
Civilian deaths: 30,000
Insurgents killed: 53,470

Iraqis who feel less secure now: 67%
Iraqi children starving: 8%
Iraqis with inoperative sewage system: 70%
Iraqis ‘strongly opposed’ to US troops: 82%
Inflation rate: 20%

Average monthly salary for Iraqi soldier: $343
Average monthly salary for US soldier: $4160

Journalists killed: 66 (83 in Viet Nam War)
Foreigners kidnapped: 251
Daily attacks by insurgents, November: 90
Casualties from mines per month: 20

Weapons of Mass Destruction found: 0

It is of course many months now since the President triumphantly announced that the war was over. Ninety-four percent of US deaths and injuries have occurred since the ‘end’ of the war. Far from being over, some of us believe the war has hardly begun. The Iraq elections taking place today as I write are being hailed by the Coalition partners as a triumph for democracy whereas in fact what has been installed is an oppressive American colonial regime. Nor is there much hope being expressed over the post-election situation. The Kurds have already virtually become an independent region with control over their own oil revenues, and given the long history of enmity with neighbouring Turkey, everyone expects that hostilities will break out between the two. The big winners in the election are likely to be the Shiite Muslims who will inevitably work to ensure that the country which had under Saddam Hussein become the most secular in the Arab world will be placed under Sharia law and become as repressive as its sister regime in Iran. An Iran/Iraq political alliance would constitute a real danger to both middle-east and global politics. And let’s not forget the five million strong Sunni community which used to run Iraq but now constitute the bulk of the so called insurgency. Today many of them appear to be opting for a political solution by participating in the election, although several I saw interviewed on TV said that they are doing so in order to return Iraq to Iraqi control and rid themselves of the occupying forces. However, once the Shiites and Kurds have divided the country between them, a Sunni return to large-scale and permanent insurgency seems almost inevitable. The lasting achievement of President Bush and his allies looks like being a radically destabilised and increasingly volatile Middle East. The principle at work here is as old as humanity itself, as an ancient biblical sage commented, “Sow the wind; reap the whirlwind”.

The second startling announcement from the Administration was that it has caved in to overwhelming international and domestic pressure about the treatment of prisoners. Last week Condoleezza Rice was given a very rough ride during her visit to European governments as more and more information was uncovered about the CIA’s practice of transiting prisoners through European countries to prisons in countries where interrogation through torture is a frequent occurrence. The initial US reaction was along the lines of ‘Hey, we are all in this war together and sometimes the extracting of information calls for unconventional methods’. But this in no way placated the Europeans. Domestically 100 Republicans joined Democrats in Congress to demand a ban on torture and now the Administration has accepted tough new rules for the US forces’ dealings with prisoners which include a ban on torture and other inhumane treatment to be written into the US forces’ Code of Justice. Hopefully this means that the regime in Guantanamo Bay will begin to reflect the values of a liberal democracy rather than those of Stalinism.

Friendly Fire

2005-11-20T13:38:00.000-08:00

This week the Taliban tendencied Hierarch of Nigeria attempted to de-throne the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a crude letter to the Archbishop allegedly signed by 17 ‘Primates of the South’, these ornaments of global Anglicanism wrote to Archbishop Rowan Williams in disturbingly discourteous and confrontational terms. The Archbishop recently spoke to the Southern Primates at their meeting in Egypt, and the letter takes him to task for having an inadequate understanding of the Bible, and particularly for his failure to treat biblical texts literally. As we have come to expect from these men obsessed by sexuality but apparently oblivious to the poverty of their people, or justice for those of them who are oppressed, the bulk of the letter focuses on the ‘sin’ of homosexuality. It goes on to upbraid the Archbishop for failing to tell the churches of the global north that they will not be invited to the Lambeth Conference of 2008 unless they truly repent The tone and implication of the letter is that Archbishop Williams is unfit to lead the Anglican communion. Even cruder than the letter itself however, were the gutter political tactics the Southern Primates employed by releasing the text of their letter through various conservative websites before the Archbishop of Canterbury who was presiding over the Church of England’s General Synod, had even received it, let alone had time to consider its contents.

I was distressed to see amongst the signatories to the letter, the name of the Most Revd Clive Handforth, Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Church in the Middle East. Now, Clive was British Chaplain in Beirut when I was British Chaplain in Haifa and although the political situation made it impossible for us to visit one another directly, we met at regional clergy conferences in Cyprus. I found him to be a modest man of great integrity, qualities which I encountered again in the United Kingdom when we had both returned to work there, and Clive held senior posts as Archdeacon of Nottingham and later, Suffragen Bishop of Warwick. Clive’s endorsement of the Primates’ letter on behalf of Arab Anglicans struck me as being so out of character that I was minded to immediately put pen to paper and write him a stern letter chastising him for his action and challenging his integrity.

Fortunately before I could complete the letter, Clive himself posted a general response which appeared on the Internet. “It is most regrettable”, Clive wrote, “and in no way helpful to the Church’s mission, that a personal letter, which should have been confidential, was broadcast in this way”. He affirms the Archbishop of Canterbury’s contributions to the discussion in Egypt as positive and constructive and goes on to express further concerns about the way the Primates' letter was drafted, the fact that he did not give permission for his name to be associated with the letter, and also suggests that some of the other Primates had similar misgivings. What is needed now is for some of these men to also publicly declare their dissent but in the case of the African Archbishops, none has thus far demonstrated the ability to stand up to the bullying tactics of the Hierarch of Nigeria. But Clive has at least done us all a service by alerting us to the scheming, manipulative, abusive and undemocratic world these men inhabit.

The Guardian newspaper was concerned enough to devote an editorial to the event. Under the title Anglicanism: Sex and Schism, this editorial claimed that the terms of the letter to the Archbishop “challenge him to break either with their own brand of conservative Anglicanism, or with that of the liberals of the north. Is Anglicanism to be a responsive, culturally sensitive and expressly inclusive religion, or a universal and fundamentalist church?” Three cheers! This for me, is the heart of the issue. The editorial concludes citing C S Lewis, a hero of the evangelical right, who averred that sexual sins were the least important; “If Dr Williams is to safeguard the Anglican communion, then it is time to insist that a doctrinal point about sexual orientation cannot be allowed to threaten it with extinction”, sentiments with which I and most of my friends concur.

On Saturday in its Review Section, the Guardian offered a number of people the opportunity of commenting on the UK Government’s controversial plans for legislation to curb incitement to religious hatred. This may appear to have little bearing upon the current tensions in the Anglican Communion, but one of the invited commentators manages to make the connection. Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and hailed as the twenty-first century Tolkien, was a colleague of mine at Westminster College Oxford. He taught children’s literature, I taught applied and community theology. In his article, Philip explores the problem of ‘identity’ and asks whether identity is a function of what we do, or of what we are, or both. He then offers a series of eight propositions including What we are is not in our control, but what we do is; What we do is morally significant, what we are is not; and Praise or blame, virtue or guilt, apply to our actions not to our ancestry or to our membership of this group or that.

Philip Pullman comments that the Anglican Church has been characterised throughout its history by its broad-mindedness and tolerance, and that this extended to those of its members, lay and clerical who were homosexual, so that this was not an issue “of public discussion, denunciation, exposure, justification, confession, condemnation, punishment”. But the issue suddenly after all this time now looks like splitting the Anglican communion in two because “the zealous faction has been feeling its power and is beginning to exercise it” with the stress on being rather than doing. "Believers", he says, "can become addicted to the gamey tang of the absolute, the pungency of righteousness, the furtive sexiness of intolerance". Thus the celibate Jeffrey John was prevented from becoming Bishop of Reading because “it was what he was that matters, not what he did. If you ‘are’ homosexual, then even if you live an entirely celibate life, you will still be tainted and abominable and unfit to belong to the clergy”. Such an attitude, he believes, leads to a cognitive dissonance, with people claiming an inner identity which is quite unrelated to their actions.

I’m grateful to Philip for this reflection because it goes some way towards explaining the behaviour of the Hierarch of Nigeria and his acolytes who lay claim to some kind of moral high ground in terms of ‘being’, while exhibiting a total lack of Christian morality in the matter of ‘doing’.

A Word in One's Ear

2005-11-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

The sources of advice we rely upon are crucial to the decisions we reach This is especially true of politics as Prime Minister Tony Blair discovered to his cost when this week for the first time under his leadership, Parliament voted against a piece of legislation he had brought before the House. The proposal that the police could hold suspected terrorists without trial for ninety days, rather than the current fourteen days, had all along been controversial, with many parliamentarians feeling that people’s civil liberties were at stake. Britain has a long history of tolerating dissent and its laws on protesting, policing, trial and imprisonment reflect that tolerance. In the vote on Wednesday night a significant number of Labour politicians crossed the floor to vote with the opposition, and the rest is history. Parliament agreed an amendment which allows the police to hold suspects without trial for twenty-eight days, but no more.

The Prime Minister has lost a great deal of credibility in the process, and the bottom line today seems to be whether his authority hasn’t been so eroded, that he is from this point on a lame-duck leader. For the first time we saw members of his party, back-benchers in Parliament mind you, not members of his Cabinet and inner circle, speaking of having suffered from his bullying tactics for too long. One used the word hubris to describe the ethos surrounding the man at the moment.

As usual on matters of security, Tony Blair predicated the proposed ninety-day legislation upon information which, of course, he was not permitted to divulge to the public. The police and security services had apparently had a word in his ear to the effect that in cases of suspected planning to commit terrorist acts, they needed at least ninety days to question the persons and assemble the evidence. Parliament was clearly not willing to accept this ‘evidence’ at face value and raised a series of questions about its reliability and the process through which the police had reached their ninety-day conclusion. I am sure I wasn’t alone when I predicted what Tony Blair’s tactic would be when the debate over detention laws heated up, but it was with a sense of disbelief that I saw it happen. As a last-ditch argument he informed parliament and the nation that only that day the police had had a further word in his ear and informed him that a two more terrorist plots had just been foiled. He urged members of the House to defend the brave men who had foiled the plots rather than heed a minority of disaffected parliamentarians concerned to protect the civil liberties of the few rather than the liberty of the nation.

For many in Parliament this distrust of the Prime Minister goes back to the manner in which he advanced the case for the war in Iraq on the basis of reliable intelligence and the conviction that Britain had a duty to rid the world of people like Saddam Hussein. Today we all know that the words of wisdom the security services whispered in Blair’s ear were at best baseless and at worst lies. An ever increasing body of Parliamentarians feel that they were misled during the run-up to the invasion and no longer trust the Prime Minister to speak unequivocally.

Tony Blair’s motivations and behaviour at that time came under further scrutiny this week when the former British Ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer published his memoirs and gave interviews to the press. Sir Christopher, let it be said, is an admirer of President Bush and remains in favour of the Iraq war, and is being criticised for breaking civil service protocol by letting us into secrets about the Bush/Blair relationship. He is the first ‘insider’ who participated in the planning of the War in Iraq who has given us insight into what went on for example, in the crucial meetings and conversations that Blair had with President Bush. Meyer paints an unflattering picture of Blair together with members of his cabinet who participated in Washington talks, suggesting that they were in such awe of Bush’s Washington establishment that they readily capitulated to the American agenda. That agenda was always driven Meyer alleges by the neo-conservative concept of regime change, rather than as Blair presented it, the removal of weapons of mass destruction which were forty minutes away from Britain and probably pointed in our direction. If Blair had any reservations about the neo-conservative agenda, it apparently took only the President’s word in his ear to lay them to rest.

The former ambassador also makes some startling admissions. As a supporter of the war, he accepts that Britain and America are now on the horns of a dilemma. This is in part due with the failure to examine a broad enough range of possible outcomes. He accepts that the task of rebuilding Iraq is now virtually impossible and that the continued presence of Coalition troops in the country is motivating the insurgency. Further than this, he dismisses Tony Blair’s claims that it was not the Iraq war which exposed then UK to terrorist attacks arguing that there is sufficient evidence around to show that home-grown terrorism has been to a degree fuelled and radicalised by what Muslims have seen happening in Iraq and fear may happen elsewhere. For Sir Christopher, terror on our doorsteps is the price we have to bear for our involvement in this necessary war.

Where does this problematic legacy leave Tony Blair? There is a groundswell of opinion at large, and I suspect with in the Labour Party as well, that the Prime Minister having signalled that he will be handing over to a new leader, probably Gordon Brown, prior to the next election, is now personally weakened. This in turn weakens his legislative programme, and indeed the Labour Party as a whole.

A word in your ear, Prime Minister. If you really want to see the Labour win a fourth term of office, go gracefully now, before the integrity of the Party becomes fatally compromised.

Going Ballistic

2005-11-06T23:48:00.000-08:00

The British Government is talking about replacing its aging Trident nuclear missile system with something more sophisticated. The current nuclear deterrent can be launched from a fleet of submarines, one of which is on constant alert 24/7 in some naturally unspecified part of the world. Each of the four nuclear-powered submarines carries sixteen American built Trident missiles, and each missile can be equipped with up to eight nuclear warheads. Each of the 128 warheads is five times more powerful than the bomb dropped upon Hiroshima in 1945. That’s an awful lot of fire-power, but who and where is the enemy?

Britain’s Defence Secretary John Reid is a little hazy on that subject. Given that the Russians have joined the Western alliance and are to all intents and purposes on our side now, the threat from them can certainly not be as great as during the Cold War era. Perhaps we need to be wary of nuclear weaponry already in the hands of so called “rogue states”. Israel perhaps? Or do we need updated nuclear weaponry to further the War on Terror? All the Defence Secretary seemed prepared to say was that “We face a range of threats at this moment – running from individual acts of terrorism through to nuclear threats. We need a range of responses that include special forces right through to nuclear threats”.

The defence establishment is reluctant to enlighten us on where these challenges may emanate from, on the grounds that our national security might be compromised. Thus the Ministry of Defence has refused requests under the Freedom of Information Act for documentation on the costs of the new weaponry. Nor will it become party to any discussions about what nuclear weapons are for. It simply argues that there is “strong public interest” in Britain maintaining a “credible nuclear deterrent”. The government is going to permit a parliamentary debate on the subject, but will not allow our elected representatives to vote on the issue, presumably on the grounds that those who serve the military machine know best, and we all ought to trust them. It is a peculiar understanding of democracy and the democratic process if parliament can be excluded from voting on important matters of life and death.

In many respects the argument for nuclear weapons is reduced to the childish response “He’s got one so I want one”, and the bizarre conviction that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction somehow makes our world a safer place. Critics have been quick to point out that the £25 billion that updating the weaponry will cost could be better spent elsewhere by providing 20,000 hospital consultants, 60 new hospitals and 800 new schools, or if one is interested in bread and circuses, ten lots of Olympic Games.

It’s times like these that I’m glad to be a citizen of a small nuclear free island nation in a nuclear free Pacific. New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy emerged from debate in the late 1960’s about the wisdom of augmenting primary reliance on hydro-electric generation of energy with nuclear fuelled generators. In 1976 a Royal Commission was established to enquire further into this question. It was inundated with petitions from communities opposed to the nuclear option and its report suggested that there was no need to embark upon a nuclear programme until possibly the twenty-first century.

Since that time the New Zealand public’s anti-nuclear stance has become even more pronounced. This was largely triggered by the regular visits under the ANZUS defence protocols of American warships to New Zealand harbours, and by the refusal of the US military to declare whether these vessels carried nuclear weapons or were nuclear powered. Large-scale public protests, including flotillas of small leisure craft, began to greet each arriving battleship. Citizens were galvanised into making New Zealand nuclear-free by declaring one’s own home to be in the first instance nuclear free. My mother, who to that point had never protested about anything, asked me to get her a nuclear-free sign which she displayed prominently: “You are Entering a Nuclear Free Property”. This and other campaigns caught the public imagination encouraging people to believe that they could make a difference.

That difference became apparent to the world when in 1987, the New Zealand Labour Government passed its Nuclear-Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act, which amongst other things prevented visits by nuclear-propelled or nuclear-armed vessels. The Government was henceforward able to decide whether to admit to New Zealand waters a vessel that may or may not be carrying nuclear weapons. This had never been done by any other country before or since. The United States was predictably angered by this legislation and unilaterally declared that New Zealand was no longer part of the ANZUS alliance. So irate was US Secretary Casper Weinberger that he declared that the American government would have to go over the head of the New Zealand government in order to appeal directly to the people. Many, myself included, noted that one US government-supported ploy was its endorsement of the noted Christian evangelist Luis Palau, whose “Gospel” message at a series of crusades was that New Zealanders were in mortal peril and should seek the protection not in the first instance of God, but of the American nuclear umbrella. US attempts to change the New Zealand legislation continue to this day, the most recent being its embracing of Australia but exclusion of New Zealand in free trade conversations.

Had Casper Weinberger had his finger on the public pulse of New Zealanders he would have been more cautious about his imperialistic utterance. Polls vary but all show that between 60-70% of New Zealanders remain committed to a nuclear free future for their country. Even the opposition National party, which had hoped at one point to capitalise on pro-American disaffection with the Labour legislation, has had to adopt a nuclear free stance. Had it not done so it would have been unelectable.

New Zealand didn’t stop at putting its own house in order, but went on to advocate a nuclear-free Pacific, and to press for anti-nuclear legislation in regional and international forums. It’s a shame that Britain at this juncture in history could not look to the New Zealand experience, and begin to move towards a nuclear-free future for her citizens. And sadly, to this day New Zealand remains the only country in the world to have enshrined in legislation a non-nuclear policy.

Mapping Political Correctness

2005-10-31T08:06:00.000-08:00

Don Brash, the Leader of New Zealand’s conservative National political party has created a new portfolio in his shadow cabinet reshuffle following his recent electoral defeat. Amongst the duties assigned to Dr Wayne Mapp is that of Political Correctness Eradicator. New Zealand has an enviable history of pioneering social reform. One thinks of its early introduction of universal suffrage and the welfare state. But while these are generally regarded as progressive moves by leftist governments, in the creation of the office of Political Correctness Eradicator, which must surely be unique in modern history, we find the Right conjuring up its own unique political innovation.

When Dr Brash was questioned by a newspaper reporter about what political correctness is, and what Dr Mapp will actually do, he appeared foggy on the details and referred the media to a speech Dr Mapp delivered on June 22, 2005. In that speech Dr Mapp defines political correctness as a person, institution or government ceasing “to represent the interests of the majority” to “become focused on the cares and concerns of minority sector groups” and goes on to criticise instruments like the Waitangi Tribunal which adjudicates on Maori land claims, the Human Rights Commission and the Privacy Commission which as their names indicate, were established to protect the rights of individuals and groups. Mapp’s basic argument echoes that of other right-wing critiques, that political correctness runs counter to the basic freedoms of society.

Dr Mapp’s own political convictions lie revealed in the examples of political correctness he refers to in his paper. He makes it very clear that the Maori people, for so long an oppressed group within their own country, are being given in our age of political correctness far too great a degree of favourable treatment. Thus he complains about the custom of powhiri (traditional Maori greeting ceremonials) now incorporated into much of New Zealand’s political and administrative life and belittles it by such claims as “the commencement of a motorway project should not require a 40 minute powhiri within a 50 minute event” because this leads to “private frustration” and “disregard for other cultures”. He likewise attacks the Government’s “promotion of the Maori spiritual world view” and within state documents the “recitation of Maori myths and legends”.

One of the bugbears of those who campaign against political correctness is multiculturalism which they regard as a form of social engineering aimed at giving different cultures equal standing and respect in the community. Their argument typically runs that multiculturalism is built on the premise that different cultures are compatible, but this is demonstrably untrue and those opposing multiculturalism are unjustly branded as prejudiced or racist. While one can detect elements of this position in Dr Mapp’s argument, his base line appears to be that, while Maori may have suffered injustices in the past, under the mantras of political correctness they are being too generously treated, and it is high time that the pendulum swung back in favour of the dominant white settler community’s culture and values. What his argument fails to take into account is that the racism which was for so long a feature of the settlers’ relationship with Maori, has by no means been eradicated from settler life.

Other examples he highlights are equally disturbing. He is opposed to proposed legislation on offensive ‘hate speech’, to the legislation already passed to create healthy smoke-free work and leisure environments, and the establishment of civil unions, in fact all those things which involve “promoting minority and alternative causes”. As might be anticipated, he includes within this umbrella the gay community’s lobbying against homophobia. As an example of the latter he cites the case of a right-wing Christian organization, Living Word Distributors, who were banned by the New Zealand film censors from distributing two US videos, AIDS, What You haven’t Been Told, and Gay Rights/Special Rights: Inside the Homosexual Agenda. These videos are opposed to the idea that homosexuality might become respectable and in particular to the way that countries like the US are enshrining affirmative protection for the gay community in human and civil rights legislation. What Mapp doesn’t tell us, possibly because it doesn’t suit his argument about the unbridled power of political correctness, is that four years ago the New Zealand Court of Appeal overturned that video ban on the grounds that informed public debate within a democracy requires a free flow of information and ideas.

It behoves us to remember that ‘political correctness’ emerged at a time when minority groups were subject to all manner of racial and other stereotyping. Blacks felt demeaned when they were called ‘niggers’ or ‘coons’ by members of the dominant group. Immigrants felt the same when called ‘wogs’ or ‘wops’; gays when they were referred to as ‘faggots’ or ‘poofs’; people suffering disabilities when they were called ‘cripples’ or ‘mongs’. The so-called Political Correctness Movement, which never was a movement until invented by the Right in the 1980’s, tried to change our stereotypical and often unconscious attitudes by challenging and changing our use of language and terminology. The focus became the merits of the individual rather than perceived membership of a particular group.

This linguistic approach has not been without its problems. I used a variation of the word ‘disabled’ above in order to avoid the pejorative term ‘crippled’. In this instance the terminology has undergone several changes from cripple to invalid to handicapped to disabled to differently abled to the current physically challenged. In terms of health, education and social care we tend to use terms like special needs and learning difficulties instead of earlier terms now considered demeaning to human dignity. Nor has religion escaped with the terms BC and AD now replaced by CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) and hospital chaplains in the UK now referred to as Spiritual Care Providers (or worse, Managers).

Personally, I reject some of the overtly political and ideological manipulations of language justified under the guise of ‘political correctness’. But I don’t want to lose sight of a very basic principle: that it is not for social engineers to decide what people should be called, but for groups within our communities to decide for themselves how they prefer to be addressed. While Dr Mapp is right to raise sensitive issues about culture and language, in New Zealand’s case by leaping on to the bandwagon of a white settler backlash he is advocating a dangerous political ploy. And to me, the creation of his post as Political Correctness Eradicator smacks too much of Stalinism.