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.

Standards in Public Life

2005-10-22T23:46:00.000-07:00

Red Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, is in the thick of controversy again. I’ve been a fan of his since his heyday as Leader of the Greater London Council when he lowered London Tube fares so that those of us living in that city could afford to travel to work. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in order to put the fares back up again had to dismiss the entire Board of London Transport and replace it with a quango comprised of her Tory cronies. Her long-term strategy under the pretext of restoring power to the people, was to get rid of the Greater London Council altogether and I imagine she thought that by so doing she was consigning Red Ken to the dustbin of history. But years later, with Baroness Thatcher herself consigned to history, Ken bounced back, having been expelled from the Labour Party for refusing to toe the party line. He stood as an Independent mayoral candidate for a newly created London-wide political authority. He won that election, and when it became clear that his popularity would carry him to a second term of office, the Party enthusiastically reinstated his membership.

Red Ken, as his nickname suggests, always seems to generate conflict. This has been in part due to his socialist understanding of inclusivity, and his celebration of diversity often through gigantic riverside parties, which have provided both a space and a voice for many of the city’s minorities. Such behaviour was bound to get up the noses of Conservative leaning elements of the media, none more so than the right wing Associated Newspapers group which has persistently and often quite unfairly hounded him. A few months ago, confronted late one evening by an aggressive reporter from The Evening Standard, Ken likened the man’s behaviour to that of a Nazi concentration camp guard. It turned out the reporter was Jewish and that’s what sparked the latest controversy.

All this happened a few days before the Olympic Committee arrived in London to assess London’s bid for the games. Red Ken was placed under enormous pressure from folk like Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologise for his offensive remark. He refused to do so on the grounds of personal integrity. He has suffered years of abuse from the newspaper group in question, and said he would not apologise as a political gesture if he did not feel the need to apologise in his heart. The controversy was referred to the Commission for Standards in Public Life which has the power to exclude people from standing for public office and sounds remarkably like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. The Commission has yet to conclude its deliberations and announce its decision.

Many of the public reactions to the affair have been couched in terms of any talk about Nazis and concentration camps being always offensive to Jews. But lurking somewhere in the background is the suggestion made by some that Ken’s remarks were anti-Semitic. And that is worrying.

Of course the form of anti-Semitism which was manifested by Nazi Germany, and which many Jewish writers suggest is based upon centuries of Christian teaching, and which saw millions of people perish in the holocaust because of their racial origin, needs to be vigorously opposed. That such attitudes and practices remain a threat to humanity has been manifested in various recent attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ in places as different as the Balkans and Africa. Ken Livingstone's record on opposing all forms of degradation and violence on the basis of race, class and gender is unparalleled in contemporary British politics.

But there is something more subtle than this at work here, something of which I became acutely conscious while living and working in Israel in the 1970’s. And that is the way in which the label of anti-Semitism has also become an ideological and hegemonic tool employed manipulatively in some circumstances to prevent the development of any critique of Jewish values and behaviours. While most of us in liberal democracies are aware that there are good Christians and bad Christians, good Muslims and bad Muslims, good Jews and bad Jews, and want, usually on the basis of our own values, to make differential judgements upon the way in which people behave, in the Israel I lived in, this had become impossible. Any criticism of individual, let alone national behaviour, and any critique of Israeli government policies was automatically branded anti-Semitic.

And this form of ideological manipulation was not restricted to the State of Israel, for communities of Jews in Diaspora were also given to employing this tactic. Thus in New Zealand in 1978, addressing a conference on the issue of land rights, I tried to develop the theme that the alienation of people from their traditional land had become a global problem. Amongst the illustrations I gave was the way in which traditional Bedouin nomadic communities in the Negev were at that time being resettled in permanent villages by the Israeli government. For employing that illustration in an academic context I was immediately labelled as being anti-Semitic in a vitriolic and abusive response in the Jewish press.

Judging by the letters to newspapers about Ken Livingstone’s brush with the reporter, many of them from members of the Jewish community, I suspect that things have improved over the last thirty years, and this manipulation, although it still exists is less crude these days. The knee-jerk claim that one’s opponent is anti-Semitic seems to me to do humanity a disservice. Not only do we all need to cultivate the ability to both offer and accept criticism in an international environment characterised by mutuality, honesty and maturity, but we also need to be vigilant to ensure that wasteful tragedies like the holocaust and ethnic cleansing never happen again. Both trivialising anti-Semitism and employing it as an ideological weapon, leave us at the mercy of evil.

A Word for Africa

2005-10-15T07:56:00.000-07:00

In an earlier blog I raised the question of whether the critical dialogue between the Anglican Communion’s Global North and Global South had become one-way traffic because political correctness or racism awareness training, and possibly both, have rendered the North loath to be critical of anything African lest this be hailed as racist. But unless there is a framework for mutual critique and constructive dialogue, we run the risk of projecting grotesque caricatures of one another.

This week my attention was drawn to two instances of Anglican leaders in the Global North being willing to be critical of the theology and politics espoused by self-styled and cavalier leaders of the Global South like Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria.

The first was a statement made last month by Anglican Bishop John Chane of Washington writing in his Diocesan newspaper. Chane was willing to tackle Akinola directly describing him as "one of the most outspoken of this small group of men who presumes to speak for the entire global Communion."

The Bishop went on to say: "If the Church is to really focus on the issues of the Bible's teaching and the core teachings of Jesus Christ, why does this Archbishop spend so much time on human sexuality issues while so many of his countrymen and women are oppressed by poverty, illiteracy and violence? Where is the strong voice of the Nigerian Anglican Church in opposing the continued neglect of vulnerable women and children, or in advocating on behalf of the poorest of the poor? Jesus was very clear in his hard teachings that one could always tell the righteous from the damned by whether they (were) feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger and visiting those who were in prison."

The Bishop might also have added to the Archbishop’s catalogue of faults the fact that while appearing to discuss nothing but sexuality in his pronouncements about the West, he constantly and deliberately avoids addressing the troubling issues of sexuality within African culture including those of polygamy, widow inheritance, widow cleansing, and HIV/AIDS.

Secondly, I was reminded that we now have an African Archbishop in one of England’s ancient Sees, that of York, when last week Archbishop John Sentamu signed the documentation which confirms his appointment. Archbishop Sentamu was born in poverty in Uganda and, a judge by profession, had to flee his country during Idi Amin’s reign of terror. An articulate Evangelical, his appointments first as Bishop of Stepney in London Diocese, then as bishop of multicultural Birmingham and now as Archbishop of York and Primate of England, have been hailed as visionary. He brings all that is good in vibrant African culture, faith and practice to a Church that many regard as lacking vitality.

In an exclusive interview with Dr Sentamu last week in The Guardian, he told his interviewer that he disapproved of the language in which the gay debate is being conducted ‘particularly by some African Archbishops who have spoken of homosexuals as a third sex threatening social unrest and have warned they will sever connections with the Church of England’ and the Anglican Communion.

Archbishop Sentamu continued: “Some of our disagreements are not Christian really . . . it seems to suggest that all of the great evils of the world are being perpetrated by gay and lesbian people, which I cannot believe to be the case. What is wrong in the world is that people are sinful and alienate themselves from God and you do not have to be gay to do that. To suggest that to be gay is to be evil, I find that quite unbelievable. Is somebody saying a gay and lesbian can’t live in Christ? . . . All of us are sinners, all of us have baggage. Why should my baggage as a heterosexual be more acceptable than the baggage of a gay person?” Here at last, is an African who is willing to both confront and respond to the biblical fundamentalism emanating from Nigeria.

Whether Africa will take any notice of course, is an entirely different question. To many of the people who raise the question of the future of the Anglican Communion with me in direct conversations in the University’s staff room and at a distance by students scattered around the world, the die already appears to be cast. Under the leadership of Peter Akinola many Anglicans will leave the Communion to establish a new ecclesial body.

It is often argued that we live today in a post-modern world where people adopt a consumerist ‘pick and mix’ approach to religion. People are joining and leaving churches for all kinds of reasons. But this has always been the case throughout the history of Anglicanism. One big exodus, at least in terms of leadership, spirituality and devotion occurred in the nineteenth century at the time of controversy over the Oxford Movement when John Henry Newman and many others reluctantly parted company with Anglicanism. Although his own brothers were also to make that journey Romewards, ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, son of the great social reformer, who would later become Bishop of Oxford, remained. He wrote in some anguish at the time:

“The glory of our beloved little church is departed. The heavens weeping over us, and the trees dropping round us, seem acted parables of our thoughts”.

But the Anglican Church’s ministry and mission were not compromised by these severe catholic losses or indeed, by the loss of the evangelical Methodists, and a vibrant church emerged from what David Newsome in his marvellous book called “The Parting of Friends”. And while there will be similar grief to see Anglican brothers and sisters of the Global South leave the Anglican Communion, for they have made a notable contribution to it, I confidently expect that Anglicanism with its unique vision, ethos and theology will survive and prosper.

Messages From God

2005-10-08T03:46:00.000-07:00

Soon after I was ordained to the priesthood the chaplain at the large mental hospital near my parish asked whether I could cover Sunday services for him while he took his month’s holiday. This chaplain was given to saying that if he weren’t chaplain to the institution he would certainly be one of its patients. He kindly warned me in advance of some of the more unusual features of celebrating mass in the secure unit. This included loud applause when I processed to the altar as if the mass was some kind of theatrical performance, which in a sense of course it is. It’s just that not many priests get applauded for their role in it. Then there was the young man who served as the altar boy. Having been trained to hold on to a corner of the celebrant’s chasuble and follow him everywhere, he did precisely that, even standing beside me clutching my chasuble as I delivered the homily from the lectern. I later learnt that this young man, barely into his twenties, had killed his entire family because he had received direct instructions from God to do so.

This experience taught me to be very wary of people who claim to be acting upon messages that God has given them. Many such people, particularly when they commit violent acts on the basis of heavenly inspired instructions, are deemed by society to have lost their grip on reality and are placed for their good and ours in institutions. Of course we have to be careful in reaching judgements about such cases. I well recall the psychiatrist R.D. Laing whose views on anti-psychiatry became very popular in the 1960’s arguing that in general those who are in touch with reality are locked up in asylums, while the rest of us, who have totally lost touch with reality are permitted to wander around freely. That’s a sobering thought.

Despite this, I was initially amused, but on reflection concerned to learn this week that President George W Bush claims as did my altar boy, to be in receipt of messages from God. It seems that in an interview with the Palestinian politician Nabil Shaath soon to be broadcast on BBC television, the politician claims “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s word coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m, gonna do it.”

George Bush was born again as an evangelical Christian in 1985 with the assistance of Billy Graham who is alleged to have warned him, ‘Never play God’. Throughout his political career he has claimed divine guidance for practically every action he has taken. He ran for President because ‘God wants me to do it’ and last year claimed in a meeting with Amish folk in Pennsylvania ‘I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job’. Moreover he believes that the USA is God’s instrument for the salvation of the world. ‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world’, he says, ‘It is God’s gift to humanity’. White House staff are expected to attend regular prayer meetings and in terms of the delivery of social welfare, the President has set aside billions of dollars for ‘faith-based groups’ because he believes these to be more effective instruments of poverty alleviation than government agencies.

Of course this religious rhetoric and faith-based welfare delivery have enormous appeal for the millions of Americans who constitute the Christian Right and whose votes are essential for maintaining Bush in power. Thus US General William Boykin, responsible for leading the hunt for Osama bin Laden told Christian groups in 2003 that the War on Terror is a war against Satan and said of the President ‘The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this’. The General was subsequently promoted to the post of deputy under secretary for defence. Of course many Americans consider the Christian Right’s captivity of the presidency outrageous, and Bush’s critics accuse him of increasingly blurring the long held constitutional separation between Church and State.

Another product of Bush’s religious convictions, shared with the Christian Right, is his Islamophobia. Although following the attack on the World Trade Centre, his use of the term ‘crusade’ in framing his response was quickly removed from his public vocabulary, there is little doubt that this is what he privately believes. This week in revealing that the US and its partners had foiled 10 al-Qaida plots since September 11 he claimed ‘We are facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world’ which is paradoxically of course precisely the way many poor nations have viewed US economic and foreign policy over the past fifty years, and in a heightened way during the Bush Presidency.

I think that Bush’s religious mania constitutes a threat to us all, particularly when he employs it to justify violence and war. The US and its Coalition partners provide no public figures of either troop or civilian casualties resulting from God having ordered the President to invade these countries. Figures compiled by agencies which do keep an eye on these things claim on the basis of the lowest estimates that in Afghanistan there have been to date 3,485 civilian deaths with a further 6,237 seriously injured, and in Iraq there have been 24,770 civilian deaths with 44,586 seriously injured.

For killing four innocent people because God told him to, my altar boy expected to spend a lifetime behind bars. For his divinely inspired role in the killing of nearly 30,000 innocent people President Bush not only remains free, but is applauded by members of the Christian Right.

The Use and Abuse of Statistics

2005-10-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Sorry that I missed posting a blog last weekend. I was busy preparing for one of our intensive distance learning residential weeks at Lampeter University, and as usual was running so late that certain things had to be sacrificed.

One of my academic interests is equipping students in the use of tools derived from the social sciences in order that they may better understand the dynamics of the world and community in which they live. I call this ‘critical social analysis’ and much of what I teach is based on the pioneering work in devising a pedagogy for social transformation which was the life-long task of Paulo Freire. I encountered Freire first through his books like Pedagogy of the Oppressed but when he held a post in popular education at the World Council of Churches, and I was involved in development education for the churches in New Zealand, our paths crossed on many occasions. One of the things I learnt from him was that knowledge can be packaged in the way a government, an educational institution, or teachers decide is appropriate, and can deliver messages those in power want the rest of us to hear. And this applies equally to statistics, and they way they can be used for social control on the one hand, or for human development and emancipation on the other.

I was reminded of that this week when I read that the American radio show host, William Bennett, one time Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan, and drugs czar under George Bush the Elder made a statement which seems to have embarrassed Republicans everywhere. He said, “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”. Although he went on to say that aborting black babies would be an “impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down” the damage was done. He was implying that US statistics indicate that there are a disproportionate number of Black criminals in comparison to the white population.

This reminded me of a situation I became aware of in New Zealand several decades ago, an instance which I now use as a case study with my students. An organization of mainly Maori and Pacific Island unemployed people in Auckland were similarly confronted by Government statistics which suggested that an overwhelming number of crimes were committed by, and the larger part of the prison population represented by the minority Maori and Pacific Island population. Certainly there was no other conclusion to be drawn from the way that the information was presented.

The organization then turned its attention to other sets of statistics presented by the Government and quickly became interested in the unemployment figures. They noticed that whereas the figures on crime were described in terms of gender and race, the numbers of those employed and out of work were presented by district and by gender only. So members very quickly articulated the question ‘Why are the statistics on crime presented on the basis of race, and those on unemployment on the basis of gender?’ They decided to engage in some research of their own into what the unemployment statistics would look like if they too were presented on the basis of race.

There’s probably little need to tell you what happened. The proportion of persons from minority populations who were unemployed almost precisely reflected the proportions of those from these communities who were branded as criminal. They came up with some horrific stories including one of an unemployed Pacific Islander who became so desperate to feed his family that he stole several loaves of bread from a supermarket. This alternative research was a cogent reminder that for many people life is absorbed by the daily struggle just to survive, just to find food, clothing and shelter for one’s family. It also revealed that in many instances our political economy reckons crimes against property to be worse than crimes against persons. And importantly it demonstrated the way that Governments, simply by the way they present statistics, can employ them for ideological ends or racist purposes.

So it looks to me as if William Bennett was doing the American Government’s work for it in highlighting the perception that Black people commit a disproportionate amount of crime. What ideologically perpetrated interventions of this kind never highlight is the relationship between poverty and crime, survival and lawbreaking, race and unemployment. It is for many of us not just an injustice but an indication of moral turpitude that in the world’s richest country possessing the world’s biggest economy there exist so many people who have become so marginalised, so alienated, so humiliated, so bereft of the compassion of the rest of the community, that they are unable to survive.

In the face of such endemic poverty it is an outrage that people like William Bennett choose to talk in terms of aborting Black babies rather than in terms of building a genuinely just, participatory and inclusive society in which the opportunities and the benefits are available to all.

Jingoism and Jerusalem

2005-09-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

When I was a parish priest on London’s Old Kent Road, I was initially bemused that virtually every couple coming to be married requested that the ‘hymn’ Jerusalem be sung at their wedding ceremony. I later discovered that this was a frequently sung song at school morning assemblies, so in some cases was probably the only ‘hymn’ with which South London’s young were familiar.

Jerusalem was being sung the length and breadth of England last weekend. And by England I mean England and not Britain, for I doubt that very few Celts in Scotland, Wales or Ireland were joining in. It was fervently sung as a patriotic gesture by Englishmen and women in two quite different settings. The first was at the final cricket test match between England and Australia at The Oval, one of London’s two famous cricket grounds. This is a game which has never appealed to me, and even less to my American friends who cannot understand the rules and conventions of a match which lasts five days. The Australians had held the symbolic ‘Ashes’ for nearly twenty years, but the English team, written off before the five match series began, had shown miraculous improvement but needed to win the final match to regain the Ashes, and as the English commentators kept arrogantly asserting ‘Bring them back to where they belong’. The England cricket team, seeking any help they could get, including divine intervention, requested that the fans sing Jerusalem.

The second setting was the last night of the Promenade Concert season at the Royal Albert Hall. This is festive occasion in which the promenaders who stand on the open floor space in front of the stage, bring flags, banners and toy instruments along to join in the final concert’s grand finale, which includes sea shanties, Land of Hope and Glory and, you’ve guessed it, Jerusalem. It is a moment for unashamed English patriotic fervour. This year however, the Observer’s music critic apparently had had enough of this rather loutish behaviour. ‘Let’s face it’, he wrote, ‘Britannia does not rule the waves any more. Those who think she does, or would like to, are clinging to the post imperial delusions beneath so much that is wrong in this country. This is not patriotism: it is the ugly face of jingoistic nationalism’.

If those who sing Jerusalem so enthusiastically were aware of the intention and meaning of the words they are embracing, they for the most part wouldn’t want to sing them at all! They were penned by William Blake who was regarded as a rather harmless lunatic by many of his eighteenth century contemporaries but is now recognised as one of the finest engravers and poets the country has produced. Greatly given to religious visions, he associated with Christian groups in London whose origins can be traced back to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a mediaeval Christian anarchist movement. The best biography I’ve read on Blake is Peter Ackroyd’s Blake and the best small book I’ve come across is Peter Marshall’s William Blake; Visionary Anarchist.

Blake was an anarchist in the sense that he believed that the Christian has a responsibility at all times to follow the law of Christ and where the law of the land conflicts with Christ’s law, to oppose the state. In 1803, in the course of removing a drunken soldier from his garden Blake was alleged to have said ‘Damn the King’ and to have intimated that ‘all soldiers are slaves’. These words led to his arrest and trial on the charge of treason, from which he was ultimately acquitted.

Blake’s poems are a complicated mix of religious vision and anarchist politics. The words of Jerusalem, are actually part of a longer work Milton and I regard them as one of the greatest works of anarchist protest against all that is oppressive, demeaning and dehumanising about authoritarian rule.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Now while it is probable that Blake was referring here to a very ancient legend that Christ himself in the course of his earthly life visited England, I think it more than likely that he also intended these questions to be rhetorical anticipating the answer ‘No’. Certainly for him there was no sign to be seen of Christ’s New Jerusalem blossoming amongst the ‘dark satanic mills’ and grinding poverty fashioned by the Industrial Revolution. In response, Blake issues his own call to action:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

‘Desire’ and ‘mental fight’ are very important to Blake’s understanding of education and politics. Our desires, our deepest motivations and intuitions are God-given instruments for progress, yet authoritarian societies try to repress them. Blake often referred to the way that the state works to control human behaviour through our socialisation and education – a process today we associate with ideological control and hegemony – as ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. Hence the important of engaging in ‘mental fight’ to overcome this power of the state in order to establish Jerusalem, the reality of Christ’s non-hierarchical and non-coercive Kingdom of justice and peace. We know that Blake’s intention was not a literal call to arms, as many people assume it to be, because of his insistence that ‘war is the health of the State’ indicating that states ultimately depend upon the force of arms to secure their objectives.

So my anarchist heart beats faster whenever I hear Jerusalem sung at weddings, at cricket matches, or at the Last Night of the Proms. I only wish that people appreciated and owned the significance of what they are singing, and in their politics were committed to heeding Blake’s call to resistance.

Where Did God Go?

2005-09-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

Disasters tend to bring out both the best and worst in humanity. We have witnessed this in the devastation wrought by Katrina along the USA’s Gulf Coast. There have been tales of heroism, of selfless action on behalf of others, of compassion towards those who are suffering. And equally there was widespread looting, reports of armed gangs firing indiscriminately, and within the refuge of the Superdome, incidents of assaults, rapes and suicides.

It’s the same with theology. A catastrophe on this scale evokes both the best and the worst kinds of theological discourse. The worst generally take the form of interpreting disasters like Katrina in thoroughly Old Testament terms which picture God wreaking retribution upon disobedient and sinful people. Given the popular tendency towards simplistic and fundamentalist religious tenets, it is not surprising to read that Katrina has prompted an outpouring of this kind of theological rubbish.

I trawled through the Internet to discover a few examples, and was not altogether surprised to see that some Christians view the destruction of New Orleans in the same biblically simplistic terms as the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s all to do with homosexual sin apparently. Thus Repent America, an evangelical and fundamentalist organisation opined that it was no accident that New Orleans was destroyed just a few days before ‘Southern Decadence’, an annual homosexual celebration which attracts thousands of people to the city, was due to be held. According to the organisation’s press release this gay festival fills ‘ the French Quarters of the city with drunken homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets and bars’. Said Repent America’s director Michael Marcavage ‘Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city . . . New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin’. He prays piously, ‘From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge’.

As if this parody of Christianity is not bizarre enough, worse was to follow in a diatribe emanating from God Hates Fags, the homepage of Westboro Baptist Church, in language much of which I wouldn’t want to reproduce in this blog. Under the banner ‘Thank God for Katrina’ this website proclaims ‘America is irreversibly doomed. It is a sin to pray for the good of this evil fag nation’ and ‘It is a sin NOT to rejoice when God executes his wrath and vengeance upon America’. And it urges its readers to ‘pray for more dead bodies floating on the . . . rancid waters of New Orleans’. Here is an instance of the cynical exploitation of religion. In this rejoicing over Katrina’s destruction and praying for a rising death count, religion has ceased to be a force for good. Religion has become evil.

So where was God in all this destruction? The answer is that there are no answers except that at many points in life humanity is confronted by the silences, ambiguities and absences of God in the world. In the biblical narrative of creation God invests humanity with mastery over creation and expects humanity to take responsibility for it. He intervenes neither to prevent the catastrophes we engineer nor to punish us for them. That we suffer the results of bad choices we make and the bad planning we execute is well illustrated by this latest hurricane which exposed both our complicity in global warming and the American administration’s failure to protect and provide for its people.

The signs of God I saw in this catastrophe were in the kindness of strangers, in the way that ordinary people became ministering angels, in the solace being offered to the lost, the lonely and the heartbroken, in public displays of the heights that humanity can aspire to in its finest moments, in the indomitability of the human spirit in the presence of tragedy and chaos.

When the prophet Elijah had his dramatic personal encounter with God, God was nowhere to be found within the forces of nature. He was not present in the raging storm which tore the mountains, nor in the shattering earthquake which followed, nor in the consuming fire. God was discerned in something unexpectedly less destructive and judgemental. God inhabits sheer silence. That silence may have been the immense silence of the desert where the only sound to be heard is the sound of one’s own heartbeat. But it may also have been within the sublime silence of the human heart itself.

New Orleans

2005-09-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

The disaster, which struck the Gulf Coast of the United States and the city of New Orleans in particular this week, was on a scale that no one could have imagined. We were transfixed in front of our TV sets as a flood of biblical proportions destroyed everything in its path, with no ark at hand to deliver people to safety. For day after day the poor of New Orleans looked in vain for somebody to come to their aid. The administration appeared to be totally paralysed by the scale of the destruction. The media quickly began looking for somebody to blame and to ask why other nations were not stepping in to help. One bewildered CNN reporter trying to make sense of the situation asked a representative of the United Nations committee that deals with such matters, “Is nobody coming to help us because of our involvement in the war in Iraq?”

The war has little to do with the world’s reaction, but certainly we have become so familiar with America’s self-assurance, with its confidence in technology, with its ruthless pursuit of its own economic and industrial interests, and as the only current superpower, its penchant for telling other nations how they ought to be living their lives, that many of us assumed that American technology and resources would cope with the crisis. It manifestly failed to do so, and the Administration’s request to the European Union this morning that it assist by supplying food, blankets and water tankers has unexpectedly reversed that trend of the poor, cap in hand, beating their path to America’s door. The experience of the world’s most powerful nation discovering itself to be vulnerable and powerless may be no bad thing if it can take to heart the lesson that today our global culture calls for mutual interdependence rather than a ‘go it alone’ mentality.

Naive theology often declares that humanity is powerless in the face of natural disasters, sometimes erroneously referred to, particularly by insurance companies, as ‘Acts of God’. But bad planning and human negligence have played their part. I was impressed with a pastoral letter issued by Bob Ihloff, the Episcopal Bishop of Maryland with whom I was a fellow student in Cambridge Massachusetts in the 1960’s. He said, “We know that hurricanes and tornadoes are increasing in number and severity because of global warming. Most scientists agree that global warming is the result of irresponsible human treatment of the environment. Yet, we, especially, as a nation, have refused to enter into global agreements which would over time eliminate greenhouse gasses and possibly reverse the trend. We selfishly are preoccupied with oil consumption to the point that even this most recent and particularly devastating tragedy gives way to our perceived need for more oil and our concern about its price!” While Americans may have been particularly resistant to giving environmental concerns priority over economics, there is a message here for all of us. Our lifestyles too have contributed to this disaster and we must accept a degree of responsibility for it.

Of course the President of the United States also has to acknowledge a degree of personal accountability. This morning’s British press revealed some sobering information. Work on the maintenance of the flood protection system around New Orleans is an ongoing budgetary item. So is preparation for evacuation of citizens in the case of flooding. Under the headline ‘Warnings went ignored as Bush slashed flood defence budget to pay for wars’ the Independent claims that vital measures to protect New Orleans from flooding were scrapped by the Bush administration to pay for its wars on terror and the war in Iraq. Funding was slashed by 80% and work on strengthening the defences protecting the city was halted for the first time in 37 years. Similarly, plans to provide emergency shelter for flood victims in the Superdome were abandoned when the funding dried up. And back in 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned the administration that ‘a hurricane hitting New Orleans would be the deadliest of the three most likely catastrophes facing America’.

So by all accounts the administration has a great deal to answer for. At the outset of the disaster the President declined to interrupt his holiday for 48 hours and spoke of the results of the hurricane as a temporary phenomenon. The Vice President still remains on holiday. Condoleeza Rice went shopping for a $7,000 pair of shoes in Manhattan. Meanwhile two of the world leaders high on the list of those the USA most despises were offering help. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela offered $1million via the Red Cross, and Fidel Castro of Cuba offered to send 1100 doctors and 26 tons of medicine.

The most shameful thing to emerge from the disaster is the blame-the-victim mentality displayed by some officials who claimed that people did not leave New Orleans when advised to do so. Middle class families climbed into their 4-wheel-drive vehicles and set off to stay with friends or relatives. British television reported other families booking into hotels and their children playing happily in the swimming pools. But the poor, mainly Black population bereft of transport, had no way of making it to safety, and it is they who have borne the brunt of the suffering. There was a dramatic moment on USA television yesterday when one young black man dared to articulate the words which were no doubt on the minds of many: “President Bush”, he said, “doesn’t care about black people”.

Africa, Akinola and AIDS

2005-08-28T04:37:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the long silence over the summer. I had intended to keep posting a weekly blog in the course of my travels in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Kenya, but the logistics of doing so proved impractical. Now that I am back home in Wales once more, our conversations can continue . . . . .

This past week I’ve been in Kenya, teaching on the HIV/AIDS and Pastoral Care MA programme, which I had a role in designing. It has been invigorating to catch up with Kenyan students and colleagues again. However, working in this programme I’m frequently struck by the immense gulf that exists between these students who are Christian teachers, pastors and social workers who are at some personal cost making significant interventions into the pandemic, and the leadership of the churches which often seems far more concerned about ecclesiastical politics and the quest for personal power than with the suffering of its people.

So the Archbishop of Kenya, the Most Revd Benjamin Nzimbi has announced that his Church will accept no further funding through the Episcopal Church’s Relief and Development Fund because of the consecration, now distant history, of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. ‘They are going against the Gospel’ and ‘we cannot continue having fellowship and links with them’ said the Archbishop. His Provincial Secretary insisted that foregoing financial support from the USA ‘will not affect the operations of the Church’. Such a statement is disingenuous given the heavy reliance of most African churches on external funding.

At the same time it was announced that the Kenyan Church is proposing to petition the Archbishop of Canterbury to bar from the next Lambeth Conference all Anglican Churches which have ‘accepted homosexuality’. There has been no subsequent amplification to explain what exactly is meant by ‘accepted homosexuality’ but if this means welcoming gay and lesbian people as honoured members of the Body of Christ, as I suspect it does, the list of Churches no longer welcome to Lambeth Conferences will be a long one: the Canadian and American Churches, the Australian and New Zealand churches, the Churches of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and the South African church to start with.

Behind the Kenyan Church’s statement about US funding lies the long shadow of Archbishop Akinola, the Nigerian tyrant who has bullied many other African bishops into submission to his fundamentalist views, his intolerance, his arrogance and his racism. His ambition and strategy is to establish his hegemony first over the African churches, then over the churches of the ‘Global South’, and ultimately over the entire Anglican Communion. He is apparently convinced that he has a divine mission so to do.

There are signs that this strategy is having some effect. The offices of the Council of African Provinces in Africa (CAPA) are based here in Nairobi. It has been part of Akinola’s strategy to ensure that CAPA ceases to be representative of African theology as a whole to become an instrument of his own narrow theological propaganda. So in respect to CAPA’s HIV/AIDS programme, Akinola gathered sufficient support to have its Chairman, the Archbishop of South Africa whom he perceived as possessed by much too liberal a stance, ousted with no successor appointed. This downgrading of the programme’s work comes as no surprise in the light of Akinola’s steadfast resistance to addressing the issue of HIV and AIDS in his own country. His self-appointed global role evidently doesn’t allow time for that. He then insisted that the programme’s primary source of support from the Episcopal Church must be abandoned even though this means that one of Africa’s most successful initiatives in this field will be unable to survive very long. Next he plotted to secure the resignation of its General Secretary, who is African but not being a Nigerian is apparently not African enough, while at the same time urging that CAPA’s office be given diplomatic status, presumably so that he can staff it with his Nigerian cronies.

One hopes for Africa’s sake that this setback to real progress in the battle against HIV/AIDS turns out to be as temporary as Archbishop Akinola’s extremist views are destined to be in the history of Christian solidarity with the poor. It is certainly difficult to see now how there can be anything approximating to a Lambeth Conference meeting in 2008. With all western churches excluded as Archbishop Nzimbi is proposing, the conference will end up as a jamboree for fundamentalist churches of the Global South who without western funding, will be hard pressed to hold it anywhere other than Archbishop’s Akinola’s back garden. It could certainly never be representative of global Anglicanism.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has to shoulder some of the blame for this state of affairs. Representing as he does the liberal wing of the Church which amongst its many values emphasises that of tolerance, he has been far too accommodating to the histrionics and insults of persons like Akinola. One of the great human lessons to emerge from the Second World War was that the appeasement of bullies leads not to dialogue and compromise but to a hardening of views and even greater outrages.

I didn’t attend Church at All Saints Cathedral last in Nairobi last Sunday. When I became a member of the organisation InclusiveChurch I determined that I would no longer worship in those churches which are unashamedly exclusive. In adopting its uncompromising and unenlightened attitude towards homosexuality, and refusing to welcome gay and lesbian people into fellowship, the Anglican Church in Kenya has to my mind already separated itself from the Anglican Church’s theology, ethos and tradition.

Letter from Australia

2005-07-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

Each time I visit New Zealand and Australia I’m struck by the vigour and imagination of the Anglican Church in these parts. That’s not to say that there aren’t things in the older and more traditional communities of Wales which I value. Each culture has its own strengths and weaknesses but it is certainly a feature of the younger countries of the Commonwealth that they are able value tradition without being bound by it, and feel free to be innovative where traditional cultures feel restrained. Both Australians and New Zealanders have an aversion to ‘red tape’, bureaucracy and pumped up authority, which often helps them to avoid arguments and delaying tactics to penetrate the very heart of issues and this is frequently reflected in church life as well as social and political life.

I came to Perth to visit David and Luisa, Isaac and Malachi, and to take part in Malachi’s baptism. David was an undergraduate student at Westminster College Oxford when I was teaching there, and after he had graduated and I had ‘retired’ for the first time, we both ended up working with the same mission agency in Oxford. For several years until David went to St Stephen’s House to commence training for the priesthood we shared a house in the picturesque Oxfordshire village of Horton-cum-Studley ten miles from the city. I was one of the officiants at David and Luisa’s wedding, and I managed to get to both his ordination as deacon, and a year later as priest, in St George’s Cathedral here in Perth. David now has an interesting split job as vicar of the parish of Greenwood, and Ministry Development Officer for the northern region of the Diocese. He also maintains a very interesting website which specialises in current news from the Anglican Communion. Should you want to visit it, the address is: www.davidbattrick.net

Malachi’s baptism was an all-day and most-of-the-night celebration. The ceremony itself was in the course of Sunday’s parish mass, which is as it should be, rather than the privatised hole-in-the-corner christenings that are a feature of parish life back in Wales. And then friends and family came to the house to wine on vintages from the nearby Swan Valley, and dine on a typically lavish Aussie buffet. Despite the fact that this is mid-winter, the temperature in this part of the country was mild enough to enable guests to sit out on the terrace until 10pm.

I’m not quite sure what to make of baptism within our highly secularised cultures. The significance for Malachi was clear – he was being welcomed into both a Christian community and into a supportive web of family and friends. Unusually (compared with Wales) he received communion at the mass and will continue to do so, being formally admitted to communion at seven, and then confirmed when he is of an age to take on Christian commitment for himself. This seems to me to be a far more natural and supportive environment than the older variant which sees the young person having to jump through several hoops to prove themselves sufficiently adult before confirmation and the privilege of receiving communion.

It is the theology of Baptism which taxes me most. The Epistle reading at the mass was from Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome where he is commenting on the absolute corruption of human nature, to the extent that whenever he tries to do good, only evil results. And when that is compounded with the doctrine of original sin – the suggestion that from the moment of our conception we have inherited this sinful human condition – it is alleged that we humans can do nothing good until ‘saved’ by Christ. I’m afraid I have never been able to look upon a child like Malachi and see only a miserable sinner with the capacity for committing even more heinous sins. And I’m terribly conscious that most of the people I know, including those who haven’t the slightest interest in being saved by Christ, manifest loving, generous, forgiving, courageous, compassionate and selfless acts which contribute to the community’s health and to humanity’s splendour.

My heresy is that I have a much more positive view of human nature than traditional theological understandings will allow. That’s one of the reasons that I am politically of an anarchist tendency for classical anarchists view the human person as an immense reservoir of goodness, abounding in latent talents which need to be treasured and developed rather than stifled by authoritarian social, political and economic systems. That’s akin to the way that Jesus seems to have regarded children. It is a child with all its goodness and all its human potential as yet undamaged and uncorrupted by the world that Jesus says we must emulate if we want to enter his Kingdom. Malachi may indeed one day turn out to be a sinner, but at the moment he is something else, one of the gatekeepers of that kingdom from whom we adults have much to learn.

Letter from New Zealand

2005-06-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

The religion which attracts most adherents in New Zealand is Rugbyism. An estimated 2.2 million of our 4 million citizens are ardent disciples of this faith and all this week the newspapers, television news and radio chat programmes focussed on little else than the upcoming first mission crusade featuring the indigenous congregation calling itself All Blacks and the visiting British and Irish congregation known as the Lions. Wednesday night’s TV showed a huge banner being hoisted into place on Christchurch cathedral where my cobber Peter Beck, himself a Pom, is Dean. The banner, recalling the way that Daniel, cast into the Lion’s den, emerged victorious and unscathed, offered appropriate encouragement and the promise of divine assistance for the All Black congregation.

Lest you should think that Rugbyism is a belief system entirely centred on human passion, it is the most scientific of religions. Friday’s edition of the New Zealand Herald presented a detailed analysis of the heights, weights and ages of the two forward packs. In New Zealand where Rugbyism is a youthful religion the oldest forward was 26. The oldest of the British forwards was 36. I was discussing this with Richard the osteopath, whom I have to visit frequently as I still bear injuries from my own youthful dalliance with this religion. Richard, a Welshman, thinks that the age difference is entirely due to the respective climates and that in view of the long, dark winters in the northern hemisphere it takes devotees there longer to grow and to blossom. In the height charts two All Blacks attain 2.02 metres, while the two tallest Lions are only 1.98 metres. The heaviest All Black weighs in at 118kg; the heaviest Lion at 117kg. Scientifically speaking, the odds favour the All Black congregation.

All week long the two denominations have been engaging in the Litany of ‘my religion is better than your religion’. On paper, the Lions would appear to hold most of the evangelistic cards, as their Guardian of the holy text is none other than spin doctor Alastair Campbell – the self-same man who was once responsible for spinning British prime minister Tony Blair’s pronouncements, until he became too much of a liability because the British public no longer believed anything the Prime Minister was saying. While this might be perfectly acceptable in religion, it is not always so in politics where it can be construed as lying. However, lying in the cause of the religion of Rugbyism is perfectly legitimate particularly on the eve of two denominations preparing to engage in a mission crusade. So Father Smug (who is referred to within his own denomination as Sir Clive) was behaving in a perfectly orthodox fashion when insisting that there are no divisions within his congregation, and that a Welsh and an Irish forward certainly didn’t come to blows during a training session as the newspapers reported, but accidentally bumped heads, leaving one of them nursing an enormous black eye.

More black eyes are predicted because Father Smug’s congregation constitutes an ecumenical experiment, drawing together four congregations of quite different class, ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. For the initial mission crusade, the Welsh congregation has been largely assigned singing roles in the choir, the Irish congregation will conduct the warm-up choruses, while the English congregation have been allotted all the key ministerial roles in the liturgy. This is appropriate in Father Smug’s view because the English congregation was the group to which, through divine revelation, the Sacred Text was first delivered, and they alone among all congregations really understand what it means and possess the sole authority to interpret it. The Scots congregation are nowhere to be seen but have been assigned the important behind-the scenes tasks of hospitality and welcoming any new converts. But rumour has it that members of the non-English congregations are less than happy with Father Smug’s determination of responsibilities, and that we will shortly see the kind of dissent emerging which was one of the sad features of the ill-fated last Lions evangelistic mission to Australia.

The crusade began last evening in a packed out St Jade’s Cathedral in Christchurch. The rain and sleet seemed to affect the commitment of Father Smug’s mission team who performed well below par. The Rugbyism liturgy which they enacted before the eager fans was the unreformed version, stolid and unimaginative, of little appeal to New Zealanders. The All Blacks on the other hand espoused a joyous charismatic interpretation of the faith, performing with flair that moved the souls of the faithful who, had there been a roof on St Jade’s, would surely have raised it. It was no contest.

Father Smug however, detected the whiff of heresy amongst the All Black team and demanded that the Bench of Bishops reconvene the Inquisition to punish a couple of heretics. This retreat into mediaevalism is decidedly unecumenical. One understands Father Smug’s disappointment, particularly after Alastair Campbell’s heroic efforts to capture the media high ground, but folk religion in these islands suggests that Father Smug has lost sight of the grand mission strategy, and unless he now abandons his elderly English congregation and seeks inspiration from the Welsh and Irish congregations, this crusade will never get off the ground.

And as for lost souls, the Scots hospitality team is disconsolate, because despite all the planning and all the praying, not a single convert was made.

Letter From America

2005-06-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

I’m in a hotel room not far from Los Angeles Airport today having a breather between the flight from London yesterday and the long flight down to Sydney tonight, surrounded by roadside diners, shopping malls, gun-toting policemen, the San Diego freeway, very large men in Bermuda shorts, and levels of pollution for which LA is infamous, on what promises to be a very hot summer’s day. And all this paraphernalia according to the books I read is part of America’s rich postmodern cultural tapestry.

My first major task of the day was wrestling with the seven sections of the LA Times newspaper. Despite having spent a considerable amount of time over the years in this stimulating country, I’ve never learnt how to read an American newspaper. My paper at home has in-depth and sometimes learned articles which start at the beginning and finish at the end – and I’ve grown accustomed to reading in this way. Here it’s different with the front-page headlining seven stories, an index indicating the gist of seven further stories in inside pages, with synopses of three related stories which are also somewhere inside. There is scarcely a complete stand-alone story to be found. I launch into a news item from Iraq and after three paragraphs am told to turn to page eight for the remainder. Some stories take on the characteristics of a serial to be found on three different pages, and occasionally in different sections of the paper. It’s all very confusing. Should I follow my Iraq story on pages one and eight, and then return to the front page to commence a new story? Or should I read the entire front page, committing to memory as many continuation markers as possible, and then turn and read pages in sequence, picking up on the various narratives wherever I can? That would be decidedly postmodern. Deciding what to do takes up most of breakfast time as I wonder what it is about the American mind that has caused it to introduce such a fragmented style of reading and comprehension.

As one might expect, there is an American ‘take’ on each news item, which in many cases would constitute the opposite of what I imagine to be my UK paper’s interpretation. The first story, ‘A Clan Scourged by Death’ comes from Iraq and begins in a lyrical way: ‘It seems these violent days need more prayers than hours can hold, but the old man prays anyway, raising his hands and closing his eyes, whispering verse as the tribal boys watch from the dusty courtyard. They know what Mohammed Mousa Tahir prays about. They have heard the low moan of his voice, like wind through a field.’ This could be the opening paragraph of a novel. Then unfolds a tragic tale, now unfortunately ubiquitous in Iraq, about the old man’s son being shot dead in his car by US troops. Several days later comes news of the old man’s six nephews and cousins being slain and mutilated by attackers unknown. UK papers like the Guardian or the Independent would probably have said that civilian casualties at US troops hands, and the anarchic social and political conditions that the US inspired doctrine of regime change has created, is all bad news for the USA. But for the LA Times, which is at pains to point out that the old man’s account is based upon unconfirmed reports, this is good news for America because the old man says that if American troops were to come to his house ‘I will tell them “Peace be upon you”. I only want the Americans to help this society and stop the war’.

The story which I was really looking for however, was so brief that it was found in its entirety on page four – the international observance of Myanmar’s pro-democracy advocate and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi’s sixtieth birthday. Having won a legitimate election contest in 1990, she was imprisoned by the ruling military regime for ten years, and ever since her release has been held under house arrest. Several UK Sunday papers featured Desmond Tutu’s call for the world to bring the same pressures to bear on the corrupt regime in Myanmar, as it brought to bear upon apartheid and which contributed to the remarkable changes forged in that country. President Bush joined others in sending this extraordinary woman his best wishes for her sixtieth birthday. Sounding the freedom trumpet loudly, as he is wont to do in these situations, the President said, apparently ignorant of the country’s change of name, ‘Her strength, courage and personal sacrifice in standing up for the oppressed people of Burma have inspired those who stand for freedom’. If ever a case could be made for the doctrine of regime-change in order to allow democracy to take root, this must be it. But President Bush remains uncharacteristically low key, one might even say pacifist, when it comes to discussing Myanmar. And that makes me immediately suspicious. Might his reticence to act have something to do with the USA’s global strategy in respect to Asia? Many of us in the southern hemisphere recall the way in which the USA left support for ‘regime change’ in East Timor to the Australians because of, as we later discovered, keen US interest in developing the fledging oil industry there.

Putting the Bush administration to one side, there are many positive things to say about America. One is constantly struck here in California by America’s enormous contribution to science and technology, and particularly to computer technology. I find that even my modest two-star hotel room is wireless enabled, so that with my new laptop which came similarly equipped, I can now post this message halfway across the world without a cable in sight. Well, I can if I remember my screen name and password. Oops!

Maybe it's in the Genes

2005-06-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

Sometime back in the 1980’s I had the misfortune to attend a meeting of the Christian Family Association in Palmerston North, New Zealand. The speaker was a right-wing, anti-Semitic activist from Australia, who harangued the audience about the decline of the community’s moral standards. She was particularly scathing about the HIV/AIDS virus, opining that God-rejecting evildoers, who had deliberately chosen to be gay, were malevolently passing the virus on to the straight community. And in the next breath she went on to say, ‘And in Queensland, mosquitoes are spreading this virus’. This prompted me to comment, probably a little too loudly, ‘how can you pick a gay mosquito?’ The audience reacted with laughter which completely nonplussed the speaker. But that’s another story . . .

It’s the gay fruit fly and not the mosquito I want to talk about. Way back in 1963 a man named Kulbir Gill discovered, very much to his surprise, genetically homosexual fruit flies. A mutated gene led affected male fruit flies to both initiate courtship with and welcome courtship from other males. Not a great deal seems to have been made about this discovery at the time, possibly because it ran counter to the commonly accepted wisdom that people become homosexual primarily through their environment and nurture rather than being homosexual by nature through their genetic constitution.

In the 1990’s Dr Dean Hamer who was researching Kaposi’s sarcoma, began also to focus on the possible role of genes in sexual orientation. His National Cancer Institute research team in the USA published the results of some of their research in Science in 1993. Their study of genetic markers appeared to indicate a predisposition towards homosexuality in a region known as Xq28 where homosexual brothers had different Xq28 markers from their heterosexual siblings. While Hamer and others thought they were well on the way to isolating the gay gene, attempts to replicate the finds by other scientists produced differing results, and the Hamer research became something of a nine-day wonder.

But other scientists continued to probe the wondrous nature of things. In 1999 biologist Bruce Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity which established that there is enormous variety throughout the animal kingdom in non-reproductive or same gender sexuality. Bagemihl documents evidence of same-sex activity across such an extensive range of animals that it becomes virtually impossible to argue that the behaviour is not ‘natural’. President Mugabe of Zimbabwe famously declared that in his country not even pigs do it, while not to be outdone, Anglican Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria is on record as saying that homosexuality is an ‘aberration unknown even in animal relationships”. Both are woefully unobservant because even domesticated animals like pigs and dogs exhibit same-gender sexual relationships just as their fellow species in the wild. Bagemihl adopts an almost religious attitude to his work saying that it is ‘a meditation on the nature of life itself and a celebration of its paradoxes and pluralities’ and that it is ‘capable of inspiring our deepest feelings of wonder, and our most profound sense of awe’.

So what’s brought all this on, I hear you ask? Well, this week our friend the fruit fly is back in the news again. According to the press, biotechnologists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and at Ohio University have discovered a single ‘switch gene’ which changes the sexual orientation of male and female fruit flies. One of the research scientists says, ‘We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies’ sexual orientation and behaviour’. Another comments ‘Hopefully this will take the discussion about sexual preferences out of the realm of morality and put it in the realm of science’.

One can’t imagine the religious moralists giving up without a fight however. Many with biblical literalist and evangelical dispositions have long insisted contrary to the belief of many gay and lesbian people that they were born with their orientation, that it is nothing more than a learnt behaviour which can be ‘cured’ either with psychological ‘help’ or with rituals of Christian deliverance. I expect they will continue to maintain this view even in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary.

But if a consensus emerges amongst the scientific community about the existence of the so-called gay gene, there will be an impact upon our theology. If some of us are born gay or lesbian what does this tell us about our Creator? And if we are all made in his image as the Bible avers, what will we now have to say about his image? No doubt the fundamentalists will come up with their own irrational response, something along the lines of ‘God creates us all as heterosexual, but Satan, always up to his wily tricks, muscles in and begins messing about with our genes’. Others will probably continue to argue that any genetic predisposition towards homosexuality is one of the results of the Fall. Like the pain of childbirth for a woman, it is a punishment that God inflicts upon us for our disobedience.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that God intended us to be this way – a wonderfully diverse humanity endowed with difference, imagination and artistry which echoes and complements the diversity of creation as a whole. Bruce Bagemihl puts it this way:

“Biological exuberance is available, if it is nothing else – at our fingertips, everywhere we turn, in the fibers and textures that surround us, in the spices that fill our nostrils as we walk past the corner store, in the cloud formations above us and the dandelion seeds strewn by the wind about us, in the embrace of a friend and the kiss of a beloved – in all the colours and patterns that fill our lives. . . . . . It is about the unspeakable inexplicability of earth’s mysteries – which are as immediate as the next heartbeat.”

Out of Africa

2005-06-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

Africa featured prominently in the media this week. There was Tony Blair’s ill-fated trip to America to bring the Bush administration on board with his international plan for the salvation of Africa. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had his say, speaking perhaps too optimistically of what might be achieved when the G8 countries meet at Gleneagles. And Sir Bob Geldof weighed into the fray, announcing a series of world concerts on the scale of Live Aid, but on this occasion not to raise funds for famine relief, but to mobilise people to protest at the time of the G8 meetings that too little is being done by the richer nations to alleviate endemic poverty in Africa. There is talk of a million people taking to the streets of Edinburgh, an estimate which is making that city’s authorities rather twitchy.

All this mind you, at a time when Europe and the USA were indulging in a childish game of ‘my plane is bigger than your plane’. Both regions provide hefty subsidies and kickbacks to plane manufacturers Boeing and Airbus, but America has taken its case against Europe to the World Trade Organisation, initiating a process which the experts say will take years to reach a judgement and cost both sides billions of dollars – while Africa continues to starve. Given the state of Africa, this costly charade is scandalous.

Down at the Black Cock, the village pub, which (now that the ancient Church of St Michael keeps its doors firmly locked apart from Sunday service times) is the only community meeting place we have in Llanfihangel Talyllyn, conversation also turned to Africa. Paul the horse breeder, Charles the retired engineer, and Mark the shepherd were agreed about one thing. Nothing we do for Africa will work until corruption is rooted out of African political and economic life. What is needed is appropriate governance so that international aid doesn’t disappear into the bottomless pockets of African elites. When asked how our village stalwarts proposed solving that problem the view was that there is nothing we in Britain can do about it; it is for Africans to get their act together, which sounded rather like the familiar blame-the-victim syndrome.

Then the conversation turned into a discussion of African Christianity which has been receiving some bad press in Britain. There have been some terrible cases of child torture and abuse brought to the public’s attention. The torso of an African boy who had been mutilated was found floating in the Thames. The press corps muttered about child sacrifices and witchcraft, and went on to reveal that there are hundreds of African immigrant schoolchildren who seem to have disappeared altogether, provoking alarm in some quarters about the scale of the problem. One report suggest that many have been sent home to Africa to undergo Christian deliverance rituals, and that some are not heard of again. Then in a much-publicised case which has provoked changes in Britain’s child care and protection agencies, a young girl Victoria Climbie, whose relatives accused her of being possessed, suffered deprivations and beatings which culminated in her death.

This week brought yet another case to prominence when three adults who had branded an eight year old girl a witch and tortured her for months, were convicted of child cruelty in a British court. The girl had over forty injuries to her body: she had been cut with a knife, slapped, kicked and beaten; she had had chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes; she had been starved; she had been tied up in a laundry bag and told she was going to be thrown into a river. Investigations indicate that the family were members of an African protestant church which preaches the reality of Satan in people’s lives, and insists that those who display symptoms of possession or witchcraft be summarily dealt with. This particular child – known only as Child B in court – was the subject of a prophecy in the course of a church retreat which had branded her ndoki or witch.

Child protection authorities are careful to point out that there is no evidence of the prevalence of child abuse in African communities being any greater than in other communities but it is the Christian connection which is alarming many. Anyone who knows Africa is aware of the way that in many instances Christianity is a veneer overlaid upon traditional religion whose practices are maintained. Thus in my own work in HIV/AIDS education in Africa, there have been examples of men declared HIV positive who, upon returning to their village, have been advised by a traditional healer to seek a cure by sleeping with a young virgin, thus transmitting the virus to an innocent child. And in the case of ‘witchcraft’, some variants of African Christianity have adapted traditional practices which call for the body to be subjected to various forms of brutality in order to exorcise the evil spirits.

This is not true of all African Christianity of course. One thinks of the gallant support churches in South Africa gave to the struggle against apartheid, or of those churches which are engaged in impressive programmes of community development, or at the forefront of the battle against HIV/AIDS. But there are also churches which preach a ‘prosperity gospel’ to those trapped in endemic poverty or which seek to exercise power and control over the poor by preaching not the power of Christ but the omnipresence of Satan. And there are many unfortunate instances of the kind of corruption identified at the political level, also being manifested in churches. In one diocese where I have close friends, the former bishop declared that he was unable to pay his clergy while at the same time constructing an enormous mansion for his impending retirement. We don’t need the skills of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot to shed light on that situation.

So you must pardon me if, when Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria declares that the future of Christianity lies in Africa’s hands, or when my evangelical friends insist that Africa provides a model for the renewal of Christianity in Europe, I prefer to take a more nuanced view.

An Issue of Marriage

2005-05-29T02:54:00.000-07:00

What appeared to be a relatively minor news item caught my eye this week. Westminster Abbey authorities have refused to allow key scenes from the proposed film of The Da Vinci Code to be shot within the Abbey. They said this was because the book is ‘fictitious’. They also announced that they are investing in a DVD and training the Abbey’s marshals and wardens to explain to visitors why author Dan Brown is so mistaken. The Abbey is following hot on the coat tails of Rome, which has condemned the book as lies and appointed a senior cardinal to counter the myths it expounds. But Lincoln Cathedral has no such qualms. Its authorities this week signed a deal with the film company to turn its nave into a replica of Westminster Abbey for £100,000.

Personally I don’t consider The Da Vinci Code any more fictitious than parts of the Bible, particularly the early books of the Old Testament which are a collection of myths, fables and legends which depict the way one group of people wrestled with those ultimate questions of how the world began, and the nature of human destiny. I’m one of those who found Dan Brown’s book a good read and consider it a ‘must’ for anyone interested in theology, but I certainly didn’t read it as if it were literally true. It’s a work of fiction and like most good fiction it fashions links with events and experiences which might possibly be true and challenges its readers to ponder ideas that are potentially credible. Dan Brown is a novelist and not a theologian, a fact well demonstrated by the fact that he has sold 25 million copies of his book in a year, earned £140 million from it, and currently has four works among the twenty best sellers in the UK ranked this week at 1, 3, 8 and 11. No contemporary theologian could market his product this well!

The Roman Catholic Church’s image is dented in this book through the author’s suggestion that it harbours a secret society charged with protecting the Holy Grail at all costs. Many readers have drawn parallels with Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic organisation dear to the late Pope’s heart, and by all accounts equally close to the new Pontiff. So the Church is embarking upon damage limitation through a PR initiative to prove that nothing of the kind could possibly exist. But such is humanity’s penchant for secret societies, and the Church’s predilection throughout its history for secret politics, the recent Papal Concave being just one example, that it is little wonder that Dan Brown’s secret society strikes a chord with his readers.

But at the heart of the book lies not so much a political as a theological issue, and this is the contention that the Holy Grail of legend is not the chalice from Christ’s Last Supper, but the womb of his wife Mary Magdalene, and that their descendants live on to the present day. On scriptural evidence alone, the fact that Jesus had a special relationship with Mary Magdalene is beyond doubt. And that relationship is also alluded to in the Gnostic extra-canonical Gospel of Mary Magdalene which has Peter saying to Mary, ‘Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than any other woman. Tell us the words of the Saviour that you know, but which we haven’t heard’. Such was the special status accorded to Mary Magdalene in the early Church that she was known as the Apostle to the Apostles. Most Biblical scholars today seem agreed that Mary was marginalized by the writers of the four canonical Gospels most probably because she was a woman.

The theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene is an assertion of an altogether different kind for which there is no direct biblical evidence. But it is nevertheless an idea which keeps cropping up in Christian and literary discourse. It was alluded to in Martin Scorsese’s film version of the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis’s work The Last Temptation of Christ. This much misunderstood film portrayed Jesus on the Cross being tempted to come down, forget his crusade and go off, get married and live a quiet life. A similar theme appeared in Kazantzakis’s novel about the life of St Francis where Francis seeks spiritual advice from a hermit. ‘Throw yourself into the abyss’, was the reply, and when Francis said he couldn’t do that, the sage told him to forget his troubles and go home, get married and have children. It is this struggle between spirit and flesh that Kazantzakis turned into the last temptation of Christ. At the end of both the novel and the film, we learn that this was indeed the final temptation that Christ endured, and that he resisted it. In the end Kazantzakis came down on the side of orthodoxy.

The idea that Jesus may have been a married man is anathema not only to the Chapter of Westminster Abbey, but to the majority of Christians who prefer a sanitised and sexless Jesus who was the embodiment of love but not that kind of love. But this is not the last word on the matter. Theology from the second century scholar Irenaeus onwards has affirmed that Christ entered every stage of human existence to sanctify and redeem it. Given that sexuality and family life are central to human life, how could Christ achieve this without being married? Hippolytus and Origen – two other early Church theologians - insisted that the Old Testament Song of Solomon was a prophecy of the marriage, albeit spiritual and non-sexual, between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Jewish tradition of Jesus’s time required rabbis to be married, and marriages were normally arranged for boys at the age of sixteen. Would Jesus’s parents not have arranged a marriage for him at that age? This argument shifts the burden of proof and makes it incumbent upon us to explain why Jesus’s parents did not fulfil their proper duties in this respect. All four Gospels relate the story of Mary anointing the feet of Jesus. Some scholars claim that this ceremony was common amongst royal houses in the ancient world, sealing the marriage between a king and his spouse. So the idea of a married Jesus, while contrary to Christian orthodoxy, is a perfectly legitimate subject for theological enquiry.

The Precentor of Lincoln Cathedral, in justifying to the media that Cathedral’s involvement with the film project argued that ‘it requires far more suspension of belief to accept the line of The Da Vinci Code than it does the Gospels’. Really? It might also be argued that belief in a married Jesus demands less of a leap of faith than belief in the resurrection.

Living by the Rules

2005-05-21T10:12:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest teachers I encountered while doing postgraduate studies in the United States during the heady 1960’s was Saul Alinsky the pioneer of community organisation and the author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. I attended some of his lectures, probably better described as virtuoso performances, at Brendeis University. In Rules for Radicals, Rule Four is ‘Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules’ for as Alinsky comments, ‘they can no more obey their own rules than the church can live up to Christianity’. He was fond of pointing out that those who ‘publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other)’ should be constantly ‘pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations’. He saw this as an effective tactic in situations where power is being abused.

This week has seen the Bush administration challenged once more to demonstrate that it lives up to its own book of rules. At the beginning of the week we were treated to George Galloway, one of the UK’s most flamboyant and outspoken Members of Parliament, lambasting the Senate committee investigating the oil-for-food scandal. Those of us used to his aggressive style and unwavering opposition to the war in Iraq knew what to expect and had eagerly looked forward to the encounter. Members of the committee appeared somewhat nonplussed by the barrage that George unleashed in response to allegations that he had personally benefited to the extent of two million barrels of Saddam’s oil. First George called into question the ‘kangaroo court’ travesty of American justice; ‘I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever having written to me or telephoned me, without any contact with me whatsoever, and you call that justice’. Then he wanted to know what evidence there was against him, and when this turned out to be his name on a piece of paper given in evidence by two Iraqi officials who are currently prisoners of the US forces, George launched into an attack on the illegality of the war in Iraq in particular, and the immorality of the occupying US forces in general.

There were some classic moments in his testimony, none more so than when he was asked how often he had met Saddam Hussein. ‘I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him’, George said. ‘The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try to bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war.’ At one level this was a wonderful piece of televised theatre in which a man who has consistently opposed the war argued forcefully that what the committee was involved in was not a judicial enquiry but rather, having got practically everything about the Iraq situation wrong, yet another attempt by the administration to justify its actions. But at a far deeper level, it was one lone person taking on the US government and challenging it to live by its own book or rules in terms of the pursuit of justice and truth.

The situation had not improved for the US by the end of the week when a British tabloid published photos which to the Arab and Muslim world were degrading, of Saddam Hussein in his underwear. In general, comment in the British media characterised the photographs as a breach of human rights and contrary to the Geneva Convention. The newspaper publishing the photographs said they had been leaked by a military source as a way of indicating to insurgent groups in Iraq that Saddam was a broken man, thus somehow undermining insurgent resolve. This is a fundamental misreading of the Iraqi mind and situation typical of the American regime. Many UK commentators focussed however, on something else – the way that the US administration cried foul when the Arab satellite TV station al-Jazeera (about which I wrote last week) paraded American prisoners of the Iraq war before the world, complaining that the provisions of the Geneva Convention were not being observed. If they were not being observed then, they were also not being observed this week. That the administration was well aware that it was not in this instance living by its own book of rules, became clear when the President backed an ‘aggressive’ investigation into the leaking of the pictures.

But the situation was compounded this morning when it was revealed that the President of Afghanistan has called for an enquiry into the way that prisoners of war were being treated by US forces in that country. This was prompted by the leaking of a military investigation into the killing of two detainees. Coming in the wake of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and the testimony of British Muslims formerly held in Guantanamo Bay about the degradation, abuse and torture they were forced to undergo, this Bagram Base incident in which two young Afghans were tortured, chained to the roof of their cells and left to die, appears to break all the rules of humanity and decency. It is easy to place the blame on the military psyche which is trained to treat the enemy as someone less than human, who can be abused and tortured in order to gain significant information which will assist the cause. I think there is some truth in this but there is also the question of the way all humanity is compromised when those in power cynically abandon the rules which they insist lie at the heart of concepts like freedom, justice and democracy.

For Saul Alinsky it is the superior strength of the powerful which becomes their undoing when they are pushed to live by their own book of rules. I’m grateful to George Galloway for reminding me once again that the arrogance of power can so easily be hoist by its own petard.

Begging Letters

2005-05-15T09:42:00.000-07:00

Amongst yesterday’s mail was an airmail letter from Uganda. The handwriting and my mis-spelt name on the envelope looked familiar. It was a letter from a pupil at St Agnes Senior Secondary School in Kampala, the third such letter that I have received, though each purports to have been from a different student. This student’s story mirrors that relayed by her two predecessors. She is an orphan having lost her dear father to the ravages of HIV/AIDS and her mother in a tragic motor accident in which a taxi in which the woman was a passenger ploughed into a petrol tanker with everyone dying in the consequent conflagration. This tragedy was shortly followed by the loss of her two siblings who had been supporting the student by paying her school fees. Her sisters had been kidnapped, raped and then finally killed by members of a rebel group. She is now utterly alone in the world and begs me to meet her school fees of $390. ‘I am here on bended knees’, she writes, ‘crying for your parental care and love towards my suffering’. It is difficult not to be moved by such a catalogue of disasters.

Unlike its two predecessors this letter has an appendix, a copy of the student’s ‘O Level Terminal Report’ which indicates how well she is doing in the seventeen subjects she is studying. The report bears the official school stamp and is signed by the headmaster. I note that all the marks, comments and teacher’s signatures are written by the same hand. Sending me the report is a clever ploy, because in a postscript to her letter, the student requests that I return the report to her as the headmaster wants it back again at the beginning of next term. Whereas I could easily dismiss the first two letters from my mind, this time a response is demanded.

It was clear to me from the initial letter I received that the School, assuming it exists (it has an E-mail address but I have not been able to locate any information about it via the Web), possesses a copy of Crockford’s Clerical Directory which lists the names, addresses and clerical biographies of all Anglican clergy in the UK. It looks as if students are encouraged to select a promising donor and write off to him or her. The question I face is whether these are cases of genuine individual need, whether the school is exploiting the stories of children to raise funds, or whether this is yet another African scam.

Am I being too cynical about the situation? The trouble is that in addition to these letters purportedly from students in Africa, I am in receipt of others from Africa. There are those which are certainly a scam: individual letters, mainly E-mails, from Christians in Nigeria whose beloved father has passed on leaving behind a fortune in properties, diamonds, or oil revenues. For political reasons the son or daughter has to get these funds out to Europe, and if I allow millions of dollars to be sent to my account for safe-keeping, I will be rewarded both by God and by my Christian brother to the tune of some 5 million dollars. All I have to do is send my bank account details . . . The rest of course would be history with not a cent arriving from Nigeria, but any money that happens to be in my account being withdrawn by my Nigerian Christian brother. Apparently even though these scams are so obvious, people do fall for them. What angers me is the way in which both the gospel and Christian discipleship and solidarity are being cynically manipulated and abused.

The other kind of begging letter I receive from Africa is genuine enough, and comes from students on the programme I teach there, who are struggling with very meagre resources to establish small educational or economic generating projects amongst persons living with AIDS. But even in these instances where the need is great and obvious, my sympathy erodes when either the project is unnecessarily grandiose and seems fired by personal ambition and benefit, or where there lies revealed an underlying culture of dependency which regards Christians in the West, prompted by guilt over their colonial past, as the primary fount of resources. This demeanour becomes even more complicated for me when African Anglicans are happy to declare that they are no longer in communion with me because of what they perceive as my liberal and unbiblical views, but happy to solicit funds from me. I experience at a personal level something of the dilemma the Episcopal church faced when the Church in Uganda declared itself to be no longer in communion with the American Church because of its election and consecration of a gay bishop, yet continued to solicit major Episcopal funding.

I have been facing a similar dilemma over my ‘Lenten box’, into which ever since Sunday School I have been encouraged to make contributions towards overseas missions. These days I want to be sure that my gifts are going to worthwhile projects which benefit communities rather than individuals, like those which contribute to developing an infrastructure which will reduce endemic poverty and the suffering which accompanies it, or which promote educational projects for HIV/AIDS. I don’t want to see a single penny go towards the salaries of corrupt bishops or the expenses of local churches, least of all those which insist that their partial appreciation of the Gospel is the norm for Christian orthodoxy. Instead my Lenten self-denial gift goes these days to Christian Aid along with a letter requesting that the donation be directed towards the kind of project to which I am committed.

Christians have special duties of compassion towards the suffering and of expressing solidarity with the world’s poor. But as Jesus suggested, we also need to be as wise as serpents to ensure both that we are not being exploited by those who are abusing Christianity, and that our gifts have the potential of making a real difference.

Mediating Truth

2005-05-08T03:41:00.000-07:00

Well, the British elections are over with the Blair government returned with a much smaller majority and the distinction of winning the election with the smallest percentage of the popular vote (around 37%) since records have been kept. This has again raised the issue of the ‘tyranny of the minority’ with a great deal of speculation about what the political landscape could have looked like had we some form of proportional representation, with seats in parliament distributed on the basis of the percentage of the vote won. In my own electorate of Brecon the Liberal Democrat candidate’s majority increased from a mere 800 to over 6000, ample excuse for drawing the cork from a hearty bottle of New Zealand Pinot Gris. Overall it was a night for quiet satisfaction as Blair was punished for his lies about Iraq, the Liberals, the anti-war party, increased their representation at the expense of Labour, and I, having vowed after surviving the Thatcher years never again to voluntarily live under a Conservative regime, do not have to pack my bags and leave.

The role of the media appears to have been more influential than in the past, particularly as political commentators and TV hosts kept the Iraq war issues centre stage, and would not allow Blair’s campaign to marginalize it in favour of discussions about the economy to succeed. One of the most dramatic moments captured on TV was the post-result speech by one of the candidates in Blair’s own constituency, the father of a young soldier killed in Iraq who had campaigned as an Independent on an anti-war ticket. With the Prime Minister amongst the other candidates looking the most discomforted I have ever seen him, the father said that he hoped that one day the Prime Minister would apologise for the deaths he had caused, and that one day he would visit the British soldiers lying injured in hospital. It was a powerful moment.

Today’s Sunday newspapers, and political analysis TV programmes are all focussing on the way that Blair has become a liability to his party. There is a great deal of murmuring about the need for a change of leadership and the return of some kind of integrity to politics, with disaffected Labour parliamentarians, generally nameless, suggesting the possibility of some kind of coup, and Blairite loyalists proclaiming that this is all media hype with absolutely no substance. This raises the question of the ability of the media to shape the political arena and process, a theme coincidentally illustrated in last evening’s episode of Dr Who. The space travelling Time Lord of the 60’s and 70’s is back on our screens again in a new series of wonderfully crafted adventures. Last night his Tardis spaceship ended up on Satellite 5, the galactic orbiting centre of all news and information, which was actually being used by an alien life form to control the entire human race some 100,000 years hence. The new Dr Who is very much into issues of globalisation and provides a popular forum for issues of global power and control.

From an academic perspective, Noam Chomsky, anarchist fellow-traveller and one of the writers I most appreciate, has been pursuing this theme for decades. Manufacturing Consent, the book he co-authored in 1988 and later made into an award winning film, exposed how in the USA, rather than relentlessly pursuing truth, the media structures all facets of the news, selecting topics and framing issues, in order to create a consensus around American economic and foreign policy. Concepts such as ‘the free press’ and ‘free elections’ are manipulated in order to mask aggressive American domination. In one of his more recent works, Hegemony or Survival (2003) Chomsky presses his thesis further arguing that contemporary American global politics of unilateralism, the dismantling of international agreements, state terror, and the militarisation of space – in all of which the media is employed to manufacture consent – threatens to turn our planet into a wasteland. According to Chomsky, what we need to do is to develop a radical and critical way of ‘reading’ the media, in order to free ourselves from its power.

There is always of course what we refer to as the ‘alternative’ media which although it cannot be entirely free from ideological influence, does try to tell things the way they are. Who can forget the dramatic news footage from the war in Iraq shown by the Arab-owned news service al Jazeera, based in Qatar? Much to the embarrassment and increasing frustration of the American commanders, al Jazeera beamed around the world dramatic evidence which belied the sanitised version of civilian casualties which the war machine wanted people to believe. It was not surprising that after the fall of Iraq, so-called ‘Iraqi authorities’ banned al Jazeera from that country, putting an end to any challenge to the ‘victors’ version of events.

But the quest for manufacturing our consent can be far more subtle than banning alternative sources of news and comment. Buried within the news this week – after all, THE most important thing had to be the British election! - was a brief article announcing that Qatar was drawing up plans to privatise al Jazeera. For in addition to offending the US, this news service which attracts 35-40 million viewers, and has changed the face of middle-East media by offering critical coverage, has also offended most of its Arab neighbours. Unable to attract sufficient advertising revenue, it relies heavily on a state subsidy to keep afloat. The fear is that if al-Jazeera is privatised, Saudi investors and advertisers, heavily into the business of manufacturing consent, will impose censorship with the channel becoming just another medium for propaganda.

Elections, with their accompanying hype and spin, provide an opportunity for us to pause and consider just how ‘free’ our media are.

The Trouble with Elections

2005-04-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

This coming Thursday we face a general election for the UK parliament which on this occasion seems more than ever fraught with intrigues. As a Christian anarchist I ought to boycott the election entirely because classic anarchists insist that to invest any credibility in the corrupt electoral system is to collude with our powerful oppressors. But the Roman Catholic priest who introduced me to anarchism adopted the view that if we did vote, it ought to be for the party which offers the best opportunity for creating a milieu in which new ideas and proposals can be freely expressed. In the case of my electorate, Brecon and Radnorshire, the choice was easy. The Liberal Democrats hold the seat with a majority at the last election of only 800 over the Conservatives. So my vote goes to the Liberals firstly because they offer the possibility of space to think afresh, secondly because it was the one major party to oppose the war in Iraq, and thirdly because I have no wish ever to live and work under a Conservative government again.

There are too many actions of Margaret Thatcher which I cannot excuse or forget: her decision to go to war over the Malvinas (known here as the Falkland Islands); her championing of the infamous Clause 28 which prohibited schools from discussing homosexuality as an orientation and lifestyle; her creation of a bureaucratic management style in higher education which saw in my case the percentage balance of student contact hours to administrative tasks fall from 80:20 to 25:75; her rejection of the Church of England’s report on urban poverty, Faith in the City, as Marxist rubbish together with her admonition that the Church steer clear of politics and focus only on spiritual values; her cynical use of St Francis’s prayer as if it gave the seal of approved to her social and economic ideology; her insistence that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and in the latter part of her prime ministership, the increasing hubris which prompted her use of the royal ‘We’ as on that famous occasion when she announced ‘We are a grandmother!’. The list is endless.

Elements of the media are suggesting that in this election the Conservatives have become the ‘nasty party’ principally because they have called upon the skills of the Australian guru who has helped engineer John Howard’s electoral successes in that country. They have been running a campaign impugning the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair over both the intelligence and legal advice upon which he based the decision to go to war in Iraq. So on numerous occasions we have seen the leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard, in addition to raising the traditional war cries of the Right in favour of the creation of bigger prisons and a greatly enlarged police state, and against immigration and asylum-seeking, publicly declaring Blair to be a serial liar. I happen to think that Blair did deliberately deceive this nation in order to go to war. After all, under his leadership Britain has gone to war now on seven occasions so he seems to have a taste for it. I don’t have a problem with Blair being called a liar, just with who it is in this case who is calling him a liar and offering himself as the perfect model of integrity.

Under the lacklustre successive leaderships of John Major, William Hague and Ian Duncan Smith, the Conservatives have lost three elections in a row, something deeply discomforting for a party that considers itself born to rule. Much as I distrust Blair, I distrust Michael Howard even more, particularly as he said this week that he would have gone to war in Iraq under any circumstances just to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I have only once heard Howard speak and that was when he was serving as Minister of Employment in the Thatcher government. The occasion was a day conference organised by the Institute of Directors, one of the bastions of capitalism, to discuss the morality of the capitalist system. The main speakers were the American Roman Catholic academic Michael Novak, the Chief Rabbi, the Bishop of Oxford and Howard. Whereas the other speakers, amongst whom there were clear disagreements, were able to carry forward a conversation in a civilised manner, all Howard could do was rant about the conservative management of Britain’s economy, this mind you at a time when unemployment was soaring and poverty increasing. There was something deeply troubling about his demeanour which was crystallised for me when one of his Cabinet colleagues, Ann Widdicombe, scuppered his first attempt to gain leadership of the party by declaring that there was ‘something of the night’ about him.

In addition to Howard’s abusive style of personal politics, there are other machinations at work in this election. The UK Independence Party, largely made up of disaffected Conservatives who want to see the British Pound retained as the UK’s currency and to have Britain withdraw from the EEC, did unexpectedly well at the European elections at the expense of the Conservatives. And they are campaigning hard again and will hopefully, particularly in the case of my electorate, draw votes away from the Conservatives. Then too the ostensibly non-political Countryside Alliance, which is trying to have the Labour governmen's legislation banning the time honoured upper class ‘sport’ of fox-hunting lifted, appears to have fathered a covert organisation that is working on behalf of the Conservatives in marginal seats to see sitting Labour members defeated. British elections seem to be won or lost in the marginal seats and this year they are attracting even greater attention.

The perennial question of whether Britain should scrap its first-past-the-post electoral system, in which governments win power on a minority of votes – the so-called ‘tyranny of the minority’ – in favour of some alternative is being discussed with even greater fervour this election. This is in part due to the steep rise in voter apathy, with many people feeling either that the main political choices are no choice at all, or that big government has become so unwieldy that the individual voice is of no significance. Commentators seem much more serious this year in discussing the introduction of alternatives such as Australia’s compulsory voting with people fined for not registering a vote, or even, Heaven forbid, a system of proportional representation like that in New Zealand!

A Union Takes a Stand

2005-04-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

The Association of University Teachers, the union of which I’m a member, has always served me very well. So when Westminster College, the Methodist College in Oxford on whose theology faculty I worked in the 1990’s, decided that its faculties of Education and Theology should merge with Oxford Brookes University with both the loss of Methodist identity and the redundancy of some staff, the Union’s advice and representation were invaluable in negotiating my redundancy payment. It also came to my aid in a different matter. As a resident Tutor with pastoral responsibilities on site and provided with a College flat, the College’s Personnel Officer assumed the right to tell me who I could and could not have to stay in the flat. I insisted that my Union representative should be present at this discussion, and the Personnel Officer quickly discovered his reverse gear.

Although formally retired and in receipt of a teachers’ pension, I’ve returned to academic work on a part-time basis at Lampeter University, and remain a union member. This week at its annual conference, my union took the controversial step of boycotting two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan because it regards them as being complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the occupied territories. The boycott had been called because Haifa University is alleged to have placed restrictions on the academic freedom of any staff who speak out against the current Israeli government’s policies, and Bar-Ilan is alleged to have links with a college in the disputed settlement of Ariel. There are also allegations concerning the prestigious Hebrew University, but the Union is taking no action in this case until it has been thoroughly investigated.

I can’t tell you what the boycott will actually mean in practice as that is to be revealed in a mailing which the union will shortly be sending out. But as one might expect, the announcement of the boycott alone has prompted fierce reactions. Sources within the Palestinian Authority have warmly welcomed it as a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian people and their ambitions. The Palestinian founder of the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel says that the union’s action makes it “acceptable to compare Israel’s apartheid system to its South African predecessor”. The apartheid image is a common one amongst Palestinians who remain aware of the close links that the Israeli government established with the South African apartheid regime, to the extent that it is still alleged that the Israelis were assisting the regime develop a nuclear capability.

There have been the predictable responses from the Jewish community with the deputy Israeli Ambassador in London noting that “the last time that Jews were boycotted in universities was in 1930s Germany”; the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declaring that the decision is “misguided and unbalanced in the extreme”; the Board of Deputies of British Jews denouncing the boycott as “blinkered, irresponsible and dangerous”; and the Union of Jewish Students in the UK calling upon the government to establish a full enquiry into the obvious extremism amongst both staff and students on British campuses.

There is dissent amongst the university community as well. The association representing university employers has raised the issue of whether the boycott is contrary to laws relating to contracts, race and religious discrimination, as well as to the spirit of academic freedom. The representative body of vice-chancellors of British universities has similarly condemned the action. What remains clear in all this is that any criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians continues to provoke deep passions.

I know Haifa University quite well. When I was living in that city in the 1970’s a colleague and I would several days a week, very early in the morning, motor from our base in Wadi Nisnas up Mount Carmel to the University’s spectacular site, to play a few sets of tennis before motoring back down to a city beach for a quick dip in the Med before breakfast. We were at that time members of a team working with the Christian community on development projects in that city and we forged strong links with the University, and in partnership with its Sociology department conducted the first social survey of urban Arabs undertaken since 1919. There were many disturbing findings in this piece of research including evidence that Israeli agents were promoting drug use amongst young urban Arabs, allegedly so that their communities could be characterised as dysfunctional.

Our team also became involved in education issues, converting an abandoned Anglican hospital into a hostel for young Palestinians, many of whom had come into the city from rural areas in search of education, and had been forced to sleep rough on the streets. We quickly became aware that while limited access to tertiary education was available at technical college level, there was virtually no possibility of Arab students gaining entry to Haifa University. All this of course was in that era when Israel sported a ‘socialist’ government under Golda Meir, which ought to have been ideologically committed to equality of opportunity. But Golda of course had notoriously declared that no such people as Palestinians exist and since that time, with governments lurching ever further to the right, I cannot imagine that the educational opportunities for Arabs have improved much in respect to Jewish universities.

It is with this experience in mind that I personally applaud the action my union has taken this week. There are times when the freedoms we academics cherish so much need to be extended to those whose situation of oppression and degradation allows them no freedoms, least of all access to education. So I find myself echoing the words of the union member who co-authored the motion calling for the boycott. “I am proud today to be a member of a union that is prepared to stand up for human rights around the world”.

On Virtue

2005-04-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

When twenty years ago I participated in a training of trainers workshop on critical social analysis, which was becoming an important tool in the field of development education in which I was then working, one of the facilitators urged us to make certain we read the reflections of those with whom we profoundly disagree. He insisted it was important for us to know exactly what the political, economic and religious opposition were saying. Although I still find this an uncomfortable pursuit, I try to maintain it because I’ve learnt the value of discerning where those with whom I am at odds are coming from.

So one of the websites I visit from time to time is VirtueOnline, run by a man with the intriguing name of David Virtue. The site claims to be ‘The Voice of Global Orthodox Anglicanism’ and to be read by more than a million people each year. Its style is deliberately confrontational. It doesn’t want to engage in reasonable dialogue with anyone, but convinced that the views it promotes are both ‘Anglican’ and ‘True’ takes to task is an unrestrained and abusive way, those with whom Virtue disagrees principally Episcopal Church bishops whom he characterises as frauds and liars.

VirtueOnline is obsessed with homosexuality, which raises questions about the psychological disposition of those who subscribe to its extremist views on this and other subjects. According to Stephen Bates in his book A Church at War, it was Virtue who bombastically announced at the Episcopal Convention in the process of confirming Gene Robinson’s election as Bishop of New Hampshire, that he had found the ‘smoking gun’ that would guarantee Robinson’s defeat. This was an allegation that Robinson was associated with an Internet gay porn site, something which after due investigation turned out to be false. Of course there has been no apology for this, or any other false claim that has appeared on Virtue’s website which seems incapable of admitting that it can get things wrong.

This week the website took on the Church in Wales, of which I am a member, and in particular Archbishop Barry Morgan’s presidential address to a recent meeting of the Church’s Governing Body. Under the headline ‘Archbishop Launches Attack on Anglican Church’ Virtue claims that Archbishop Barry ‘launched a shocking condemnation of his own Church’. Virtue also noted the dreaded ‘h’ word in the Archbishop’s address, claiming that the Archbishop ‘used the opportunity to turn the focus of the Anglican Church once again on the issue of homosexuality’.

VirtueOnline in fact gives a completely distorted view of the contents of the Archbishop’s address. To begin with, the first half of the address is devoted to discussion of the ‘make poverty history’ campaign and the need to seriously address poverty both at home and abroad. But poverty is not something that appears high on VirtueOnline’s hierarchy of virtues or vices and thus attracts no mention.

When later in the document the Archbishop addresses the issue of sexuality, he records that in February he participated both in the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, and in the Anglican Primates’ meeting in Ireland. He devotes time to outlining the studious, dialogical, and consensus-building way that the WCC has proceeded with the task of engaging in study of human sexuality mandated at its 1998 Assembly. There is an implied critique here of the way by contrast that the Anglican Primates have approached discussion of the issue, which, he says, has been more of ‘a verbal slanging match’. The WCC process was marked with ‘openness and became encounters with sacred humanness’ because, as the Archbishop puts it, ‘people felt able to speak openly and honestly because they were listened to with respect and understanding’.

So what he advocates as essential within the Anglican Communion debate ‘is not a theological rant or a throwing of verbal grenades at people who happen to disagree at our own particular positions, but a reasoned, balanced discourse of some of the issues involved and the giving of space and time to every kind of viewpoint . . . . If the Church of God can’t conduct a debate in a civilised way when it claims to be a reconciled and reconciling community – what message does that give to the world? We cannot as a Church call for compassion, peace and justice in our nation and in our world if we as Christians do not exemplify those virtues in our own lives and in our dealings with one another’.

Amen to all that! And Amen too to Archbishop Barry’s taking to heart the Lambeth and Primates’ concern that we ‘listen to the experience of homosexual people, be committed to their pastoral support and see their victimisation or diminishment as abhorrent’ and initiating a process in the Church in Wales which honours those undertakings. Would that more bishops, particularly those in the so-called ‘south’ – the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America - were willing to treat the possibility of dialogue this seriously. Unfortunately their rampant homophobia does not allow them to meet with lesbian and gay Christians, even were they able to identify them. Many of the African Bishops I know maintain, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that homosexuality is a ‘disease’ brought by white colonists to an Africa which had no history of it. The dialogue which Archbishop Morgan pursues in faithfulness to the Gospel, sadly remains an impossibility for most of the so-called ‘orthodox’ churches of the South as well as for VirtueOnline.

One Wedding and a Funeral

2005-04-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been subjected to a television extravaganza this weekend, what with the late Pope’s funeral and the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles.

First then, the marriage which is surrounded with controversy. There is a constitutional crisis revolving around what Mrs Parker Bowles – famously referred to as ‘the Rottweiler’ by the late Princess Diana – will be called should Charles one day become King. The Prince’s press office (always referred to in the media as ‘Clarence House’) in an effort to stem the rising opposition to this marriage said that she would be taking one of Charles’s titles and be known as the Duchess of Cornwall. But last week in Parliament it was revealed that she would be perfectly entitled to use the title ‘Queen’ should she choose. To prevent her from doing so new legislation would have to be put in place, and nobody is suggesting that course at the moment. And later in the week it was reported that Mrs Parker Bowles will formally become Princess of Wales upon her marriage no matter what title she elects to use. But of course, Clarence House has been aware of this all along, and it is typical of its disdain for the general public that it should have pretended otherwise.

Charles is on record as saying that he wishes the British public would show him more compassion. But following his inability to understand the offence his long standing relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles caused his wife, and his unfortunate remark that he wasn’t going to be the first Prince of Wales not to have a mistress, many of the public are simply fed up with him. His plea shows how out of touch the monarchy is with the people. Given the iconic status afforded Princess Diana despite her own failings, one cannot see this situation changing.

It is not surprising in these circumstances that the dreaded word ‘republic’ has appeared in the press coverage again. An increasing number of people regard the usefulness of the monarchy only for its potential for boosting tourism revenue as hundreds of thousands of people flock to this country to view ornately dressed soldiers performing the Changing of the Guard, or to take a guided tour of one of the many grandiose buildings which the family owns. In Britain, the monarchy is too big a money-earner to jettison without careful consideration.

It’s different for those of us from ‘colonies’ like New Zealand of course, where the idea that our liberal democracy needs as its head of state, a British descendant of a German royal house, is ludicrous. Had the Queen taken, as most of her commoners do, the family name her spouse had adopted, she would have become Elizabeth Mountbatten, or more correctly Battenburg, for that was the original family name anglicised during the first world war to dispel anti-German sentiment. I have absolutely no objection to Camilla being known henceforth as Mrs Charles Battenburg. The present Queen (God bless her!) should be the last head of state for both the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom and the last Supreme Governor of the Church of England. If we must have heads of state, they should be persons who are role models and who understand and respect their people. Mr and Mrs Charles Battenburg simply don’t possess those qualities.

As for the Pope’s funeral, we haven’t witnessed such a spectacular farewell for a personage for many years. It is said that four million pilgrims flocked to the Holy City for the ceremonies, most of them of course unable to get anywhere near St Peter’s Square. It was certainly a moving occasion with a great deal of unexpected crowd participation and many banners calling for the immediate beatification of John Paul II.

A great and beloved leader for certain Roman Catholics he may have been, but as one Roman Catholic colleague said to me yesterday, ‘he set the Catholic Church back a hundred years’. We should never forget that despite his many achievements and, as I said last week, his constant stand against violence and war, he was responsible for first slowing, and then virtually putting a stop to the development of ecumenism and Christian unity and banning the use of the phrase ‘sister churches’. He withdrew permission to teach theology from some of the Church’s most distinguished theologians including Eduard Schillebeeckx (Christology) Hans Kung (Ecclesiology), Yves Congar (Ecumenism), Leonardo Boff (Liberation Theology) and Charles Curran (Moral Theology). He excommunicated Father Tissa Balasuriya for writing a splendid book Mary and Human Liberation. He removed French Bishop Jacques Gaillot from his diocese for opposing the Church’s teaching on condoms in relation to HIV/AIDS, and homosexuality. These men were prohibited from teaching not because any errors had been discovered in their work, but because of the opinions they had expressed, and this introduced a new criterion into Catholic orthodoxy. He proved incapable of relaxing the Church’s rules on contraception in order to alleviate the ravages of AIDS in Africa, or of addressing the pain of women called to the priesthood but denied ordination. The man who opposed authoritarian politics in Poland and throughout Eastern Europe, contradictorily established an authoritarian regime at the heart of the Vatican. And that is why many of my Roman Catholic friends are praying that a very different kind of Pope will be elected his successor.

Attachment to the Culture of Life

2005-04-02T02:13:00.000-08:00

Terri Schiaro’s husband insisted that she wanted to die; Terri’s parents fought a rearguard action through the courts over many years, to have her artificially fed despite her vegetative state. Last week, two weeks after her feeding tube had been removed by doctors, and while her parents were still engaged in court battles, Terri died. The question of how long people should be kept alive when according to medical opinion there is no hope of recovery became a focus in the news.

Terri’s parents are Roman Catholics and on the day of her death a priest appeared on American TV chastising her husband for a lack of compassion and Christian responsibility. Two weeks ago in my comment on abortion as an election issue, I said that many of the pro-life people I encounter are interested only in preserving the life of the foetus and do not campaign on the ending of life in other circumstances, particularly war. So is it perhaps a good sign that this priest appeared on TV campaigning against the ending of Terri’s life?

It is the question of what constitutes a natural death which is the problem here. Ten years’ ago my mother, who was in her eighties, suffering from advancing dementia and in a private nursing home, suffered a major stroke. This was not the first stroke she had undergone, but it was the most serious and although I flew out from the United Kingdom to New Zealand to be with her, by the time I got there she had slipped into a deep coma. Her doctors wanted to artificially feed her and also recommended she be shifted away from her home town to a hospital where she could receive physiotherapy. As a family we decided that she should remain where she was, given liquids, and allowed to die naturally and peacefully. Death came some days later, and the doctor put on her death certificate as the cause of death, not ‘stroke’ but ‘extreme dehydration’. I interpreted that to mean that we her family were somehow responsible for my mother’s death by not allowing her to be artificially fed, or in her comatose state, to be subjected to physiotherapy.

So I understand many of the issues Terri’s family were facing and particularly whether to allow nature to take its course, or whether to artificially or technologically prolong life.

There are thousands of similar cases every year. But the Terri Schiaro case received more publicity than most when President Bush intervened and had Congress pass special provision to have her case reviewed. On BBC television the day Terri died there was a news item which reported, “President George W Bush, who offered his sympathies to her parents, said he was attached to a ‘culture of life’”. I imagine he would say that this attachment springs from his embrace of a particular form of born- again and conservative Christian discipleship.

I would like to know more about the President’s attachment to the culture of life. Like many pro-lifers, he excludes from this culture a great many instances, including all those prisoners who were executed in Texas while he was Governor of that State, all the women and children who died in Iraq victims of ‘collateral damage’, and those dying daily in other parts of the world either as a result of his aggressive foreign policy, or from the endemic poverty which is a by-product of American isolationism, trade protectionism and refusal to accept the ecological provisions of the Kyoto agreement. When we have a single human being like Terri in the frame the issue of who accepts responsibility appears more clear-cut. But when we put a mass of people into the frame, the question of who is responsible is obfuscated.

So does the President bear any responsibility for the 152 executions while he was Governor of Texas? Can we hold him to any degree responsible for the 10,000 gun deaths in the USA every year? Or the 27 children who die every day of poverty in the USA because the President in his budget slashed support for child welfare programmes? Does his refusal to support a decrease in the amount of toxic arsenic allowed in drinking water, or his slashing of funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, both ostensibly a result of his support for the large oil companies, make him responsible for deaths incurred by those actions? And on the global scale, does the President’s refusal to see the USA reduce toxic emissions implicate him in the deaths of more than 160,000 per year from global warming? Does his declaration of war on Iraq render him accountable for the 30,000 Iraqi soldiers who died there and the estimated 100,000 civilians? The latter figure is disputed because the USA does not take civilian body counts. Do we hold him accountable for these deaths, or excuse him on the grounds that this is how it is in the world of pragmatic politics?

As I write this it has been announced from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II is dying. Although I profoundly disagree with aspects of his theology and politics as well as with his authoritarianism, here is a man who did consistently advocate a culture of life and always spoke out for human dignity and against violence and war. He made it clear to Tony Blair and probably to President Bush also, that to go to war against Iraq would be a crime against humanity. And if what we are told is true, the Pope has not sought to have his life prolonged, but has serenely accepted the approach of death and for the first time in Papal history has demanded that his vulnerability and suffering be exposed to the world’s media. Compared with this man, President Bush’s claim to be attached to the culture of life is an affront to humanity.

Christians and Politics

2005-03-25T23:27:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Press for Roman Catholics

2005-03-19T05:51:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Deception

2005-03-13T01:07:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Plague Upon Both Your Houses

2005-03-03T15:40:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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