Category: Establishment

Secularism – A Force for Good?

by Savi Hensman, community worker, author of “Sexuality, Struggle and Saintliness” and LGBTI+ equality activist

Sometimes religion is twisted to serve the ends of those ruthlessly seeking power. Yet others live out their faith through commitment to justice and equality, risking themselves for others.

One of example of this is what we have witnessed in South Asia over the last few weeks where people of various faiths and none have risked their own safety to defend their neighbours and values they regard as important, including secularism. There have been moving scenes of caring and courage across India in resistance to a law that would harm a vulnerable religious minority. Women students in Delhi have bravely protected a male friend from further beating and slum-dwellers in Mumbai (Bombay) have marched in their thousands against discrimination.

Often ‘secularists’ are thought of as being opposed to faith or at least its influence on public life. But for many in South Asia and beyond, opposing the idea that the state should favour just one religion, so treating people with other beliefs as if they were of lesser worth, is seen as a way of showing love and promoting justice.

Avoiding division, cruelty and inequality

According to its constitution, India is a ‘secular democratic republic’ with ‘equality of status and of opportunity’ in which state discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex is banned. This has often not been put into practice, but as the 70th anniversary of the original constitution approaches later this month we are reminded that the ideals still remain. For instance, gay sex was only decriminalised last year. This happened in part because the ban was ruled unconstitutional, as was shoddy treatment of the ancient transgender community, though on this matter the law remains unsatisfactory.

However, in recent years a government has been in charge which has distorted Hinduism in its quest for power – despite the protests of some devout Hindus. As Religion News reported last October, Muslims have been lynched and Christians, Dalits and dissidents persecuted. Economic bungling has worsened the plight of the poorest. The seizure of Kashmir in 2019 and isolation of its residents (in ways now ruled unlawful) was a further step towards ditching the ideals which energised the independence movement. A national register of citizens is now planned, where people will have to prove their status – which of course is extremely hard for those on low incomes, who often do not have birth certificates or other documents and cannot afford lawyers.

Many will be left stateless and most likely herded into camps, as has already happened in Assam. A Citizenship (Amendment) Act has also been passed which would allow most of those affected, if they are not Muslim, to eventually be declared ‘refugees’ and allowed to become citizens again. It seems clear that politicians appear to have intended to pick off minorities one by one.

But defying fear, protesters – many of them women – have gathered in India and overseas, with slogans such as ‘All Indians are brothers and sisters’, ‘Save humanity, save country’ and ‘Keep dividing, we will keep multiplying’.

A couple of weeks ago, 200+ Christian leaders from across India came together and stated: ‘The new law is deeply divisive, discriminatory and violative of human rights. In particular, this legislation discriminates against Muslim communities in India, who constitute over 14 per cent of the population of India, and therefore, it is totally unacceptable in a secular democratic republic of India.’ They appealed for lawmakers to scrap the legal changes and ‘stop the construction of detention/concentration camps at the earliest’.

The Archbishop of Bombay and president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, Cardinal Oswald Gracias, has also spoken out, declaring ‘The Citizenship Amendment Act is a cause of great anxiety for all citizens and there is a danger that there could be a polarization of our peoples along religious lines, which is very harmful for the country…It is the responsibility of all to promote solidarity and respect for all in our country.’

Not watering down spirituality for worldly gain

I would therefore suggest that in such circumstances, secularism can in fact assist the deepening and spread of true religion.

This may seem a strange notion to some people of faith, especially given many Christians believe that belonging to an established Church helps to promote their message. I accept that links with the state, and with others with authority and wealth, can be helpful in sharing the Good News and serving the community. Yet ties which are too tight can in my opinion cause harm, especially if a Church is too afraid to defend the weak or the essence of faith is diluted to please powerful patrons.

Piety may in fact become a cover for corruption and the quest for power or status at others’ expense, a concern. This is something that the ancient Jewish prophets knew all too well about and to which Jesus also pointed. Worse still, a twisted religious fervour can be turned against women, minorities or others who are marginalised, hatred and contempt whipped up against ‘outsiders’, who may become scapegoats.

As one brave Hindu priest, Pujari Laldas, warned before he was murdered by fanatics of his own faith in 1993: ‘All the communal riots that have rocked India have been caused for financial and political gain.’

In contrast, kindness, generosity, wisdom and concern for peace with justice are at the heart of authentic faith.

This is not to say that those drawn to ‘religious’ movements which oppose human rights for everyone are always insincere. Some are just naïve and unaware of the human cost to their neighbours, especially those whose experience is very different from their own. Others may be seduced by charismatic leaders or slick publicity, especially if these tap into the insecurities or resentments which we all have. However Divine love offers a deeper and more lasting satisfaction.

Christians worship a God who, for love’s sake, abandoned power, privilege and security, instead being born as a helpless baby and condemned to death by the mighty and ‘holy’. Yet, through the cross, new life is offered in a world turned upside down, the hungry fed and divisions overcome. This hope helps to sustain many Christians, in India and beyond, who have put their own reputation and safety on the line for others.

Therefore, whilst I recognise that there are some secularists who are agnostic or atheist, I would suggest that passionate faith can, and often does, go hand in hand with commitment to religious equality and human rights for all.

January 17, 2020
Are We Partly to Blame?

by Jayne Ozanne, Editor of Via Media News and Director of the Ozanne Foundation

Families. They affect us all – for better or for worse.

Some are so close knit that they never let anyone through their metaphorical front door, whilst others quite literally wash all their dirty linen in public and leave it hanging there to dry!

Families are the one thing that most of us have no choice at all of being part of – as Harper Lee famously said: “you can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family”.

Interestingly families are one of the things that comedians – old and new – love focusing on. From Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s award-winning Fleabag, to one of the world’s most famous families, The Simpsons. Perhaps I should say the world’s most famous fictional families? For there is of course one family that is known and loved above all others, made up of real people, with real lives, who have real feelings, and bleed when cut – although I very much doubt that their blood is actually blue. I speak of course of our Royal Family, not that portrayed by the drama series The Crown, but the one made up of individuals who have had no choice but to accept the role into which they were born.

Very few of us know what it is like to live under the intense scrutiny of the 24-hour media. It is, I am assured, utterly relentless. The advent of social media has made this undoubtedly worse. For we now live in a world where diplomacy is conducted in 250-characters and news broken via Instagram.

Never has there been a greater need for clarity of communication that is impervious to spin in order for it to be believed and trusted. However, ironically, never has there been such a soundbite culture that demands fast news, at the risk of it morphing into fake news.

And so we start to witness the casualties – most recently in the form of a certain young couple who have declared that they want their lives and their privacy back. We blame the insatiable appetite of the media, without recognising that it is us – the public – who are the ones that are hungry for news.

It reminds me that there was once a young man who also found it hard to escape the multitudes. Who had people monitoring his every move, and criticising his every decision – including his own family. His popularity and fame were legendary, and ultimately led to him being crucified by the very crowds who had originally feted him. Jesus of course was prepared for this.

It is however a sobering reminder about the role we, the public can play. At the start of this New Year, perhaps it’s time to check our appetite for certain types of news.

January 10, 2020
Nationalism, Patriotism and Glory…

by the Very Revd Dr David Ison, Dean of St Paul’s, Member of General Synod and Vice-Chair of the Ozanne Foundation

‘Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism is when hate of people other than your own comes first.’

So wrote the Lithuanian and French Jewish novelist Romain Gary, who knew about nationalism and being an outsider. We can patriotically love and support our country without hating or dominating others; which means that in times of election fever and division we can put the demands or promises of parties and leaders in their places.

100 years ago the Dean of St Paul’s, Dean Inge, wrote in his diary about a speech he gave in December 1917, in which he warned of the dangers of a post-war international settlement that would create ongoing conflict. His perceptive comments were met with a torrent of abusive news reports and letters; he wrote that ‘one good lady says: I am praying for your death; I have been very successful in two other cases.’ This time the lady was unsuccessful; but Dean Inge ruefully noted at the end of his diary for 1917 that ‘our people, slow and reluctant to enter the war, are now mad with rage and hatred… It is indeed a terrible time.’

Nearly every day I worship in St Paul’s Cathedral, surrounded by statues and memorials intended to focus, not on the suffering and damage of war, but on national and individual glory. These monuments to men like Nelson, Wellington, Collingwood and Abercrombie, who lived or died ‘gloriously’ for their country, were erected at public expense so that their glory will be remembered by our nation, exalted heroes who built the Empire or defended the realm, held up as examples both of self-sacrifice for the nation and of the glory to be earned as a result.

But the lives of these heroes were more like ours than their monumental statues suggest. These were men with families, loves and betrayals, pride and anger, courage, vanity and endurance. They killed other people, and were responsible for the deaths of many under their command, as part of the human cost and moral ambiguity of war. Each one was a human being doing their duty as they understood it – but not peaceful martyrs for their faith, or humanitarians like Florence Nightingale whose memorial is downstairs in the Cathedral crypt.

Their memorials were erected by men like them who held power in uncertain and revolutionary times; men who wanted to avoid rebellion against themselves, men for whom gaining glory in the service of the nation was a useful distraction from the question of who and what the nation is for at all – and from the cost of the pursuit of national glory, the mentally and physically battle-scarred veterans, and the victims of conflict who are so often women and children and those unlike ‘us’, airbrushed out of the nationalistic narrative.

Like a promise of glory in time of conflict, Christian faith has been used to bolster those in power and keep the discontented masses quiet by promising future rewards for present suffering, as Karl Marx recognised. But true faith is subversive, because worship of God and allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ comes first.

As Christians we have to put into their place the nation, our political or religious party, even our own self-interest, with our highest loyalties being to God and to the well-being of all humanity. Such subversion isn’t a destructive threat to a nation, but a threat to nationalism, which is the creed of those who use national loyalty in order to capture or keep hold of power. Having Christian values that can judge whether what we’re told is in truth for the good of the nation, and having a population able to reflect on politics and hold national leaders to account, is a sign of a nation’s maturity, not of disloyalty, recognising that populism and nationalism are perversions of something better.

In a febrile, binary and intolerant world we need to see ourselves from God’s perspective.

Surrounded by statues extolling human glory, I remember the words from John’s Gospel (12.23-33) where Jesus speaks about his glory and honour coming, not from victories on behalf of the nation, but from the glory God reveals in Jesus being nailed high on a cross. The glory of God is in self-giving, in loving, in dying that others might live. God’s glory doesn’t mean power for great men, but honour for those whom the world sees as weak and disposable. The glory of Christ is the cross, where Jesus carries our sorrows and suffers for us.

Empires and nations and their glories come and go, but God’s love for each one of us endures. Although some of their memorials remain, the ‘glorious dead’ are long gone; we remember their limitations, and our own, and see true glory in those who bear the mental and physical damage of conflict, whether due to war, or to the divisions and hatreds of our own society.

As Christians, we glory not in self or in power, but in loving service and working for the good of all; we long, not for glory, but for the day when war and conflict will be no more, when nations will serve each other, and love will have the final word.

November 29, 2019
Spinning the Stats – Are We Too Defensive to Really Listen?

by the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

Is the Church of England still the church of the nation?

It’s probably only Anglicans themselves who still assume it is, and even then not all of them. Constitutionally, little has changed in the last century or so to imply that the Church of England’s position is fundamentally different now from what it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. In that sense, it is still the national church, or at least the established church. But it would be very foolish to think that the vast majority of the population of England have any real, tangible sense of this. Many – but a declining number – still get baptized, married and have their funerals in Church of England churches, but with an ageing and shrinking congregation, the wider claim looks more and more fragile.

Two weeks ago the usual annual report on statistics was issued, bearing the by now well-established balance of good and bad news.

There was plenty of bad news. Once again, the average Sunday attendance was down, to 765,000 in October 2017; that’s a seemingly catastrophic decline of almost 15% in ten years; but the fall was higher – 24% – for attending children. Easter attendance has fallen by 16%. Baptisms have fallen by 22%, weddings and associated services by 27%, and funerals by 28%. All of the falls reflect longer term trends, though of course there are fluctuations in various indices year on year. No wonder the perception of many parish clergy is that the Church is in dire straits.

But there is some good news. Christmas attendances are up again, rising gradually over the last few years to reach 2.68 million, suggesting that nearly 5% of the population are at a Church of England church at some point at Christmas. That led the Bishop of Manchester to suggest that Christmas services probably represent a more attractive form of worship than the usual Sunday fare.

But the other quoted statistic concerned a different measurement, the ‘worshipping community’, a more amorphous concept meant to catch those who ‘regularly’ attend at least once a month, but not necessarily weekly. This suggested no essential change since 2012, with some 1.1 million in that category. Moreover, the Church’s ‘hits’ on social media more than doubled in one year from 1.2 million to 2.44 million.

These positive figures enabled the statistics to be spun, as critics were quick to point out, and it doesn’t take a lot of thought to work out that if (and it’s a big ‘if’) we take all these figures at face value as accurate, then one conclusion must be that commitment to regular attendance is thinning out, as the weekly Sunday numbers continue to fall, yet people’s wish to be in some way connected to their church via less frequent attendance remains apparently stable.

As lots of people have pointed out, the idea of the ‘worshipping community’ is particularly problematic, because it’s not at all clear what it’s really measuring. The broader and looser the technique of measuring something is, the greater the number of variables one is likely to have to factor in when interpreting the data. Someone who slips into Evensong from time to time because they like the relative calm and the opportunity to reflect, and the music (if there is any), might have very little real sense of identity with the local worshipping community – indeed the whole point for them might be to avoid community. And yet, I suspect there is a basic realism about the measure, however slippery.

When I was in a parish, and also when I was in charge of a chapel, I’d often find myself totting up roughly the number of people I would see from time to time and would count as part of the wider ‘family’ of the church or chapel – it was of course always much bigger than the weekly attendance. Sometimes the only connection between all these people was me. Sometimes someone who attended irregularly turned out to have a very strong, informed faith. Amongst those who came for the sake of the music, or the peace (when they could have it), were certainly some virtual non-believers.

All of that reminds us that spirituality is not the same thing as going to church, that great devotion does not necessarily show itself in being active in church life, above all that people’s motives are always very complex and varied. The statistics barely penetrate these deep, below-the-surface realities, and the only way to get at them at all is by close study of particular communities – a brilliant example being Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas’s study of Kendal (The Spiritual Revolution, 2005).

We should, then, be very cautious in making precise deductions about what people do and don’t want from the annual statistics, and also of being a bit inclined to seize immediately on the positives – in that sense, I doubt that Christmas really is much of a pointer to ways forward. That downward trend looks pretty steep, and it poses an enormous challenge to the Church of England.

In response to that challenge, there seem to be two quite different strategies on the table – I’m talking in general terms, not about specific church policies.

One is to emphasize the distinctiveness of Christian teaching over and against the world around us, and to press people to make firm decisions between the Church and the world. Some would call this circling the wagons, or going into the bunker. It looks like a defensive move, but it usually depends on a definite strategy of mission, with catechesis, with distinct forms of outreach, and so on. So it isn’t necessarily inward-looking. But it is what the larger Evangelical congregations essentially are about, and it’s usually defensive about wider developments in society such as changes in sexual ethics and changing concepts of identity.

The other is to stress inclusivity, to widen the boundaries of those to be welcomed, to open up the Church to those who might otherwise feel excluded or condemned by it. This has its own risks, of course, which are likely to include looking a bit woolly and a bit over-reactive to social change.

Both may miss something vital about the Church, which ought to be relentlessly inclusive and at the same time confident in its values and traditions. Reconciling those two things requires a lot of hard work, but it also requires a readiness to change and above all a willingness to listen to others and to learn from them.

We have a gospel to proclaim. But our first thought should surely be, ‘What do others have to say to us, and what can we learn from that?’ In order for us to hear what they have to say, we have to encounter them wherever they may be – and that means tearing down the walls of our own defensiveness and insecurity. Only then can the Church truly be an inclusive community.

November 26, 2018
‘Cake-Gate’, Discrimination & Established Churches

by Dr Meg Warner, Theologian, Lecturer and Member of General Synod

A Northern Ireland-based family bakery this week won its appeal to the UK Supreme Court against a conviction for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. You may be familiar with the story – Mr Lee, an activist for the organisation ‘Queerspace’, ordered a cake from Ashers Bakery, run by a ‘conservative’ Christian couple, Daniel and Amy McArthur. The cake was to be decorated with the text ‘Support Gay Marriage’ and a photo of Sesame Street’s Ernie and Bert, as in the photo above. After initially accepting the order, the bakery later cancelled it and returned the deposit. The McArthurs were initially found guilty of sexual orientation discrimination contrary to Northern Ireland legislation. (There was more to it, but this description will suffice for our purposes.) Although an initial appeal was unsuccessful, the McArthurs were ultimately cleared by the UK’s highest court of appeal.

The essence of the Court of Appeal’s decision was that the McArthurs had objected to the message and not to the messenger. In other words, as the McArthurs would have been happy to have baked a cake with some other message for `Mr Lee, and would have refused to bake the cake with this message regardless of the sexual orientation of the person placing the order, they were not discriminating against Mr Lee on the basis of his sexual orientation, but merely objecting to being implicated in the promotion of a cause with which they fundamentally disagreed.

While commentators argue about the likely implications of this decision for LGBTI people and organisations in the UK (for example, Stonewall claims the decision ‘sets a hugely dangerous precedent’, whereas Peter Tatchell has argued that the decision is a victory for freedom of expression, and Savi Hensman that the decision is no great loss for LGBT rights), I find myself wondering how the McArthurs, and Mr Lee, are getting on.

Take the McArthurs – sure, they’ve had a big win, but what kind of shape are they – and their business – in? Family-run bakeries tend not to be disproportionately represented amongst top-level litigants in the UK. Litigation is inordinately expensive, and especially at this level, so the McArthurs are likely now either bankrupt or caught up in the political machinery and machinations of others in ways they could not possibly have foreseen when they originally gave Mr Lee his deposit back. Of course, it is not only money that gets chewed up in legal proceedings, but also time, emotions, privacy and dignity. What kind of abuse has been directed at the McArthurs over the years since they cancelled Mr Lee’s order? Anybody who has stuck his or her head, however unwittingly, over the parapet on either side of the sexuality issue, will know from bitter experience the sort of invective that has likely been directed at the McArthurs, and no doubt also at Mr Lee, who has now also suffered a major defeat. I hope that the McArthurs have a good pastor and a supportive congregation, and Mr Lee very good friends. They will have needed them.

One of the great ironies of this case is that had Ashers Bakery been part of the business empire of The Church of England Inc, instead of the family portfolio of Mr and Mrs McArthur, none of this would ever have been an issue. Religious organisations are entitled to discriminate. There is no need on their part to distinguish between message and messenger, opinion and person – UK religious organisations, including churches, are permitted (in certain defined circumstances) to discriminate on the bases of sexuality, marital history, gender and religion or belief.

‘Mum and Dad’ family-businesses are bound by legal restrictions from which churches are excluded. The irony, of course, is particularly marked in the case of the Church of England, which is an established church. Even though Magna Carta provides that the monarch is to be subject to the law of the land, the established church of which the monarch is supreme governor may discriminate between the people of the land in ways that would be illegal for those people themselves.

With increasing calls for disestablishment as the Church of England drifts ever-further from the people to whom it is called to minister, and as the evangelism of ordinary English women and men (and especially young people) proves ever-more challenging, it is time for the Church of England to show leadership by relinquishing its special privilege to discriminate.

Probably the McArthurs were not aware, prior to ‘cake-gate’, that churches are entitled to discriminate in ways that they themselves are not.

I bet they know now. I wonder how they feel about it?

October 15, 2018