MetaCatholic

The Daily Telegraph is posting a link of most influential Anglicans. Okay, these contests are mildly silly and rarely helpful, but I wonder what this ranking says.

43. Chris Sugden – director of Anglican Mainstream
42. Davis Mac-Iyalla – Changing Attitude, Nigeria.

When a conservative English newspaper puts a gay Nigerian layman ahead of an ordained English traditionalist, you have to ask just what is going on?

Jonathan Wynne-Jones reports (supposedly) the “first gay wedding” in the C of E. He then goes on to claim that this is a test of Archbishop Williams’ ability to act. I would be very surprised if this were the “first gay wedding” as opposed to the first to get public attention, and I suspect Mr Wynne-Jones would be also. I would also be surprised if he, as a specialist journalist, wasn’t well aware that Rowan Williams has virtually no power to exercise here. That is why I think he’s guilty of malicious journalism.

Having said that, this whole farrago (should that be virago?) sounds pretty ghastly. As “gay weddings” go this has a touch of the Wayne and Colleen about it, albeit a few centuries out of date. The pretentious order of service combines an illegal rite of blessing with an equally illegal Eucharistic prayer, and various other pseudo-traditional elements.

I am one of those who believes that any public liturgy that pretends to be an act of the church when the church has failed to agree the theology is fundamentally dishonest.

I’m all for recognising civil partnerships. If the church was agreed about what it was doing, I would be quite comfortable blessing them. But that’s not where we are, and I fundamentally disagree with using acts of worship for political statements.

Whether we are talking about traditional theological categories of marriage, or doing contemporary queer theological analysis, it seems to me that we’re a long way from any kind of agreement. Traditionalists are still in a kind of fantasy land about equating biblical views of marriage with nineteenth and twentieth century heterosexual romanticism. Their serious argument about linking the sexual relationship with procreation might work a lot better if they were RCs condemning contraception. Gay people have yet to produce a coherent argument for the marriage model other than conformity to the straight world, and in fact are seriously conflicted about this. Is marriage just too straight to do justice to the God who queers our human conventions?

Rowan Williams can’t actually do anything, except make (probably unproductive) public statements. He could, however, do a lot worse than encouraging the Bishop of London to require his clergy to only use forms of service authorised and allowed by canon, as they swore in their ordination oaths. Nearly every evangelical and catholic traditionalist would be equally guilty of breaking them. By and large they have done so with more coherent arguments and better taste, nonetheless legally they are guilty of the same offence.

Update Sun 8 June evening. I think this will be my final update. Ruth Gledhill has since left an additional comment on Andrew Brown’s post. It is a remarkably honest and humble personal statement, and I commend it to you.

Update Sun 8 June. I feel my dilemma has only worsened in the light of Ruth Gledhill’s comment below. The trouble is I’ve intruded as an outsider in what seems almost like a family argument. Not for nothing do the police dislike getting involved in domestics. I invite you, however, to read it with due caution. At the very least it seems Ruth’s original remarks as quoted here, which she fairly quickly removed, should be read more as an expression of emotion on behalf of a friend, and not as a considered statement of opinion. 

Update Sat 7 June: In a comment on Andrew Brown’s blog Ruth Gledhill explains (in part at least) why the post refered to here has disappeared.

I took the post down on the advice of a friend whose judgement I trust.

This leaves me with a dilemma about what to do with my quotations. I have decided to leave them (since Ruth only seems to qualify the wisdom of posting them, rather than the content of what she says), but I think you should know the context if you decide to read any further. Ruth Gledhill, Damien Thompson and Andrew Brown all interact with each other over on Andrew’s blog.

What is interesting is that RG and DT claim respectively that senior journalists on the Times and the Telegraph were “shocked” and “disgusted” by AB’s comments. I can only assume, given the ease with which these papers attack anyone in even semi-public life is that what shocks and disgusts them is that it’s been done to a journalist, and one of their own.

So, if you want the original post, you can read on, but bear in mind that Ruth Gledhill has removed the remarks after second thoughts prompted by advice she trusts.

****

Earlier today the Times religious correspondent went a bit over the top. Ruth Gledhill really doesn’t like Andrew Brown, who often uses his Church Times column to have a go at her and other religious affairs writers for what he regards as sloppy, fact-unchecked journalism. The proximate cause of this was a sort of obituary comment on her Sunday Times equivalent Chris Morgan who last week killed himself, apparently after a lengthy bout of depression. (May God be good to him.) Brown’s remarks were not exactly charitable, but neither as far as I can determine, were they untrue. It’s just that Ms Gledhill clearly believes in nil nisi bonum – although as far as I can tell she often only applies it to her friends.

Here are a sample of her remarks (with comment), that I preserve for posterity, since either she or the Times lawyers have taken them down,

It has always puzzled me that the Church Times should employ an atheist, but I guess the undoubted cleverness of Brown’s writing made up for any lack on the God front. Or maybe it just that the Church Times epitomises the style of Anglicanism where it actually does not matter much what you believe in, an antediluvian institution where failed liberal theologians sit around the editorial table under the 1960s-style delusion that atheism can be fashionable, daring even.

Hmm … Brown, a former religion correspondent for The Independent (back when it was worth reading) is asked to review the week’s media coverage of religion. In doing so he often calls the church to account for stupidity or media-naivety. Arguably the mix of his outsider status and professional experience makes him well-qualified to do so. You might think the Church Times should be applauded for inviting this kind of voice to comment.

I still find it extraordinary however that an atheist, Bedales-educated former drop-out who writes books on Darwinism but has no university degree, and who is not even a churchgoer, should become the effective spokesman for the frustrations of the liberal wing of an established church that hasn’t got the guts to tell journalists these things to our faces, or to look in the mirror and see therein the ugly beams, beams so large they’ve blighted their view of the world.

I believe this is called an ad hominem attack. Journalists attack the church all the time, but when someone attacks a journalist, shock and horror break out all over. Speaking of looking for beams …

At The Times, we cancelled one of our Church Times subscriptions some time ago. It seemed rather a waste of resources. The Church of England Newspaper is far better, in particular the monthly media column by Ruth Gledhill.

There is a fine dividing line between self-promoting chutzpah and egocentricity. I would suggest that this may have crossed over.

I can’t help but wonder what’s happened to the astonishing rant from which I took these excerpts. Perhaps Ruth Gledhill has thought better of them once she got over her initial reactions. Perhaps the lawyers have got involved. But isn’t it a sad comment on the state of things that my initial reaction is how like a newspaper or a journalist that something like this should disappear, but no apology be made in its place.

I’ve been meaning to comment this week on a slightly odd story reported in the Sunday Telegraph. As reported:

A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.

The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a “hate crime” and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that “no-go areas” for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities, as the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed in The Sunday Telegraph this year.

Arthur Cunningham, 48, and Joseph Abraham, 65, both full-time evangelical ministers, have launched legal action against West Midlands Police, claiming the officer infringed their right to profess their religion.

…

West Midlands Police, who refused to apologise, said the incident had been “fully investigated” and the officer would be given training in understanding hate crime and communication.

For those who aren’t familiar with the UK scene, a “police community support officer” is sort of equivalent to a teaching assistant in a classroom. 

I want to offer a few observations:

This story seems to have sunk from view like a stone. That makes me think there may be rather more to it than reported, and that journalists investigating further decided it was less news-worthy than they thought. The “evangelists” concerned seem to be seriously fundamentalist. Of the Bible they believe that “Every Word of the original manuscript [sic] is inspired”, but they are also keen to state:

What We are Not
We are not ecumenical, Charismatic, Arminians, Calvinists or denominational.

That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for manoeuvre.

A large part of this story’s power comes from the bigger immigration narrative. Without wanting to downplay any of the issues involved, I want to highlight what I see as the biggest danger for the way some people want to enlist Christians to their aid on immigration. The implicit subtext is that Christians are white and native, and if you’re foreign and black you must be Muslim or some other religion. (Something similar seems to have happened in the US in the way some people regard Obama as Muslim.) This is not only politically dangerous, but, from a Christian viewpoint, profoundly heretical.

Churches that don’t evangelise ought to be seen as a contradiction in terms. Mission more generally is of the essence of the church. There are, however, good and bad ways to do it, and (as far as I can tell) what these particular preachers were doing is such a bad way of doing it it’s doubtful that it can be seen as evangelism at all. It looks rather more like an aggressive act of religious and racial hostility, than a generous sharing of the love of God. The preachers’ readiness to pose for a photo and take their story to the paper to tell a story of Muslim no-go areas for Christians encourages me in that suspicion.

It is interesting that nowadays the cases that may most test “freedom of speech” are religious ones. Christians probably need to remember that historically, they have approved of this no more than many Muslims today would, and that effectively it evolved more to protect those outside or against the churches from Christian totalitarianism. Its transformation into a basic Western value that Christians now appeal to both against the secular state and in favour of the freedom to evangelise, is deeply ironic.

I think we will see more and more of this sort of story, and we will need to be very careful about how we read them. They raise quite complex questions of civic polity as well as inter-faith relationships, dialogue and mission. They also suggest that there’s room for far more theological reflection on methods of evangelism that are appropriate to gospel and culture in the early 21st century West. How much power does the method used have to stop it being good news at all?

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s observation that rather a lot of bishops think their clergy aren’t up to snuff comes a different story. This time yet another bishop gives everyone pause to wonder at his monumental crassness.

At one level, there is a certain commonplace nature (particularly within some theological traditions) underlying his observation, namely that since all have sinned, all deserve God’s judgement, however humans rate the sinfulness involved. But in fact, the bishop seems to wish his comparison with Josef Fritzl to highlight the heinousness of environmental sins, so this isn’t much of a get out clause for him..

It would be remarkably easy to think that rather a lot of bishops have two modes of verbal operation: the anodyne and the daft. Almost certainly unfair, but remarkably easy. It’s probably true of anyone who regularly has to speak in public and doesn’t have an army of PR people watching their back. Yet even in professional politics a remarkable number of gaffes get through.

No doubt it’s as much a media problem of ignoring all but the most outrageous things said, unless they come from a particularly vacuous celebrity source. Not being celebrities, bishops (and other clerics) compete for attention in a marketplace of noise, and send their sentences over the top in the hope of reaching the trenches between their audiences’ ears. Unfortunately, as in this instance, they end up dropping their verbal grenades on their own positions, leaving their holes well and truly foxed.

It is no doubt unfair to have a real go at the Bishop of Stafford for doing what many a cleric has managed (whether episcopal or more lowly). However, in the aftermath of being told that many bishops think large swathes of us clergy aren’t fit for purpose, it’s irresistible, even if I shall leave you to read the insult into this post’s title.

I’d forgotten about this until some idle browsing reminded me. A few years back, this advert got banned from UK TV.

It was held to be offensive to the feelings of pregnant women and the bereaved. What’s interesting is that no-one seems to have objected to the message that we should “play more”. Instead they objected to the idea that “life is short” when it was portrayed so graphically (and, I think, humorously). Was this censored because the advert was offensive, or because reality is offensive?

Today’s chattering class news from the Westminster politico-media village was that Tony Blair thought Gordon Brown would lose the next election. A spokesperson for Blair has denied this. I wonder though, how many people will believe the denial. Either they will want Blair to have said this, or believe that it sounds all too plausible, or simply follow the basic political rule: “Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”

Thinking about this I recalled a recent post on Windows Vista. Responding to this comment: “Microsoft, of course, has fumbled the launch of Windows Vista” Paul Thurrott points out:

I do not agree that Microsoft has “fumbled” the launch of Windows Vista, however. That is all perception that was driven by the media. Windows Vista has sold at a rate higher than its predecessor, and it has done so without any mathematical gymnastics: After one year on the market, 10 percent of the installed base was running Vista. That’s higher than was the case with XP. So much for perception.

There is the same issue of perception trumping reality, and it is one that crops up everywhere. Consider the ways in which the debate over recent days about Expelled has fuelled the (already common) perception that religion and science are enemies. Those of us who feel compelled to make the opposite case sometimes feel as if we are pissing into the wind.

No doubt the modern media world has intensified this phenomenon. Once something becomes the established story, it is hard to shift perception, whether by denial, argument or the production of facts. I suspect this is similar to what military strategists mean by “the initiative”. When you feel things are running your way they start running your way even more strongly. Somehow your own mistakes cease to mater as much, and your enemies mistakes are magnified. You are running the show and they are reacting.

Historically, I find myself wondering if this wasn’t also the case with the rise of Christianity. The really big persecutions, the Decian and Valerian in the mid third century, and the Great Persecution at the start of the fourth, are perhaps reactions to the growing sense that pagan Rome is on its way down, and the initiative is with the Great Church.

If this is so, then I suspect that the challenges to the Church today are far deeper and more devastating than we are generally prepared to think. Remember this is not about truth and reality, this is about perception. Where is “the initiative” in today’s world, and who has it? I suggest it is with those who trumpet the free untrammelled individual, and see State and Church alike as potential enemies of that freedom to live an unconstrained and fulfilled life.

I’m afraid I must resist being tagged by John Hobbins. I’m far too stupid to have heard of some of these people. I think the list is far too biased in favour of political scientists. I think that by being biased in terms of being active in public life, the list ignores some of the real intellectuals who drive those in public life. (What no Alisdair MacIntyre?!) I simply don’t think some of the people on the list are intellectuals. Dawkins is a very clever man and a polemicist, Chomsky a pseudo-intellectual whose reputation rests on linguistic obfuscation, and a predilection for being outrageously stupid in his support for totalitarian regimes wherever they are to be found. So, sorry, John, I don’t like this list, and I’m not showing up my ignorance by playing the game.

For over ten years, the British media and others round the world have been getting people to play a particularly silly game, with help from an Egyptian grocer.

There remains some hope but little likelihood that the game is now over. My lingering questions seem to be completely different from everyone else’s.

1. Could Princes William and Harry sue Al Fayed for contributory negligence in their mother’s death, given that an inquest has now established that the man he employed as their chauffeur was drunk?
2. Is irrationality continuing to gain ground in public, or just in the media?

The Sun newspaper may be the most appallingly atrocious rubbish, but they give great headlines. If only preachers could communicate with the same clarity (although I’m not sure every congregation would appreciate the sense of humour.

(Oh, and my favourite Sun headline ever was when Caledonian beat Celtic in the Scottish league: “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious”)