Easter Sunday passed without incident here, mainly since it was only Easter for the Catholics, and everybody ignores them. Oh, except I worked out how the Shroud of Turin was formed – Jesus must have been under for 3 weeks rather than 3 days, because my filthy bedlinen has definitely taken on the print of my body.
Too much detail.
Anyway, religion was on my mind last week as I joined the discussion on euthanasia at Cranmer and OurKingdom – and thanks to everybody who contributed to those discussions, particularly David at Britology Watch. As I said in my original post, this is one of the few areas where the religious insist that their views on life be taken as the standard for everybody else, but to their credit most of the commenters on those other threads presented credible non-religious cases against legalising euthanasia.
Paying a visit to Britology Watch, I revisited the “controversial” statements by Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali following Archbishop Rowan Williams’ prolonged bout of stupidity “controversial” statements. Have you noticed that comments by the clergy only get labelled as controversial when they try to say something about politics? That’s probably because of the separation of church and state that we have – no, wait, that’s the US I’m thinking of.
In an interview with Bishop Nazir-Ali, I was greatly amused by these lines:
The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it.
That “moral vacuum” metaphor should be put out of its misery as soon as possible, since it manages to be simultaneously banal and meaningless.
Is morality something that can be pumped out of society as if we lived in a bell jar? Is there an optimal level of morality that we should be striving for? If it’s possible to have too little morality, is it possible to have too much morality? What people like Nazir-Ali mean when they say this is that they don’t like the morality that they see around them.
Unfortunately this is a common meme amongst Christians and Christian nostalgia buffs who long for a time before the 1960s, when apparently we didn’t live in a spiritual and moral vacuum. It’s strange that anybody thinks that prior to the 1960s we lived in a more “moral” time, back when we thought crushing the natives underfoot, firebombing German cities and winning at football were morally justified. Quoth Nazir-Ali:
Do the British people really want to lose that rooting in the Christian faith that has given them everything they cherish – art, literature, architecture, institutions, the monarchy, their value system, their laws?
The article then points out – with no apparent irony – that he is “a Pakistani-born immigrant who has suffered racist abuse – he was called a “Paki papist” by Anglican clergy.” So apparently I should be taking my moral cues from bigots – good to know. While these thoughts were percolating through my brain, clogging it up like coffee grounds, the Rev Dr Peter Mullen weighed in with his thoughts. Guess what? He feels similarly to Nazir-Ali:
We might have expected the Church to resist the decay, but instead it has connived with the destructive sexual and social revolution begun in the 1960s. Back then, I voted for homosexuality to be decriminalised. But this meant “between consenting adults in private” – where “between” meant two, “adults” meant men over 21 and “private” meant behind locked doors. I did not foresee the obscene and coercive “Gay Pride” pantomimes that now disfigure our high streets.
The Reverend should probably have thought more carefully about what he was voting for; in any case, the 1967 Bill decriminalised homosexual acts, not homosexuality. Criminalising homosexuality (i.e. the state of being homosexual) takes us into the land of crimethink, which isn’t somewhere I particularly want to go. The Reverend isn’t upset by homosexual acts (as long as they’re kept behind locked doors, of course) but by the sight of buttless chaps; and I’m not certain that buttless chaps are a moral issue.
I don’t particularly like Gay Pride marches (although I do like pantomimes) but you know how I deal with that problem? I DON’T GO NEAR THEM. It’s a controversial approach, but I’ll stick to it.
Mullen’s opinion piece is entitled “Without Christianity, our society is doomed”, but neither he or Nazir-Ali seem to have noticed the slight problem with their thesis. When Mullen says “We might have expected the Church to resist the decay” – well, wasn’t that his job? When Nazir-Ali laments the spiritual vacuum that’s magically appeared, does he stop to ask which institution usually addresses spiritual issues? It was their job, and they failed to do it, failed so badly that CofE attendance has fallen precipitously even while other denominations have risen.
Nazir-Ali says
If people are not given a fresh way of understanding what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a Christian-based society then something else may well take the place of all that we’re used to and that could be Islam.”
Well, it could be. It could also be Christianity, which has approximately 26 times more adherents than Islam, a comprehensive network of churches and other institutions across the country and a privileged position in the establishment. I would rather that the UK celebrated its religious heritage, and I would rather that Christianity continued to inform our social and political development. However if the pair of them – and all the others that follow their view – don’t want to live in a “spiritual vacuum” or an “Islamic theocracy”, then I humbly suggest that you fill it with something more substantial than a love letter to pre-1960s Britain, the era that brought us two worlds wars, institutionalised racism and sexism, and spam fritters.
Bah. I wanted to be the Lord of the Dance, but it turns out I’m the Scrooge of Easter.