Of all the modern thinkers who have been influenced by St Augustine of Hippo, from Pascal and Rousseau to Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt, none ought to have been better qualified to follow in his footsteps than the former Archbishop of Canterbury, now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge: Rowan Williams. He is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most distinguished theologians to have occupied the throne of the “other” Augustine — St Augustine of Canterbury, who converted the Anglo-Saxons. His study of the Bishop of Hippo, On Augustine, will be published by Bloomsbury in time for Easter. He has written some 40 books, reads nine languages and speaks three. Already Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at 36, he was one of Mr Toad’s clever men at Oxford who know all that there is to be knowed. He is also a poet in the Celtic tradition of his countrymen and a life peer.

And yet Dr Williams is overrated. It is a harsh judgment on such a clubbable cleric, whose sibilant voice and Druidic beard made him instantly recognisable, who did his best to adapt the Church of England to the secular new saeculum, and whose public visibility gave a whole new meaning to the Anglican via media. Yet prelates are not there to be liked. As Primate of All England, Dr Williams was supposed to offer spiritual leadership to the nation. How well did he discharge his duties? As one of Britain’s most fêted public intellectuals, he has been a ubiquitous Christian presence in hostile company; but he is often merely a token presence. Typically, Dr Williams is more concerned to accommodate “the Other”, however inimical, than to assert the truth of his own creed. He has rarely mounted a vigorous defence of what is, after all, not only his personal faith, but the established religion of the land. Nor has he always seemed eager to stand up for the public role of the Church — now finally abandoned by Baroness Butler-Sloss’s Commission on Religion and Public Life.

As Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, he sometimes seemed to do the opposite. Most notoriously, in 2008 he declared that the adoption of Sharia law in Britain “seems unavoidable”; Muslims should not have to accept that “there’s one law for everybody”. Though criticised, he refused to retract views shared by Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice and later President of the Supreme Court. Their advocacy undoubtedly facilitated and accelerated the spread of Sharia courts or “councils”.

Such acquiescence in what some might see as the relinquishing of England’s Christian patrimony fits with his vehement opposition to Western intervention in the Middle East. In 2007 he denounced US action against Syria as “criminal, ignorant and murderous folly”. Dr Williams has been consistent in siding against the West since his youthful support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Unlike his predecessor, George Carey, he has seldom gone out on a limb for persecuted Christians. Unlike his successor, Justin Welby, Dr Williams never really left his previous profession behind.

What led such a conventional left-wing professor to suppose that he was equal to the task of acting on a global stage? In 2002, when Tony Blair appointed Dr Williams, even conservatives such as Charles Moore greeted him as “prophetic”. The favoured alternative was Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester: a man no less intelligent but far more tough-minded, with first-hand knowledge and experience of the Muslim world and the ability to articulate the dangers posed by radical Islam. Dr Williams was on the liberal, Dr Nazir-Ali on the traditionalist side of the bitter disputes within the Anglican Communion over women and homosexuality. Church unity seemed the most important issue facing Anglicans at the time, but with hindsight it mattered much less than the then emergent threat to Western civilisation. It is a tragedy that Mr Blair felt obliged to appoint a man to lead the Church of England who had plenty of charisma but lacked the charismatic gift of wisdom.

Augustine of Hippo was hard on those, including himself, whose pride blinded them to their limitations. He only achieved maturity as a writer after coming to realise that his intellectual gifts were of no account compared to the vocation to which God was calling him. What, then, of the spiritual journey of Dr Williams? He has yet to write his Confessions, but it is hard to imagine him wrestling with his conscience. Whatever spiritual depths may be concealed behind the obscurity of his prose, he has not hinted at repentance for any sins, either of commission or omission, during his archiepiscopate. Augustine taught us to love the sinner and hate the sin, yet Dr Williams finds it hard to condemn either. Long before Pope Francis, he made a virtue of refusing to be judgmental. Embracing the zeitgeist in this way does not absolve him of the sin of intellectual pride. Giving up academic life, he wrote: “I was being asked to leave behind an environment where I could feel more pleased with myself than bishops normally can.” Now that he has returned to his comfort zone as Master of Magdalene, is Rowan Williams still pleased with himself?

The post Rowan Williams appeared first on Standpoint.

In so far as St Augustine of Hippo gets a press at all today, it is a bad one. In the popular imagination, he is remembered above all for his notorious prayer: “Give me chastity and continence, only not yet.” Lacking context, his plea is taken by most people as evidence of hypocrisy, but is in fact the opposite. It occurs in his Confessions, Augustine’s literary and spiritual masterpiece, which is addressed throughout to God. The fact that he confesses his self-deceit to God and man is testimony to the sincerity of his remorse. But the presumption that the pious are all hypocrites makes the opportunity to subpoena a saint against his own faith too good to miss.

Even worse, Augustine is credited with saddling Christendom with its most unfashionable doctrine: original sin. The learned sneer at him for misunderstanding the Fall, though the more charitable among them blame a faulty translation. But original sin is more generally reviled because it is supposed to have unleashed the emotion that modern psychology most abominates: guilt. What kind of monster could have believed that even innocent babies “are born sinners”? Or teach that God knows in advance who will be saved and who will not — the idea of predestination that later loomed so large in the Reformation — thereby undermining free will? No wonder Catholics have long been notorious for their exaggerated sense of guilt. It is all Augustine’s fault.

Yet here, too, the modern view does not do justice to Augustine. In more than a hundred works, he set out what has remained the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church for 1,600 years. Free will is compatible with God’s foreknowledge, because our thoughts and actions are governed by causality. Original sin is not the fault of the newborn infant, but it is the occasion for God’s grace — proof that humanity cannot do without God and his forgiveness. For Augustine, man’s first disobedience was above all a sin of pride, when Adam and Eve sought to blame others for their actions. The Fall brought death into the world and with it the corruption of sexual desire — a subject on which Augustine wrote without prudishness. For him, the inability of men to control their lust was a consequence of Adam’s disobedience. Original sin is about human psychology, the ways in which we justify ourselves, as much as it is about theodicy, the ways in which we justify God. When Augustine converted from the teachings of Mani to those of Jesus, he also rejected fatalism, astrology and the notion of evil as an independent power. If we are evil, it is because we freely choose to do wrong.

Not only was Augustine among the first to write about the darker aspects of human nature with devastating insight, but in the Confessions he created a new genre: the first self-portrait of a mind — indeed, one of the greatest minds of all time. It is also the first depiction in words of what was then a comparatively new phenomenon — the born-again Christian — and although there have been countless autobiographies since, the Confessions has never been surpassed. We probably know more about Augustine than anybody else in the classical world. Lost works are still being rediscovered; what we know about his contemporaries — pagans, heretics or Catholics — often survives only in his tractates, sermons and polemics. No wonder Augustine has attracted many fine scholars, among whom the Princeton-based Irishman Peter Brown stands out.

Robin Lane Fox is the latest to grapple with his intractable genius: his Augustine: Conversions and Confessions (Allen Lane, £30) deals not so much with the Doctor of the Church as the drama played out in Augustine’s court of conscience, as the aspiring Catholic struggles with the despairing Manichean. What tipped the balance was his mother, Monica — a woman of sanctity and nobility. Lane Fox also illuminates the sophisticated cultural milieux of Carthage, Rome and Milan which formed Augustine’s character. As a classicist whose perspective is emphatically not a Christian one, Lane Fox shows Augustine as the last true intellectual of antiquity: as at home with philosophy and rhetoric as with theology.

But he was much more than that. After his conversion, he returned to Africa to become Bishop of Hippo. As the Roman Empire tottered, he began his “great work”, De Civitate Dei (City of God), soon after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 and finished it around 427. Three years later, the Vandals besieged Hippo as Augustine lay dying; his cathedral and library alone miraculously survived the razing of the city.

City of God is not only the most prodigious book ever written up to that time, a vindication of Christianity against those who blamed it for the triumph of the barbarians, but also a Noah’s Ark of the mind, preserving what was needed to build a new, heavenly city on the ruins of the old. Among his legacies were the Rule that bears his name — monasticism was the bridge between ancient and medieval civilisation — and the idea of the just war. Indeed, when we justify the defence of Western civilisation against modern barbarism, we are all Augustinians.

The post St. Augustine appeared first on Standpoint.

I hand over an extra £6.50 (a paltry contribution, considering that it costs more than £6,000 a day to keep the cathedral open), and begin the ascent. Does a spiral of breathless tourists constitute a congregation? Not a word passes between us as we progress in single file up each uneven step, but as the handrail grows clammy and our sighs fall together in time, we might as well be hymning in unison.

The cathedral has recently become the set for a new £100 million drama series. The BBC had hoped to make it, but lost out to online film streaming service Netflix. The Crown, which follows the lives and marriage of Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy) and Prince Philip (Matt Smith) and is due for release next year, is being marketed as the story of “two houses, two courts, one crown”.

American viewers (no doubt the primary target audience) will not be disappointed with the backdrop to the wedding scene, at least. No less than Westminster Abbey, where the royal wedding actually took place, Ely Cathedral is the perfect encapsulation of the history of England and her architecture.

The surviving building dates back to the 11th century, although 400 years earlier the Saxon princess Etheldreda established a monastery here, of which she became abbess. From the second gallery of the tower, perhaps a third of the way up, the eye can even separate the layers of the past: the architectural orders, Victorian restorations, and shadows of the Dissolution, before falling upon the traces of one of the rounded Romanesque arches that has been converted into a stronger Gothic one.

The closer one gets to reaching the final, 288th step of the West Tower, the more these changes seem to matter. Another of the towers collapsed in 1322, having been built on uneven ground. It is hard to believe it, for the surrounding Cambridgeshire landscape looks so flat from the summit that one finds oneself forming a pretty good cinematographic picture of the invading Danes stomping over these parts in the tenth century.

Ely from above is a handsome patchwork of biscuit-brown, largely Georgian buildings and neat walled gardens. Below are what remain of the monastic quarters and the house where Oliver Cromwell once lived, now a museum dedicated to the rogue himself.

One suspects that the cathedral would be better used to inspire a 1,000-year English epic of its own, rather than as a jolly backdrop for yet another royal biopic. Still, anything to keep it open.

Writing of Ely in 1722, Daniel Defoe observed how the cathedral “totters so much with every gust of wind”. The building feels more stable today. In the 14th century a magnificent Octagon was erected to replace the fallen Norman tower, while the spectacular Lady Chapel — the largest in England — was constructed to the north of the Presbytery. The chapel bears the scars of the Reformation, but goodness, does it make one glad for surviving the heady descent from the roof.  

The post Royal Ely appeared first on Standpoint.

St Simon’s sits opposite Lennox Gardens. It was built in 1859 by Joseph Peacock, an eccentric architect with a taste for untamed Gothic details, pastiche and asymmetric carving. “Altogether we fear the building will be no gain to art,” was one contemporary comment.

Soon after we moved, my mother decided that the scarlet carpet was neither a gain to art nor spiritually enhancing and so commissioned her father, the architect Quinlan Terry, to replace it with the original tile pattern on stone.

We fixed two benches outside the church, which are rarely unoccupied. By day, builders sit and eat their sandwiches and mothers wait for their children after school. By night, romantic tourists sit in the soft glow of the street lights and a homeless man sleeps.

We leave the church open all day. I love reading the comments left in the visitors book; people from around the world write so often of “peace” and “home” that it is perhaps inappropriate to call it a visitors book.

St Simon’s was adored by John Betjeman, who described the church as “vigorous and eccentric . . . like a very strange dream”. My grandfather and Betjeman were members of the FAB society, which was set up by the arts and crafts architect Charles Voysey as a place to exchange rare foreign art books. There were dinners every quarter at which my mother and aunt, then children, would wait on table. I wonder if Betjeman and Grandpa ever discussed St Simon’s, or Peacock, its wilful architect.

Equally vigorous and eccentric was my favourite parishioner, who sadly departed soon after the carpet. Then in her mid-eighties, Eliza had had three husbands, and “hadn’t murdered any of them”. She brightened the gloomiest of Sundays with sparkly green eye-shadow and Barbie-pink lips, glowing from under the broad rim of one of her many hats. I once asked her how many hats she had, to which she replied, “My mother told me, ‘Never let the side down’.” I understood her perfectly.

A number of the flock often drifted into the vicarage for post-post-service sherry. Over a dry Tio Pepe, Eliza confided to me that she was on the hunt for a lover. I cast my eye around the room to scope out the potential. How about the visiting prebendary? An eligible bachelor who had been up at Oxford in the 1950s, lively as a spring chicken and presently reading aloud from P.G. Wodehouse to an audience of young and old bent double from laughing. “Too old,” she said, “they must be younger, they’re better at it.”

The post Chelsea Haven appeared first on Standpoint.

During the election campaign we have had politicians doing God and churchmen doing politics, but have heard very little on the most important factor in all of this: the religious voters. As I write, hustings are taking place in churches, chapels and mosques across the country but you will hear little about it. Few focus groups will involve the faithful; few polls will exclusively target believers. The lack of reference to, or analysis of, the religious vote in the UK reflects the overwhelmingly secular mindset of most politicians, pollsters and their associates in think-tanks and across the media. Ethnicity is the preferred distinguishing mark, with “BMEs” (black and minority ethnic) the latest acronym favoured by the number crunchers and policy wonks in Whitehall. But the lumping together of ethnic minorities, and Christians for that matter, is even more problematic at election time. Can we really say that today’s ethnic minorities have a shared experience, let alone shared values, which collectively determine their partisan affiliation? Do Christians who worship under the same cross tick the same box in the polling booth?

The tendency to slice British society along ethnic lines is in fact a hangover from Britain’s outdated model of multiculturalism forged in the 1970s, which was secular in its construction and hinged on what respected sociologist Tariq Modood has called  a “white/black dualism”, one that ignored the fact that most minorities (particularly Muslims, who are an ethnically diverse group united by faith) classify themselves by their religion rather than their race. A connection between faith and party is much more illuminating than any lazy link between race and party. Among Britain’s non-Christian communities for example, there is a clear correlation between Muslim voters who tend to vote Labour, Jewish voters, once Liberal, then Labour, and now overwhelmingly Tory, and Buddhists, who side with the Liberal Democrats. Hindus and Sikhs are much more evenly split between the two main parties.

Data analysis on the religious vote over the last 40 years collated by the Christian think-tank Theos also reveals that despite growing secularisation there is still a clear political demarcation between Christian denominations and political affiliation. Unlike those on the European continent, the post-war period did not see the emergence of a singular Christian party in the UK but the continuation of historic religious-political bonds that had governed politics since the 19th century. Anglicans are still overwhelmingly Tory voters and twice as likely to vote Conservative as Catholics, who remain predominantly Labour supporters regardless of how devout they are. It perhaps does not need saying that there exists a clear political divide between churchgoers and their church leaders: “Guardian readers preaching to Telegraph readers” was how one Anglican vicar put it in the 1980s, a phrase that still rings true today in most parishes. (Incidentally, the Catholic Church often has the opposite tension.) For all their protestations, church leaders have failed to convert their congregations politically.

Britain’s Nonconformists — a shrunken army since their glory days as the spiritual force behind the 19th-century Liberal party — are now more evenly spread across all parties. Statistics for the 2010 general election, for example, revealed that while the majority of Baptists and Methodists voted Conservative, United Reform Church members favoured the Liberal Democrats, and Free Presbyterians voted Labour.

Those with no religion are less likely to vote Conservative and, significantly, are more likely to be swayed by the less established parties. The irreligious, who constitute an ever-increasing proportion of voters, are not bound by old affiliations or allegiances. Could it be that the recent rise of alternative parties in the British electoral system can partly be explained by the growing secularisation of the electorate? If this is true, the days of the two-party system may well be over.

But we must be careful not to get too carried away with such polls. Faith has always been inherently linked to class in Britain while gender, geography and age are equally important factors in determining voter allegiance. Jews in Salford, for example, are more likely to vote Labour than their London counterparts, partly because of their comparatively lower economic status. Anglican and Catholic women are both more likely to be Conservative than their male counterparts, adding substance to the oft-repeated claim that women tend to be more right-wing then men.

If religious-political affiliations are clearly evident, then what impact, if any, will the religious vote have on the 2015 election? While it will certainly not determine the outcome, its influence will be felt in three important ways. First, the alienation of Christians (chiefly Anglicans) from David Cameron’s Conservative party. Second, the switch of Scottish Catholic Labour voters to the SNP. Third, the changing nature of the British Muslim electorate.

When Parliament passed the gay marriage act, it could be said that the battle for sexuality minorities fought since the 1960s was over. In Britain, however, issues of sexuality or morality had never been partisan matters and for this reason tended not to have a prominent place during elections. In the 1960s, when Parliament decriminalised homosexuality, legalised abortion and liberalised divorce laws, it did so through a series of private members’ bills rather than manifesto pledges while MPs voted with their conscience, free from the discipline of the party whip.

The 1980s saw a new wave of social conservatism as Margaret Thatcher sought to enshrine Judaeo-Christian family values within the fiscal, legal and social fabric of the country. One result of this was Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Section 28 pushed some key Thatcherite buttons — the rights of parents and supposed mismanagement of public funds — while it also conveniently discredited Labour-led local councils in the run-up to the 1987 election. 

In March that year, Labour’s press secretary Patricia Hewitt wrote privately to Frank Dobson MP confirming that the “gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners”. At that time gay rights was more problematic for the Left than the Right, exposing the differing priorities of old working-class voters and the new liberal Left. It was for this reason that the Labour leadership initially dithered over whether to support or condemn the clause and it was only after mounting internal pressure that Neil Kinnock came out against it. Importantly, the 1987 election would be the last time that homosexuality would be used as a political pawn by the mainstream parties.

There is little doubt that David Cameron’s promotion of legislation permitting gay marriage in 2014 was part of his attempt to “detoxify” the Tory brand and wipe the slate clean of the murky legacy of Section 28. And there are signs that he is already reaping the rewards. A recent poll by Pink News showed that the Conservatives are now on equal ranking with Labour among LGBT voters; for the Conservatives this represents a five per cent poll rise since 2010. But, just as Kinnock struggled to keep his core working-class voters onside over Section 28, so Cameron has found that in supporting gay marriage he has alienated loyal Anglican Tory voters. These are voters who would not classify themselves as homophobic but do not believe that a homosexual union should be given marriage status and resent even more a feeling that they are unable to voice their objections. In a recent ComRes poll commissioned by Premier Christian Radio, more than a third of respondents claimed that gay marriage had put them off voting Conservative.

This disaffection with the moral direction of the Conservative party is something that UKIP’s Nigel Farage has seized upon in a quest to broaden his party’s appeal beyond Euroscepticism. In UKIP, the old Thatcherite cries of moral and national degeneration are finding their voice once more. Ex-Tory voters are attracted to UKIP because of the party’s promotion of a nostalgic view of England, of which social conservatism and faith are a key element. UKIP’s wooing of Christian voters has in truth been half-hearted, not least because its leadership tends to take a libertarian view of personal morality and, like Margaret Thatcher, considers such issues as a diversion from the main cause. There is, however, a small but dedicated band of what are known as “UKIP Christian Soldiers”, although they are said to number only 1,000, and are no match for the Conservative Christian Fellowship, which works hard to ensure that the party keeps in touch with the grass roots in the pews. On gay marriage, Cameron took a political gamble; time will tell whether his decision to trade a band of hitherto loyal Christian Tory voters for socially liberal and secular floating voters will pay off.

On the surface, the politics of Scotland appear to represent a unique case, although the rise of the SNP too reflects the overall UK downward trend in old denominational identities. The recent surge of the SNP is one that can in part be explained by religion. Sectarianism, which for a long time cast a dark shadow over Scottish society and dominated its politics, has declined rapidly over the last 20 years, creating a void which has been replaced with a secular nationalism. Depending on how you see it, the Scots have either embraced national victimhood or national self-determination as their new religion, which in many respects is as unedifying and hysterical as the sectarianism of yesteryear. For a long time, the Tories and Labour in Scotland lazily fed off the sectarian divide within Scottish society while it has been the SNP which has capitalised on its decline.

This is a remarkable turnaround for the SNP, once dubbed the “Tartan Tories”, who were typified by their romantic, parochial and essentially conservative ideology and whose growth had long been stunted because of their inability to win over Catholic voters. The 1970s may have seen a limited surge in the SNP but not among Catholics. In the words of John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, “At that point the concern among Catholics was that an independent Scotland might become a replica of Ulster.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, as social and economic barriers for Scottish Catholics disappeared and the SNP morphed into a left-of-centre party seemingly more in tune with traditional Scottish Labour voters than the Labour party itself, so the SNP started to make serious gains among the Catholic working-class electorate. Catholics began to see Scottish nationalism as something which embraced rather than excluded them. The narrative of the SNP championing the underdog citizen and the underdog nation is one to which all Scots, regardless of religious affiliation, can subscribe.

Equally important has been the declining importance of the Church of Scotland in both Scottish religious and political life. As a Calvinist national organisation the Church of Scotland is ecclesiastically unique, but before devolution it too held a specific duty as the seat of Scottish nationalism. The Kirk’s debates were relayed live on BBC Scotland, as moderators and elders were naturally assumed to be articulating the concerns and views of the Scottish nation. Unlike the Church of England, no one questioned whether it should be meddling in politics.

It is partly for this reason that Mrs Thatcher’s speech to the General Assembly in 1988 (in which she proceeded to lecture the Kirk on the true meaning of Christianity) proved so explosive. It was a complete affront to Scottish (religious) national identity. But, paradoxically, while the speech helped further alienate an already anti-Thatcherite Scotland from the Conservatives, it also signalled the last days of the Kirk at the centre of Scottish national life. Within ten years its role would be replaced by the Holyrood parliament while it witnessed a near-collapse in its membership. Part of the reason the SNP are such a confident and pervasive political force is that their support lies not in an ageing, devout population but in a younger, less religious electorate. While its strength can be attributed to secularisation, its rise cannot be understood without reference to the decline of old religious-political bonds.

Politics in Scotland are not complicated by a multi-faith electorate, but south of the border they certainly are. But although Jews, Hindus and Buddhists may form only a tiny fraction of the electorate, but the opposite is true of the British Muslim community, which currently makes up a third of BMEs and 4.8 per cent of the population. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of Muslims in England and Wales rose from 1.55 to 2.77 million. This naturally translates into electoral power: 26 parliamentary constituencies are now 20 per cent Muslim, while YouElect has estimated that Muslim votes have the potential to influence the result in 32 constituencies.

The legacy of the War on Terror, however, has meant that Muslim affiliation to the Labour party is no longer guaranteed. In both 2005 and 2010 a proportion fled to the Liberal Democrats; in 2015, many are undecided voters.

The main issue when speaking of the “Muslim vote” is not who they will vote for, but whether they will vote at all. Muslims in Britain are more disinclined to vote than any other minority group (an apathy which predates the War on Terror). In 2010, just 47 per cent of Muslims voted, compared with 65 per cent of the general population. If the Islamic community feels disenfranchised and victimised, then voting must be encouraged as a way of overcoming this.

More pointedly, the Muslim electorate is changing. It is now inaccurate to depict Muslims as low-skilled, low-paid and marginalised archetypal Labour voters: 43 per cent of Muslims own their own property, 47 per cent are born in the UK and only 6 per cent have English language issues. The number of those Muslims with no qualifications dropped from 39 per cent to 26 per cent between 2001 and 2011. With the emergence of a more sophisticated, heterogeneous Muslim electorate, especially one that is overwhelmingly young in composition, its allegiance to Labour cannot be taken for granted. Like the Hispanic vote in America, the Muslim vote in the UK is numerically significant and will in the long term have an increasing influence on the outcome of elections.

Is there evidence that some are pushing a distinct (and indeed negative) Muslim political agenda? In 2010, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) claimed to have successfully galvanised the Muslim vote to unseat three MPs whom they considered “pro-war Zionists” and hostile to Islam. There was in fact little evidence that the results were genuinely down to MPAC’s actions. In March this year, the Muslim Council of Britain issued a document called Fairness not Favours, spelling out the issues for Muslims at election time. Unlike the pastoral letter from the Church of England’s House of Bishops, the statement received little coverage in the mainstream press. But the tone of the MCB was remarkably similar to the Anglican bishops in advocating policies which furthered the common good, while also highlighting specific Muslim concerns such as rising Islamophobia and Britain’s policy on Palestine, its tone mirrored that of the Anglican pastoral letter in. Statistical evidence regularly points to the fact that Muslim voters are not exceptional in their voting concerns, with education, hospitals, jobs and tax foremost in voters’ minds.

Bracketing Muslims under the umbrella term “ethnic minorities” predetermined to vote Labour is problematic. So too is characterising the Islamic community as a homogenous group who thrive on victimhood and are hostile to the British political system. British Muslims need to find their electoral voice and the British political system needs to wake up and listen.

If politicians make claim to their faith, Christian or other, they do so not out of a wish to appeal to devout voters but because the majority of the British electorate take some comfort in knowing that their leaders have some (but not too much) spiritual guidance.

But unlike many Americans, the British do not vote with their Bible in one hand and their ballot paper in the other. Faith may not determine the election result, yet it is certain that changes in the nation’s religious make-up are having a knock-on effect on the political landscape of Britain. Old allegiances are dying, new allegiances are being forged. The religious vote still matters — but for how much longer?
 

The post Is There Such A Thing As A Religious Vote In The UK? appeared first on Standpoint.

A new book has now emerged, On Rock or Sand? Firm Foundations for Britain’s Future, edited by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, explicitly harking back to the earlier one. Regretting, in his own words, that “on facing savage attacks [on Faith in the City] not only by those in the government of the day but also by other powerful figures in society, the Church leadership then lost its nerve and moved on to internal ‘churchy’ matters”, he presents the new book as the Church of England having regained its nerve.

On Rock or Sand? (SPCK, £9.99) may not be quite as bad as its predecessor, but Archbishop Sentamu’s contribution, the lengthiest in the book, is fundamentally flawed. His overriding concern is with inequality, of the extent of poverty in what is, overall, a relatively prosperous society. The flaw—surprising in one who originally hails from overseas—is that he presents this solely as a British phenomenon, seemingly unaware that studies by the International Monetary Fund and others have clearly shown that, throughout the developed world, inequality (as officially measured) has been gradually rising for the past 30 years or so, under a wide variety of governments and policies.

So there is nothing unusual about the British experience, nor can it be attributed to the policies of the present UK government. Indeed, the most recent official figures suggest that, over the past few years, income inequality in the UK (unlike in most other countries) has lessened slightly. There are clearly larger forces at work affecting us all, of which modern technology and globalisation are two of the most important; and most people, sensibly, would not wish to turn their backs on either. It is, of course, understandable that at a time of recession inequality causes more resentment than it does when overall prosperity is growing—which, happily, in the UK it now is. It is also understandable that at a time of recession there is increased resentment at the extent of tax avoidance by the rich. But that is a separate issue.

According to the leftist French economist Thomas Piketty, who has written a best-selling (if little read) big book on the subject, the explanation of growing inequality worldwide is that the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. This dubious generalisation is not only based on flawed statistical evidence but ignores the extent to which the return on capital reflects risk. Be that as it may, his proposed remedy is a swingeing tax on high incomes, worldwide. My own experience is that, when as Chancellor I sharply reduced the tax on high incomes in the late 1980s, the yield actually rose, giving me more scope for helping the poor through public expenditure. The only sufferers were the accountancy firms and tax lawyers, who had been doing very well advising the rich how to reduce their tax bills. Needless to say my heart bled for them, but I felt they would survive.

I was also aware of the observation of the eminent development economist, Professor Peter Bauer, that you do not make the poor rich by making the rich poor. The bottom line is that we need to focus more on policies that relieve poverty, rather than attempt to reduce—or is it eliminate?—inequality.

Be that as it may, Archbishop Sentamu is not only seemingly unaware that the rising inequality which exercises him is a global, not a British, phenomenon. He is also, surprisingly (although this is true also of Piketty), apparently unaware of a much more important feature of the past 30 years, namely the progressive reduction in inequality between the developed and developing worlds. As a result of the belated discovery by most of the developing world that the liberal market capitalist economy, for all its undoubted flaws (for that is the nature of mankind), is the only high road to material prosperity, and greatly assisted by globalisation, the gap between living standards in the developing world and in the developed world is steadily narrowing, a welcome process that seems likely to continue.

It is true, of course, that inequality within the developing world is considerably greater than in the developed world, and is probably growing faster. Nevertheless, a world in which extreme poverty is perceptibly diminishing, and inequality reducing on the global scale, while by no means perfect (nothing is), does not seem to me too bad. There are certainly far worse things to worry about.

Archbishop Sentamu’s ignorance or neglect of what has been happening beyond our own shores, however, is one thing. What surprised me more was the contribution of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to the book. I have a high regard for Justin Welby. We worked closely together, for more than a year, as members of the Parliamentary Banking Commission, under the outstanding chairmanship of Andrew Tyrie MP. Indeed, it was on my suggestion that (as Bishop of Durham) he was invited to join the Commission in the first place. Moreover, he is unusual among the bishops and archbishops to have had a successful business career before entering the Church, having been a highly-regarded group treasurer of Enterprise Oil, trading oil derivatives with the best of them. (Curiously enough, Enterprise Oil was a company which in a sense I created, when, as Energy Secretary, I forced the then state-owned British Gas Corporation to disgorge its North Sea oil interests, which I then privatised under that name.)

At the heart of Archbishop Welby’s contribution there is the following bewildering passage: “We believe that if we can fix the economy, the fixing of human beings will automatically follow. That is a lie. It is a lie because it is a narrative that casts money, rather than humanity, as the protagonist of God’s story.”

I have to say that, in a rather long lifetime either observing or participating in politics and public life, I have never come across anyone who believes that “if we can fix the economy, the fixing of human beings will automatically follow”. With great respect, the only proposition close to a “lie” is to assert that “we” do believe that. We certainly believe that it is an obligation on governments to try and “fix” the economy to the extent that they are able to do so: the people, rightly, expect no less. But insofar as this is connected to the “fixing” of human beings (a much more difficult task) the relationship in fact flows in the opposite direction.

For example, the full name of the Commission on which Justin Welby and I sat was the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards; and “standards” referred to standards of behaviour, a cultural and ethical matter which was at the heart of the banking meltdown of 2008 and which had had such disastrous economic consequences. As I wrote in the updated version of my memoirs some five years ago, “While New Labour’s system of bank supervision and regulation was a disaster, that is in no way to deny that the root cause of the crisis lay in the greed and folly of all too many bankers, in the broadest sense of the term.”

This is certainly a difficult area. The ability of politicians and governments in a free society to influence human behaviour and promote ethical standards is limited. And it is significant that the great Adam Smith, author of both The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an analysis of man as a moral being, and The Wealth of Nations, an analysis of man as an economic being, spent most of the rest of his days vainly trying to write a synthesis of the two.

But the claim that “we” believe that by “fixing” the economy we can “fix” human beings, and that this alleged belief has anything whatsoever to do with the problems that face us, is absurd and unhelpful. Archbishop Welby may well have a point when he complains that “our greatly secularised society seems to agree on only one, quite un-Christian principle: that it’s every person for themselves”; but that clearly doesn’t apply to the political class. Unlike in some other countries, few in Britain enter politics in order to enrich themselves, nor (unless they become Prime Minister) do they do so.

As I have observed elsewhere, there has indeed been a damaging cultural change, which has undoubtedly made a contribution to the banking disaster in particular. In the old days, bankers’ greed and folly was to a considerable extent kept in check by the fear of loss of reputation if things went wrong: a powerful spur to banking prudence and rectitude. But we now appear to live in an age in which the acquisition of wealth counts for more than reputation. The archbishops would have done better to have addressed themselves to how this might be reversed. But then that would have been much harder.

The post We Can Fix The Economy But Not Human Nature appeared first on Standpoint.

Catholic critics, including the Editor of this magazine in the Sunday Times, refight the Reformation by accusing her of producing a modern version of the old patriotic Protestant history; a fictionalised verion of Our Island Story. And it is true that Mantel’s Thomas More is a twisted sadomasochist who tortures and executes Protestants, rather than the exemplary Renaissance humanist of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. But then no honest writer or historian can follow Bolt’s airbrushing of More’s heretic-hunting, and Mantel, for all her inventive gifts, is a stickler for historical accuracy.

Her Cromwell is not quite a hero. Mantel keeps him at a distance by writing about him in the third person. But Catholic writers have a half point when they say we see events through his eyes, just as we see the French Revolution in her novel A Place of Greater Safety through the eyes of Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre rather than the eyes of the revolution’s victims. But you need to be a religious propagandist yourself to believe that her choice of point of view makes Mantel’s work propaganda.

Equally hopeless in my view are the political commentators who have mused on the strangeness of the public’s appreciation of Wolf Hall. We are supposedly sick of manipulative fixers. Yet we warm to her Cromwell. Perhaps secretly we admire the Osbornes and the Mandelsons, despite all our protestations to the contrary.  At least they get things done.

If you want, you can find something in their argument too, and agree that Mantel relishes the brutal realities of politics.

Peter Straughan’s script for the BBC is a masterpiece. He compresses two long novels into a mere six hours of television, without ever cluttering the screen or hurrying the pace. I’ll watch the series again just to try to work out how he did it. Straughan, like Mantel, does indeed show Cromwell as an operator. When the director Peter Kosminsky turns his camera on him at court, Mark Rylance’s Cromwell never lets his feelings show. His face is the mask of the imperturbable bureaucrat, until the moment he is sure his back is covered and he can let rip with the withering voice of a man of power.

But to think that Mantel is just praising or dissecting a practical politician is as simple-minded as thinking she is just updating Protestant patriotism. The screamingly obvious fact about her great historical novels is that she is drawn to revolution. Her glory as a writer is that she shows better than any novelist I know how fast the old certainties can vanish; how events historians will write hundreds of millions of words about happen in a shorter time than it takes a historian to write an academic paper. One minute you must subscribe to the rules of Catholic England or Bourbon France to prosper or just survive, the next they are gone, and there is no going back.

Mantel once said of the working-class matriarchs, who dominated her—Catholic—childhood, “They’d been nowhere but they’d seen everything.” You could say the same of her. Mantel understands hope, ambition, envy and, unusually for a woman writer, male sexual desire, but her writing draws its power not only from her startling imagery or her cool observation of her characters, but from her ability to heighten familiar emotions in the furnace of revolution.

The jealousies and flirtations of Anne Boleyn and her ladies-in-waiting become evidence that will secure her execution when Henry VIII needs Cromwell to find a reason to be rid of her. Revolutionary times allow Cromwell and Robespierre to turn their grudges and insecurities into reasons to murder.

The view of Wolf Hall as simple-minded anti-Catholicism or a mere examination of everyday political chicanery fails to see her in the round because, above all else, Mantel understands the elation and despair of revolution.

In A Place of Greater Safety, the young Camille Desmoulins is caught eavesdropping on a conversation between his father and the Prince of Condé on the possibility of revolution coming to France. The prince isn’t angry. He kindly asks the boy how he stayed still and silent for so long. His friendliness isn’t reciprocated.

“Perhaps you froze my blood,” Camille said. He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. “Of course there will be a revolution,” he said. “You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.”

Desmoulins does not build a pure republic. His revolution ends in tyranny, and Desmoulins ends on the steps to the guillotine with his comrades urging him to pull himself together and not give the mob the satisfaction of seeing him cry.

In Wolf Hall, Cromwell delights in his master Henry VIII. Anything seems possible as long as he has the king’s ear.
 

You could watch Henry every day for a decade and not see the same thing. He admires Henry more and more. Sometimes he seems hapless, sometimes feckless, sometimes a child, sometimes master of his trade. Sometimes he seems an artist, in the way his eye ranges over his work; sometimes his hand moves and he doesn’t seem to see it move.

As Cromwell gathers more power, he dreams he can turn England into an industrious Protestant nation where the poor are put to work, good folk read the Bible in English and merchants prosper. Yet all his power and hopes depend on the nearest England has had to a Stalin. The violence he needs to fulfil his ambitions will destroy him as surely as it will destroy the French revolutionaries. Henry VIII’s ministers, wives and nobles find, as the Bolsheviks were to find, that the most dangerous place in the world is the seat next to a tyrant.

Damian Lewis’s Henry is charming, charismatic and boyish. He looks as if he barely cares for power, until the moment his eyes narrow and he pulls Cromwell close. He must have what he wants, and if he does not get it someone must pay. Eventually that someone will be Cromwell.

The post Protestant Power Games appeared first on Standpoint.

A significant part of this main point lies, then, in its insistence both on how our use of the meaningful symbols through which we are enabled to make thinkable the world which we inhabit, demands always to be understood in terms of our having to carry on from what has gone before linguistically, and as being always susceptible to moving, or being moved, off in different and hitherto unsuspected directions. In this Rowan Williams’s sense of the irreducible indeterminacy of language, including its inherent lack of any determinate beginning, is strikingly reminiscent of that expressed by Jacques Derrida who, as just one among a remarkably wide range of thinkers and experts of all kinds with whom, as the blurb puts it, “Williams enters into dialogue,” does indeed make a fleeting appearance on page 152 of the main text, but not, curiously enough and as do most at least of the others, in the index. A bibliography would have been helpful — but its lack must be accounted a relatively minor complaint in the context of a notably stimulating and remarkably wide-ranging discussion.

Rowan Williams’s main contention, as I understand it, is that the practice of our engagements in language, and in our conceptualised and conceptualising interchange with the world in which we find ourselves, cannot in principle be understood and explained in terms of the causal structures of our existence alone; and this, he argues, carries with it the irresistible implication that the universe which we inhabit and about which we are able to think and to communicate our thoughts with each other has somehow to be understood as the manifestation or “representation” of an underlying and all-pervasive intelligence. Moreover — and this is a further and crucially important part of his argument — we cannot seriously suppose that the only way in which to record the true nature of this universe must be through the cumulative stating of facts about it or through hopefully accurate descriptions of its various aspects and workings. For one thing, the universe does not impose on us any one “true” way of formulating or expressing those facts; different “natural” — as indeed different “artificial” — languages carve them up and re-present them sometimes very differently.

But experience of the limitations of descriptive or would-be fact-stating language pushes us to see that there are other ways of “representing” the truth of the sometimes “extreme” situations in which we may find and recognise ourselves. Rowan Williams is not only a former Archbishop of Canterbury, he is also an accomplished multi-linguist, a distinguished academic theologian and a poet, with a strong sense of the difference between poems that “ring true” and those that may not; and all this comes through very strongly in this book.

What exactly does all this add up to? Well, for one thing, that the word “exactly” is here as inappropriate as was my earlier use of the word “just” — and if this seems to present some sort of paradox of reflexivity, it is in the context a paradoxically appropriate one. No doubt that all engagement in language has to be seen as a form of what Chapter Four presents as “material practice”, that is to say as consisting in its enactments of a series of macro spatio-temporal events, and as such subject to the kind of explanation structured in terms of (preceding) cause and (subsequent) effect that must in principle be presumed to govern all such occurrences. At the same time, to take part in meaning-orientated activity, to think and/or to act linguistically, is to engage in a rule-governed activity, only properly understandable as a goal- or future-directed effort to meet standards of evaluation by which its success or failure in the transmission or deciphering of meanings may be judged. Attempts to show how one might hold together these two schemata of explanation within one and the same framework of humanly rational understanding have lain, and still lie, at the heart of many of the great philosophical enterprises and controversies; and it may indeed be that the best that one can hope for is a rational understanding of why that cannot in the end be done.

Where this would leave us poses, of course, an immense question — to which the only certain answer may be that it leaves us with both the inescapability and the ultimate unanswerability of the question itself. As Rowan Williams puts it towards the end of his concluding chapter, “There are versions of human self-description which in effect make it impossible to understand at all what is going on in the language we actually use — and thus make it, if not impossible, at least unintelligible that we ourselves should speak. And this,” he quite rightly comments, “is not an easily sustainable position.” And for him “this means that the most comprehensive . . . account we can give of what is recognisably human is deeply implicated in concerns about ‘the sacred’ — about what is not yet said, what is not sayable . . . Such an account does not deliver a ‘proof of God’s existence’ [but it does] enable us to see that what is affirmed in the language of specific religious ritual . . . goes with the grain of what matters most . . . in anything claiming to be an adequate picture of our human speaking.”

One of the many striking things about this whole mode of argument is how ecumenical it is in both implication and spirit. Ronald Dworkin’s last book was entitled Religion Without God, and he was and is very far from being alone among those unable to attach any clear sense to talk about God, but in finding themselves nevertheless impelled to ask Y a-t-il du sacré dans la nature? (the title of a book, edited by Bérengère Hurand and Catherine Larrère, containing the papers from a conference held in Paris in 2012). It would seem surely to follow from such a line of argument that there can be little clear reason to attach any cognitively (or “factually”) distinctive importance to the language and doctrines of any one given religious-cum-theological tradition rather than to that or those of any other.

It may go without saying that, so far as he himself is concerned, the former Archbishop of Canterbury does indeed fully “accept the Christian revelation”. But does this — can it? — mean that he should regard other religious traditions to be, perhaps even grievously, mistaken in their prima facie cognitively incompatible doctrinal claims? Or should we — should he? — understand the repetition of these claims in one traditional context or another, whether it be one of private or of common utterance, not so much as expressions of explicitly cognitive affirmation or endorsement, but rather as the performance of a verbally structured practice of continuing commitment to the community of which one may see oneself and be seen as a member — or indeed, as in the case of bishops, archbishops and the like as an institutionally important representative?

The continuing observance by their members of their traditional customs and practices plays, of course, a crucially important part in holding families and communities together across the generations with all that that means in terms of mutual recognition and support. And that other families and communities have each their own established traditions of shared practice, both verbal and non-verbal, is something much easier to accept — and even on occasion to take part in as honoured and respectful guest — than differences in belief as to the very nature of the universe and of the cognitively doctrinal demands that its supposed Author may be thought to make of us. Men and women of very different religious traditions, or even none at all, may perhaps ecumenically agree that there is indeed “quelque chose de sacré dans la nature“, even if they have also to agree that it must in the end be impossible to specify, let alone actually to agree on just what may be meant by “the sacred”, or how best to express one’s recognition of it. But what the implications of such ecumenical agreement may be for the working theologians of different faith communities, and more especially of communities with long established traditions of their own specific revelation, is a question that one can only leave for debate among the theologians of such communities themselves.

The post Do We Speak the Same Language as God? appeared first on Standpoint.

Cooper understands that women’s power doesn’t always come through formal institutional roles. Rather, it’s the “informal happenings of daily life” — sharing a meal, caring for the vulnerable, offering hospitality — that provide a framework for the transmission of culture. Christianity lacked a formal structure in its earliest years: meetings took place in courtyards or households, communities formed around converted families. Women were often at the centre of things, providing hospitality and shelter for new converts and creating what Cooper calls a “tide of female networking”.

Few documents preserve the “small-scale acts of seemingly unimportant people that allowed Christianity to snowball into an empire-wide spiritual revolution”, so Cooper reconstructs this forgotten world of early Christian women from “glancing references” in surviving early texts. She admits the book “remains an exercise of the imagination” but this is academic modesty. Band of Angels is quietly informed by scholarship, and it’s Cooper’s individual genius — her particular familiarity with sources gained over years of research — that allows her imaginatively to cross-reference texts, adding line and texture to otherwise blurry patches in the historical record.

For all that academic scaffolding, Band of Angels is not a dry work but a pacy tale of heroines, martyrs, virgins, mothers and sisters. The narrative rarely slackens and manages the tricky task of slipping in historical context without being an obvious lesson in ancient history. Starting with Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, Cooper takes several women named in the letters and asks who they were. As a tent-maker, Paul probably encountered prosperous and independent women in the cloth trade who owned property and businesses in their own right: “they were used to juggling the sometimes diverging demands of a complex identity.”

Early Christianity from a woman’s point of view is not a tale of domestic drudgery. These are women of spirit who “discover a blazing fierceness of purpose when faced with the impossible”. Women like Thecla, for example, who turned away from her expected role as wife and mother, leaving fiancé, home and family to follow Paul and preach the gospel. This kind of thinking didn’t go down too well with the imperial authorities and many early Christian women met sticky ends in Roman arenas, thrown to the lions in gladiatorial games.

The turning point came with the conversion of the empress Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine. Cooper is careful not to overstate Helena’s role “as the mother of imperial Christianity”, focusing more on the effects of legitimation of the Church as a powerful organisation within Roman society. 

This marks a “an institutional ‘hardening’ of the faith” in which women have to renegotiate their place, particularly as worship moved out of households into newly-built basilicas. Cooper presents this as a period when women could influence culture through poetry, reading, and scholarship. 

By the fourth century, books transmitted “ideals of ascetic renunciation and virginal purity” which made chastity seem like an attractive option for women. Communities of virgins and widows flourished, offering a release from volatile husbands and constant childbearing with a high risk of infant and maternal mortality. Women gained like-minded company and the chance to do good works for the poor and vulnerable.

Spiritual power is Cooper’s main focus, “not the offices and institutions that had sprouted like weeds” within the Church, and where women are concerned Cooper’s narrative makes it clear that spiritual power operates more effectively where structures are looser and improvised. There are implications for developing a deeper theology of women in the church, particularly when the ordination of women remains a contentious issue, but Cooper never strays out of her area of expertise into theological territory. 

Band of Angels is not a book for feminist theologians, who would be familiar with most of the material anyway. It’s telling that Cooper’s ideal reader is her own mother, and she describes “a desire to write the kind of book that she and my aunt would have wanted to read”. 

It is pitched at smart, interested, spirited women. I can already think of a few female friends who would enjoy it, and suspect its success will depend on word of mouth and the quiet tide of female networking.

The post Saintly Networkers appeared first on Standpoint.

As an orthodox Christian, you approve of sexual activity only if it is between a man and a woman joined exclusively to one another and preferably in the eyes of God. Hardly a novel sentiment, this view is shared across the great monotheistic faiths. It is rooted in reason, tradition and nature, and in scripture too. 

You thus ask your employer to recuse you from same-sex ceremonies, volunteering to work so that other registrars—of whom there are plenty—
are available. There is no obligation on your employer to appoint you as a same-sex partnership registrar, simply the duty to make available designated officials in case need arises. There is no detriment in service to any same-sex couple or to the council’s ability to provide the lawful range of civil partnerships. Other than your own line manager and a few close colleagues, no one even knows of your quietly-held dissent. The work roster requires only a small adjustment to satisfy your needs and all are happy.

It would seem to most people that it would be reasonable in this case for the council to accommodate your beliefs. If, however, you are Lillian Ladele, a Christian unlucky enough to be employed by the London borough of Islington, that quietist conscientious objection will be rudely trounced. You will be threatened with disciplinary proceedings for alleged pre-emptive breaches of Islington’s “diversity” policy, and have your employment contract unilaterally varied to force participation in same-sex partnerships. In effect, you will be hounded out of your job.

Thanks to the Equality Act 2010 (consolidating inter alia the regulations that forced the closure of every Catholic adoption agency), English law contains a conflict between the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of religion. This conflict is brought into sharp focus by Ladele’s case: her litigation against the council has now wound its way up to the European Court of Human Rights. The court’s judgment on Ladele and three other religious liberty cases is expected very shortly, before the departure of its outgoing British President, Sir Nicholas Bratza.

Ladele claims Islington breached her religious freedoms under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This protects the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, “either alone or in community with others and in public and private”, and the freedom to manifest this “religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance”. The court has to consider whether the clashing discrimination prohibitions constitute limitations on the appellant’s Article rights “prescribed by law and necessary in a democratic society for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”. Given the reasonableness of Ladele’s claim, it seems any democratic society worth its name should accept that accommodation. So why not Britain? 

The problem is now made harder by an obligation in the Equality Act which burdens the entire public sector—and any body exercising public functions—to have “due regard” to the “need” to “eliminate discrimination”, to “advance equality of opportunity” and “foster good relations” between the religious/non-religious and those with any sexual orientation and none. These ends are to be met by removing or minimising disadvantages suffered by those discriminated against, “meeting their needs” and “encouraging” them to participate in public life. 

Each of these ideas can be seized by either the pro-religious or the pro-gay to suit their ends. In Islington’s case, it was the pro-gays who won in the domestic courts. But in doing so, they presented latent discrimination as real discrimination. Only if every registrar refused to conduct same-sex partnerships would harm be suffered, or if they otherwise abused their position to restrict the right of homosexual partners to same-sex partnerships.

We will shortly know whether the European Court will protect religious liberty or take the position adopted by the United Kingdom in oral argument before it: Christians can either shut up or get another job. The state no longer takes a neutral position on the competing conceptions of the good life represented in this debate: it is passing bad law that is easily interpreted to become a sword against religious belief rather than a shield against genuine discrimination. A return to the insidious criminalisation of homosexuality that existed before the Wolfenden Report of 1957 is impossible. As the public square evolves, it has to balance and respect all rights, and not just the preferred choices of some, if it is to be truly liberal.

The post Rights and Wrongs appeared first on Standpoint.