Daily Mail, December 22 2002

What God needs for Christmas is a spin-doctor.

Religion has got a terrible public image. Of all the great faiths, Christianity takes this most to heart. Constantly red-faced with embarrassment at itself, it backs away from one encounter after another, mumbling apologies.

Even at Christmas, it is being air-brushed out of the celebrations. You have to search to find Christmas cards with nativity scenes. The Christmas story is held to be irrelevant, risible or offensive.

Indeed, so great was the fear of giving offence to Moslems in particular that the Red Cross banned Christmas altogether from its 430 fund-raising shops, with staff ordered to take down any religious decorations. This, in fact, only caused astonishment and scorn among Moslems, whose teachings say they should respect other faiths.

Christianity has hardly been helping itself. The Catholic church in particular has dug itself into a terrible hole over covering up for its paedophile priests. And now we learn that a Catholic priest took part in the IRA bombing of the Northern Ireland village of Claudy in 1972.

As one of the mothers bereaved in that carnage observed, it seems perverse beyond belief for a man of religion to be involved in mass murder.

The same can be said of Islam. So great was the atrocity carried out in its name on September 11, and so grave the continuing threat, that since then all [ital] religion has been demonised as a source of terror, violence and oppression.

This is a wildly unbalanced view, which says more about the prejudices of those secular folk who have seized upon September 11 to mount their own jihad [ital] against any and every faith. It is undeniable that, throughout history, dreadful things have been done in the name of religion when it has tried to force people to adhere to its version of truth, or been used as a marching song for territorial conquest.

But it is also true that the great tyrants of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, perpetrated atheistic creeds which led to genocide, mass murder and oppression.

And religion has also been a powerful force for good. It has given us civilisation, by teaching us to regulate our behaviour through codes of morality. And the values cherished by secular folk themselves – such as individual liberty and equality -- derive from the Judeo-Christian belief that mankind was created in the image of God.

Religious instinct is hard-wired into the human psyche. It is as futile – and as intolerant – to try to eradicate it as it would be to try to stamp out our love of music, for example, or our creativity.

Certainly, the two great proselytising religions, Christianity and Islam, pose specific dangers of oppressing non-believers. But they also do much good. It cannot be stated too strongly that the West’s necessary defence against terror perpetrated in the name of Islam is not [ital] a declaration of war upon the religion.

Moderate Moslems should be helped to resist the violence that has hi-jacked their faith, and given every assistance to replicate the separation between church and state that enabled Christianity to shake off its own violent legacy.

Moreover, the Moslems’ critique of the West has much truth in it. As they say, the West has indeed torn up its moral maps, substituted the worship of materialism for religion, and lost its way in family breakdown, prostitution, drug abuse and crime.

In short, they are right to argue that there is a God-shaped hole in western secularised society. The very same argument was mounted by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in his Dimbleby Lecture last week.

One can disagree with Dr Williams over much of his analysis of social trends – that the nation state is being wiped out by globalisation, for example – but still agree with the key spiritual point he was making.

As he said, our consumerist approach to politics has turned any policy restricting lifestyle choice into electoral suicide. Yet this individual free-for-all has not created the good society. For without any deeper connections to anything beyond ourselves, politics becomes a meaningless game of shifting advantage.

Merely encouraging respect and tolerance is not enough, he said, if the ultimate goal has become releasing our own potential, shrouded in vague and sentimental platitudes towards others.

The abandonment of public religion and morality undermines politics, law and citizenship. What is missing is any sense of the intrinsic value of things, of what gives life its meaning.

People want to find such a prop. The problem, though, is that many no longer believe the supernatural story that accompanies it. Indeed, a survey at the weekend suggested that one quarter of Anglican clergymen themselves no longer believe in the Virgin Birth. So how can religion reconnect to the people?

The answer is to bring it out of the pulpit and into everyday life. There is no doubt that religion reaches the parts other social reformers cannot reach. Its successes can be seen most spectacularly in the United States, where results achieved by religious groups working with drug addiction, family breakdown or crime beat secular projects hollow.

That’s because religion provides individuals with structure, support networks and -- most crucial of all -- hope. Dr Williams was arguing similarly that the Anglican Church should play a much expanded role in areas such as education and the regeneration of desolated communities.

Liberal secularists who regard him as their ally should look again at what he is saying. For they hate religion and want to banish it altogether from the public sphere. He, by contrast, wants to bring it back to replace what he calls the ‘market state’ which has failed.

But if it is to do that, he will surely have to confront the Church’s own retreat from moral authority, which has caused it so often to become indistinguishable from the most morally indifferent social worker.

What happened, for example, in Birmingham’s Balsall Heath was particularly instructive. For years, the Moslem community there led a daily picket against the street prostitutes, pimps and kerb-crawlers who were degrading the neighbourhood. The pickets succeeded not merely in removing this nuisance from their area, but also in substantially reducing crime as a result.

Yet the local churches were hostile and even preached against this exemplary civic activism as a ‘campaign against working women’.

What a turnaround from the 19th century, when evangelical Christians were the driving force behind the great reform movements such as the abolition of slavery and child prostitution, and the promotion of temperance and sexual continence. It was these Christians who re-moralised Britain.

Deficiencies in both the state and the free market demand new ways of thinking about our social problems. Without any doubt, the way forward is through giving a greater role to voluntary organisations and religious bodies.

This week will amount to what is for many only an annual exposure to the Christian ritual. Others will seek to avoid it altogether. But religion – given inspired and statesmanlike leadership – might yet ride to the rescue of a beleaguered society. Happy Christmas.

Posted by admin at December 22, 2002