Category: Public square

Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life exists to promote a better understanding of the role of religion in public life and to facilitate dialogue between religious groups of any faith and among such groups and public institutions

Its board is small but distinguished

* The Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester
* Professor Oliver O’Donovan, Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology, Edinburgh
* Canon Dr. Vinay K. Samuel, Director Emeritus and Senior Teaching Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies

But there is no sign of any events in the UK, sadly.

OCRPL is related to Get Religion ‘The press just doesn’t get religion’

Also trying to educate the media is the brand new Lapido Media: Religious Literacy in Public Affairs

The second Theos Forum Faith in our Media: The Church and the news agenda with the Rt Rev’d Dr Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, takes place on Tuesday 4th December at St Bride’s, Fleet St, EC4

It is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it. What we teach in school, what subjects we encourage in universities and the methods of instruction are all subject to the one overarching test: what do the kids get out of it? And this test soon gives way to another, yet more pernicious in its effect, but no less persuasive in the thinking of educationists: is it relevant? And by â??relevantâ?? is invariably meant â??relevant to the interests of the kids themselvesâ??.

From these superstitions have arisen all the recipes for failure that have dominated our educational systems: the proliferation of ephemeral subjects, the avoidance of difficulties, methods of teaching that strive to maintain interest at all costs â?? even at the cost of knowledge. Whether we put the blame on Rousseau, whose preposterous book Emile began the habit of sentimentalising the process whereby knowledge is transferred from one brain to another, on John Dewey, whose hostility to â??rote learningâ?? and old-fashioned discipline led to the fashion for â??child-centred learningâ??, or simply on the egalitarian ideas which were bound to sweep through our schools when teachers were no longer properly remunerated â?? in whatever way we apportion blame, it is clear that we have entered a period of rapid educational decline, in which some people learn masses, but the masses learn little or nothing at all.

True teachers do not provide knowledge as a benefit to their pupils; they treat their pupils as a benefit to knowledge. Of course they love their pupils, but they love knowledge more. And their overriding concern is to pass on that knowledge by lodging it in brains that will last longer than their own. Their methods are not â??child-centredâ?? but â??knowledge-centredâ??, and the focus of their interest is the subject, rather than the things that might make that subject for the time being â??relevantâ?? to matters of no intellectual concern. Any attempt to make education relevant risks reducing it to those parts that are of relevance to the uneducated â?? which are invariably the parts with the shortest life span. A relevant curriculum is one from which the difficult core of knowledge has been excised, and while it may be relevant now, it will be futile in a few yearsâ?? time. Conversely, irrelevant-seeming knowledge, when properly acquired, is not merely a discipline that can be adapted and applied; it is likely to be exactly what is needed in circumstances that nobody foresaw.

Roger Scruton Culture Counts

Working on behalf of the Churchesâ?? Main Committee (representing the spread of Christian denominations in the UK), I have studied a great number of tribunal determinations on asylum claims from across the country, especially claims from people whose conversion to Christianity makes it unsafe for them to return to countries such as Iran.

The adjudicators lack an understanding of the nature of conversion and the differing Christian cultures, whether in this country or in the country of origin. Frequently, ridiculous test questions are asked such as: â??What is the number of books in the Bible?â?? and â??What is the birth date of Jesus Christ?â?? (You have to say December 25.) Failure to produce the required reply breeds a disbelief which prejudices fair judgment.

Many of these applicants are respected members of their congregations and communities, yet evidence by their bishops, clergy and laity who know them best is swept aside by the tribunals.

Dismissal of appeals has led to dawn arrests and deportations at weekends, when it is hard to get preventive injunctions. Legal aid changes have hugely reduced the professional support which can be obtained. On numerous occasions the Home Office has had its fingers rapped by the courts for its refusal to observe due process.

If Labour does lose the next election, it will be partly because all across the country Christian people have lost faith in a government now obsessed with currying popularity rather than standing for justice.

The Very Rev Nicholas Coulton Letter to the Times

And see the Evangelical Alliance’s Alltogether for Asylum Justice – Asylum seekersâ?? conversion to Christianity (large PDF)
Asylum seekers are in danger of becoming some of the most vulnerable, alienated and demonized members of society.

Churches are central to community engagement and often provide a first port of call to newly arrived asylum seekers as they provide certain core services such as food and clothing, English language courses, and shelter for individuals at risk. It is for this reason that asylum seekers often become engaged with not only the practical side of church life, but also spiritual aspects. Asylum seekers of other faiths and those of no faith often become attracted to Christianity through the work of churches and Christians offering to help them at times of great need. It is, therefore, unsurprising to hear of stories of asylum seekers who convert to Christianity once in the UK. This, however, can complicate their application for asylum. Having arrived in the UK fleeing religious, racial or political persecution in their homeland and initially applying for asylum on those grounds, a conversion to Christianity can provide reason for a fresh claim to be lodged with the Borders and Immigration Agency.

While there are inevitably a proportion of bogus claims of Christian conversion, there remain many asylum seekers who have genuinely chosen to follow the Christian faith. Having had their asylum application refused, they face being sent back to countries where it is not safe for them to practice their faith.

The case studies included in this report are evidence of a number of asylum seekers who, having applied for asylum in the UK under reasons of political persecution, subsequently applied for asylum on the grounds of religious persecution.

Christian human rights organisations such as Christian Solidarity Worldwide and Release International know it is often unsafe to return a practising Christian to an Islamic country let alone return an apostate (a convert to Christianity) to an Islamic country where conversion is illegal. Therefore, there are grave implications for returning asylum seekers who have converted to Christianity to countries like Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The report includes case studies:

Mrs S became a Christian three years ago after she arrived in the UK from Iran. Her husband is a Muslim. His application for political asylum has been refused. Her fresh application, on the grounds of religious persecution, was refused. The Judge didnâ??t believe that she was a Christian. He accused her pastor, a leader of an Arabic Church, of bias towards her. He is an Iraqi Christian, Mrs S is an Iranian convert.

Mrs S would suffer persecution if she were to return to Iran. Her relatives and friends do not accept conversion. She would be unemployable and subject to physical abuse if returned to Iran.

Mrs S has experienced exclusion for the Iranian community in Wales who canâ??t accept her conversion from Islam to Christianity.

and see Persecution.org

There are a number of important issues at stake here. First, there is a clearly a clash between two principles: the principle of equality as defined by human rights legislation, which includes sexual orientation, and the principle of freedom of religion and conscience in a pluralistic society. In this case, the principle of equality has trumped the right of freedom of religion and conscience.

Second, what is striking is the influence that the homosexual lobby has gained through using human rights legislation to achieve their political and ideological ends. We have passed from decriminalizing homosexual behaviour to the active promotion of homosexuality as a lifestyle the equivalent of heterosexual marriage. The next stage in this process is the silencing of any opposition—particularly opposition from the Catholic Church.

The Anglican churches in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, like their North American counterparts, are broadly sympathetic to the homosexual cause, as are several other Protestant denominations, thus leaving it mostly to the Catholic Church to defend traditional Christian sexual morality. The success of the homosexual campaign in silencing those who dissent from the new liberal secularist orthodoxy can be seen from the behaviour of the police in recent years. When an Anglican bishop mentioned the possibility of changing sexual orientation in a parish newsletter, he received a visit and a stern warning from the local police. The police have also threatened such Christians as an elderly couple and a Catholic radio broadcaster who objected to the homosexual lifestyle.

Even more ominously, these conflicts over faith schools and Catholic adoption agencies reveal the existence of powerful secularist lobby groups that are not only anti-Christian but especially anti-Catholic. They are found in the main political parties and among public figures and seem determined to remove the Catholic Church from public life and to undermine its institutions.

North American readers are well familiar with this syndrome of the illiberal liberal left. What is lacking in Britain is a robust group of Catholic intellectuals such as exists in the United States to answer these assaults on the Church. Instead, we have The Tablet, which, under the editorship of John Wilkins, gradually abandoned orthodox Catholicism and seems to have become little more than a vehicle for something resembling liberal Anglicanism, which, as has been demonstrated, is no answer at all.

John Loughlin Secularist Attacks on the Catholic Church in Britain

The Church as public service
The Christian life in the Church is the form of life in which we can most truly be together. It is life with Christ. The proper identity of Christ is established by the Father, so Christ does not have to establish his own identity, which makes him free to be our servant, and to remain so, forever.

Christian politics rests on this understanding that we are served, by Christ. Christ is not wrestling for power with us as we wrestle with one another. Free from any concern to establish his identity, he endures and will overcome our all power play, against him and one another. The assumption that, if God wields more power or responsibility we are left with less, is entirely untrue of the Christian God. Christ intends us to become like himself, self-controlled, and so free to take our delight in one another and find service of one another its own reward. Christ shares with us the self-control by which he is always free, even whilst being our servant. With Christ fully free, and therefore fully therefore master in all his service of us, we may participate in his self-mastery and freedom. In Christ we participate in the relationships which he shares with all others, and through all these relationships we share in his freedom. Then we are free to receive and pass on the love and care, discipling and mutual correction, which is the form his grace takes.

Members of the church serve one another. The household of mutual service (leitourgia – liturgy) which the Church is, spills out beyond the Church to serve those outside it, so Christians serve whoever is ready to receive their service. The Church serves the world because not to offer guidance, correction or intervention when it seems to be required would be a lack of love. Such love comes as provision of care, protection and order, and explicit teaching about these. Long-term concern for justice, government and education, and public dialogue about them, is an outworking of the gospel, not an addition to it. Through time this outworking does become ossified into the national institutions of justice, law enforcement, education and health services. The service which the Church offers to anyone who will take it, is the extension of the self-government, that is the mutual subordination, of the Church which is the public form of Christ’s service of the world.

Christ, religion and ‘other religions’

With many thanks to the Tyndale Fellowship‘s Ethics & Social Theology group and Jonathan Chaplin of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics

Marriage is first and foremost a social institution, created and sustained by civil society. Law sometimes creates institutions (the corporation is a prime modern example). But sometimes the law recognizes an institution that it does not and cannot meaningfully create. No laws, and no set of lawyers, legislators, or judges, can summon a social institution like marriage into being merely by legal fiat. Marriage and family therefore can never be reduced to a legal construct, a mere creature of the state.

As scholars in other disciplines come to shed increasing light on the importance of marriage as a key social institution, family law as a discipline is moving in the opposite direction, embracing family diversity as the moral ideal which should undergird family law. Even as American society in general begins to refocus on how marriage can better serve the needs of children, much of family law as a discipline and practice remains preoccupied with the sexual choices and rights of adults.

The basic understanding of marriage underlying much of the current same-sex marriage discourse is seriously flawed, reflecting all the worst trends in marriage and family law generally. It is adult-centric, turning on the rights of adults to make choices. It does not take institutional effects of law seriously, failing to treat with intellectual seriousness any potential consequences that changing the basic legal definition of marriage may have for the children of society. Sadly, an attack on the idea that family structure matters now forms a part of some advocatesâ?? case for same-sex marriage in both the courts and the public square.

A legal or policy reform strengthens marriage as a social institution when it:

Protects the boundaries of marriage, clearly distinguishing marriedcouples from other personal relations, so that people and communities can tell who is married, and who is not. The harder it is to distinguish married couples from other kinds of unions, the harder it is for communities to reinforce norms of marital behavior and the more difficult it is for marriage to fulfill its function as a social institution.

Treats the married couple as a social, legal, and financial unit. When the law, through the tax code or other means, disaggregates the family and treats married men and women as if they were single, this does not represent â??neutrality.â?? Because marriage is in fact a real economic, emotional, social, parenting, and sexual union, the law must in justice treat married couples as a unit, rather than as unrelated individuals.

Marriage and the Law: A Statement of Principles

There are two very astute pieces from Pietro De Marco over at Chiesa on the Church and the public square in Italy, though it could be the UK that he is describing. The first is called A Catholicism deliberately absent from the public sphere

A first thesis: in the Tuscan communities, Catholic existence â?? outside of the circles of family and parish, or the many spiritual and intellectual cenacles, as well as the visibility circumscribed by the Sunday Mass and outreach activities â?? is, paradoxically, mainly notable for its absence.

This prevalent absence is an absence from what is called the public sphere. A dominant Catholic invisibility cannot be replaced by a thousand activities, as important and generous as these may be, in the social realm and in the domains of daily life. The public sphere is something else. The civil dimension of â??reactivating at the present time the values of the Christian faith and the ethical guideposts derived from itâ?? (Garelli) is not realized in the little things.

A second thesis: this Tuscan syndrome of a publicly absent Catholic existence is often translated into a presence of individuals in the intellectual or political sphere. This presence is mimetic. What does that mean? A mimetic presence is given if one acts by imitating and adopting the appearance and role of actors already familiar and accepted in the public sphere.

Thus the Catholic is by turns the tolerant mediator, the pacifist, the narrator of the glories of Florence in the twentieth century, the critic of the institutional Church, the extremist defender of the Constitution, the political leader on the side of the citizen, the priest of the disenfranchised (the other priests arouse distrust), the volunteer for strictly humanitarian reasons, the theologian who presents himself as a leftist intellectual, etc. Make no mistake, this mimetic presence is more often the expression of personal conviction than of an effort to mask oneâ??s identity.

A third thesis: this effective invisibility, constituted by a mimetic presence, entails the objective separation of the faith of the individual and of the ecclesial community from the public sphere. But at the same time, it faces recurrent appeals to break down the â??historical barricadesâ?? between the Church and civil society. If this contradiction is accepted with complacency, it is because Tuscan Catholic invisibility and its popular theorems have a background of weak theology, which makes it seem natural to merge the condition of the lay Christian with modern secularism.

So three points:

1. Christian institutions are being made, or making themselves, invisible, as Christian institutions.

2. We are happy to fall into the roles that the media is ready to acknowledge, and then Christian witness is identified with this or that individual rather than with the Christian community, so it ceases to be Christian witness.

3. This minimises the Christian difference. But the point of Christian witness is not to dissolve the difference between the Church and society – that would be to hide the distinctiveness of the gospel. The difference between Church and society must be clear, for the sake of society.

A lot of good theological diagnostic work is being done by the Catholic Church in Europe. The Catholics are teaching us how to be public Christians.

Are evangelicals in the UK listening to this? Are you listening Bible Society, Theos, Evangelical Alliance, Christian Today?

First of all, a remark about the idea of dialogue itself. It is, I suggest, an idea that finds its roots and origins in the Jewish and the Christian traditions. It is an idea that has undergone, philosophical development in the western world. In his great encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, Pope Paul VI spoke of Christianity as essentially dialogical in nature. It is grounded in dialogue between God and man that finds its full expression in the relationship between Jesus and his heavenly Father. The spirit of Gaudium et Spes is one of dialogue and therefore of a spirit of openness to what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world as a whole

As Catholics, when we evangelise, when we preach, we are also receptive to what the Holy Spirit has been doing and is doing in the lives of those to whom we preach our message. I mention this to make the point that this key concept of dialogue, which is integral to Vatican II, may be quite alien to members of other religions. They may see it as an imposition of a Western way of thinking on them. Both Muslims and adherents to the great religions of the East could have questions about the rhetoric of dialogue. They might see questions of the unity of the human community in quite different terms.

Nonetheless I would submit that dialogue is a vital contribution that Christians have to make to inter-faith relations and peace in the world. Dialogue means respecting the other as other. When members of different religions come together in dialogue they do not water down their beliefs in order to find a lowest common denominator. When we come to the table of dialogue we bring the whole of our faith. Otherwise we come empty-handed. And if we bring our faith in all its fullness and integrity to the table of dialogue then we will discover shared perspectives, convergence of understanding as well as sympathy and mutual respect. As Christians we cannot but promote dialogue and seek a response- an attitude of dialogue in those to whom we reach out.

Archbishop Kevin McDonald of Southwark Inter-Religious Dialogue in a Globalised World

I think the idea of a globalisation of solidarity is wonderful, and I am glad to say that CAFOD, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, has set in train a project called Live Simply, designed to help people live in solidarity with the poor. It has often struck me that Islam asks of its followers a similar commitment to solidarity with the poor. This seems clear in the idea of having a banking system that works in accordance with the basic principles of Islam. My thought is not that I should open an Islamic bank account, but rather that it may be time for Christian and Muslim economists to put their heads together to see what we can learn from each other in the sphere of genuine commitment to solidarity with the poor. Looking at the newspapers or the television news sometimes makes me shudder at the fate of so many people in the world who live in such a shocking state. But I feel uncomfortable and guilty if I cannot react. I do what I can; I imagine we all do, but I have a feeling that, together, we could do so much more.

A second thing we could undertake together to improve the state of tomorrowâ??s world for our children is to work for genuine freedom of religion. I have already mentioned that many British Muslims feel misrepresented or at least misunderstood in our media and in public opinion. You are not the only ones, but unfortunately in the present moment much more is being said about Islam than about Christianity or other religions. More than this, there are times when we may all feel that we are not exactly muzzled or silenced, but we are most certainly not free to express our deeply held convictions, sometimes simply for reasons linked to so-called â??political correctnessâ??. I think there are ways we can work with those who form public opinion to solve many of these problems, and I am certain that we should do this together.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor Christian and Muslim Perspectives on Inter-religious Dialogue

(Last week the Islamic scholar and reformer Tariq Ramadan argued in the Guardian for an end to calls on British Muslims to integrate. Here, Prospect editor David Goodhart replies)

The idea that British foreign policy has been run on an anti-Muslim agenda does not stand examination. In Bosnia and Kosovo (and Sierra Leone), Britain took military action on behalf of Muslims, in some cases against Christians. In Iraq, rightly or wrongly (and Prospect was opposed to Britain’s role) we helped to remove a secular dictator, and we will leave behind a Muslim democracy of some kind. If there has been a disproportionate intervention in Muslim countries, it is mainly because those countries are disproportionately unstable and conflict-ridden. Of course, I am aware it is not seen like that in much of the Muslim world—where the typical hypocrisy and realpolitik of the west (relating to UN resolutions, Israel, oil, good dictators and bad dictators) always seems to bear down on Muslims. But the belief that it is all about Islam is an oddly self-regarding conceit, arising from the prickliness and defensiveness that many Muslims feel confronted with a stronger and more successful western world. And if British Muslims are so troubled by the loss of Muslim life, why did we hear so little about the greatest unnecessary loss of such life in recent times in the Iran-Iraq war? No, unfortunately, what moves many political Muslims is the loss of Muslim life that can in some way be construed as the fault of the west. Shouldn’t you be using your influence to combat this anti-western, victim mentality among your fellow Muslims?

David Goodhart Open Letter to Tariq Ramadan