Anglican Mainstream

By Benjamin Lazarus, The Commentator

European countries with sizeable Muslim populations would do well to be cautious in the face of an Islamist backlash

It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.

Bernard Lewis: ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ (1990).

Whenever there are sectarian problems in Africa, the Middle East or Europe, Islamism is more often than not the root cause. The recent insurgency in Mali is simply the latest episode, and as Islamist rage spreads across regional fault lines in Africa and the Middle East, the battle between the West and Islamism is clearly intensifying.

In 2010, this conflict was described by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as an ideological war against the cultural and religious equivalent of revolutionary communism. He believed this conflict would play out as a ‘generational-long struggle’, a view recently echoed by the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

It has long been assumed if the Israel-Palestine conflict was resolved, political Islam across the globe would quieten down, and we would co-exist peacefully. I have even recently heard this same spiel from the mouth of a senior British UN Representative.

This notion – that creating a Palestinian utopia would quell the rage boiling beneath the surface of so many Islamic communities worldwide – is idle, ignorant and absurd.

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By Ed West, Telegraph

By Hilary White, LifeSite News

In a speech to the Roman Rota, the Vatican’s legal office that deals mainly with marriage annulment cases, Benedict reiterated that marriage is an “irrevocable covenant between man and woman.”

But “contemporary culture, marked by a strong subjectivism and moral and religious relativism, places before the individual and family pressing challenges.”

Questions, he said, are being widely raised whether it is even possible to create a bond that lasts a lifetime or whether such a thing “corresponds to human nature,” or whether it is fundamentally opposed to human freedom.

“It is part of a widespread mentality,” Benedict said, “to think that a person becomes himself only by remaining ‘independent’ and coming into contact with others only through relationships that can be interrupted at any time.”

Rejecting faith, said the pope, leads to “a profound imbalance in all human relationships, including marriage, and facilitates an erroneous understanding of freedom and self-realization.

“These, together with the flight from patiently borne suffering, condemns humanity to becoming locked within its own selfishness and self-centredness. On the contrary, accepting faith makes human persons capable of giving themselves … and thus of discovering the extent of being a human person."

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by David Lindsay

The floundering David Cameron is rushing through both Houses in a mere two days his ill-thought-through scheme to repeal the Act of Settlement and to abolish male primogeniture for the Throne (though not for estates, nor for the hereditary peerages that continue to elect 92 members of the House of Lords). Which Realm or Territory is considering leave the family defined by our shared monarch unless these changes were given effect, though not otherwise? Even if any were, then it would still be wrong.

There is a certain Spot The Deliberate Mistake quality to proposals to make the monarchy more egalitarian or, heaven help us all, “meritocratic”. The Act of Settlement reminds us that we are different, and it does us the courtesy of taking our beliefs seriously by identifying them as a real challenge.

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From This is Money

The next Archbishop of Canterbury has blasted banking giant UBS for being ‘corrupted’ following its £940million fine for rigging interest rates.

Justin Welby, a member of the Banking Standards Commission, admitted he was ‘stunned’ by the scandal, which emerged before Christmas, adding there was ‘scarcely a bank’ that had not been involved in wrong-doing.

The withering verdict came as top bosses at UBS were hauled in front of MPs and peers to answer questions about the debacle, described by its chairman Andrew Tyrie as a ‘shocker of enormous proportions’.

Brash traders calling themselves ‘superman’ and the ‘three musketeers’ openly boasted in social forums about manipulating Libor rates – used to set the cost of mortgages for millions of homeowners.

But yesterday UBS admitted to the commission that just 18 of the 40 unnamed traders the FSA revealed had been directly involved in the scam had been fired.

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By Lis Howell, MercatorNet

The Savile story is not just about the ghastly flaws of a celebrity. It is about how Britain's toffy public broadcaster has itself been seduced by the sexual revolution.

[...] Perhaps the most important thing I want to draw attention to is the issue of the Savile scandal itself. The issue of Newsnight dropping the investigation is much, much bigger than the later fiasco about the North Wales children’s home. The most important point is that the Savile story was not just a story about exposing the ghastly flaws of a celebrity.

From NOM

If we ask ourselves how it is that the advocacy of gay marriage has become an orthodoxy to which all our political leaders subscribe, we must surely acknowledge that intimidation has some part to play in the matter. Express the slightest hesitation on this score and someone will accuse you of “homophobia”, while others will organise to ensure that, even if nothing else is known about your views, this at least will be notorious. Only someone with nothing to lose can venture to discuss the issue with the measure of circumspection that it invites, and politicians do not figure among the class of people with nothing to lose.

 

Yet it is unlikely that the ordinary conscience will find itself entirely at ease with a change that overthrows social norms on which people have depended throughout recorded history. In this, as in so many things, people of conservative temperament look around for the person who will speak for them and find only an embarrassed silence. Strident minorities, acting on the growing disposition to censor their opponents, ensure that the deeper the question, the more likely it is to be settled by shallow arguments.

by Edward Malnick, Telegraph

Dr Rowan Williams, who will step down from the post tomorrow, said that “risking unpopularity” and “taking the flak” were what the job was all about.

His warning comes weeks before the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Justin Welby, a former oil executive, is due to take over as spiritual head of the Church.

In his final broadcast before his departure, Dr Williams defends his outspoken attacks on successive governments, including his strong opposition to the Iraq war.

“Risking unpopularity, taking the flak, is what archbishops are here for – it is the stuff of the job. It is something you realise the more you work here, that maybe Britain benefits from having someone to get angry with, and that compared to my predecessors I have got off lightly,” he says.

In 2008 Dr Williams was widely criticised for suggesting that the adoption of some aspects of Islamic Sharia law in Britain “seems unavoidable”, although in an interview earlier this year he admitted he had “failed to find the right words” and “succeeded in confusing people”.

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Thought the world of politics was beyond satire? Then read SIMON HEFFER’s tongue-in-cheek predictions for the coming year…

January: David Cameron makes his long-awaited speech on the future of Europe, saying he wants to renegotiate our arrangement.
 
The other 26 countries tell him to get lost. In yet another U-turn on same-sex marriage, he announces that the Church of England will be allowed to marry homosexual and gay couples.

In Italy, 76-year-old Silvio Berlusconi embarks on his election campaign with his 27-year-old fiancée. Two heart surgeons are in his entourage.

Back home, following calls for programmes showing recipes using unhealthy ingredients to be screened only after the watershed, the Government considers ordering all aspiring cooks to go to bed before 9pm.

February: In a further development of the Prime Minister’s same-sex marriage policy, he now announces that not only will the Church of England be allowed to marry homosexual and lesbian couples, it will be open to heavy fines if it refuses to do so. Silvio Berlusconi’s Bunga Bunga Party wins the Italian election. He promises to spend, spend, spend the country’s way out of stagnation.

The euro drops by ten per cent on the foreign exchanges.

Pre-Budget leaks hint that the Chancellor is considering putting VAT on all foods deemed by doctors to cause obesity. As Britain shivers through the coldest winter for 100 years, the Prime Minister renews calls to build more wind farms to fight global warming.

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by Tim Stanley, Telegraph

By Harry Mount, Telegraph

In his Christmas message, the Pope said, “The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have."

How we rush to fill our time with time-saving appliances that soon become mere time-filling devices. Mobile phones, iPads, Facebook, tweeting – all, at their best, are staggeringly efficient things that produce extraordinary advances in our working lives. I have written whole articles on my phone while on the train and filed them to newspapers instantaneously – a process that would once have needed a pen and paper, a copytaker, a railway station telephone box and a team of hot metal print workers.

Those same marvellous things then come along and devour our spare hours, destroying our capacity for spiritualism, for reading long books and for just thinking. We shouldn't really blame the devices themselves, more our capacity for being waylaid by short-term gratification. That man avidly staring at his phone on the 7.32am from Guildford might be reading Proust or the Bible on his mobile – except he's not.

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By Melanie Phillips, Mailonline

You really would need to have a heart harder than the five-pence piece in the Christmas pud not to feel sorry at present for Professor Richard Dawkins.

Christmas must be such a terrible trial for the planet’s most celebrated — and angriest — atheist. All that cheerfulness and pleasure associated with Christianity’s main celebration seems to drive him simply nuts.

[...]  His view of religion is as cheerless as it is unbalanced. As countless others prepare for an enjoyable and — dare one say it — even spiritually uplifting holiday, Professor Dawkins seems to become all the more miserable. If Charles Dickens were writing A Christmas Carol today, surely he would have replaced Ebenezer Scrooge with the figure of the joyless, rage-fuelled Dawkins spitting out ‘Bah, humbug!’ at families sitting down to the Christmas turkey.

After last week’s census details which showed that Christianity in Britain is in decline, Dawkins rejoiced that it was ‘on the way out in this country’.

Well, this is tantamount to rejoicing that Britain and western civilisation are on the way out. For Christianity underpins their most fundamental moral values — ones that both believers and non-believers hold dear, such as the difference between right and wrong, respect for other people and doing good things rather than bad.

It is also woven into Britain’s literature, art, music, history and national identity.

What’s more, despite the decline in believers, nearly two-thirds of the population still describe themselves as Christian. If Britain stops being a mainly Christian country, then it will stop being recognisably Britain.

 It is not just Dawkins and his followers, however, who are dancing prematurely on Christianity’s grave.

In the eyes of just about the entire governing class, cultural milieu and intelligentsia, belief in Christianity is viewed at best as an embarrassment, and at worst as proof positive of imbecility.

Indeed, Christianity has long been the target of sneering comedians, blasphemous artists and the entire human rights industry — all determined to turn it into a despised activity to be pursued only by consenting adults in private.

As it happens, I myself am not a Christian; I am a Jew. And Jews have suffered terribly under Christianity in the past.

Yet I passionately believe that if Britain and the West are to continue to be civilised places, it is imperative that the decline in Christianity be reversed.

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By Julie Henry, Telegraph

For years, primary school Christmas plays have been as likely to revolve around a snowman, an elf or a reindeer than the baby Jesus, as teachers opt to avoid the Christian story in favour of secular ones.

But new figures suggest the traditional nativity play is making a comeback, with parents demanding a return to performances based on the biblical tale.

An increase in the number staged this month which focus on the Christian nativity has been reported by companies which provide schools with scripts for plays.

The comeback follows years of concern that teachers were ditching the story of the birth of Jesus in favour of secular productions for fear of upsetting pupils of other faiths.

Musicline, which sells both nativity and non-nativity Christmas plays to schools, said that this year the nativities accounted for 58 per cent of sales, up from 50 per cent last year.

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By Andrew Carey, CEN

American-style ‘culture wars’ are breaking forth in British society as a result of the politics of gay marriage, argued Fraser Nelson last weekend (Britain is getting a glimpse of the crazy world of culture wars, Sunday Telegraph, 13 December 2012).

He is late to the party. I have regularly documented in this column the fact that these so-called ‘culture wars’ have been with us for over a decade. Nelson helpfully draws attention to the American sociologist James Hunter, who defines them in terms of “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding.”

Nelson writes: “The trick is to draw a dividing line, insult those on the other side – and try to attract supporters by forcing people to choose.”

The really ‘crazy’ thing is that David Cameron is introducing this heightened form of cultural warfare over gay marriage at this particular time and with such determination. Opinion polls reveal a slight majority support for gay marriage especially among younger people, but there is an even greater suspicion on the part of the public that Cameron’s personal motives are partisan, cynical and ‘trendy’.

One of the most concerning aspects of this for Christians is the fact that the introduction of gay marriage bounces the churches into renewed division over an issue that has come out of nowhere. Over the years I have spoken to many Christian gay activists who have told me that the unions they want the church to approve are not ‘marriage’. They recognised that ‘marriage’ had particular theological connotations that were universally accepted as subsisting in the complementarity of the genders with the potential for procreation.

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By Fraser Nelson, Spectator

By Peter Hitchens, Mailonline

• Peter Hitchens says that the Census is not just a description of the state of things on a day in 2011 but a prophetic document telling us where we are going
• Christianity is on the decline while Islam is on the up and fewer of us are married for the first time ever

 The future will be another country. They will do things differently there.

The Census is not just a description of the state of things on a day in 2011, it is a prophetic document telling us where we are going, whether we like it or not. I don’t.

For the past 60 years or so, we have lived in a nation that was more or less familiar to anyone who had grown up in the pre-war Britain of 1939.

Even the devastation of conflict had not transformed it out of recognition.

People behaved, thought, worked, laughed and enjoyed themselves much as they had done for decades.

They lived in the same sorts of families in the same kind of houses. Their children went to the same kinds of schools.

And they had grown up in a land that was still identifiably the same as their grandparents had known.

And so it went back for centuries.

As recently as 1949, the prices of most goods were roughly the same, and expressed in the same money, as the prices of 1649.

A short-distance time-traveller between 1912 and 2012 might be perplexed and astonished, but he would not be lost.

That period is now coming to an end. I suspect that anyone in Britain, travelling between 2012 and 2112 would be unable to believe that he was in the same place.

What is the most significant single fact in the Census? I do not think there is one. Several are shocking or disturbing, if you are not fond of change, and delightful if you are.

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By Nick Baines

[...]  So, we have politicians who are badly briefed, ignorant of the polity of the matters they are dealing with, change their minds every five minutes, put out ‘consultations’ at the same time as announcing that they “are determined to push this through”, make a false and factually erroneous distinction between ‘civil marriage’ and ‘religious marriage’ in their consultation paperwork, fail to think through the implications of their proposals, fail to provide evidence of anything other than ad hoc and reactive populist thinking in the proposals they announce prematurely, and then expect to be taken seriously.
 
[...]  One of the charges against the church is that we are irrelevant and out of touch with contemporary values. This might be true. It is also true that the church always needs to check its hermeneutics against lived reality and have the humility to consider that it might be ‘reading wrong’. But, the principle that the church ought automatically to go along with whatever a particular contemporary culture thinks is ‘right’ or ‘obvious’ is such obvious nonsense that it is embarrassing to have to name it.

Let’s be dramatic – and remember we are talking principle here. What should the church have done when German society in the 1930s colluded with the nasties? How should the Russian church have re-shaped itself during the Communist years? Should the church in England simply let go of some unpopular values because they get widely ridiculed? Should a church’s theological anthropology simply be short-circuited in order to keep trouble away and ‘fit in’?

The Christian scriptures and tradition don’t sit easily with this line. The prophets weren’t popular in the sixth or eighth centuries BC when they saw through the short-term political and military alliances that would ultimately lead to chaos. When life was cheap they didn’t refrain from holding to the inherent value of human life, the common good and the need for justice. Jesus didn’t get nailed for being untrendy – but for daring to challenge the Zeitgeist. His followers weren’t encouraged to blend in to first century pagan culture.

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By John Bingham, Telegraph

British society is missing out on a massive contribution the elderly could play because too many people are simply waiting for them to die, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.

In his last speech in the House of Lords before he steps down, Dr Rowan Williams said too many older people being were being “tolerated” rather than “valued”.

He said that the “extremes of human life” – childhood and old age – were both being sidelined because of an “eccentric idea” that only those in the so-called prime of life could make a contribution.

And he warned that the tendency to view older people as “dependents” or a “problem” was the root cause of neglect and abuse.

Dr Williams, who steps down at the end of this month, was speaking as he opened a debate in the Lords on how elderly people should be viewed as “participants” in society rather than “passengers”.

The 62-year-old said society was so “frenetically oriented towards youth” that it is missing out on the contribution older people can play.

“Its effect can be both to ignore the present reality of responsible, active people in older life, who are still participants in society, not passengers – and to encourage younger people to forget that they are ageing themselves, and that they will be in need of positive and hopeful models for their own later years,” he said.

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By Fraser Nelson, Telegraph

George W Bush once declared that the problem with the French is that they have no word for “entrepreneur”. This story (told by Baroness Williams, who says she was told it by Tony Blair) was intended to ridicule the ex-president. But his overall conceit is sound: a country and its culture can be defined by its vocabulary, or lack of it. The Italians have no word for “leadership”; the Germans have no word for “small talk”; and the Eskimos have no word for “war”.

Some concepts are simply alien to some cultures, which is why the British have no word for “Kulturkampf”. The practice of “culture wars” – dividing a nation into warring tribes and then exploiting that division – has been happily absent from our politics. Anyone visiting the United States during election time will watch, amazed, the bitter arguments about abortion, gun control or the teaching of evolution. The power of these debates is astonishing: they can set neighbour against neighbour, while often bearing only a tangential relationship to the issues actually resolved at election time.

Returning home, a Brit can tune into the evening news and sigh with relief at our less lively, but rather saner, public discussion. But the news, in recent days, has started to sound a little more American.

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By Alexander Boot