And that brings me to my third point.
The Bible has helped to shape the values which define our country.
Indeed, as Margaret Thatcher once said, “we are a nation whose ideals are founded on the Bible.”
Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love”¦
”¦pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities”¦
”¦these are the values we treasure.
Yes, they are Christian values.
And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that.
But they are also values that speak to us all ”“ to people of every faith and none.
And I believe we should all stand up and defend them.
Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality.
They argue that by saying we are a Christian country and standing up for Christian values we are somehow doing down other faiths.
And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour.
I think these arguments are profoundly wrong.
The reason people find these utterances so bland and uninteresting is that, to paraphrase Dorothy L. Sayers, you don’t get the dogma, so you don’t get any drama. Sixty years ago, Christopher Dawson and T. S. Eliot, for better or for worse, moved more cogently and compellingly from Incarnation to principles of human rights and mutual care. Right or wrong, their case was at least intellectually and socially interesting.
When Cameron (or any other leader, American or British) speaks today, he goes from “the values we treasure” to the statement, “Yes, they are Christian values.” And the alert reader will see that the second statement is only an add-on. Dawson, Eliot, and others made it clear how starting with realities Christians affirm results in ethics–social and political, as well as personal–different from the ethics of those, like Communists and Nazis, whose center of reality is quite different. In the middle of the last century, fighting a war against those who challenged democratic ideals, FDR did not have to be a theologian to grasp this connection. In England, the Sword of the Spirit movement, which started in the Church of Rome, clearly tied democracy to Christian belief.
My students hear and therefore tend to identify Christianity with everything bad and oppressive. I think I’m going to offer a course and bring back the best of Dawson, Sayers, Lewis, and Eliot, as well as George Bell and Hugh Lister, and really get into these important issues. It’s not simply a matter of everyone “sharing” the same “values” until a “dogmatic” person or country comes along and misses everything up.
David, if you ever have a spare semester do come and offer that course in the UK. (Although I advise you to avoid the phrase ‘Church of Rome’.) (And it was said Church that having launched Sword of the Spirit drew back in alarm and killed off its nascent ecumenism.)
On the one hand Cameron’s speech is a marker. It says that there is no postmodern soup. He is rejecting its nonsense of ‘my way, your way, their way, my values, your values, their values – no one is right, no one is wrong.’ But I wish he could have had the courage to be quite unequivocal about his faith. Yes of course Christians struggle sometimes – no one looking at the world’s suffering or their own sin could think otherwise – but occasional struggle does not in any sense diminish the truth in which we believe.
Thanks, Terry Tee!
“David, if you ever have a spare semester do come and offer that course in the UK.”
I’d love to–after I’ve done a decent job here and worked out the kinks. I worry about how I will get across some of this material to today’s undergraduates. Eliot in particular really takes a while to get to the point, and even then he’s a bit opaque–not The Wasteland, but still obscure.
“Although I advise you to avoid the phrase ‘Church of Rome’.”
Really? Is that term deemed offensive there? Don’t Roman Catholics themselves still sometimes refer to the Church of Rome? I really don’t know.
“And it was said Church that having launched Sword of the Spirit drew back in alarm and killed off its nascent ecumenism.”
Yes, yes, I know. Interesting story–had to do with personnel changes at the top, too. Andrew Chandler and I get into all this in our new biography of Geoffrey Fisher, coming out next year in Ashgate’s new series, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. Adrian Hastings has a good, short account of the Sword in his fine, lively history of English Christianity in the twentieth century.
“On the one hand Cameron’s speech is a marker. It says that there is no postmodern soup. He is rejecting its nonsense of ‘my way, your way, their way, my values, your values, their values – no one is right, no one is wrong.’”
Yes, that’s good.
“But I wish he could have had the courage to be quite unequivocal about his faith.”
What is his faith–practicing Anglican?
I read an article yesterday in which David Cameron was “inviting” Rowan Williams to speak on behalf of the Church rather than engage in politics. Heh.
Similarly, I don’t know why Cameron’s own faith life needs to be revealed. When purportedly asked, he said he’s a vaguely practicing member of the Church of England and he has a lot of questions. That’s nice. Now, if I were British, I wouldn’t feel that this has anything to do with his competence, abilities, or negotiating skills. I can’t say I care how often or where Obama attends church services.
Yes, he is practising Anglican, both he and Samantha attend St Mary Abbotts Church in Kensington.
Church of Rome is regarded as the kind of thing that Ian Paisley might say. Roman Catholic is OK.
Re Sword of the Spirit: I love the story of the meeting in the Stoll Theatre in the Strand, circa 1941. Acres of London are in a smoking ruin after the blitz and Christians have met to discuss how they can bring spiritual renewal to help the future of the nation. At the end of the session Archbishop William Temple wants the hundreds present to pray together the Lord’s Prayer but Cardinal Hinsley is there with him and Catholic teaching at that point forbade interdenominational prayer. ‘Can we pray Our Father’ he asks Hinsley anxiously. Back booms Hinsley’s voice with a loud clear lead: ‘Our Father …’ and of course all join in. It took the Luftwaffe flattening London to get Christians to pray the Lord’s Prayer together! We need to remember sometimes how far we have come …
David I think your Fisher book might catch a wave. There is a feeling now that he might have been underestimated by historians who preferred Temple’s social conscience and Ramsey’s mysticism (and puckish humour).
Apologies to Kendall and all that we are way off the subject.
Thanks. I doubt that it will sell more than 500 copies, but we’ll see. At least some readers of this blog might appreciate the fact that he was an Anglican leader who knew how to serve the mainstream church and get things done–both at home and around the world. Btw, he was a much better administrator than Michael Ramsey (on that, see Andrew Chandler’s excellent history of the Church Commissioners). Fisher was a Martha to Ramsey’s Mary.