I have never watched ‘Songs of Praise’ on television except when I have caught it by accident, looking or waiting for something else, so I may have got the wrong impression. But it always seemed to me to be likely to give the impression that Christianity was something your auntie did (and you didn’t). Rows and rows of neatly-dressed old ladies in an unusually full church, singing away at traditional hymns, wasn’t ever going to put the fear of the Risen Christ into an indifferent nation.
I like to sing a traditional hymn myself, when allowed. (I use the word ‘sing’ here in its most generous sense). Those who choose the hymns in our churches and cathedrals often seem to have made quite an effort to prevent me from doing so. Cathedrals, in my experience, search the books for hymns that are actually impossible to sing. As for Anglican parish churches, There are about three hymns that come up all the time, one of them being the frightful ‘Lord of the Dance’, which seems to me to have nothing to do with Christianity (where in the Gospels does Christ dance, or refer to himself as ‘Lord of the Dance’? Isn’t the ‘Lord of the Dance’ Shiva, who can found in another establishment altogether?). It’s also an abuse of a rather fine old Shaker hymn tune from the Appalachians, ‘ ‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free’. I wouldn’t even pretend to sing this, or an appalling dirge called ‘Living Lord’, which always sounds to like a pensioners' coach party in the backroom of a Blackpool pub rounding off a wet day with a sing-song after a slow evening on the brown ale. I read the Psalms while these are going on.
Another regular is ‘Lord of all Hopefulness’ written by the non-churchgoing agnostic Joyce Anstruther (‘Jan Struther’, as is obvious once you know this, is a pen name) to prove that she could write a hymn if she felt like it. I am increasingly conscious of this mocking origin, each time I sing it and note its lack of solid Christian ingredients, concealed by bland niceness.
Oh, all right then, here are some I actually like – ‘Immortal, Invisible, God only wise’, ‘Judge eternal, throned in splendour’ ‘ 'O, Worship the King’. St Patrick's Breastplate, ‘Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation’ Bunyan’s original ‘To be a Pilgrim’, ‘Father, Hear the Prayer we offer’, ‘ Through all the changing scenes of life’, ‘Eternal Father, Strong to save’…I could go on. Anyone who knows the hymn book will get the picture.
About 30 others circulate in an unending loop and that’s about it. Yet when I was at school we sang and knew a much wider variety. These verses linger endlessly in the memory, as they were designed to do, and men and women of my generation are surprisingly familiar with them.
I realised the other day, as I sang the particularly exalted and exhilarating ‘Who are These like Stars Appearing?’ that I had not sung it for about 50 years, but even so remembered large chunks of it.
But I know that in general hymn-singing is something that people don’t do and couldn't conceive of doing. Children, dragged to church, usually do not sing and would only do so if tasered. Modernised churches don’t have hymns anyway, but ‘songs’ - one of which, I can swear on oath if required, goes to the introductory music of ‘The Flintstones’. Yabba Dabba Doo. Amen. These are often accompanied by drums.
So I am slightly puzzled about plans (which I first thought fanciful) to record this programme in the small makeshift church that has been built in the migrant camp near the Calais entrance to the Channel Tunnel.
What will they sing? Something tells me that Christians from the Horn of Africa or the Middle East will be unfamiliar with the tunes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and the words of the Wesleys (and even of the Flintstones). Will they bus over some nice old ladies from Haslemere to fill the pews? Will they take with them a pedal-driven harmonium of the sort my prep-school used when a piano wouldn’t quite do?
Perhaps I’ll watch and see. I’m fairly certain that Eritrean, Ethiopian and Syrian old ladies won’t be present (The Calais encampment is better-suited to the young, tough and slender, and mainly to the male sex, which may be important to the argument which follows).
I’ve been on the receiving end of a number of sermons, some actual, some metaphorical, on this subject lately. Philip Hammond’s perfectly sensible remarks (if only they were in any way connected to his government’s policies) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11792798/Millions-of-African-migrants-threaten-standard-of-living-Philip-Hammond-says.html
about how Western Europe cannot indefinitely absorb all the people who want to live there, have been subjected to contemptuous snorting. I am not sure why. Much is made of the word ‘marauding’ but its specific use to refer to migrants making frequent assaults on the fences around the tunnel entrance, seems quite apposite to me.
In what way is this untrue , unjust or unimportant? The logic of it – that there are huge numbers of people who would like to come to western Europe if they could, and that we have no realistic power to send them back one they get here, is the problem. It means that we are entitled to place limits on those who come, and to send away those we do not accept. On what basis can we do that? On the basis of law and rules, of waiting your turn and of not necessarily being accepted, the things which those at Calais openly intend to avoid. Where in the Beatitudes does it say' Blessed Are the Queue-Jumpers'?
Yet there seems to be a sort of assumption among nice liberals that any border restriction is an act of callousness. One such sermon was delivered by a writer in the Independent on Sunday, Ellen Jones, who quoted scripture thus :
‘The Bible says: "You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself." So it might seem an obvious editorial choice for the BBC's flagship Christian programme to film at a Calais migrant camp.’
People of Ms Jones’s generation cannot even sermonise properly, for they were robbed of the real Bible as children. How much more impressive it would have been had she quoted the passage (Leviticus, Chapter 19, verses 33-34) from the Authorised Version, instead of one of those Rocky Horror Bibles they use along with the Flintstones tune.
The proper quotation rumbles and thunders thus: ‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’.
More potent yet (in my opinion) is this rather different passage from Ruth, beginning at the sixteenth verse of the first chapter of the eponymous book. ‘And Ruth said “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried”.’ I cannot read or hear this passage without tears.
And I might just chuck in here, from the 39th Psalm: ‘Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.’
But of course this means something entirely different and unworldly, and is on the same level as the warning to all settled persons in the material world (St Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, 13th Chapter, 14th verse): 'For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come'.
What do all these things really mean? Are they, as the liberals maintain, a sort of suicide note for any rich, settled civilisation where lots of people wish to live? Do they license the abolition of frontiers?
Jesus seems to me to have been silent on the subject of immigration, legal or illegal. He, and Joseph and Mary, fled into Egypt to escape from Herod, with good reason, but they were actual refugees and returned to Nazareth when the danger had passed. Jesus’s attitude towards law, property, debt and obligation seems to have been fairly conventional, judging by the parables of daily life which he told. Debts must be paid to the uttermost farthing, work must be done diligently, talents must not go buried, idleness is punished, as are unreadiness at the time when promised duty must be done, and the rude rejection of hospitality.
I cannot see why he should necessarily be interpreted as being against reasonable controls on entry to any place which depends for its stability and prosperity on choosing who shall enter and who shall not. What, in the end, is compassionate, about allowing so many into the lifeboat that it sinks and all drown, including those who sought to board it? Indeed, in such a shipwreck, who is the Christian? He who prevents such a thing from happening, amid the curses and blows of the self-righteous? Or he who , for the sake of others’ approval, allows the disaster? It’s no good saying that the one who gives up his place to another is the Christian. It’s true up to a point. But unless someone is there to limit the numbers, there will be no place to give up.
The most forgiving and beautiful of all parables ‘The Prodigal Son’, ultimately sympathises with the brother who has not wasted his substance on riotous living. And it leaves the thoughtful reader wondering what restitution the Prodigal would have needed to have made, once the fatted calf was eaten and the welcome was over.
The Good Samaritan is a (rather complicated) story about the absolute obligation to rescue those in danger or injured, which transcends tribal loyalties, rank and religious rituals. An actual Samaritan, venturing into a village on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho on any mission, would have been risking his life, so bitter was the sectarian hatred between Samaritans and Jews in that age. Nobody needed a barbed-wire border or passports to enforce the boundary between the two peoples. Anyone who crossed from one society to the other would have had to have done the profound thing that Ruth did, a complete change of loyalty, hope and tradition. ‘Thy people shall be my people and Thy God my God’ is no small thing to say, or do.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is not an anti-racist tract or a plea for open borders between Judaea and Samaria. The beautiful story of Ruth is actually about a newcomer in a strange land adopting its faith and customs and soil as her own. The Sermon on the Mount preaches charity, compassion , gentleness and generosity, and warns us that all our actions, of cruelty or kindness, are done to Christ himself and are not forgotten. But it says nothing about how much migration a society can absorb without damaging itself and its people.
Nor does it anywhere say ‘Thou shalt make others suffer for the sake of thine own peace of mind’.
I am myself filled with admiration for individuals who personally take in newcomers from war-ruined or otherwise disastrous countries. These are genuine Good Samaritans of Our Age. I have in my life known such people. But I confess that I do not really wish to be one of them. Indeed, if I’m completely frank, I wish not to be one of them, and would be unwilling to open my home to strangers except in the direst emergency. I count myself inadequate for this failing, but I must honestly acknowledge it. And if I won’t do this, I can’t stand up and urge anyone else to do what I won’t do.
But this country seems to be full of people who, while not Good Samaritans themselves, are very keen to conscript *others* into a brigade of compulsory Good Samaritans. The comfortable left-wing middle classes, with their scorn for borders and their jeering dismissal of 'xenophobia’ don’t (usually) live in the poorer, less favoured parts of town where new migrants invariably settle. They do not see their neighbourhoods transformed, nor do they experience the pressures on space, schools, medical facilities, transport and the rest. If they did, then they’d perhaps be less liberal on the subject. I suggest any public figure who urges that we ’take them all in’ be asked if he would himself do so in his own home.
Now, you may well argue that our society would be better if its population was larger and more diverse. It’s a point of view held, I suspect, by quite a lot of political radicals. You may well believe that a general lowering of wages, people living in smaller homes in more crowded cities, the permanent dilution of a shared language and culture, the introduction of a major new religion among us, were good prices to pay for taking in huge numbers of people from abroad and possibly even beneficial in themselves. This is a valid opinion.
I suspect many in the government privately believe it (valuing as they must the huge downward pressure on labour costs, and the ability to benefit from the superior education systems and work ethics of other nations) but would never openly say so. Nor would most of them expect it to affect them personally. Their wages won’t fall, they won't be replaced by a Pole or an Eritrean, they won't have to move to smaller homes to make ends meet, their villages or suburbs won’t become more crowded and densely-built. They barely know what a bus is, let alone what it is like to wait ages for such a bus in the drizzle, and then find it is full, the day after the fares go up. They won’t have to wait days for a doctor’s appointment or find their children’s schools transformed by large new intakes of boys and girls who don’t speak English at home.
But let us return for a moment to Leviticus etc. leaving aside the precise nature of the authority and weight of its very Old Testament pronouncements in a formally Protestant Christian country, such as we used to be, and against whose standards Christians (such as I claim to be) are judged by Ellen Jones and various sermonisers I have encountered in the last few weeks.
Note that use of the word ‘sojourn’ in old and new versions of the Leviticus passage. As a verb and a noun, ‘sojourn’ has one invariable, inescapable meaning. That meaning is ‘temporary’. The injunction concerns the ancient and invariable laws of hospitality, found in almost all cultures. The stranger, while he stays with you, must be used kindly, honestly and generously.
If he decides his stay is to be permanent, the rules may be slightly different. I understate. Settling permanently in someone else’s country, without first submitting yourself wholly to that country’s King and God, is generally associated in the Bible with conflict and even invasion. As my atheist literalist friends (who regard the Bible as a Christian equivalent of the Koran, as I do not) are fond of quoting to me, the Children of Israel are rather given (under Divine instructions) to arriving in other people’s territory and killing off or driving away the inhabitants. Their relations with Moab (‘my washpot’) Edom ( a receptacle for cast-off shoes) and of course the hated Philistines are, let us be frank, appalling. From time to time they are rescued from, or allowed to fall victim to, invasions by Assyrians and Babylonians, which do not end in integration, harmony, equality or diversity, but in enslavement, rape, pillage, exile etc. The prophets generally reckon such events are punishment rather than reward.
This is not out of tune with the rest of human history. It was pointed out to me once that all the most enduring and successful human civilisations had grown up behind the protection of great natural barriers, sea, desert or mountain. I have yet to find an exception. Others are subject to the occasional huge mass migrations such as those that finished off the Western Roman Empire, or those that repeatedly menaced what is now Russia.
In recent times, natural barriers aren’t enough. Without their own navies and armies, those in possession can be evicted , subjugated, exterminated or turned into serfs in what used to be their own land. The era of European imperialism demonstrated this to a lot of people who though they were permanent masters of their own land. The Spanish conquistadors, and those who colonised North America and Australia were not sojourners, as the Native Americans and the Indigenous Australians have found in some detail. There was nothing temporary about them.
What we see now is something almost entirely new. Defended countries with enforced borders are even so being reached by very large numbers of determined, hardworking outsiders, prepared to use pretty radical methods to reach their goals – dangerous treks across deserts and seas, climbing over defended fences, living and working illegally for many years. The defended countries cannot - without becoming authoritarian states quite unlike their present conditions - ruthlessly expel these newcomers as their ancestors would have done. Nor can use their armed forces or advanced weapons against these people, for they are not armed or violent nor do they present themselves as formed bodies or as hostile states. On the contrary, they are often personally admirable, pitiable and – as individuals - they often add to the temporary prosperity of the countries in which they arrive.
Yet it is reasonable to suggest that their unlimited arrival presents a danger to the order and long-term prosperity of the countries to which they come. I have always been amused by a certain leftist contradiction on this subject.
The modern European Left is pretty invariably pro-Arab and anti-Israeli; it accepts (not unreasonably) the Arab view that Jewish immigration into British Mandate Palestine was unwelcome and damaging to the pre-existing Arab population, its freedoms and stability – and so it certainly proved . I say this as a convinced Zionist. Israel’s failure to maintain global acquiescence was partly due to the timing of its creation, much later than Australia or the USA, and partly due to the role that the issue would later play in pan-Arab politics, in which hostility to the Zionists was a useful safety valve in despotic, failed states.
Easily able to see the political, cultural and religious problems of immigration in the Holy Land, the Left profess to be quite unable to see any comparable difficulty in Europe. Indeed, had it stayed at a low and manageable level, migration into Europe from Turkey and the Arab and North African regions would not have been all that much to worry about. But all the signs are that the migration begun by our moronic interventions in Iraq, Syria and Libya (it was, in my view, an absolute Christian duty to oppose all of them) is so much greater than anything that has gone before, that Europe now faces a transformation at least as big as the one which the USA has undergone (and is still undergoing) through Hispanic migration.
In my view, it’s rather bigger. The USA’s migrants come from societies where Spanish, rather than English is spoken, and are in the USA in such numbers that the USA is becoming bilingual, and it is now hard to find English-speakers, even among official persons, in some parts of the USA. Who knows how this battle of the languages will end? Then there’s the wholly different political and religious culture, Roman Catholic and not exactly law-governed , owing nothing to Locke, Jefferson, or to Magna Carta. Which of the two traditions will come out on top? I wouldn’t like to say, having read a bit of history in my time.
But these are as nothing to the contrast between the European Christian heritage and the traditions of Islam which our many thousands of energetic, hard-working , determined new citizens are bringing with them, just when Christianity of all kinds is becoming vestigial in the lives and minds of Europeans. Except perhaps as a stick with which to beat politicians who, however feebly, wonder if we are doing the right thing.
