As I smiled my way through this weekend’s harvest of attacks on me on Twitter (ranging from people wishing I was dead, apparently without any feeling of guilt or trepidation at expressing this view, to crude swearwords, via unreasoning assumptions that everything I say must axiomatically be wrong, because I write for ‘The Mail’, to a woman who, gathering that her son would be attending a talk by me at his school sixth form, sought to inoculate the poor child against me by showing him YouTube films of my late brother. I wonder if she also hung a clove of garlic round his neck. Heaven forfend that he might think for himself), I thought this was a good moment to examine the question of bigotry.
I am ceaselessly accused of this fault. Well, any reasoning person, with access to the facts, can reach his or her own conclusion about the justice of the charge, though I’m not sure how many reasoning persons interested in facts there are these days. I’ll just have to hope they’re on the jury (if there is one) when I’m eventually hauled before the Thought Court on charges of WrongThink.
I note that at least one long-term contributor here (who skulks behind a juvenile pseudonym, not having the courage to put his own name to his own opinions) has recently attempted to smear me by association, by suggesting (incorrectly) that I have never rebutted, rejected or criticised the racially-prejudiced contributors who sometimes post comments here.
The words used were cunningly formulated to contain the charge without nakedly making it and ran ‘If you are concerned that some people believe you are racist, why not try distancing yourself from those who use your blog to express what are blatantly racist views? If you don't challenge contributors who argue that people of different races actually belong to different species, it might send the message to others that you agree.’
Might it send that Message? How, exactly? And as for distancing myself, why not try it, eh? Why not try it? And how does he know I haven’t ‘tried’ it? Oh, no need to *know*. Let’s just *assume* that it is the case.
I’ve warned before against presuming that I (or anyone else) haven’t said, written or done certain things, unless the person making the statement also has total knowledge. Perhaps it would have been wiser to make some enquiries, or to seek knowledge on this matter first, before making this insinuation. If the accuser can’t be bothered to look back through several years of my writings, perhaps it would have been more prudent to stay quiet. But no, the innuendo must be produced anyway. Out of such slack-minded, and if I may say, bigoted folly is totalitarianism born.
Anyway, the affair of the UKIP foster parents, and the affair of the female bishops, both give us an insight into the intolerant fury of the modern left-wing mind.
I should say about the Rotherham fostering case that I am surprised that so many people are surprised, and see it as an individual case or scandal that can be corrected. No, this is simply what Britain is now like. Get used to it. It isn’t going to change. Most such cases never get into the papers and never will.
Look at the Prime Minister’s own long-ago dismissal of UKIP members as (amongst other things) ‘fruitcakes and loonies and and closet racists’. Rotherham Council’s social services department and Mr Slippery both share more or less the same view. Despite what they now say, I should think the front benches of all three ‘centre’ parties, and the senior editorial staffs of the BBC and several newspapers do so too. They are closet bigots.
(By the way, it is amazing the way people delude themselves about politicians of all sorts. For instance I have been getting letters telling me that Alexander (Boris) Johnson is some sort of new Churchill. But as Mr Johnson showed on Sunday during his trip to India, his fabled ‘Euroscepticism’ amounts to two parts of nothing at all in practice. In any case, as I have often warned here before, a referendum on the EU is a worthless promise. What we need is a party committed unconditionally to secession from the EU, winning an election on the basis. Any government can ignore a referendum, or wriggle out of it, always assuming the BBC doesn’t rig it in the first place. I so wish people would grow out of demanding this dubious vote, and see ‘Euroscepticism’ for the worthless fence-sitting that it is).
But back to the bigotry of the Left. For a start, the left have increasingly embraced the racial determinism that (to their credit) they rejected back in the 1960s. Those who once saw the racial categories of National Socialist Germany, or later of Apartheid South Africa, as sinister and offensive , have now adopted the most elaborate schemes of racial categorisation ever seen.
You cannot apply for any sort of state service, let alone employment, without being confronted with questions about your ethnicity ( I always refuse to answer these, but how much longer will this be permissible?) . And the police, since Macpherson, have been instructed that ‘colour-blind’ policing is actively wrong and that people must be treated differently according to the colour of their skin. There have been dozens of attested stories about fair-skinned, middle-class, conventionally-married heterosexual couples facing insuperable problems over being allowed to adopt or foster, especially if they gave any sign of having socially conservative opinions, or of adhering to the Christian religion.
Since the reasoning, informed human being knows that (as Martin Luther King so powerfully put it) what matters about someone is not the colour of his or her skin, but the content of his or her character, these questions, and this behaviour are grotesque insults to reason. And surely bigotry is just that, the denial of reason, the refusal to use it, the dismissal of people , institutions, ideas on the grounds of a reasonless prejudice.
Now how does this apply in the debate about women’s ministry in the Church? I am (reasonably) chided here for my feeble wishy-washy approach to this matter. But I’m sticking to it. The truth is that I think the Christian church is so essential to civilisation, unselfishness, kindness and justice, as the Embassy of the Kingdom of God on Earth, that I judge the importance of religious issues on that basis. Things which do not seem to me to be crucial for the survival and success of the Christian gospel , even if they trouble me personally, are relegated to the second or third order of importance.
The last thing I want to hear in church is some sort of sectional whining about who gets what job or under what conditions. I want help in discovering how we should live and die, not office politics with added stained-glass windows.
I am, as I keep insisting, very uninterested in theology. My religion can easily be summed up, understood and either rejected or accepted, by anybody who listens to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ , who reads the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and who has seen the great English cathedrals.
My instincts (which oppose needless change) might suggest to me that the campaign for women ministers ( I don’t call them priests) might well have been some sort of egalitarian project designed to strike at the roots of the Church. But, as a favourite (male) parson in my part of the world is fond of saying, the Church of England is a tough old goose. And it has turned this change very much to its advantage. In practice I have found that many women ministers are more persuasive, reverent, thoughtful and devoted, and perhaps less given to fussy fiddling with things best left alone, than many of their male equivalents. It seems plain to me that the Church, short of good clergy as it is, and very short of money, could not have coped without them, and should admit that.
I can’t see why the same thing shouldn’t go for Bishops. If they believe what they preach, and are on fire with the beauty of it, then let them be Bishops.
But I also know that plenty of my fellow-worshippers take other views. For them, women cannot be truly ordained. I disagree with them, but I understand that they believe this to be hugely important, and that it is not motivated by loathing of women. A recently-retired vicar of my acquaintance, who held to this view, was living, breathing proof of that, being amongst other things very happily married, saintly in his person, and ( as Anglo-Catholics often are) rather left-wing politically. To keep him and others like him in his post, the church set aside a small corner where there would be no women ministers. Why not do the same with bishops?
You tell me. But when (as on the BBC programme ‘The Big Questions’ on Sunday, still available on i-player) I found myself facing the champions of change, it rapidly became obvious that they were not interested in having women bishops *as such*. They could have had that years ago. They were interested in having women bishops at all costs, without any conditions or limits, and with no binding concessions to (perhaps) a quarter of Anglicans who, for one reason or another, are deeply unhappy about the idea. Well, as we know from history, if you want unconditional surrender, you condemn yourself to a much longer and crueller war than if you are prepared to make terms.
Always suspect a cause that does not present itself straightforwardly as what it is. It has something to hide. And always mistrust any movement which has universal approval. It is precisely when ‘everyone’ thinks something that the thoughtful person needs to cry out ‘wait!’ and demand time to consider.
When the General Synod failed to agree on the specific proposal for the introduction of women bishops, last Tuesday evening, it absolutely did not reject the principle of appointing women as bishops, only the particular version of it under discussion.
An earlier version of the plan, containing much stronger protection for dissenters, was about to be voted on last July, during the normal meeting of the Synod at York. An amendment, drawn up by the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury in consultation with other bishops, was designed to deal with the concerns of traditionalists. Had it gone through then, there would have been women bishops by 2014 and possibly sooner.
The traditionalists wanted to have the undoubted right to be supervised by male bishops , even if they lived in an area headed by a female bishop. This wasn’t very different from the time-worn arrangement for parishes which didn’t want female clergy.
But Kaboom! A wave of supposed ‘outrage’ swept through the meeting. A petition with 5,000 signatures denounced Archbishop Rowan’s plan. One campaigner said (in what in my view is a ludicrous exaggeration) that it would ‘entrench discrimination against women in the established church and place a permanent question mark over the validity of women’s orders’ A whole phalanx of female clerics, announced that they were ‘dismayed’, that the concession ‘undermined’ women, and Christina Rees (whom you can see in action on the ‘The Big Questions’) said ‘the amendment has proved controversial because it puts on the face of the measure that people in the Church with certain views on women would have been protected in English law. It would have the effect of discriminating against people who believe women and men were equal’.
This is the same sort of logical judo-plus-origami which is used to transform kindly, hesitant old sexual conservatives, who wouldn’t ever be cruel to anyone, into foaming, cruel homophobes. It’s not that you have principles different from mine. It’s that you want to *discriminate* against a *minority* (voice rises). After which, of course, you’re not fit for human society.
The Church is a very odd institution. Judged by purely worldly standards, it is absurd and pointless, and its rules and concerns necessarily barmy. But it shouldn’t be judged by those standards, or subjected to worldly rules. You might as well try to introduce equality and diversity into the editing of the Oxford Book of English Verse (what have I said?), or issue decrees on where bluebells and forget-me-nots should grow.
The Sermon on the Mount is a pretty unfashionable doctrine, important because those who try to abide by it think (to the horror and scorn of materialists) it came from the mouth of God himself, and many similar Christian beliefs, from the Virgin Birth upwards, are derided or greeted with sighs and groans by the majority of fashionable society. I would argue that unless people were prepared to believe these odd things, there’d be no Church and much good would be left undone, which is currently being done.
But for many loyal sons and daughters of the Church these beliefs come in inconvenient, but internally logical packages. And among them are the passionately convinced opponents of women bishops, both Catholics and Bible Protestants. Note that these people no longer seek to prevent female ordination or women bishops. They simply ask for an accommodation, so that believers in absolute Biblical authority, and believers in apostolic tradition, can be given a small space in which to stay in the Church of their birth, baptism, upbringing, the church where they were married and expect to be buried.
But rather than approve that accommodation, the other side irritably deride their scheme as ‘discrimination’ against ‘equality’, which is near enough to a thought crime.
So instead of getting women bishops through compromise, the militants deliberately postponed the vote in July, and agreed instead to spend £210,000 of scarce church money on holding a special meeting in November – at which they expected to win.
And then they lost, narrowly, but they lost - because their opponents have picked up a trick or two about organisation and rule books.
They lost entirely according to rules they would have accepted, had they won. The radicals would have been quite happy if their proposal had triumphed under the same constitution with the same narrow majority. Those who complain about rules that they would willingly have benefited from, when others benefit from them instead, are surely inviting suspicion about their respect for the rule of law.
The original vote to allow women to be ordained was won by quite a narrow margin, and the Synod system is designed to protect minorities from majority tyranny.
What’s more, Parliament, 40 long years ago, gave up interfering in Church government. Parliament used to have the right to vote on measures put forward by the Synod’s forerunner, the Church assembly. But this led to a great crisis in 1928, when the Commons refused to approve a new Prayer Book. It was the memory of this crisis, among other things, which led to the creation of a more independent Synod. As one of the participants in ‘The Big Questions’ said, it’s all a bit like Devolution. Once you hand over such powers, you cannot complain when they are used.
In any case, I look forward to Parliament legislating for total non-discrimination between men and women in the appointment of religious leaders. The Roman Catholic Church in England might be resistant, and the spectacle of the British state insisting on the appointment of female Imams , and female Rabbis in Orthodox Jewish congregations, fills me with a strange satirical delight.
But that’s only a small part of the point I seek to make. There have long been branches of the Christian church which accepted female leadership. If this is a matter of overwhelming importance to you, might you not consider changing churches? If not, then what should you do? Well, you might seek to persuade your own church to change its mind.
But a church is not just a club or society , or a political party, where you can thump and shout your way to success by winning votes, briefing the media and forming factions to drive your opponents out. If you deliberately (or also in my view unintentionally) hurt people by winning, you have broken the fundamental rules of the whole institution.
For the Church is a mighty force for good, consisting of people who believe (or say they believe) above all things In unselfishness, forbearance, forgiveness and kindness. I might add that it is a place in which the last shall be first and the first shall be last, where high office is deep service (the word ‘minister’ means ‘servant’). ‘Who sweeps a room as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine’, as one of the greatest of all Anglicans, George Herbert, wrote.
The pursuit of high position for its own sake is axiomatically disallowed. Any victory must be mitigated by magnanimity , generosity and consideration. Those who become Bishops should really be those who least wish to become bishops, and when they do attain the mitre, they should be the servants, not the overlords, of those in their flock. Likewise, the winning faction in a struggle for change must show great consideration to the defeated.
Those who set out to change the church were surely the ones who needed to show such consideration to the other members of that church,. But when you watch the radicals, in the debate on ‘The Big Questions’, do you see any sign of magnanimity, generosity or consideration? Or do you see dogmatic campaigners seeking the unconditional surrender of their cornered and outnumbered opponents? I know what I see, a contest between the ancient dogmas of unworldly Christianity, and the modern dogma of worldly power. And while I still couldn’t care less what sex the bishop is, and I am not *for* the opponents of women bishops, I am certainly *against* their militant supporters. They remind me of some other people I don’t like, I can’t just now remember who.
