About a year ago a newspaper headline caught my eye. It read something like “Rowan Williams and Annie Lennox fight forest privatisation”. I wondered at the time what had prompted our scholarly primate and the former Eurythmics singer to combine to challenge government policy on the future of the Forestry Commission. In fact the Archbishop was just one of 100 signatories to an open letter opposing privatisation; others on the list included Ken Livingstone, Roy Hattersley and various Green and Labour politicians, as well as the radical Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Oh, and the Bishop of Gloucester for some reason.
The open letter was a pretty blatant tug on the heart-strings: “We, who love and use the forests, believe that such a sale would be misjudged and short-sighted. It is our heritage. We are an island nation, yet more people escape to the forest than the seaside.”
These Churchillian words, rounded off with a factoid of stunning banality and questionable accuracy, contained more non-sequiturs than you could shake a stick at.
Nevertheless, once I had wiped the tears from my patriotic eyes, I began to ask myself: what Biblical imperative had prompted the Archbishop to join this motley band of lefties and eco-warriors in opposing, with such passion, clauses 17-19 of the Public Bodies Bill? Was it some modern paraphrase of Isaiah 10:19 (“And the remaining trees of his sold-off forests will be so few that a child could write them down”)? Or perhaps the Archbishop’s motivation was more apocalyptic, bearing in mind Revelation 7:3 (“Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.”)? I scoured the Lambeth Palace website for illumination, but could not find an answer.
I was reminded of the forestry issue when Anglican bishops last week defeated the government’s welfare reform plans in the House of Lords. The Bishops, described rather brutally by one Daily Mail columnist as “a bunch of pampered pinko prelates”, had united in their condemnation of the proposed £26,000-per-family cap on benefits. Their leader, the Bishop of Ripon & Leeds, had invoked the spirit of Matthew 19:14 (“suffer little children…”) when he told peers: “Christianity, along with other faiths and beliefs, requires us to think most of those that have no voice of their own. Children are one of the most evident examples of that. Children have no vote in our society. This amendment goes some way to protect them”.
This was another moment to bring out the handkerchief. But were the bishops really mounting a moral defence for a welfare system wherein those who work hard but earn little are obliged to subsidise the unemployed so that they can live in bigger houses in posher areas? The reaction from the right-wing press was predictable. In an article for The Sun, former political editor Trevor Kavanagh described the “monstrous cheek” of unelected bishops bullying an elected government. Former Archbishop Lord Carey has been equally critical of the bishops, albeit in less colourful terms.
We now have a curious phenomenon of bishops who would happily (if only metaphorically) punch each other’s lights out when it comes to sexuality and the role of women in the church being united on domestic social issues like never before; and almost exclusively at the left-wing end of the political spectrum, sometimes to the left even of the Labour Party, which actually supports a benefits cap. A church that was once the Tory Party at prayer seems now to have its social agenda written for it by the leader writers of The Guardian, and on occasions The Morning Star.
But our episcopate has previous form when it comes to jumping on radical bandwagons. Back in November Rowan Williams joined several Christian charities including CAFOD, Christian Aid, Tearfund and Church Action on Poverty in backing the global campaign for the misleadingly named and economically illiterate Robin Hood Tax. This despite the fact that the inventor of the tax levy on financial transactions, the economist James Tobin, never saw it as a redistributive measure, it failed in the one country where it was tried (Sweden) and many economists think the tax will serve only to increase financial volatility and lead to reduced pension funds and higher bank charges.
It is not that I mind episcopal radicalism per se, but I do object when it is so selective. Take the issue of Israel/Palestine for example. In the recent five-hour House of Lords debate on Christians in the Middle East, not one bishop explicitly addressed the fundamental root cause of Christian flight from the Holy Land, which is Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories since the Six Day War of 1967 and its continued building, with tacit US support, of illegal settlements on occupied land. The Church’s desire not to offend the Jewish community, with which it has rightly worked hard to restore relations in recent years, has led to an excessive caution when it comes to speaking out against injustice in the Middle East. This has led the Anglican Church to be heavily compromised in the eyes of many Middle Eastern Christians.
This week Rowan Williams is making what has been described as “a personal pilgrimage” to the Holy Land. My prayer is that while he is there he will see the harsh realities of life for ordinary Palestinians, and be moved to speak out against the injustices of occupation and illegal settlements. This would be a much worthier cause than jumping on the latest populist bandwagon being promoted by the stripped-pine-table left-wing intelligentsia back home.
Jeremy Moodey is Chief Executive of BibleLands (www.biblelands.org.uk), the inter-denominational development charity which supports Christian social ministry in the lands of the Bible, including in Israel/Palestine. He has written this article in his personal capacity.
Source: Church of England Newspaper
