How Dave has shamed the moral cowards in the Church – Stephen Heffer in The Daily Mail
A deeply thoughtful clergyman told me recently of his despair with the Church of England over its failure to see how the welfare state has harmed many thousands of people by trapping them in a downward spiral of welfare dependency.
He was also distressed by the attitude many in the established Church have about wealth — and who believe that the well-off should inevitably feel guilt and the poor are inevitably wronged.
These are difficult times for the Church. A poll published to coincide with Christmas showed that the number of people claiming to be Christian has declined — down to 70 per cent compared with 77 per cent in 2006. Even the devoutly Christian Tony Blair has sent a Christmas card this year which omits any overtly Christian message, merely offering good wishes to those with ‘special holidays’.
And since anti-capitalist protesters began their occupation outside St Paul’s Cathedral, the Church has been caught off balance on a number of key political and moral questions.
The troubled relationship between God and politics was further highlighted last week when the Prime Minister spoke to Anglicans in Christ Church, Oxford, urging the Church of England to take more of a moral lead.
David Cameron said he believed Britain to be a Christian country, and warned against a secularist culture. He defined Christian values as ‘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 qualities could as easily have defined the values of Jews and Muslims. No doubt, this was deliberate, enabling Mr Cameron to say that the more Christian Britain is, the more other faiths can feel welcome in this country — not just because of tolerance, but because different groups have those values in common.
Indeed, one might as easily add atheists — of whom I am one — since no civilised being would reject any of the values he listed.
The Prime Minister also argued against what he called ‘moral neutrality’, adding, perhaps mischievously, that he had ‘never really understood the argument some people make about the Church not getting involved in politics’.
An editorial in the Church Times immediately attacked him for what it saw as his call for the Church to be a guardian of the nation’s morals (for example, that the clergy should have publicly condemned last summer’s rioters). It said: ‘The Church is not a transcendal [sic] branch of the police force, and Christianity is not merely a moral code.’
But apart from being flummoxed over the spelling of ‘transcendental’, some could be forgiven for wondering whether Christianity, as practised by many Anglicans today, is even a moral code. Its leaders seem very reluctant to make moral judgments — which perhaps explains the Church’s confused attitudes to (for example) homosexuality.
Shamefully, it won’t stand up for the institution of heterosexual marriage, or promote the conventional family, even though both seem an integral part of the Christmas message. Such vacillation stands at odds with many people’s conception of what an established Church should do.
My clergyman friend told me the Church is reluctant to be too judgmental. But surely making judgments, based on theological teachings, is precisely what the Church is required to do: and, inevitably, some of those judgments will be political.
At a time of grave economic crisis, the role of the Church becomes even more important.
Take, for example, the St Paul’s protest. Leading clergy have singularly failed to discriminate between concern for the genuinely poor and those who are agitators seeking to exploit the Church for their own secular ends.
To me, as an atheist who respects the place of the Church in our society, the course of action it should have taken was clear. It should have deplored those people, such as bankers, who, through greed, ruined businesses and inflicted a huge bill on the taxpayer. It might even have suggested a specific form of atonement — such as donating Christmas bonuses to carefully-chosen charities.
However, it should equally have declared that while some of those protesters were idealists, many were anarchic malcontents cynically exploiting the Church.
Then again, the Church should have prevented itself from being depicted — as it has been — as a staunch opponent of the so-called government ‘cuts’. For these reductions in public spending are both economically necessary and, in some cases, essential to end the demoralising effects of welfarism, as thousands on benefits are kept in a cycle of poverty and idleness.
This is a key area where the Church should take a clear stand.
The truth is that a welfare state should help those who cannot help themselves, not those who simply cannot be bothered to do so, or those who feel the State should fund a career in scrounging or political protest.
If the Church were to argue that the best approach to welfare is to help people to help themselves — which does not always entail spending money — then it would provide a strong moral example and assist the reforms championed by Work And Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.
Is it not better to spend the country’s scarce resources on the elderly, the very sick, widows and orphans rather than on people without the discipline to work for a living? That, after all, is the message of much of the Bible.
The problem, I suspect, is that many in the Church don’t actually believe in the Christian teachings that are deeply entrenched in Britain’s laws and culture and that are instinctively relevant to all of us.
I have never been one of those atheists, such as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, who are affronted by the existence of religion.
I have always been attracted to the values of Christianity and wish I could believe. I also wish the Church would live up to what I always thought were its ideals, for the sake of our culture and society.
The tragedy is that instead of following the Bible, some Christians expect it to fit in with their lifestyles. Thus, the established Church, in its wranglings over the family, homosexuality and women priests, has given the impression of dining a la carte from what was thought to be a fixed-price menu, and thereby appearing morally flaccid.
These are hard times. The Church can, and must, give comfort to those affected; but it also needs to see that in some cases the comfort will not come from taking the line of least resistance.
It needs to think more robustly about its views on welfare, statism, wealth and private charity.
To judge from his speech last week, David Cameron is more holy than much of the clergy of the Church of England. That is a serious problem for the Church —whose leaders could do worse than start to follow the lesson the Prime Minister preached to them.