Majorityrights Central > Category: Christianity

“The first time the Church has launched such a defence of the country’s Christian heritage” is how an un-named bishop described a confidential Church document, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph today.

“An astonishing attack on the Government’s drive to turn Britain into a multi-faith society” was how the Telegraph saw it.

The paper, titled Cohesion and Integration – A briefing note for the House [of Bishops], was written by Guy Wilkinson, the interfaith adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury.  These are the criticisms it levels at our so-liberal political masters:-

1. The attempt to make minority “faith” communities more integrated has backfired, leaving society “more separated than ever before”.

2. Divisions between communities have been deepened by the Government’s “schizophrenic” approach to tackling multiculturalism. While trying to encourage interfaith relations, it has actually given “privileged attention” to the Islamic faith and Muslim communities.

3. The Church of England has been sidelined. Instead, “preferential” treatment has been afforded to the Muslim community despite the fact that it makes up only three per cent of the population.

4. Britain remains overwhelmingly a Christian country at heart and moves to label it as a multi-faith society suggest a hidden agenda.

5. Public funds have been used to fly Muslim scholars to Britain, legislation on forced marriage has been shelved, financial arrangements to comply with Islamic Law have been encouraged.  Yet none of this has produced any “noticeable positive impact on community cohesion.  Indeed,” the report goes on, “one might argue that disaffection and separation is now greater than ever, with Muslim communities withdrawing further into a sense of victimhood, and other faith communities seriously concerned that the Government has given signals that appear to encourage the notion of a privileged relationship with sections of the Muslim community.”

6. The Government is wrong to see faith as the cause of a divided society.

Of course, one has to note from the outset that the Church of England is more the wounded liberal Establishment at prayer than the forthright, awakening defender of an imperilled Christian nation.  It still adheres firmly to the pluralistic faith-society, the la-la “why can’t we all love one another” ideology.  But this is kumbayah with an oddly refreshing note of menace - at least as far as this useless, fearful, screwed-up Government is concerned.

The day that menace finds its proper target amid the golden crescents of England’s northern towns and cities will be really something.

Just one more ball to find.

Since I am not a Christian nor a liberal nor a Ugandan immigrant nor sound asleep it is difficult for me to assess the utility of today’s sermonising by Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York.  He is, alas, the second most powerful figure in the Anglican Church, and living proof of the Communion’s exciting, go-ahead committment to ... vibrancy, of course.  So when he adumbrates upon the nature of my Englishness and cautions me to vote for a mainstream political mugger in Thursday’s local authority election, should I obediently sit up and take notice.  Does anyone, in fact, obediently sit up and take notice?

Well, according to BBC News this is what he said:-

Referring to parties like the British National Party, Dr John Sentamu said they espoused the “politics of fear”.

Dr Sentamu, who was born in Uganda, described Britain as “a country of immigrants” and ... told BBC Radio Four’s Sunday programme: “This country has been one of the most welcoming, most accommodating.

I want to suggest if it lost that because people simply say ‘we’re going to put a barbed wire around a number of things in order for us to feel safe’, that is not actual security, that’s fear - and any politics which plays on people’s fears in the long run, give it a bit of time, it will fail”.

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I am somewhat bemused to find three men in cassocks stepping into the ring to take on the “silly bureaucrats” and the “minority in leadership who want to privatise religion”.  But that’s what has happened today.

First off, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams put his name to a piece in The Mail On Sunday saying:-

What makes some people suspicious of Christmas these days is that it’s too religious. This year there seems to have been even more stories about the banning of Christian images and words by silly bureaucrats.

Right on cue the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, weighed in during GMTV’s Sunday Programme with:-

“We must avoid the kind of political correctness that is creeping in and undermining the public expression of the Christian faith.”

He said he was concerned about “a worrying hostility towards Christianity and all religions by a minority of people in leadership today who want to privatise religion, push it to the boundaries, not allow a voice in the public arena.”

Meanwhile the Bishop of Lichfield, the Right Reverend Jonathan Gledhill, declared his diocese to be fighting back against the politically correct approach to Christmas with a new poster campaign:-

“There have been reports from all over the country about local authorities, businesses, retail centres and even central government trying to take the Christ out of Christmas, claiming Christmas is offensive.

“They seem to want to make Christmas history - the Diocese of Lichfield wants to make Christmas His story”

Ordinarily, we would say these churchmen are part of the liberal problem and preside over an emotionally feminised version of Christianity.  However, even they have limits.  They have, it seems, noticed that the silly bureaucrats and the mysterious minority in leadership have none, and will go on chipping away at every surviving outcrop of Western culture until nothing remains.

The “hands-off” declarations of today reveal a fault-line between religious liberals and committed egalitarian activists.  In essence, the former are drawing a line in the snow.  They are refusing to let their faith be marxised out of existence - which is a point I have made many, many times in respect of Western Man in general.  When all roads lead to extinction, resistance will be the only recourse.

In rejecting their own ethnic traditions liberals are left with a major problem. What is to hold society together, if not a common ancestry, culture, religion and history?

Australian intellectuals are especially fond of “imagining” new forms of national identity which will unify society. The latest effort is called “Australia: Ideas for our Future”. The authors of this work believe that there is an Australian tradition of mateship, tolerance and a fair go for all around which a unifying Australian identity can be based.

The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, has criticised this approach to an Australian identity in an article in today’s Age newspaper (not yet online).

He is, firstly and understandably, disappointed that the proposed national identity is entirely secular. He sees this as further proof of the declining position of Christianity in Australia. In his own words, “Frankly, Jesus is slipping out of memory and imagination.”

He then points out the limitations of the proposed identity, in words which demonstrate a mixture of clarity and confusion:

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Every month I get a magazine from my old school, Xavier College, which is the leading Catholic private school here in Melbourne.

Up to now, I’ve been uncertain whether I want to send my own son to Xavier. But the latest school magazine has made the decision easy. He won’t be going.

The latest magazine shows all too clearly how far the school has drifted away from Catholicism into a modernist, secularised liberalism. In fact, going by the magazine the school has dropped religion altogether in favour of a new kind of cult called “social justice”.

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I heard about the shooting on the radio on Friday morning. A man had been gunned down in his Melbourne home during the night.

In today’s paper we get the full story. The victim was a man by the name of Jafar Heshmaty. He had left his native Iran, worked illegally in Greece, bought a Greek passport and then flown to Melbourne in 1989.

In Melbourne he was put in detention while his claim for refugee status was fought in the courts. He received support from the Baptist Church which organised protests and a Christian community sponsorship for him.

But after three years the High Court ruled against him because of doubts about his real identity. So he sought and received asylum in America instead.

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Browsing through an autobiography of authoress P.D. James, I was surprised to discover she is something of an Anglican traditionalist. She writes,

“The Church of England in my childhood was the national church in a very special sense, the visible symbol of the country’s moral and religious aspirations, a country which, despite great differences of class, wealth and privilege, was unified by generally accepted values and by a common tradition, history and culture, just as the Church was unified by Cranmer’s magnificent liturgy.”

As you might expect, she does not approve of recent developments within the C of E. She declares,

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Great men are rare beings, and the Catholic world has lost one this evening.  Few Pope’s have been more loved than the Polish Pope or meant more to non-Catholics, too.  May he rest in peace.