I was at a concert at an Anglican church once when in the pew ahead of me a little girl asked her mother during the course of the service, "Do they believe in the Pope?" Her mother said, "Yes, dear, but not as much as we do."
Sandhurst military academy has dropped the Church of England Creed from services over fears that it may offend religious minorities.
The move has outraged worshippers who say centuries of religious tradition have been sacrificed for the sake of political correctness.
Senior chaplain Reverend Jonathan Gough dropped the Christian declaration of faith in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, when he took office earlier this month.
Mr Gough – nicknamed the 'Right On Rev' by some of his flock – says he wants avoid offending non-believers.
But Christian cadets and civilians were furious when the traditional Anglican service abruptly ended without the Creed being read last Sunday.
Although no official announcement was made, a fellow Chaplain said it had been removed 'to stop upsetting cadets who do not believe in God'.
[....]
This is despite the fact that it is not compulsory for any Sandhurst cadets to attend.
[....]
The Creed, found in the book of Common Prayer, begins: 'I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried'.
Theologian, Dr Richard Bell, from Nottingham University, said it was 'something that unites most Christians and for the vast majority it is the act of stating who you are'.
[....]
An Army said it was common practice to alter the service from time to time. 'The people who are angry should sit down with Reverend Gough for a cup of tea,' a spokesman said.
I dunno, buddy. Angry tea-drinkers bring images of horror to my mind. You know, one of them might say: "I say!" That'd be the end of all peace in the realm. Just start running and let the jihadis have the ruins. "My neyes ni seen nuttin'...."
Those looking at the banner at No Dhimmitude will see I like William Blake, as an illustrator and also as a poet. Many do. But that don't much matter in this day and age in Britain. Blake is too nationalistic and he discriminates against city dwellers. Enough of him, then. Ban the bastard from church. By Hannah Strange
It is one of the nation's best loved hymns and a favourite of Gordon Brown's. But William Blake's "Jerusalem" will no longer ring from the spires of Southwark Cathedral after it was banned by the church's dean on the grounds that it was unchristian and too nationalistic.
Regarded by many as a paean to Englishness, it has over the centuries become an unofficial national anthem, sung at the last night of the Proms and by England rugby and cricket fans. It is such a favourite of the Women's Institute that a recent BBC drama based on the group was titled "Jam and Jerusalem."
But the Very Reverend Colin Slee believes it is not "to the glory of God" and as such should not be sung by choirs or congregations at the South Bank cathedral, one of Britain's foremost churches.
[....]
"The Dean of Southwark does not believe that it is to the glory of God and it is not therefore used in private memorial services."
The words of the hymn are a poem by William Blake, which starts: "And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England's mountains green?"
The verses, written in 1804 as a preface to Blake's epic poem "Milton", are said to be based on a legend that Jesus Christ came to England as a young boy and visited the Somerset town of Glastonbury. It is linked to a section in the Book of Revelation describing a Second Coming in which Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem.
The idea of Jerusalem is often used as a metaphor for Heaven by the Christian Church, particularly the Church of England. Though interpretations of the poem differ, it is often seen as suggesting that Jesus briefly created heaven in England and that we should strive to re-establish this once more. The reference to "dark Satanic mills" is usually thought to allude to the early industrial revolution and the damage it wreaked on nature and the poorest sections of society.
The words were set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916, as an anthem for the suffragettes' movement.
It is not the first time the hymn has been deemed unchristian by the clergy.
In 2001 it was banned from a Manchester wedding ceremony because the vicar thought it overly nationalistic and inappropriate to the occasion.
Meanwhile the parish church of Parliament, St Margaret's in Westminster, has excluded it from services in the past on the grounds that the "dark satanic mills" discriminated against city-dwellers.
For much of the 1990s it was banned by St Paul's Cathedral but the church has now relented.
I think this would be a directive from the same Church of England that recently announced the inevitaility of sharia in Britain and the need for British accommodation with it. Fine that, but none of that Blake.
For Blake's poem and a lovely backdrop by Bruegel, click HERE.
The other day I was having a conversation with someone who used the expression "menials". "What do you mean, menials," says I.
"The menials do the ordinary housework that the courtiers won't touch."
So what do the courtiers do?
Well, today comes the answer: they let the world know that the Queen is, how do they put it, not amused by the Archbishop and his calls for Sharia:
According to a royal source, the Queen has not expressed any view on whether Dr Rowan Williams was unwise to say it was "unavoidable" that aspects of the sharia legal system could be incorporated into English law.
But as Supreme Governor of the Church of England she has been dismayed by the controversy that the remarks have generated at such a difficult period in the history of the Established Church, which faces possible schism over the issue of homosexual clergy.
The Queen, who approved the appointment of Dr Williams on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, takes her role as Supreme Governor very seriously.
One royal source said: "I have no idea what her view is on what the Archbishop said about sharia law. But the Queen is worried, coming at such a difficult time in the Church's history, that the fallout may sap the authority of the Church." [...] Another royal courtier said: "The whole thing has not been skilfully handled. It can only have undermined the authority of the Church."
A Buckingham Palace spokesman declined to comment.
Statements such as this do not get issued lightly and the words used go much further than a critique of the Archbishop, this is a clear indication that HRH is not happy at all with the Islamic presence in the UK.
HRH is obviously aware of the crisis within her realm and she has now broken her silence, we can only hope for more of the same.
We were happy to note last week that the Royal Family is granting the use of Windsor Castle for a special dinner to mark Israel's 60th anniversary. Again, the speculation is that the Queen is sending the British government a message on what values it should be upholding.
An artist has turned Lincoln Cathedral into a mosque in a protest against comments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Local artist Andrew Riddle said he found the Archibishop's comments "ludicrous". Mr Riddle, an artist and farmer from Corringham, near Gainsborough, said: "His comments seemed so ludicrous to me, the idea that different sections of the population should be subject to different laws. . . there was a different picture in the window, but when I heard his comments it inspired me to do this drawing."
There are cathedrals in Istanbul and Damascus that are now Mosques which I would imagine were Mr Riddle's inspiration.Top left, Mr Riddle's drawing, bottom right a photograph of the West Front. The third central tower is hidden from view at this angle.
Adrian Morgan provides a useful overview of the present storm over the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments, and provides some background to recent developments in Britain.
Of course, despite Archbishop Rowan Williams' general political foolishness, and his unwittingly anti-Christian moral and cultural relativism, the Archbishop is at least correct that Sharia law already exists in some form in Britain as, for example,the reports of Muslim police and government officials helping families track down wives and daughters who have tried to escape to women's shelters testifies. When the state is helping to sustain a culture that still performs honour killings, the outrage over Archbishop Rowan William's testing of the Sharia waters is understandable. According to police, there are up to 17,000 women who are victims of honour crimes each year in Britain.
What is becoming more and more clear is that there is growing a very serious divide between the elites or the bureaucratic-academic-journalistic classes and the bulk of (increasingly internet-informed) public opinion in countries like Britain on the questions of "multiculturalism" and Islam and their place in (British) society. This is a highly dangerous situation that could lead to great violence because it testifies to a collapse of a shared conception of what the national covenant of Britain is. If the elites, full of their vague and fundamentally incoherent half-ideas about cultural and moral relativism, "multiculturalism", "European Union", (anti-)nationalism and democracy, are unable to represent the nation and political citizenship in ways that can be used, exchanged, modified, by the large majority of people, under a national political constitution that provides a people the non-violent means to constitute and renew their political identities, it is only a matter of time before there will be serious disorder.
According to a recent report for one of the world's leading elite-liberal-post-nationalist organizations, Europeans think Islam is dangerous:
An “overwhelming majority” of Europeans believe immigration from Islamic countries is a threat to their traditional way of life, a survey revealed last night.
The poll, carried out across 21 countries, found “widespread anti-immigration sentiment”, but warned Europe’s Muslim population will treble in the next 17 years.
It reported “a severe deficit of trust is found between the Western and Muslim communities”, with most people wanting less interaction with the Muslim world.
Last night an MP warned it showed that political leaders in Britain who preach the benefits of unlimited immigration were dangerously out of touch with the public.
The study, whose authors include the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, was commissioned for leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
This divide between "leaders" and "citizens" is indeed frightening. The basis of all human order, the means by which we defer violent conflict, is through the exchange of signs or representations. These signs must emerge and be exchanged on shared scenes, a requirement that has led us in the West to develop shared national cultures, on the realization that multicultural empires have proven less capable of insuring the democratic exchange of signs. But this is a lesson we are always forgetting, due to the unhappy but inevitable history of conflict within and between nations, and due to the appeal of more simplistic Utopian ideas about imperial control and unified deferral to centralized signs of "multicultural", i.e. extra-cultural, rule. To speak of "extra-cultural" rule is to suggest that the "culture" ruling multicultural empires is parasitic on the subject cultures and does not provide a means for much cultural renewal in the long run. If "multicultural" "unity" comes at the cost of a loss to ordinary people's capacity to engage seriously in the renewal of the culture by which they are led, if unity means that politics becomes a game of horse-trading among demagoguing elites who stir up the mobs they presume to represent, focusing their resentment on the other demagogues and the other mobs-cultures of the multicultural empire, instead of engaging one's constituency in a serious exchange of signs, then it is not a unity that will last long the erosion that human resentment effects on any and every form of political order.
Multiculturalism, as a principle of rule, must be parasitic on all the cultures that constitute the political entity, for it cannot fully provide any one culture the freedom continually to renew the terms by which leaders and led will relate to each other. It robs any one culture of the degrees of freedom necessary to that essential human task. Whatever multicultural flourishing we (Canadians) should allow ourselves in the domestic, strictly (privately) religious, consumer, and economic spheres of life, when it comes to public politics, our ideal should be a universally shared national covenant. If multiculturalism means eating Chinese food, or becoming a Hindu, fine. But if it means that our political leaders speak primarily not to individual Canadians as free individuals, but to Chinese, Hindu, etc. "community leaders", then we are going down a road to a political culture that will rob ourselves of the necessary means for renewing our politics non-violently. Only a political order that has a constitution that allows the people the individual- (not group-)based freedoms to be variously involved in renewing their culture(s) can hope to survive long in history, especially at a time when our means of communications and resentment are so great.
Order is never primarily a question of brute force or power, but of shared opinion about the political and social lines that must be respected and defended. It is once that shared exchange of political representations is lost between putative leaders and led that the attraction of brute force to those seeking power and order becomes fantastically appealing.
But those who want to forestall the coming danger will not simply jump on the popular bandwagon of denouncing both Islam as a violent and supremacist cult, and the elites who insist it is a religion of peace. What Islam is or can be is not half as important as what Western nations understand themselves to be. Will Westerners, currently immersed in the religion of White Guilt, give up on renewing and championing their national cultures, both as the basis for a more transparent and effective inter-national mediation of conflict, and for maximizing our individual potential to live free and meaningful lives within the march of history?
The real leaders of society will take it upon themselves to sit down with their friends, neighbours, internet acquaintances - all fellow citizens of good faith - and start asking how we can start representing our nations in ways that can preserve and renew our traditions of individual freedom and self-ruling democracy. When I hear of covenant zones, or something like them, popping up in the UK, I will worry less that out-of-control street violence, or totalitarian government, is in the future of the land that gave Canada the basis of our constitutional freedoms.
Nigerian Archbishop Ben Kwashi responds to Rowan Williams:
I remember with interest a book I once read detailing a common theme in myths from around the world. These would be myths characteristic of an agrarian society with a dawning consciousness of how its myths work. These myths tell us about a society that, in times of trouble, hears the words of a wise man, or, alternatively, someone who is not usually heard from, telling the people to look for a special sign of something or someone - say, someone whose pants have a horizontal, not vertical, seam - someone who, it is implied, is somehow connected to the cause of the crisis. The person who speaks intuitively grasps that the community needs a victim, someone to point to and cast out, not that they know exactly what it is to scapegoat; what the person does not realize, until too late, is that in speaking out he or she becomes marked as a potential victim him or herself.
Such a myth is mark of a world still somewhat primitive, not yet fully in the light of the Judeo-Christian unveiling of myth's role of transfiguring sacrificial violence by making victims into myth's tragic heroes or gods, a world not yet troubled by myth's inability to explain itself, its own history and relationship to human violence and to the rituals that represent and obscure originary violent events.
I'm really not sure if I am being facetious in suggesting that such a mythic consciousness would be roughly the equivalent in religious consciousness of today's Archbishop of Canterbury:
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has called for new laws to protect religious sensibilities that would punish “thoughtless and cruel” styles of speaking.
Dr Williams, who has seen his own Anglican Communion riven by fierce invective over homosexuality, said the current blasphemy law was “unworkable” and he had no objection to its repeal.
But whatever replaces it should “send a signal” about what was acceptable.
This should be done by “stigmatising and punishing extreme behaviours” that have the effect of silencing argument.
The Archbishop, delivering the James Callaghan Memorial Lecture in London this afternoon, said it should not just be a few forms of extreme behaviour that were deemed unacceptable, leaving everything else as fair game.
“The legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting,” he said. [...] In 2006, Parliament passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which creates an offence of inciting or “stirring up” hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion. But the act was so watered down during its passage through Parliament that its critics fear it will be almost useless.
Dr Williams said: “It is clear that the old blasphemy law is unworkable and that its assumptions are not those of contemporary lawmakers and citizens overall. But as we think about the adequacy of what is coming to replace it, we should not, I believe, miss the opportunity of asking the larger questions about what is just and good for individuals and groups in our society who hold religious beliefs.”
Dr Williams was criticised by the National Secular Society who accused him of promoting “self-serving and dangerous" ideas.
Terry Sanderson, president, said that the Archbishop’s speech was a “blatant pitch for new legislation to replace the blasphemy laws that the Government are planning to scrap.”
Thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting? Self-serving indeed. I mean what could be more thoughtlessly sacrificial than pointing the finger at someone and labelling them with highly emotional and subjective labels like "thoughtless" and "unintentionally cruel", and then casting them out of society as the bad guy? Sure the lawyers would develop all kinds of standards and protocols for such charges; still, at the end of the day, what kind of law can judge "unintentional thoughts" without making the traditional English ideal of a univerally-applied law into a plaything of arbitrary judicial interpretation? How could a society with such a law not corrupt its judiciary and their aspirations to disinterestedness, given that a judge would have to rely on political correctness to know when someone was being criminally thoughtless and unintentionally cruel?
A society that became so irrational as to cast out all that Christianity has taught us about the irrationality of scapegoating and depending on victimization for creating social order - a society whose present erosion is in part tied to its religious and political refusal to name and contest the primitive religious sensiblity that is growing in its midst (as anything other than "anti-Islamic" and "cruel") - is a society that could easily turn on the Archbishop and say that he is the one being thoughtless and unintentionally cruel, and cast him out.
Where do they find these people, these half-witted readers of Rene Girard (I have read that Dr. Rowan Williams is among their number) who never seem to appreciate what Girard is really telling us about our cruel addiction to casting out the bad guy, "Mr. cruelty"? The British Isles that gave us the greatest lessons in the rule of law and free speech, are now home to many high officials and sacrificers who need to go back to school and relearn those lessons.
The claim that what Robert Sheaffer--an interesting "amateur" theoretician of resentment to whom I shall return in a future column--calls "envy control" is the founding principle of human society strikes me as more valid by every reasonable intellectual criterion than, for example, Richard Rorty's popular idea, borrowed from Judith Shklar, that the good society is one that avoids cruelty. The idea of avoiding cruelty is so sanctimoniously self-serving, in a word, so sacrificial--Cruelty as the black-hatted Bad Guy--that it makes me nostalgic for the Aztecs who supplied themselves with protein by slaughtering their neighbors; no mealy-mouthed hypocrites there! But this Nietzschean reaction, however natural, only plays into the hands of the "institutional middle class," with its "empathic" notions of compassion and cruelty-avoidance. As proof, Nietzsche himself has become a hero of this class, which is to say, of the Left, which he execrated. His revaluation of all values is now, with fitting irony, put to just the opposite use to that for which it was intended: the conscration of the victimary. This should be a warning to all thinkers who dare speak of resentment.
sacrificed for the sake of political correctness.
