Melvyn Bragg on Mary Mag: A cause for Concern

The BBC is showing a documentary about Mary Magdalene tomorrow lunchtime. Typical, pious, Good Friday viewing, reminding the public that Easter isn't all chocolate and bunnies but (for Christians at least) has something to do with Jesus, you might think. It's presented by Melvyn Bragg, for one thing, which is British broadcasting's ultimate stamp of intellectual seriousness. Better than Botney, even. But the loopy evangelical pressure group Christian Concern are aghast. In an "action alert" email tonight, they urge supporters to complain to the BBC about this forthcoming outrage, the timing of which they suggest is "highly inappropriate and inflammatory."

"The BBC's online complaint form only takes a few minutes to complete," they remind people. "The BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives."

Because the Beeb is entirely unfamiliar with the concept of an organised write-in campaign.

"Inappropriate timing" is hard to sustain. The Gospels state that Mary Magdalene stood at the foot of the cross while Jesus was being crucified, and that she was the first person to see (or imagine she saw) the risen Christ. And those are the only definite references to her in the New Testament. So it's hard to see what would be a more appropriate time to celebrate her.

So what's so outrageous about it?

Christian Concern are disturbed by a Telegraph piece in which Milord Bragg discusses the "tantalising and elusive" evidence about Mary M, and the "fragments which increasingly hint at radical new truths about the woman who has been called the apostle to the apostles."

This is certainly over-egging the pudding. The "radical new truths" have been around for donkeys' years: a few passages in apocryphal gospels that hint at a unique closeness in the relationship between Mary and Jesus. Yes, all that Holy Blood, Holy Grail/ Dan Brown stuff that has been the stuff of speculative history and conspiracy theorising since I was a lad and probably long before. There is, Bragg offers, "one taunting scrap of record which may well lead to the conclusion that she was his wife."

Well, knock me down with an archangel's feather.

If there's anything to be aghast about, it's the fact that this utterly familiar idea, for which there is, of course, no definitive proof (nor will there ever be) is still being presented in TV documentaries and newspaper articles as new and shocking. Given that half the population of the planet seems to have read Dan Brown's poorly-written thriller, that ought to be a genuine scandal. But, of course, that isn't the scandal that Christian Concern is concerned about.

Their concerns are as follows:

1) In a broadcast at the precise time Christians are remembering his death on the cross, this programme questions the purity of Jesus.

The programme suggests that Jesus might, just possibly, have been married. To a woman. How does this "question his purity", exactly. I thought that Christian Concern approved of heterosexual marriage. Barely a day goes by without Christian Concern voicing their supposedly Christian concern about the "threat" to traditional marriage posed by the government's proposal to extend it to gay couples. Only this Tuesday they sent out a "prayer alert" urging people to pray that the US Supreme Court uphold California's ban on same-sex marriage "and that God's good pattern for marriage and family is not further corrupted."

Yet somehow God's good pattern is not good enough for the Son of God, that if Jesus had married it would have exposed him to "impurity". As Cranmer Tweeted to me earlier this evening, one might expect Roman Catholics, with their ideal of the celibate priesthood, to reason thus (though celibate Catholic bishops, like the very pure ex-Cardinal Keith O'Brien, have put themselves at the forefront of the campaign for traditional marriage). But Christian Concern is a largely Protestant outfits, and Protestants have never thought that marriage might be somehow "impure".

It's an odd objection.

2) The claims about Jesus are based on dubious scholarship... it feeds on Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code' hypothesis rather than taking account of sensible scholarship.

Well, they're on slightly firmer ground with this one, I suppose. The scholarship itself isn't dubious: the apocryphal gospels which imply a wife-like status for the Magdalene do exist, and to regard the statement that "he often kissed her on the [mouth]" as suggesting physical as well as spiritual intimacy is not wholly implausible. What is dubious is the notion, which no serious scholar makes, that these texts are historically reliable. But to say that is not to say definitively that Jesus was not married.

What we can say is that the mainstream Christian tradition has always assumed Jesus to have been celibate; but that there were, in the first few centuries AD, contrary ideas floating about. The Gnostic and other apocryphal gospels record some of these ideas. So while there is no real evidence that Jesus was married, there's also no direct statement in the canonical gospels that he wasn't.

How does this matter? What Christian Concern and their ilk can't abide is that, for many people, Jesus is a fascinating historical (or quasi-historical) figure about whom little is known but about whom many would like to know more. I suspect that very few people would be scandalised if proof emerged that there was a Mrs Christ. Most of us would be quite pleased, I would guess, because most of us (even including Richard Dawkins) feel quite warmly about the Jesus depicted in the gospels, and wouldn't begrudge him a little connubial happiness. The theory that Jesus was married keeps getting trotted out, in other words, not because it's scandalous but because, credible or not, it has popular resonance. It's also plausible that a church that acknowledged Jesus as married, or even gave equal prominence to his female disciples (a role which Mary Magdalene, as depicted in the New Testament, undoubtedly fulfilled) might have had fewer problems down the centuries with sexuality and the role of women.

3) It makes indefensible claims about the nature of the Bible (e.g. the process by which the books of the Bible came to be recognised and collated)

Bragg:

The Gnostic Gospels which were rejected by those who put together the authorised versions include the Gospel of Mary, found in Cairo in 1896 and widely argued to depict the character of Mary Magdalene, and, as important for her story, the Gospel of Philip – which was among the texts found by an Arab shepherd in the desert in 1945. These, like others, were excluded from the final political version of the Bible. When you read them you can understand why. Philip tells us that Christ “loved her” more than all the other disciples. In Mary’s Gospel she speaks of close and long dialogues with Christ himself. But the forces of men, later abetted by the forces of the manly state of Rome, and the masculine structure of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, were going to bring her down.

If all Christian Concern are saying is that the compilation of the canon of scripture was more than just a patriarchal plot to exclude female voices (even if that was the effect) they may have a point. But Christian Concern's idea of a "defensible" claim about the Bible is that it is the revealed Word of God, literally true in every particular, that may as well have floated down on a cloud, leather bound and written in Jacobean English. Compared with the view of scriptural fundamentalists, Bragg's "political" interpretation, simplistic caricature as it is, is rather closer to what modern scholarship has discovered.

I would however urge my few remaining readers (sorry about the patchy service of late) to bear in mind Christian Concern's valid points: that the BBC complaint form doesn't take long to fill out, and that "the BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives." Read the rest of this article

Free speech, the Internet and the legacy of 1689

Could the internet be the way that both traditional Christianity and rigorous investigative journalism can be preserved for the British public in the future?
asks Rev Julian Mann

Both British Christians and secular journalists have good reason to celebrate 1689. It was the year Parliament passed the Act of Toleration which removed the restrictions on non-conformist Protestants holding church meetings. It was also the year Parliament passed the Bill of Rights, effectively allowing a free press in England, which then extended to Great Britain following the 1707 Acts of Union.

But now 1689 is being put into reverse by the coalition government. If same-sex marriage is passed into law, the Equality Act of 2010 could well make it illegal for a Christian teacher to declare his or her belief that same-sex marriage is wrong or even that it is not on a moral par with heterosexual marriage. Christians in the public sector will be the new nonconformists officially persecuted by the State.

The suppression of a free press in the UK is likely to be a more slow-burning process than the squeeze on Christian freedom of expression. But the Leveson enquiry demonstrated that there is a powerful and wealthy lobby of celebrities who want the British government to stop journalists criticising their moral behaviour, particularly their sexual conduct. That narcissistic celebrity mentality is surely the same as that driving the politically influential gay lobby, who want to stop Christians expressing the Bible's moral teaching in the public square.

If anyone is inclined to doubt that Christians and journalists are in the same boat in the threat they face from repressive political correctness dressed up as an 'equality' crusade, then they need look no further than the recent reaction of a government minister over an article in a national newspaper criticising transsexuals. Former equalities minister Lynne Featherstone demanded that The Observer 'sack' Julie Birchill, one of its freelance writers. It is an intervention worthy of a Carolingian prelate against a non-conformist pamphleteer before 1689.

Thankfully, the advent of the internet makes it difficult for modern governments to suppress freedom of speech, whether Christian or secular. Such sites may have to locate off-shore in the future but it would be hard for the government to stop British people from reading them.

Should the UK press get muzzled, it is important that internet sites do employ proper investigative journalists. Politically correct repression of free speech has a pretext when journalists are cavalier with the truth, are unscrupulous or are professionally incompetent. If the internet is the way of holding the UK executive to account, then that responsibility cannot be left to amateurs.

It may well be that internet users will have to pay for the cost of employing properly trained, professional journalists. But surely the exposure of evil abd the clear and open declaration of the truth is worth the price. It is only powerful mountebanks who will benefit from the suppression of both Christianity and a free press.

Christians know from their New Testament that the powerful religio-political establishment of 1st century Judea was desperate to stop Jesus speaking his mind. At the end of one argument, during which Jesus famously said 'if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed' (John 8v36), his enemies tried to stone him to death.

For the sake of preserving the spiritual and temporal legacy of 1689, Christian communicators and investigative journalists must not make their excuses and leave the UK public to the ravages of powerful liars.

Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire -
Read the rest of this article

Ratzinger: the grinch who stole Christmas

The Mail brings us a hilarious attack on the "killjoy" Pope who it accuses of "rubbishing" beloved Christmas traditions in his latest book.

With just under 34 days until Christmas the Pope has put a dampener on the festive period by rubbishing the idea that donkeys or any other animal have a place in the traditional Nativity scene. Benedict XVI also claims angels never sang to the shepherds to proclaim Christ birth's - trashing the much-loved carol 'Hark! The herald angels sing' in the process. From this falsehood the tradition of singing carols was born, the Pope says.

Oh dear. Is the pontiff channelling his inner Richard Dawkins? It seems so. In a desperate attempt to shift the million copies of the last instalment of his three-volume study of Jesus (which focuses, for reasons best known to his publisher, on the beginning of the story) Ratzinger has looked at the relevant passages in the Gospel of Luke and discovered, presumably not for the first time, that they contain no mention of the ox and ass so familiar from the Christmas crib. This is news! 

If Rowan Williams had said it, the Mail could happily have put it down to trendy Anglican liberalism. But we don't expect to hear such tradition-busting language from the Pope.

It is, it seems, an especially radical departure because the Pope's own Rome headquarters "regularly has a giant scene at Christmas and has displayed an array of animals at the heart of the Vatican, but the Pontiff is certain that is wrong."  There's no suggestion that a new, purified, donkey-free crib will be introduced this year, however, despite the Pope "debunking the theory". This is clearly scandalous.  Ratzinger should have the courage of his convictions and tear down the misleading Vatican crib.  Or else, follow his own logic and include a sack-bearing Santa along with the Three Wise Men, a character hitherto inexplicably missed out of Nativity scenes.  The original Santa Claus was a saint, after all, so there would be ample religious justification, at least as much as for the wholly fictional animals.

The horrified tone of the report suggests that, like some liberal Anglican bishop of decades past, Ratzinger has cast doubt on basic Christian doctrines. Which, of course, he hasn't. The books insists, as one would expect, on the historicity of the Virgin Birth, which many would consider strains plausibility rather more than the apocryphal presence of an ox and an ass in the stable. He even, it seems, accepts the story of the Star of Bethlehem, adopting the currently fashionable rationalising explanation that it was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.

I haven't read the book, but it strikes me that in sticking so closely to the text of the Gospel narratives Ratzinger is being a bit, well, Protestant. The familiar Nativity story, with its choirs of angels, lowing animals, three kings and all the rest is a quintessentially Catholic one: a delightful hodgepodge combining the accounts in Luke and Matthew with details plucked from other parts the Bible (the ox and the ass, for example, are mentioned in Isaiah), stuff from apocryphal gospels that never made it into the official Bible and centuries of storytelling and art. The elements were brought together by St Francis of Assisi, who assembled the first nativity scene (featuring live animals) in 1223.

The Nativity story is rooted in the Bible but much of its emotional engagement and narrative depth come from the later elaborations. Nor are they illogical. Luke doesn't mention a stable, but he does say that Jesus was "laid in a manger." A manger implies, if it doesn't necessitate, a stable; a stable implies animals; the heavily-pregnant Mary had presumably not walked all the way from Nazareth, so there must have been a donkey. There were "shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night"; hence sheep. Three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh imply three gift-bringers; the costliness of the gifts imply that they must have been rich; and so on.

The result was part theology, part fairy-tale. But the whole beautiful structure began to unravel when the Reformation put an emphasis on the words of the Bible and to downplay the story in favour of the theology.  What was left was a children's story.  But without the supporting cast of shepherds, innkeepers, donkeys and camel-riding kings the few basic Biblical "facts", which the Pope prefers to concentrate on, look rather exposed.

Read the rest of this article

Papal Balls

When a priest invites an altar boy to come up and feel his balls, it doesn't usually end well. But fear not. All that is happening here is the culmination of the Coptic Church of Egypt's months-long search for a Pope. Representatives of the clergy and laity had already voted, but in time-honoured fashion the final choice was left to a blindfolded boy. Weird, perhaps, but at least it works: the Copts now have a new pope, Bishop Tawadros, while the secretive Crown Nominations Committee apparently hasn't managed to agree on a choice for the next Archbishop of Canterbury, even though when Rowan Williams told the world he was moving to Cambridge the late Pope Shenouda III was still going strong. And the process is much more transparent than the CNC, literally so in fact.

The scene in Cairo's main cathedral, and indeed the atmosphere, was incongruously like the National Lottery draw. The three names were placed in clear balls, which in turn were placed in a glass urn and swizzled around before the chosen boy was led up to the altar. Loud cheers erupted when the name of the lucky winner was read out. But was all entirely as it seemed? Watch closely:



It looks to me as though the officiating bishop is guiding the boys hand in a suspiciously firm manner. I've watched the earlier part of the proceedings (the video is over 4 hours long, so I'm not putting it up here, but it's on YouTube) and it strikes me as being quite vulnerable to influence. The same man was responsible for folding up the pieces of paper, putting them inside the glass balls, putting the balls inside the urn, sealing up the urn with ribbons and wax (a process that took several minutes and which any magician would recognise as being a classic piece of misdirection) and, later, briefly shuffling the balls. The shuffling was so perfunctory, the officiant - who was not blindfolded - could easily have kept track of which ball was which.

I'm not saying that the choice of the new Pope of Alexandria was rigged. But the whole thing does look decidedly iffy. Read the rest of this article

In defending Christian England, Eric Pickles is the modern Disraeli

This is a guest post by Rev Julian Mann

Eric Pickles is clearly not ashamed to be a Conservative. In defending the public role of Christianity generally, and of the Church of England in particular, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is upholding democratic Conservatism as it developed in the 19th Century under the leadership of Benjamin Disraeli.

Writing in Friday's Daily Telegraph, Mr Pickles could not have been clearer in articulating the Disraelian commitment to preserving the influence of the Church by law established:

Christians continue to be positively involved in public life, from the role of Anglican bishops in scrutinising legislation in the House of Lords, through the moral leadership offered by Christian leaders, to the contribution of thousands of churches and Christian charities to the social fabric of our neighbourhoods with their volunteering and sacrifice. Religion is the foundation of the modern British nation: the Reformation is entwined with British political liberty and freedoms, the King James Bible is embedded in our language and literature, and the popular celebrations of the Royal Wedding and Diamond Jubilee placed the Church side by side with our constitutional monarchy.

Disraeli may seem an odd figure to invoke in an argument about Conservatism and Christianity. He pursued a dissolute, Byronic youth and had a tendency to mendacity in his political life. It would be foolish to present him as a proto Ann Widdecombe.

But he would have been appalled at the fact that the Strictly Come Dancing star has not been elevated to the House of Lords because she has been too vociferous in upholding historic Christianity and opposing political correctness.

Disraeli was assiduous in promoting the influence of the Church of the nation. He passionately believed that a strong national Church was an essential safeguard against governmental tyranny. One of his last acts as Prime Minister was to appoint the evangelical JC Ryle to be bishop in the then new See of Liverpool in 1880.

Though he could be accused of some political manoevering in that appointment, Disraeli knew full well that Ryle would pro-actively proclaim Jesus Christ across Merseyside and appoint frontline clergy who would do the same.

Disraeli's famous 1864 saying about Darwin's theory of evolution - "Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels" - was not a scientific statement; it was a witty denunciation of the spiritual and moral aridity of atheism.

Significantly in the light of the contemporary debate, the mature Disraeli honoured the God-created institution of heterosexual marriage. In relation to the Seventh Commandment ("Thou shalt not commit adultery"), he was conspicuously unlike William Gladstone who sailed very close to the wind in that department.

With the modern party membership falling and political indifferentism prevailing amongst young people, Disraeli, if he were here now, would be thoroughly supportive of Mr Pickles's inspiring reminder of the spiritual and moral roots of Conservatism.

He would agree that Conservatives who harbour a 'whatever' attitude towards Christianity in our public life are not only ducking a vital issue for our identity and cohesion as a country; they are betraying themselves.
Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge in South Yorkshire. Read the rest of this article

The Other Pope

Pope Shenouda III, who died at the weekend, was leader of the X million strong Coptic Church of Egypt (X being a number anywhere between 7 and 13) and possessor of one of the most remarkable beards of any prelate, certainly putting our own dear Rowan Williams to shame. He was 88, to Rowan's 61. But Coptic Popes aren't allowed to retire. Indeed, Shenouda appears to still be in the job, his final duty being to appear, propped up and fully robed in his patriarchal throne in Cairo, looking it must be said livelier than John Paul II did during the last five or so years of his pontificate.

Shenouda's death has attracted warm tributes from, among others, the Archbishop of Canterbury who spoke of Shenouda's "exemplary and outstanding" leadership and his "depth of Christian love, welcome and wisdom." Less attention has been paid to his cosy relationship with Mubarak or his history of making nasty anti-semitic remarks.

The Coptic Pope rejoices in one of the most grandiose titles in the Christian world. So complex is it, indeed, that it's not entirely clear just what it is. But it goes something like this:

Pope and Lord Archbishop of the Great City of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy Orthodox and Apostolic Throne of St Mark the Evangelist and Holy Apostle; Father of Fathers; Shepherd of Shepherds; Hierarch of all Hierarchs; Pillar and Defender of the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church and of the Orthodox faith; Dean of the Great Catechetical School of Alexadria; Ecumenical Judge of the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church; Thirteenth among the Apostles.

Which is, I'm sure you'll agree, slightly over-the-top, even for a prelate so impressively bearded as the late Shenouda. The title "Pope", by the way, is older by a couple of centuries than that of his Roman equivalent. Strictly speaking, we should refer to the latter as "Pope of Rome" to avoid confusion.

Precisely where the Coptic Pope comes in the global Christian pecking order is complicated by the fact that (as a consequence of various splits and schisms down the centuries) there are both Greek Orthodox and Latin claimants to the Holy Throne of St Mark, though neither have large numbers of followers. But traditionally Alexandria ranks at number three after Rome and Constantinople. To complicate matters, although the head of the church is patriarch of Alexandria his cathedral, as well as his official residence, is in Cairo. And has been since the eleventh century. But I suppose that when you've got a title as long as that one you're better off leaving well alone.


In recent decades the Coptic Pope has been considered the top-ranking member of the Oriental Orthodox communion, a somewhat ad hoc group of churches that does not form a clade but which is united by a reluctance to accept the conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon of 451 AD. It's a long story; let's just say that it had something to do with the vexed question of precisely how Christ could be both God and man. It was to the fifth century church what the argument over gay clergy is to the 21st: divisive, unresolveable and ultimately a bit daft. About twenty years ago a high-powered group of theologians came up with a form of words that seemed to satisfy everybody (except the few remaining Nestorians). But the fifteen hundred odd years of mutual anathemas should stand as a warning to anyone who thinks that the current rows over sexuality and gender will be patched up any time soon.

Perhaps the dispute would have been patched up earlier had Egypt not fallen to the Muslims in 639AD, an event positively welcomed by many Egyptians as it meant seeing the back of the hated Byzantines with their inaccurate Christology. The history of the church thereafter was one of slow decline, however, as the Egyptian population slowly went over to Islam. The process took centuries and (arguably) is still going on. Egypt probably had a Christian majority well into the thirteenth century, and in the eighteenth there were still parts of the country speaking Coptic (the language of the Pharaoahs and still of the church's liturgy). Many observers detect signs of revival in recent years - an increase in recruitment to the monasteries, for example. On the other hand, Copts have faced increasing discrimination, attacks on churches and rising hostility from Islamists. It's reported that hundreds of thousands are now considering emigration.

I was intrigued to learn about the process that will be used to select Shenouda's successor. In some ways it's more open and democratic than the system used to choose the Archbishop of Canterbury (though even the Roman conclave is more democratic, if not necessarily more open, than that) but is also satisfyingly weird. The Synod of the Coptic Church (which corresponds to the House of Bishops in the Church of England General Synod) and a body representing the laity both take part in elections to discover three potential candidates. But the final choice is made by a boy who is led blindfold to the altar and invited to pull one of the names out of a hat. Well probably not a hat, but the same principle applies.

I suppose this vaguely resembles the former system in the Church of England, where two candidates for a vacant bishopric were presented to the Prime Minister to choose between.
Read the rest of this article

Karen Armstrong and the death of paganism

Karen Armstrong was up to her usual tricks on Start the Week yesterday, combining historical inaccuracy with the sort of passionate intensity that brooks no contradiction. She warned modern Christians not to be so "dogmatic" as to actually believe things, something she described in her postmodernist way as a "peculiar modern Western Christian development". Asked by Andrew Marr whether churches and other religious institutions (which he thought were "struggling") had any future, she told him:

They will struggle if they can't adapt. When faith traditions cease to be able to adapt to their current conditions, they die. That's what happened to the old paganism.

On the contrary.

The old paganism didn't wither because it failed to adapt, as Armstrong knows perfectly well. It was destroyed. It was consciously and deliberately persecuted out of existence. Within a few of generations of Constantine's conversion to Christianity another Roman emperor, Theodosius I, acting under the influence of a Milanese fanatic later known as St Ambrose, made the practice of the empire's traditional religion illegal. Temples were closed, soothsaying was outlawed on pain of death, the Oracle of Delphi was shut down, the Olympic Games were cancelled after more than a thousand years of quadrennial celebration, Plato's Academy in Athens was forced to close its doors (many of its leading lights fleeing to sanctuary in Persia), the Vestal Virgins were forcibly married off. He then went one further and issued decree prohibiting any pagan worship even within the privacy of people's own homes. His policy was one of religious totalitarianism.

Before Theodosius got to work in 381 AD, Classical paganism was very far from being dead. Over half the population of Rome was still pagan, as were large parts of the empire. And it had adapted, considerably, to survive. The Neoplatonism espoused by the pagan intellectuals of late Antiquity was a very different phenomenon from the worship of gods in the Homeric age, from the cults of Republican Rome, or from the myriad of mystery religions and popular shrines that flourished for centuries around the ancient Mediterranean. Christianity and paganism weren't simply rivals, either: they borrowed from each other, Christianity taking over certain pagan festivals and official paganism imitating Christian organisational structures and priestly hierarchies.

There was no inevitability about the death of Classical paganism. Its equivalent in India survived and flourishes still in the guise of Hinduism. Modern Hinduism is more theologically and philosophically sophisticated than most ancient paganism, of course; but then it has had a great deal longer to become so. And many of the old cults still survive. They answer, as Classical paganism answered, the needs of ordinary people in their millions. Had India ever had a Theodosius, intent upon suppressing the Hindu religion and replacing it with Christianity or (more likely) Islam, he might very well have succeeded. Instead, the country enjoyed rulers like Ashoka, a liberal-minded Buddhist, Akbar the Great, who enjoyed listening to representatives of various religions engaged in intellectual debate, or the British, who (as Diane Abbott recently reminded us) enjoyed playing divide-and-rule and in any case completely lacked the resources to impose their religion on anyone.

Karen Armstrong is obviously right that for a religion or a religious institution to survive it needs to be adaptable. And some are very adaptable indeed: the Church of England, for example, has successfully (so far) preserved its official status by putting itself forward as a sort of clearing-house for faith in general rather than for Protestant Christianity in particular. It likes to pretend that it has been ever thus: the Queen, who herself embodies another institution that knows how to adapt to survive, recently praised it for having "created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely." Whereas the religious and political freedoms of non-Anglicans have been wrested, over centuries, from the usually unwilling leadership of the once dominant Church of England.

But it's a curious mistake to write off ancient paganism as hidebound and unadaptable. It was anything but. And it embodied far better than any form of Chistianity ever has Karen Armstrong's own religious ideals. It was non-dogmatic. It was a religion (or religions) of practice rather than of belief. Its narratives were grounded not in history, which invites secepticism and archaeological research, nor in texts, which invite critical analysis and source-comparison, but in the recurrent cycles of nature and in a fluid body of myth and epic. The vulnerabilities which afflict the "religions of the book", which Armstrong imagines are modern and aberrant (though ancient pagan philosophers delighted in pointing out the implausibility of the factual claims made by Christians about Jesus) were alien to the spirit of ancient paganism.

None of that could save it from Theodosius' persecution. The fact that the emperor (like Christian and Muslim rulers of other previously pagan societies who came after him) saw the need to destroy traditional religion with such violence and finality suggests that it was, after all, a tough old bird that would, if left alone, have continued to serve the needs of people humble and great for centuries to come. It remains true, however, that Theodosius' campaign was successful. Unlike Christianity, paganism could not survive sustained persecution. It was too gentle, reasonable and flexible a faith. It had no core of fundamental belief; it made no historical claims; it compelled adherence to no creeds; it didn't care what its followers actually believed, so long as they turned up to sacrifices and listened to the lyre recitals.

In other words, it was nothing like the militant fundamentalism, or for that matter the "militant atheism", of which Karen Armstrong so disapproves. It lacked conviction. When a more dogmatic creed came along it was doomed. Read the rest of this article

Richard Dawkins' mistake

On the Today programme this morning, ex-Canon Giles Fraser asked Richard Dawkins if he could repeat the full title of Charles Darwin's magnum opus.
"Yes I could!"

"Go on then," came the challenge.

"On the Origin of Species, er, with... oh God... On the Origin of Species, um... There is a subtitle... er, um, with respect to, erm, the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."


That's not bad, said Justin Webb, just a tad patronisingly. It never does to be too confident, but it was frankly painful to listen to. I was willing him on.

Fraser was ecstatic:

You are the High Pope of Darwinism. If you asked people who believe in evolution that question and only two per cent got it right it would be terribly easy for me to say they don't really believe it after all.

Having collected himself, Dawkins repaired to his website, where he protested that Fraser wasn't playing fair:

The fact that I got it in the end, thereby demonstrating that I knew it all along but was temporarily flustered by the unexpected ambush will by no means deter them!

But he didn't get it in the end. He missed out what many would consider to be the most important words of all. It is On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection... Even I knew that bit, though I would have missed the part about favoured races and the struggle for life.

Never mind. It was, in any case, not a good comparison because the Mori poll question was multiple choice. The polled 'Christians' were not asked "What is the first book of the New Testament?" and expected to enunciate a word-perfect "Matthew" (a one-word memory feat as opposed to the 21-word memory that was asked of me). They were only asked to choose from one of the following: Matthew, Genesis,, Acts of the Apostles, Psalms, Don't know, Prefer not to say. 39% chose "Don't know" and only 35% chose Matthew.

Well indeed. But then the people being asked weren't theologians, either. A good comparison would be for a senior clergyman - Fraser himself, perhaps - to be asked to rattle off, say, the first three verses of the Gospel According to John or name the Books of the New Testament in the correct order. Knowing the full title of The Origin shouldn't be too much of a stretch for someone who has been preaching the gospel of Darwin for the past five decades. Stephen Jay Gould wouldn't have forgotten it.

The context for this was a piece of Dawkins-sponsored research that claimed to show that Christianity was less prevalent in Britain than the oft-quoted figure of 72% who ticked the Christian box in the 2001 Census would imply. It set out to demonstrate that these "Christians" were, mostly, at best nominal believers. For a start, the researchers only found 54% who admitted to describing themselves as Christian a decade ago. Had they forgotten or changed their minds, like all those people who now deny ever voting for Tony Blair? It's not clear.

Anyway, of those self-described Christians, around half said that they did so because they had been baptised (which in most cases, of course, reflected their parents' decision rather than their own). There was a range of other responses. "I believe in the teachings of the religion" scored 18%, as did both current and past church attendance. Half never went to church at all. 17% were weekly churchgoers, a figure that rose to just shy of 30% for those who attended at least monthly.

By contrast, a mere 6% were Christmas and Easter worshippers, which implies that the custom of nominal seasonal attendance is dwindling. People either worship more-or-less regularly or not at all - a finding which some clergy may find reassuring. (Though it's a surprise to me: the carol service I went to, at Ely Cathedral, was packed, and I'm sure I was far from being the only non-believer in the congregation.) The survey appears not to have asked why the 29% of regular worshippers attended church, which seems an unfortunate lapse. It would have been interesting to know how much truth there is in the stereotype of middle class parents faking religiosity to get their kids into a faith school.

The questions that most annoyed Fraser related to people's personal beliefs: he thought it impertinent of Dawkins to want to rate self-declared believers by seeing how many points of doctrine they were willing to sign up for. He has a point there. The most relevant findings were that 30% described themselves as having "strong religious beliefs", 45% said that they were "religious" and a full 60% said that Christianity was very or fairly important in their lives. As to the influence that the religion had on their lives, the most popular response that it encouraged them to be "a good person". I don't think that implies either that they think you have to be Christian to be a good person, or that the respondents are confusing Christianity with basic humanistic morality, as Dawkins was trying this morning to imply. The religion would be pretty useless, even on its own terms, if it didn't somehow help its followers to lead moral lives.

It's nevertheless interesting to see whether most Christians really do believe the things they're supposed to believe.

Anyway: over 60% believed in Heaven and (more surprisingly, perhaps) around 40% believed in Hell. Most believed in the power of prayer and "fate". A small majority (less than believed in Heaven) believed in what might be called a personal God. A mere 17% agreed with Jesus' alleged claim that "No-one comes to the Father except through me."

The Bible is regular (weekly) reading for a mere 15%. 32% could be put down as occasional readers - anything from monthly to once in the last three years. On the status of the Bible, the most popular response (42%) was this: "The Bible is not a perfect guide to morality as some of its teachings are not appropriate today, but it is still the best guide we have." It's a view that I suspect would also have many takers among professional clergy. 61% never took part in church-based community activities; mostly, these will be the non churchgoers, but even a majority of fairly regular attendees would seem to confine their church-related activities to actual services.

On the resurrection, the orthodox view (that Jesus physically came back from the dead) was endorsed by fewer than a third; the most popular answer being that the resurrection was a purely "spiritual" event. But 44% were prepared to describe Jesus as "the Son of God and Saviour of Mankind." This would include many who don't regularly attend church. I'm not quite sure not to make of someone who believes that Jesus Christ is their saviour yet can't be bothered to worship him one day a week.

There were mixed views on such subjects as bishops in the House of Lords (most people, I suspect, just don't care) or daily worship in schools. There was no strong feeling either in favour or against teaching creationism in classrooms, the state funding of hospital chaplains or the status of the Church of England as the established religion. But on social questions there was a clear trend: those who describe themselves as Christians tend to take "liberal" positions on questions of same-sex relationships, sex outside marriage (does that one even still count?) and assisted suicide. Most dramatically, there was emphatic support (63%) for the proposition that a woman with an unwanted pregnancy should be able to choose an abortion.

Three-quarters agreed with the propostion that "religion should be a private matter and should not have a special influence on public policy. Take that, Lady Warsi.

But this survey doesn't show that most "Christians" have a merely sentimental or cultural attachment to the faith. They may not go to church very often, they may read the Bible even less, they may have only the vaguest scriptural knowledge, they may not believe in the resurrection (the virgin birth question was apparently not even asked). But that doesn't mean that they don't think of themselves as Christians or attempt to lead some sort of Christian life.

This is the constituency which Christian leaders, populist politicians and Daily Mail editorials claim to speak for when they evoke notions of Britain as a "Christian country." But the people in this survey are clearly not calling for more religion in politics, and they do not, by and large, display illiberal attitudes on social matters. Devout or lukewarm, they tend to look upon religion as a private matter, a source of moral or spiritual inspiration, not as a source of political identity. This may please Giles Fraser more than Richard Dawkins, ultimately, even though the professor claimed to have found "lots of good stuff" in the survey. It sure as hell won't please Sayeeda Warsi. Read the rest of this article

Book Review: This Saint Will Change Your Life

This Saint will change your life by Thomas Craughwell (Quirk Books £13.99)

This sometimes fascinating, often bizarre collection of 300 patron saints is written in an light but not overly sceptical style: just pious enough to satisfy believers without quite concealing the far-fetched and accidental nature of many of the saintly affiliations. Dark humour abounds, especially in the gruesomely baroque tales of martyrdom. St Barbara was beheaded by her own father, who thereupon exploded: she is now the patron saint of gunpowder. St Quentin is patron saint of coughs, because according to legend his torturers poured a mixture of lime, vinegar and mustard down his throat (which makes one wonder, adds Craughwell, why he isn't also invoked against gagging).

Patron saints are probably, in essence, a diluted survival of paganism, where there was a god for everything, but they are still being awarded contracts today. There's a patron saint of blogging, apparently (it's St Augustine of Hippo, on account of his prolific and sometimes confessional output) and, believe it or not, of disputed elections. Though that one seems to be a little tongue in cheek: it's St Chad, as in "hanging" chad, and he's only had the job since the Bush/Gore stand-off in 2000. A better-deserved affiliation is that between St Bernadino of Siena and the advertising industry. Bernardino invented (or at least popularised) the IHS logo often found on altar-cloths and clerical vestments.

There's a strange specificity - and ingenuity - on display in such cases as that of St Elizabeth of Hungary, patron saint of those who get on badly with their in-laws, or St Dominic Savio, the patron saint of hoodies (who sounds from the account like he should really be the patron saint of swotty kids in glasses). The shortest straw may have been drawn by St Germaine Cousin, in life cursed with "a withered right arm and a disfiguring skin condition" and unsightly swellings on her neck, abused by her family for her whole life and dead at twenty-two. Even in death there's no escape for the poor girl, who now rejoices in the title "patron saint of the physically unattractive."

There are some signs of bowdlerism in this book. Mary Magdalene is listed only as patron saint of hairstylists, on account of her traditionally luxuriant tresses. "She was not a prostitute", insists Craughwell. But how does he know? There's more evidence for that than for the idea that she had good hair. And no implications should be drawn from the fact that hairdressers and prostitutes share the same patron saint.

Another puzzling one: St Thomas is listed here as patron saint of construction workers, on the basis of a bizarre legend in which he defrauded an Indian king, promising to build him a palace but actually giving the money to the poor. When the king understandably objected, and threatened to have Thomas killed, the saint explained that a glorious palace awaited him in heaven. That was good enough for the king, it seems: a more gullible character, obviously, than Thomas himself, who I always assumed was the patron saint of sceptics. But he should really be the patron saint of con-men.

There's plenty more unsaintly behaviour on show. St Vladamir was a rapist and murderer. Pope Callixtus I, as a slave, stole his master's money and spent it on dodgy investments. Saint Camillus de Lellis was an out-and-out con man who "liked whoring and drinking, and was blessed with a gift for gambling and swearing". The Blessed Angela of Foligno was a sort of Anna Nicole Smith figure who cheated on her rich but aged husband and, too embarrassed to confess, carried on going to communion. (That, from a Catholic point of view, was of course far worse than the adultery.) But they all repented in the end, so they got to be saints. No entirely fair.

St Sebastian is the patron saint of atheists. That sounds promising. But no, he is "invoked for the conversion, or at least the confounding, of atheists and all enemies of Christianity", which isn't the same thing at all.

This Saint Will Change Your Life is available on Amazon here.
Read the rest of this article

Is carol-singing in pubs proof that we still live in a Christian country?

How do Christians get away with it? asks Rev. Julian Mann

It came home to me as a group from our church were singing Christmas carols in our local pub: profoundly counter-cultural words and socially subversive truth-claims are wrapped up in an acceptable packaging of nostalgia and collective memory.

The look on the face of the barman, though, made me suspect that the cultural wrapping paper might be wearing a bit thin. But that could have been my singing.

Consider the second verse of the Christina Rossetti poem ‘In the Bleak Mid-winter’, sung magnificently incidentally by Annie Lennox on her 2010 Christmas album: ‘Our God, heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain, heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign; in the bleak mid-winter a stable-place sufficed the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.’

The outcry if that were sung in a Hallal supermarket in Tower Hamlets would in a sense be more honest than the passive acceptance of a village pub. The drinkers there do not actively believe the astonishing claim of the Rossetti poem – that a human baby, born 2000 years ago, was God Incarnate, the exclusive self-revelation of the Divine.

Consider too ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, which is hardly flattering about human nature: ‘O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray: cast out our sin, and enter in; be born in us today.’

Phillips Brooks’s 19th century carol might not be highly favoured by anti-Israeli English clergy but it proved utterly uncontroversial to the Sunday evening crowd at a 21st century public house.

Perhaps the majority of the regulars ticked the Christian box in the census, but the truth-claims in carols like those certainly make little practical difference to their daily lives or even to their lives for an hour or so once a week.

They don’t even attend Sunday worship.

Arguably, the fact that English Christians can get away with carol singing in a pub is a sign of the weakness of English Christianity.

If we Christians were making more impact on our local communities for the counter-cultural truths the Christmas carols communicate, would the residents be quite so comfortable with us?

Is it because we pose no threat that they allow us to come and sing our beliefs in their social space?

A polite refusal from a pub landlord or at least a complaint might actually be a sign that a local church is making an impact for Christianity in its community. Read the rest of this article

Rowan Williams' response to the riots

Rowan Williams has been reflecting on the summer's riots in the Guardian. He asks:

How do we as a society back up good lessons in the home and show that we corporately want what a good family wants – mutual attention and affirmation, stability and emotional literacy, a sense of value that doesn't depend on accessories?

His answer is vague, indeed tautological, in the extreme:

We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have.

More interesting is what he doesn't say, which is that religion might have any role to play in instilling a sense of values and responsibility in young people.

In the course of an eleven hundred word article, Williams avoids mentioning "God", "Jesus", "Christianity" or "religion" even once. There are no Biblical quotations, no drawing on the wealth of Christian social teaching, no examples drawn from the life of Christ or the writings of any major theologian. Nothing that could not have been written by a fully-committed atheist of similarly left-leaning persuasion. The archbishop mentions a report compiled on behalf of the Children's Society without hinting at the charity's close links with the Church of England.

Nor is there a single reference to the work of clergy in inner cities. Yet the churches have a good story to tell here. It's unlikely that many of the rioters were committed Christians or regular churchgoers. Many Christian clergy and leaders of other faiths have done remarkable work among the socially excluded, and have been doing so at least since the foundation of the Salvation Army way back in the 19th century.

Coming from a Christian leader - indeed, the country's most prominent and senior Christian leader, the religious head of the established church - these omissions are rather striking.

Rowan Williams' politics are one thing. Some will nod in agreement at the archbishop's characterisation of the rioters as disappointed, disaffected youth, whose "vague but strong longings for something like secure employment" have been thwarted by unstable families and a failed education system. Others will note that the commandment Thou Shalt Not Steal does not come hedged about with sociological caveats. But that's a different argument. The Bible and Christian tradition contain resources enough to support both conservative and socialist arguments. So why not use them?

Without any explicit religious underpinning, or any other, Williams' comments are mere verbiage. For he fails to offer the solutions that, presumably, he believes would make a radical difference to the lives of young people trapped in a cycle of inner-city deprivation. "Young people need love," he writes. Do they, perhaps, need the love of God? They need "a dependable background for their lives, emotionally and socially... that helps them take certain things for granted so that they know they don't have to fight ceaselessly for recognition." Might religion help to shore up such a background? Williams doesn't tell us. He appears not to have even considered the question. Surely one would expect a leading clergyman to argue, and think, that the hopelessness that blights so many lives is as much spiritual as economic.

It has been suggested to me that there is indeed a deep theological perspective lurking behind Williams' pop sociology. I've no doubt that there is - in, for example, his comments on the shallowness of consumerism and its "fierce Darwinian hierarchy of style" (great phrase, that). But it takes a theologian to spot it.

Bishops are expected (or assume themselves) to be experts on morality, but they derive that status from the ancient and still resonant association between morality and faith. Rowan Williams is posing here as a standalone moral philosopher, or, worse, as an opinionated columnist. He fails to make clear the connection with his views on society and politics with his Christianity. He seems almost to be embarrassed by it. Yet without God he is nothing. Just what is the point of an archbishop who doesn't do God? Read the rest of this article

Why bankers used to be good

This is a guest post by Rev. Julian Mann.

Hopefully Private Eye editor Ian Hislop's BBC programme about Victorian financiers - When bankers were good - will properly explain why they were.

The answer very clearly is that Victorian Britain was saturated with Biblical values in the wake of the 18th century evangelical revival. Evangelical Christianity teaches that the whole of life is impacted by the truth of the gospel. That means one should earn one's money in an ethical manner and use it for the love of God and of one's neighbour.

Such a spiritual and moral culture thus conduced to bankers with active consciences moved to virtue, in contrast to the financiers spawned by de-Christianised Britain.

My Hislop's own position in relation to Christian Britain is interesting. He clearly has some sort of spiritual sympathy with it, having presented a previous BBC series about Victorian philanthropists.

But the magazine he edits was a product of the 1960s, the decade which set the hounds on Christian Britain. Private Eye, launched in 1961, belongs to the Beyond the Fringe satirical movement championed by its former proprietor, the late Mr Peter Cook, which set out to lampoon authority and undermine respect for the then British establishment.

The current corrosive cynicism about politicians, in fact more accurately the nihilism about political engagement, has its roots in that godless movement.

The antidote to greedy bankers, corrupt politicians, and a cynical public is evangelical Christianity. That antidote was active in Victorian Britain when rich people were more inclined to listen to Jesus Christ: "Take heed and beware of covetousness; for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth (Luke 12v15 - King James Version)."

Mr Hislop's moral position would be more consistent if he preached that message, forsaking the cynical cultural Baal of Private Eye, now ironically a journal the Ahabesque British establishment is quite comfortable with. Read the rest of this article

Karen Armstrong and the relics

There are relics (or, in most cases, relic-containers) on show at the British Museum - the exhibition Treasures of Heaven is running there until October - and there's a heavy, lavishly-illustrated catalogue to accompany it. The show represents a spectacular assemblage of medieval bling - bejewelled boxes, golden crosses (some look as though they might have been designed by Christian Lacroix), gilded upraised arms, medallions, ornamental statues. My personal favourite is in the shape of a foot, built to exhibit a bone from that part of the body of St Blaise. Seriously weird.

The catalogue brings to bear varied academic perspectives on the whole subject. The essays take us from the emergence of the cult in late antiquity, through the collecting mania of the high Middle Ages to its later manifestations and distant echoes (including even the artist Piero Manzoni's ironic distribution of his own canned faeces). Theology features (for example, the way in which the architecture of churches came to reflect the place of relics in worship) but so does the relationship between patrons and artists and the impact of pilgrimage of international trade and diplomacy.

Interesting stuff, and a good reminder that the Middle Ages were not simply (as some continue to believe) sunk in stupidity and unquestioning faith. Medieval people were not wholly alien. Despite the very different conditions of life and the era's pervasive religiosity, they were human beings with the same mixture of motivations high and low, mercenary and altruistic, power-seeking and idealistic as people today. The cult of relics brought the sacred down to earth. On the one hand it transfigured bits of old cloth and bone into something holy, the focus of religious yearning and superstitious dread. Just as significantly, however, it turned the spiritual realm into something that could be touched, trampled on, traded in, stolen, an opportunity for profit or for the accumulation of power and prestige.

Unfortunately, the British Museum (hoping, perhaps, to appeal to modern-day pilgrims) seems to be selling the exhibition as some sort of spiritual event. Director Neil MacGregor has claimed that it is "all about trying to represent the universal human desire to reach out and touch the absolute." He will no doubt be thrilled by the predictable outpouring of twaddle the show has brought forth from that world-class purveyor of free-floating, feelgood, pseudo-intellectual spirituality, Karen Armstrong.

Writing in the Guardian (obviously) Armstrong wants us to believe that we have much to learn from the degraded religious sensibility of the late Middle Ages, and (unlike, say, Martin Luther) she is prepared to take at face value contemporary theological expositions of its deep sacred significance.

Far from being an unfortunate eruption of popular religion... the cult of relics was in fact a serious attempt to explore the full dimensions of our humanity; surprisingly, it has much to teach us today.

As usual, Armstrong disregards and undervalues modern rational, evidence-based modes of thought, preferring to genuflect (perhaps literally) in awe at the ineffable wisdom of other times and places. But in fact an "eruption of popular religion", unfortunate or otherwise, was exactly what the cult of relics originally was. It emerged spontaneously some time during the late Roman empire. Authorities both temporal and ecclesiastical acted rapidly to bring the emerging devotion under some kind of control and to give it a theological framework, but the impetus came from the bottom up. (And hang on a minute, Karen, what's so wrong with "popular religion" anyway, you elitist snob?)

For centuries, the official response was ambiguous. Relic-worship was positively encouraged - and lavishly funded by both church and state - but its popular excesses were the subject of concern. Controlling both the supply of relics and the theology of their veneration was seen as vital. It was said (and it may well have been true) that the empress Helen, mother of Constantine, personally travelled to Jerusalem where she found - or was given, more likely - what was claimed to be the True Cross. There's no doubt that by the end of the 4th century bishops and emperors were giving the cult of approved relics there full backing, and by the 8th century it had been officially decreed that every church was to have its own relic.

And so it continued. By the high Middle Ages an elaborate pan-European relic industry had developed. It gave rise to the first international tourist industry, with places like Santiago de Compostela in Spain and Canterbury in England becoming rich off the backs of their saintly associations. The tomb of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral makes a particularly interesting case study. He was not (like Santiago's St James) a New Testament apostle, and the fact that he died on the orders of King Henry II might have made him seem a subversive figure. Yet his cult was encouraged - in an act of contrition - by the very king who had had him murdered. He might have remained a local hero, yet thanks to a stunningly successful international marketing campaign (which included sending small pieces of the saint's body to carefully-selected rulers and churches throughout Europe) Canterbury was soon the 4th most important pilgrimage site in Europe.

That was the official cult of relics, characterised by elaborate gilded containers of the sort on show in London, grand chapels built to house them, lavish donations from the rich and powerful. Armstrong, typically, says of the latter that "the profane wealth of an oppressive aristocracy was redeemed in the exquisitely crafted golden reliquaries and transferred from the rich to the realm of the sacred." Of course, rulers were partly demonstrating their piety; but they were also showing off their wealth in a socially approved manner. Some amassed vast collections of sanctified bones. Notable examples were the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, the French king Louis IX (who spent over a quarter of his country's annual income acquiring the supposed Crown of Thorns) and, in the early 16th century, Frederick of Saxony whose holy hoard eventually ran to more than 19,000 relics. It seems unlikely that Frederick's motivation was entirely religious - especially when you consider that his collection really took off when a wealthy cardinal in a neighbouring state began building up a rival relic museum.

All this magnificence served to encourage popular devotion to the saints, but it also (and just as importantly) served to channel and contain it. The bones themselves were generally not visible: what the pilgrim saw were gilded, bejewelled containers, stained glass windows, soaring Gothic arches. The relics might have been at the centre of this theatre of devotion, but they were, in most cases, hidden from profane eyes. The remains themselves were, largely, the preserve of the priestly elite.

Armstrong has it exactly wrong when she writes that

...the relic forced pilgrims to come literally face to face with their mortality. They had to overcome their natural revulsion for a corpse by kissing the relic, pushing themselves into a new realisation: because humanity was divine, even dead flesh, redolent of our ultimate defeat and corruption, could become pregnant with sacred power.

What forced people in the Middle Ages to come "literally face to face with their mortality" was the pervasiveness of death itself - death by disease, death by violence, death by starvation, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in fact. Kissing a bejewelled box reputed to contain a phial of Christ's blood or the fingerbone of an apostle was about meeting the divine, gaining spiritual credit (there was a close connection between relics and the trade in indulgences that so infuriated Martin Luther), praying for divine or hoping for a miracle. Only in a limited sense, if at all, was it about contemplating mortality.

The elaboration of the medieval cult was partly about controlling access and reinforcing both spiritual and temporal power; and it was partly about maintaining theological orthodoxy. It existed in tension with popular devotion, which was more immediate and animistic, never far from superstition and magical thinking. Theologians worried about the danger of relic-veneration tending towards idolatry. Some also worried about the proliferation of fake relics - the exploitation of the gullible satirised in the figure of Chaucer's Pardoner, as even the soppy-minded Karen Armstrong has noticed.

Yet she's able to write romantic guff like this:

Medieval pilgrims did not question a relic's authenticity as we would today, because they had actually felt the martyr's powerful presence for themselves. ...

Medieval pilgrims had not yet lost the art of participating in the "play" of ritual, which required them to behave as if something were the case, an imaginative exercise that propelled them into new vision. ..Most of us have lost this skill; indeed, since the Reformation the very word "ritual" has been capable of inspiring distaste. But the contradictions in the relic cult familiarised even the simplest pilgrim with the essentially paradoxical nature of religious thought.

I'm tempted to ask: how can she possibly know? How many medieval peasants has she actually interviewed?

[Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum] Read the rest of this article

Chris Patten: "terrified of doubt"

Here's a rather strange statement by Chris Patten:

It makes people think I'm peculiar and lack intellectual fibres because I don't have any doubts about my faith, but I'd be terrified to have doubts.

Now, I have some sympathy with Patten's frustration. There is nothing intellectually sophisticated about atheism, and it is wrong and more than a little smug of some atheists to pretend that there is - by calling themselves "brights", for example. Committed atheists may be over-represented at the top end of the IQ spectrum, but so are committed believers. If anything, the mental flexibility required to be a serious religious believer in the modern scientific, secular-focused world is much greater than that needed to justify atheism. And I'm not just talking about subtle liberal quasi-believers who write for the Guardian. The world is not short of highly intelligent, if staggeringly blinkered, creationists, who are well aware of the strength of evidence for evolution and who, far from ignoring it, are convinced that they can easily refute it. The ingenuity of such people is as much a product of their intelligence as it is of their commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible.

Being an atheist, by contrast, really is a doddle. All it requires is to accept the scientific understanding of the world at face value. To a first approximation, the universe appears to be a material place. There are no obviously supernatural events occurring on a regular basis. In former centuries, when the prevailing interpretation of the world was a religious one, to be an atheist required both courage and intellectual independence - for it seemed plain that the complex and ordered cosmos required a God to set it in being. When William Paley combined the "design" of an eye to the design of a watch he was making a common-sense argument. It was Darwin who was the revolutionary. When Richard Dawkins sets out the argument for natural selection being true, he is Paley's heir more than he is Darwin's, using logic, rhetoric and appeals to common sense to support a proposition that has the whole weight of informed opinion on its side.

Where Chris Patten comes unstuck is in his admission that he'd "be terrified to have doubts". If he really is too scared to confront the arguments against his faith, then he does indeed lack "intellectual fibres" - or at least intellectual moral fibres. It seems to me that being too terrified to confront possible doubts is not a sound basis for religious faith. What is he afraid of, that he might find the doubt all too plausible? It sounds almost like an admission of tacit atheism: "I don't want to go there, just in case I discover something I don't like, or can't easily dismiss. So I'll just sit here in my religious comfort-zone and stick my fingers in my ears." It's not an intelligent remark for any publicly prominent believer to make, though it is, perhaps, an honest one. Read the rest of this article

Christianity for Muggles

It is during Holy Week that Christianity most closely resembles an ancient pagan mystery cult. The teachings associated with Jesus Christ, the parables and injunctions to neighbourly love, largely give way to a drama of sacrifice and redemption, as his final days on earth, violent atoning death and triumphant (though obscure) resurrection are ritually re-enacted in story and music. More than a commemoration of supposed events in Jerusalem not quite two thousand years ago, the days leading up to Easter present an intensely mythic lesson about the human condition which followers of Osiris, Dionysus, Mithras or Attis would have recognised - even if they would have considered an itinerant Jewish preacher, executed as a troublemaker by the Roman authorities, an unworthy focus for the great cosmic drama.

That may have been the masterstroke, of course. As EM Butler put it in The Myth of the Magus, the Passion narrative's "humanising of what in the legends of Osiris and Dionysus had been divine mysteries made a reality of the sacrifice which staggered the whole world". The Christian version of the story survived because it was located in history, because it attached itself to a real person - and so it could be claimed that the narrative was not just mythically or psychologically true, it was also factually true. These events actually happened. But did they? Is the similarity between the myths of antiquity and the recorded facts of Jesus' life and death not just a little too convenient, a little too coincidental? Which came first, the man Jesus or the incarnate Christ - and what relationship do they actually have with each other?


A book drops through the letterbox, with the publicity-friendly title Jesus Potter Harry Christ, that attempts to tackle such questions. The title, and the mildly blasphemous cover image, suggest a fairly light-hearted examination of apparent parallels between the boy wizard and the Son of God; and that is indeed how it begins and ends. The parallels are obvious enough, despite the well-known objection to the novels by some fundamentalist Christians, and at least to some extent deliberate. Derek Murphy enumerates them: Harry, half-magic, half-Muggle (but is he both fully wizard and fully Muggle, as Jesus was fully man and fully God?), is rescued from danger at birth and brought up in secret, performs miracles, struggles with the Dark Lord, appears to die in a final battle but emerges triumphant. And so on.

Some of the parallels are worked out in great detail - but as a sceptic quoted by Murphy rightly says, much of the Potter-Christ similarity can be put down to Harry "following a standard sacrificial hero archetype". That rather begs the question, though. Harry Potter is no more Jesus than Luke Skywalker is, or Doctor Who - which is to say, quite a lot. The basic Jesus storyline is so fundamental to Western culture that, believer or atheist, it is impossible to ignore. It has profoundly influenced the very concept of what a story looks like. On the other hand (and despite an attempt by Murphy in his conclusion to promote Harry Potter as "a much more humane, in depth, vibrant character than the Jesus of the gospels") the young wizard is destined to remain squarely within the realm of literature and film. There will be no Potteranity (or Harry Krishnaism) any time soon.

It is the reverse contention that is more intriguing - not Potter as Christ, but Christ as Potter - and it is this which occupies most of the book. In fact, Murphy says little about Harry Potter after beyond the first chapter of an almost 500 page volume, and the comparison seems to be not much more than a convenient peg on which to hang a detailed discussion of the origins of Christianity. Murphy's contention, briefly, is that the Jesus worshipped by Christians is a fictional character, who never existed (or if he did exist, is not relevant); and that Christianity is indeed a pagan mystery religion whose saviour-god has been mistaken for a real person. "The Jesus of the early Christian communities," he writes, "rather than a recently deceased historical person, was primarily a literary construct."

This isn't just a case of consigning Jesus to a notional archetype of "dying and rising" gods: the New Testament writings, Murphy tells us, are coded with precise astrological symbolism that reflect now largely forgotten, but once widespread, ideas. All this is worked out at some length, and with varying degrees of plausibility. In Murphy's account, the "heretical" Gnostic versions of early Christianity, in which Jesus appeared as a mystical and usually disembodied source of arcane knowledge, were not late elaborations but rather preserved the original (but mthological) Christ-figure from which the "historical" rabbi-messiah was derived. He contends that the story of the earthly Jesus originally represented the exoteric, first-stage presentation of early Christian doctrine - a mere prelude to "higher" teachings in which initiates were presented with a more obviously unhistorical Christ. In some Christian communities, the esoteric teaching was neglected or lost; but their attachment to an imagined history gave them the edge. Their religion was less elitist, better organised and inspired more fervent devotion (including acts of martyrdom). It survived and grew, and so all we are left with today is a Christianity for Muggles.

Murphy also shows convincingly that the distinction between Judaism and paganism is not as absolute as generally supposed, that there was in the Roman world a great interplay between the two (as seen, for example, in concepts such as the Logos), and suggests that the figure of Jesus represented a convenient synthesis.

Such ideas are far from new. A hundred years ago, indeed, the theme was already so hackneyed that James Joyce (in Ulysses) could include Was Jesus a Sun-myth? among the Twelve Worst Books Ever Written. I've already referred to The Myth of the Magus (overlooked by Murphy) which places Jesus in a continuum of wizard-heroes - some historical, some mythical, some fictional - stretching from Zoroaster to Madam Blavatsky. The names of James Frazer and Joseph Campbell, among others, crop up frequently in this book - as do those of more recent speculative writers. Murphy demonstrates, however, that doubts about the historical reality of Jesus can be traced very early, even within the lifetime of the first apostles. The similarities between the Jesus story and those of pagan gods were remarked on by ancient writers, pagan and Christian, and adduced as evidence both for and against the truth of the new religion. Yet as Murphy admits, in this secular era the area remains academically suspect, even taboo - hence the continuing quest for the "historical Jesus".

This is indeed a paradox.

Edward Gibbon wrote, with typical irony, that "By the wise dispensation of Providence a mysterious veil was cast over the infancy of the church". That's putting it politely. The fact is that we know nothing whatever about either Jesus himself or about how the religion we all recognise as Christianity emerged from out the seething cauldron of myth, history and ideas. There is only guesswork. Jesus is not a historical figure like Julius Caesar, about whom some things are indeed known and others can be plausibly surmised; or even like Paul, whose personality and voice survive powerfully in the New Testament epistles. I'll repeat. When it comes to Jesus WE KNOW NOTHING.

That's not to say that a huge amount of evidence hasn't survived that appears to cast light on Christian origins, though in reality the light it casts is fragmented as though refracted through a myriad prisms. There are the canonical writings of the New Testament, of course, which at least look like historical documents of some recognisable kind, even though there aren't. There are brief, not terribly enlightening allusions in Josephus and Tacitus that seem to anchor Jesus in history. There are Gnostic and other apocryphal writings that were never accepted by what became orthodox Christianity, but which reflect other ways of interpreting who and what Jesus was. There are rumours and traditions, referred to in the writings of early church fathers. There is some highly disputed archaeology. But there is nothing which can be pointed to with certainty as proving either the existence or the actual teaching of Jesus Christ.

Instead, what all this wealth of contradictory material provides is an opportunity for endless discussion and debate. We may know nothing, but we can imagine anything, and can quote chapter and verse to make that anything sound plausible. The current tendency is to locate the historical Jesus in the context 1st century Palestine, emphasising his Judaism and the continuity between his teaching and earlier Jewish thought. It's possible to create thereby a plausible account of an itinerant preacher such as an original Jesus must have been. But - as Murphy points out in one of the strongest passages of the book - this can only be done by jettisoning most of the theology and mythology in which the figure Jesus comes wrapped, already in the earliest stratum of Christian literature. In other words, it requires a backwards logic: the starting point is the assumption of the very thing which the historian sets out to prove, which is that there is a plausible human Jesus to be found underneath all the theological accretions. But what if there isn't?

The point is not that there was no original Jesus "behind" the myth. (Murphy's case that there might not have been is ultimately rather weak, I think, but his thesis does not in fact depend on the non-existence of Jesus the man.) The point is rather that the original Jesus is irrecoverable, and in any case is not the Jesus that Christians actually worship. Who (if anyone) inspired the paradoxical teacher of the Synoptic Gospels, the incarnate Logos of St John and the personal saviour of St Paul is a fascinating but ultimately unanswerable question. The Jesus of faith is a figure of literature and myth, who answers powerful human needs, but who has no existence outside of the Christian tradition that reveres him.

I would argue that there remains strong evidence that a real man stands behind the mythologised figure of Jesus Christ - a human teacher who was believed by many to be the promised Jewish messiah. I would point, for example, to the Ebionites, a Palestinian sect who for centuries retained their Jewish observances and who did not (it appears) believe that Jesus was God Incarnate or hold other "pagan" beliefs about him. Murphy doesn't mention them. It is, though, striking just how quickly the personality of Jesus was mythologised. Paul - whose letters are the earliest surviving Christian literature, older than the gospels - shows very little interest in the events of Jesus' life, or even awareness of them. Yet his theology is already fully formed. It is almost as though Christianity came first, Jesus himself being something of an afterthought.

Jesus Potter, Harry Christ - which I'd certainly recommend though it's not entirely error-free and some of the astrological claims strike me as a bit forced - doesn't seem to be available in Britain at the moment, but you can order it through Amazon USA. In addition, large parts of it are available for free download on the book's dedicated website. It's controversial, but far from outrageous, and full of fascinating, insufficiently disseminated information.
Read the rest of this article

Does God care about animals?

It isn't quite April 1st yet, so I suppose this must be true.

New Humanist reports that PETA, the US animal rights group, is objecting to a new "inclusive language" version of the Bible, on the grounds that the language isn't quite inclusive enough. The translators' politically correct agenda extends only to human beings, you see: animals are routinely afforded the pronoun "it". I find it hard to think of a more inclusive pronoun than "it", personally - it's not as though creatures are assumed to be male - but PETA nevertheless finds it rather undignified. Animals are people too - a spokesman is quoted as claiming that the pronoun "denies them something" and that "God cares about animals". "He or she" would have been both inclusive and respectful of the unique personality of each of God's creatures, from the elephant down to the humblest flea. We're not told how the translators should tackle the pronounisation of hermaphrodites, such as earthworms.

This is all a trifle odd. The strongest argument in favour of inclusive language, where human beings are concerned, is that the old grammatical principle that "the male embraces the female" is offensive to women. In other words, that many women are offended by it. Are animals offended by being called "it"? Are they even aware of such nuances of language? And if not, why should it matter?

As for God caring about animals, the evidence for this in the Bible would seem ambiguous at best. Yes, the Lord did instruct Noah to rescue two animals of every kind (rather more of the edible ones) and preserve them from the Flood. But the cramped conditions of the Ark would scarcely answer to modern animal welfare standards - and with only one breeding pair of each species I worry about the health of the genepool. And what of all the myriads of other creatures, those not lucky enough to be selected by Noah? God was quite happy to drown them all for the sins of humanity, it would seem. Perhaps he cares more about fish.

In the Old Testament, God's concern for animals seems to revolve mainly around their suitability for eating and sacrifice. The Bible records, usually without adverse comment, several instances of what looks like casual cruelty. In Numbers, Balaam beats his ass (which does, however, answer back). A little later, in Judges, Samson catches 300 foxes, ties their tails together and sets them on fire, just to frighten the Philistines.


And God himself takes revenge on the serpent that tempted Eve: "On thy belly shall thy go, and dust thy shall eat all the days of thy life". He might, though, be said to have a soft spot for frogs and locusts, which he sent to plague the Egyptians. And, as Alexander Waugh noted in his eccentric biography of the deity, God does have at least two pets, Leviathan and Behemoth. Sadly, though, "When God has finished playing with them his intention is to crush their heads and feed their flesh to the wild beasts of the wilderness". Ouch.

The New Testament starts off well, with Jesus talking warmly about the birds of the air and claiming that not one sparrow falls to the ground without God being aware of it. But before long he is casting demons, with cavalier disdain, into an entire herd of quite blameless pigs. Not, I would think, quite the behaviour PETA would want to encourage. Read the rest of this article

Are Christians right to be Concerned?

There's no doubt what a persecuted Christian looks like. She looks like Aasia Bibi, the Pakistani mother who has been languishing in jail for 18 months after an altercation with neighbours led to her being accused of making uncomplimentary remarks about the prophet Mohammed, and who is now under sentence of death. The country's president would like to pardon her, but for the moment his hands are tied while fundamentalist mobs take to the streets demanding her execution. Indeed, were she to be released tomorrow it is likely that their bloodlust would soon be satisfied.

Her case is extreme, but far from being unprecedented. In many countries whose leaders cleave to the faith of Islam Christians labour under civil disabilities or more informal but pervasive types of discrimination. Or they may be tolerated so long as they do not try to fulfil the New Testament commandment to spread the gospet. And there are other countries, such as China and Russia, where Christians (and other religious people) who do not belong to particular state-sanctioned churches are looked upon by the authorities with considerable suspicion.

A campaign launched today seeks to convince us that British Christians are in a similar plight to that of Aasia Bibi. Backed by no less a Christian than Lord Carey, once the Archbishop of Canterbury (technically the most senior commoner in the land), Christian Concern have produced a pamphlet detailing alleged examples of "Christianophobia", most of which seem to have been culled from the pages of the Daily Mail. You may be familiar with the cases of Nadia Eweida, the British Airways check-in clerk who was banned from wearing a cross on duty, or Lillian Ladele, the registrar who declined to conduct same-sex civil partnership services. Or the Catholic adoption agencies who closed themselves down rather than submit to equalities legislation. Or the councils who every year think up creative new ways to avoid saying "Christmas". It all adds up to a deliberate attempt to sideline Christianity and oppress Christians, claims Christian Concern. Christians are being made to feel "ashamed", they say.

The main culprit in this wave of persecution is a conspiracy of liberal, politically-correct public employees, who are imagined as both actively engaged in a process of de-Christianisation in the service of an atheistic human-rights agenda, and craven, terrified of minority (especially Muslim and gay-rights) special interest groups. Either they are using the banner of diversity cynically as an opportunity to undermine the traditional British way of life, or they are gripped by a self-hatred and multiculturalist dogma that renders them powerless to defend the national culture. Or both.

The notion that Christians are suffering widespread persecution in Britain is paradoxical. There are, after all, thousands of Christian schools. Every hospital and regiment has its Christian chaplains. There are 26 Anglican bishops in the House of Lords. Most contributors to Thought for the Day, even now, are Christian. The uncritical enthusiasm with which the BBC - usually singled out as a hotbed of liberal anti-Christian political correctness - reported on the Pope's recent visit was striking.

But then the whole basis of Christian Concern is a paradox. On the one hand, they claim for Christians a minority status, which they need in order to prove that they are being discriminated against. At times, they seem to be advocating a new sort of identity politics, in which Christians (or just fundamentalist evangelical Christians) as a self-designated minority group demand rights and special privileges. The invention of the term "Christianophobia" (or sometimes "Christophobia" - they haven't quite worked out what to call it) speaks to this embrace of grievance culture. The analogy with "Islamophobia", coined as part of an Islamist political project to conflate valid questioning of religious attitudes with racism, is entirely deliberate.

And indeed, unless you believe the Census returns, Christians - committed, religiously active Christians - are a minority in Britain, though they remain comfortably the largest and most publicly prominent of our religious minorities. And Christian Concern represents only a minority of this minority. A glance at their website reveals a particular set of obsessions - abortion, opposition to gay rights, the supposed decline of marriage, the right to proselytise at work - that are clearly not those of the majority of Christians, let alone of society as a whole. Their main, unacknowledged struggle seems to be for control of British Christianity. In this, as in their authoritarian and somewhat paranoid outlook, they strangely resemble Islamists. And of course their call for more overt religiosity in public life runs counter to the long-standing British reluctance to talk too much about God.

On the other hand, Christian Concern claim to represent the historic national culture of the majority. They appear, indeed, to claim exclusive ownership of large parts of our national life, like Christmas, for their narrow brand of Christianity. And so when they (though not the religiously apathetic or tacitly humanist majority of their fellow-citizens) are inconvenienced or merely annoyed by some manifestation of political correctness, they assert that the whole country is the victim of anti-Christian persecution. Not only do they believe that society as a whole should reflect their particular set of prejudices, they seem genuinely confused when it does not. And angry: in some ways Christian Concern resembles the English Defence League at prayer. There is, for example, a section of their website devoted to warning about the threat of Islam.

Christian Concern seem to think that persecution is just another word for not being in charge. Read the rest of this article

Anglicans seen consorting with Buddhists on Songs of Praise

This is a guest post by Julian Mann

If you want to see what mainstream establishment religion looks like, then watch the recent edition of the BBC's Song of Praise, rather patronisingly entitled Surprising Sheffield.

Not even the BBC can suppress the Nicene credal theology expressed by the Christian hymnody Songs of Praise necessarily features. But in this edition showcasing multi-faith Sheffield the inescapable aspects of Nicene Christianity were well drowned out by politically-correct religiosity and complacent sentimentality.

Aled Jones’ cheery voiceover described an inter-faith meditation group meeting at Sheffield Cathedral. When this collaboration between the Cathedral and local Buddhists came to light around eight years ago, the then Diocesan Evangelical Network raised objections and I debated with a Cathedral cleric on BBC Radio Sheffield. Our group argued that such a meditation group in the Cathedral involving Buddhists undermined Biblical and indeed Anglican teaching regarding the supremacy and uniqueness of Christ.

But there it was, flattered and flaunted on Songs of Praise.

At least, you know where you are with Nicene Christianity. You can argue with it and if you are unpersuaded in a Christian-influenced democracy, you are free to reject it. This new politically-correct establishment religion is much more slippery.

If you criticise it, you can be accused of undermining good community relations and even public order in a multi-cultural society. But it needs to be criticised if we are to value free and rigorous intellectual enquiry in our country. Politically-correct religion is incoherent. Buddhism and Nicene Christianity cannot both be correct.

Either, to quote the Nicene Creed, there is ‘one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible’ or there is not.

Either there is ‘one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God’ or there is not.

Freedom of speech and intellectual enquiry has far more to worry about from this new PC establishment religion than from counter-cultural Christianity.

No wonder none of the pro-active evangelism and church planting being done by orthodox Christians in Sheffield received the Aled Jones' treatment.

The Heresiarch adds:

The latest issue of Private Eye reports on recent comings and goings at the BBC's religion department, including at Songs of Praise. It mentions the "2008 head-hunted recruitment of Tommy Nagra" as the programme's editor:

Nagra's staggering lack of knowledge of music, Christianity, TV and the meaning of the word "Emeritus" became such an embarrassment that [Aaqil] Ahmed [Head of Religion] had to appoint yet another executive to help him out. This new "series editor" was David Taviner, barely more knowledgeable than Nagra, but an evangelical Christian. Nagra has since been given the grand new title of Head of Religion and Ethics TV.

(The "emeritus" reference is to a notorious alleged incident in which Nagra spotted a caption reading "Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu" and supposedly exclaimed "I didn't know Desmond was his middle name".)

So it seems that the person ultimately responsible for this latest multi-faith horror is in fact an evangelical Christian. Just shows how far the rot has spread, I suppose... Read the rest of this article