Christianity

In his column last week, Rod Liddle suggested that an alleged fatwa by a Saudi Arabian cleric had said it was permissible to eat one’s wife when suffering from ‘severe hunger’ gave him (Rod) the go-ahead to eat his own wife. Not so, surely. In the Christian religion and, indeed, the secular law of the United Kingdom, one can have only one wife at a time. If one has only one wife, it would be quite wrong to eat her. Under Islam, one can have up to four. Obviously this generous provision creates ‘spares’. Until recently, British marriage law was hidebound by tradition, but, before the last election, Parliament voted to abolish the previously general understanding that marriage has to be between a man and a woman.

Speaking on the Today programme on Monday, Sir David Attenborough, who wants a global agreement to control carbon emissions, pointed out that ‘Never in the history of humanity have all the people of the world got together to deal with a particular problem and agreed what the solution could be. Never, ever, ever.’ He is right. But he seemed to defy the logic of his own observation. They never have. Probably, since the truth is best arrived at through disagreement, they never should. The key point is that they never will. So it is a waste of time to try. When someone commits suicide, those close to that person naturally reproach themselves. In politics, and similarly contested areas of life, people reproach others too.

Yusuf, when I last saw him, was still smiling, a middle-aged man with the greying pony-tail of a rock roadie. He described himself as a feminist: he met his wife through work, where, he told me proudly, she was a better computer engineer than he. Yusuf had the stoop of a tall man who’d spent most of his life under ceilings too low for him, and the corrugated iron hut his family now called home was no exception. So we sat cross-legged on the floor, while I asked him about religious tensions in a southern Turkish refugee camp. 'If you want to know, I’m an atheist. I mean, in Damascus, my friends all were - it’s not like you’re living in a village, your grandfather checking you’re in mosque. I don’t believe in any of it. But I never shouted about it.

Usama Hasan, an imam attached to the Quilliam Foundation, argues in the Times that Islam is steadily adapting to modernity. It has been doing so since the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire launched certain reforms. Islam should not be judged by a few marginal hiccups in this process. ‘Isis follows a fundamentalist and selective reading of scripture which is ahistorical and heretical. They are linked to Islam and the Koran in the way the Ku Klux Klan and Anders Breivik are linked to Christianity and the Bible.’ This is not helpful. For extremely reactionary Christians have not gained power in a large proportion of the traditionally Christian world.

This April, Michael Gove wrote in The Spectator: 'To call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal.' Certainly, the titters it provoked in the more left-wing corners of Twitter rather proved his point (a white man? complaining of prejudice?). On faith, as in everything else, Britain today erodes into fragments, small landscapes inhabited by the mutually deaf. I carry no brief for the man: my instinctive sympathy with his school reforms is matched only by my frustration with what Ian Leslie, in a profile published this week, calls the temperament by which Gove 'is drawn irresistibly to the theatre of battle'. But even his greatest enemies don't deny that Gove is a man of conviction. (Indeed, many use it as an insult).

On Tuesday, Pope Francis set foot in the United States for the first time in his life. His plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where American presidents depart and arrive on Air Force One. But, according to a Spanish journalist on the papal plane, this was not how Francis had wanted to arrive. He would have preferred to cross over from Tijuana, the grubby Mexican city menaced by drug gangs from which countless migrants slip across the border into California. In other words, if the report is true, the Pope wished to turn his arrival into a political gesture, aligning himself with America’s 11.

Mitres off to the Archbishop of Canterbury for inviting 'a family or two' of refugees into his home. Well, not specifically into his home but into a four-bedroom cottage that sits in the grounds of Lambeth Palace. Opening up your second home to refugees is becoming quite fashionable among people who have more houses than they have hats or, indeed, mitres. Bob Geldof has offered refugees use of his Kent home as well as his London flat. The Pope has instructed that Vatican lodgings should be made available to a few families. This refugee crisis is proving easier to solve than we first thought. By my quick calculation, that's possibly up to 10 families already fixed up. Just another two hundred thousand to go.

‘I know our Lord told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,’ muttered a colleague after a waspish College meeting; ‘but, being busy men, some of us find it advisable to specialise.’ I detected that approach in Matthew Parris’s contention, in The Spectator last week, that Christianity, particularly the Gospels, cannot help us prioritise when faced with the vast, terrible refugee crisis. We all want to help, he said, but the teachings of Jesus don’t tell us how to do it. All right: much popular reaction, Christian included, has been little more than anguished arm-waving. But soundbites are not the real clue. What counts is action.