Christianity

I read in the Daily Mail that the hunt is on for an Isis terrorist camped out in Calais who is anxious to get into the UK so that he can kill everyone. Perhaps Bob Geldof could put him up in his London flat. Certainly the people at #refugeeswelcome should be agitating to have this chap given his papers immediately – he has important work to do and it must be frustrating sitting in that camp, seeing the white cliffs of Dover beckoning in the distance. Things might get so bad that he is forced to blow himself up in France. But just one Isis terrorist? You sure ‘bout that? Meanwhile, there are queues of asylum seekers at a German church, all of them wishing to embrace Christianity so as to ease their passage into the west.

The migrant crisis raises the largest questions about our basic public creed, our ideology, secular humanism. Normally we pay little attention to this creed. Yes, yes, we affirm the ideal of universal human flourishing, the equal worth of all human beings, human rights. But do we believe it? This crisis forces us to wonder. As Matthew Parris says here this week, we simply do not know what our moral obligations are in relation to these people. Should we love our neighbour as ourself, and rush off to help them? How can we reconcile our universal humanism with the need to prioritise the welfare of our own tribe? Isn’t Western morality just too demanding? Its excessive demands on us leave us without a sensible, moderate, realistic sense of our moral duty.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Theo Hobson debate the role Christianity in the migrant crisis" startat=1383] Listen [/audioplayer]Proximity shouldn’t make a difference — should it? We were on a beach on the European side of the Mediterranean, it was a beautiful late August day, and I felt so happy. The sea was fresh, the sky was clear and a stiff breeze was whipping white horses out past the headland. ‘Rough weather for migrants,’ I thought, then checked myself. What an awful thing to think.

In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation should be used to punish teachers who hold ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality and perhaps divest themselves of these views to their pupils. I assume this could mean simply reading out bits of the Bible — that pungent little verse in Leviticus, perhaps, with its reference to ‘detestable acts’. Or maybe he would be OK reading out bits from Leviticus if he then made it clear that the Levite priests, and God Himself, were totally wrong on this issue and that homosexuality is absolutely lovely. But never mind the Levites.

You know, when gay marriage legislation was going through parliament and Christian campaigners were warning about the possibility that those with a conscientious objection to gay marriage would find themselves at a disadvantage in public life - especially teachers - I honestly thought that it would take some time to happen. You might have some nutty secularist calling out a teacher who stubbornly refused to teach the parity of gay and straight marriage to children, but outside the Liberal Democrats, I couldn't really see persecution ahead, other than for marriage registrars who would, unfortunately, just have to lump their conscientious difficulties with marrying same-sex couples. Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Ties that bind Lewis Hamilton was ejected from the royal box at Wimbledon for not wearing a tie. Some places he would have been welcome: — In 99 out of 100 of the most expensive restaurants surveyed in 2010. — For four evenings a week on a Cunard cruise (he would need a tie after 6 p.m. on the other three). — Driving a cab in Dubai (ties are no longer compulsory after a customer pulled one driver’s). And some places he wouldn’t: — Visiting Lloyds of London. — Competition days at Knebworth Golf Club (though socks are not usually compulsory). — Bicester Community College (ties compulsory for pupils from September).

One of the finest speeches Benedict XVI ever delivered was about sacred music. It is a small masterpiece, in which Benedict recalls his first encounter with Mozart in the liturgy. ‘When the first notes of the Coronation Mass sounded, Heaven virtually opened and the presence of the Lord was experienced very profoundly,’ he said. Benedict robustly defended the performance of the work of great composers at Mass, which he insisted was necessary for the fulfilment of the Second Vatican Council’s wish that ‘the patrimony of sacred music [is] preserved and developed with great care’. Then he asked: what is music? He identified three places from which it flowed.

The question is, says the Guardian in a report from San Francisco, whether God is actually gay, what with the gay marriage movement being on such a roll. The US Supreme Court majority ruling that marriage between same-sex couples is a constitutional right usefully coincided with a similar ruling on gay marriage in Mexico, which makes a nice change, I expect, from worrying about the narcotics-related homicide rate. In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull says it's bound to happen there. Quite a coup, this, for the social media companies like Facebook, Apple and Google who've been campaigning for just this outcome.

I’ve just been reading Jonathan Sacks’ excellent new book, Not in God’s Name, which sets out to explain why people kill for religion. Although he explores the theology of the Old Testament, Rabbi Sacks also looks at evolution and evolutionary psychology to explain the unending human tendency to have in-groups and out-groups. This will be familiar to people who have read The Righteous Mind or Big Gods, which the former chief rabbi cites. What’s especially interesting is that he argues that the prevailing ideology of the west – a sort of liberalism that aims at abolishing identity and replacing it with individualism – is actually part of the problem.