Religion

The Church of England’s relationship with state education seems simple enough. Its schools have been a major source of strength, significantly slowing its rate of decline over the past few decades. Many congregations have been swelled by parents seeking a better-than-average state education for their offspring. From an Anglican point of view, what’s not to like?  Well, this: selection by church attendance is unpopular with those who do not benefit, giving the Church an image problem with its non-members. This makes some of its members, including me, uneasy. Also, the integrity of church attendance is in doubt, in parishes near a popular school. The cliché of the pushy parents faking their piety is partly true, and it affects the meaning of contemporary churchgoing.

Phyllis Schlafly could have been America’s number one feminist. She graduated from good universities, wrote important books on serious topics, was an outspoken orator and political organiser, didn’t let her life be defined by her husband’s career, and stood up to bitter abuse from her opponents. In reality, however, she was America’s leading anti-feminist. Her death this week, at the age of 92, marks the passing of an organisational and publicity genius who did all she could to fight against the spirit of the age. When passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution seemed imminent and inevitable in the mid-1970s, she created a democratic grassroots pressure group, ‘StopERA’, that managed to kill it once and for all.

Christians continue to be slaughtered in the Middle East. But as reports of genocidal atrocities mount up, our governments have found a new reason to sit on their hands. Christians, the theory goes, don't have it as bad as the Yazidis. As 'people of the book’, Christians enjoy privileged status. Rather than suffering the full extent of Islamic State's depravities, they can pay a tax (Jizya) in return for protection. It sounds credible and contains just enough theology to bamboozle the secular population of the international community. Here's the Office of the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights: 'While Christian communities still living in Daesh controlled territories live difficult and often precarious existences...

Those who want to revive grammar schools are accused of ‘bring backery’ — the unthinking idea that the past was better. But many of their accusers suffer from the rigid mindset of which they complain. They say that grammar schools ‘condemned most children to failure at the age of 11’, and that, even at their peak, grammars catered for less than 20 per cent of the school population. Why assume that the return of grammars must re-create either of these things? Grammar schools grew up, historically, in different ways and at different times. Then, in the mid‑20th-century mania for uniformity, they were standardised and, in the later 20th-century mania for comprehensives, almost completely abolished.

Let’s say that a man kills a few people at random in your neighbourhood – on the street in broad daylight. Is it better or worse if he justifies his killing spree as part of a holy crusade? In other words, which is worse – terrorism or meaningless psychotic violence? I am aware that this is something I perhaps should not admit, but when reports emerge of such attacks, I sometimes catch myself hoping that it is terrorism, not just meaningless madness. Maybe the journalist in me wants a chunkier story, linked up to world events. But the main motive is wider, I think: we can view the evil of terrorism as theoretically curable – by replacing religious extremism with better ideas. This is not so with insanity, which makes it even more terrifying than terrorism.

Andrea Leadsom presumably considers her aggressive pride in her maternity to be something to do with her Christian faith. To quote her heroine (who now seems wonderfully subtle): No, no, no. Pride in procreation is dull, banal, pagan stuff, not completely unrelated to fascism. Christians ought to steer clear of it. Did Jesus or St Paul lack a stake in the future by virtue of failing to breed? Christianity broke with the Jewish and pagan assumption that having a big family is essential to a fully meaningful and fulfilling life. It said that the community of the church was more important, and in this community the childless, including dedicated virgins, were seen as at least as valuable as family types.