Religion

There is a new series of BBC Radio 3’s discussion programme ‘Belief’. Some readers may be interested in this episode in which I am interviewed by Joan Bakewell. It was recorded before Christmas and went out a few days ago. In any case, I much recommend the other programmes in the series, particularly those with Ian McEwan and Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Writing in the 23 December 1966 edition of The Spectator, Auberon Waugh considers the role of Christianity, in all its forms, in an English Christmas. It’s not hard to see why most grown-ups detest Christmas nowadays. It is expensive and tawdry, a time for self-deception and false sentiment. It is a children’s feast, which is why we all pretend to be children and show gratitude for unwelcome presents and rot our fragile insides with poisonous green crystallised fruit. To crown all the meretricious jollity and make-believe, an enormous number of grown-up Englishmen go to church. This has become as much part of Christmas as the plum pudding, and I think

I’d just like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our heir to the throne, Prince Charles, for, as he put it, spending ‘twenty years’ trying to ‘build bridges between Islam and Christianity and (to) dispel ignorance and misunderstanding.’ Sadly, he has concluded that this noble endeavour was in vain and that Christians are being persecuted right, left and centre (or indeed wherever they are unfortunate enough to live in Muslim countries). Still, how kind of him to have tried. The thought of Prince Charles dispelling ignorance on any topic, let alone this one, is a captivating one. He seems to have gone about this particular

The Silence of Our Friends, my Amazon Singles ebook about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, is published today. I know I’ve written several posts on this subject recently, so I promise to stop, so long as everyone buys the book. Otherwise I won’t. Ever. It’s a subject that has become ever more urgent this year with violence against Christians in Syria, where Islamists have been engaged in ‘religious cleansing’, and in Egypt, which saw the worst anti-Christian violence in centuries. Over the weekend the leading Catholic in Iraq, Patriarch Louis Sako, was in Rome where he lamented the west’s apathy, after a decade in which 1,000 Iraqi

Further to yesterday’s post on Britain’s apathy about Christian persecution, the main question people asked in response was: what can Britain do, without military means? Taking aside that our military power helped to bring about persecution in Iraq and almost certainly would have done in Syria had this government got its way, there are lots of ways you can peacefully influence a country’s politics, including financial and moral pressure. That is what Saudi Arabia does, after all. The Organisation Islamic Co-operation (OIC), for example, a bloc of 57 Muslim countries dominated by the Saudis, has just released the latest edition of its annual ‘Islamophobia report’. It states that in the

There was an excellent Radio 4 documentary on yesterday in which Sarfraz Manzoor interviewed a group of people you don’t hear much about – ex-Muslims. Like all good radio documentaries, it left me wanting to know more about the individuals involved, feeling more confused about the world, and with mixed feelings too. On the one hand I can understand that Dover Beach sadness of people falling away from religion, and why the parents of those interviewed would feel devastated by that loss. On the other hand, the ex-Muslims are right. They’re right to question the beliefs they were brought up with, and they’re right to see the inconsistencies and those

Liberals are almost as likely to flee diversity as conservatives, according to new research by Prof Eric Kaufmann for Demos. Some 61 per cent of white people who were ‘very comfortable’ with mixed marriages (the best indicator of views on race) moved to whiter areas during the period, compared to 64 per cent of those who were ‘fairly uncomfortable’. The Sunday Times called it ‘polite white flight’. The tendency of white liberals not to practise the diversity they preach dates back to the 1960s at least, and offends people who rightly point out that their reasons for moving are to do with space, schools, housing and a number of other

The Church of England is doomed, Lord Carey has said, warning that Anglicanism is just ‘one generation away from extinction’. To be fair people have been saying this for a long time; in the mid-19th century the Church decided to make a survey of churchgoing, and were stunned to find out that only a quarter of people in England attended Anglican services and a similar number to non-Conformist services. Half the population wasn’t going at all. Now you’d be lucky to get that many at Christmas. The Church faces the same problem as all churches, namely that religious belief continues to decline across Europe, and that those religions that do

Most Coffeehousers are probably profoundly and justifiably cynical about anything masquerading as a consultation exercise in politics, so it might spread a little cheer to see how the Catholic Church goes about it. There’s been a surprising fuss – BBC news coverage; leader in The Times – about Catholic bishops consulting the laity about matters relating to the family. But although it is indeed quite something for the laity to be asked about anything (their views, mind you, aren’t conclusive, so nothing new there) the manner in which the bishops are doing it is fabulously anachronistic, gloriously uncompromising. To put it in context, the bishops are having what’s known as

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of

It is twenty years since Samuel Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ was first published in Foreign Affairs. On Monday night I took part in a discussion on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves about the article (and the resulting book) which turned oddly nasty. I have always been a qualified admirer of Huntington’s most famous work (‘qualified’ because like most people who have read the book I admire its range and grasp while disagreeing with certain of its conclusions). But broadly admire it or not, it appears to be a difficult work to discuss. This is largely because it suffers the double-bind of being misunderstood by people who have not read it. Nine