Religion

A year ago, a relatively unknown Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope. A few days later he announced he would take the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, because, he said, he had particular concern for the poor. In the 1880s, Pope Leo XIII also drew the attention of his clergy to St Francis’s teachings on poverty. The Spectator approved, and recommended it to Protestants as well as Catholics, but it took issue with the Pope’s argument that the spectacle of rich people joyfully embracing holy poverty would be enough to encourage the poor not to mind being poor.

A friend of mine, quite a distinguished lawyer, takes the view that marriage ceased to make sense after no-fault divorces came in. What, he says sternly, is the point of a contract when there’s no sanction if you break it? Well, quite. But if no-fault divorce pretty well invalidates marriage after the event, prenups do quite a good job of undermining it beforehand. The point of marriage is that it’s meant to be a lifetime affair – the hint being in the ‘til death do us part’ bit – and the point of prenups is that they make provision for the thing ending before it even gets underway.

Today I have a piece in the Times (£ obviously, you know that) about the power of the Christian Left, following the Anglican bishops’ letter in the Daily Mirror; the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman goes into detail in the Telegraph about how her congregation did a better job of caring for the poor than the state did. That is what’s at the heart of the argument for Christian conservatism. State spending is effective when there is acute, widespread poverty, but once a country rises above a certain income there are diminishing returns, because the causes are less likely to be wider social and environmental forces. This is a good, or at any rate conservative, argument for spending on overseas aid, where the money really can make a huge difference.

I had always assumed that the one thing atheism had going for it was that you could have a lie-in on Sundays. For the past year, however, an atheist church has been meeting in London on Sunday mornings. Founded by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, the Sunday Assembly is a symptom of what Theo Hobson identified in this magazine as ‘the new new atheism’, the recognition that the new atheism of Professor Dawkins et al had, in rejecting God, gone too far in rejecting all His works. Churches, the founders felt, had much to recommend themselves — a space for inspiration, reflection, and a sense of community in an atomised city — and they found a willing audience.

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has been something of a hero of mine since the publication of his Reason, Faith and Revolution, a thoroughgoing demolition of the Richard Dawkins critique of religion – on the sound basis that Prof Dawkins didn’t know what he was talking about – and his latest, Culture and the Death of God, promises to be pretty good too.

For non-Catholics, the most luridly fascinating aspect of Catholicism is confession. Telling your inmost sins — and we know what they are — to a male cleric, eh? In a darkened booth. How medieval is that? Well, the fantasies that people who never go to confession nurse about it are about to be shored up by a new book on the subject by the Catholic author John Cornwell. It’s called The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession. On the cover is a scary-looking picture of a confessional — not somewhere you’d take the children, frankly, but right at home in a Hitchcock movie. John Cornwell is a friend, and moreover an intelligent and thoughtful man, but if ever there were a book that played to its gallery, it’s this one.

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 it is time it stopped. Christmas as we know it has nothing whatever to do with religion.

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.

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.

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’.