Theo Hobson

The message of Pope Francis, in his exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), seems to be this: there must be rules. Only tough rules can express the absoluteness of the gospel. Without these rules it will be diluted, its saving force depleted. But the Church must apply these rules with Christlike tenderness and mercy, rather than with legalistic rigour. It must be tolerant of innovators on the edge, testing the boundaries. But it must uphold the core rules, even if they seem harsh. For this harshness corresponds to the absoluteness of the ideals of Christianity. We may all struggle to live up to these ideals, but we need absolute standards to aim for – we need to try, and fall short, in the right direction.

Some people seem to want to discuss their sex lives on television, as in the show Sex Box. Couples are interviewed before and after they have tried something new, right there in the studio (although hidden from view). This week, the couple were close friends, and were trying out being lovers for the first time. The interviews are full of therapeutic empowering chat, plus saucy joking. I consider this sort of thing a form of cultural vandalism, rather like what Isis got up to in Palmyra. Something frail and important is being damaged in a quick burst of self-righteousness. What is being damaged is the delicate tradition that associates sex with profound privacy. Without such privacy, its capacity to be meaningful is reduced.

Terrorism is a distraction. It’s a distraction from the big question of our day, about Islam and violence. Only a tiny minority of Muslims affirm that sort of violence. A far larger proportion of Muslims condone another, vaguer sort of violence. It is this that we must confront. I mean the violence of theocracy. Theocracy is the belief that one religion should be absolutely culturally dominant. Of course it thinks that the state should enforce this; if the state fails to do so it loses legitimacy. This theocratic worldview is the underlying cause of Muslim terrorism. To judge from its founding texts, and its history, Islam is a religion that wants to be very firmly established. It wants to be the official religion of a nation, or empire.

It’s Holy Week, so I wonder if our national Church is in the news at all? Let’s see…There’s a story this week about a long dead bishop called Bell, accused of child sex abuse, to the anger of some. Don’t confuse Bell with Ball, an undisputed episcopal abuser. And don’t confuse Bishop Peter Ball with Bishop Michael Ball, the disgraced Ball’s twin brother – there’s also a story about such confusion. There’s also a simmering story about a recent archbishop, George Carey, allegedly failing to pass on a specific allegation of sexual abuse relating to Peter Ball. So: Bell, two Balls and Carey – that’s pretty much the Anglican news this Easter.

A ‘damning’ report has been published into the Church of England’s handling of a particular abuse case. Except it’s not very damning. In 1976 a 16-year old was abused by a priest called Garth Moore – an attempted rape took place. He kept quiet about it for a couple of years, then told various priests about it over the next few decades, including some bishops. Moore died in 1990. The Church did nothing about his claims until 2014, when it began an inquiry that led to him receiving some compensation last year. The report says that the Church was at fault for failing to advise him to report it to the police, and for failing to launch its own investigation earlier. But there is no allegation that the Church dissuaded the victim from pressing charges.

What’s different about Donald Trump? Forget about the hair for a while, if you can. What sets him apart is his defiant disregard for the ideological consensus that other American politicians sign up to. That consensus can be summed up as ‘hopeful humanism’. Of course ‘humanism’ doesn’t mean non-religion here: this hopeful humanism is always expressed with some degree of reference to Christian (or Judeo-Christian) tradition. This consensus, of course, involves certain patterns of moral rhetoric. It involves speaking about people of all races and religions with respect – not labelling Mexicans rapists, not proposing a ban on Muslims coming into the country.

What do they mean, these Islamofascists, by using children in their publicity films? Last month one of their films featured a cute British kid of about six called Isa Dare: he looked on admiringly and then threatened the kaffir. Earlier this month a new film showed an English-speaking boy of about ten actually beheading a Syrian prisoner with a little knife. It wasn’t widely reported. (Has such stuff become routine, or has the quality press decided to refuse to mediate such messages?) Why the use of children? Does it make their regime seem scarier? Not really. Does it ensure such videos get maximum attention? Yes, but there’s more to it than that. It also heightens the attraction of the regime. To understand why, we have to revisit a rather unfashionable concept.

Christian columnists of left (Giles Fraser) and right (Charles Moore, Peter Hitchens) agree: Bishop Bell has been most sorely wronged. The Church should not have compensated the person he allegedly abused about seventy years ago. It has damaged the reputation of one of its major figures, without any sort of trial taking place. I disagree. I think the Church has behaved – shock, horror – Christianly. The Church knew what a huge step it was taking in believing this woman, who has now told her story to the Brighton Argus. (She was a relative of a member of staff in the bishop’s palace; she was occasionally read bedtime stories as she sat on his knee, and was interfered with.

My line on the Anglican crisis is a bit eccentric. I think there are now grounds for hope that the Communion can survive – and the reason is the recent rise of gay marriage as the central issue. Lazy punditry says that gay marriage is the bone of contention. But it’s actually a new issue – it wasn’t being discussed a decade ago, when Rowan Williams was holding these summits. The real bone of contention is whether actively gay priests and bishops should be allowed. On this the two sides are obviously adamantly opposed. The arrival of gay marriage as a big issue seems to make the crisis worse than ever – but this is a superficial view. It is actually a blessing in disguise. For it allows a compromise position to emerge.

The new Charlie Hebdo cover is feeble. God with a machine-gun, looking over his shoulder, and the line ‘The Assassin is still at large’. It makes Richard Dawkins look nuanced. Religion is to blame? All religion? It feels dishonest, timid: a refusal to face the fact that it’s a particular form of religion that is the problem. In fact satire in general is pretty feeble, when it comes to religion and terrorism. Satire is good at attacking established power, and religious terrorism is obviously an intensely marginal thing – far more marginal than satire itself. There is a wider target: Islam in general, but in the West this too is more marginal than satire.

A vicar called Paul Eddy has argued, in the Oxford church newspaper, that carol services should be more manly. For there are many men who only get this annual glimpse of church, and they should be challenged in their assumption that religion is a soppy women-and-children thing. He suggests showing a clip from an action film, emphasizing the heroic nature of Jesus’s post-infant life, and keeping the sermon, and indeed the whole service, short. I sympathise. Church attendance is disproportionately female (the official figure is 59 percent, but it can feel a bit higher). And church culture can feel pretty alienating to younger men. Vicars should bear this in mind all year round, and in particular cut down on soppy music. But is Christmas a good time for the church to man up?

The new report by the Woolf Institute on religion in British public life is predictable stuff. It says that some reforms are needed, so that Britain’s pluralistic, largely secular character is better expressed in law. It recommends that the law that demands religious worship in school assemblies should be scrapped, that faith schools should move away from selecting on the basis of religion, that the bishops in the House of Lords should be fewer and joined by other faith leaders, that the next coronation should reflect the religious, and non-religious, character of the nation.

The Times has a story for the first week of Advent, about baby Jesus and golden Daleks.  An artist called Kate Richardson exhibited her work in a minor Cornish gallery. Some Christians complained about some of the paintings, and the exhibition was cancelled. The contentious works were copies of famous nativity paintings, in which a golden Dalek appeared – in one case in place of baby Jesus, in another as a bystander (or perhaps worshipper). She has now moved her work to a gallery in Cardiff, home of Doctor Who. I have a fairly strong opinion about this. Christians should never, ever complain about the weird, tasteless or ‘blasphemous’ recycling of their iconography.