Theo Hobson

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.

Usama Hasan, an imam attached to the Quilliam Foundation, argues in the Times that Islam is steadily adapting to modernity. It has been doing so since the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire launched certain reforms. Islam should not be judged by a few marginal hiccups in this process. ‘Isis follows a fundamentalist and selective reading of scripture which is ahistorical and heretical. They are linked to Islam and the Koran in the way the Ku Klux Klan and Anders Breivik are linked to Christianity and the Bible.’ This is not helpful. For extremely reactionary Christians have not gained power in a large proportion of the traditionally Christian world.

Some advice. Don’t watch the rugby world cup final with anyone too politically correct. My friend Tom and I were so busy arguing about the Haka that we missed the first try during the semi-final on Saturday. ‘I love a bit of primitive ritual’ I said, as the men in black became animated wood carvings that would make a missionary quake. ‘Er, I’m not sure you’re allowed to say that.’ ‘Eh?’ ‘I think you’ll find that word’s kind of you know…racist?’ ‘What, primitive?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Racist? But there’s white people doing it too.’ ‘Yeah but it’s a Maori thing, so you’re basically calling Maoris primitive.

Are you a Phillist or a Teddist? A Phillist is not a Philistine in a hurry, but one who warms to the sensibility of Philip Larkin. A Teddist prefers that of Ted Hughes. Recent BBC documentaries on each poet have clarified the choice. Whose vision of life is more convincing and compelling – the glum librarian or the dashing naturalist who made the ladies swoon (in and out of ovens)? To define their difference it’s tempting to call Hughes a Romantic, and Larkin an anti-Romantic. But it doesn’t quite work. Hughes’s fascinated reverence for the natural world has some Romantic features, but his vision of nature’s brutality is hardly ‘Daffodils’.

The Pope has in effect said this to his Catholic flock: Let our rhetoric be liberal; Let us sound like a Church that is moving from harsh rigour to soft friendliness. Does that mean he seeks the reform of any of the Church’s traditional teachings? God knows. He began his US tour in Washington, where he warned the bishops that there is a temptation 'to think back on bygone times and to devise harsh responses'. They should try to persuade people 'with the power and closeness of love' rather than obsessively condemning 'their positions, distant as they may be from what we hold as true and certain'. In his final address, in Philadelphia, he presented himself as the enemy of legalism, like Jesus railing at the Pharisees.

Are you already dreading Christmas, on account of having to host relatives who hardly bother hiding how much they hate each other? Well spare a thought for Justin Welby, who will host a big powwow of global Anglican leaders in January – many of the Anglican primates he will host don’t bother hiding their mutual antipathy at all. He is doing the brave and right thing, trying to agree a new looser model of communion, in which the 38 provinces declare themselves in communion with Canterbury, but not necessarily with each other. Such a move would confirm the current situation as the new normal, which is definitely the least worst option. Welby reportedly admits that there is a large chance of creating a permanent schism.

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.

I’m getting tired of the self-righteousness of Owen Jones. His response to the terrible spate of deaths of people fleeing Syria and Africa is to imply that if only everyone were as moral as him, the problem would be solved. He seems to think that the key cause of these people’s deaths is that many people in Britain call them by the wrong word. To call them 'migrants', he says, shows a total disregard for their humanity. 'Those of us who want more sympathetic treatment of people fleeing desperate situations have failed to win over public opinion, and the cost of that is death.'  The implication is that if his right-on attitude was shared by all of us, the deaths would be avoided. This strikes me as completely nuts.

David Cameron is right to speak against religious extremism, even if it claims not to support violence. But what exactly is religious extremism? He defined it in opposition to British values, meaning democracy and the rule of law and so on. Maybe this is clear enough. But I think the matter can be clarified further. I think it should be defined in this way. Religious extremism idealises religious unity as the basis of good politics, and denigrates pluralism, liberal values, ‘secularism’ (in the political sense). In other words, it is theocratic religion. ‘Theocracy’ is an old-fashioned word, but I think we need to use it a lot more. It gets to the heart of the matter.