Christianity

Thursday

Theo Hobson

Tim Farron can’t have it both ways on sin

Tim Farron is a conservative evangelical. Such Christians think they are braver than wishy-washy liberals when it comes to sin – they are not afraid to put it at the heart of their message. But in fact they’re in a muddle on sin. Farron embodies it. During the election he was repeatedly asked by journalists whether he thought gay sex was a sin. He tried to avoid the question by saying that such questions were beyond the bounds of normal political discussion; he implied that secular journalists framed the question in the wrong way, not understanding that we are all sinners. But they kept pestering him. So in the end,

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

How can any intelligent person have faith?

Ten years ago, I had a strange debate about faith with a famous Jesuit and an agnostic psychoanalyst in a monastery on a cliff-top in Syria. At the time I thought I’d made some valuable additions to the discussion. The notes I took then record my own contributions with horrible precision. Looking back on it, I was just an observer. The main players were Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian priest who’d made his life in the Middle East, and Bernard S., a highly regarded Jungian analyst: neat, Swiss, troubled. The scene of this chat was Deir Mar Musa, a 6th-century monastery that Fr Paolo had restored, perched high on a

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Mission impossible? | 13 December 2017

If you work for the Church of England in any capacity, from Archbishop of Canterbury to parish flower-arranger, how do you deal with the distressing statistics that in the past 20 years, average Sunday attendance has plummeted to 780,000 and is going down by a rate of about 20,000 a year? Do you pretend it’s not happening and just tell everyone about the spike in your numbers at Christmas, or accept that it might be happening but believe that God’s grace will deal with the problem in its own good time? Or do you throw your weight behind a vast national marketing initiative, hurling millions of pounds at the problem?

Carola Binney Carola Binney

Christmas in China

If you think capitalism has blinged up Christmas, you should see what the Communists are doing to it. At this time of year, Chinese cities are dressed up like one big Oxford Street, but with lights that put London’s in the shade. Christmas Eve has become the biggest shopping day of the year. At the school where I taught last year, every classroom had at least three Christmas trees: one outside the door, one inside the door and one at the back. Tinsel ran up staircases, fake snow adorned all the windows. The Chinese have even developed their own Christmas traditions: revellers give each other elaborately packaged apples, and Father

Thursday

Alexander Waugh

Eat the forbidden fruit

Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as a ‘piece of shit’ are not among the activities usually associated with serious religious historians. But Reza Aslan is something else. An American academic born in Iran, brought up as a Muslim, converted to Jesus by the Jesuits and back to Islam through his own free will, he came to prominence following an interview on Fox TV to promote his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013). He was repeatedly asked how being a Muslim qualified him to write about Jesus, to which he responded by

Tuesday

Richard Rex

Martin Luther is the patron saint of individualism

Martin Luther shot to fame five hundred years ago with his protest against indulgences in October 1517. At the core of his message was the straightforward idea that the answer to every religious question was to be found in the Bible, the Word of God, taken in its plain and simple sense. As we now know, it didn’t quite work out. The Word of God just wasn’t as plain and simple as Luther thought. Rival prophets, from erudite theologians down to everyday cranks, read the same Word of God with different and sometimes swivelling eyes, and came to very different conclusions. Ulrich Zwingli, the godfather of the Reformation in Zurich,

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 October 2017

‘Persecuted and Forgotten?’ is the name of the latest report by Aid to the Church in Need. Unfortunately, there is no need for that question mark in the title. Both the persecution and the oblivion are facts. Christians have been victims of the genocide in Isis-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria. In 2011, there were 150,000 Christians in Aleppo and now there are 35,000. Persecution rises in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Sudan and Iran. In Nigeria, 1.8 million people have been displaced by Boko Haram. In India, there is much more harassment of Christians since Narendra Modi came to power in 2015. In China, there are now thought

Charles Moore Charles Moore

From China to Europe, the world is becoming more dangerous for Christians

‘Persecuted and Forgotten?’ is the name of the latest report by Aid to the Church in Need. Unfortunately, there is no need for that question mark in the title. Both the persecution and the oblivion are facts. Christians have been victims of the genocide in Isis-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria. In 2011, there were 150,000 Christians in Aleppo and now there are 35,000. Persecution rises in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Sudan and Iran. In Nigeria, 1.8 million people have been displaced by Boko Haram. In India, there is much more harassment of Christians since Narendra Modi came to power in 2015. In China, there are now thought

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Blame the grown-ups for the safe-space tribe

A car driver ploughs into a bunch of people outside the Natural History Museum in London and lefties are furious mostly because the right-wing columnist Katie Hopkins thought it was another jihadi attack. For thinking this she is a racist bigot and consummately evil — despite the fact that I suspect most Londoners thought precisely the same as Hopkins when they heard the news. We are in the bizarre situation where horrible incidents not perpetrated by Muslims are gleefully welcomed by the lefties because they believe it adds grist to their idiotic mill: other people are capable of driving cars into pedestrians, you see, so it is racist to suggest

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Christianity triumphant – and destructive

In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of being overcome by lust at the sight of their own bodies. Some concealed their nakedness in outfits woven from palm fronds. One designed a leather suit that also covered his head. There were holes for his mouth and nose, but not, apparently, his eyes. There was a monk who spent three years with a stone in his mouth to remind him not to speak. Another wept so hard, his tears dug a hollow in his chest. There were those who went about on all fours. St Anthony, one of the

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

The most half-baked thing about the anti-transgender Christian couple isn’t their approach to gender

We live in a society with a tendency towards liberal intolerance, in which the fury of the mob turns on anyone who dares hold a different belief to the mainstream particularly if they are from an unpopular group such as conservative Christians. But we also live in a society where some people who hold non-mainstream beliefs don’t feel they really have to think them through. Last week, I wrote about the difference between directing scorn at Jacob Rees-Mogg for holding unpopular beliefs which he is happy to justify, and directing scorn at those who hold unpopular beliefs which they aren’t prepared to debate in public, possibly because those beliefs are

Sunday

The Spectator

Religion is on the decline – yet our society is underpinned by faith

For Church of England vicars who worry less about what they will preach on Sunday than whether there will be any parishioners to listen to them, the latest findings of the British Social Attitudes Survey will make grim reading. For years the number of people professing religious belief in Britain has hovered around the 50 per cent mark. Now it seems to have dived decisively, plunging from 52 per cent to 47 per cent in just a year. According to a survey we are no longer a Christian country, but then neither — for all the squeals over sharia law — are we becoming much of a Muslim country, or

Friday

Theo Hobson

Britain is a nation of quiet Christians

The latest survey says that under half of us (42 per cent) identify as Christian, and that just over half have no religion. Does this show that we have finally turned the corner, and are no longer a Christian nation? Well, it’s a very curved corner – we’ve been turning it for about fifty years. But on one level we remain a Christian nation until a movement comes along that redefines us in explicitly secular terms – and there’s no real sign of it. It might sound perverse, but I think these figures show religion to be surprisingly popular. For consider how little religion there is in popular – or

Thursday

The Spectator

Keeping faith | 7 September 2017

For Church of England vicars who worry less about what they will preach on Sunday than whether there will be any parishioners to listen to them, the latest findings of the British Social Attitudes Survey will make grim reading. For years the number of people professing religious belief in Britain has hovered around the 50 per cent mark. Now it seems to have dived decisively, plunging from 52 per cent to 47 per cent in just a year. According to a survey we are no longer a Christian country, but then neither — for all the squeals over sharia law — are we becoming much of a Muslim country, or

Harry Mount

Eat, pray, learn

My greatest spiritual moment this year came in Eton College Chapel. I was there for Evensong with a friend who’s an English master at the school. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the congregation belted out Verdi’s ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ — in English. Part of the pleasure came from the shock of hearing 1,300 upper-middle-class schoolboys imitating Hebrew slaves singing a lament about their Babylonian captivity in 500 BC. But it was also the sheer joy of the music in Henry VI’s chapel, a triumph of the Perpendicular Gothic. In quieter moments during the service, I examined the 15th century wall paintings, which are splendid, Flemish-style pictures of miracles of the Virgin

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Can leading politicians get away with opposing abortion and gay marriage?

What can politicians with socially conservative beliefs expect from public life? Is there now a faith glass ceiling under which lurks would-be party leaders whose views on abortion and homosexuality are just too unpalatable for voters? If there is one, Jacob Rees-Mogg might have a good chance of telling us where it is located. The alleged contender for the Tory leadership told Good Morning Britain today that abortion was ‘morally indefensible’ in any circumstances and that he opposed same-sex marriage because ‘marriage is a sacrament and the decision of what is a sacrament lies with the Church not with Parliament’. William Hill has already cut the North East Somerset MP’s

Thursday

Robert Carver

The roots of witchcraft

Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort was the Triple Goddess. The most notable advocate of this theory was the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Then came revisionists led by Norman Cohn. Examination of witch trials suggested there had been no witchcraft: it was a ‘social construct’ of the Christian patriarchy persecuting innocent women, as it had innocent Jews indicted for the same satanic practices. Professor Hutton is a follower of Cohn. His study, by ideological necessity, makes no reference to the historical and modern evidence that European witches used hallucinogenic drugs which produced psychedelic sensations of flying, time-space

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Losing our religion

Sir James MacMillan’s European Requiem, performed at the Proms on Sunday, isn’t about Brexit. The composer had to make this clear in a Radio 3 interview just before the broadcast, because the BBC was just itching to cast the work — a melancholy score, despite its thunderous drumbeats — as a lament for us leaving the EU. That would have been neat, given that the second half of the concert consisted of Beethoven’s Ninth, whose ‘Ode to Joy’ has been clumsily appropriated by Brussels. Incidentally, some Remainers in the audience chattered through the symphony’s first three movements, impatient for their Big Tune. I don’t know if there were any ancient

Thursday

Rod Liddle

My fears about the new ‘extremism commission’

The Egyptian-born Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi was once invited to speak in this country — and the row which developed as a consequence was both entertaining and instructive. Many people said he shouldn’t be given a visa because of his ‘extremism’. Others, such as the mainstream UK Muslim organisations, insisted that this was a libellous description and that Qaradawi was a moderate who had always favoured dialogue with people of other faiths; Ken Livingstone went further and described him as being a ‘leading progressive voice’ within Islam. So who was right? On the one hand it is true that the Qatar-based Qaradawi has been opposed to jihadi terrorist attacks —

Thursday

Gary Dexter

Mixed blessings | 13 July 2017

Japan is the only developed country where people openly espouse two distinct and incompatible religions at the same time — Buddhism and Shinto. The Japanese go to Shinto shrines for weddings and children’s celebrations. They go to Buddhist temples for funerals. Shinto shrines are sometimes found within the precincts of Buddhist temples, and vice versa, so it’s possible to beseech Buddha and the fox god in the same ten minutes. To confuse the picture still further, Japan is one of the most secular places on Earth: atheism is practised simultaneously with the other mutually incompatible religions. My Japanese wife, for example, visits and prays at temples and shrines, but in