Christianity

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 31 December 2015

What Blair omitted to say Sir: Mr Blair’s latest in these pages, like his recent Foreign Affairs Committee appearance on Libya, papers over so much history that one hardly knows where to start (‘What I got right’, 12 December). His own Libyan history will do. We all know the ‘deal in the desert’, whereby Gaddafi relinquished a feeble ‘WMD’ programme to come in from the cold, lift the sanctions, and pave the way for oil deals. What was not known until 2011 was the real price of this bargain. The price was a UK-US-Libyan conspiracy to kidnap two whole families from exile and ship them to Gaddafi. Had we not seen the

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Britain needs Christianity – just ask Alan Partridge

Are we really, as David Cameron claimed in his Christmas message, a country shaped by ‘Christian values’? Yesterday’s Evening Standard poll – which found that shopping is three times more integral to Britons’ Christmas than going to church – makes you wonder what the phrase even means. It doesn’t just mean do-goodery, though that is important. About 10 million Britons get help from a church-based group every year. If you see a queue of homeless people in a town centre at about 6 o’clock in the evening, you can bet there are a bunch of God-botherers handing out sandwiches at the other end of it. Where there is poverty, physical illness, mental illness, unemployment, the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron says Christian values make Britain successful. Why?

David Cameron’s Christmas message is being reported as one of his most Christian public statements yet, with the Prime Minister arguing – as he did at Prime Minister’s Questions recently – that ‘it is because of these important religious roots and Christian values that Britain has been such a successful home to people of all faiths and none’. Cameron has – with the occasional rather odd hiccup – become much more confident about talking about Christianity, both in terms of his own beliefs and the importance he thinks faith should have in wider society, since he described his personal faith as being ‘a bit like the reception for Magic FM

The Spectator

Justin Welby on imposter syndrome, American exceptionalism and what makes churches grow

In the Spectator’s Christmas treble issue, Michael Gove speaks to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Below are some outtakes from the interview. On the supposed decline of religious belief I don’t believe that that was then or is now an accurate perception. Church attendance in this country has fallen hugely both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the population. The number of Christians around the world has risen hugely since the nineteenth century and continues to rise at an extraordinary rate: it is over two billion now. So we’re seeing a change in the pattern of where the church is: the Anglican Communion is essentially global, as much

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Biblical art, like Christianity, is always renewing itself

This sign adorns a local church in Harlesden. I suppose it could be called a Pop Annunciation. Who says religious art is stuck in the past? Then again, it is a perennial – and fascinating – question in Christian art: how much contemporary life to include in biblical scenes. For centuries artists have shocked the public by including ordinary-looking young beauties as Mary, ordinary working blokes as shepherds or apostles. Caravaggio is a good example, but even before him nativity scenes were transposed to Tuscan landscapes. In fact the first realistic landscapes in Western art were posing as biblical backdrops. The shock was rehashed by the Pre-Rapahelites, whose sacred scenes featured

Taki

Atheism may be fashionable, but most intelligent people believe in God

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74

Sunday

Mary Wakefield

Twenty years on, I’m homesick for the Christian cult I left

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going to

Thursday

Taki

We need Christianity more than ever in this Age of Atheists

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74

Alexander Chancellor

The Lord’s Prayer is no more offensive than Jeremy Clarkson or deodorant

There was a time not so very long ago when the most common complaint about Christmas was that it had become too commercial and that its Christian significance was being forgotten. Since then the decline in religious belief in Britain has grown so much that the secularity of Christmas is taken for granted. It is effectively a pagan festival now. According to the Church of England, only about one million people, or around two per cent of the population, still attend church on Sundays (though about twice that number do so on Christmas Day). The Church is in a bad way, and it is only natural that it should seek,

Martin Gayford

Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?

A young Polynesian woman lies outstretched on sheets of a soft lemon yellow. She is wrapped in deep blue cloth, decorated with a golden star. Beside her bed sits a hooded figure, apparently an older woman, holding a baby. In the background is a huddle of resting cows, suggesting that the setting is a barn or stable. There is something familiar about the set-up — baby, young mother, farm animals — but it may take a while to notice certain details. The head of the woman on the bed is encircled by an area of darker yellow, which forms a sort of halo, and the baby’s head is similarly ringed

Michael Gove

Faith is left, right. . . and central

There was, of course, something very special about the House of Commons debate on Syria earlier this month. The moral challenge of how to face those who embrace evil without limits, the long shadows and sombre memories generated by military actions past, the divisions within parties and between friends, the wrestling with conscience that brought good men and women close to tears. The importance of what the House of Commons was being asked to authorise inspired outstanding speeches, most notably of all, Hilary Benn’s. While I was listening to the shadow foreign secretary, I noticed a hunched figure in the gallery also held spellbound by the speech, his head occasionally

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Am I a brave cult survivor, too?

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The question Christianity fails to answer: ‘Who is my neighbour?’

‘Fine old Christmas,’ wrote George Eliot, ‘with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and colour with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.’ Thus opens the second chapter of Book II of The Mill on the Floss. I had found the passage when searching for a secular reading for my newspaper column’s readers at a carol service at St Bride’s church in Fleet Street a couple of nights ago. I knew at once I’d found what I wanted. Eliot had been my first port of call. You can be confident

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

‘Creeping intolerance’ towards religion could push young British Muslims to Islamic State, Cabinet Minister warns

What do politicians find it harder to admit to doing in Britain today: smoking weed or praying? Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb thinks it’s the latter, and that this is part of a ‘creeping intolerance’ in Britain that makes our society less able to resist religious extremists. In a lecture last night to the Conservative Christian Fellowship, Crabb argued that ‘Britain in 2015 is… increasingly characterised I believe by a creeping intolerance towards Christianity, and towards religion more generally, which we should be deeply concerned about’. He believes that the marginalisation of religious faith and discussion ‘risks pushing more young Muslims into the arms of Isil’ because it delegitimises their faith.

Sunday

Charles Moore

Why it is wrong for Christians to eat their wives

In his column last week, Rod Liddle suggested that an alleged fatwa by a Saudi Arabian cleric had said it was permissible to eat one’s wife when suffering from ‘severe hunger’ gave him (Rod) the go-ahead to eat his own wife. Not so, surely. In the Christian religion and, indeed, the secular law of the United Kingdom, one can have only one wife at a time. If one has only one wife, it would be quite wrong to eat her. Under Islam, one can have up to four. Obviously this generous provision creates ‘spares’. Until recently, British marriage law was hidebound by tradition, but, before the last election, Parliament voted

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 December 2015

Speaking on the Today programme on Monday, Sir David Attenborough, who wants a global agreement to control carbon emissions, pointed out that ‘Never in the history of humanity have all the people of the world got together to deal with a particular problem and agreed what the solution could be. Never, ever, ever.’ He is right. But he seemed to defy the logic of his own observation. They never have. Probably, since the truth is best arrived at through disagreement, they never should. The key point is that they never will. So it is a waste of time to try. When someone commits suicide, those close to that person naturally

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Can Christianity incorporate Daleks into its iconography?

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

Jane Ridley

Cultivating the fourth estate

Lord Palmerston is remembered today not for his foreign policy nor for his octogenarian philandering, but for his management of the press. He was the first prime minister to grasp that dealing with journalists was all about pragmatic negotiation and buttering people up. The deal between Palmerston and the newspapers was: ‘I’ll tell you something no one knows if you give me your support and a favourable report.’ It still works like that today. Most historians assume that Palmerston was the only Victorian prime minister to cultivate the fourth estate. Balfour loftily boasted that he never read the newspapers. But this was an affectation. As Paul Brighton shows in this

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

There’s a good reason why humanism should be taught in schools

A confusing story about RS (religious studies in schools) from last week has come to my attention. A group of parents brought a court case against the Department for Education: they complained that its new GCSE syllabus failed to include humanism. They won the case – sort of. The judge said that schools should not be allowed to exclude atheism and humanism, but he also said: ‘It is not of itself unlawful to permit an RS GCSE to be created which is wholly devoted to the study of religion.’ This seems to mean that it’s OK for the actual content of the GCSE syllabus to be devoted to religion, but the

Thursday

The Spectator

The many fights over the Lord’s Prayer

Amen corner Digital Cinema Media, a company which distributes adverts to cinemas, refused to allow an advert which involves the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer by, among others, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Some other battles over the prayer: — Campaigners want Alberta to follow other Canadian states, where recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in state schools is already banned. In the latest battle the Pembina Hills School Division voted by 30 to three to let the prayer still be recited. — Last year cheerleaders at a high school football game in Oneida, Tennessee, were accused of violating the US First Amendment, which forbids the state from promoting one form of religious