Christianity

Number 10 has a lot on its mind with the looming Cabinet reshuffle, but I suspect that there’ll be a sigh of relief there if the General Synod of the Church of England votes in favour of allowing women bishops. For if proposals for women bishops are defeated again, the problem could well end up in parliament’s court. There are those in the Church of England who believe that if this measure fails again then parliament should simply legislate to allow them. Given the status of the Church of England, parliament has the power to do that and there are some influential MPs who privately favour this course. But the

He didn’t mean to, but Lord Carey, the outspoken and unpopular former Archbishop of Canterbury, may just have carried out a minor miracle. By coming out in the Daily Mail in favour of assisted suicide, he has succeeded in bringing together Christians of all denominations and political persuasions to oppose him. Trendy evangelicals, Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, and the Orthodox may have profound differences, but one thing they know is that disagree with Lord Carey, especially when he makes out that the truly Christian position is to support this first step towards legal euthanasia in Britain, which will be debated in the House of Lords this week. Carey is not exactly well

‘We don’t do God,’ was Alastair Campbell’s put-down when his charge, Tony Blair, was tempted to raise the issue of his faith. Unfortunately, it seems to have become the motto of David Cameron’s government. It is a month now since 276 girls were kidnapped from a school near the town of Chibok in northern Nigeria, and still the Foreign Office’s statements on the crisis read like a deliberate exercise in missing the point. ‘Continuing murders and abductions of schoolchildren, particularly girls in Nigeria by Boko Haram, are a stark reminder of the threat faced by women and girls in conflict-prone areas,’ Mark Simmonds, minister for Africa, said this week. ‘Young

First the godly, then the godless, then the godly again. The public debate about whether Britain is indeed a Christian country, which the Prime Minister kicked off with his article in the Church Times saying that Britain should be evangelical about its Christianity, took legs when fifty-odd self-important atheists took issue with his remarks in a letter in the Telegraph and now the debate has a new spin after a group of academic philosophers wrote to the same paper (lucky letters editor) to contradict the atheists. “In important ways Britain remains a Christian country, as the Prime Minister has rightly claimed”, they wrote. “The establishment of the Church of England enshrines

David Cameron’s decision to hug-a-Christian seems to have worked pretty well, judging by the political response he’s provoked. For starters, his comments about Britain being ‘evangelical’ about its status as a Christian country managed to enrage the sort of people who also might annoy the churchgoing conservatives he needs to win back after the row over gay marriage. Today, he – and the secularists – got a response from the Archbishop of Canterbury who wrote on his blog: ‘It’s all quite baffling and at the same time quite encouraging. Christian faith is much more vulnerable to comfortable indifference than to hatred and opposition. It’s also a variation on the normal

As the crucifixion of Damian McBride over Easter in 2009 proves, the four-day news void can be gruesome for Downing Street, yet it seems congratulations are in order this year. No.10 managed to throw the chattering classes such a juicy bone of distraction that they all spent Easter trying to convince themselves that the UK is not a Christian country. The row was stoked by an assorted group of lefties with impeccable Labour, Liberal and Green credentials writing to the Telegraph, questioning why a PM may possibly wish to talk about religion. The irony that it was Easter, top and tailed by two bank holidays where their entire ‘non-Christian country’

Last week, David Cameron surprised a number of people when, during a pre-Easter gathering at Downing Street, he spoke about religion. Not religion in general, the all-faiths-and-none diversity-speak of the political class, but his own Christian faith. James Forsyth writes about the implications in this week’s magazine. But what was most surprising was that the prime minister went further by saying that ‘our religion’ is the most persecuted in the world and that ‘I hope we can do more to raise the profile of the persecution of Christians’. He added: ‘We should stand up against the persecution of Christians and other religious groups wherever and whenever we can, and should

David Cameron is doing God. He has followed up his comments about his faith at last week’s Downing Street reception with an article for The Church Times in which he declares that we should be ‘more confident about our status as a Christian country’ and ‘frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people’s lives.’ This is a strikingly different tone to the one that Cameron used to adopt. Back in opposition, he talked about his faith being ‘like reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes’. Personally, as I say in the magazine this