Religion

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

Saturday

Tom Holland

The perfect religion for Guardian readers (plus some other neglected belief systems)

Exciting news from the world of philosophy! Next year will see the 20th anniversary of the New Stoa, an online community of ‘all those who are Stoics and who wish to be known by the commitment they have made’. Stoicism, the philosophy of choice for sanctimonious Roman billionaires, is evidently making a comeback. Its appeal, to an age obsessed equally by smartphones and virtue signalling, is no great mystery, I suppose. Seneca, who served as Nero’s tutor and whose manipulation of the overseas currency markets may well have precipitated Boudicca’s revolt, was a Stoic. ‘Though finding fault with the rich, he acquired a fortune of 300,000,000 sesterces,’ wrote the historian

Thursday

The Spectator

State of the Union

Last year, the United Kingdom came within 384,000 votes of destruction. A referendum designed to crush the Scottish nationalists instead saw them win 45 per cent of the vote — and become stronger than ever. Since then, the SNP has taken almost every Scottish seat in the Commons and is preparing for another landslide in the Holyrood election next year — giving Nicola Sturgeon the power to threaten a second referendum. We may be just a few years away from a second battle for Britain. In her short time as First Minister, Sturgeon has established herself as one of the most formidable politicians in Europe. She has raised a rebel army that

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The Church of England urgently needs a better PR team

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. It reminds us that Anglican, and Christian, allegiance has fallen significantly (since 1983, the number of

Tom Holland

Would you believe it? A selection of ancient faiths ripe for revival

Exciting news from the world of philosophy! Next year will see the 20th anniversary of the New Stoa, an online community of ‘all those who are Stoics and who wish to be known by the commitment they have made’. Stoicism, the philosophy of choice for sanctimonious Roman billionaires, is evidently making a comeback. Its appeal, to an age obsessed equally by smartphones and virtue signalling, is no great mystery, I suppose. Seneca, who served as Nero’s tutor and whose manipulation of the overseas currency markets may well have precipitated Boudicca’s revolt, was a Stoic. ‘Though finding fault with the rich, he acquired a fortune of 300,000,000 sesterces,’ wrote the historian

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

Jan Morris

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

During the first ten pages of this long work Paul Theroux, on a journey through the American South, meets two citizens of Alabama. The first, encountered in Tuscaloosa when he asked the way to the Cornerstone Full Gospel Baptist Church, was named Lucille, called him ‘Mr Paul’, said ‘Ain’t no strangers here, Baby’, took him to the church and said ‘Be Blessed’ when they parted. The second, a citizen of Gadsden, was named Wendell, called him ‘Sir’, clamped him on the shoulder, said ‘Kin Ah he’p you in inny way?’ and before they parted suggested they meet again for ‘a sandwich, peanuts or anything’. In neither encounter, in a part

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tricycle’s Ben Hur is magnificent in its superficiality – a masterpiece of nothing

It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing? Patrick Barlow’s new spoof, Ben Hur, must answer ‘No’ on all four counts. The show takes aim at two principal irritants: vain actors and the Hollywood epics of the 1950s, whose titanic scale was offered as bait to audiences besotted with their cosy new TV sets. Old Hollywood is a spent ogre these days and the foibles of the acting trade are hardly a threat to civilised life, so the show can’t embrace our immediate concerns. But the execution is compellingly assured. The cast is led by John Hopkins, an

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

John Gimlette

Bad news from paradise

Suddenly, the Maldivians are in the news. Earlier this year, they locked up their first democratically elected president, and just recently they declared a state of emergency. It never used to be like this. The Maldives was just a place you saw in brochures, looking expensively turquoise. It has a population no bigger than Barnet (350,000), and 99 per cent of the country is covered in water. Until recently, even its neighbour, Sri Lanka, hardly seemed to notice it. During my time in Colombo, visiting Maldivians were merely a source of idle curiosity. They flew into town either to pick up a secular education or to get roaring drunk. It

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

Peter Jones

True dedication

Benjamin Clementine, who won the 2015 Mercury Music Prize for his debut album At Least For Now, received his cheque for £20,000 and the trophy and, breaking down in tears, ‘dedicated his award to the victims of the Paris terror attacks’. One may be given leave to doubt it. In the ancient world, people of all backgrounds made dedications, from soldiers thanking gods for their escape from a nasty situation in battle to those who had had a threatening dream or wished to demonstrate their piety. Often people made ‘votive’ offerings (votum, ‘vow’), i.e. after vowing to the god that if they e.g. escaped a storm, they would make a

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam?

The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of

Thursday

Tom Holland

Of gods and men

Over the stupefyingly long course of Egyptian history, gods have been born and they have died. Some 4,000 years ago, amid the chaos that marked the fragmentation of the original pharaonic state, an incantation was inscribed on the side of a coffin. It imagined a time when there had been nothing in existence save a single divine Creator. ‘I was alone in the emptiness,’ the god proclaimed, ‘and could find no place to stand.’ Nevertheless, beside him, he could feel the gods that were yet to exist. ‘They were with me, these deities waiting to be born. I came into being and Becoming became.’ The gods emerged, to reign first

Monday

Theo Hobson

The Pope is trying to be the good cop. So who will be the bad cop?

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

Thursday

Theo Hobson

Corbyn’s salvation

On religion, Jeremy Corbyn is interestingly moderate, circumspect — not the angry atheist you might expect. In a recent interview with the Christian magazine Third Way, he said his upbringing was quite religious: his mother was a ‘Bible-reading agnostic’ and his father a believer, and he went to a Christian school. ‘At what point did you decide that it wasn’t for you?’ he was asked. He replied very carefully, even challenging the premise of the question: ‘I’m not anti-religious at all. Not at all… I find religion very interesting. I find the power of faith very interesting. I have friends who are very strongly atheist and wouldn’t have anything to

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

There was nothing illiberal about Ben Carson’s ‘Muslim president’ comment

Republican hopeful Ben Carson was asked on television whether a president’s religious faith matters. He said that a president’s faith should be compatible with the Constitution of the US. Asked whether that included Islam, he denied it. ‘I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.’ He has been accused of Islamophobia and of disregarding the Constitution itself, which states that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office’. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for Carson to withdraw from the race. His answer was clumsy, but not essentially wrong. The US Constitution does