The most persecuted people in the world
One woman, at least, is safe. Throughout her pregnancy she had been in prison in Khartoum, living with the dread expectation that she would be hanged once her baby was born. Her crime was that she had married a Christian and been accused by the authorities in Sudan of apostasy, renouncing her faith, even though she maintained she had never been a Muslim in the first place. On Thursday her eight-month ordeal finally ended when Meriam Ibrahim was flown out of the country to Rome where she, and her new baby daughter, met the Pope in the Vatican.
But it has been a different story for the 3,000 Christians of Mosul who were driven from their homes in northern Iraq last week by Islamist fanatics who broadcast a fatwa from the loudspeakers of the city’s mosques ordering them to convert to Islam, submit to its rule and pay a religious levy, or be put to death. The last to leave was a disabled woman who could not travel. The fanatics arrived at her home and told her they would cut off her head with a sword.
Most people in the West would be surprised by the answer to the question: who are the most persecuted people in the world? According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular group with members in 38 states worldwide, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. The Pew Research Centre says that hostility to religion reached a new high in 2012 when Christians faced some form of discrimination, in 139 countries, almost three-quarters of the world’s nations.
All this seems counter-intuitive here in the West where the history of Christianity has been one of cultural dominance and control ever since the Emperor Constantine converted and made the Roman Empire Christian in the 4th century AD.
Yet the plain fact is that Christians are languishing in jail for blasphemy in Pakistan and churches are burned and worshippers regularly slaughtered in Nigeria and Egypt which has recently seen its worst anti-Christian violence in seven centuries. The most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century saw 500 Christians hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals in India, with thousands more injured and 50,000 made homeless. In Burma Chin and Karen Christians are routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labour, and murder. Persecution is increasing in China and in North Korea a quarter of the country’s Christians live in forced labour camps after refusing to join the national cult of the state’s founder Kim Il Sung. Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives, Iran, Yemen and Mali all feature in the 10 worst places to be a Christian.
A few voices have been raised in the West about all this. The religious historian Rupert Shortt has written a book called Christianophobia. American’s most prominent religious journalist, John Allen, has just published The Global War on Christians. The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, told the House of Lords recently that the suffering of Middle East Christians is “one of the crimes against humanity of our time”. He compared it with the Jewish pogroms in Europe and said he was “appalled at the lack of protest it has evoked”.
Why is this in a culture which is happy to make public protest against the ferocity of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza or the behaviour of Russia in Ukraine?
In part it is because our intelligentsia are locked into old ways of thinking about Christianity as the dominant force in Western historic hegemony. The Church has not helped in this, with its fixation on pious religiosity and on cultural issues which it falsely regards as totemic – issues like gay marriage and women bishops. A bogus dichotomy between religion and equality has been set up, resulting in a succession of comparatively trivial new stories about receptionists being banned from wearing religious jewellery or nurses being suspended for offering to pray for patients’ recovery. Adopting the rhetoric of persecution on such matters obscures the very real persecution of Christians being killed or driven from their homes elsewhere in the globe.
Most of the world’s Christians are not engaged in standoffs with intolerant secularists over such small matters. In the West Christianity may have increasingly become embraced by the middle class and abandoned by the working class. But elsewhere the vast majority of Christians are poor, many of them struggling against antagonistic majority cultures, and have different priorities in life.
The paradox this produces is that, as John Allen points out, the world’s Christians fall through the cracks of the left-right divide – they are too religious for liberals and too foreign for conservatives. In the UK it is socially respectable among the secular elite to regard Christianity as weird and permissible to bully its followers a little. This produces the surreal political reality in which President Obama visits Saudi Arabia and “does not get the time” to raise the suppression of Christianity in the oil-rich nation and in which Prime Minister Cameron gets a broadside from illiberal secularists for the historically unquestionable assertion that Britain’s culture is formed by Christian values.
The reality of being a Christian in most of the world today is very different. It only adds to their tragedy that the West fails to understand that – or to heed the plea of men like the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem Fouad Twal when he asks: “Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?”
from the Independent on Sunday
FollowIs Christian unity anything more than a pious aspiration?
Something significant happened in Rome this week when the Archbishop of Canterbury met the Pope for the second time since the two men took office, within days of one another, just over a year ago.
They have agreed a joint project to use the worldwide reach of their churches to combat the global trade in human trafficking. They discussed how to pressurise 50 top multi-national companies to render their supply chains free of forced labour by 2020 – and ensure they “slavery proof” the investments and purchasing of their own churches. There were other areas of practical co-operation, including peace-building in areas like South Sudan. As he left Rome, Archbishop Justin Welby hinted that other new initiatives had been discussed.
But what was also striking was the renewed commitment the two men made to the idea that their two churches should merge. Pope Francis said that “the goal of full unity… remains the aim which should direct our every step along the way”.
This is a process which many assumed had stalled. The decision by the Church of England to ordain women in 1992 caused a theological rift between Canterbury and Rome. The ordination in the wider Anglican communion of openly gay bishops, like Gene Robinson in 2003, created another obstacle. And next month the General Synod is likely to vote for women bishops – something Rome sees as a greater theological problem even than female priests.
Yet in the background heavyweight theological discussions, on what unites rather than divides the two churches, have been continuing. One of the purposes of Archbishop Welby’s visit to Rome was to launch a new website (www.iarccum.org) dedicated to implementing better ecumenical relations.
Such a small step is a far cry from the early heady days of ecumenism when it was widely assumed that unity was just a few years away.
Things had moved swiftly after the meeting by Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher and Pope John XXIII in 1960 – the first time an Archbishop of Canterbury had visited to the Vatican for 600 years. Pope John asked when the Anglicans would return to the Catholic fold. Archbishop Fisher replied: “It is not a question of returning, but going forward together.” His words became the model for a new relationship which was affirmed when John XXIII’s revolutionary Second Vatican Council (1962-65) recognised the validity of baptism by other Christian denominations.
In a gesture of massive significance, in 1966, Pope Paul VI gave an episcopal ring to Archbishop Michael Ramsey – which Archbishop Welby wore this week on his visit to Rome. A year later an Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) began unity talks. By clarifying old misunderstandings and embracing new scholarship it resolved many of the divisions which had bedevilled the two churches since the Reformation.
Much of ARCIC’s work is safely banked. When Rome’s top ecumenist, Cardinal Walter Kasper, called a meeting of Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and Reformed churches in 2010 it found, one insider said, “not one single area of theology in which we do not have some measure of agreement”. This was not just a clever repackaging of old disputes. It is a real growth in understanding.
But until recently ARCIC had hit the buffers. When Rome took an extraordinary 10 years to respond to one key ARCIC agreement many Anglicans lost patience and went ahead with the ordination of women and more liberal attitudes to gays.
In response the Vatican pulled the plug on the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission (IARCCUM). Pope Benedict XVI’s unilateral decision in 2009 to set up an Anglican Ordinariate to poach dissident Anglicans to Rome caused further resentment.
Yet things have clearly begun to change. Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby have similar visions. Both are no-nonsense characters with a “sleeves rolled up” approach to making change happen. Yet both see theological union as crucial. They have no patience with the “let’s agree to disagree on theology and just open a food bank together” approach.
In Rome Archbishop Welby – who despite his evangelical background, has a Benedictine spiritual director and has invited a French Catholic religious community, Chemin Neuf, to live in his home in Lambeth Palace – said that Anglicans and Catholics had to “get away from being quite comfortable with the fact we live separately”. Without theology, he said, the churches will become “just another NGO with a lot of old buildings”.
The renewed talk of unity is more than a pious aspiration. A third round of ARCIC talks has had meetings so far in Bose, Hong Kong, Rio and Durban. They have shifted the focus away from what divides the two churches to “receptive ecumenism” – what each side has to learn from the other.
At the heart of their discussions is how the two Communions go about making decisions. There are huge contrasts: Catholicism is heavily centralised whereas in Anglicanism authority is dispersed between many churches in many nations. Division is part of the Protestant DNA. And Anglicans are more divided among themselves now than ever before.
But Pope Francis clearly wants to change the governance of the Catholic Church so it is less like a mediaeval monarchy and more open to the wisdom and insights of all its members.
Given the practical difficulties posed by issues of gender and sexuality it is hard to see what unity between Catholics and Anglicans might look like – certainly not uniformity. But if the intellectual difficulties are greater now than 50 years ago, emotionally the two churches are closer than at any time since the reign of Henry VIII.
Archbishop Welby this week presented Pope Francis with a cutting from the giant fig tree planted in Lambeth Palace by the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole (1500-1558). What fruit it will bear, and when, is hard to predict. But hope is a theological virtue. For the past five decades the two churches have been moving on parallel lines. It feels as though, at last, those lines may be once more converging.
from The Independent
Shinto ends 2,000 years of isolation to help save the planet. What religion can offer the Sustainable Development Goals
14 June 2014
from Paul Vallely, in Ise, Japan
Under the double-barred gate posts, by the entrance to the bow-backed bridge, a solitary figure was waiting. He was white-robed and bare-headed. He was about to make history.
The Shinto priest bowed deeply to the group of men and women who approached the most venerated shrine in Japan. They too were enrobed – in the rich gold-embroidered red and blue of Chinese Daoism, in glorious Hindu saris, in simple white Islamic tunics and shifts, in bright yellow Sikh scarves and turbans, in the austere cassocks of Scandinavian Lutherans, the cream vestments of African Catholics and the black and red academic robes of American Baptists.
At any time in the past 2,000 years the job of the Shinto guardian of the Hiyokebashi bridge would have been to prevent such aliens from entering this holiest of Japan’s sacred places. But now he bowed deeply, twice, and welcomed them to enter.
History was made at Ise Jingu in many ways this month. The ancient shrine has been completely rebuilt from new wood, as it has been every 20 years since the reign of the Empress Jito (686-697). The record 14 million visitors that has attracted reveals an extraordinary restoration of Japan’s ancient religion which, in the decades which followed the Second World War had reached a low point which was unprecedented in its 3,000 year history.
That revival has demonstrated a step-change in Japanese openness to the wider world – not just in welcoming in representatives of the faiths of foreigners including even the Confucians and Daoists of the two great religious traditions of Japan’s historic enemy, China – but in a new approach to what Shintoism has to say to a world which is threatened by climate change and environmental degradation.
So much so that the United Nations chose the first international conference ever hosted by Shintoism this month as the forum in which to invite the world’s religions to help shape the debate on social, political and economic yardsticks which will replace the Millennium Development Goals when they run out next year. The conference was named “Tradition for the Future” and its brief was to discover “culture, faith and values for a sustainable planet”.
The rebuilding of Ise shrine is a potent symbol of that. The paradox at its heart is that the wooden buildings at its heart are impermanent and yet constantly renewed. The 20-year cycle allows ancient skills in forest husbandry and carpentry, thatching and metal-working, leatherwork and weaving, to be passed on from one generation to the next in unbroken tradition. Those rebuilding the bridge, for example, hand down the skills of boat carpenters practised in fitting together the floor of the bridge so it is resistant to rain. Some 100 million people will cross the bridge, wearing it away to a half its 6 inch thickness, over the course of its 20 year lifespan.
The process is a metaphor for what “tradition for the future” can mean in our modern world – especially since it places a premium on how humanity can live in harmony with the world rather than through depleting the earth’s non-renewable resources.
Shintoism is an unusual religion. It was no creeds or dogmas, no doctrines or scriptures. It is rooted in an animist belief that spirits or deities, kami, reside in objects throughout the natural world – rocks, rivers, waterfalls, mountains – as well as animals and people, and that the spirits of the ancestors live on in the places in which they once dwelt. There are 80,000 shrines to such spirits throughout Japan.
But Ise is special. It is held that when the Ise shrine is rebuilt, and the old deities are transferred to a new dwelling – in a ceremony which takes place at night, beneath a large drape of silk, so profane eyes may not view the sacred objects in which they reside – they renew their power in a way which rejuvenates the strength of the nation.
Religion and politics have long been intertwined here but at no time more so than during the height of the Meiji period of imperial Japan which lasted from 1968 until 1945. Then, in an attempt to end the old feudal shogun warlord culture and replace it with the thriving political and industrial models of Western Europe, the imperial family created state Shinto to unite the nation.
They decided to purge Shintoism of the Buddhist influences with which it had co-existed since the 6th century in an attempt to make it more nationalistic. Buddhist symbols and monks were expelled, many of the statues ending up in the British Museum thanks to the intervention of a far-sighted British diplomat.
Ise Jingu was the shrine in which the spirits of the imperial family’s own ancestors were enshrined dating back, the legend had it, to the sun goddess Amaterasu from whom the emperors claimed descent. The marriage of animism and ancestor worship found its high point in Ise. Shintoism thus became an imperial cult in which everyone was compelled to venerate the emperor – a state of affairs which persisted until the Japanese were defeated in World War II and the Americans forced Emperor Hirohito to go on radio to declare to the nation that he was no longer a god.
In the years which followed the six-year American Occupation the old religion of Shintoism became discredited. Acts by ultra-nationalist Shinto priests, who enshrined even the spirits of Japanese war criminals at the Yasukuni shrine of the war dead, disillusioned many of the general population even further. Socialism began to replace Shintoism for many.
Five decades on things began to change. A new generation had grown up without the demoralisation and guilt the war had brought. Emperor Hirohito had died in 1989 and, since the date changes in Japan with the advent of a new emperor, the feeling of a new era dawned. The events of the 1990s only compounded that; Japan’s property bubble burst leading to a long decade of deflation and stagnation.
The old Shinto traditions, with their simplicity and piety, seemed an antidote to the failed consumerist materialism of the Japanese Dream. Unable to afford foreign holidays, people stayed at home. Pilgrimages to the ancient shrines revived. The numbers visiting Ise reached an all-time low, 5 million a year, in 2002. Thereafter numbers have climbed, to 8 million last year, and 14 million this.
The shikinen sengu ritual of transferring the sun goddess to a new shrine building is part of that. But there is something more. At the last rebuilding one of Japan’s leading newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun, ran a campaign condemning it as a revival of imperialism and a waste of money. Donations to the rebuilding dried up. It is a measure of how much things have changed that the same newspaper supported the current rebuilding, with a few minor criticisms.
In 2000 Shinto representatives attended a conference of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation in Katmandu. There they had a revolutionary epiphany. They declared that they now realised that spirits and deities did not just reside in natural phenomena in Japan, but all over the world. Shinto has joined the global ecology movement.
Princess Akiki of the Japanese imperial family told the “Tradition for the Future” conference why. “Contemporary humans are going too much against nature,” she said. “But you should put yourself in the environment and enjoy it – and extend a sense of thankfulness to nature and the deity. That is the spirit of Shintoism.”
The acceptance of Shinto into the alliance of world religions prompted the United Nations to piggyback on the event in Japan to get some faith input into the Sustainable Development Goals which it is hoped world leaders will sign at the UN General Assembly in September 2015. The SDGs are succeed the Millennium Development Goals which were the benchmarks for international attempts to reduce poverty in the developing world since 2000. They expire at the end of next year.
The SDGs are a good deal more ambitious than the MDGs which applied only to poor nations and succeeded in some countries more than others. The new benchmarks will cover all nations and include targets for curbing climate change with a rising world population. They will be more expensive and harder to agree.
The UN has decided the world’s religions can help here. It flew its Assistant Secretary General, Olav Kjørven, out to Japan to tell religious leaders that the shortcomings of the MDGs were in part due to the fact that they had been drafted by technocrats and economists whose focus was narrowly materialist.
The faith leaders will have some time to offer their input. But their initial responses were instructive. Some were uncompromisingly austere. “It’s about greed versus nature,” said one of the Chinese Daoist masters, Lei Gaoyi. “We need to follow a more natural way of living in stead of taking carbon that’s taken hundred of millions of years to acquire and spewing that back out into the atmosphere upending the delicate balance that Daoism teaches us is required for humanity to flourish.”
This was an interesting take from someone from the country which is the largest producer of greenhouse emissions in the world. But it may be a sign that things could yet change, even in China. Ren Xuehua, 23, a Chinese Buddhist, confided that there were many among the children of the country’s affluent entrepreneur class, for whom material prosperity had not brought happiness. She was at the conference with her father Ren Ping, a Confucian, who is CEO of a £500m hydroelectric company. “Young people now want values,” she said.
The UN may be looking for more than values. It wants help from religion with implementation. That is a realistic expectation. Some 75 per cent of Kenya’s schools are run by churches or faith groups, said Abdalla Kamwana of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims. “If the religions had been involved in devising the MDGs they would have been better delivered,” agreed Bishop Fredrick Shoo of Tanzania.
“The UN needs a global workforce of volunteers who are altruistic, and passionate about saving our blessed planet for future generations,” said Dr Husna Ahmad, Secretary General of the World Muslim Leadership Forum. “Faith leaders have the trust of the people,” added Bishop Nathan Kyamanywa of Uganda. “What a religious leader says has weight.”
What gives that extra clout is that those involved with the Alliance of Religions and Conservation have for the past decades been running a variety of major projects worldwide using faith networks to improve farming, land management, health and sanitation, and to curb the illegal wildlife trade.
But religion has more to offer than delivery. “Religions preach a sense of contentment,” said Dr Rajwant Singh, a prominent American Sikh. “We teach competition, but with humility, a sense of inner richness and of sacredness.” The shortcoming of the MDGs was that they lacked passion, said Bishop Walter Thomas, a US Baptist. “They were just tasks on a tick-list. Faith would have made them come alive and got people excited.” That is because, said the Kenyan environmentalist Dorcas Otieno, “faith would’ve put emphasis on behavioural change, attitude and moral change. Life will be more sustainable if people are doing it because it is the right thing to do.”
The rebuilding of the Ise shrine offers a living symbol of that. Each renewal needs years of preparation. More than 12,000 cypress logs are required, many of a thickness which requires them to be around 200 years old. The wood for the columns on either side of the shrine, four and a half feet in diameter, is from trees some 400 years old.
The last time any timber was taken from the shine precincts was in 1391. Some 800 years of deforestation followed. But in 1923 Shinto’s Shrine Precincts Preservation Committee started planting cedars around the headwaters and set up a 200-year plan so cedar can once again be obtained from the shrine’s own forests. It will be another 120 years before they will be ready to be used. But this year around 20 per cent of the smaller trees used in the rebuild came from the replanting for the first time.
“Everything that is physical will be degraded,” said Tsunekiyo Tanka, president of Jinga Honcho, the association of Shinto shrines, “so we need constantly to make things new afresh. And we don’t just renew, we add something on every year.” Perhaps Shinto and the other religions will be able to teach that lesson to the rest of the world. If they have been left enough time.
Pictures: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/history-in-the-making-an-unprecedented-visit-to-ise-jingu-japan-s-holiest-shrine-to-see-it-rebuilt-9555482.html
Ordinary stories of an extraordinary man
The little town of Sale, where I live in the southern suburbs of Manchester, has been in a state of shock since last week after the sudden death of our MP, Paul Goggins, at the age of just 60. The sense of numbed disbelief can be detected everywhere – on the streets, in the shops, in the pub, at the library, in the gym and even across the great divide with which football enlivens the multiple identities of the great city of Manchester.
Everywhere everyone is saying the same thing. We have lost a man who was a beacon of decency, generosity, justice and kindness. But these are more than tributes to a fine man. What local people are saying goes to the heart of an important truth about modern politics.
Paul Goggins’ virtues were recognised everywhere he worked – from the children’s home he ran in Wigan, before he became an MP, to the Stormont office where, as Minister of State for Northern Ireland implementing the Good Friday agreement, he won the trust and respect of all sides.
He did the same in Westminster. One political editor said he had never known such generous cross-party Commons tributes at the death of an MP. He was called a true champion for the disadvantaged and dispossessed, a good and wise man, principled and hard-working, and utterly without ego or personal ambition.
But it was the plain people of Sale whose memories told the real story. The wife of a man dying from asbestosis spoke of his unflagging commitment to obtain justice. A housing expert spoke of the precision of his insight that the Coalition’s spare bedroom tax would hit the North hardest. The mother of a child with leukaemia recalled the MP’s unexpected visit to her home to offer support. The manager of a community centre in the constituency’s poorest area in Wythenshawe called him a man with no side, no airs or pretensions, who treated everyone the same.
Beneath all this was a deep faith. Though Paul Goggins gave up in his youth the ambition to become a priest, his faith and his politics were inseparable all his life. The passion and compassion they inspired made him the exemplar of what a modern politician should be.
In an age where Government ministers waffle about their “values” to draw a veil over the detail of their dubious policies, Paul Goggins did the opposite. He did not need to proclaim his values, for it was easy to deduce them from his actions and concerns. He pressed for change on children in care, homelessness, prison reform and poverty in the developing world. His was a commitment to justice which knew no bounds, as one friend said.
It made him not just a good guy but also a very effective politician. As David Blunkett said: “He managed to achieve things by persuasion and personality that some of us have to do by hectoring and force.”
But here in Sale we remember not only the politician but the man. One friend told me Paul Goggins’ only failing was to support the wrong football team. He was a lifelong Man City fan while his wife Wyn was a keen Everton supporter. As a Northern Ireland minister he was forced to spend long periods away from home. So when he did get back to Manchester, to maximise their time together, he bought himself a season ticket for Everton so he could go with her.
Paul Goggins was, in the very best of senses, a man who was on everyone’s side. But it is perhaps only here, on the streets of his constituency, that it is clear how many lives this extraordinary man has touched.
from The Church Times
Benefits Street shows we are quick to demonise and slow to understand
The devil has been dropped from the new baptism service being tried out by the Church of England, to make the ceremony more “accessible”. But the powers of darkness will not be too bothered. We are, after all, as a society rather good at creating our own demons.
This week alone we’ve been doing it to the poor, to immigrants, to black people, to the police, to people without jobs, to EU officials, and people who have too many children. Not to mention that bloke with the peculiar sticky-out hair, again just for looking odd.
Demonisation goes beyond criticism. It is more even than scapegoating. It occurs when we begin to conceive of an entire group of people as somehow Other. It carries a moral subtext. In the old days the Other was more simply characterised. There was God and the Devil and even in this more secular age something of that remains. Those we demonise are represented as diabolical, a group who are somehow antithetical to the interests of right-thinking members of society.
A prime example was thrown up last week by Benefits Street, which was Channel 4’s most popular programme in over a year, set in a road in Winson Green in Birmingham where filmmakers claimed that 90 per cent of the residents lived off state welfare payments.
For the edification of its 4.3m viewers the programme paraded a cast of petty criminals, irresponsible parents, drunks and drug-takers in a freakshow which placed these chavvy losers, squalid free-loaders and foul-mouthed wastrels in the digital stocks for voyeuristic public condemnation. So gripping was this poverty porn that tourists have been arriving in the street to shout abuse at its real-life residents or simply to gawp like Victorian worthies visiting the lunatics of Bedlam.
Not everyone has reacted in that way. By Friday almost 1,000 people had complained to the broadcaster or the media regulator Ofcom and 20,000 people had signed a petition calling for the rest of the five-part series to be pulled and asking Channel 4 to make a donation to charity to compensate for “stirring up hatred”.
The programme-makers have defended their work as a study of community spirit in the face of the increasing austerity of public spending cuts, squeezed benefits and low employment opportunities. And the first film certainly conveyed the human warmth that persists amid the squalor. It also cast interesting light on how individuals entrapped in welfare dependency turn their sense of self-worth away from an urge to take responsibility for themselves and into a braggardly defiance of authority.
But it was classic demonisation because it took the exceptional and invited viewers to see it as normal. Had Benefits Street merely been a dramatisation of how Britain’s benefits budget is really spent it would have included a road of 100 houses: 42 old age pensioners, 20 low-paid workers receiving tax credits, 16 sick or disabled residents, and just two people on job-seeker’s allowance.
As the local MP Shabana Mahmood told Channel 4: “ If you were interested in making a programme about what life is really like for people who are on the bread line then I can promise you two things – it won’t be entertaining and it won’t be funny”. But it might go some way to dispelling, rather than feeding, the myths and fallacies which grip the general imagination on such matters. A recent poll showed that 41 per cent of the UK benefit bill goes to the jobless; the real figure is 2.3 per cent.
The problem goes beyond lazy ratings-chasing journalism. One of the reasons the Liberal Democrat Sarah Teather is quitting politics is because she perceives a wilful strategy to demonise the poorest in our society. Papers she claims to have seen while a government minister suggest that the cap recently placed on benefits will not save money (because emergency accommodation will have to be found for people who are thrown out of their present homes). It is rather, she says, a deliberate attempt “to stoke up envy and division between people” in an attempt to gain electoral popularity and “that is immoral”. It is not a genuine cost-cutting measure but “a political device to demonstrate whose side you are on”.
Our society thrives on clichés and stereotypes. Some have mythic truth, like this week’s Wolf of Wall Street image of the predatory bankster or the story of the Cumbrian man on benefits who has fathered 22 children or the suggestion by the top EU official Viviane Reding that David Cameron’s concerns about Romanian immigration are only fears at the electoral prospects of UKIP. But most do disservice to the complexity and contradiction of real life.
The verdict of lawful shooting by the Metropolitan Police of Mark Duggan shows that. Here stereotypes collided. Duggan was a dangerous armed gangster out on the streets with a gun. Duggan was a happy family man only ever convicted for two relatively minor offences. Demonization requires unhelpful shortcuts in thinking as prejudice among the police, and prejudice against the police, this week equally showed. Reality is more nuanced, as the complex verdict of the jury after the Duggan inquest showed. Perhaps we should not be surprised that, after four months and 100 witnesses, they came to a subtler verdict than those relying on news soundbites and well-set prejudices desired.
The outcry over the police shooting a black man found by a jury to have been unarmed came the same day as the inquest on the policeman who was shot by the white gunman Raoul Moat about which there was hardly a ripple. The respective reactions were instructive. When Duggan’s aunt made a black power salute and shouted “No Justice, No peace” outside the court did it mean the same thing as when it was shouted by one of the low-life characters in Benefits Street the next day?
A demonised figure from the past spoke out this week. Christopher Jefferies, the man vilified by the media with unsubstantiated innuendo that he was guilty of the murder of the architect Jo Yeates in 2001, revealed that these baseless suggestions plunged his life into a limbo in which he became uncertain of the difference between fantasy and reality. Fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, nightmare and familiarity are blurred by the process of demonisation. “It feels as though we are living in a parallel universe from mainstream society,” wrote one of the Duggan family’s supporters the same day.
In Benefits Street on Friday the local newspaper found a businessman in a suit leaving one house bright and early. At another a woman was polishing her front-door knocker. Smartly dressed children were on their way to a local primary school which has just been reopened as an academy by the Oasis Trust which runs successful schools across the country. A local trader was complaining that his insurance company were threatening to withdraw cover on his vehicles as a result of the documentary. A takeaway owner said that his children were being teased about their address at school. The public pillory has private consequences. Good journalism should challenge the stereotypes of demonisation, not reinforce them.
Paul Vallely is visiting professor of public ethics at the University of Chester
an edited version of this appeared in The Independent on Sunday
Should we deal with the undeserving rich in the same way as the undeserving poor?
The early signs are that George Osborne’s political manoeuvre on welfare cuts may have backfired already. The Chancellor of the Exchequer decided to usher in the New Year with an announcement designed to wrong-foot the Labour Party and effectively declare open the 2015 general election campaign. But his move revealed, intentionally or not, something about the morality of this government’s attitude to the poor.
Another round of spending cuts is to be at the heart of the Conservative election strategy it seems. Of the £25bn proposed cuts, half will come from taking the axe once more to benefits. Old age pensions are to be exempted, apparently because older people vote more than do the under 25s whose housing benefit is the only specific target announced in the new welfare cuts.
The subtext, apparently, is that this will paint Labour as “the scrounger’s friend” ever-ready to squander the taxes of “hard-working people”, to use another Tory catchphrase. Many in Conservative party ranks, however, are unimpressed with the idea of balancing the budget on the backs of the working poor and those without jobs. There is also talk of intergenerational unfairness in sharing the burden of austerity unequally between young and old.
But there is a deeper subtext too. For it revives the old distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor of which our Victorian forebears were so fond with their Poor Law to incarcerate paupers in the Workhouse.
Earlier in the life of this government Dr Rowan Williams, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned against “a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of deserving and undeserving poor”. Not all churchmen agree. His predecessor, Lord Carey, opined in response, in the Daily Mail, that “hand-outs given to the long-term unemployed” exacerbated the problem of a “bloated” system of “welfare dependency” that “rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility”.
The general public tends increasingly to the latter view. The 2012 British Social Attitudes survey suggested that 37 per cent of the population thinks that most people on the dole are “fiddling”. Some 62 per cent think unemployment benefit is too high and discourages work.
This is almost a threefold increase on what people said during the last recession in 1993. The public now sees the occupants of the 340,000 household in which no adult has ever worked as idle and undeserving caricatures from Shameless rather than people who, in Dr Williams words, are not “wicked or stupid or lazy” but who need help “because circumstances have been against them”. But the majority are not always right.
Clearly there is a balance to be struck between the duty of solidarity with those in need and the requirement to creative incentives for individuals to take responsibility for themselves and their families. The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has for years been grappling bravely with that issue. His success has been only limited, not least because such a move is, ironically, best conducted in a time of plenty rather than one of austerity. But any attempt to achieve that balance will be further undermined by Mr Osborne’s crude politicking.
The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have both said that Mr Osborne’s new cuts will disproportionately hit the sick and disabled. That cannot be right. And both say that tax increases will be very difficult to avoid if the public deficit is to be reduced. Paying taxes is also a moral issue. Odd then that we hear nothing from Mr Osborne, who previously cut taxes for millionaires, about the undeserving rich.
from The Church Times
Behind all the pantomime boos and cheers over Comic Relief’s investments the truth is rather more complicated
Comic Relief is doing something funny with your money. Or should I say our money since I too invariably pick up the phone to give after one of the heart-tugging films in which Red Nose Day specializes and which this year raised £100 million for good causes. So the revelation by Panorama on BBC1 – the same channel which screens those fund-raising films – that the charity has some cash invested in companies which manufacture cigarettes, alcohol and armaments was a bit of a shocker since all of those wreak a toll on lives of many of the poorest people whom Comic Relief sets out to help.
This being the panto season much of the subsequent hoo-haa has involved booing and cheering at stereotypes. Panorama sprayed the charge of hypocrisy at other charities too, with a range of accusations over issues some of which seemed woefully ignorant to anyone who knows anything about international development. At the other end of the scale Russell Brand chipped in at the end of the week by Tweeting: “Comic Relief is run by beautiful, devoted people. If you want to look for corrupt arseholes there’s a lot of better options”.
This was all good knockabout stuff. But the panto journalism, and the withering comments from those who limit their intellectual analysis to 140 characters, failed to explain why Comic Relief got itself into this pickle – and what should be done to extricate it.
A couple of scenarios will illuminate that. Suppose Panorama had run the opposite kind of claim –that, say, Comic Relief had incompetently lost £20m over the last 10 years because of poor investments. Or suppose the scandal was that the charity had dished out all its money in a hurry and that significant amounts of the cash had been wasted or trousered by corrupt recipients.
The latter could have come about had the charity had different policies in place to allocate the money it raises. At present teams of specialists, advised by outside experts, distribute the cash in a controlled way which allows two years, until the next Red Nose Day, to allocate it all.
Some good causes are allocated money to spend over a five year period. Grants are given in instalments to ensure that last year’s dosh was properly spent before the next year’s is handed over. The committed cash could stay in the bank, earning a measly half a per cent interest, but Comic Relief invests it. The money that makes is used to pay the charity’s running costs, allowing it to pledge every penny the public gives goes to good causes with none spent on admin.
Comic Relief is a massive organisation. It has raised £900 million since it began. Currently it has just under £240m invested but this is not, as critics have fatuously suggested, “hoarded”: £125 million is set aside for long-term projects, £90 million will be allocated before the next Red Nose Day in 2015. That leaves £15m (6.25pc) to run the charity.
But the independent managers of the blue-chip funds in which the money is held have put together a diversified portfolio which includes £630,000 in the arms company BAE Systems. This is just 0.26 per cent of the total but, even so, it is embarrassing for a charity which in the same year spent £5.5m helping “people affected by conflict”. It has small holdings in drinks companies too, though many aid experts find alcohol far less problematic.
Its investment in tobacco companies, however, is deeply controversial. It has £2.7m invested in an industry which heavily promotes cigarettes in the developing world. Comic Relief supports a charity called Target Tuberculosis which calculates smoking may be responsible for over 20 per cent of TB cases worldwide. Hence the red faces behind the red noses.
The obvious solution is for Comic Relief to use ethical investments. Charity law allows such that Sam Younger, the Charity Commission chief executive, said on Panorama – but it also demands charities invest for the best financial return. But the programme did not reveal that immediately after the interview Younger wrote to the BBC saying “judging from some of the questions asked… I think there’s possibly a slight confusion as to what charity law says about investments”.
That’s unsurprising because charity law says contradictory things. It acknowledges charities might lose public support if they invest in what will bring maximum returns. But, Younger said, it is easy for a single-issue charity, like one focused on cancer or animal welfare, to exclude undesirable investments. But it is much harder for a charity a wide range of projects like Comic Relief.
“This might sound counterintuitive,” he wrote, “but that’s the law. The wider a charity’s objects, the more difficult it is to justify an ethical investment. A charity with broad or general objects is in a different position given trustees’ duties to invest for the best return (relative to risk).”
That is not all. The evidence on ethical investments is mixed. Sometimes they perform as well, or better, than the wider market; other times not. Comic Relief also claims that such funds are too small to give the security a widely-diversified investment brings. More evidence is needed on all this and Comic Relief should make public its exploration of the issue. It has done some work on this in the past. In 1999 it shifted some of its money into ethical funds but they underperformed. It trustees felt charity law required them to shift back into more conventional funds. Comic Relief clearly understands the problem but has not been found a solution.
Part of that lies with the Charity Commissioners. They need to clarify the law and offer some calculus to allow a charity to decide how to balance the risks of a loss of cash against loss of reputation. If they cannot issue more robust guidance then it may be that the law has to change to allow charities like Comic Relief to drop high-profit but incompatible investments without worrying that they are breaking the law if they end up earning less.
Panto journalists would still find a way to boo and jeer. But the public could be happy that, when they are exhorted to do something funny for money, the funny business ended there.
Paul Vallely is Visiting Professor in Public Ethics at the University of Chester
from The Independent on Sunday
What is time, St Augustine once mused and then pronounced: “If no-one asks then I know. But someone asks me, and I have to say, then I know not.”
He might have said the same about religion. What is a religion? Everyone assumes they know – until, that, is we have to define it.
The Supreme Court has just discovered this slippery truth. It has had to rule on whether or not Scientology is a religion.
Previously the courts had said No because, they had adjudged, though Scientology calls itself a Church its ceremonies were not “acts of worship”. They were backing a previous court ruling from 1970 which had pronounced that Scientology did not involve the “veneration of God or of a Supreme Being”.
Common sense definitions, based largely in the culture of Britain’s Judeo-Christian inheritance, once supposed that religion was something to do with God, or gods for those who had done classics at school.
The world’s main religions seems to fit that label. Some five billion people – Hindus, Jews, Christians and Muslims – see religion as something to do with deity. So do Sikhs, Zoroastrians and many smaller faiths.
But as our society has learned of far-off philosophical faith-systems like Confucianism and Shintoism it has dawned that a deity is not essential to a religion. There is no God in Buddhism. That is why, presumably, the Supreme Court justices have now said religion should not be confined to faiths involving a “supreme deity”.
So definitions have cascaded down to sociologists and anthropologists who, over the years have assembled rafts of criteria involving text, tradition, myth, ritual, symbol, gnosis, morality, law, sacred places and scriptures.
But beyond the fact that, as Durkheim noted, religion is always social where spirituality can be solipsistic and individual, all these academics have failed to find a definition that could be universally accepted. Today we have got to the point where individuals can pretty much define it as they want, hence those who declared their religion to be “Jedi Knight” on a recent census form.
In our relativist age, self-definition is considered the ultimate arbiter of truth. Religion is any system of belief or behaviour by which humans give meaning to their lives. The great philosophers of the past, from Aristotle to Kant, would have been unimpressed.
Still it allows everyone their two-penn’orth. It allows Scientologists to claim their beliefs and services have evolved in the four decades since the last legal ruling. And it permits politicians like Communities Secretary Eric Pickles to offer a more venal view. He said: “I am very concerned about this ruling, and its implications for business rates”. If Scientologists are a religion rather than a psycho-cult they will get exmptions from local taxes on their premises. Once the traditional definitions of religion are loosed there is no knowing where we will end up.
Paul Vallely is the author of Pope Francis – Untying the Knots published by Bloomsbury
from The Independent
The BBC has been struggling with a virility test over a probe by Panorama into the corporation’s in-house charity Comic Relief. The programme’s reporters have accused it of failing to spend some of the money it raises from the public and investing it unethically in arms, tobacco and alcohol companies.
BBC bosses did not want to appear defensive over the long-running investigation which is finally due to broadcast this evening. But a greater danger looms. It is that the programme will feed a woefully unsophisticated view of how the modern world of investment works.
Not all the cash that charities raise is spent at once, for good reasons. Projects to bring change can require five-year programmes. Cash is handed over annually, once it is clear last year’s money was well spent. To keep the balance in the bank would earn a meagre half per cent interest. So charities invest the cash in equities, not in risky single companies but in blue-chip managed funds.
Charity Commission guidelines insist on this. Legal, and legal precedents like Cowan v Scargill (1985), insist charities have a duty to obtain the best financial return in relation to both risks and yields.
Charities with a single-focus are allowed to avoid some investments; animal charities, for example, can eschew firms which do animal research. But charities with broad briefs like “the relief of poverty” are not allowed to avoid everything considered bad for poor people in some way. That would give them too narrow an investment base which could make their portfolio more risky.
There are ethical investment funds. Some have windows of good performance. But overall they are slightly more risky, cost more to manage and produce lower returns. Ethical funds substantially under-perform the global equity average. To secure £100 today you’d need, seven years ago, to have invested £80 in ethical funds compared to £70 in broader global equity funds. There are sound moral arguments for individuals to choose them but the law does not allow charities to do that. Had Comic Relief invested its full portfolio ethically in 2003 it would today have £20m less to spend on projects to help the poor.
Once you use managed funds it is difficult to isolate “undesirable” investments, as the Church of England found to its embarrassment when it was revealed to have money in Wonga world. Had Panorama journalists scrutinised their own BBC pension scheme they would have found its seventh biggest equity investment in British American Tobacco (£37.8m). It is also in arms, with £25.3m in BAE Systems, and has more than £50m in alcohol. Sensationalist journalism might cry pot and kettle. The truth is that investing ethically in a world of complex globalised interdependency is nowhere near as easy as many suppose.
Paul Vallely is Visiting Professor in Public Ethics at the University of Chester
A shortened version of this was published in The Times
Unsettling journalism from Panorama
There was a rather unsettling piece of journalism from Panorama this week. But, unlike that programme’s best offerings, it unsettled for the wrong reasons. Where’s Our Aid Money Gone? was very shaky journalism. It was pegged to a fund-raising meeting of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria in Washington on Tuesday which aimed to raise $15 billion to support its work for the next three years. The British government has already pledged $1bn of that.
The central premise of the programme was that something was seriously amiss at the Global Fund. It made allegations of fraud and suggested the Fund’s chief inspector had been sacked because he was too diligent in uncovering corruption. The trouble was that it failed to establish either of these facts but threw a lot of mud in the process.
The first sign that something was wrong came with reporter Richard Bilton’s criticism of the model of international donors using local organisations to deliver services. This, he pointed out, came with risks – because money might go astray. True. But what he didn’t says is that the opposite model, bringing in expats to do everything, brings the far greater risk that gains on the ground are not sustainable once the foreigners have gone.
Next it failed to set its report in a proper context. One of Panorama’s own expert witnesses, Amanda Glassman of the Centre for Global Development think-tank, had to resort to a blog to point out that in the programme’s prime example, in Cambodia, “the total amount of misused funds was modest – $431,567 out of $86.9 million” the Fund dispersed in that country.
Then Mr Bilton compared a draft report into the alleged fraud, by the Fund’s own investigators, with the final report the Fund published. A number of serious allegations were dropped in the published version. This was clearly a cover-up, Panorama suggested. Perhaps it was.
Or perhaps it was simply that senior Fund officials and lawyers found that the investigators’ allegations were not backed by sufficient evidence – a process familiar enough to any reporter whose editor pronounces that the facts are too thin to print a putative story.
The irony was that the primary evidence against the Global Fund was information which had been turned up by its own internal monitoring processes. The Fund has suspended two companies for paying improper commissions and increased scrutiny in Cambodia.
Panorama’s criticisms of Fund investigations elsewhere could only be that they were taking too long to conduct – despite the fact that in the country at the top of the list of inquiries, Niger, is at war. Again as Ms Glassman concluded: “The Global Fund’s continued commitment to open investigations and reporting should be praised, not slammed, and improvements should be encouraged”.
The most egregious fault of the documentary was naiveté. Money does go astray in aid operations and it is an important function of journalism to investigate that. But responsible journalism sets that in proportion. This programme opened with ad hominem attacks on the Global Fund’s chief promoters, the rock star Bono and the politician Tony Blair, and with the curious suggestion that the Fund has “only” saved four to five million lives not the 8.7m claimed by the World Health organisation.
Its tabloid title Where’s Our Aid Money Gone? invited viewers to generalise from the particular which, as a visit to Twitter revealed, a number did. “Panorama makes me seriously doubt that money given to charities ever gets there,” said one Twit. “Corruption damages trust,” Mr Bilton concluded. So does dubious journalism.
Paul Vallely is a Senior Fellow at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester.
from The Church Times
Nelson Mandela was a man, always, of his time. Yet he was, paradoxically, one who in some ways stood apart from – and even above – that time. It was in this that his greatness lay.
Mr Mandela, who died yesterday, aged 95, was a towering figure in the 20th century. He did not just bestride the continent of Africa but became a political colossus of the entire world stage.
Yet he was more even than that. The magnanimity he displayed, as the white rule of apartheid crumbled in his native South Africa in 1990, created a paradigm shift in what was possible – or even thinkable – in modern politics.
Because of those extraordinary personal qualities, the name of Nelson Mandela sits as comfortably in a litany of his century’s great spiritual leaders – like Ghandi and Martin Luther King – as it does among the 20th century’s iconic political figures, like Lenin, Churchill, Mao and Gorbachev, who shaped the destiny of their nations.
Mandela’s name adds lustre, too, to a catalogue of Nobel Peace Prize laureates which includes Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama.
But, though some have characterised him as a kind of secular saint, throughout his career he demonstrated a distinct combination of visionary imagination and fine political judgement. “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying,” he once observed, with a touch of asperity. He was no holy fool but a holy sage. He brought together integrity and calculation in a singular political package.
From the beginning of his public life he demonstrated a paradoxical combination: being of of his time and yet leading it on toward a better future. He was born the hereditary successor to a Tembu chiefdom but renounced it on his father’s death to become a lawyer. “I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth,” he later wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. “But a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.”
The systematic oppression of the black majority by a white minority in South Africa led him to join the African National Congress and engage in 15 years of activist opposition to apartheid after it was introduced in 1948. It was only when the ANC was banned in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960 – in which South African police opened fire on a peaceful crowd of black protesters, killing 69 people – that Mandela argued for the setting up of a military wing of the ANC.
When Mandela was put on trial for plotting to overthrow the government by violence in 1963 he made a statement from the dock which echoed round the world. It did not save him from prison. But over the next 27 years which he spent in jail, studying for a London law degree by post, his international reputation grew steadily. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” he later said.
Obituary of Nelson Mandela: Through his chains it was as if we were all enslaved, and through his extraordinary magnanimity he freed the world
“Rwanda is our nightmare, South Africa is our dream”. So wrote the Nobel Prize winning African novelist Wole Soyinka in 1994. It was just a month after two events which seemed to span the polarities of despair and hope so many saw in the continent of Africa in the post-independence era. In Rwanda a million people had died in a ghastly genocide. But South Africa had made an astonishingly peaceful transition from oppressive white rule to a black-majority government elected in the country’s first free elections ever – and it had done so under the guidance of one extraordinary man.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela embodied not only enormous political sagacity but also an almost saintly capacity for magnanimity, forgiveness and reconciliation. Despite 27 long years in jail at the behest of his white enemies his conduct and temperament, both inside and when he was eventually freed, earned him an unparalleled moral authority among blacks and whites alike.
His very name ought to have given a clue to the background and influences which formed him as one of the seminal figures of 20th century history. His forename was Rolihlahla which in the tongue of his native Xhosa tribe means “troublemaker”. His family name, Mandela, like his clan name, Madiba – which became the affectionate term by which he was known in his later years as father of his nation – revealed him to be a member of the family of the paramount chief of the Thembu people, to whom his father was chief councillor in the rural Transkei, the homeland of the Xhosas in the Eastern cape province.
There he was born on 18 July 1918 and there he was imbued with strong sense of both tribal pride and of the responsibility of leadership. A teacher at a local Methodist school, where he was baptised by his devout Christian parents, gave him the forename of Nelson after a great military leader from across the seas, it being the missionary custom to give exemplary English names to all the African boys.
When he was just 12, his father died and Mandela went to live with the paramount chief himself. The young Nelson watched the great man dispensing justice, which gave him an early interest in the law. He was an astute and able student and after the Methodist high school when to the black university college of Fort Hare, where he met the man who was to become his closest friend and political ally, Oliver Tambo. He joined the Students Christian Association, giving bible classes to the local people, and becoming involved in political protest against the government’s decision to remove black voters from the electoral register – in what became the precursor to the white supremacist policy of apartheid – the idea of “separate development” for whites and blacks.
