Christianity

This April, Michael Gove wrote in The Spectator: ‘To call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal.’ Certainly, the titters it provoked in the more left-wing corners of Twitter rather proved his point (a white man? complaining of prejudice?). On faith, as in everything else, Britain today erodes into fragments, small landscapes inhabited by the mutually deaf. I carry no brief for the man: my instinctive sympathy with his school reforms is matched only by my frustration with what Ian Leslie, in a profile published this week, calls the temperament by which Gove ‘is drawn irresistibly to the theatre of battle’. But even his greatest enemies

On Tuesday, Pope Francis set foot in the United States for the first time in his life. His plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where American presidents depart and arrive on Air Force One. But, according to a Spanish journalist on the papal plane, this was not how Francis had wanted to arrive. He would have preferred to cross over from Tijuana, the grubby Mexican city menaced by drug gangs from which countless migrants slip across the border into California. In other words, if the report is true, the Pope wished to turn his arrival into a political gesture, aligning himself with America’s 11.3 million ‘undocumented’ immigrants

Mitres off to the Archbishop of Canterbury for inviting ‘a family or two’ of refugees into his home. Well, not specifically into his home but into a four-bedroom cottage that sits in the grounds of Lambeth Palace. Opening up your second home to refugees is becoming quite fashionable among people who have more houses than they have hats or, indeed, mitres. Bob Geldof has offered refugees use of his Kent home as well as his London flat. The Pope has instructed that Vatican lodgings should be made available to a few families. This refugee crisis is proving easier to solve than we first thought. By my quick calculation, that’s possibly up

‘I know our Lord told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,’ muttered a colleague after a waspish College meeting; ‘but, being busy men, some of us find it advisable to specialise.’ I detected that approach in Matthew Parris’s contention, in The Spectator last week, that Christianity, particularly the Gospels, cannot help us prioritise when faced with the vast, terrible refugee crisis. We all want to help, he said, but the teachings of Jesus don’t tell us how to do it. All right: much popular reaction, Christian included, has been little more than anguished arm-waving. But soundbites are not the real clue. What counts is action. To

The migrant crisis raises the largest questions about our basic public creed, our ideology, secular humanism. Normally we pay little attention to this creed. Yes, yes, we affirm the ideal of universal human flourishing, the equal worth of all human beings, human rights. But do we believe it? This crisis forces us to wonder. As Matthew Parris says here this week, we simply do not know what our moral obligations are in relation to these people. Should we love our neighbour as ourself, and rush off to help them? How can we reconcile our universal humanism with the need to prioritise the welfare of our own tribe? Isn’t Western morality just

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3″ title=”Matthew Parris and Theo Hobson debate the role Christianity in the migrant crisis” startat=1383] Listen [/audioplayer]Proximity shouldn’t make a difference — should it? We were on a beach on the European side of the Mediterranean, it was a beautiful late August day, and I felt so happy. The sea was fresh, the sky was clear and a stiff breeze was whipping white horses out past the headland. ‘Rough weather for migrants,’ I thought, then checked myself. What an awful thing to think. There really would be migrants out there somewhere over the horizon; desperate people; people who, had they been visible to me — were they, Heaven forbid,

In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation should be used to punish teachers who hold ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality and perhaps divest themselves of these views to their pupils. I assume this could mean simply reading out bits of the Bible — that pungent little verse in Leviticus, perhaps, with its reference to ‘detestable acts’. Or maybe he would be OK reading out bits from Leviticus if he then made it clear that the Levite priests, and God Himself, were totally wrong on this issue and that homosexuality is absolutely lovely. But never mind the Levites. These ‘old-fashioned’ views would include

You know, when gay marriage legislation was going through parliament and Christian campaigners were warning about the possibility that those with a conscientious objection to gay marriage would find themselves at a disadvantage in public life – especially teachers – I honestly thought that it would take some time to happen. You might have some nutty secularist calling out a teacher who stubbornly refused to teach the parity of gay and straight marriage to children, but outside the Liberal Democrats, I couldn’t really see persecution ahead, other than for marriage registrars who would, unfortunately, just have to lump their conscientious difficulties with marrying same-sex couples. Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. For