11.06.2008
In defence of privilege
Jim Moody analyses the Church of England's new offensive
The Church of England has come out against a key element of official multiculturalism with the publication of a new report. It has announced its intention to maintain and consolidate its own privileged role in opposition to this essential component of mainstream bourgeois ideology.
Commissioned by bishop Stephen Lowe, Moral, but no compass: government, church and the future of welfare was published on June 9 and is to be considered by the archbishops’ council of the Church of England. Lowe was appointed two years ago as the C of E’s first “bishop for urban life and faith” - his remit has been to continue to promote the dissemination and implementation of the 1986 Faithful cities report and to be responsible for the church’s ongoing work on urban issues.
Given the incipient rupture with the bourgeois consensus that the report represents, several papers broke a press embargo to comment on Moral, but no compass before publication day. The Times was one paper to give it prominent coverage. Under the headline “Church attacks Labour for betraying christians”, it quoted the report as follows: “Every participant in our study from the church agreed that there was a deep ‘religious illiteracy’ on the part of the government, especially on the local level, and that an increased tendency to centralised mega-contracts in some government departments was bad for the whole of the voluntary sector” (June 7).
The report’s title is a deliberate poke at prime minister Brown. Its aim is to combat his constant (and nauseating) suggestion that he and his government operate under some kind of high moral compass. In point of fact, of course, the church and Brown share the morals of the bourgeois muckheap.
The Daily Telegraph was also in Brown-slapping mood: “Christianity is being discriminated against by the government in favour of islam and other minority faiths,” its religious affairs correspondent, Jonathan Wynne-Jones, opined. Feeding islamophobia in its usual manner, the paper’s writer maintained: “It echoes claims made by the bishop of Rochester, the right reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, last week that the decline of christian values is destroying Britishness and has created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical islam is filling” (June 7).
Church of England crusaders
What motivates the report is the concern that the church should be confirmed as a key player at the very centre of state affairs: “When the Church of England is disempowered it leads to a reduction in civic health.” The C of E hierarchy recognises that multiculturalism’s advocacy of the equality of religions poses a threat to the established church’s power and influence. Indeed, disestablishment would be the logical outcome for multiculturalists - prince Charles has stated he would wish to be known as “defender of the faiths” (plural) upon his coronation. Moral, but no compass seeks to combat this trend by stressing the church’s alleged social contribution.
There seems little doubt that the report is a political document sanctioned by the church’s leaders. After all, bishop Lowe, the report’s instigator, is directly responsible to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Church of England’s two leading clerics.
In their conclusions, the authors of Moral, but no compass recommend the appointment of a “minister for religion, social cohesion and voluntary action”, replacing the prime ministerial responsibility for this at present. They also want a new philanthropic fund established, which would bolster what the report calls “christian [read C of E] social innovation, advocacy and welfare provision”.
Over recent decades, many charities and other non-profit bodies have taken on what were previously government departmental responsibilities. The effect of this has been to allow Tory and Labour administrations to get off the hook when difficult situations develop due to maladministration, service-delivery failure or the plain lack of sufficient funds for social needs. As a result, patients, clients and users of services generally then have little recourse in the event of failure and no-one can be held democratically accountable.
Taking this trend a step further, the report recommends government allocation of budgets to Church of England cathedral and diocesan bodies so that they can invest openly in local civic initiatives. This would include the cultural areas of architecture, art, education and music, further removing such important concerns from the domain of elected politicians.
The report takes to task one of the government’s current hobby horses, the Faith Action network, which receives “government funding to be the voice of faith and community organisations delivering public services” (faithaction.net). But the authors complain that Faith Action “in some instances consists of a lone freelance consultant”. They claim that projects based in the C of E’s 42 cathedrals are already utilised to better effect in covering the same territory.
What must be ominous for Brown and co, now that the New Labour project has died the death and nothing has as yet taken its place, is that the authors of Moral, but no compass are directly calling into question the role of the government. In a sense this can be viewed as part of a wider switch in bourgeois allegiances from Labour to Conservative. The report states: “We encountered on the part of the government a significant lack of understanding, or interest in, the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere ... A conscious focus on minority communities was being achieved, to the relative exclusion of the christian church and hundreds of other charities.”
However, Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition seems to be viewed in a much more positive light: “The Conservatives’ social justice report is stridently anti-poverty, but what is notable is that it suggests that poverty is being driven by a breakdown in the ‘social fabric’ of the UK. In contrast to Labour, the Conservatives’ report argues that renewal will come by liberating the third sector from the incessant pressure to do the government’s work in the government’s way.” Which is another way of suggesting that some non-profit agency work should be placed in the church’s offertory plate.
Bishop Lowe commented, following the report’s release: “The Church of England is still a major player in social and welfare provision in this country despite what its detractors might believe. It has earned the right as the largest voluntary organisation (and so much more) in the country to be listened to and worked with as a respected partner in the area of welfare provision as it is in education.”
Special recognition
Some believers, however, can see drawbacks in continuing to demand special recognition. Simon Barrow, co-director of Ekklesia, a christian think tank whose personnel were interviewed for the report, said: “It is particularly important that the needs of the vulnerable and the reasonable expectation of all people (whether religious or non-religious) for equal treatment from public services should not be subsumed too readily in a ‘contracting-out’ culture that can put the interests of providers - government, voluntary and private agencies - ahead of those they are supposed to be helping.”
Backing up this assessment, Ekklesia’s website warns that “the churches should beware of being sucked into running taxpayer-funded services in a way that compromises their integrity and detracts from their ability to raise bigger questions about the whole system, particularly in terms of inequality and poverty” (www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/7257). We say, of course, that such provision is anyway not something that should be dependent on charity, but on rights that have to be won from the state that rules us. The device, convenient for government, of arm’s-length provision of services is, as already noted, profoundly undemocratic.
On June 10, Blairite outrider and atheist David Aaronovitch used his Times column to berate the church hierarchy. Sniping at the report’s “tone of grievance”, Aaronovitch questioned its claims that the C of E was being done down, correctly noting its position as a school proprietor and the fact that its bishops sit in the House of Lords. However, although he devoted over half his column to the issue, he ignored the real argument. As with most bourgeois commentators he fears advocating genuine secularism, let alone inculcating a hostility to the indoctrination of religious mumbo-jumbo through the school system. That would be too politically challenging for this former Eurocommunist.
The Church of England wants to preserve its privileged position and indeed seeks to strengthen its influence. Communists, however, call for the complete separation of church and state. Not only should the C of E be immediately disestablished and all subsidies withdrawn, but its vast wealth and assets - historically accumulated through centuries of exploitation - should be confiscated. “Social and welfare provision” should be the responsibility of the state, whose representatives must be democratically accountable and subject to recall.
Likewise we oppose the extension to other religions of C of E privileges under the pretext of multiculturalism - a fundamentally divisive ideology. Culture is a construct that lives and breathes, changing as social struggles and migrations impinge upon it. The artificial separation of different ‘cultures’ originating in different ‘communities’ serves only to divide worker from worker on the basis of their perceived and often officially funded ‘cultural needs’ based on religion and ethnicity. In this way the class interests of all workers are hidden from view and sectional interests nurtured.
