Archive
Christians aren’t persecuted, and they aren’t disrespected
.jpg)
Lord Carey, about whom I have had impolite things to say in the past, seems determined to storm about in his tea cup, whipping up a righteous indignation amongst tabloids and those predisposed to such indignation. His most recent stunt is another high profile letter, this time to the Sunday Telegraph (predictably) complaining of bias against Christians.
The letter, which can be read in full here, begins thus:
SIR – On March 29, a Christian nurse, Shirley Chaplin, will take the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust to the Exeter Employment Tribunal.
This dedicated nurse, who has cared for thousands of patients over 30 years, was told by the trust to remove from her neck a cross she first wore at her confirmation service over 40 years ago.
She has worn the cross every day since her confirmation as a sign of her Christian faith, a faith which led to her vocation in nursing, and which has sustained her in that vital work ever since.
Mrs Chaplin refused to remove her cross and, as a result, was prevented from working in a patient-facing role.
It would seem that the NHS trust would rather lose the skills of an experienced nurse and divert scarce resources to fighting a legal case, instead of treating patients.
The uniform policy of the NHS trust permits exemptions for religious clothing. This has been exercised with regard to other faiths, but not with regard to the wearing of a cross around the neck.
Even the Daily Mail managed to report that this woman was asked to remove her cross for ‘elf’n'safety reasons. She wore it above her clothes, and refused to put it underneath them. Judging by the picture attached to that Mail article, it exists on a fairly long chain and is in danger of contact should a nurse lean over a patient.
In 2006, the BMA recommended that doctors stop wearing neckties for precisely this reason, as they were washed less frequently than other items of clothing and had greater risk of contact. This was recommended as a means to inhibit the spread of MRSA. No doubt there is a similar medical logic to this officious move against a nurse’s cross.
So far as I’m concerned, the item either is a risk to health, in which case it should be banned across every hospital, or it is not and it should be permitted. Things don’t get much simpler. Far be it from me to step in the way of some religious crusade, against an imaginary slight, on the part of crusty Anglican relics.
The letter continues:
Furthermore, Mrs Chaplin has been informed that the Court requires evidence of the fact that Christians wear crosses visibly around the neck. It cannot be right that judges are unaware of such a basic practice.[...]
The cross is ubiquitous in Christian devotion from the earliest times and clearly the most easily recognisable Christian symbol. For many Christians, wearing a cross is an important expression of their Christian faith and they would feel bereft if, for some unjustifiable reason, they were not allowed to wear it. To be asked by an employer to remove or “hide” the cross, is asking the Christian to hide their faith.
Any policy that regards the cross as “just an item of jewellery” is deeply disturbing and it is distressing that this view can ever be taken.
In deciding whether or not something should be covered by the religious exemptions, the existence of which Carey acknowledges, surely it makes sense to have testimony from people of a given religion that an article of clothing is important to their faith. In the case of Sikhism or Islam, specific holy documents cover the topic.
There is no similar elevation of the wearing of a cross on a necklace for Christians by the New Testament. Now, I don’t agree with this method of approaching the subject; in the case of health professionals, either something is a danger to patients’ health or it is not. If not, allow it; if so, ban it. But this is not Lord Carey’s objection.
Carey specifically objects to what I’ve suggested – that the cross on a necklace be treated like any other piece of jewellery.
His problem is that Christianity no longer has the right to unthinking exemptions from the same sort of rules which everyone else has to follow. It is with the decline of Christianity in the UK, and the ebb of its control over the State, as implied by Carey’s evident desire that judges treat Christian icons as deserving of special treatment.
Reproduced from the Daily Mail article listed above
There is another section, from the elipsis above, which deserves comment:
This is yet another case in which the religious rights of the Christian community are being treated with disrespect. We are deeply concerned at the apparent discrimination shown against Christians and we call on the Government to remedy this serious development.
In a number of cases, Christian beliefs on marriage, conscience and worship are simply not being upheld. There have been numerous dismissals of practising Christians from employment for reasons that are unacceptable in a civilised country. We believe that the major parties need to address this issue in the coming general election.
I have a lot of sympathy for people dismissed for upholding their conscience. After all, if we remove religion from the equation for a moment, isn’t asking other workers not to cross picket lines an example of appealing to the conscience of the individual? This type of thing calls for a new departure in industrial democracy.
In the second example, where an Islington Council registrar was dismissed for essentially refusing to do her job, we may not agree with or admire the homophobic sentiments located there. On the other hand, we shouldn’t make common cause with an overbearing State; we should instead ask a) was there enough work on regular marriages to keep her busy elsewhere and b) were her colleagues willing to make accommodation for her?
Instances such as these are not ones where medical science will be called on to judge health risks potentially occasioned by clothing, or whether safety risks are possible due to carrying what may be considered a weapon in public spaces, where it can represent a serious problem. They can be resolved with understanding.
What they shouldn’t be used for, as Lord Carey as well as Dr. Sentamu and the Catholic prelate of Westminster, Vincent Nichols have all done, is to attack ‘secularism’ and on several occasions atheism. They are not the result of these things – and many of them will not be resolved by the abandoning of Labour’s Equality Bill – which has been a recent hobbyhorse for this type of sentiment from clerics.
Nor should we draw the conclusions that all the signatories to this letter have done, that ‘the religious rights of the Christian community are being treated with disrespect.’
People still go to worship without trouble. They are free to live according to their beliefs – to the point of being according specific exemptions in many fields, e.g. the right of a Doctor to refuse a woman an abortion on grounds of religious belief. Key Christian festivals are still national festivals – Easter and Christmas for example.
By and large, Christians have little cause for complaint. Letters such as Carey’s, and his many co-signatories, simply serve to create a lot of noise without ever actually solving anything.
Islamism in the Labour Party, hypocrisy in the Telegraph
Allegations by the Sunday Telegraph that there are “Islamists” at work in the Labour Party won’t come as a galloping shock to anyone who regularly reads Private Eye. That organ has contained plenty of juicy gossip about Lutfur Rahman, leader of Tower Hamlets’ council, and the goings on in that area. The Telegraph simply attempted to put a name and formal structure to the influence peddling and dodgy politics.
That name is, allegedly, the Islamic Forum of Europe. The scoop was in getting Jim Fitzpatrick, Minister for the Environment, to denounce them as “entryists” and to say that they are, “completely at odds with Labour’s programme, with our support for secularism.” Hereafter everyone will be able to talk about the process like it’s a conscious infiltration rather than part of a broader trend that requires no secret conspiracy.
Islamisn and Labour
Read through the Telegraph articles and comment pieces on the subject. This group, the IFE, have only gained ground as people “moved away from secular, Left politics”. This move shouldn’t surprise anyone; the secular Left has been caught in an impossible position between a Labour government waging war on Muslims and a Labour Party that would prefer its genuinely Left members to shut up and gormlessly pound the pavement, rather than expect to have any say on policy.
By ‘genuinely Left members’, I mean those who still hold to all the old chestnuts: redistribution, universal public services where corporations don’t turn a profit, liberal values of free speech and civil rights and so on. The splitting of this Left across Greens, Labour, the Socialist and Socialist Workers Parties and a welter of independents, plus the crushing weight of bureaucratic power in Labour that prevents a coagulation of the Left within the Labour Party, leaves the way open for fundamentalist groups to win people to other avenues.
We’ve witnessed it with the BNP, and every time a genuine take-no-shit socialist runs against the BNP, with a sufficient campaign to back them, the BNP get hammered back. This will be much more difficult if the link between the Left and minority communities is broken by religious extremists, and in turn this will create a feedback loop that polarizes the white working class away from uniting with minorities to the good of all.
Andrew Gilligan, in his piece, compared the Islamic Forum of Europe to the Militant Tendency, a revolutionary socialist group that picked up thousands of members due to agitations against the inaction of Labour’s leaders over the Miners Strike and the other Thatcherite attacks on the working class. The irony here is that only groups like the Militant can win people back from religious extremism, because only those groups can be unambiguous and forthright in their class politics and class demands – but Labour’s leadership does its level best to kill those groups.
In the case of the Militant, this was done through expulsions – but for those who survived the Labour Party purges of the 1980s, it has continued in the bureaucratic attitudes and structures of the labour movement that sees union leaders act as New Labour backscratchers, leaves the Party NEC as a puppet for the parliamentary leadership, and leave Labour conference as a figleaf democracy.
Hypocrisy and ignorance in the Telegraph
Beyond the immediate concerns of preserving Labour’s secularism (for which the leadership’s first recourse won’t be a change in policy, to quit alienating Labour votes, it’ll be expulsions or NEC control of local selection procedures), I found the holier-than-thou attitude of the Telegraph Op Ed piece on the subject to be really quite amusing:
“If the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) was open and frank about its aims, voters would be able to make up their own minds about whether they wanted to see its members in any form of government in Britain. It is part of any democratic system worthy of the name that those who abide by the rule of law are entitled to campaign in elections, even if we find their beliefs objectionable. But some members of the IFE demonstrate in private that they have an agenda that they are not willing to share with the electorate.”
Hypocrisy! Both the Labour leadership and its Tory counterparts quite happily hold off on announcing policies and plans because they might alienate voters. The Tories are especially guilty of this at the moment, with their loud claims that they can’t really say anything definite until they are in office and can see the book-keeping. Which is precisely why this “Change” guff is so all-pervasive. The Op-Ed continues:
[The IFE] would be more credible if, in public, the IFE was not presented as simply a “social welfare organisation” committed to “community cohesion” and “tolerance” – while in private, it shows itself to be committed to replacing democracy by a theocracy based on Islamic law.
This type of sentiment displays a staggering ignorance. The reason extremist organisations gain influence is precisely because of their roles as ‘social welfare organisations’ – in the absence of a State prepared to step up and fulfil its responsibilities. Has no one noticed the proliferation of extremist Christian churches in the shittiest parts of this country, with their Bible groups and focus on helping the sick, the old, mothers etc? It’s the same principle – and whilst not especially violent, can be just as antithetical to liberal secularism.
All talk of community cohesion and tolerance is to Brit politico-speak what “Freedom”, “Truth”, “Justice” etc are to US political discourse. Who the hell is going to admit to being against them? There’s a fair argument to be made that with their emphasis on nuclear family values, harsher sentencing, less redistribution and the odd slip back into anti-immigration rhetoric, the Tories aren’t exactly contributing to community cohesion and tolerance – but damned if the Telegraph spends pages arguing about that, because they agree with Tories.
Part of the problem
This rise of ethnic extremism is the precise counterpart to the continuing nationalist, xenophobic diatribes of the Waily Mail, Telegraph, Sun etc. If the conditions of the British working class are presented as being the result of mass immigration, and disenfranchisement a result of individual corruption or ‘political correctness gone mad’, then we’re pushing for the rejection of the big minority communities that form a part of the UK, and capitulation before the hysterical “cultural Christianity” of Melanie Phillips et al.
By doing so, we’re inviting others to take advantage of the resentment stoked up in both majority and minorities. And still nothing will be solved; disenfranchisement will continue, declining public services will continue. The ‘British’ far Right are interested in the same harmful privatisation and cut backs as the mainstream – they vote for them in local councils like Kirklees on a regular basis. The ethno-nationalist Right – as demonstrated across the Islamic world – is equally little interested in social welfare and the liberation of the individual.
The socialist answer – one that has an immensely powerful pull when talking to people of all races, cultures and creeds on the ground – is simple: we fight extremism and we fight the indifference of our political class by the same methods. Building the democratic organisations for a fighting working class, to secure the most basic demands; employment, housing, universal healthcare, education and public services and a government form which does not breed an unaccountable political class.
Recent Comments