Fisking the Fisker…

I wouldn’t usually do this, but I feel my innate sense of Fair Play (© MarkFerguson) demands it. So here we are… below you will find three different texts. In plain font there is a letter from Matthew Offord MP to his constituent outlining his position on the issue of same-sex ‘marriage’. In bold there is Mark Ferguson’s clever little fisk of said letter. In red is my response to his fisking.

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“My own position is that I will not be voting for legislation that extends marriage for same-sex couples. Having waited many years to get married I acknowledge the value the commitment brings.”
You think YOU’VE waited many years to get married Matthew? Imagine how long a gay couple might have waited.
Around about the length of time they have been with their partners, I guess. A general rule that applies to heterosexual couples, too. No great message to be drawn from that.

It is my strong personal, moral and religious belief that the institution of marriage is to provide the foundation of a stable relationship in which those two people of the opposite sex procreate and raise a child. That is physically not possible for same-sex couples so I don’t see the point of introducing a law to allow this.

So marriage isn’t valid without procreation? What about those who can’t conceive? What about those who don’t want children? Marriage is not entirely about childbirth, and hasn’t been for quite some time… Ahhh, this old chestnut, favourite of many a combox crusader. Saying marriage isn’t interlinked with procreation because some can’t conceive is rather like saying cars aren’t for driving because some won’t start. In other words, it’s facile.

I strongly believe in same-sex couples having the right to a civil registration, in order that they receive the same benefits as opposite-sex couples but not marriage.
Matthew wants same-sex couples to “receive the same benefits as opposite-sex couples” – all except the benefit of getting married that is. Marriage isn’t ‘a benefit’, which implies (in classic New Labour style) that it is a universal right one can simply demand irrespective of all other factors – for those with a religious hue, it is the acknowledgement before God of the union of one man and one woman. ‘Twas ever thus. You may not have a religious hue, Mark, unless of course it’s the lovely fuzzy ‘let’s-all-hug-a-poor-person’ stuff that doesn’t offend your metroliberal sensibilities, but the law of the land does, mainly because we are, effectively, a church state. Which is why the issue of the law and entitlements before it really is relevant. Completely relevant. Not that this is a non-religious vs. religious debate – there are plenty who defend marriage as marriage outwith religious argument.

To many this might seem like a trivial matter, particularly since the introduction of Civil Partnerships in 2004 means that same sex couple already enjoy the same rights that married couple do.

Apart from the right to get married. Keep up Matthew.

Ahhh, that ‘rights’ things again. Which rather puts the cart before the horse, since the issue of whether marriage is a right is precisely the point. And if marriage is, by very definition, the union of one man and woman, then to demand it as a right for either those of the same gender, or for polygamists, or for any other creative construction you can think of is, its opponents would argue, simply nonsensical. Or as Scruton put it ‘The pressure for gay marriage is, therefore, in a certain measure self-defeating. It resembles Henry VIII’s move to gain ecclesiastical endorsement for his divorce, by making himself head of the Church. The Church that endorsed his divorce thereby ceased to be the Church whose endorsement he was seeking.’ Oh I know you won’t like Scruton because, y’know, he doesn’t vote Labour and probably reads the Telegraph ‘n’ stuff. Try Michael White instead. Or try Google for a list of various other lefties who oppose the same legislation – it won’t take you long. 

However the institution of marriage is woven into the fabric of our nation – it affects our courts, inheritance rights and even our schools. And it is the effect on our schools, children and teachers that is worrying so many. Close to 100,000 people have signed the one man, one woman equals marriage petition.
Because that’s how policy is decided now – once 100,000 people sign a petition then the issue is settled. Thank goodness for that then, because once we find the other 50,000 who want Clarkson as PM then we’ll be home and dry. Firstly it’s worth pointing out that the online petition now has over half a million signatories, but you’re quite right policy shouldn’t be decided this way. But then, Mr Offord wasn’t suggesting that policy should be decided this way. He was merely pointing out, and making no great issue of it, that there is a depth of feeling amongst the general public that aligns with his own point of view. Rather like certain centre-left websites, for example, who try and discern great political truths from the latest opinion poll. Mark Ferguson, meet Mr Straw Man…

In regard to education, Section 403 of the Education Act 1996 places a legal requirement on schools to teach children about “the importance of marriage”. If marriage is redefined, schools will have no choice but to give children equivalent teaching on same sex marriage, even those children of a very young age, including those at primary school.

WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN? If only they had before previous equality crusaders decided to close Roman Catholic adoption agencies that were trying to find loving families for orphans. But no, it was all about ‘rights’ back then, too. The right to protection from discrimination in the provision of goods and services, as I recall. ‘Good and Services’. Sheesh.

The underlying tone of this suggests that somehow learning about same sex couples might have a negative effect on children. No, he quite pointedly sticks to the issue of marriage. It neglects, however, the positive impact children learning about same sex couples would have in terms of lessening the likelihood of homophobic bullying in schools. A speculative non-sequitur and emotional blackmail, quite frankly – bullying is abhorrent and should be ruthlessly stamped out in all circumstances, whatever the reason. Kids can be cruel, and the cruelty they inflict upon one another is not merely proportional to the extent to which their victim is different, or indeed how they are different. Which is precisely why bullying shouldn’t be chopped up into categories but should be hit head on for exactly what it is – and why any speculative argument such as this should be approached with rather more caution.

Also, I may be getting on a bit, but I don’t remember marriage ever coming up when I was at school. Maybe that explains why you have a distinctly hazy view about what it actually is. Now that either means a) it did but had absolutely no impact on me so I can’t remember (hardly the greatest basis for suring up your arguments) or b) it didn’t happen. Considering the national school curriculum, I strongly suspect it was a). I guess there may be a c) teachers are brainwashing our children, but in the reality-based community we ignore nonsense like that… We in the reality-based community know that teachers ‘brainwash’ children everyday. We choose the subjects they learn and the knowledge they have access to. We reward correct answers and correct wrong answers. We tell them to respect authority, and themselves, and one another, and punish them when they don’t. We seek to instil them with a set of values and expect the children to live up to these values, be it on racism, or commitment, or bullying. In short, they absorb the environment we create for them, most of which works more like osmosis than a written list that has to be learnt by rote. In other words, much the same as what happened when you were at school.

So what will happen to parents who because of religious, or philosophical beliefs take their children out of lessons? It is simply inconceivable in today’s world where political correctness runs a mock in our institutions, that there would not be profound consequences for those who hold traditional views. Parents who object will be treated as bigots and outcasts, possibly excluded from being on the PTA, or from being a governor.
Hold your horses Matthew. You’ve made a big leap of faith from same sex marriage here. You’ve even fallen back on the old “PC gawn mad” stuff which is “running a mock”. Although Matthew, let me be as strident as you for a moment – those who would pull their kids out of lessons for fear that they might hear about loving same sex relationships are, by my definition at least, bigoted in this regard. Sorry. Which rather proves the general theory that for every Daily Mail reader willing to spout  ‘PC gawn mad’ there’s a Guardianista willing to screech ‘bigot!’. Incidentally, the issue wasn’t about loving same-sex ‘relationships’ – nobody would take their child out of class because they were learning about the love a father might have for his son, or the bonds between two brothers, or the love shared between a grandmother and granddaughter. The issue was, quite specifically, same-sex ‘marriage’ – and not every parent, be they religious or not, wants their child taught that there is no distinction between the two. It is not hard to imagine such a person… some examples off the top of the head might include a devout Muslim sending their child to a Muslim faith school, or a devout Jew sending their child to a Jewish faith school, or a devout Roman Catholic sending their child to a Roman Catholic faith school, or a devout… (&c.)

Discriminated against and persecuted because they hold views that have been enshrined in our laws and have been the cornerstone of our society for two thousand years.
Don’t make me list some of the frankly ludicrous laws we’ve had in the last 2000 years Matthew. Don’t make me do it…. I’ll tell you what, why not list some of the laws that stood the test of time and were cast aside in haste, to be repented in leisure. It might be rather less rhetorically useful for you, but it would be a more productive use of your time. And rather more relevant to the issue at hand.

And what of the teachers who object to teaching about same sex marriage. Will they face disciplinary action? How will it affect their careers? Will same sex marriage be covered under such subjects as citizenship forming part of the main curriculum taught to our children and tested through examination? These are just some of the questions that the Government has so far failed to answer.
Yes Matthew, there will be a “Big Gay Test” at the end of term*. Honestly this is all getting very silly. Again, at school I don’t ever remember being forced to take a compulsory citizenship test – does anyone else? So an issue is raised, an issue that is causing serious concern amongst a whole host of institutions, an issue that is already playing out on the national stage and is getting increasingly ugly, an issue which has hit the national newspapers numerous times in just the last few months, an issue which concerns religious liberty and the freedom of parents to have their children brought up according to the tenets of their faith, an issue relating to the freedom of schools to operate according to the tenets of the faith they stand within, indeed an issue that concerns the very make-up of the education sector… and you go for the ‘Big Gay Test’ quip instead. Get you.

I do not believe that same sex marriage would serve to enhance British society or its values.

One of the great problems with using the phrase “values” in a British context is that what those values are is rather contested. Quite. Often it’s shorthand for “my values”. Agreed. So Matthew, here’s what I think of when I think of “British values”. Fair play. And blocking equal marriage seems distinctly unfair to me. Which only goes to show the extent to which you remain almost entirely oblivious to the arguments of many who argue that marriage is what it is, and once it ceases to be that it becomes something else entirely – which is not marriage. Still, perhaps your notion of fair play could be extended a little to, oh I don’t know, understanding and then addressing the arguments placed before you, avoiding collaboration with Mr Straw Man to fuel your rhetoric, ceasing to throw in witty rejoinders as a means of belittling an opponent and their arguments and lastly, and most importantly, by refraining to fling the metaphorical muck by disregarding your opponents as bigots when they take a different view to yourself.

Fair play. Sounds noble in theory, huh?

Yours sincerely,
MATTHEW OFFORD MP
* – Note to Matthew, there will NOT be a “Big Gay Test”. That was a joke.

Gosh, thanks for clearing that up Mark.

The Flag of Heritage

Flying a flag is a political act. It means something, even if we cannot always explain quite what it is or why it is important. It is more blood and guts than bloodless theorems, and it can imbue a place with an identity and dignity woven from the diverse and sometimes imperceptible threads of a shared heritage.

So, what does it say that flying above the buildings of some our greatest historical treasures is the banal logo of a government agency?

Now at this point, I might as well lay my cards on the table: contrary to received wisdom, I do not believe the flag of St. George requires detoxification. Nor do I believe that it is indelibly linked with an attitude of mind violently opposed to the tenets of contemporary society. Indeed for a great many, the flag is no more offensive or sinister than are jeans and trainers because thugs often wear them. To my mind, those who traduce the flag are often those whose principal experience of its flying is filtered through the sensationalised glare of a controversy obsessed media. In short, those who would make synonymous the flag and violent (often racialised) expressions of political activity are wide of the mark.

Yet it also worth rejecting the common slogan appearing from the opposite direction, that lazily claims the left is unpatriotic (usually whilst quoting some part of Orwell that the interlocutor never actually read), by pointing to the rather inconvenient fact that a great many on the left are not. After all, one is rather more likely to see the flag of St. George draped from the bedroom window of a council-house in a Labour stronghold than from the quads of an Oxford college or the sash windows of a thatched Cotswolds cottage.

And this is important, for it is here one most clearly glimpses the cleave in attitudes toward the flag of England. What the flag requires is not detoxification. What the flag requires is social and cultural extension. That it could for so long be maligned as a symbol of vulgarity and boorishness could only occur because it was for too long absent from association with the lived experience and valued institutions of those who would so willingly jump to such lazy conclusions (and who have often had a disproportionate role in public discourse with which to do it). There has been an element of social capture of the flag of St. George, unwarrantably narrowing its capacity to bestow identity and embody unity; quite simply, more people need to be able to share in it.

As such, we need once again to weave together the principal symbol of our national identity with those things that cut across social and class boundaries and point toward a history and identity in which we all share.

The English Heritage flag cleanses some of our most important sites of any emotional ties, erecting a sterile symbol of state bureaucracy more suited to road traffic signs and office stationery than marking the landscape of our shared history. Where an expression of our communal identity and possession ought to be, there is the logo of a government agency.

We ought to dismay at this riding roughshod over our collective heritage. We ought to reclaim our heritage for the flag of England, and have our heritage shared and secured for all by flying under this same flag. We ought, quite simply, to put the flag of England back into English Heritage.

Dear Christine Blower…

Dear Christine Blower,

I was very disappointed to read your letter to the Guardian, dated Sunday 29th April. Your decision to sign the letter in your capacity of General Secretary of the NUT is of particular concern.

To begin, the legislative basis upon which you base your objection to the actions of certain Roman Catholic schools lacks serious credibility. Indeed, that you should need to resort to the claim that Roman Catholic schools had breached ‘the spirit of the Equality Act’ really ought to have been enough to give you serious pause for thought. In short, no law has been broken. Further, no school is, by law, required to conform to the ‘spirit’ of the Equality Act, as opposed to its precise legislative demands, not least because that very notion is itself transient and shifting. That you should choose, therefore, to link the decision of some Roman Catholic schools to inform their students of the C4M petition with incidents of homophobic bullying is little more than unfounded slur intended to enforce conformity through semantic (emotional) blackmail; those NUT members who work within Roman Catholic schools, and who can recognise your intervention for the prejudice-riven ignorance that it is, have every right to be concerned.

Put simply, Roman Catholic schools are very often beacons of equality and diversity – it is in our DNA – and to suggest we neglect to teach human rights or an understanding of one another is deeply offensive. There are, naturally, areas of disagreement, though do not please assume that you have a monopoly on either ethics or morals, or that your own interjections carry with them the quality of moral infallibility – one can disagree with your political, social and moral pronouncements without thereby being cast off as either reactionary or unpleasant. Indeed, the intentions and tone of your letter does little to suggest that your own worldview is one of inclusivity and tolerance.

Clearly, you have chosen to present your personal views as synonymous with your professional role, no doubt with the intention of adding authority to your pronouncements. This is inappropriate. You may well, of course, think the settled law of the land is homophobic or fuels homophobia. You may, indeed, think that marriage as legally, culturally, socially and historically understood is homophobic and fuels homophobia. You may also, clearly, believe that anyone who wishes to preserve the existing legal situation, by espousing the perfectly mainstream view that marriage is between one man and one woman, is homophobic or fuelling homophobia, or indeed polygamyphobic and fuelling polygamyphobia. All that is fine, and should you wish to pursue these views further then you do of course have every right to do so. What you absolutely do not have the right to do is to use your position as head of a national union to add any sort of professional imprimatur to these views, especially when the attack (for that is what this is) falls on the heads of so many of your members, whose hard work and membership fees are vital for the continuing success of your union.

Should you wish to complain about the role of Roman Catholic schools in informing their students about the C4M petition, which contradicts absolutely no law, then please do so in your capacity as Christine Blower. To do so in the name of the union you lead is a gross distortion of your role as union leader, and a gross abandonment of those whom you are morally obliged to represent.

As things stand, I see no reason why Roman Catholic members of the NUT, nor indeed those who work in and are committed to Roman Catholic education, nor indeed anyone else of all faiths or none who happen to find the current law on marriage perfectly sufficient, should continue to support any union, the General Secretary of which can cease to represent them and their interests, and indeed should seek to attack them directly on the basis of little more than slur and ignorance.

As such, I shall be reconsidering my membership of your union. Should I choose to stay, it shall be due to my unending admiration for the hard work and commitment of those in the lower tiers of the NUT hierarchy, rather than for any support or loyalty for those currently sitting at the top.

Yours,
Michael Merrick

There may be trouble ahead…

Some while back the CES e-mailed Catholic schools with information about the Coalition for Marriage’s campaign to provide political opposition to the Gospel of Dave, providing information on how to sign the petition to protect the traditional (and only) definition of marriage. Whilst I’m quite confident in saying that a great many staff in a great many schools never received this e-mail, nor were forwarded it, there has nonetheless arisen the unmistakable screech of the Usual Suspects incensed that Catholic schools should ‘abuse their position’ by daring to do such a thing. The usual slurs followed, followed by the customary appeal to the Equality Act 2010, that ticking timebomb purposely left unexploded by both Harman and Balls for reasons of base political calculation.

Anyway, the Independent reported this brouhaha under the headline: ‘Anti-gay petition challenged.’ This choice of words being important, not least because it frames the issue within a value judgement from which all too few within the political world have dissented. Those who wish to preserve marriage as, well, marriage, are simply anti-gay: there is no middle ground here. And with this rhetorical flourish prominent figures who have long advocated ‘gay rights’ have suddenly found themselves, against all rationality, on the wrong end of the ‘anti-gay’ slur.

Now it hardly needs pointing out that the Coalition for Marriage is not primarily anti-anything. It is pro-marriage, and does nothing more radical than state the definition of marriage as most people understand it and as most people have historically understood it. This is a perfectly mainstream and indeed rational position: to portray it as anti-gay is merely to bludgeon people into conformity, either through perfectly natural aversion to being deemed prejudiced or through the positive desire to appear anti-prejudice. And this approach has traction, even if its power is on the wane. After all, who wants to be seen as anti-gay? Anti-gay equals anti-equality, which means pro-prejudice, and prejudice that is not ignorance is actively evil, with both needing to be both challenged and corrected. If Citizenship lessons ever told us anything, they told us that.

As such, the question becomes what effect this rhetorical bludgeoning, once it has run its course, will have on faith schools. There has long been an uneasy truce between faith schools and cosmopolitan liberals, often because faith schools can prove (at least theoretically) bastions of social and moral conservatism. That they rarely do is not really the point; that they theoretically have the ability to do so is the key issue.

And so we have the flair up between catholic schools, some of whose own pupils demonstrate how woefully ill-informed anyone who maintains that Catholic schools indoctrinate children really is, and the political and cultural hegemony that would seek to extinguish all dissent from its own cultural and moral orthodoxies. As such, and despite Greg Pope sending a further round of e-mails breathlessly issuing clarification, the mud that was flung had already began to stick, such that the Department of Education are apparently looking into the question of whether or not faith schools have breached rules on political impartiality – not on their work on water poverty, of course, or homelessness, or foreign aid, or racial justice, which is all fluffy and cuddly and social justice based so therefore to be commended (and of course ignored by the true extremists over at NSS and BHA), but because they informed and possibly encouraged members of their population to live out their faith and in so doing to consider signing the C4M petition. (What cannot be ignored is how the size of this petition has already proven something of an embarrassment to the cultural establishment who had both assumed and argued that only an extreme minority of homophobes and bigots could possibly be opposed to what effectively amounts to the abolition of marriage).

Cue outrage and increased scrutiny, as faith schools are called to account for being… well, faith schools.

And of course, a similar situation arose just a few months back, when Brendan Barber of the TUC made a somewhat bizarre (and highly suspicious – though less of my conspiracy theories) intervention demanding that Michael Gove use ‘Equality’ legislation to ban the use of ‘homophobic material’ in our schools, which by his account would mean pretty much banning Roman Catholic sexual ethics, or indeed anything else that Stonewall or the editor of PinkNews might find objectionable.

In the end, Michael Gove dampened down the confrontation by insisting the ‘Equality’ legislation did not apply to the school curriculum. Whilst this gave him breathing space, it also mapped out the ground upon which the next challenge will proceed. After all, Gove did not reject the analysis of these materials as ‘homophobic’, which essentially means he did not reject the analysis of Catholic (and many others’) doctrine as ‘homophobic’; he simply questioned whether the legislation mooted by Brendan Barber as sufficient to ban the circulation of such materials contained within it the provision to do such a thing. Should the day come that some move to close this loophole, do not expect Michael Gove, with his sneering disdain for ‘backwoodsmen’, to perspire too greatly in protecting the freedoms of those he implicitly accepts, ignorant as he is, as being ‘anti-gay’.

Of course, there is the danger that one succumbs to sensationalism in predicting choppy waters ahead, and in saying that the position of faith schools is becoming increasingly untenable I anticipate that it will be more death by a thousand cuts than an almighty siege that demands immediate surrender and retreat. It is the slow drumbeat of an opposition advancing inch-by-inch that tells of what lies ahead – which at least has the beneficial effect of allowing faith schools to plan their response in advance. In short, the Equality Act with which the CES effectively colluded will one day turn on faith schools – when that day arrives, the Church hierarchy must have effective plans for how best to respond in a manner that continues to offer assistance to the faithful in educating their children in the truths of the faith.

As such, Catholic schools need to plan and prepare for a future climate rather less benign than the one in which it finds itself. The storm is coming – the question has now become how the Church organises herself the better to weather it.

Demos and faithful citizens

Starting a debate (or not)

Very occasionally one comes across people who are so absorbed into their own worldview that they have long proven incapable of acknowledging much that would challenge it. They are usually found arguing that black is white, the better to uphold the truth not of reality but of their own worldview. Whenever a charge crops up that does not fit into this worldview, they can refute it by simply ignoring the context and substance of the original charge. Take the BBC, for example. People have long called it a lefty organisation. What they have nearly always meant by this, a la Andrew Marr, is that the BBC is an overwhelmingly liberal organisation, something which (much to the chagrin of some of us) has become synonymous with the term lefty. As such, when the BBC comes up with anything even mildly supportive of the government position on the budget deficit, for example, characters like James Macintyre will pop their heads up, roll their eyes and with raised eyebrows mutter knowingly (as if they have penetrated the heart of a mass fraud): ‘…and they say the BBC is left-wing, do they?’ Cue mass retweets and digital-rage as legions of Twitter fans queue up to completely miss the point. Which is that the BBC, quite simply, is drenched in a metropolitan liberalism that unthinkingly sneers at and censors mainstream small c conservative positions as if they are extreme. That is the substance of the charge; that is the thorn in the flesh of those who despair of BBC ‘bias’; that is where the debate must be held if we are to make anything like a useful contribution on the issue.

Why bring this up? Well, because I have been reading this new report by Demos on faith and citizenship and I think it is guilty of using much the same sleight of hand to sustain itself. In so doing it misses the central points it ought really to be addressing. Either blinded by the narrow culture of which it is part, or else lacking the courage to penetrate into the real heart of the matter, the report simply uses old tropes to move the debate on to a ground upon which would have undoubtedly suited the socio-political paradigms of the early noughties, but which seems amusingly dated now.

As such, it is no accident that the report is couched in some very tired language. Words like ‘progressive’ and ‘faith communities’ really are the shell-suits and brut aquatonic of modern political discourse. Indeed, the whole thing reads like a Citizenship teacher’s wet dream. This is not incidental – as we see from the foreword onward, the normative presumptions of early Blairite Britain ate the normative prusumptions and prejudices upon which the report builds.

Timewarp Timms

The document starts off with a foreword by Stephen Timms, steeped in the ‘progressive’ mantras of the Blairite era from which he is a remnant, seeking to reconcile the progressive cause with religion on the basis that there is quite a lot within the worldview of the religious with which a ‘progressive’ might happily find common cause, such as ‘human rights’ and ‘equality’. So far, so bleedin’ obvious.

But there is a big huge elephant in the room here, which demonstrates a failure to visualise such key concepts from intellectual paradigms outwith the metropolitan, secularised bubble from which they emanate: whilst many Christians are strong supporters of human rights and equality, lots of what seriously antagonised religious folk under the Labour government was couched precisely in talk of ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Equality’.

I, for example, am a Roman Catholic and believe wholeheartedly in the centrality of both human rights and equality in building both a personal and social ethic – after all, we pionerred such ideas in the first place. But the ways those terms are configured to uphold the primacy of a rationalistic, immanentised ethic is something that I find deeply problematic, as do many people of faith (and many without, too). After all, it was this version of ‘Equality’ that guided Labour’s decision to ban Catholic adoption agencies from finding loving families for orphans, just as it is this version of ‘Human Rights’ that seeks to make an absurdly illiberal hash of the institution of marriage. Polling has demonstrated that David Cameron’s move to pursue ‘same-sex marriage’, for example, brings nothing but very bad news from religious voters – yet these are the same sorts of people that Demos can happily profess hold ‘progressive’ views on things like ‘equality’. Similar issues arise with ‘women’s rights’ and attitudes to abortion.

Clearly there is something going on here that merits exploration, though whilst Timms acknowledged this as an historic issue, one which the Tories ‘exploited’ for political purpose, he nonetheless completely fails to critique it, or ask serious, searching questions in light of it. This is perhaps no surprise: Christianity within New Labour was only really welcome if it was of the ‘social gospel’ variety, promoting a lovely, fluffy message on social justice whilst abandoning to ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘bigots’ all those aspects of mainstream orthodoxy distasteful to the instinctively secular metropolitan hegemony: what Archibishop Fulton Sheen called ‘Christ without the Cross’. But there is a disconnect here, a genuinely antagonistic rendering of terms so central to both sides of the debate, such that robust exploration of this critical distance is an absolute necessity if any meaningful analysis is to be offered. The last fifteen years did happen – they must be taken account of.

Keep in touch, yah?

One way of finding out whether or not someone really knows what they are talking about is by measuring their amount of surprise to aspects of reality that everyone else on the ground thought perfectly normal and obvious. If, for example, an individual walked round the saucier ends of Salford and found to his astonishment that there are many people there who can read and who actually work for a living, then you can reasonably guess that such a person does not go to the saucier ends of Salford all that very often. They exist within their own bubble, with its own presuppositions and prejudices, and in so doing report mundane instances of everyday life as great discoveries central to our understanding of mankind.

I mention this because it is an impulse that occurs time and again throughout this report. Indeed, the subject matter itself, being confined to explaining to Progressives how ‘progressive’ religious folk can be, smacks of the very same detachment. It reminds me of a time when I pointed out to someone that Pope Benedict was really quite far to the ‘left’ – on economics to ecology, capitalism to climate – as indeed is the Roman Catholic Church generally (if such paradigms are appropriate). To which the response was: ‘nah, he’s a massive right-wing bigot.’ And yet Pope Benedict is, by many of the terms identified, a ‘progressive’ (though we could just call him a Catholic) – any serious or sustained effort to engage with his message, and that of the Roman Catholic Church, reveals as such.

So when it is announced that religious folk are often politically and civically engaged, sharing certain outlooks with their ‘progressive’ counterparts, I fail to be all that awestruck. However, the very existence of surprise, the need to point this out and publicise it, merely suggests a religious illiteracy incapable of reconciling what it thought were two disparate threads, but which in reality always were mutualistic sides of the very same coin.

Take for example this passage:

Indeed, despite religion’s adherence to fundamental core values that tend to be considered conservative, religion has also been the impetus for revolutionary social change, including the abolition of slavery and civil rights movement

What does it say? Well, that despite the conservative core values, religious folk do some good stuff too. Which apart from being mind-blowingly arrogant, also sells down the intellectual river the very movement within which most ‘progressives’ feel themselves most at home. In short, these positive achievements can happily proceed from conservatism; there is no reason whatever to believe they happen accidentally in spite of it. Just as Labour attacks capitalism (or used to) from a conservative viewpoint, in defence of the individual and the family and the community, so do Pope Benedict XVI and other religious folk pursue ‘progressive’ policies as a consequence of their orthodox commitment to faith. Whilst this might not be the settled view of the esteemed voices within the culture industry, who merely articulate what everyone within that same culture already assumes to be true, it is nonetheless true in the real world of lived relationships. To fail to understand this is to retreat into a culture war narrative that fundamentally misunderstands religion, and indeed politics – the inability of the ‘progressives’ to comprehend David Cameron being both a Tory and One-Of-Them speaks of the same naivety. As such, any report that can say ‘However, perhaps surprisingly, religious exclusivists are also likely to hold progressive political views,’ reveals only its fundamental ignorance of that which it seeks to analyse.

‘Christians are Christian! Who knew?’

Examples of this apparent inability to get into the real flesh and guts of the religio-political debate abound, such that it often reads more like a British view of a caricatured American religio-political landscape imported back into a British context for the opportunity of writing a report on it. As such, more specific examples of religious illiteracy can be found, with comments connecting religious folk and opposition to ‘homosexuality’ for example (which, if that comment was supposed to include Catholicism, is ignorant of Catholic teaching.) The other end of this scale is the satisfaction on display when, like a small boy discovering a wonderful fossil inside what he thought was a plain old rock, it is pointed out that religious folk can hold some ‘progressive’ opinions, too.

We hear with apparent surprise, for example, that religious folk can be remarkably ‘progressive’ with regards immigration and immigrants, and we are (I think) to be impressed by that, as though this were some great paradox antithetical to being religious in the first place (though by framing that debate into a depersonalised issue about numbers rather than about the effects on community, solidary and reciprocity, the ideological narrowness of yesteryear that cost Labour so dear at previous elections is merely reconstituted).

We also hear that ‘some faith groups are still very much involved in areas of countering extremism and fostering cohesion’, as if community cohesion doesn’t flow like water from a spring directly from the Gospel and that anybody taking the message of Jesus seriously could really do much else. Indeed, recent studies have suggested that the challenge of today is countering intolerance from those without a faith upbringing, or in the words of Professor Leslie Francis: ‘the challenge facing schools today is to enable those young people who do not come from a religious background themselves to gain insight into how their peers from religious homes feel about things’ – tired old caricatures about religion and social divisiveness withered long ago.

No, if any of these things are news at all, then it is only news to a small and highly ignorant clique, probably hanging around LiberalConspiracy or CiF – the bigger issue, and the one pretty much ignored, is instead the views that the ‘progressives’ don’t gyrate about but pursue and seek to destroy.

Faith is a foreign country; they do things differently there

In sum, this report offers little to suggest that those on the centre-left have progressed in understanding the newly energised religio-political dynamic weaving its way through the British political scene. Whilst political engagement by those of an orthodox Christian bent (be they religious or not) is becoming an ever more significant feature in British politics, and ‘values voters’ are an increasingly important constituency on the Excel spreadsheets of hotshot psephologists, it seems that some are determined to (mis-)understand this in a manner that disregards the ways in which society and attitudes have changed since the downfall of New Labour: the report seems to say, in effect, ‘hey look, these religious types are more like us than we thought, maybe we should talk to them too.’ As far as reflective thought goes, that doesn’t rate highly; if, as the Goodharts and Glasmans of this world contend, we have reached the post-liberal moment, then the left’s views on the interplay between religion and politics need updating too – and it goes much further than some ‘progressives’ condescending to work with those they might have once chosen to ignore. The game has changed; increasingly, so have the rules. This means looking at the relationship from within the new context, and not through the very lens that has already been so resoundingly rejected.

As the report itself acknowledged, ‘we analysed responses to a range of value-based questions that tap into the heart of the left–right political divide. The results were mixed.’ One would have hoped that this might have set off a great big warning siren as to the appropriateness of using the old dichotomy to analyse the new settlement. Or in other words, the left-right divide is obsolete in this field: orthodox Catholics can be (and historically have often been) lefties; just as social liberals can (and increasingly are) Tories. More, for some it is their Catholicism that leads them to the left, just as for some it is their social liberalism (a staple of ‘progressive’ thinking) that leads them to the Tories. The old dichotomy is dead – real life has destroyed it.

Or to end with a quote from the report:

Clearly, the more you get to know people who may be different from you, the more you begin to see them as fellow human beings, and less as stereotypes or misconceptions perpetuated by media and popular culture

This was being aimed at Christians and their irrational fears over folk who are different, in itself an offensive reductionism. Alas, perhaps such a comment might better sum up the key weakness of this report – as well offer a waymarker on how to improve it.

O Filii et Filiae

Why Beauty Matters – Roger Scruton

Just noticed this is up on Youtube. Well worth an hour of anyone’s time. Enjoy!