TRIPLE JEOPARDY FOR THE WEST
Aggressive secularism, radical Islamism and multiculturalism
By Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. Bloomsbury. 195 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978 1 441 113 474
As someone associated with the now nearly 12-year-old ‘Christian Heritage’ organisation based in Cambridge, I immediately thought the book review editor of this paper had had a sneak preview.
On almost every page comes the simple but insistent message, ‘this nation has its roots in the Christian faith and nothing can be adequately understood about it or done about it (by way of recovery I mean) without that realisation’. A single illustration from the introduction must suffice: ‘Any historical narrative of the emergence of Britain as a nation will have the Christian faith, and the values that sprang from it, at its heart’ (p.ix).
Heritage under threat
More importantly, the author knows that this heritage is now under threat, hence the urgency of the title. (Our normal idiom, of course, is of a ‘double jeopardy’, but this is insufficiently alarming for the bishop.) In fact we face a triple jeopardy, he says! First, aggressive secularists are trying to dismantle each and every vestige of our Christian heritage. Simultaneously, radical Islamists suggest a better alternative, namely, devotion to the prophet Mohammed — helpfully showing us, incidentally, what this might look like by occasionally bombing or bludgeoning those opposing them! Thirdly, the multiculturalists, with an aura of simpering moral rectitude which is rarely less than menacing, insist, authoritatively of course, that all cultures and religious ideas are essentially the same and, therefore, to be rigorously tolerated.
Breaking faith
The author first outlines the sorry state of the country and aptly chooses for the title of his first chapter ‘Breaking faith with Britain’. Part two deals with the Islamist threat. Part three takes on the social dangers implicit in contemporary bioethics and assisted dying. Part four is headed ‘Politics: values and good government’. All the bishop presents is worth reading. His subject is shot through with alarm, yet his tone is gentle and careful. With typical humility he suggests early on that he ‘is among the least qualified to write about such matters’ (p.4). Nothing could be further from the truth: if anything his roots in Muslim-controlled Pakistan equip him all the more to understand clearly what is going on around us in Britain today.
In this connection, interestingly, he raises questions about two contemporary evangelical commentators, Colin Chapman on Islam and John Chaplin on what I would call ‘a neutral Public Square’. The former, he suggests, takes a too-lenient view of medieval Islam’s treatment of its minorities; the latter he feels fails to give due weight to ‘the need for a moral and spiritual tradition’ (p.xii). As he quite rightly goes on to say, ‘not all religious traditions lead to the same results’ (p.iii). In other words, Muslim and secularist cultures cannot produce the good fruit we expect from our political system — because good fruit cannot come from bad trees (Matthew 7.16-20). So we need to be doubly on guard — and thoroughly sceptical — about the promised destinations to which other religious (or, worse, irreligious) traditions purport to direct us. None can give us what we have enjoyed over the past four centuries within our Christian heritage, marred as that has been by our sinful prejudices and oversights. And to the question, does such a commitment on our part mean that we have to have an ‘established church’, the author is quite clear. ‘No’, he says, ‘[but] we should be clear that the privileged position of any church is not the same thing as the need for a moral and spiritual tradition … This would remain true even if there were no established church…’ (p.xii).
My only critique of the book is its patchiness. The major part, obviously, is put together from earlier articles. An illustration of this is the chapter on Islamic law. Though valuable, it is too long and dense for the scope of the volume as a whole. A measure of overlap and repetition is also a bit tedious. Nevertheless, the book is deeply ‘prophetic’ and a much-needed reminder of the seriousness of our particular moment of history in Britain.
Ranald Macaulay,
Christian Heritage, Cambridge (http://www.christianheritage.org.uk)
