In today’s Daily Mail, George Carey has executed what is to my mind becoming the classic Conservative manoeuvre, known as the “I-like-David-Cameron-but…”. The Conservative peer and former Archbishop of Canterbury has penned an oped in which he lambasts the PM for “aiding and abetting” aggressive secularisation.
He writes:
At his pre-Easter Downing Street reception for faith leaders, he said that he supported Christians’ right to practise their faith. Yet many Christians doubt his sincerity. According to a new ComRes poll more than two-thirds of Christians feel that they are part of a ‘persecuted minority’.
Their fears may be exaggerated because few in the UK are actually persecuted, but the Prime Minister has done more than any other recent political leader to feed these anxieties.
Let’s put aside for a second the fact that a member of this “persecuted minority” has been given the front page of a national newspaper to air his opinions. Still, the irony of Carey’s timing couldn’t be more acute. The Mail has chosen to splash on his remarks the day before the culmination of one of the biggest Christian festivals of the year, which the nation is marking by having two public holidays. It’s quite hard to feel like you live in an aggressively secular nation on a weekend when, for instance, thousands of people gather in central London to watch a religious reenactment or BBC2 will be broadcasting a Christian service timed so you can still catch most of Doctor Who straight after.
The census, too, didn’t quite bear out Carey’s view that his religion is now in the minority. While 10 per cent fewer people volunteered their religion as Christian in 2011 than in 2001, the figure was still 59 per cent. And as NS blogger Nelson Jones pointed when the 2011 data was released, choosing to identitfy yourself as religious has now become a political statement, as religion dominates discussions of education, marriage, abortion and medical ethics.
Which brings us to surely the real reason behind Carey’s dislike of David Cameron – the prime minister’s stance on gay marriage. Near the end of his article, it comes out:
By dividing marriage into religious and civil the Government threatens the church and state link which they purport to support. But they also threaten to empty marriage of its fundamental religious and civic meaning as an institution orientated towards the upbringing of children.
It’s politics, pure and simple. The equal marriage legislation will be considered by the House of Lords in the near future. Carey has sat in the Lords for a long time – first as a bishop (because this “aggresively secular” country still appoints the officers of our established church to our legislature) and after his retirement as a Conservative peer. It’s a political warning to the prime minister that his Bill won’t get an easy ride in the upper house.
But is this really the kind of publicity the Christian church wants at the climax of one its most important festivals? If political headlines are what you want, there are lots of government policies that are about to kick in (as my colleague George Eaton has laid out here) that will really harm the most vulnerable in society that Carey could legitimately criticise as unchristian, rather than indulging in some self-serving moral outrage.
The last word on this definitely goes to pseudonymous blogger Archbishop Cranmer. As His Grace puts it:
Jesus went to hell and back. Christians are being persecuted or slaughtered across Asia, Africa, and the Greater Middle East. Surely we can put up with a bit of ‘marginalisation’.
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