When Politics Replaces Religion: The Irrelevance of Rowan Williams

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams thought it would be a good idea to guest edit a left-wing magazine and take a few potshots at the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition in support of his beloved Labor Party. He resorted to a lot of cliches about "fear" and called for more "discussion" before the government implements his policies; Global Anglicans have heard this sort of claptrap before. He also attacked the education policies and the spending cuts policies of the government, the former of which holds the potential of giving poor children a possible way out of poverty through a high quality education and the latter of which just might allow the country to avoid the agonies for the poor that would inevitably accompany national bankruptcy, or the threat thereof. It is simply impossible to take this man seriously as a practical political thinker.

However, my complaint is different. In my opinion, the main problem with his frequent incursions into partisan politics is that it gives the impression that the Church has nothing unique to say about the contemporary cultural and political situation, that is, nothing that the Labor Party does not say better and in more detail. This was the main point of the comparison between Williams and the man who appointed him, Tony Blair, in the Guardian this week.

The Guardian article basically said that if you want to listen to a left-wing politician, you might as well listen to a successful one. Blair won three majorities and held his party together despite everything. Williams is presiding over a disintegrating Communion and an increasingly divided and discredited Church.

But Williams never seems to have anything to say about spiritual reality, the need for conversion or the truth of the Gospel. When it comes to theological matters, say universalism or homosexuality, he is given to nuance, qualification and "on the one hand . . . but on the other" kind of statements. His religious utterances are usually couched in paradox and leave one scratching one's head wondering just exactly what he was driving at. However, when it comes to politics, he is clear as a bell. Whereas in religion he tries to be neither conservative nor liberal, in politics he leaves no doubt that you are to vote Labor and take a leftist line on just about everything.

As Stephen Glover puts it:

'Even if Dr Rowan Williams' remarks had been uncontroversial, his decision to be guest editor of the Leftist New Statesman would still be hard to understand'

Even if Dr Rowan Williams' remarks had been uncontroversial, his decision to be guest editor of the Leftist New Statesman would still be hard to understand.

I would say the same if had he been asked to edit a Right-wing magazine. The primate of the Church of England, and the leader of the 70million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion, should not enter the hurly-burly of political journalism.

In the event he has gone much further in his two-page editorial in the New Statesman.

By seemingly questioning the legitimacy of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition, and by criticising its policies, he has created a storm that may harm his office and the Church of England, and will dismay many churchgoers and others.

Of course, prelates should speak up for the poor and excluded, but they run a terrible risk when they stray from general arguments about society into making party political interventions.

I doubt any archbishop in modern times has been so specific in his political point-scoring as Dr Williams.

Damian Thompson at his Daily Telegraph blog can't help contrasting Williams' ineptitude and irrelevance to the leadership exhibited by Pope Benedict XVI.

It’s one thing to dismiss the Big Society as a meaningless slogan (though I don’t think it is). It’s quite another to suggest that it’s an “opportunistic” excuse for spending cuts. Do you remember Dr Williams protesting when Gordon Brown was hosing down the public sector with money, fundamentally weakening the economy – and the weakest people in it? Me neither.

Here’s the reality. The Anglican Communion has disintegrated on Rowan Williams’s watch, partly thanks to his habit of saying one thing to fundamentalist Africans and quite another to liberal Americans. His own bench of bishops is hopelessly divided on key moral issues, and Rowan’s hand-wringing isn’t uniting them.

Out of four bishops commissioned to look after traditionalist congregations, three have left the C of E to become Catholic monsignors. Over fifty Anglican ministers are being ordained RC priests this month.

You may or may not sympathise with their decision. But one thing’s for sure. When Pope Benedict is confronted by a major crisis in his Church, he doesn’t take time off to guest edit a secular magazine in the hope of impressing his mates.

Others have speculated that Williams' retreat into leftist politics is a way of evading the difficulties of his ecclesiastical work and saying things that will garner plaudits from the chattering classes that Williams respects. I think he actually thinks that leftist slogans is all the Church has to say to the world.

And that is the tragedy of his leadership and the cause of its failure.

The Left Cries Wolf Again

You may have heard of the story of the little boy who cried "Wolf"? Well, the moral of that story is that irresponsible shouting about a non-existent danger is not only annoying, but harmful to the community. When a real wolf actually did appear, no one came to help.

The leftists in the Democratic Party are harming the body politic by irresponsibly playing the race card every time they turn around. Here is Jim Clyburn, a particularly egregious offender in this regard, as quoted in a recent article in McClatchy Newspapers:

House Assistant Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, on Wednesday blamed most of President Barack Obama's political problems on racism.

Clyburn, who's from South Carolina and is a close ally of the president, offered his views in response to a question about Obama's re-election prospects next year.

What he is basically saying is that no one is allowed to criticize the most powerful man in the world just because of the color of his skin. Barack Obama is not a poor, black student in an overwhelmingly white university and he is not even an ordinary black citizen in a mainly white country. He is at the very pinnacle of political success. Yet, no one is allowed to criticize him or his policies because to do so is racism.

Well, the truth is that to refrain from criticizing the president of the United States just because he is black is a betrayal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. His "I Have a Dream" speech, you will surely recall looked forward to a day when a man would be judged by the quality of his character rather than by the color of his skin. That day is today. Barack Obama is President of the United States, which was something almost unimaginable during Martin Luther King's lifetime.

Yet, Clyburn wants to use the color of Obama's skin as a political talisman warding off all normal criticism and attacks. He can't forget what color Obama's skin is because he is a race hustler who has built a career on guilt and political correctness and if King's dream were to be realized, then Clyburn's one-trick-pony career would be over. Clyburn is thus invested in keeping racism alive.

You can be absolutely sure that if Allen West or Herman Cain were president, Clyburn would blame absolutely none of their political problems on the color of their skin. This is not about the color of anybody's skin or the issue of racial prejudice; it is about left-wing politics.

Clyburn is a useful tool of the leftists who are manipulating Obama and the Congressional Black Congress even as Obama and Clyburn, in turn, seek to manipulate the left wing of the Democratic Party. Let's face it: the charge of racism is a powerful political weapon. The Left is extremely racist and dependent on the race gimmick to deflect criticism of their radical agenda, which is not supported by the majority of the American people.

Racism is an ugly thing. But if everybody who criticizes Obama is racist - or if Jim Clyburn and his cohorts are allowed to decide who is and who isn't - then political debate has been cleverly hijacked by those who are in danger of losing the argument.

If Mitt Romney becomes the next president, it is conceivable that some people might oppose him and criticize him because he is a Morman. It could happen. But would his supporters be able to stand up and dismiss all political criticism of Romney because some of it originated in prejudice against his religion? Of course not. Mormans don't get a free pass and neither do Muslims, women, Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews or anyone else.

Race is an emotional subject and susceptible to demagoguery and that is precisely why flinging charges of racism around irresponsibly is dangerous and harmful to the quality of political discourse. The danger is that people will get used to hearing the same old song every single time Obama comes under fire.

And eventually, when real racism rears its ugly head people will just shrug and ignore it because the Left cried "Wolf" one time too many.

Bernard-Henri Levy: A Caricature of Himself

I don't often link to Iowahawk because it is often profane and also because his extreme libertarianism sometimes borders on libertinism. However, with that disclaimer firmly in place, I have to admit that his satire is always witty, often hilariously funny and at times sublime in its skewering of the self-important, self-righteous, self-preoccupied Left.

His latest entry, entitled "Justice, I Spit on Your Justice" was purportedly found "Under a hors d'oeuvres tray at a Tina Brown cocktail party, the first draft of Bernard Henri-Levy's Daily Beast cri de coeur on behalf of his ami Dominique Strauss-Kahn"

It reads, in part:

I do not know what actually happened Saturday, the day before yesterday, in the room of the now famous Hotel Sofitel in New York.

I do not know — no one knows — because can there or cannot there be such a knowing? I do not know. All is but existential abyss. For who is to know this mocking mime which taunts us by its cruel appellation, "reality"? Even reality itself cannot know, because have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. We have only the leaks regarding the leaks of his so-called "DNA." Was he was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there, or if, or at which why, as was stated, he was having a mud bath in Baden-Baden with his daughter? Reality, you are a cruel mistress.

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, if knowing were indeed a matter of conceptual possibility—how a mere proletarian chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” to remove to the myriad of empty Dom Perignon bottles and half-smoked Gauloise crushed into beignets they should have expected from one of the most closely watched figures on the planet. In protest I have written to the Michelin guide and demanded they be demoted to 3 stars.

And I do not want to entertain the considerations of dime-store psychology that claims to penetrate the mind of the subject, thrusting remorselessly and without consent into his libido, observing, for example, that the number of the room (2806) corresponds to the date of the coming liberation of France by the Socialist Party (06.28), in which he is the uncontested favorite to storm the Normandy beaches, march triumphantly into Paris, free it from its Sarkozian captors, seduce to the grateful lovesick coquettes with his Hershey bars, and thereby concluding that this is all a Freudian slip, a subconsciously erotic role-play, and blah blah blah. Sometimes a baguette is only a baguette.

What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to a ravenous pack of dogs, a breed of which has neither been obedience trained nor clipped in the proper poofs. . . .

The best line comes half-way through:

This morning, I hold it against the jejune American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, dared treat this man of nobility as subject to the justice of the peasant.

I am driven to ennui by a system of justice modestly termed “accusatory,” meaning that anyone can come along waving a stained hotel towel and accuse another fellow of any crime— even when the one accused has a pied-a-terre on the Left Bank and sits on several film prize juries.

And they think American cowboys and country rubes invite mocking. Do they have any idea? Any clue how ridiculous they look to normal people?

It goes on. Read it all here.

The American pop-culture allusion in the Conclusion, which will be invisible to the denizens of the Left Bank even though they undoubtedly will still be smarting from the insult in the penultimate paragraph, is deliciously ironic:

Enough is enough, I say. I will not stand idly by as the uncultured puritanical prudes of Les Etats-Unis and their mad inspector Javerts hound another hero of the French nation — as they did Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Ira Einhorn, and Theodore Bundy — for the mere sin of intellectual virility, and listening to the "oui" in a woman's eyes instead of the "non" in her screams of ecstasy.

J'Accuse America - with your filthy cheeseburgers, and your stupid tailfins, and your unnuanced medieval notions of "rape." Until, and unless, my friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn is freed from his political bondage, I refuse to provide you another paragraph of philosophy.

Bye-Bye, Miss Americaine-Pie. You can drive your Chevy to this Levy, but this Levy is dry.

Bravo, Iowahawk!

Should the Burqa be Banned in Canada?

Should the burqa be banned in Canada? At the moment, only 54% say "yes." Ezra Levant has a column in the Sun on the issue, "Will Your Daughter Play with the Burqa Barbie?" and he points out that religious freedom is in conflict with the equality of women and men on this issue.

So let's be honest here: the problem is not that extreme right-wingers are being intolerant; rather, it is that we are struggling to figure out how to respect the religious beliefs of Muslims without enabling the oppression of women, which is a legitimate and serious problem with which to grapple as a liberal democratic society. As a conservative, I am willing to admit that religious freedom is not unlimited. When a religion goes against the law of the land, it is no longer tolerated; this is a well-established principle in law and many Christian beliefs are not reflected in Western law. Islam does not have unlimited freedom to remake Western society in its image. Liberals who are busy trying to eradicate all Christian influence from our legal and educational system should have no problem admitting that principle with regard to Islam.

Yet we find that so-called "liberals" are increasingly finding themselves aligned with Islamic male oppression of women - treating women as property, obsessing about obedience and sanctioning "honor killing" - instead of being on the side of the individual as liberals used to be. Levant takes it to the feminists:

Canada’s misguided experiment with multiculturalism pretends that all cultural ideas are equal, and Canadian values, such as the equality of men and women, are no better than foreign values like the subjugation of women.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, enacted in 1982 when our Muslim population was tiny, is contradictory.

Section 27 of the Charter calls for “the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”

But Section 28 says that rights “are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.”

Well, which is it? “Enhancing” Saudi values? Or guaranteeing women’s equality?

Because you can’t have both.

Margaret Atwood published her sci-fi novel The Handmaid’s Tale, about America being taken over by a Christian theocracy that treats women as sexual property, 25 years ago.

It has become trite to watch cultural liberals like Atwood bravely attack imaginary discrimination, while staying silent on real discrimination.

The Handmaid’s Tale won Atwood the Governor General’s Award for fiction. A book about the subjugation of women in radical Islam would win Atwood a death threat.

Atwood loves posing as a feminist at champagne receptions in her honour. But she’ll leave the heavy lifting to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

She’s the Somali refugee who wrote and narrated a movie called Submission, about the place of women in radical Islam.

The film’s producer, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered for it, but a note pinned with a knife into his body referred primarily to Hirsi Ali, who has had to live under around-the-clock security ever since.

That’s all a bit too real for Atwood, and is the reason why other feminists like the once-noisy Judy Rebick are so meek and gentle with the real butchers of women’s rights.

Levant mentions Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has emerged as a spokeswoman for women who are being oppressed by a religious-political system that is brutal, unjust and violent toward women. To give you an idea of how pernicious and craven the Left has become and how dangerous postmodern moral and cultural relativism actually is to those under oppression, have a look at this interview of Hirsi Ali by the anti-American, ultra-Leftist Avi Lewis on the CBC show "On the Map."



It is pretty amazing to watch this doctrinaire Leftist try to tell Hirsi Ali, who herself is a victim of female genital mutilation, that a lot of Muslims are content with their religion and that there is actually no real difference between religions. The idea that all religions are the same is an article of faith with Leftists. Otherwise, it would be meaningful to discuss the question of which is better and which is worse and that is a debate the Left wants to stifle because it would result in Christianity being preferred as a superior religion in the sense of being more compatible with liberal democratic values. Since liberal democracy emerged in the context of a Christian civilization, this is hardly surprising. But the Left wishes to conceal this truth because it does not fit its narrative of how Christianity (and religion in general) is the source of all evil in the world while secular statism is the source of all good.

It is entertaining watching Hirsi Ali take this guy apart; it is like watching an adult school an adolescent. My favorite part is near the end when he claims that democracy is "broken" in America and refers to "stolen elections." Then he laughs at her for saying that anyone can come to America and get wealthy and stand for public office. In response to his mocking, she says:

I read Alexis de Tocqueville and I heard about democracy and I lived in countries that have no democracy . . . so I don't find myself in some lecture as you do. You grew up in freedom and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom. I haven't. I know that there are many things wrong with America but I still believe it is the best nation in the world.

The interviewer comes off looking like a smiling apologist for tyranny, which of course is what he is as a Leftist subversive. Usually, however, that fact is disguised whereas in this interviewer the Leftist sympathy for a totalitarian regime is unveiled in all its ugliness and hatefulness.

Can This Be For Real?

The National Post is reporting today that a group of professors at the University of Regina is trying to take scholarships away from children of soldiers who have died in Afghanistan as their way of being anti-war. Seriously. It must be a hoax. Can there really be people with academic qualifications who are so obtuse?

Anyway, here is the story under the headline "Professors Slam Scholarships for Children of Dead Soldiers."

"A group of professors at the University of Regina is protesting a scholarship program for the dependents of dead soldiers, arguing it promotes militarism.

"We think this program is a glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan," said Jeffrey Webber, one of 16 professors who drafted an open letter to university president Vianne Timmons.

The program, called Project Hero, provides financial aid for children of Canadian Forces personnel who have lost their lives while serving in an active mission. Individual universities establish the terms and conditions for the scholarship including value, duration and application process.

The open letter, endorsed by Mr. Webber and his colleagues, asked for three things: the immediate withdrawal from "Project Hero," public pressure on government to provide funding for universal access to post-secondary education and a public forum on the war in Afghanistan and Canadian imperialism to be held before the end of semester exams.

Barb Pollock, a spokeswoman for the University of Regina, defended Project Hero.

"The decision was made by the executive of the university," she said. "Other universities whom we respect are involved in it and we thought it was a good thing to do."

She did not expect the reaction from the group of protesting professors.

"We have diverse opinions on moves the university makes all the time and the decision has been made at this point.... That's where it's at." But she said university will "not have a debate" on the issue and has made its decision to go through with the program.

The professors' objections begin, but don't end, with the name of the program.

"Project Hero" has dangerous cultural underpinnings, implying that Canada's military activity in Afghanistan is heroic, said Mr. Webber.

"We disagree with that. We think it's a military occupation of a sovereign country," he said. "It's not the position of the university administration to take a position in favour of this war."

"We think it's aligning a public university -- without any consultation with its students or staff, or the broader community -- with support for this war."

Read the rest here.

For once words fail me. If that is what it means to be a pacifist, color me a militarist. And put James down as a militarist too:

"True religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless
and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
(James 1:27)