Another Reformation anyone?

If the Church of England really wanted to attack the government, there are plenty of issues it could seize on: child poverty, homelessness, unemployment, inequality, bankers’ bonuses, spending cuts etc etc. Opposing gay marriage neatly reveals the CoE’s priorities.

What concerns the CoE’s hierarchy more than anything else is its privileged position within the state as the established church. It gets to do royal weddings, has seats in the House of Lords for bishops and its own canon laws are recognised and incorporated by the state.

This exclusive position owes everything to political opportunism and expediency and nothing to divine intervention. In 1533, when England was under the Church of Rome, divorce was forbidden. Henry VIII persuaded Thomas Cranmer, then Archbishop of Canterbury, to ignore the Vatican, dissolve his previous marriage and allow him to marry Anne Boleyn. This set in train the English Reformation, the break with Rome and the creation of the CoE.

With congregations continuing to decline and the CoE deeply split over a number of issues like women bishops, seizing on gay marriage proposals is partly a deflection from its own internal problems. But its vitriolic attack on the government’s consultation paper is nonetheless deeply reactionary and positively feudal in tone.

“In common with almost all other Churches, the Church of England holds, as a matter of doctrine and derived from the teaching of Christ himself, that marriage in general – and not just the marriage of Christians – is, in its nature, a lifelong union of one man with one woman,” the formal response says.

Even in biblical terms, this is wrong. Solomon, the King of Israel, had 700 wives and 300 concubines, for example. The reference to “lifelong union” is almost catholic in sentiment and flies in the face of modern society, where divorce is commonplace and a large number of single households with children live with no fear of retribution.

The real concern is about remaining the established church. It fears that the duty of Anglican clergy to perform marriages for any parishioner who wanted one might disappear, undermining the CoE’s role as the state church. The hierarchy fears a clash between church law and parliamentary law could prompt a break-up of the 500-year-old relationship.

This is scaremongering nonsense. As Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, which campaigns for gay rights, said: "I have not come across such a master class in melodramatic scaremongering - that somehow this is the biggest upheaval since the sacking of the monasteries - since as a journalist myself a decade ago I was summoned to a government briefing to be told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

He finds it “odd” that the CoE “should be obsessing about a few thousand gay couples once again when there are currently three million children in Britain living in single-parent households" and there are major issues like global poverty and the HIV pandemic.

There is nothing odd about it, unfortunately.

The CoE, like all state institutions, is fighting its corner, defending its privileges and special place in the sun by citing god-given “rights”. Police do the same, and so do army generals. All change is presented as the end of civilisation as we know it. Steps towards equality are often ignored in practice, with the police being a case in point when it comes to institutional racism and sexism.

Religion should be a personal matter in any case and the state should play no part in matters of faith. Disestablishmentarianism is an extremely long word but a useful, progressive concept which can be part of the drive to democratise society from top to bottom.

Another Reformation anyone?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Crisis in the cathedral

The resignation of the dean of St Paul’s over the occupation outside his front door tells us a great deal about the deepening ideological crisis inside the establishment and the fragility of its institutions.

Graeme Knowles quit because he simply couldn’t bear the criticism that followed the cathedral’s decision to align itself with the medieval City of London Corporation’s legal moves to clear the area of tents and people. Last week he lost his canon, Giles Fraser, and another senior cleric who took an opposite stand.

The dean is so elevated in the church hierarchy that whoever fills the position requires the approval of the queen herself. So Knowles’ decision to quit is no small matter, leaving a vacuum temporarily filled by the hard-line bishop of London.

St Paul’s wanted to look both ways. Being adjacent to the stock exchange, from which the occupation movement was barred, and within spitting distance of a financial artery of global capitalism, it tried dialogue between God and Mammon.

But the accumulation of wealth is not and will never be a moral question, not principally one of greed or corruption – although they play their part. The financial system has deeper structural foundations in the nature of capitalism itself, in the relentless, unstoppable drive for profit.

The dialogue has come to an abrupt halt. The cathedral is with Mammon, as historically it always has been. The Church of England is the established church for good reasons. It has, with a few dissenters along the way, sanctified monarchy, privilege, war and colonialism in its time.

“What would Jesus do”, reads one banner outside St Paul’s. He certainly wouldn’t have built great monuments like cathedrals to hold people in awe and watch while the church became part of the established order. But that’s another story.

No doubt the benefactors of St Paul’s in the shape of the City’s institutions played a role in preventing publication last week of a report by the cathedral into corporate and financial excess. It would have only inflamed the occupation.

Nevertheless, the right-wing press is enraged by the laughing stock St Paul’s has become. First it shut its doors on secret “health and safety” grounds; then it reopened them to tourists willing to cough up £14.50 to get in. Now the dean can’t stand the heat and has departed.

As Mark Field, Tory MP for Cities of London and Westminster, remarked: “The whole thing is farcical. You couldn’t make it up. It’s gone from the sublime to the ridiculous… Ironically, the only capitalist organisation that has lost out is St Paul’s. I suspect that these resignations will only ensure that these protesters become more entrenched.”

The disarray at the top of society is to be welcomed. Every crack, every rupture weakens the ideological edifice that helps to hold people in check, to convince working people that life is fate, that capitalism is the centre of the known universe and will remain so eternally. Amen.

We are pushing at an open door and the occupation movement should lift its horizons to take advantage of the tumult within the state and its institutions. This furore is the product of a profound, historical crisis in global capitalism which august bodies like the International Labour Organisation fear will produce social confrontation in many countries.

As the occupation at St Paul’s originally insisted, the system is unsustainable and undemocratic. Even if you could – and it’s a big if – open up the way the City of London Corporation functions, for example, what difference would that make? None.

The way forward is through the people’s assemblies concept, turning them from street meetings into permanent structures in every community that can eventually become the basis of a new sovereign, democratic power. Our focus has to be on deep-going structural political and economic change that takes us beyond capitalism and profit.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The 'enemy within' has a new face

With official opposition to the government’s policies virtually non-existent, the only significant criticism of the Coalition is coming from areas of the establishment usually seen as traditional supporters.

People like the leader of the Church of England and institutions like Oxford and Cambridge have taken up the cudgels against unbridled market capitalism while Labour leader Ed Miliband is happy to attack the poor who depend on state benefits.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, as a guest editor of the New Statesman, wrote that “with remarkable speed we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted” and that “at the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context”, the government had to respond quickly and with all guns blazing.

The archbishop did more than expose the cruelty of a few cuts; he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the government and with it the charade of bourgeois democracy. And the holy man went on to declare that the big society was viewed with “widespread suspicion”, that the coalition was facing “bafflement” and “indignation” over its plans to reform the health service and education, and so on.

This is a challenge to the fundamentals that underpin the system itself and is not so easily brushed off. A further instance of government policies stirring up its own people to rebellion took place at Oxford University where academics and tutors voted for a motion of no confidence in the higher education minister David Willetts by a landslide majority (283-5).

At the meeting they lined up to attack plans to instigate a market in universities. Willetts, in his annual speech to vice chancellors ten days before, had said the government’s ambition was to make the new higher education framework “as de-regulatory as we can”, with the emphasis on increasing competition.

Bernard Sufrin, computing scientist, conjured up “the spectre of the private, for-profit university” at the Oxford gathering. Professor of English David Norbrook argued that academics were being forced to speak a language “that we all know doesn’t honestly represent what we do and what we believe in but which we speak because it is the price of funding”.

Adbel Takriti, a tutor at St Edmund Hall, called the plans “ill-articulated and incoherent”. The unity between academics and students (who were demonstrating outside) was evident when David Barclay, president of the student union, said that “the marketised core of the government’s plans is rotten, and will turn our successors into those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing”. Other university academics will hold their own meetings, and they are not likely to be much different. Thousands are signing the no-confidence web-sites

What is most remarkable about this revolt-from-within is the emphasis on the “loss of community” and “collective life” that the commercialisation/privatisation plans imply. A growing opposition turning everything into a commodity for sale is becoming more articulate, more focused on the ideas behind the policies.

Even more scary for the government is the fact this opposition does not come from within Parliament or from the trade unions. Ministers are forced to turn and face a growing number of jabs in the back from unexpected quarters, from people who would normally refrain from direct criticism, from those who do not respect the rules of the parliamentary game.

In a newspaper article, Barclay and two academics wrote: “The model of organising resistance to this degradation of collective life can already be seen, honeycombed throughout the country”. Indeed it can, amongst doctors, teachers, nurses, civil servants and many other groups of professional workers facing cuts, job losses and the destruction of services.

The creation of People’s Assemblies, to bring together all sections of the community into united opposition to government plans, is a natural next step. Building a network of assemblies around a strategy of transferring political and economic power into the hands of the majority would offer a real alternative to the status quo.

Peter Arkell

Crucifying the Archbishop

A World to Win’s editors are not for any religion or the supremacy of one “belief system” over another. But we can see how those who want to find a peg on which to hang all their prejudices have chosen the Archbishop of Canterbury’s thoughts about the rights of minorities. Rowan Williams has become a punch bag for reactionaries and fake liberals of all kinds following his considered remarks about sharia law and minority communities.

Few people challenge the alienating power of the state which, as a result, assumes some quasi-religious divine right to rule. So it’s a paradox that the most senior figure in the established church has done so. Williams rightly attacked the notion – which has been advanced by New Labour with its “citizenship” propaganda for example - “that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state”. His insistence that there is a “distinction between the rights of citizens overall and the duties of individuals under their religion” and that peoples right to practice what their consciences dictate is equally important.

No wonder that the Brown government immediately joined the lynch mob after the tabloid media spiced up Williams’ address to lawyers last week, declaring that there could only be “British law that reflected British values” and that the archbishop was mistaken. The fact that multiculturalism in Britain has not been entirely successful doesn’t mean that the idea that different peoples can live in harmony should be abandoned. Nor should it mean that all minorities – religious or secular - should be compelled to integrate or face social exclusion. This has been the thrust of Williams’ arguments and the reaction it aroused shows all too clear the intolerance that New Labour and people like Trevor Phillips has helped foster with their attacks on multiculturalism.

Johann Hari and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, both Independent columnists, have shown the true colours behind their supposed free-thinking, liberal stances. They both suggest that Williams has endorsed the abuse of women that occurs in countries under the justification that it is sharia law, which is something that he has not done. Hari, like the Bishop of Rochester, attacked the notion that different peoples, religions and cultures could live together in the UK without being intolerant of each other’s beliefs. Strutting about as a liberal, Hari – who infamously backed the invasion of Iraq – somehow denies that there are minorities like Muslims who have been singled out for punishment and ostracised, taking the place of persecuted Jews, Catholics, Afro-Caribbeans and other ethnic and religious minorities.

Williams did not for one moment suggest that sharia or any other religious-based law should overrule British law. He merely tried to advocate greater understanding of history and customs of another cultures and faiths and to raise whether communities could have some forms of self-regulation in the sphere of civil law. All of the archbishop’s detractors chose to ignore his main message – which is an attack on one-dimensional dogmas of all kinds. In particular, he warned against allowing governments “a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity”.

A strong, confident state that enjoys the general support of the people would, of course, not over-react the way it has over the Williams’ speech. But the institutions of the state do not enjoy such a privileged position. The Church of England, which is an integral part of the British establishment, is itself in some crisis. Reactionaries within the church who joined in the attack on Williams would prefer oblivion to any sort of radical change. They are part of the growing authoritarianism in Britain that is intended to intimidate those who favour open debate.


Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary