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Press: If it’s not true, so what?

by
20 August 2008

by Andrew Brown

Close fight: the candidates with Rick Warren, reported in Monday’s Independent

Close fight: the candidates with Rick Warren, reported in Monday’s Independent

THE CHRISTIANITY that is thriving in the US at the moment is the least rancid sort of Evangelicalism on offer there. Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch pulled off a remark­able coup in getting the two presidential candidates to answer questions from Pastor Warren, even if they could not bring themselves actually to talk face to face.

It’s worth looking at his introduction of the candidates to see what a church leader really confident of his position in society can sound like: “Both of these guys are my friends. I don’t happen to agree with everything each of them teach or believe, but they both care deeply about America. They’re both patriots. And they have very different views on how America can be strengthened. In America, we’ve got to learn to disagree without demonising each other and we need to restore civility.”

Their answers on evil were, I thought, particularly instructive. Obama said: “Evil does exist. I mean, I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children.

“I think it has to be confronted. . . That is God’s task, but we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it.”

This seems to me entirely theologically correct and true to the empirical facts, which is why John McCain’s answer is going to be more popular: “Of course, evil must be defeated. My friends, we are facing the transcended challenge of the 21st century — radical Islamic extrem­ism.” This was followed, unblushingly, by a story exposed months ago as a propaganda fab­ri­cation: “Not long ago in Baghdad, al-Qaeda took two young women who were mentally disabled, and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a marketplace, and, by remote control, detonated those suicide vests. If that isn’t evil, you have to tell me what is.”

But never mind whether the story’s true, a nice, straightforward war on evil will always be popular everywhere. I believe the Islamic trans­lation is jihad.

ONE PENDANT to last week’s reflections on the Lambeth Conference: this may have been covered elsewhere, but I missed the story before it appeared downpage under the uninformative byline of “Staff Reporter” in The Catholic Herald.

“Forward in Faith, which represents 1000 priests and bishops, is consulting ways in which churches and homes could be retained should parishes convert to Rome. The Bishop of Ful­ham, John Broadhurst . . . said at an emergency meeting during the Lambeth Conference: ‘This property is very much our heritage and inheritance and to suggest that many wish to steal it from us would not be an understate­ment.’”

There’s no reason to doubt the accuracy of this quote: the mixture of clumsy syntax and unmistakeable meaning seems to guarantee its authenticity, and it shows what we have ahead of us. It may come as news to my old boss, Andreas Whittam Smith, that the Church Com­missioners are attempting to steal churches and vicarages which they believe they own.

But Forward in Faith seems to be planning an extension of the American Civil War into this country, in which the parishes whose priests wish to leave — and who have spent the last 14 years between women priests and bishops preparing to take their parishioners with them — will start to sue to take the churches and vicarages with them.

I have no idea whether they will succeed in doing anything more than forcing the Church Commissioners to spend a lot of money and arousing a lot of bitterness, but even if that is all they accomplish, they will not feel the effort wasted.

IT’S ALL ENOUGH to make me envy the simple comforts of the Revd Glyn Evans, of Newcastle, who was asked by his local paper, “What is the best holiday you’ve ever had?” and answered: “My honeymoon on Guernsey — plenty of sea, sand and you know what!” And then, “What’s the favourite thing in your home?” to which the answer was “My golden retriever called Phillip. He listens to you and licks you when no one else will.”

His luxury for a desert island was a bath of Vaseline.

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