EGYPT heads for the abyss; Europe urges patience; Obama dithers.
You can sympathise with the US President. His personal instincts
are non-interventionist, and he is well aware that, after Iraq and
Afghanistan, there is little appetite among voters for active
involvement in the Middle East.
In spite of endorsing the killing of Osama bin Laden, he
embodies the United States' traditional opposition to colonialism.
He is well aware that the US's wealth and power have engendered a
kind of cultural and moral colonialism that is deeply resented by
the Arab world, and increasingly opposed by Russia and China. The
US will not play global policeman unless it has to.
In the current moral and political vacuum, it might be worth
reviewing our expectations. I am a child of the 1960s, and am well
aware that one of the things that separates my generation from that
of my parents is the idealism we have about what politics can
actually achieve.
We expect governments to be transparent. We want our leaders to
be moral, and to work not only for a better society, but a better
world. Most of us do not question the belief that democracy,
freedom, and progress go together. While we have enjoyed years of
relative peace and economic growth, we have become more attuned to
injustice in less favoured parts of the world.
Christians, too, have had high expectations. With the growth of
theologies of liberation, we have all become more sensitive to the
eschatological dimension of scrip-ture. We look for the mighty to
be cast down, and the humble and meek raised up. There has been a
tendency in Christian thought to conflate hopes of human progress
with the advance of the values of the Kingdom of God.
Perhaps in this we have been naïve. Christians of earlier ages
were less optimistic about what worldly power could achieve.
Augustine's City of God was a bleak rejection of any
equation between worldly empire and the Kingdom of Christ. While
our Christian forebears prayed for their rulers, perhaps more
fervently than we do, they expected rather less of them. They
recognised the corruptions of power; they knew that nations are
always going to put their own interests first.
Worst of all, they recognised the sober reality that might tends
to win, even when it is not right. If the Christian vocation is to
speak truth to power, perhaps we need to question some of our
idealism, and to recover the recognition that a fallen world is a
rough old place.
The Revd Angela Tilby is the Diocesan Canon of Christ
Church, Oxford, and the Continuing Ministerial Development Adviser
for the diocese of Oxford.