IN THE lead-up to last week’s vote on assisted dying, the Bishop of London argued against it on grounds of workability and safety. Determined not to be accused of religious bias, she insisted that it was “not about . . . atheism v. religion”. I understood why she put it that way; but the events of last week left me wondering whether we are, in reality, reaping the harvest of an atheistic mindset that is endangering our communal ethics.
Sir Keir Starmer happens to be the first Prime Minister to have declared himself an atheist, although he takes care to praise religious groups for their contribution to society. But, last week, we saw three examples of how Christian perspectives on vulnerability were brushed aside.
The first was the decriminalisation of abortion in the case of full-term babies, a change to the law which took barely two hours of parliamentary time (News, 20 June). Framed as an act of compassion for vulnerable women, it ignored the vulnerability of their almost-born children.
In the same week, Baroness Casey’s report revealed the extent of the cover-up over grooming gangs. So inconvenient to the programme of cultural harmony, so inflammatory to the far Right! The victims — often poor, ill-educated, and sometimes in care — were regarded as expendable; their sufferings being regarded as the fault of their “lifestyle choices”.
And then there was assisted dying. Three times in one week, the Starmer Government has shown its moral blindness towards the vulnerable.
Most of our politicians are wedded to the secular dogma of individual autonomy. This assumes that I have an absolute right to fulfil myself as far as I can, and that it is incumbent on the State to provide for me to do so. This is a tempting philosophy, but, in practice, it is leading to the breakdown of any ethic of mutuality, obligation, and personal restraint for the sake of others.
The Church has a healthier model: a society not just of inclusion, but incorporation, belonging together, in spite of our differences. In the background is St Paul’s understanding of the Church as a many-membered body, a metaphor that the Established Church has extended to the whole community.
We should all be concerned about bodies — individual human bodies (aborted babies, raped girls, the bodily dignity of the sick and dying); but also about the body corporate. My choices affect others. Duties and obligations sometimes go beyond private choice. Sir Keir and the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, appear to believe that society’s differences can be resolved by legislation based on the ideology of human rights.
In Goethe’s Faust, the phrase “Do as thou wilt” sums up the demonic philosophy of Mephistopheles, a magnetising invitation to hedonistic freedom. But the cost, as the drama goes on to demonstrate, is Faust’s soul. “What shall it profit a man. . . ?”