Wholly wrong: a holy mess

This article appears in The Times tomorrow.

EVEN TO an atheist, there is much to be said for antidisestablishmentarianism. The Church of England may be a constitutional oddity in a democratic age, but Primates such as William Temple and Michael Ramsey have contributed much wisdom to the nation’s political affairs.

Part of that wisdom has lain in heeding the observation of one of the best recent Anglican ethicists, the late Canon Ronald Preston: “It is impossible to conceive of any particular moral or Christian responsibility in politics . . . without involving ourselves in technical problems which are rarely simple and clear.”

All changed this week. Surveying a conflict that is neither simple nor clear, and that has defied diplomatic resolution for decades, the General Synod voted to sell the Church’s investments in companies whose products are used by Israel in the occupied territories. This policy will contribute nothing to a peace settlement, and have no impact on the companies’ share prices. Its sole lasting significance may lie in the lack of seriousness with which the Church’s pronouncements are received in future.

The model for the divestment campaign is the financial pressure exerted on apartheid South Africa. It is a pernicious precedent, for it implies a parallel between constitutionally mandated racial discrimination and a conflict of nationalisms. Both sets of national claims in the Holy Land are legitimate; both must coexist in any lasting territorial settlement.

The tragedy is that those competing claims might already have been accommodated, at Camp David in 2000, when the offer of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital was rejected by Yassir Arafat in favour of a renewed campaign of violence.

Fifty years ago the great Protestant social thinker Reinhold Niebuhr acknowledged that a biblical right to the territory of Palestine had “evaporated some thousands of years ago”, but argued for a historically grounded Christian obligation to the Jewish state.

The modern Church of England believes by contrast in penalising a state that faces enduring anti-Semitic campaigns of delegitimation, and whose civilians till recently contended with continual suicide bombings. The Church’s witness to our nation is not dead, but you might be better off seeking moral guidance from the next person you pass in the street.