Episcopal reflection

In the post immediately below I worry that members of one the great institutions of state, the armed services, might venture political judgements that in their public position they have no right to make. But in addition, the young servicemen captured and then released by Iran have, so far as I am aware, no special competence in political analysis either. They should be aware that there is already a tradition in British public life whereby one institution determines on demonstrating a near-total absence of political understanding. It would be a shame if anyone were to usurp that role.

I refer, of course, to the bench of bishops of the Church of England. (There are 24 bishops, along with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, who sit in the House of Lords, out of 108 bishops of the Church of England in total.) One of them, the Bishop of Rochester, offers his Easter reflections after witnessing the release of our servicemen from Iranian captivity.

I saw on the one hand what Iran was doing, and what the president [of Iran] said had much to do with the moral and spiritual tradition of their country. The president talked about the religious background to the release, with reference to the Prophet’s birthday and the passing over of Christ. What struck me was that if there were any values on the British side they were free-floating and not anchored in a spiritual and moral tradition. Unless we reroot ourselves in a spiritual and moral tradition, we won’t know what we stand for and will not be able to confront other people, countries and ideological movements who are very clear where they stand.

I want to be fair to the Rt Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, and I suspect The Sunday Times's leading article, while expressing sentiments I have much sympathy with, may be misinterpreting him:

Can anybody seriously believe that the Iranian president, having milked the illegal seizure of British forces for all it was worth, has a higher moral authority because he makes a couple of religious references? The four British soldiers blown up in Iraq, whose youthful faces peering out of our newspapers make their deaths almost too hard to bear, were killed with roadside bombs supplied by Iran. Mr Ahmadinejad presides over a country where women are killed for adultery, men are hanged on cranes and religious minorities are viciously persecuted.

What do the bishops want? Were they happy that Saddam Hussein, one of the bloodiest dictators of the postwar era, continued unchallenged in power? Should Britain have walked on by, rather than getting involved in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, for fear of denting our moral authority? Do they lament our high moral heyday when we stood back and watched the rape of Bosnia?

The Bishop, on my reading, is merely lamenting that modern Britain lacks a coherent sense of moral and spiritual purpose. He is, unfortunately, too obtuse to realise that his reference to the spiritual values of Iran's puppet-president illustrates the nonsense of his argument. Of course we're not "anchored in a spiritual and moral tradition". That's because we're a free society, in which we may profess whatever we like about origins, eschatology and the basis of ethics. What binds us is not a set of religious doctrines but common citizenship and democratic rights under the rule of law. If you want to see what the alternative is like, Iran is not a bad place to start.