Unmasked

I blogged a couple of months ago (Masks) about the Occupy London protest. This is a group of people in V for Vendetta-style Guy Fawkes masks, who camped between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Corporation of London to protest against economic injustice.

Their presence must have been very scary for London’s financial elite. So I am sure their recent eviction has brought sighs of relief and saved the stock market from meltdown.

I was interested to see one Occupier interviewed – without his mask. It is now the powerful who are keeping a low profile. The Corporation of London continues to hide – behind the bailiffs and police officers who carry out their bidding.  But the Corporation at least expressed “regret”, while St Paul’s has (to my knowledge) remained silent.

Mary Ann Sieghart wrote recently in the Independent celebrating the tolerance she sees in the Church of England. She links this to its status as the Established Church: belonging to all, it seeks to be the servant of all. (David Cameron celebrated the same tolerance in a recent statement about this country’s Christian values.)

Certainly, in a world where some religious groups preach death to homosexuals or to poets they don’t approve of, the C of E – by contrast – is certainly a broad church. It tolerates many voices, including scepticism of its own stated beliefs.

But is it possible to be too tolerant? Pastor Niemoller spoke with regret of the failure of the German church to oppose the Nazi regime. In Kenya, Bishop David Gitari challenged economic injustice and political corruption – and at one point was actively asked by government figures to make sure the church maintained its role of prophetic moral challenge to those in power.

The Church of England has the same role and the same invitation. The role (shared with other denominations) derives from a Biblical call for justice, and has led people (from Wilberforce to Barnardo to Desmond Tutu) to show us that the world can be better, if we will it so.

The invitation derives from its status as the established church, which places its senior bishops in the House of Lords. Thus (if the mood so takes them) they can challenge our thinking from Parliament as well as from pulpit.

And from time to time, they have done so. David Shephard wrote Bias to the Poor (and thereby ruled himself out of contention for the Canterbury post while Thatcher ruled). John Sentamu cut up his clerical collar on national TV in protest against the Mugabe regime.  I think it was David Jenkins who dared to “pray for our enemies” during the Falklands war.

But on the whole, the established church, understandably, does not want to rock the boat. Sieghart values a church “that is prepared to move – albeit a generation behind the rest of society – with the times”. I would like to see a church which moves ahead of society: which takes the lead, like Wilberforce, like the Quaker reformers, like the Jubilee campaign: which sides with the vulnerable in the (often hidden) face of the comfortable and the corporate.

The trouble is, challenging the government has been portrayed (at least since Thatcher, perhaps longer) as disloyal. But the opposition’s official title is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Opposition to bad legislation – indeed, forcing the government to properly justify good legislation – is an essential function in a democracy.

It is also a function which the church forgets at peril to its relevance. We do not make the gospel “relevant” by changing the message to fit what people already believe, any more than we make the speed limit “relevant” by changing it to match the speed people already drive at.