It’s funny how faith leaders start rediscovering their faith when they stop being leaders.
When he was still the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey did much to contribute to aggressive secularisation (if only by not resisting it robustly enough). Amazingly secularisation is still called ‘liberal’ whereas in fact it’s the exact opposite of that.
Now Lord Carey attacks Dave’s government in The Mail for ‘aiding and abetting this aggression every step of the way’. How true. And how much more weight such accusations would have carried had Lord Carey levelled them ex cathedra, say in 1999, when the previous lot of spivocrats were abusing Christianity in most egregious ways. Dave doesn’t call himself ‘heir to Blair’ for nothing.
Mind you, Carey’s first paragraph shows that he’s still sitting on the fence: ‘I like David Cameron and believe he is genuinely sincere in his desire to make Britain a generous nation where we care for one another and where people of faith may exercise their beliefs fully.’ But at least he’s now on the fence, rather than consistently remaining on its wrong side.
From then on, Lord Carey, now freed from the shackles of high office, says all the right things, which perhaps could suggest that he doesn’t like Dave as much as he professes.
Listed are such outrages as the government’s plan ‘to turn the 700-year-old Parliamentary chapel of St Mary Undercroft into a multi-faith prayer room so that gay couples can get married there.’ Homomarriage itself comes in for rough treatment, as Lord Carey is ‘very suspicious that behind the plans to change the nature of marriage, which come before the House of Lords soon, there lurks an aggressive secularist and relativist approach towards an institution that has glued society together from time immemorial.’
‘Suspicion’ is the political for ‘certainty’, and once a politician always a politician. But the situation is as dire as Lord Carey ‘suspects’. Dave is an oxymoronic modernising Tory, and such modernisation includes hatred of Christianity as an essential constituent. This ineluctably leads to distaste for all traditional institutions that collectively add up to what used to be called Christendom.
For just as Christ begat Christianity, Christianity begat Christendom, our ancient civilisation. That’s what the likes of Dave strive to modernise, which is the political for destroy. As far as they are concerned, Christian symbols which they are banning from public life don’t just transgress against other religions – they offend against the very essence of modernity.
Dave presumably hopes that the crucifix will be replaced by the blue rosette as the unifying symbol of what he calls modernisation. In fact it’s much more likely that the new dominant symbolism will be provided either by the crescent or the hammer and sickle or perhaps even a version of the swastika.
For, when Christianity goes, Christendom goes with it – the two are linked by an unbreakable umbilical cord. Christian civility, love of fellow man, sublime art, justice, charity will all have a door slammed in their face, just as another door will be flung wide-open to beastliness and barbarism.
But the event we’ll be celebrating tomorrow shows that death does not have to be final, that it’s possible to rise from the dead and start a new, higher life. This applies to Christ, Christianity – and we must all pray that it holds true for Christendom as well.
Happy Easter!