Priests and Politics

Trevor Beeson

Description

Since Christianity is an ethical as well as a mystical religion and since individuals live in communities, the church is bound to be involved in politics and other social action that determines the quality of human life. So argues Trevor Beeson in this study of how the Church of England’s leaders responded to the radical social changes that transformed life in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 10 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334051787
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Priests and Politics

Priests and Politics
The Church Speaks Out
Trevor Beeson
© Trevor Beeson 2013
Published in 2013 by SCM Press
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978-0-334-04657-8
Typeset by Manila Typesetting
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
Contents
Preface
1 Throne and Altar
2 Towards Democracy – Slowly
3 Socialism with a Christian Soul
4 The Rise and Fall of Religious Education
5 The Durham Miners and their Bishops
6 Greater and Lesser Prophets
7 John Bull’s Other Island – Irish Crises
8 The War that Did Not End Wars: 1914–18
9 Living and Talking in Hope – Three Conferences
10 Responding to the Dictators
11 The Catastrophic War: 1939–45
12 Founding the Welfare State
13 The Cold War
14 The Church and the Bomb
15 Racism and Injustice in South Africa
16 A New Morality
17 Into the Heart of Industry
18 A Sorry Tale of Too Many Cities
19 Whither Prophecy?
Further Reading
Preface
This is the sixth volume in a series of histories of the Church of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries designed for the non-specialist reader and focused chiefly on those of its leaders who made significant contributions to its developing life.
Having decided to turn finally to the Church’s involvement in the political and social life of the nation, I was not disposed to waste much space arguing the case for such an involvement. The Christian religion is an ethical as well as a mystical religion. Building on the strong foundations of the Jewish faith, which was inseparable from the life of a particular nation, Jesus reinforced the belief that love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.
This teaching, expressed in sayings and parables and above all in his own life, related to what he called the Kingdom of God and was addressed to individuals living in a particular place during a brief moment in history. But the values embodied in his teaching are universal values and, inasmuch as individuals are born to live in community, they have social as well as individual applications.
Christian history records how the Church has interpreted and responded to this second challenge. Being a community of sinners, it has not always done so successfully and sometimes seems to have made no effort at all. Yet, there have been long periods when its own life has been so intimately bound up with the life of a nation that social and political action has been routine. At other times, complacent inaction or positive support amounted to endorsement, for better or for worse, of the status quo. And the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced some outstanding exponents of Christian social thought and action whose stories are told in the pages that follow.
A much larger book remains to be written, though not by this author, dealing with the much wider and very much more significant influence exercised by Christian lay men and lay women, often holding the highest offices in politics, finance, industry, commerce and other spheres of community life. The work of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson in helping to secure the end of the slave trade would be its starting point.
This book consists of a series of essays dealing with the main issues arising during its period and makes no attempt to provide a comprehensive guide to the Church’s involvement in this field, such as is contained in E. R. Norman’s scholarly Church and Society in England 1770–1970. In spite of the surprisingly unconcealed right-wing political bias expressed in much of the author’s analysis, his book is an indispensable and accessible treatment of a great deal of important material.
In order that my own political predilections should not go unnoticed, I must confess that my own Christian life was indelibly stained at an early, formative stage by the teaching of Archbishop William Temple. I am old enough to have been present in Leicester in February 1943 at the third of the ‘The Church Looks Forward’ meetings, when he spoke about the need for social planning. As a young bank clerk, impatiently awaiting call-up into the wartime RAF, I read with perplexity but recognition that something important was probably being said in his lecture to the Bank Officers’ Guild on ‘The Christian View of the Right Relationship between Finance, Production and Consumption’.
I still have a much underlined copy of his Penguin Special Christianity and Social Order and absorbed into my spiritual bloodstream his statement that ‘[t]he Church is bound to get involved in political and social affairs because it is by vocation the agent of God’s purpose, outside the scope of which no human interest or activity can fall’.
Much later, Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings helped to convince me that the great man’s approach was not beyond qualification, and, later still, my experience as Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher brought me close enough to political life to recognize the complexity of the social and economic issues that politicians are daily required to face and the unavoidable compromises that decision-making demands.
Nonetheless, 14 years of ministry in a coal-mining village and a 20,000-populated council housing estate in the diocese of Durham were sufficient to confirm my discipleship of William Temple and the deep conviction that faith demands a commitment to the enhancement of the human lot through a wider embracing of justice, equality, compassion, freedom and mutual responsibility.
Once again, I am grateful to Fiona Mather for her support and candid commentary.
Romsey
Easter 2013
1
Throne and Altar
The Church of England’s relations with the State at the beginning of the nineteenth century differed little from those established by the Elizabethan Settlement in 1559, when three Acts deprived the Pope of his power to appoint bishops in England, required the clergy to surrender to the Crown their legislative independence, and all to acknowledge the monarch as the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England. In principle, this was a continuation of the interdependence of Church and State that had held sway throughout medieval Europe, and it also embodied the Lutheran concept of ‘a godly prince ruling a godly people’. The 1662 Act of Uniformity had prescribed the Book of Common Prayer as the only legal source of the Church’s worship, and the designation ‘as by law Established’ was a recognition that the Church of England’s ecclesiastical regulations alone were enshrined in the law of the State.
It was, however, the case that the political power of the Crown was now waning. The advance towards parliamentary democracy still had a long way to go, but it was undoubtedly advancing and must ultimately affect the mode of Church–State relations. Yet there was no suggestion that the Church of England might one day cease to embody the essential spiritual dimension of national life. In fact, fear that something akin to the French Revolution might cross the English Channel served to strengthen the conviction that this dimension was vital to the national interest.
The Church was content that this should be so. Apart from some serious problems during Oliver Cromwell’s rule and a few anxieties during the brief reign of James II, it had not found its link with the Crown inconvenient. Neither had the Crown been troubled by ecclesiastical dissent, having taken care over its appointments to bishoprics and received regularly the sworn allegiance of all the clergy.
Nonetheless, the appearance in the political arena of Whig reformers was bound to raise in the minds of some of the bishops – all of whom were involved in the business of government through their membership of the House of Lords – the possibility that a Christian conscience might require them to support change. More of the lesser clergy recognized this, and of their number Sydney Smith was the most prominent as well as the most entertaining.
This ceased to be a theoretical matter when the advance of democracy required a Roman Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 and a much wider Reform Act in 1832. In both these instances the bishops were divided – most favouring Emancipation, most strongly opposed to Reform. In the latter case, their opposition, which helped to defeat the Bill, caused considerable public anger expressed in violent demonstrations, and they were soon cajoled into support. It was soon the turn of the State to intervene in the affairs of the Church of England by the setting up of a commission to investigate a situation in which the bishoprics and cathedrals were immensely wealthy, while the Church’s ministry in the new industrial towns was neglected for want of funds.
Pre