C of E Christmas Day hypocrisy
Turns out that Christmas is a religious festival. I know, I’m as shocked as you are. Anyway, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Christmas address at Canterbury Cathedral, spoke on the theme of dependence. We are in the habit, he said, of thinking of dependence as a bad thing – alcohol dependence, for instance. In what amounts to a discussion about semantics (necessary vs unnecessary dependence), he said that we shouldn’t consider depending on others any more a bad thing than depending on, say, food or air. Inter alia, he said
in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall test you relentlessly in schools, we shall bombard you with advertising, often highly sexualised advertising, we shall worry you about your prospects and skills from the word go; we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing – which is ‘independence’, turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won’t need too much maintenance.
That sounds sufficiently close to Manufacturing Consent to seriously annoy that part of the C of E that is content for it to be the Conservative Party at prayer. Rhetoric and reality remain, though, curiously removed from one another for the Church of England. The Guardian reports that
Children as young as two are to be targeted as part of a new campaign to recruit young people back to the church, the Guardian has learned.
I cannot help but feel that, were Richard Dawkins to announce that he was going to target two-year-olds to bring them into the Brights, there would be howls of outrage about militant atheism even if trying to add to the numbers of the Church Militant in exactly the same way is perfectly acceptable.
The article reads
The Rev Jan Ainsworth, the Church of England’s chief education officer, said there was no compulsion on anyone taking part in a church-run group to become Christian and the emphasis in training would avoid the use of heavy-handed tactics. “We do not endorse high-pressure techniques, we would not endorse anything that places psychological pressure on someone. We would endorse ways of interesting children in the Christian faith and the Christian story.”
Which is lovely, except for the mandatory worship and religious schools that see people attending church just to get their kids into a decent school. If that isn’t a high-pressure tactic, I don’t know what it is.
Anyway, revenons aux nos moutons. If we take Dr Williams’ lament for lost childhood, we could easily say that indoctrinating children well before they can make moral and ethical choices for themselves, giving them an idea that mandatory love is a good idea, scaring them into good behaviour with threats of hell-fire and brimstone and leaving them worrying for their eternal soul is on a par with the commercialisation of childhood that does so little to prepare people for the realities of adulthood.
I don’t doubt Dr Williams’ intentions; he strikes me as a well-meaning sort and I have defended his liberal values on this blog before. However, my suspicion is that the effect of what the C of E desires would not be the quiet, internal reflection of the Reverend Prelate, but “turning [them] into a useful cog in the social machine that won’t need too much maintenance”.
xD,
December 26th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I don’t agree with you for once Dave. I’m a fellow non-believer, but I don’t think you’re right to either dismiss the AB of C’s words as just “semantics”, or to make the little dig at the Tory party. On the first point, his words speak to something real, if “real” means something that lots of us have noticed and disliked (the atomisation of modern Britain), and on the second point, not only has there long been a strand of toryism more in favour of mutual interdependence than arid individualism, since Cameron became leader it has become the party’s dominant strand. I think this is what Phillip Blond talks about.
I don’t think its hypocritical for a church to believe these things and to campaign for them, as you seem to suggest.
Anyway I hope you had a lovely Christmas!
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December 26th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Graeme,
The full quote is
I wasn’t having a dig at the Tories; I was having a dig at the C of E.
As it happens, I rather agree with Dr Williams’ sentiments above; the point I was trying, if somewhat ineptly, to make was that Williams’ Christianity is of a quiet radicalism that does not sit well with the traditional state-religion manifestations of the C of E in public piety.
The hypocrisy is not on the side of anyone who agrees with Dr Williams on atomisation or the too-soon loss of innocence, but on the Church’s part when it can simultaneously have the AB of C saying that we shouldn’t strip children of childhood at the same time as the policies revealed in the Guardian – at least as I understand them – do precisely that.
Anyway, I hope you’ve had a lovely Christmas.
xD.
December 27th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Children as young as two are to be targeted as part of a new campaign to recruit young people back to the church, the Guardian has learned.
It used to be called Christening and Baptism and was just what parents did with their offspring. Sad commentary on today’s society that our old traditions are caleld “targetting”, as if they are somehow not good.
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