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Culture

Freedom of Belief

Politics

13 March 2024

5 min read

Asylum row pits Church against State

From Westminster to Weymouth, the church incurs the wrath of statesmen.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A man wearing a waist coats sits at a desk and ask a questions of a panel of people with their backs facing us.

Lee Anderson MP questions clergy.

To tune into yesterday’s Home Affairs Committee hearing on asylum-seekers was to witness the Church in the dock.

The Church is “aiding and abetting” people-smugglers by being so welcoming to refugees, one committee member, MP Marco Longhi, claimed.

There were audible groans when one of the three Church representatives put forward to defend such claims - Baptist Union spokesperson Steve Tinning - revealed that seven asylum-seekers from the Bibby Stockholm have been baptised since October.

There were more groans when Mr Tinning claimed each of the baptisms had involved individuals whose conversions had taken place before their arrival on these shores.

“A likely story!” the groaner - I think it was the new Reform Party MP, Lee Anderson - seemed to wish to say.

The “hostile environment” facing asylum-seekers was referenced several times by the Church of England's Bishop Guli Francis Dehqani, and “hostile” would certainly describe the reception she received.

On the other hand, there was celebration for the “bravery” of the “whistleblowing” former Church of England minister, Rev Matthew Firth, who told The Telegraph recently about the alleged “conveyor belt” of asylum-seekers being baptised after falsely claiming to have converted to Christianity.

One committee member, MP Tim Loughton, suggested Rev Firth might be appointed to a prospective working group on the issue.

There was no such invitation for the other Church representatives.

It seemed in this particular hearing that to speak for asylum-seekers was very much to swim against the prevailing tide.

There perhaps could be no clearer illustration of this than when Mr Longhi flatly accused the Church of England of “working in the opposite direction” to the government’s efforts to deter immigrants from arriving on our shores.

While the Home Office minister tasked with responding to this accusation did not specifically charge the Church of this sin, he did caution them to “think very carefully” about how the work that they do “can be portrayed by those that are facilitating these terrible [Channel] crossings”.

There can be little doubt that the comments of senior figures, including MPs, have contributed to such threats.

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Freedom of Belief

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What the Gaza conflict and the asylum seeker row have in common

Graham Tomlin

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7 min read

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Dame Diana Johnson, who chaired the meeting, paid tribute to the churches “supporting some of the most vulnerable people in our country”, but such tributes were not forthcoming from the other committee members. Quite the contrary.

Dame Johnson also thanked Mr Tinning for highlighting the “sadness and fear” of church members in Weymouth who have been insulted and threatened since the stories of asylum-seekers converting in their church were publicised.

Mr Tinning said the church had received an email saying: “You need shutting down, and the backlash from this will be huge. The truth is, you know you’re lying and cheating our system. Treacherous to taxpaying people! Brace yourself!”

“This church is now fearing the backlash because of language used,” Mr Tinning said, “about whether taxpayers are being ‘scammed’, or others saying that ‘you attend Mass once a week for a few months and bingo, you're signed off by a member of the clergy’. It's just not true. And it's doing damage to the communities that are desperately trying to serve the poor and vulnerable in their areas.”

Dame Johnson said it was “quite disturbing” to hear the Weymouth church had been targeted. But again, this was to swim against the prevailing tide.

There was an eagerness to celebrate the “bravery” of Reverend Firth - this was mentioned by several committee members - to stand up against the powerful Church, while the bravery of regular church members to stand up for refugees seemed to be overlooked.

All of which leads one to wonder which is braver: to stand up against the Church, or to stand up against the State? And which is more powerful?

“The Church of England has come down on you like the Spanish Inquisition!” MP Tim Loughton suggested to Rev Firth.

And when Rev Firth reported being told that “people might try to get you” for speaking out, he received understandable sympathy.

But might it have been even more courageous for the other committee members to have joined Dame Johnson in also speaking out on behalf of church members like those in Weymouth who have been threatened simply for daring to assist asylum-seekers.

And there can be little doubt that the comments of senior figures, including MPs, have contributed to such threats.

Another element in the background of the hearing was Suella Braverman’s contribution, in absentia, by having recently claimed - in another widely read piece in The Telegraph - that churches around the country were “facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims”.

The Home Office Minister, Tom Pursglove, was asked several times whether there was any evidence for this claim, the short answer to which appeared to be no.

“You’ll have to ask her,” was his repeated response.

But as Mr Tinning mentioned in his closing remarks, words are important, and what stood out most from the hearing was that the general consensus among MPs, it would appear, is that those who speak out against asylum-seekers and the Church are to be welcomed - perhaps simply because they are working with, and not against the government.

Perhaps it's little wonder, then, that churches who do stand up for refugees - which in the current climate would appear to be standing up against the State - incur the wrath of statesmen.

The question for the general public to decide is which is more harmful: the desire of the Church to speak up for asylum-seekers, even if some may be found to be bogus, or the desire of the State to stop them arriving at all costs.

Watch the full Home Affairs Committee hearing on Parliamentlive.tv.

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Politics

28 November 2024

4 min read

Here's why we need to keep democracy holy

It's much more than a utilitarian deal that benefits the most.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A sign reading 'polling station' stands by the entrance to a church.

Red Dot on Unsplash.

One of the more ludicrous constitutional contributions of late has been the parliamentary petition, with well past two million signatures when I last looked, demanding another general election be called, because the Labour government, elected in July, has “gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead-up to the last election.”

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has surprised precisely no one by saying that he won’t be calling one. And so we’ll move on. But, in passing, what is truly breathtaking is how little our democracy is understood and, apparently, how unseriously democracy in the west is now taken. If that sounds unduly censorious, I have a two-word response: Two million!

Little time need be spent on demolishing the premise of this spurious petition, other than to wonder how many of those signatories would have appeared on one calling for, say, a fresh mandate after the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg (where is he now? Ah yes) performed a massive reverse-ferret on a manifesto pledge not to raise university tuition fees.

Or how many of these same fearless electors believe the result of the Brexit referendum should be voided because of the lies of the Leave campaign, most notable the one painted on the side of Boris Johnson’s battle bus. But no – two million residual, self-righteous righties can only be mobilised against a Labour government.

This event none the less raises valid questions about what our democracy is (and is not) and why we should want to protect or even cherish it. These questions become the more critical because there’s a tangible feeling of slippage in western democracy, as if we’re growing a bit tired and even contemptuous of it.

There’s the ominous re-growth of nationalism across Europe. And not a few bien pensants – me included, to my shame – might admit to a feeling after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president that democracy is too important to be left to the people.

Slightly more seriously, we need to ask ourselves what the qualities of democracy are that we should seek to defend. The first of these is, quite obviously, the rule of law. Should a political actor seek to overthrow a democratically established electoral process, then that is a crime within the rule of law. Witness the horrors on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on January 6 2021.

That’s the Feast of the Epiphany as it happens, but nothing to do with the coming of wise men. With Trump at the centre of it. Draw your own democratic conclusions – and weep for the rule of law.

Natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence.

Again, why does this matter and what is it about democracy that we hold sacred, even holy? It can’t simply be that we hold dear a kind of hard utilitarian ideal that what we elect to do is for the benefit of most of the people, for most of the time, as decided by popular mandate among the demos.

If we believe in democracy, as I believe most of us do, we’re presented with a choice: We can look to secularism as a solution, universal Enlightenment principles built on citizenship and equality before the law. Or we can look to a multiculturist model, keeping the peace between essentially separate communities and the state.

Or we can shape something on Augustinian Christianity, that recognises the limits of political democracy, which would eschew undemocratic theocracy, but which would hold that no political order other than the Body of Christ (the Church) can claim divine authority.

We’re in classic Rowan Williams theological territory here: “[T]he Body of Christ is not a political order on the same level as others, competing for control, but a community that signifies, that points to a possible healed human world.”

Unsurprisingly, I buy that. Williams goes further to state this spiritual effect on the political environments in which we find ourselves is likely to be “sceptical and demystifying.” Which seems to be a reasonable manifesto in a democracy.

The principle of election can be a worrying one in theological terms. We don’t “elect” God, though some secularists would claim that the Godhead is our invention. Rather, it has sometimes been perceived to be the other way around historically.

Reformational Calvinism would hold, among many other things, the rather terrifying view that we’re elected by God. “The Elect” are those who will be saved, while the rest of us (I presume) can rot in hell. Little democracy there.

Less deterministically, a more modernist worldview would argue that the Christian faith, on which foundation western civilisation is built, offers a viable moral definition of the lawful state, with which politicians of all (democratic) persuasions can tackle issues of global justice.

One such issue of natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence. That’s an important aspect of Christian witness and will require true grit in in its application during the years ahead. That’s, if you will, our grit in the democratic oyster.