Article
Church and state
Creed
Politics
6 min read

The Church and the State need to disagree on asylum seekers

Politicians don’t always get how church and state relate, but both have a vital and different role to play when it comes to immigration. Graham Tomlin explores the age-old tensions between clerics and politicians

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A woman dressed in a blue suit sits at a table talking and gesticulating with her hands.
Then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, answer to a parliamentary committee, December 2022.
House of Lords, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As we all know, Suella Braverman thinks the church is aiding and abetting bogus asylum seekers. The case of the Afghan migrant Abdul Ezedi, who carried out an acid attack on a woman and her children and reports that residents of the Bibby Stockholm barge were attending churches nearby has added fuel to the former Home Secretary’s charge that churches are naively supporting the asylum claims of immigrants to the UK. Everyone on the right of British politics seems to have weighed in to the issue, from Nigel Farage to Priti Patel, Robert Jenrick to Melanie Phillips. Now, even the left has joined in. Keir Starmer has indicated he would close loopholes for those who falsely claim conversion if he becomes Prime Minister (quite how he will do that is not explained).  

I feel personally invested in this story. When I take confirmation services as a bishop, quite regularly these days, among the list of candidates, there will be Iranian or Syrian refugees who have apparently become Christians, waiting in line among the 12-year old schoolkids, the new parents who want spiritual help in bringing up their children and the elderly man approaching death who realises he needs do something he’s been putting off for years.  

I have confirmed several Iranian refugees. I can’t look into their heart, or even my own to guarantee all of them were genuine converts. Yet I have seen their desperation to escape an oppressive regime, and although some may have started out coming to church to improve their chances of asylum, in the process some of them at least, have found, to their surprise, real faith. Several that I know have gone on towards ordination in the Anglican Church. If that is a ploy to get past the immigration system, it does seem to be taking things a bit far.  

It’s hard not to think the attack on the church is some kind of retaliation for the bishops’ opposition to the government’s Rwanda scheme. But underneath this argument there are deeper issues at play. 

The wrath of God is more severe than the wrath of Suella. And the generosity of God is wider than the Home Office.

This dispute is in reality another outbreak of the age-old tension between the Church and Caesar. In the early years of the church, Roman emperors never really understood Christianity and thought they could use it for the purposes of the Roman Empire just like they were used to doing with the pagan cults.  

Yet the Christians had other ideas and higher loyalties. As Augustine put it, the loyalty of the church is ultimately to the City of God rather than the earthly city. And in time, they developed a careful understanding of the way the church related to the state.  

So when it comes to immigration, the church will always take a different approach from the state. St Paul, in the very early years of the Christian Church, wrote: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you.” In the very foundations of the Christian faith was this idea that even though we humans were moral and spiritual vagabonds, God has extended us a welcome into his presence. So woe betide any Christian who failed to welcome others into their fellowship if they wanted to join.  

If the Christian life was a matter of imitating and displaying God's ways in the ordinary business of life, then hospitality became one of the core Christian virtues. As one early Christian writer put it: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." To risk offending an angel - a messenger of God – was a bad idea. The wrath of God is more severe than the wrath of Suella. And the generosity of God is wider than the Home Office.

Now of course such hospitality could be abused. The New Testament also has warnings about naively welcoming scoundrels who speak falsehood and lies: "Do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you... for to welcome is to participate in the evil deeds of such a person." So, the early Christians were told to be on the lookout for fakes, just like clergy today. Walk down a street with a dog collar and you are a magnet for people telling you that they have lost their wallet and could you give them the train fare to visit their dying mother in Newcastle. With their doctrines of sin and the deceitfulness of the human heart, vicars should know more than most that not every claim to charity is genuine. Yet that dose of realism always took place in the context of a presumption to welcome. To think the best of people not the worst. To give people the benefit of the doubt. 

The state on the other hand has a different role. Later political theology developed more nuanced ways of putting it, but it goes back to St Paul’s claim that civil authorities are “God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” It is their job to be suspicious, to investigate fully, to winkle out fake claims and to set proper limits, while  tempering justice with mercy and be willing to welcome the genuine person in need. And wisdom is found in the tension between the two. It was always a mistake for the church to act like the state, being overly suspicious and critical. It was equally a mistake for the state to act like the church, being overly optimistic about all claims to asylum or innocence.  

So, when asylum seekers turn up at church asking to be baptised, the local vicar should not act like an agent of the state, assuming they are all bogus, just wanting to fiddle the system. She must act out of loyalty to her faith which tells her to welcome the stranger. The immigration officer on the other hand, whether he happens to be Christian or not, has to play it differently. Of course, there needs to be proper scrutiny of people's application for asylum - that's why we have an immigration system and quite right too. But vicars are not immigration officers. Their job is not start out by doubting motives but to act out the welcome of God, even if it draws the ire of the Daily Telegraph. This is the way that church and state should work together, one reminding the other of the Kingdom of God - a whole different way of life where welcome and grace takes centre stage. The other, conscious of the human tendency to deceive, being rightly cautious.

Suella's problem is, at root, a theological one. She hasn't understood the way Christian faith works. She hasn't understood the relationship between the church and the state. And let's be honest, sometimes in the past, the Church has tried to play the role of the state as well, which is equally a mistake. There is an inevitable tension in this relationship, where sometimes the church will believe the state is being too harsh, or the state will believe the church is being too soft, as we have seen in recent times. But it's one of those creative tensions where each side needs the other.

Perhaps in other, wiser ages, we understood this delicate balance between church and state, and the careful work that went into defining their relationship. Maybe it's time to recognise the role that each plays, not just for the sake of a healthy social life, but for the sake of those people who come to our shores desperately seeking a new life – whether with good motives or bad. 

Essay
Comment
Community
Identity
Politics
1 min read

The country needs fixing, here’s where to start

Turning back the clock, closing the gates, and putting up more flags, is not the answer
A commemorative blue plaque on a a wall is smashed to pieces
Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash.

This is the third in a series of articles clustered around the ideas of constitutionalism, Christianity and national identity. The first article set out the case for a new written constitution in order to protect against the authoritarian reactionary populism that threatens to undermine democratic norms and institutions. The second article made a distinction between England’s ‘metaphysical’ constitution and its ‘mechanical’ constitution – arguing that the former is in need of restoration, and the latter in need of thorough reform.  

This final article concludes with a plea for peace and unity. There is not much, in this increasingly febrile and polarised political climate, that left and right agree upon. Who is responsible for the mess we are in: the Romanians or the Etonians? Against whom should we direct our ire: the people in small boats in the Channel, or the people in big yachts in the Cayman Islands? Was Thatcher a hero or a villain? Was the purity of Brexit bliss betrayed by scheming Remoaners, or was leaving the European Union always going to be a disaster? 

What we can agree upon, however, is that something is deeply broken. While we might disagree on the causes and the solutions, the unavoidable evidence of brokenness is before our eyes. In every area of daily life, things are – to use the most fitting vernacular expression – ‘a bit pants’. Perhaps things are not utterly dire, in the way that much of somewhere like Sudan or Burma is utterly dire, but they are nevertheless far from the standard that one might reasonably expect from the rich, first world, country we still claim to be.  

Park life 

Go, for example, to your local park, if there is one. Observe the broken glass, the graffiti, the used condoms, the discarded drug paraphernalia, the joyless air of bleak menace in a place that should be a happy sanctuary for children and families. If that description does not match your experience, perhaps you are one of the lucky ones, who lives in a good area – but many of your fellows, in dull decaying provincial towns, are much less fortunate.  

Parks are just one manifestation of a land in the doldrums. One might just as well point to the fact that since privatisation water companies have not built any new reservoirs, or to uncollected rubbish piling up in the streets of Birmingham, or to the difficulty of getting an NHS dental appointment. Everything is tired, run down, threadbare, falling apart.  

Those in charge, nationally and locally, are stretched between the irreconcilable demands of expanding needs and tight budgets. Engulfed by short-term crisis-management, they lack the ability to look up, grab the situation by the horns, and bring about the fundamental, structural and systematic change that is needed to actually fix things.  

The decay is evident, too, in society at large. Employment, for those who can get it, is characterised by low wages and precarity. Housing costs are absurd. People at all levels have become exhausted, demoralised, bored and lacklustre, locked in an ‘overwhelm paralysis’. The public mood has become despondent, cynical, ineffectually angry, but also frightened. Many are grimly hanging on, just going through the motions to the minimal extent necessary to endure the week, and afford the month. Even basic civility and politeness have worn thin.  

This is a far cry from a ‘Land of hope and glory’. Indeed, if one were to take honest stock of things, one might conclude that we live in a state where there is none righteous, and where all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  

Cobwebbed constitution 

In making this sudden metaphysical turn – jumping from the decay, despondency and desperation evident around us, to the realm of the spirit – I do not wish for a moment to minimise the importance of such mundane human affairs as ideologies and policies. What government does and does not do, and what law allows or prohibits, matters. It should be no surprise that if governments leave undone those things which they ought to have done, and do those things which they ought not to have done, then there will be, at the end, ‘no health in us’.  

Still less would I wish to neglect the role of institutions and structures – and, ultimately, the constitution itself. The woes we experience, in terms of bad policy and poor execution, are largely the result of an ill-constituted state. The words of Tom Paine (a man ill-remembered by history, but one of the few Englishmen to have understood the centrality of constitutional matters) are as true today as when he penned them more than two centuries ago:  

‘For want of a constitution in England to restrain and regulate the wild impulse of power, many of the laws are irrational and tyrannical, and the administration of them vague and problematical.’  

When it comes to mending a country in decline, the first thing to do is to make sure the constitution is sound, and that the institutions of democracy and governance work as they should. Behind all the policy and governance failures, of both Conservatives and Labour, lies the fact that we are governed by the cobwebbed remains of a once mighty commercial imperial state, now hollowed out by neoliberalism, without any clear ethical principles to direct or sustain it. To expect good outcomes from such an ill-constituted state would be as absurd as expecting to gather figs from thorns, or grapes from briers. 

We might even put it in these terms: Every good constitution brings forth good government; but a corrupt constitution brings forth evil government. A good constitution cannot bring forth evil government, neither can a corrupt constitution bring forth good government. 

Constitutional renovation has therefore become a precondition for the restoration of the legitimacy, credibility, authority, and moral integrity of the state, as well as for the health, well-being, and prosperity of the people. This calls for quite a different project of national renewal from that offered by offered by the parties of the reactionary right. Simply turning back the clock, closing the gates, and putting up more flags, is not the answer.  

Governo largo 

The centrepiece of a national renewal project should be constitutional: to create a truly ‘public state’ – a democratic state founded upon, oriented towards, and capable of serving, the common good. Tend to that tree, water its constitutional roots, and the fruits will follow.  

Again, Paine tells us what the fruits of that good tree are, and therefore how to recognise when the constitutional tree is healthy:  

‘When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.’ 

This is little more than a restatement of the basic Aristotelean distinction between good and bad government. Good government (the well-constituted state, or ‘polity’) governs in the public interest, for the common good, while all forms of bad government – tyranny, oligarchy and populism – govern in the private interests of the rulers, perverting public power for personal gain. 

The renaissance Italian statesman, Francesco Guicciardini, highlighted this distinction in clearer, more binary terms. He contrasted the ‘governo largo’ with the ‘governo stretto’. A governo largo is a wide, open, broad-based government, in which power is broadly shared and publicly accountable, so that public life is centred upon public needs. It is system of government not only by and of the people, but also for the people. ‘Governo stretto’, in contrast, is a narrow, restricted, closed, private, self-seeking, public-ignoring state. 

The first attempt at constituting a ‘governo largo’ in England was made during the Civil Wars, with the ‘Agreement of the People’. This went through several drafts between 1647 and 1649. The title was well chosen. Real, working, constitutions are produced through a process of discussion and negotiation – ‘arguing and bargaining’ – that enables a broadly acceptable constitutional settlement to be reached. The constitution expresses what been agreed, amongst the people or their representatives, as the common foundation of the state.  

Reaching such an agreement today, in a society that has become as polarised and divided as ours, will not be easy. It is nevertheless necessary. In order to establish a state that serves the common good, we must have some agreed foundations, ground-rules, shared principles, upon which a general consensus exists. This alone can provide the basis for an inclusive, publicly-oriented, ‘governo largo’.  

This is not a radical innovation. Almost every country which has become independent from the British Empire has adopted a democratic constitution as its supreme and fundamental law. In some cases – in India in 1950, South Africa in 1996, and Kenya in 2010 – a serious attempt was made to establish an inclusive ‘governo largo’ constitution. In so doing, they sought to heal deep divisions, to reach a broadly acceptable settlement, and thereby to make good government – and with it socio-economic development – at least possible. 

Perhaps we think we are better than all that, beyond such constitutional trifles. Yet, the fact remains that our politics today – and our society today – look much more like those of India, South Africa and Kenya than, say, like those of 1950s England. Either we find ways to dwell together in unity, or we face the kind of civil breakdown which the ancients referred to as ‘stasis’, in which all notions of the common good and the public interest are abandoned in partisan, factional, sectarian or ethnic conflict.  

Here then, we must return to matters of the spirit. A good constitution is necessary, but the best constitution cannot save us. A constitution might call us to liberty – to that political freedom which enables us, as responsible citizens, to exercise care for common things, through systems of representative and responsible ‘public government’, but that is not enough, unless we also cultivate the qualities of character to use liberty well and wisely.  

Saint Paul enjoins us not to use liberty ‘for an occasion to the flesh’ – that is, to seek our own, selfish, corrupt or partisan ends. He warns us perils of stasis: ‘But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.’  He also points to that one solution by which the degeneracy of the state, and the corruption of the constitution, might ultimately be overcome: ‘all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ 

In other words, if we wish to seek the common good, to be well governed, to live in peace and unity, with freedom and justice, then we have to learn to love one another. Civic and political regeneration cannot ultimately be separated from regeneration of our souls.  

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