Article

Church and state

Creed

Politics

8 February 2024

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 Tomlin

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.

Column

Creed

Football

Grace

Sport

24 May 2024

8 min read

Manchester City and the surprises of Grace

What a footballing dynasty's dominance tells us about the problems of meritocracy

Graham Tomlin

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

A football team wearing a sky blue kit leaps for joy holding a trophy.

Celebrating winning the English Premiership.

Manchester City.

So Manchester City didn’t quite win the double double. Manchester United, against all the odds, spoilt the party and created their own by winning the FA Cup. But City won the Premier League yet again. That makes six times out of the last seven seasons. It would take a brave person to bet against them doing it again next season. Supporters of other teams look on with a mixture of resentment, admiration and envy. Despite losing the Cup Final, Manchester City fans are basking in the time of their lives.

When our team wins, we football fans gloat. Especially over our rivals. We all do it. We assume it means our team is superior, that victory is deserved, that there is some kind of moral credit involved in winning. Football fans are meritocratic to a tee.

In 2020, Michael Sandel, Harvard Professor of Political Philosophy published The Tyranny of Merit. In the book, he traced the rise of the idea of meritocracy, the notion that if you succeed in life it is to your credit, and if you fail it is your fault. We talk about “going as far as your talents take you”, “getting what you deserve in life” and so on. Speaking from the American context in particular, he argues, it means a belief that we are masters of our own fate, that achievement is to our credit and failure due to our fault.

He also sheds light on the dark side of meritocracy. The most important factor in whether people voted for Trump or Brexit was educational background. Getting into college or university meant you stood a much better chance of landing a good, well-paid job and rising through the rungs of society. And if you did so you tended to end up more liberal in political and social outlook. If you didn't go to college, you were more likely to stay in manual or blue-collar work, looking at a distance at the educated class of people who ran the government, the economy and the legal system, and feeling they didn't represent you.

Meritocracy, Sandel argues, generates on the one hand hubris and on the other hand shame. It makes the successful feel proud in their own achievements, looking down with a secret smugness at those who didn't get the big jobs with the big money, and on the other, generates resentment and a sense of shame in those who missed out on the educational and financial gravy train.

A meritocratic society makes parents more and more obsessive about getting their kids the advantages that will set them up for life. Yet such obsessive parenting for success has so often led to an epidemic of teenage depression and distress. College life becomes increasingly competitive, aiming to build an impressive CV to land the big jobs when you leave university for the big wide world of competition.

Yet the reality is, he argued, that most of what made for ‘success’ was fairly random and the result of chance. If you happened to be born into an educated family with a reasonable income you are more likely to get the education that would keep you within that class. Without that origin it is much harder to break through the social barriers. Of course, there are plenty of examples of people born into disadvantaged circumstances who rose through the ranks to get good well-paid and high-profile jobs. Yet such stories fit neatly into the meritocratic story, as these people are held up as the poster boys and girls of meritocracy - exemplars of precisely the kind of moral virtue and character that is needed to succeed.

Some would say beautiful brand of football that out-passes and outplays virtually everyone else.

Aristocracy by contrast, may have contained many flaws and inequalities, but at least the poor didn't feel that their poverty was their fault. We talk about our talents as ‘gifts’, which implies they have been given to us rather than earned by us. If we happen to have a talent for numbers, for writing, an instinct for strategy, reading people well, or managing stress, that is not really to our credit but something we have inherited in our personality. Of course we can and need to develop these skills, but again society has a fairly random way of rewarding certain talents and not others - we pay people skilled at football far more than people similarly skilled at netball, and hedge fund traders far more than nurses.

So what does all this have to do with Manchester City?

In September 2008, Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, who is currently the vice president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, completed the purchase of Manchester City, a club that had finished ninth in the Premier League the season before and was without a trophy in 32 seasons. From that moment they had the financial resources of virtually an entire Arab state at their disposal. Since then, they have spent a net amount of £1.4 billion on transfers. They hired the best manager and the best striker in the world, and play the most finely-tuned, relentless, some would say beautiful brand of football that out-passes and outplays virtually everyone else. In a recent match against Tottenham, they lost their number one goalkeeper Ederson to injury who was then replaced by Stefan Ortaga, who played a blinder and effectively won the league by keeping Tottenham from scoring. Ortega would walk into almost any other Premier League club. City’s strength in depth is such that they could almost turn out two teams that could win the Premier League on their own.

If the mind of Sheikh Mansour had gone in a different direction, Reading fans might have been celebrating a treble by the M4, or Wigan could be playing Real Madrid.

Back in the 2008 season, presumably the group from Abu Dhabi looked at the Premier League table for clubs they might buy, presumably discounting the already successful ones like Manchester United (who won the league that year), Chelsea, Liverpool or Arsenal. Looking just below City, they would have seen Blackburn Rovers in 7^th (who had won the league as recently as 1995, Portsmouth in 8^th, or a little lower, Middlesborough in 13^th or Wigan in 14^th. Sunderland, Bolton, Reading, Birmingham and Derby made up the numbers further down the table.

Of these teams, this past season, Portsmouth, Derby, Bolton and Reading played in the third tier of English football, struggling to make ends meet before small crowds against small clubs such as Stevenage, Burton, Fleetwood and Bristol Rovers. Birmingham were relegated into the third tier. None of the others were playing in the Premier League, let alone the Champions League.

Manchester City, by contrast, in their spanking new stadium, fresh from a season where they had won the treble (Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League), were winning the World Club Championship, marching towards another League title, only just missing out on the Champions League on penalties in the semi-final.

Did the rulers of Abu Dhabi consider buying Reading? Or Blackburn Rovers? Or Portsmouth? Whether they actually did or not, in theory they might have done. In other words, picking out Manchester City has a high degree of randomness. If the mind of Sheikh Mansour had gone in a different direction, Reading fans might have been celebrating a treble by the M4, or Wigan could be regularly playing Real Madrid.

Maybe they can teach us the humility of knowing that our success or failure is much less to our credit or fault than we think.

Manchester City is a prime example of the element of randomness in success. Now of course it's not all random. Many other clubs have spent huge amounts of money but without the success of Manchester City. You have to say their owners know how to run a football club, unlike the shambles of the owners of clubs such as Chelsea or Manchester United in recent times.

Yet there is undoubtedly an element of sheer chance, luck, or to put it in Christian terms, undeserved Grace about it. Manchester City’s being chosen by Abu Dhabi is a strange worldly echo of the Christian doctrine of Election (no - not that election!). This is the idea that in the Bible, God chooses a part out of the whole, for example choosing Humanity out of all the species of animal life on the planet to look after and care for it, choosing Israel out of all the nations of the world to bear the message of God's care and love for that world, and choosing the Church as God’s chosen people, to bear witness to Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world.

The difference in this Christian notion is that election is never for success. God does not choose humanity, Israel or the church so that they can outstrip all the others and bask in their own superiority, even though all three have fallen into the trap of thinking that way many, many times. God chooses them precisely so that they might be a blessing to the rest of the world, the channel through which God desires to pour out his goodness to everyone, the bearers of a message of good news that everyone needs to hear. Election therefore breeds not a sense of superiority, but a deep sense of humility at having received a status that was not earned, undeserved, but that carries great responsibility.

So Manchester City's triumphant progress is perhaps an object lesson for the rest of us, that any success we may have achieved in life, anything we are tempted to boast about, whether privately or publicly, is not as much to our credit as we think. Just as they were plucked from mid-table obscurity to become one of the great teams of recent times, while the likes of Reading and Wigan languish in mediocrity, a large part of any success that may have come our way, is not down to our credit, but derives from a gift, something bestowed on us, so that we might use whatever good comes our way to raise up others and be a blessing to those who don’t have such fortune.

While Manchester City win everything (and it won’t last, as we Manchester United fans know only too well) maybe they can teach us the humility of knowing that our success or failure is much less to our credit or fault than we think. We can learn generosity to those less fortunate than we are, contentment when things go badly, and gratitude for the grace that we have neither deserved or earned.