More marches might just make the point about peace

Protest marches highlight conflict close to home, as commentators cast around for agents of peace. George Pitcher thinks he might just know who they are.

George Pitcher

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

A crowd of people on a protest march file down the street in one directions.

A recent pro-Palestinian march in London.

Austin Crick on Unsplash.

The Home Front of the Gaza war opened up in Britain last weekend. There had been pro-Palestinian marches since the conflict began on 7th October, but for many here it remained the equivalent of a “phoney war”, waged thousands of miles away.

What brought it home were the threats to civil order presented to us over the Remembrance weekend. We now know that the end was drawing nigh for home secretary Suella Braverman when she wrote in The Times last week that the police response to self-styled peace marchers was inadequate.

Whether or not her words inflamed far-right yobs to attack police at the Cenotaph is a matter of conjecture, but that and the massive pro-Palestine protest last Saturday leave no doubt that Israel’s military response to the Hamas atrocities on its people is now a very live issue on British soil.

Many of us have consequently spent this week wondering about the right and proper way to respond to these events. We are, in a way, spoilt for commentary. Paul Goodman wrote presciently in The Times at the start of the week that there had always been a policy fault line between prime minister Rishi Sunak and his home secretary, just ahead of their political tectonic plates shifting, precipitating Braverman’s condemnatory earthquake of her former boss’s alleged betrayal and weakness.

No one can be left in any doubt that there is now support for Hamas terrorism and racist intimidation of Jews on British streets. As a people, we can’t sit idly by and witness this development. The big question is what we do to protect the peace and who does it. Goodman concluded his piece by writing this:

"We are waiting for someone, somehow, to help bring people of all kinds, ordinary Muslims not least, into a great political alliance of moderation, decency, sense and, yes, Britishness. Who is this saviour? Your guess is as good as mine."

In an otherwise excellent piece, I’m tempted to respond to this pay-off thus: Well, duh! It’s almost like someone saying wistfully, in response to the challenges of illegal immigration which the UK faces, that if only there was some kind of pan-European federation of which we could be a member in order to sort the problem out collectively. The answer to that is staring us in the face, as is the answer to the question Goodman raises.

I’d hope I don’t have to spell it out. It is the duty, even the obligation, of a state that has the Christian Church established in law as its moral arbiter to deploy those who witness to its faith as peacemakers between the potentially warring factions in our midst. If that means getting between Hamas sympathisers, racist yobs and frightened Jews who may or may not be Zionists, then so be it.

We should confront in peace, though firmly, those who chant racist and hateful slogans. We should be visible in our demand for peace; that demand made to our polity, to our people and the United Nations.

Though we should not rejoice in it, this is our moment. So is this nation visible in its Christian witness to peace and reconciliation, to the defence of the helpless and innocent at the hands of those who would do them harm and would kill them? I’m afraid not.

True, the House of Bishops of the Church of England has issued an unequivocal statement on the last day of October, calling for a kind of peace. It calls for the release of Israeli prisoners held by Hamas; for “humanitarian pauses” in the conflict to allow for the evacuation of suffering civilians; for safe areas for them and for the observance of “international humanitarian law”.

But it stops short of calling for ceasefire. Why? Is there not a gospel imperative that the killing has to stop? But, anyway, the truth is that these are just words. We are called to action too.

The organisers of the pro-Palestinian protests in the UK to date have called them peace marches. From what I’ve witnessed so far, I’ve no doubt that the vast majority of participants are doing just that – marching for peace.

The Church should either join them, or organise its own peace marches, led by the cross, alongside people of all faiths and none. We should confront in peace, though firmly, those who chant racist and hateful slogans. We should be visible in our demand for peace; that demand made to our polity, to our people and the United Nations.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that this leadership comes from our bishops. It may need to be a movement from the base up, the way Christian witness has been most effective throughout its history. Last weekend, a friend of mine visited a town-wide church celebration, “flags of all nations on the walls, 500 folk… a mix of elderly 1980s Charismatics, trendy Anglicans, plain Baptists and independents, African diaspora Pentecostals, young hipsters of all ethnicities”.

This is where the hope will come from, (in every sense) the peaceful mass. So, when the estimable Mr Goodman asks rhetorically “who is this saviour?”, our answer should be clear: It’s ours.

Article

Belief

Comment

Life & Death

Politics

16 July 2024

5 min read

Did God save Donald Trump?

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Graham Tomlin asks whether or not we can see the hand God at work.

Graham Tomlin

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

Red hat with the words Make America Great Again

Given the polarised nature of American politics and the venomous nature of the debates, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was not entirely a surprise, even if a massive shock to the system. It was both tragic for those who were killed and yet a relief for everyone that Trump survived, not least for the unimaginable consequences across the country if he had not.

It doesn’t take a very deep dive into the maelstrom that is Twitter/X these days, to discover a common theme among Trump supporters - that God shielded him from a certain death. “God protected President Trump,” Senator Marco Rubio posted. “God saved the life of Donald Trump” say a million others, confident that the seemingly miraculous slight head tilt at the moment of the shot that ensured the bullet hit his ear, not going through the back of his temple, was a moment of divine intervention.

Yet look elsewhere on X and you can find vast numbers of people equally certain that this is complete nonsense. God did not save Donald Trump, either because there is no God to save anyone, or because if there is a God, either he doesn’t intervene at all, or even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t want to save the likes of Donald Trump.

If God saved Trump, they say, why did he not save the life of Corey Comperatore, the volunteer fireman who was killed by bullets fired from the gun that was used in the attack? Trump supporters respond with the claim that Trump has a special calling, justifying divine intervention, to ‘restore the Judaeo-Christian heritage to America’ as one tweet put it.

So, which is it?

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history.

Christian thinkers have normally held to the possibility that God can and does, at decisive moments, interrupt the normal flow of history. After all, the central Christian claim is that he did this in remarkable acts of deliverance such as the Exodus, at key moments in the history of Israel and most importantly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And, they claim, he does it in less prominent ways, as testimonies to prayers answered and apparently miraculous occurrences suggest.

Yet divine interventions like this are by definition rare. In one of Douglas Coupland’s novels, one of the characters ponders a Christian group that expects constant miracles: “They’re always asking for miracles and finding them everywhere. In as much as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that he created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding him with requests for miracles, we are also asking that he unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.” He has a point.

Yet a world without any interventions at all would be a world which God had seemed to abandon to its fate. The idea that God set up his world to run like clockwork with no further intervention is Deism, not Christianity, a theology popular in the C17th and C18th, still found today, but leaves God watching us from a safe and uninvolved distance. It would lead to the conclusion that God did not really care that much about the world, leaving it to its own devices, especially when evil runs riot and nothing seems to prevent it. Such interventions are best seen as signs, special indications that do not ‘unravel the fabric of the world’, yet are tangible reminders that even though it is broken, God has not given up on this world, and will one day redeem it.

Yet if God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

If God can and does step in at certain moments to divert the course of history in a fallen and broken world, that doesn’t mean that every claim to divine intervention is genuine. So how can you tell? Who do we believe?

At several points in the Old Testament, writers wonder how you can tell the true prophet from the false. One of them answers like this: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.”

To be honest, this doesn’t appear to help much. You can tell if a person has got it right if their prediction comes true, but at the time, you have no idea whether it will come true or not, so it still leaves you in the dark as to who to believe.

Yet it does suggest an important insight. You can only tell God’s intervention retrospectively. You can only say with a degree of confidence that God has ‘intervened’ when looking back on events and seeing how they turn out.

If Donald Trump is elected, and somehow brings about harmony and flourishing for as many people in the USA as possible, stabilises the economy, enabling all people to live a decent life, not just the rich and powerful, restores a sense of civility and generosity to public life, resists the forces of harm and evil in the nation and in the world, and brings freedom for Christians and others to practice and promote their faith, then maybe we might look back in future years and say that God did step in on July 14^th 2024 to frustrate the purposes of evil in the world.

Yet if none of that happens, and what results from his survival is instead a deeper fracturing of social cohesion, a coarsening of public debate, a siege mentality that divides the world between ‘us’ and ‘them’, an increasing divide between the rich and the poor, the elites and ordinary people, then we might in future say it was mere chance, one of those random things that happen in this created yet fallen world with its mysterious blend of order and chaos.

Which will it be? Time will tell. Until then, we’d better be cautious about claims of divine intervention. Not because God never does it, but because we’re not very good at telling when it happens.