Now is the Time for Churches to Make a Stand

In these critical and uncertain times let us make an impassioned plea for church leaders of all and any denominations to speak out for our freedoms before it is too late. Bishops this is your moment.  The Church finds itself as one of the last institutions that can successfully speak out against creeping authoritarianism. 

Instigated by my good friend and co-host to Irreverend, Rev Dr Jamie Franklin, a letter was published this week to the Prime Minister from over 1200 church leaders. I was very proud to sign that letter. (Indeed beyond the authors on the list I am its first.)  https://vaccinepassportletter.wordpress.com/   which has also appeared in the online Spectator Magazine in https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/an-open-letter-from-christian-leaders-concerning-vaccine-passports. 

Scroll down the list and you will find clergy of all denominations but no official "heavyweights." It wasn't without trying. I will leave it at that.  Perhaps this works best anyway from the ground up, ordinary foot soldiers of the Church militant drawing a line and ready to make a stand? Let me quote the letter itself to reiterate this..

To deny people entry to hear this life-giving message and to receive this life-giving ministry would be a fundamental betrayal of Christ and the Gospel. Sincere Christian churches and organisations could not do this, and as Christian leaders we would be compelled to resist any such Act of Parliament vigorously.

As a teenager in the 1980s I was dazzled by those churchmen who stood firm for their convictions even if I did not always share their politics or their theology. In this country Robert Runcie, Donald Soper, Bruce Kent, Terry Waite and David Shepherd were to me giants. (I had the good fortune to meet all of them.) Who can forget Pope John Paul II promising Brezhnev that he would personally board a plane to Poland if Russian tanks dared to roll into Poland? These were muscular Christians who commanded our attention and inspired many of us to take up the call to ministry.

Unmoored from the normal democratic constraints it is clear that Western governments are now in danger of transforming into unaccountable oligarchies. Disproportionate moral panic derived from the coronavirus is robbing us of our inalienable liberties. Combined with surveillance capitalism technology this makes them almost undefeatable. Only the most gullible would imagine that the relinquishment of emergency powers is just around the corner. 

The worry must be that Western governments like our own borrow not only the concept of lockdown from Chinese Communist Party but also the philosophical underpinnings of Trotskyite perpetual revolution.  The authoritarian playbook requires imposing a perpetual state of anxiety upon a population. Compliance is then much easier. So just when the public ache for light at the end of the tunnel Whitty and Vallance are rolled out to tell us that coronavirus is here to stay and that the ever present “variant” requires further restrictions.  In this case the revolution is televised.

New political movements and pressure groups like Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party or Toby Young’s Lockdown Skeptics could put a spanner in the works; however, they depend on votes, cash and the good fortune not to be "cancelled."  There is one set of institutions that is almost impossible for authoritarian governments to shut up. King Henry II found this out to his peril when he went head-to-head with Thomas Becket.  Their dissent and resistance also became a big headache to the Soviets. This is of course the churches.

What could the churches get their teeth into?  Apart from opposing never-ending lockdowns on an existential level the two most pressing issues must be the introduction of immunity passports and police overreach.  When it comes to these passports the malefic trinity of Johnson, Gove and Hancock are giving the green light to something that is fundamentally illiberal and un-British.  This new passport is a social credit system by the back door. It will create a two tier society of the jabbed and the jab not.  

The churches must surely speak out and if necessary invite civil disobedience as a matter of social justice? Once this new tech is up and running you can bet that the app developers will not rest until it is adapted and upgraded for all sorts of other “safety” concerns. I for one will resist it as if it were the farts of the Devil himself. As the Church of England leadership is now more spiritually at home with the Liberal Democrats perhaps the bishops can take a leaf out of the book of its leader Ed Davey who seems to have found his voice and some political capital in decrying this? People are now giving the Lib Dems a second look.

Secondly, it would also be easy to underestimate the public’s disquiet at the policing of lockdowns. The barging into a Good Friday liturgy in a Polish church in Balham was unbelievably insensitive and creepy. Photographs from the Archdiocese of Southwark a few days later clearly show that the congregation were far from ram packed. It looked no different from the numbers and social distancing we had in Salcombe Church on Easter morning. This liturgy was also celebrated on a day when no one died of the virus in London and half of the city vaccinated. What on earth were the police thinking? Sadly this has been an all too familiar pattern. Throughout the year the police in some quarters exhibit a vulgar zealousness for finning minor breaches that put to question why their moanings about lack of resources and recruitment of previous years should have ever been believed?  

All of this should be ample fuel for preachers and prelates to make a noise and stir things up. These issues go to the heart of who we are and what we are to become. These are by their nature theological concerns. The choice is now between a society where our rights and freedoms are fundamentally God-given or a world micro-managed by the dictates of unelected experts and their henchmen. The latter is what CS Lewis foresaw his famous essay The Abolition of Man when society convinces itself of its own immutable superiority and turns itself into men without chests.

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As if you couldn't make it up Premier Christian News are running a story that police apparently gave a warning to Wakefield Cathedral not to hold a memorial service for Prince Philip because of Covid regulations. https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/cathedral-s-memorial-service-for-prince-phillip-cancelled-after-police-warning#.YHnPFOknXZk.twitter