Virginia Tilley

14 December 2011

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that the Arab Spring is 
threatening the safety of Christian communities in the Middle East.[1] He 
did not realise it, but this public warning—much as President Obama’s UN 
speech in September[2] struck the death knell for US credibility in the 
Middle East—has dealt another fatal blow to a central Middle East actor: the 
world’s Christian Churches, already suffering from a wobbly posture 
regarding ethnic and religious relations in the Middle East. For those 
within the faith, it impels a collective “j’accuse” to Christian leaderships 
and an unqualified call for principled action. For it must now be said 
plainly, and confronted honestly: it is morally unacceptable for the Christian 
churches to continue to dither and wander morally on sectarian relations 
in the Middle East by ducking the question of Palestine.

Anyone familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knows the painful back 
story to the Archbishop’s concerns. The Middle East is a pastiche of 
religions and sects which have coexisted mostly peacefully through the 
millennia, except when some exogenous factor stirred things up. Invading 
empires and crusades occasionally have done so, from the Persians through 
the infamous US interventions in Iran (1953) and Iraq. But one such sin has 
stood for the past century as a seeping sore, aggravating sectarian tensions 
and provoking religious polarisation throughout the region. That is the 
creation of Israel as an ethnic state in the Levant and the resulting 
Palestinian-Israeli conflict which springs from explicitly religious bigotry. 
For a Church leader of the Archbishop’s stature to pretend that this conflict 
does not enter the Arab Spring equation is both disingenuous and 
unacceptable.

For decades, it has been a quiet scandal that individual Christians and 
Christian projects regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict, labouring on 
doggedly with courage and principle, have been consistently crippled by 
pabulum statements, strategic over-caution or sheepish silence by the major 
Church leaderships. This silence has not reflected any lack of information. 
It’s certainly no secret to Christian Palestinians, and therefore the Church 
leaders to whom they report, that Israel has deliberately sabotaged the 
ancient Christian axis of pilgrimage between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. 
Thus shattering Christian community and impoverishing the old Christian 
mercantile sectors, Israel has also systematically and deliberately stoked 
tensions between Muslim and Christian Palestinians over the years. The 
combination has impelled steady Christian emigration in recent decades, 
reducing the once-formidable and culturally rich Christian community from 
some nineteen percent of Jerusalem’s population in 1944 to just over two 
percent today. As a package, Israel’s policies have indeed brought Christian 
Palestinians in the occupied territories under a sense of local siege and 
threat they have not experienced for centuries, while aggravating sectarian 
tensions with their Muslim neighbours in ways that have polarised and 
poisoned sectarian sentiments throughout the Middle East. Cries of alarm 
about this trend have issued from Christians in Palestine for decades and 
with increasing alarm.

It has further agonised those faithful who treasure Palestine’s 
awe-inspiring biblical landscape to see the Christian Churches stand silent 
while Israeli settlements and security installations pave that landscape 
over. Just twenty years ago, Christian pilgrims could still walk to the old 
city of Jerusalem or Rachel’s Tomb on ancient trails laid down over five 
thousand years among the rocky hills of Judea, following the footpaths of 
prophets and disciples that wove among the springs and valleys of biblical 
legend. Just twenty years ago, shepherds still tended their flocks by night 
around the hills of Bethlehem, playing on wooden flutes. Now these sacred 
landscapes[3] are paved over, blocked off, and the West Bank is an uglified 
mess of four-lane highways, broken up by hideous concrete barriers and 
electrified fences, the old olive terraces crushed and buried under acres of 
monolithic Jewish-only apartment blocs. The shepherds are arrested, 
harassed and gone. The ancient trails are gone forever. Millennia of 
humanity’s historical heritage, razed and effaced in a scant few decades, to 
serve not natural population growth but an artificial state-sponsored project 
to take over land in the name of an exclusive ethnic nationalism. The loss 
is heartbreaking on so many levels that it cannot be expressed.

And the world’s great Churches, whose cathedrals are nested in all this? To 
Israeli authorities, quiet pleas, in stiff meetings behind closed doors, 
tactical manoeuvres to keep privileges and access. To the world, silence or 
token gestures, even as Israel’s construction and archaeological excavations 
press up against their churches’ very walls.

Some may quickly protest that the Christian Churches have not been silent. 
The World Council of Churches has regularly met, denounced, and called for 
action on Palestine. The Catholic Church has expressed concern in various 
ways. The Presbyterian Church launched some broad discussions. The 
Evangelical Lutheran Church has called for prayer, investment and education. 
Yes, yes. But a close read of Church statements finds in most of them a 
disturbing vagueness, language calculated not to offend, punches 
consistently pulled. The net effect? Complicity, and a spiritual crisis.

Examples of this net effect are myriad, but two will illustrate the problem: 
first, a small one, the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum’s It’s Time[4], which, 
despite a bold title, manages never to bruise the toes of the Israeli 
government. Take, for example, its gentle idea that “It’s time to assist settlers 
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to make their home in Israel” while 
not saying why or how. Or, “It’s time for people who have been refugees for 
more than 60 years to regain their rights and a permanent home,” yet 
carefully not specifying where those homes should be. At some point, It’s 
Time slips into morally offensive symmetry that also violates common sense: 
e.g., “It’s time for both sides to release their prisoners and give those 
justly accused a fair trial.” While adopting the profile of a call for action, the
whole piece leaves one spiritually anaesthetised and bemused, as the 
illusion of real spiritual fortitude is derailed into vaporous ideals amounting 
to non-action. Over-all, the effect is like reading one of those pastel 
Sunday-school pamphlets.

Or, for a far more influential example, take the 2009 Kairos Palestine[5], 
which has drawn thousands of Christian signatures and the endorsement of 
some Christian world leaders, including Archbishop Tutu. Composed by 
a formidable line-up of theologians, it does offer some firm statements: e.g., 
“the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity”. But 
the first warning flag arises in the first sentence of the preface, which refers 
blandly to “difficult times that we still experience in this Holy Land” and 
other vapid calls to “stand by” the Palestinians without saying much about 
how. Otherwise, it gives the bad impression of a co-written document whose 
moral momentum was curtailed by some timid gatekeepers. The bulk of 
Kairos Palestine is a recital of Israeli human rights abuses and a long-winded 
theological treatise on “hope”, “love” and “mission”. Alas, the journey 
thus suggested never gets anywhere. For example, under the subsection, 
“word to the Churches of the world”, we find an appeal: “We ask our sister 
Churches not to offer a theological cover-up for the injustice we suffer, 
for the sin of the occupation imposed upon us.” But instead of a clear call for 
action and an incisive statement of principle, this passage then waffles 
away to drain all but the mildest energy: “Our question to our brothers and 
sisters in the Churches today is: Are you able to help us get our freedom 
back, for this is the only way you can help the two peoples attain justice, 
peace, security and love?” The call to “Jewish and Muslim religious leaders” 
is equally void: “Let us together try to rise up above the political positions 
that have failed so far and continue to lead us on the path of failure and 
suffering.” But “rise up” how? And what action is urged regarding 
Jerusalem, which is affirmed to be “the foundation of our vision and our 
entire life”? None at all, except to urge that Jerusalem be “the first issue to 
be negotiated”. After a page or two of this fog, the mind numbs over 
and moral energy fades and turns inward to prayer circles and polite 
discussion groups.

Lest it seem rude to denounce so well-meaning an effort, consider that the 
1985 Kairos[6], composed by Archbishop Tutu among others, targeted 
precisely this kind of slippery religious language as deployed by the major 
South African churches and the South African state to defend apartheid. For 
real Christian inspiration regarding Palestine, this famous Christian 
document from South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle should be reread in 
full, but a selection is worth reproducing here just to show just how 
clear-headed Christian activism can get when it truly girds its loins. The 
1985 Kairos had no truck with empty talk of “peace”, “reconciliation” and 
“dialogue” and its reasoning on this point is worth quoting at length 
(readers are encouraged to substitute “Palestinians” for “South Africans” to 
suggest the comparison):

In a limited, guarded and cautious way [mainstream Church Theology 
in South Africa] is critical of apartheid. Its criticism, however, is 
superficial and counter-productive because instead of engaging in an 
in-depth analysis of the signs of our times, it relies upon a few stock 
ideas derived from Christian tradition and then uncritically and 
repeatedly applies them to our situation. The stock ideas used by almost 
all these Church leaders that we would like to examine here are: 
reconciliation (or peace), justice and non-violence. …

Church Theology’ takes ‘reconciliation’ as the key to problem resolution. 
It talks about the need for reconciliation between white and black, 
or between all South Africans. ‘Church Theology’ often describes the 
Christian stance in the following way: “We must be fair. We must listen 
to both sides of the story. If the two sides can only meet to talk and 
negotiate they will sort out their differences and misunderstandings, 
and the conflict will be resolved.” On the face of it this may sound very 
Christian. But is it?

The fallacy here is that ‘Reconciliation’ has been made into an absolute 
principle that must be applied in all cases of conflict or dissension. 
But not all cases of conflict are the same. We can imagine a private 
quarrel between two people or two groups whose differences are based 
upon misunderstandings. In such cases it would be appropriate to talk 
and negotiate to sort out the misunderstandings and to reconcile 
the two sides. But there are other conflicts in which one side is right and 
the other wrong. There are conflicts where one side is a fully armed 
and violent oppressor while the other side is defenseless and oppressed. 
There are conflicts that can only be described as the struggle between 
justice and injustice, good and evil, God and the devil. To speak of 
reconciling these two is not only a mistaken application of the Christian 
idea of reconciliation, it is a total betrayal of all that Christian faith has 
ever meant. Nowhere in the Bible or in Christian tradition has it ever 
been suggested that we ought to try to reconcile good and evil, 
God and the devil. We are supposed to do away with evil, injustice, 
oppression and sin–not come to terms with it. We are supposed to 
oppose, confront and reject the devil and not try to sup with the devil.

In our situation in South Africa today it would be totally un-Christian to 
plead for reconciliation and peace before the present injustices have 
been removed. Any such plea plays into the hands of the oppressor by 
trying to persuade those of us who are oppressed to accept our 
oppression and to become reconciled to the intolerable crimes that are 
committed against us. That is not Christian reconciliation, it is sin. 
It is asking us to become accomplices in our own oppression, to become 
servants of the devil. No reconciliation is possible in South Africa 
without justice.

The 1985 Kairos Declaration is especially clear-headed about the true meaning 
of peace: “It would be quite wrong to try to preserve ‘peace’ and ‘unity’ 
at all costs, even at the cost of truth and justice and, worse still, at the cost of 
thousands of young lives. As disciples of Jesus we should rather promote 
truth and justice and life at all costs, even at the cost of creating conflict, 
disunity and dissension along the way.” And where Kairos-Palestine, It’s Time 
and other Christian Church resolutions skid around in “both sides’ 
language, the 1985 Kairos explicitly rejects any false symmetries and focuses 
on the central issue of oppression: It would be quite wrong to see the present conflict as simply a racial 
war. The racial component is there but we are not dealing with two 
equal races or nations each with their own selfish group interests. The 
situation we are dealing with here is one of oppression. The conflict 
is between an oppressor and the oppressed. The conflict between two 
irreconcilable causes or interests in which the one is just and the other is 
unjust. … This is our situation of civil war or revolution. The one side 
is committed to maintaining the system at all costs and the other side is 
committed to changing it at all coasts [sic]. There are two conflicting 
projects here and no compromise is possible. Either we have full and 
equal justice for all or we don’t.

With this noble language before us, we must finally see the truth and drop 
the charade. Most Christian Church statements regarding Palestine are 
embarrassing fluff by comparison.

Why the weak and woolly stance by Church leaderships in Palestine, where 
the moral issues are so stark and Christian concerns so keen? The reasons 
are too well known. The world’s major Churches have long walked on eggs 
with Israel. Some of this caution reflects well-warranted (if confused) guilt 
about centuries of anti-Semitism. Local churches may restrain themselves 
out of kindly and principled concern not to offend and ruffle relations with 
Jewish neighbours. Less noble motives include conservative concerns to 
preserve Church real estate and privileges in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the 
Galilee and other Biblical sites, where an irate Israel can sever Christian 
access in an instant. It is also Not Done to criticise other Christian 
denominations, so even those Churches who view Israel’s practices as 
abhorrent will still avoid challenging the whole Zionist project, as this 
would insult the Zionist theology of evangelical churches that have fallen 
for Israel’s (cynically deployed) story of collective Jewish redemption of the 
Holy Land. Given that actual Christian life in Palestine is being graphically 
destroyed, however, one does not have to be a 666-er to see that Zionist 
propaganda has “led Christians astray” by successfully attaching Jewish 
state-building in Palestine to misty visions of Jewish life in a Biblical 
landscape and confusing Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (even 
Christian ones) with messianic prophecies about the End Times.

Some historically minded cynics might object here that Christian timidity 
and confusion about the conflict in Palestine should not be singled out. 
Courageous priests and Christian activists have always stood forth in the 
world’s conflict zones in selfless and sometimes martyred defence of the 
weak, and do so in Palestine, but the uncomfortable truth is that these heroic 
figures and groups have always been outliers. Overwhelmingly, over 
past centuries the major Christian churches have either linked their futures 
and finances to whatever states they operated within or simply operated in 
an illusory sphere of detached spiritual practice where they absolved 
themselves of moral responsibility for the suffering around them, except by 
offering spiritual solace to endure it. Here one might recall the old state-
church alliance in Latin America, a system of totalitarian social control that 
has stood for five centuries as the edifice glowering over those grassroots 
liberation-theologians whose courage is always cited as the Church’s 
redeeming example, yet whose noble work the last Pope outlawed. Hence, 
for long-time observers of the conflict, it has been no surprise but still a 
bitter pill that the Archbishop of Canterbury, like most Church leaders, has 
been conspicuously silent, vague or reserved about Israel’s physical ruin 
of the Holy Land landscape and its progressive decimation of Christian 
community in Palestine.

Yet it is really too much that this same Archbishop now blames the Arab 
Spring, of all things, for an anti-Christian tilt that his own Church has, 
through neglect and caution of the Palestinian problem, systematically 
aggravated. For it is indeed a bitter scandal that the official Churches in 
Palestine, with their great properties embedded in the Jewish state and their 
slumbering but immense moral authority on the world stage, who could 
delegitimize and end Israel’s occupation overnight with one unified public 
denunciation, instead have opted—from timidity, caution, conservatism, 
internecine rivalries or merely a sloppy moral compass—to enable it. That 
this choice has fed heavily into the present sectarian mess in the Middle East 
is a given. The Archbishop may well worry that Christians in Egypt and 
elsewhere now feel “exposed and uncertain”, but he would do well to 
consider how much responsibility for those fears traces to his own desk.

It is up to the entire Christian community to end this confusion, abandon 
feeble caution and unintended hypocrisy, and reconsider the example of 
Jesus as set forth in the 1985 Kairos and in the Gospels themselves. The tasks 
in Palestine have long been plain. The evangelical Christian right must be 
approached about its gullible equation of a modern military state with 
spiritual rebirth. Israel’s instrumental deceit about Jewish life in the Holy 
Land constituting a path to Christian salvation must be exposed. The sins of 
ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored bigotry must be confronted. The 
malevolent whispers circulated by Zionist plants in Jerusalem and Palestine, 
which attempt to demonise Islam for Christians and Christianity for 
Muslims, must be openly and unanimously denounced. In the spirit of the 
1985 Kairos, the true meaning of Christian love must show its moral fist to 
reject false symmetry and the sinful notion of reconciliation with oppression.

Each Christmas, it has become a seasonal ritual for Christians to call for new 
care and action on Palestine. Each subsequent year, the same empty, 
circumscribed, ineffectual gestures result. The courage of the Arab Spring 
exposes this shameful ritualised cycle of moral failure as a spiritual 
imperative. This year’s Christmas must be a time for spiritual renewal, 
frank self-examination, fresh insight, and new courage to set aside sanitised 
pleas and empty prayers, stop listening to the internal gatekeepers, reject 
Israel’s manipulation of Christian theology to serve militaristic ends, 
and demand that all Church leaderships, with one clarion voice, call for true 
justice in Palestine. If the teachings of Jesus mean anything today, surely 
they mean this: the salvation of all three Abrahamic faiths from the false 
gods of mutual fear and the scourge of oppression. The alternative is to 
stand before the Cross at Christmas 2012 with a deepening and well-earned 
sense of shame.

 Links
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/12/arab-spring-christians-archbishop-canterbury 
2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/21/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assembly
3. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520234222
4. http://tinyurl.com/84z5y93
5. http://www.kairospalestine.ps/?q=content/document
6. http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/kairos-document-1985-0

Virginia Tilley is a former professor of political science and international 
relations in the US. In 2005, she took leave to conduct research in South Africa 
and in 2006 was appointed Chief Research Specialist at the Human Sciences 
Research Council of South Africa. In that capacity she led the inquiry which 
examined whether Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories 
had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid. It produced 
the 2009 report “Occupation, Colonialism Apartheid?: A Re-assessment of 
Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian Territories under International 
Law.” She is author of “The One-State Solution” (London Review of Books, 
Nov. 6, 2003)* and The One-State Solution (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005) and 
numerous articles and essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Email: 
virginia.tilley@gmail.com

The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It was the church in Latin America, especially in Central America and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, which provided the physical space, moral support and direction for the opposition to dictatorship. It was the church in East Germany that organized the peaceful opposition marches in Leipzig that would bring down the communist regime in that country. It was the church in Czechoslovakia, and its 90-year-old cardinal, that blessed and defended the Velvet Revolution. It was the church, and especially the African-American church, that made possible the civil rights movements. And it is the church, especially Trinity Church in New York City with its open park space at Canal and 6th, which can make manifest its commitment to the Gospel and nonviolent social change by permitting the Occupy movement to use this empty space, just as churches in other cities that hold unused physical space have a moral imperative to turn them over to Occupy movements. If this nonviolent movement fails, it will eventually be replaced by one that will employ violence. And if it fails it will fail in part because good men and women, especially those in the church, did nothing.

Where is the church now? Where are the clergy? Why do so many church doors remain shut? Why do so many churches refuse to carry out the central mandate of the Christian Gospel and lift up the cross?

Some day they are going to have to answer the question: “Where were you when they crucified my Lord?”

Let me tell you on this first Sunday in Advent, when we celebrate hope, when we remember in the church how Mary and Joseph left Nazareth for Bethlehem, why I am in Liberty Square. I am here because I have tried, however imperfectly, to live by the radical message of the Gospel. I am here because I know that it is not what we say or profess but what we do. I am here because I have seen in my many years overseas as a foreign correspondent that great men and women of moral probity arise in all cultures and all religions to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. I am here because I have seen that it is possible to be a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or an atheist and carry the cross. The words are different but the self-sacrifice and thirst for justice are the same. And these men and women, who may not profess what I profess or believe what I believe, are my brothers and sisters. And I stand with them honoring and respecting our differences and finding hope and strength and love in our common commitment.

At times like these I hear the voices of the saints who went before us. The suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who announced that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said, “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” Or Henry David Thoreau, who told us we should be men and women first and subjects afterward, that we should cultivate a respect not for the law but for what is right. And Frederick Douglass, who warned us: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” And the great 19th century populist Mary Elizabeth Lease, who thundered: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” And Gen. Smedley Butler, who said that after 33 years and four months in the Marine Corps he had come to understand that he had been nothing more than a gangster for capitalism, making Mexico safe for American oil interests, making Haiti and Cuba safe for banks and pacifying the Dominican Republic for sugar companies. War, he said, is a racket in which newly dominated countries are exploited by the financial elites and Wall Street while the citizens foot the bill and sacrifice their young men and women on the battlefield for corporate greed. Or Eugene V. Debs, the socialist presidential candidate, who in 1912 pulled almost a million votes, or 6 percent, and who was sent to prison by Woodrow Wilson for opposing the First World War, and who told the world: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who when he was criticized for walking with Martin Luther King on the Sabbath in Selma answered: “I pray with my feet” and who quoted Samuel Johnson, who said: “The opposite of good is not evil. The opposite of good is indifference.” And Rosa Parks, who defied the segregated bus system and said “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” And Philip Berrigan, who said: “If enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.”

And the poet Langston Hughes, who wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The DallasMorning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Afghan civilians killed in the War On Terror over 8,800

Iraqi civilians killed in the War On Terror estimates range from over 150,000 (WHO) to over 650,000 (The Lancet) to over 1.1 million (IIACSS/ORB) to as high as 1.45 million (extrapolation) The Lancet’s estimate 2.5% of the country’s population

Refugees created as a direct result of the War on Terror over 6.7 million. (UNHCR)

-Is the world any safer or more peaceful?

September 9, 2011

I’m getting ready to duck, but don’t shoot the messenger. The results are in: religious people are nicer. Or so says Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard.

Described by London’s Sunday Times as the most influential academic in the world today, Putnam is not a religious believer. Best known for Bowling Alone, the book that made ”social capital” a key indicator of a healthy society, Putnam, with his co-author David Campbell (a Mormon), has waded into the debate about religion in the public square with his latest offering, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. The book emerges out of two massive and comprehensive surveys into religion and public life in America.

Their most conspicuously controversial finding is that religious people make better citizens and neighbours. Putnam and Campbell write that ”for the most part, the evidence we review suggests that religiously observant Americans are more civic, and in some respects simply ‘nicer’ ”.

On every measurable scale, religious Americans are more generous, more altruistic and more involved in civic life than their secular counterparts.

They are more likely to give blood, money to a homeless person, financial aid to family or friends, a seat to a stranger and to spend time with someone who is ”a bit down”.

Putnam and his team interviewed 3000 people twice over two years, asking a range of questions about people’s religious lives as well as their civic involvement, social relationships, political beliefs, economic situation and demographic profile.

The religious landscape is very different in Australia, but what information we do have suggests similar results here. A 2004 report by the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Research and Philanthropy in Australia, found that people who said they were religious were more likely to volunteer, and for more hours, than others. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data suggests the same. Nonetheless, a study here as in-depth and wide-ranging as Putnam’s would be fascinating.

Putnam says religious people don’t like everything about his book, but they do like this material.

Yet, despite what I’m writing here, I’m not really claiming that people of faith are better people than non-believers.

Many of my friends have no faith and would outdo me on measures used in these surveys.

In the church, just like any area of life, it’s a mixed bag of the good, the not so good and the, well, nutty.

But this research is in stark contrast to claims by prominent authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. After reading their works, you’d swear that religion makes you immediately abandon rationality to become an inward-looking extremist. What Putnam’s book does at the very least is to bring a bit of balance into the conversation.

A sobering note for believers is that this study reveals that the content of a person’s belief isn’t what matters so much as their level of involvement in a religious community.

An atheist who comes to church to support her partner will rate as well as any believer on these scores.

What can’t be denied, according to Putnam and Campbell, is that there is something unique about a religious community, that has an impact on people for good.

So next time a removalist truck delivers a bunch of God-botherers into your neighbourhood, don’t despair. It might be reason to celebrate.

Simon Smart is a director of the Centre for Public Christianity.

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/gods-truth-believers-are-nicer-20110908-1jzrl.html#ixzz1XRnFw6lL

In recent decades people have rioted because their football team has lost a match or because their livelihood was threatened by the invisible power of market forces.

Thirty years ago in the UK, black people took to the streets to protest against what they saw as police violence and racial injustice. In recent years small-scale rioting followed demonstrations against globalisation or the rise in university fees. What these episodes had in common is that they represented a response — direct or indirect — to some issue or cause.

The riots that have engulfed England during the past week are very different. While the first riot in Tottenham emerged from a protest march in response to the police shooting of a local man, the copycat riots across the country appear to have no purpose. This is a kind of grotesque recreational sport that provides a wider focus for the pre-existing anti-social and destructive impulse of groups of young people who inhabit geographical spaces that cannot be called communities.

It is all too easy to simply condemn rioting. Many accounts of such events are often informed by the personal prejudices of the commentator. As a sociologist I am aware that comprehensible protest is often devalued by authorities who are hostile to its objectives. Time and again rioting is wrongly blamed on outside agitators. The spreading of such violence is often described as the copycat effect.

Others fall into the very different trap of endowing urban violence with intrinsic social and political meaning.

Such commentators will describe this violence as a form of rational behaviour of the dispossessed and insist that it is the only way those without a voice can make themselves heard.

None of the conventional sociological explanations — from the Left or the Right — can satisfactorily account for the present riots in England.

The riots that erupted in Tottenham, north London, and then spread to other parts of this metropolis before erupting in other English cities are the consequence of a unique form of community disintegration. This process of disintegration has been made worse by unhelpful forms of government policies, which have sought to evade the issues at stake.

The eruption of the riots and its swift expansion to other parts of England has been blamed on the role of social networking applications. Digital technology did play a role in providing rioters with an organisational tool.

But a far more important factor has been the role of the police or, more specifically, the disorganisation of the institutions of law and order.

In recent years on my travels throughout Europe I have frequently come across urban decay and poverty. Every large city has its share of marginalised neighbourhoods. In such areas, petty crime and drug dealing is rife and respect for prevailing social norms is minimal. However, in comparison with England such neighbourhoods have a relatively smaller social weight. Moreover, unlike England they still manage to retain a semblance of community life. Even the banlieues of Paris have a discernible code of behaviour and sense of community. Although life is far from pleasant for the inhabitants of German, French or Dutch marginalised neighbourhoods, it is not nearly as atomised and fragmented as in England.

The problems that afflict urban ghettos and housing estates of English towns are far more extensive than their counterparts in western Europe. The most striking manifestation of this malaise is the feeble quality of community life. When the riots first broke out in Tottenham numerous critics of the police claimed that local people felt aggrieved because the forces of law and order did not “talk to them”. Many observers stated that the police did not talk to the community. Now it is possible that the police were not brilliant at communicating or lacked sensitivity to local circumstances. But the question that needs to be posed is, who is the “them” that they would talk to?

Most individuals purporting to be community leaders are self-appointed careerists or employees of a state-sponsored quango. In any case they represent only themselves and are as isolated from “them” as anyone else. That there is no one to talk to or negotiate with is symptomatic of the problem of neighbourhoods without neighbours, and of locations where a geographical designation is denuded of communal content.

There are many factors that led to the implosion of numerous English urban communities. Industrial decline and loss of traditional manual working-class jobs had a significant effect on parts of urban England during the past four decades. However, the usual problems of urban poverty have been aggravated by the peculiar form of state assistance to these communities. Those without resources and means of survival deserve support from the rest of society.

However, in Britain the provision of welfare has mutated into a culture that encourages people to regard their circumstances as not a temporary phase but as a way of life. So the problem is not the provision of social benefits but the normalisation of welfare dependency as the defining feature of people’s life.

One former youth worker tells me “this is about the cuts”. Now and again you hear deluded individuals hinting that the riots are “payback” for the government’s proposed cuts in state expenditure. From their standpoint, the violence sweeping English towns and cities is “our” equivalent of the demonstrations against austerity measures in Athens and Madrid.

Perhaps there is a link between Europe’s debt crisis and rioting in England, but it isn’t what critics of austerity measures suspect. Decades of wasteful and totally purposeless expenditure on bureaucracy-led welfare programs have had the perverse effect of demoralising their target population. Billions have been spent on measures that foster irresponsibility. So the riots are not so much about the cuts but about corrupting community life through promiscuous spending.

The normalisation of welfare dependency has been actively promoted by advocates working inside and outside the public sector. There are numerous institutions that assist people to claim the maximum amount. Claiming has become a term that connotes the possession of an awareness of “rights” as well as negotiating skills. The principal outcome of the advocacy of claiming is the legitimation of a way of life. From this perspective, improvements to one’s quality of life depend on enhancing one’s claiming skills rather than through work and effort.

Some conservative critics of the welfare state object to the dependence that those living on benefits have on public institutions.

However, such dependence is only a part of the problem. A far more important consequence of the normalisation of welfarism is that it undermines the everyday social and cultural bonds that link members of a community. Historically, those suffering from poverty would develop institutions of self-help and organisations of solidarity. Today, such organisations are conspicuous by their absence. Why? If people are encouraged to rely on state assistance in a one-dimensional manner, they have little incentive to help one another. As far as the people of Tottenham or Liverpool’s Toxteth are concerned, their communities’ effort has little to do with the quality of their lives. Despite their common experience of poverty and marginalisation, people have little incentive to improve their circumstances through joint effort.

The British culture of welfarism has had the perverse effect of eroding community life. Its most disturbing effect is the unusual degree of social fragmentation. Typically the breakdown of community is most striking in relation to the loss of authority that older people have towards the younger generation.

For it is young people who are most afflicted by the destructive consequences of community implosion. Denied any positive ideal of what it means to belong to a community, numerous young people are spontaneously drawn towards prevailing forms of anti-social behaviour. Those who are involved in “recreational” rioting are not abnormal feral youngsters but young people who simply have no stake in their community.

They may belong to gangs that are associated with a distinct geographical territory, but their gang identity does not have any wider community-related significance. Historical experience shows that urban gangs often take their own “manor” very seriously. In contrast the highly atomised groups of rioters today have little inhibition about burning down the corner shop that services their own family.

In an imploded community, even family life is threatened by the imperative of atomisation. Youngsters who have little respect for their own family and parents are unlikely to take wider norms of civic behaviour seriously. That is why so much of the rioting by youngsters is the consequence of years of uncontained behaviour.

The implosion of community life is not a problem of which policy-makers are unaware. From time to time officials attempt to initiate projects that aim to enhance what they call “community resilience”. Previous governments have promoted what they called policies of “inclusion”. But what all these initiatives had in common was to bypass the problem of a welfare culture. Money devoted to community projects and initiatives served to employ a handful of otherwise unemployed people but did nothing to strengthen communities. Why? Because communities evolve organically in response to problems that mean something to local residents. They cannot be constructed from above, especially by institutions that have been complicit in eroding the independence of community life in the first place.

The consequence of such policies has been to evade the problem they were meant to address. Instead of developing resilience, communities have been enfeebled.

But why now? In principle these riots could have erupted any time during the past decade.

The reason it has happened now is because of the high public visibility of the demoralisation of the British police. The British police force is not above criticism; it has a sad record of operational screw-ups and of making a bad situation worse. However, in recent years the morale of the police has been severely undermined and it is not an exaggeration to state that they have lost much of their coherence as an effective force.

Even the mildest form of policing of public events is regularly criticised.

Police tactics, which are far more restrained than they were 30 or 40 years ago, are frequently denounced as brutal. In recent months rioters in London and Bristol must have drawn the conclusion that their activity bears only a minimal cost.

Consequently, the public profile of public-order policing has become increasingly defensive and operationally inept. The failure of London’s Metropolitan Police Service to prevent protesters from rampaging through the street of the capital in recent months — most vividly illustrated by its inability to protect the car in which Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall were travelling — has been noted by people throughout the land. In such circumstances many young people have drawn the conclusion that taking on the police is no big deal and that rioting is its own reward. So the rioting that broke out in Tottenham is merely an escalation, albeit a significant one, of the disturbances that have occurred during the past year.

There is no short-term solution to the implosions of community life. Decades of misguided government policies have undermined its fabric. The challenge is to ensure that young people are forced to understand that their future depends on their own effort and achievement, and that the best way forward for them is to develop a stake in their community. What’s required is an acknowledgment that the previous policies have failed to recognise the malaise that afflicts English cities. What’s required is a system of welfare that encourages young people to develop their own resources to make their way in the future.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/why-londons-burning/story-e6frg6z6-1226113579983

Therefore our first reaction to the frightening extent of looting and disorder that has swept our cities must be to reaffirm our common humanity. Those on the streets, in their houses, the police, the politicians, all of us should recognise that we share the same essential hopes of security, freedom, love and creativity. But we are separated by largely one thing, the accident of birth. As social mobility dwindles and the inequality gap widens, the brute luck of who our parents are dominates our lives. Some come to the debate from Eton via Tuscany, others have never left the streets that now burn. We go our separate ways but this common humanity inevitably keeps breaking through.

So, second we should recognise how much these events show we have in common. What some have unhelpfully labeled a ‘feral underclass’ is simply the mirror image of a now feral elite – the further a few rise beyond society the further many have to fall below it. But both feel compelled to cheat to get what they want. The bankers bend the rules, take reckless risks with other people’s money and asset strip companies and therefore communities; politicians lie and fiddle their expenses for moats; the media eves-drop on the lives of the stricken and the police are on the take.  And the ones in hoods who have no opportunity take it when they see it and have nothing to lose and so little to fear. No not all who are poor are looting but when every police cell in London is full something deep and more profound is happening.  So who has the moral high ground?  The rich and powerful who cheat for the trappings of super success; or the poor, powerless and humiliated who want so little but see the behaviour of those ‘at the top’. We don’t have to condone the lawlessness (and we shouldn’t) to understand it – so that it’s less likely to happen again.

The similarities don’t end there. The zombie rioters mirror us too, the zombie shoppers who spend every weekend walking through the front doors of the shops rather than through a smashed window after dark. We all want ‘what’s in store for us’. How could it be otherwise when today ‘being normal’ is defined by our ability to keep up as consumers? We all see the same 3000 selling images everyday, relentlessly imposing a single vision of success and we want it. We just differ on how.

Catherine Holmes, a resident in Hackney emailed the BBC in the early hours of Tuesday morning to say “we spoke to looters trying to get home, the only explanation they gave for their behaviour was that they had no money today. It is sad to think that these people are thinking of only the next moment”.

What seemed achingly sad, along with the sight of small shopkeepers losing their livelihoods, were the trophies of lawlessness. It was not transformative power or a different world the rioters sought but almost pathetically just a new pair of trainers. Their ambition, like the wider culture, is only to own.

Ironically perhaps, even the police and the rioters have something in common. The failed consumers, the looters, who take what they can’t buy are used to police us. Systematically they are deployed to create the dark sense of the ‘other’ who we desperately try not to be like.  It is in part the fear of their wretched lives that keep the rest of us on the exhausting treadmill of earning and owning.  No other option for life is presented or allowed.  This is our prison.

Thirty years ago, the last time our cities burned, the shopping revolution, and the rampant individualism it spawned, was just under way – this time it has a stranglehold on all of us.

Finally, we might not know exactly how or why but we all know that the current world order is breaking down. We stand on the precipice of another global meltdown with no resources this time to clear up the mess. And we all know too that the planet is burning beyond our ability to control it. Events are on fast-forward as we stumble from crisis to crisis with no chance to catch our breath. The neo-liberal hegemony of the last three decades is over. Even Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph recognizes the game is up for the right.  But in this interregnum morbid symptoms appear. While we still think we are a fair, prosperous and contented nation, events tell us otherwise. The poor get poorer and the planet burns, creating a third crisis of democracy itself. To which there will always be a reaction.

The sky is darkening not just with the dense smoke of burnt out buildings, but the sight of chickens coming home to roost; a social recession that long predated the economic recession, the rise of a feral elite with no responsibility to anyone but themselves, the loss of the public realm and any sense of public interest, the cuts which hit the poorest hardest and the monotonous creation of a consumer monoculture culture – that has now been taken away.

If we tell young people that their worth is to be measured in terms of how much they own or how close they get to Oxbridge, while pursuing an economic programme predicated on ever-widening inequality, and a political agenda that increasingly alienates the majority from all centres of real decision-making, when our democracy fails to hear their voices, then how in all honesty do we think the ones left at the bottom are going to react? You don’t have to be a police chief let alone a Kaiser Chief to predict a riot.

The finger can be pointed across the spectrum, from right to left. No political party has done the right thing. Cameron once talked about recapitalizing not just the banks but the poor. New Labour said it would be tough on the causes of crime. But it goes wider through every major civil society organisation – the churches, the unions, the big NGOs right down to all of us and all our lives. We take too much and give too little. We deal with symptoms of the rot and never the causes.

Hope can only come from what we have in common. This is the building block of a good society in which no one gets so far ahead that some get left so far behind. People need hope and the belief that we are all in this together. It cannot be austerity for many and riotous prosperity for so few. It is a society in which democracy decides to build parks, playgrounds and youth centres not more, prisons, penthouses and shopping centres. We must commit to rebuilding lives and hopes with apprenticeships and good jobs, with support for meaningful education for all and for communities with services and public spaces in which society itself can be nourished. Right now we need strong local government and localised police forces accountable to the community they serve and through which all are made equal before the law. We need to renew a social contract and revive the notion of the public interest by examining the way in which unaccountable elites now dominate our world.

And we need a good society in which earning and owning comes second to the time to love, care and be truly free not just as individuals but crucially by working together to shape and mould the big things in our lives.

Our common humanity came shining through again as people volunteered to help clear up the mess, as the broom suddenly became a powerful metaphor for collective action, it was evident in the community leaders trying to bind back together their broken neighbourhoods, it can be seen in the good cops and the brave firefighters who understand the idea of a public service ethos. Our common humanity is all we have.

Let this week be a wake up call. There is more to clean up than broken shop windows. We have much to clean out and then an economy and society to rebuild. Only together can we make that happen.

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Australian Christians and non-Christians alike are grieving the loss of a moral heart in our country. I have heard countless expressions of disillusionment, sadness and shame over the politics of border control.

Many are angry and may well be inclined to join the ancient chorus and say “Amen” to the curse on those who would deny justice to vulnerable people:

“‘Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice’. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’”(Deuteronomy 27.19)

Under the cover of one of the most aggressive “on message” slogans Australian politics has seen – “smashing the people smugglers’ business model” (a shockingly crass and economically utilitarian alternative to “Stop the boats”) – as of Monday the Gillard Government has brought us to a new national low.

It’s official: Australia now trades in people.

There are, unfortunately, numerous examples in Australia’s history of our governments mistreating people, ignoring or abusing people’s human rights and stripping already vulnerable people of their dignity. But the deal with Malaysia commodifies people in a way many of us could not previously have imagined.

The Government is responding harshly and defensively to the criticism that they are trading or commodifying people.

The Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister want us to believe that taking 1000 refugees per annum for four years from Malaysia, more than balances out those 800 we will send to Malaysia – with more to be sent in the future (already we are hearing talk of a “pilot program”).

Likewise, they talk up the safeguards that have been built into the arrangement for asylum seekers sent to Malaysia. We have even been told that this deal could initiate a conversation that may see Malaysia become increasingly committed to the international human rights regime.

The Government is most desperate however, for us to believe that the real motivation for this “people swap” is to keep people safe from smugglers, those “traffickers in human misery.”

I have no doubt that Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen were horrified by the loss of life off Christmas Island last year. It is hard, however, to ignore what lies just beneath the surface of their public comments – that this action will serve to redirect the response of the more compassionate Australians in their favour, and will thus act as cover for the base political motivation of one of Australia’s darkest moments.

Here is some of what we know:

> People put their lives in the hand of people smugglers out of a desperation that most of us can hardly imagine, let alone understand.

> People smugglers do take advantage of vulnerable people, and as a result people end up dying in tragic circumstances.

> Australians do not want people to die at sea.

> The Government has taken a political beating over asylum seekers who arrive by boat, and they believe they have to neutralise it by beating the Opposition at its own game.

> The Gillard Government has made a deal with a country which has an appalling human rights record in order to sterilize a septic political sore.

> Far too many Australians would prefer to believe that there is an orderly queue of well-behaved refugees out there somewhere, than have to imagine the brutality, poverty and chaos that millions of others have experience every day.

Whatever special treatment it has managed to secure for our 800 asylum seekers, and despite the guarantees of the Malaysian Government, at the end of the day the Australian Government – supported by what I can only imagine is a UNHCR office in Malaysia that is beyond desperate – has decided to engage in people-trading for base political gain.

It is not without justification that many people have compared this deal with the “Australian” live export trade to Indonesia. Treating 800 people as though they are somehow “ours” to send elsewhere is neither a decent nor a humane act, and is certainly notjustified by the possibility of a better behaved Malaysia in the future.

A few days ago Frank Brennan wrote, “Why would a church group publicly endorse something it knew to be either unworkable or immoral?” He went on to recommend that once the deal was done,

“church groups or agencies as ever should work hard and pragmatically to make it work as best it can, minimising the adverse impacts on the most vulnerable including unaccompanied minors.”

Fair enough. And, of course, those of us who can, will. But the churches must not keep silent about a policy and an arrangement between two nations that required the abandonment of our leaders’ moral compasses.

Confronted by a few thousand needy people turning up on our doorstep uninvited, we are the ones lost in a sea of political expediencies, failed responsibilities and moral impoverishment.

In my opinion, Julia Gillard, Chris Bowen and every member of Cabinet who has given their assent to proceed with the Malaysian “solution,” along with Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and every member of federal Liberal Party who has indulged in the xenophobic “Stop the boats” mantra, have lost any right to invoke the role of “basic Christian values” in their upbringing or moral formation.

Christianity must forever own its history and continuing involvement in the slave trade, apartheid, colonialism, imperialism and other acts of brutality. These are expressions of a faith that has often lost its way and whose followers must always remain vigilant to the evil that lies within us.

Nevertheless, at the heart of Christianity lies God’s love for the creation and God’s call on the faithful to demonstrate that love with acts of compassion, generosity and hospitality.

This call demands that we bestow on others the dignity which is inherent in everyone’s being as beloved children of the Creator. God’s will for the world is for justice, peace and reconciliation for everyone and for everything, and we have been invited to be God’s partners in this mission.

Those of us who claim to motivated by such values, by the Judeo-Christian tradition which places such central importance on the practice of hospitality to the stranger in need, and by the Christian story of the man who ate with the outcasts – even if we do not claim the faith itself – cannot engage in acts that strip away people’s dignity, deny their agency and dehumanise their very existence.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets speak often of God’s self-identification as the one who cares for the exiled and the stranger, and the one who calls the Hebrews to constantly remember their own slavery and exile.

The Christian faith teaches that each of us, created in the image of God – however we understand this – is precious and valued by God. Our responsibility as human beings is to recognise this in each other.

Christianity also teaches that those who have much in this life have a special responsibility towards those who suffer poverty, violence, illness, oppression and dispossession, and who hunger and thirst, whether for justice or for sustenance.

Christians believe that we are made to be in healthy, vibrant, robust, grace-filled, forgiving, hope-full relationships with each other. When these relationships break down, we have the responsibility to work for justice and peace that they may be restored. A broken world is not made better by more breaking.

As many others have written over the last few weeks, we are most certainly failing to meet our international obligations under the spirit and terms of the Refugee Convention, and we are failing to meet our obligations as one of the wealthiest, most secure and most democratic countries in the world.

We have a miniscule problem by world standards, and yet we keep inventing new and morally regressive arrangements with our less secure, less democratic and more impoverished neighbours to relieve us of that burden.

Asylum seekers haven’t created a problem for us – we manufactured it all by ourselves. The only people with a problem are those very asylum seekers who have had to flee their homelands.

In the latest book by Quaker theologian Daniel Smith-Christopher, entitled Jonah, Jesus and Other Good Coyotes, he argues that we have turned borders – and national borders in particular – into idols, objects of false worship.

While the Australian situation is quite different from that of the US-Mexican border – the border that Smith-Christopher is writing about – there can be no doubt that our national “border” has become an idol.

We spend billions protecting it against the threat of invasion and from those who were not invited. We watch reality television shows about the protection of our border – for excitement and assurance, no doubt – and we watch television dramas set on the boats that patrol our island’s coastlines. Our border is a sacred place that must be protected from any and all incursions.

Smith-Christopher writes that because Christians are called to be peacemakers and agents of reconciliation, they are therefore called to violate the very borders that we have constructed and which serve to keep us at odds with each other.

He challenges us to follow in the footsteps of the Bible’s good coyotes – Jonah, Ruth, Jesus and others – who challenged and crossed the borders that had become excuses for prejudice and violence, and which kept people from the exchange of the gift of God’s love.

Christians and non-Christians alike have written about the loss of compassion in the heat of the debate about asylum seekers. They are often derided in the vicious stream of comments on blogs and opinion pieces as do-gooders, bleeding-heart lefties who have the luxury of not having to make hard decisions, who over-simplifying and exaggerate (and these would be the polite comments).

Well, I can only hope that I deserve to be called a “do-gooder” because, as a Christian, it is exactly what I am called to be. And it is my hope that churches all over Australia are producing thousands “do-gooders” in our society.

As for the charge of being a “lefty,” it is a reflection of the sad and impoverished state of public political debate in this country that doing good, believing in compassion, seeking public policy that causes no harm, and being committed to upholding human rights or protecting environment are so readily politicised.

It is true I don’t have to make hard decisions on behalf of this country, but God help me if I ever arrived at the place where I was prepared to accept that the dehumanising trade of people was an acceptable political option.

Elenie Poulos is the National Director of UnitingJustice Australia, the justice policy and advocacy unit of the National Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia. She is also the Chairperson of Act for Peace, the international aid and development agency of the National Council of Churches in Australia and a member of the World Council of Churches’ advisory body, the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs.