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This is a guest post for Virtue Online by the most excellent Julian Mann

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Bradford Cathedral has appointed a Muslim as the Cathedral’s first Interfaith Development Officer. Nuzhat Ali is to be the second Muslim the Church of England has added to its payroll, following the example of Blackburn Cathedral.

Do we need Muslims working in our Cathedrals?

TAX-PAYER FUNDS POLITICALLY-CORRECT WAFFLE SHOPS IN ENGLISH CATHEDRALS

Which English cathedral will be the first to apppoint a government-funded diversity officer to enforce political correctness in its services?

The decision by two cathedrals, Blackburn and Bradford, to appoint Muslims to their staff raises the question. Political correctness is an integrated ideological package promoted by the liberal elite, embracing the multi-faith agenda, pan-sexuality and the blurring of God-given differences between the sexes. So, if the Baal of PC is given a shrine in a cathedral, then it will not be too long before he wants to check the service sheet.

Church of England Newspaper columnist, Andrew Carey, had the courage to denounce the apppointments in his column of October 2nd. Of the Bradford appointment he wrote: Yet another Cathedral has appointed a Muslim to its staff prompting the question of whether a Mosque will ever reciprocate. Bradford Cathedral’s decision to appoint Nuzhat Ali, as its Interfaith Development Officer, has barely drawn any controversy, let alone surprise.

Canon Chris Chivers of Blackburn Cathedral, the first to employ a Muslim, pre-empted any protest: “There are always going to be people with extreme views who will have difficulties with this. However if you are firm and strong in your faith then what is the problem in talking to someone of a different faith? What are you going to lose?”

If ever a straw man deserved to be knocked down it is this one. Firstly, the implication that you are an extremist if you have reservations about employing a Muslim in a Cathedral is misleading and surely deliberately insulting. Secondly, the idea that ‘talking to someone of a different faith’ automatically equates to employing them is clearly questionable.

It is clear that Nuzhat Ali will have some kind of theological role in the Cathedral including holding ‘Scriptural Reasoning Workshops’ and giving lectures. I’d object to this appointment on the grounds that it implies a recognition of her Islamic theology as on a par with the Christian theology. Furthermore, as the Church of England experiences frontline cuts of clergy across the dioceses, I have even greater concern over such diversions of funding from Christian mission.

This prompted a letter against Andrew Carey from Canon Chivers in the October 9th edition of the CEN. Complaining that his ‘lengthy and nuanced conversation’ with a CEN staff reporter had been ‘conflated into into a misleading sound-bite suggesting that anyone who didn’t agree with such appointments was an extremist’, he acknowleged that he did say that ‘such appointments should be judged on the theological basis by which they were made’.

The conclusion of Canon Chivers letter is deeply revealing of his own theological basis: Pick up the phone Andrew – my number’s in Crockford’s, as elsewhere – and I could really have helped you out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. Firstly, I could have informed you that yes, an Anglican priest has already worked from a mosque in Burnley – as part of the groundbreaking Building Bridges project there. As secondly, I could have disabused you of the notion that the money involved has somehow been diverted from church coffers at a time of ‘frontline cuts’. In both cases the costs are being borne by Government agencies, in other words they come from the public purse.

Of course, you may not be happy with this either. But if you aren’t, at least you could have said so on the basis of fact not conjecture. More importantly, the two of us might perhaps have got past these false assumptions – and my irritation at your cavalier journalism – and onto some real theology, and the belief I share with many others that talking to people of different faiths and world views is part and parcel of the Missio Deo: God’s conversation with the world in the incarnation. The Government somehow seems to have got hold of the importance for society of this pattern of divine self-communication and the conversations it’s meant to inspire. I’m praying that you might one day do the same.

So there you have it from the Canon Chancellor of an English cathedral: church liberals and secular PC activists are colluding in the appointment of non-Christians to the theological staff of English cathedrals with the tax-payer footing the bill for ‘this pattern of divine self-communication and the conversations it’s meant to inspire’.

And Canon Chivers has the audacity to pray that a faithful, confessing Anglican – and a fine journalist – like Andrew Carey will start worshipping at the shrine to PC. Fortunately for Andrew Carey, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, mankind’s only Lord and Saviour, is not inclined to answer that kind of prayer.

–Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Sheffield diocese UK. His weblog is Cranmer’s Curate – www.cranmercurate.blogspot.com

Tags: Church Life

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