Quote of the Day
If David Cameron wants a Big Society, he must bring ‘We the people’ into his thinking. And to do that, he must devolve and trust. But if he will not do that within his own party, he is not likely to achieve it in the country. The Big Society is about personal and collective responsibility – the Church has been doing it for centuries. And that irrefutable fact calls for humility on the part of the Prime Minister: instead of criticising and lecturing church leaders, he might just sit at their feet and learn about the church’s centuries of experience in educating children, feeding the poor, housing the homeless and ensuring justice for the oppressed.
Tags: Christianity, Politics, Religion Society
June 24th, 2012 at 11:16 am
“Prime Minister: instead of criticising and lecturing church leaders, he might just sit at their feet and learn about the church’s centuries of experience in educating children, feeding the poor, housing the homeless and ensuring justice for the oppressed.”
Christians in the U.K. must remember that fair and universal welfare provision was beyond the church, thus the need for and the establishment of the welfare state.
Big Society christian foodbank charities are undermining the state mechanism and principle of universal subsistance welfare.
June 24th, 2012 at 6:39 pm
I have reliable information that the 5,000 government agents whom Cameron is recruiting to “empower” the Big Society are now in training. One shudders to think what type of busybodies would apply for such jobs and what the criteria for selection are.
The idea is reminiscent of another party which had a similar idea about a “Big Society”. They called it the Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community) and all eligible people were under great pressure to join in with it. The government believed that people must really be made to feel that “they were all in it together”. The government was that of Adolf Hitler.
There are, of course, numerous “fake charities”, wholly or partially government or EU-funded to help in the process. The government now calls charities “The Third Sector” and uses them as a concealed arm of
state manipulation.
If the “Big Society” was genuinely independent of the state, it would not need government agents to promote it. Simply reducing regulation and letting people get on with creating their own mutual institutions without interference would do the trick.
It was an unforeseen consequence of things like national insurance and the welfare state that a huge range of mutual, self-help and charitable organisations were destroyed. It is arguable, for instance, that continental health systems preserved more of this with religious and charitable foundations retaining control of hospitals and becoming contractors to the public health insurance authorities. In the British NHS the whole lot were effectively nationalised without compensation to the trustees. That was the fashionable way of doing things in the post war era when people genuinely believed that “the man in Whitehall knows best”.
June 24th, 2012 at 7:32 pm
My own comment on the this post.
This belief that society has to thank the Church for its ‘centuries of experience in educating children, feeding the poor, housing the homeless and ensuring justice for the oppressed’ is the REAL spin. If the church was so wonderful at doing these things, why did we NEED a welfare state in the first place? Moreover, the greater part of ‘educating children, feeding the poor, housing the homeless and ensuring justice for the oppressed’ was accomplished by Non-Conformists and humanists – while Anglicans sat on their backsides and did little – the Shaftsburys and the Wilberforces the exception rather than the rule. His Grace should remember that when the churches were fuller and the Bible better known, the lot of most people in British society was far worse than it is now.
‘Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.’ Ecclesiastes 7:10 KJV
A little more acquaintance with social history and less hankering after a past that didn’t exist is what is needed when discussing the Church’s role in British history.
As an aside it would interesting to hear just WHAT Christians themselves are doing. Here, I don’t mean self-righteous little diatribes on the internet or yards of web-posts sneering at the present and past governments; nor putting £2 in a collection plate and thinking that is doing one’s bit. But rather rolling up one’s sleeves and actually DOING something, instead of sneering and believing just because one is ‘a Christian’ one has the moral high ground. And just remember Stuart, that if it wasn’t for the welfare state, giving its hand outs to the mentally ill – with its free health system that treats the mentally ill, instead of locking them up in asylums – that your experience of your illness, if the likes of Cranmer and his hard line conservatism, would be very much the poorer – as benefits would go and there would be far more interest in functional ability rather than the vague excuses of mental health diagnoses. And of course, when the churches were full and the Bible well known, only the upper middle-classes were allowed their liberty when it came to mental health problems. The rest of us would have been thrown in an asylum or left to starve.
So be careful what you wish for… a return to former times, when Christianity ruled, isn’t necessarily a good thing!
June 25th, 2012 at 4:44 pm
If you need some evidence that Christians are doing more useful stuff than most non-believers I know, then try these for starters:
More people do unpaid work for church organisations than any other organisation.
A quarter of regular churchgoers (among both Anglicans and other Christians separately) are involved in voluntary community service outside the church. Churchgoers overall contribute 23.2 million hours voluntary service each month in their local communities outside the church.
The Church of England provides activities outside church worship in the local community for 407,000 children and young people (aged under 16 years) and 32,900 young people (aged 16 to 25 years). More than 116,000 volunteers and an additional 4900 employed adults run children/young people activity groups sponsored by the Church of England outside church worship.
June 26th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
[...] Quote of the Day at Stuart James’ eChurch Blog on Sunday was this: [...]