eChurch Christian Blog

Finally resumed reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s seminal work, ‘A History of Christianity’ after my month long Tom Wright excursion.

Most recent previous post on ‘A History of Christianity’ can be found here.

Unfortunately the snippet below covers the darker period of Western Christianity, circa 13-15th Century:

Pages 419-420:

This constant exposition of the Passion had an unfortunate side effect. To dwell on Christ’s sufferings was liable to make worshippers turn their attention to those whom the Bible narrative principally blamed for causing the pain: the Jews. Franciscans were not slow to make the connection explicit, and in doing so, they complicated and darkened the already tense relationship bewteen Jews and Christians.

Augustine of Hippo had declared that God had allowed the Jews to survive all the disasters in their history to act as a sign and a warning to Christians. They should therefore be allowed to continue their community life within the Christian world, although without the full privileges of citizenship which Christians enjoyed: God only intended them to be converted en masse when he chose to bring the world to an end. So Jews continued to be the only non-Christian community formally tolerated in the Christian West, but their position was always fragile, and they were excluded from positions of power or mainstream wealth-creating activities. One result was that a significant number turned to money-lending at interest (usury), an activity which, thanks to half-understood prohibitions in the Tanakh, the Church prohibited to Christians. That trade could bring wealth to Jews, but certainly not popularity.

It is true that Franciscans had not pioneered or singly-handedly invented the link between Jews and the Passion. The Western liturgy of Holy Week had been celebrating and intensifying the drama of Good Friday, the day of Jesus’s death, for at least a century before their first appearance, and others had drawn conclusions from the emotion of the liturgical experience. Yet the tragedy remains: the heirs of the apostle of love, Francis, were among the chief sustainers of the growing hatred of Jews in medieval Western Europe. It was in this atmosphere that England pioneered Western Europe’s first mass expulsion of Jews when in 1289, Edward I’s Parliament refused to help the King out of his war debts unless he rid the realm of all Jews; other rulers followed suit later.

Such anti-Semitic ill-will continued to be balanced, in the untidy fashion of human affairs and with Augustine’s lukewarm encouragement, by perfectly cordial or straightforward relations between Jews and Christians, but the impulse to harass or persecute Jews became a persistent feature of Western Christianity which it has only now properly confronted in the wake of terrible events in the twentieth century. Jews were not the only group to be scapegoated: we have already noted the way that in bad times, lepers and homosexuals could also be seen as conspiring against Christian society.

The early fourteenth century added a news set of conspirators: Satan and his agents on earth, witches. Pope John XXII, a man much exercised by enemies and disruptors of the Church like the spiritual Franciscan, crystallized a good deal of academic debate about magic and witchcraft which had been building up during the previous half-century. In 1320 he commissioned a team of theological experts to consider whether certain specific cases of malicious conjuring could be considered heresy, a controversial proposition generally previously denied by theologians, who had tended to treat magic, spells and meetings with the Devil as devilish illusions without substance. In the wake of the Pope’s commission, six or seven years later he issued a bull, Super illius specula, which now proclaimed that any magical practices or contracts with demons were by their nature heretical and therefore came within the competence of inquisitions. This was one of those ideas which bide their time; for the moment witches were not much troubled by the Church’s discipline, but more than a century later, with the aid of new publicists fired by their own obsessions, the Western Church and its Protestant successors were to initiate more than two centuries of active witch persecution.

OK that was a very dark period.

I wondered why the BBC website was suddenly posing the question as to the relevance of a doctor’s religion and now I know why.

Professor Clive Seale has published some fascinating and quite disturbing research today over at the Journal of Medical Ethics which appears to confirm that atheist or agnostic doctors are twice as likely to take decisions that might shorten the life of somebody who is terminally ill as doctors who are deeply religious.

I can only access the Abstract free of charge, so here it is:

Background and Aims The prevalence of religious faith among doctors and its relationship with decision-making in end-of-life care is not well documented. The impact of ethnic differences on this is also poorly understood. This study compares ethnicity and religious faith in the medical and general UK populations, and reports on their associations with ethically controversial decisions taken when providing care to dying patients.

Method A postal survey of 3733 UK medical practitioners, of whom 2923 reported on the care of their last patient who died.

Findings Specialists in care of the elderly were somewhat more likely to be Hindu or Muslim than other doctors; palliative care specialists were somewhat more likely to be Christian, religious and ‘white’ than others. Ethnicity was largely unrelated to rates of reporting ethically controversial decisions. Independently of speciality, doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than others to report having given continuous deep sedation until death, having taken decisions they expected or partly intended to end life, and to have discussed these decisions with patients judged to have the capacity to participate in discussions. Speciality was independently related to wide variations in the reporting of decisions taken with some intent to end life, with doctors in ‘other hospital’ specialities being almost 10 times as likely to report this when compared with palliative medicine specialists, regardless of religious faith.

Conclusions Greater acknowledgement of the relationship of doctors’ values with clinical decision-making is advocated.

And the moral of the story is if you or a loved one is facing an “end-of-life” situation, it may be prudent to find out your doctor’s views were on religious matters, as there appears to be a strong link between religious belief (or lack thereof) and clinical decision making.

UPDATE: More at the BBC, here and here (Radio interview with Prof. Clive Seal & Baroness Finlay)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bish Nick Baines has now blogged on this.

AND ANOTHER: Michael Merrick of Outside In has also blogged this one in the style of a good ol’ fashioned BBC fisking.

The Biased BBC blog has picked up on a recent episode of Horrible Histories which is a programme aimed at children and is described [by the BBC] as an Historical sketch show.

The recent episode focused in part on the Crusades and came complete with quotes such as:

“A time when the Christian people of Europe decided to go to war with the Islamic people in the Middle East just becasue they didn’t believe in the same things…hard to imagine I know.”

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One commentator wrote in to the Biased BBC blog and had this to say:

“I had to gulp at the opening introduction. There was a reference to the Westerners deciding to go to war with the Muslims because ‘they happened to live there’ laced with sarcasm. The rest of the narrative was blatantly anti-west. Who wrote this script, I wonder?

Am I being paranoid or have they completely missed the Muslim conquest of Syria in the 7th century, attacks of Muslim Seljuk Turks, murder of pilgrims and the consequent aggressive expansionism that led to the Byzantine Empire issuing a desperate call for help to the Pope?

It’s like describing the reason for D-Day as a war on Germany because Germans ‘happened to live’ in France.

I am shocked and above all disturbed by the inversion of teaching to the young about such an important time in history.”

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Is the BBC guilty of biased historical revision? This is an important question because I should imagine many children – rightly or wrongly – gain their historical knowledge from programmes such as these. It would be a serious charge against the BBC indeed.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, the UK’s most prominent atheist, will today call on Ofsted to force faith schools to bring religious education into the national curriculum. Professor Dawkins said that the move would be the first step in ending what he calls the “wicked” practice of inculcating children with religious belief, as he steps up his campaign against religious education with a film that calls for the abolition of faith schools.

But in an interview with The Times, he made a striking admission — far from condemning parents who fake belief in order to get their children into a good school, he even could imagine doing so himself.

In Faith School Menace?, the evolutionary biologist argues that faith schools are socially divisive and educationally damaging. Citing the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where almost all schools are sectarian, he says: “If it wasn’t for religion, and especially religious education going on down the generations, you wouldn’t have a label by which to know who to oppress.”

He told The Times that his visit to Madani High School, an Islamic school in Leicester, revealed the educational dangers of faith schooling. “When I talked to a handful of girls and to their science teacher I was really shocked to discover that every single one of them rejected evolution because when in doubt they would always put the Koran ahead of science.”

Professor Dawkins said that the end of faith-based education would mean “religion would be taught in a comparative way according to a national curriculum, not indoctrination”.

The solution, he said, was straightforward: “Faith schools should not be allowed to opt to out of religious education. Yet they are given this free pass to do religious education in their own way, which is not inspected by Ofsted.” He added: “Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results but they’re not foolish enough to believe that it’s because of faith that they get good exam results.” Anecdotes of parents suddenly discovering God shortly before school admissions season are certainly common, and Professor Dawkins is sympathetic.

“I don’t want to cast any blame on them. It’s hypocrisy that is imposed on them by a ridiculous and unjust system. It’s something that taxpayers shouldn’t be tolerating.” In fact, if he were in the same situation, he might be tempted to do the same thing.

“Since I have absolutely no belief at all, I wouldn’t be betraying anything,” he said.

Faith School Menace? will be broadcast as part of Richard Dawkins’s Age of Reason season tonight on More4 at 9pm

Two similar tales of Christian academics faring poorly within academia.

The first from the UK:

Harry’s Place

The Daily Telegraph carries a depressing story today about Dr Tali Argov, a Jewish Israeli lecturer at Oxford who claims she was discriminated against after converting to Christianity:

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The second from the US:

Cranmer’s Curate

Though Professor Kenneth Howell has just been reinstated by the University of Illinois after his dismissal for defending Catholic moral teaching to students, his case has major implications for academic freedom. It is surely optimistic to believe that he will be the last academic in the US or the UK to fall foul of a ‘hate speech’ complaint.

If universities in the US and UK start firing academics for sins of speech against political correctness, consider what they would have to do with some of the texts that are taught on their courses. Here is an extract from John Le Carre’s classic novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, first published in 1963:

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