Western civilisation and Christian values

Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tom Holland's thesis is that the moral and ethical values of Western Civilisation have been shaped mainly by Christianity, and in this book he tries to follow and explain the process by which this happened. He covers a broad sweep of Western Christianity, sometimes illuminating particular historical events and periods as he does so.

I think it is a book that would be useful for most Christians to read; Western Christians, because it is about them and their history; Orthodox Christians living in the West, or in any society where Western values are influential, to help them to understand the society in which they live. It would also be useful for Orthodox Christians not living in the West, because the West is influential even in places where its values are not dominant. It will be useful to people living in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia, especially those colonised by the West, to see what Western values are based on.

For an example of the last point, Holland makes some interesting comments on how the Western concept of "religion" came to be applied outside the West. In a sense the British East India Company applied the concept of "religion" to India. This concept had been shaped by the history of Christianity in the West, especially in the Early Modern period, and it could be said that the British East India Company invented Hinduism as a religion. Holland could, however, have said a little more about how the concept had developed in the West before being applied to India. He does point out that in the premodern period "religion" referred primarily to those who had taken monastic vows or something similar, but modernity has changed this understanding. A useful book on this topic, for those who would like to know more, is "Religion" and the Religions in the English Enlightenment by Peter Harrison.

Tom Holland is not himself a Christian, as he makes clear in the last chapter, but he acknowledges that his values are based on Christian presuppositions. In general I agree with most of what he says; I might, however, differ from him over what he does not say.

He appears to give a survey of the history of Western Christianity, but there are significant lacunae. Some of the gaps seem to have things that do not support his thesis, or that might cause readers to modify it. He does not, for example, mention the Great European Witchhunt, in which large parts of Early Modern Christendom appeared to revert to pagan values with regard to witchhunts. He should have at least made some attempt to explain such a dramatic reversal in terms of his theory. For more on this, see my article on Christian Responses to Witchcraft and Sorcery.

Another gap that stood out for me came in the penultimate chapter, dealing with fairly recent events. He describes events of the annus mirabilis 1989, when authoritarian regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa and a wind of freedom blew through the world.

Holland notes that both Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk tended to interpret South Africa's liberation, and that of many communist countries, in 1989/90 in biblical terms, as the writing of God's finger on the affairs of state. loving enemies etc. But Western leaders tended to see it differently. As Holland puts it:

This, however, was not how it tended to be seen by policy-makers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx turned out instead to be closer to a hell emphasised the degree to which the true fulfilment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Confucian, or Muslim, or Hindu. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived (Source: Holland 2019:489)

Secularism, liberal democracy and the concept of human rights are all values which, according to Holland, the West derived from Christianity. I don't quibble with him there. But I don't think they were the values the "policy-makers in America and Europe" thought most important. Those policy-makers included people he did not name, and those who dominated in the 1980s were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose chief values were enshrined in the ideology of neoliberalism, which they had been pushing for the previous eight years and more.

The Neoliberalism they pushed for very strongly, and applied in their own countries, has continued to dominate the world economic system, and may seen as a watered down version of the ideology propagated by Ayn Rand, an atheistic despiser of Christianity and its "altruism". That ideology has been influential in the West since the 1960s, and certainly was held by some people in Reagan's administration, if not by Reagan himself.

In the five years since Holland's book was published, however, events have shown that the West is rapidly abandoning any traces of Christian values that remain.

According to Holland:

That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance and shelter and refuge from persecution:these were never self-evident truths.

The Nazis, certainly, knew as much -- which is why, in today's demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they -- because communism was an expression of concern for the oppressed masses -- rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless society.

But in the five years since Dominion was published, Tom Holland's thesis has been completely overturned. The mass murder precipitated by racism in Gaza in 2023-24 has not been seen as at all abhorrent by Western governments, as can be seen by their frequent protestations of support for the perpetrators. The Western values that Holland says are based on Christianity, like human rights, and concepts like "crimes against humanity" are safely stored away in the musical banks described in Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon.

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Look who's defending Western Christian Civilisation now!

Back in the 1950s and 1960s the National Party government in South Africa kept passing more and more repressive laws, which it claimed were necessary to defend Western (or "White" -- the terms were interchangeable in Nat vocabulary) civilisation.

What were they defending it against?

The Communist menace, that's what.

One of the first repressive laws they passed was the Suppression of Communism Act (Act 44 of 1950).

The National Party in South Africa and the Communist Party in Russia fell from power a couple of decades ago. The National Party has since disappeared from the scene, its remnants being absorbed into the DA and the ANC, which are now the two biggest parties in the South African parliament.

The Russian Communist Party, however, still exists, and look what they're up to now:
В Госдуме создают депутатскую группу по защите христианских ценностей - говорят, что для пропаганды : Новости : Накануне.RU, which, being interpreted means

And here it is, from the horse's mouth:

We intend to develop international cooperation for the common defense of Christian values, because we believe that the future of Europe, as well as the future of a revived Russian Federation does not conclude in a plantation of permissiveness, of total consumption, dehumanization, flouting the basic norms of human common life, and a return to traditional, orthodox Christian values.

That's from Sergei Gavrilov, a Communist Party representative in the Russian Duma.

Sergei Chapnin, an Orthodox journalist in Russia, comments on Facebook:

What a disgrace for Russia! What a mockery of history! The Communists are going to defend Christian values​​, "the Communist Party Guide never took anti-Christian positions. You can not put the Communists in the current blame the sins of 20s, the acts of" militant atheists "Yaroslavl-Gubelman or the latest large-scale" Khrushchev's "persecution of the church in the early 60's" (S. Gavrilov, the Communist Party).

One doesn't know whether to laugh of cry.

PamBG's Blog: Christian Economic Life - Post 1: Foundation

Pam BC has just started an interesting series of posts on Christianity and economics. I've read the first two, and it looks very promising indeed. PamBG's Blog: Christian Economic Life - Post 1: Foundation:

I'm going to try a thought-experiment here. I want to think about what an economy run on Christian principles might look like. And this is quite literally a 'thought experiment'. At the moment, I have no idea of what I intend to write in the future, but I want simply to think out loud, building on ideas step by step.

So here are some initial thoughts for a foundation:

1) Christian thinking on economics should begin with Christian and biblical principles, not with economic principles.

2) That being said, it seems to me that a good principle for a Christian thought experiment on our economic life would be: honor God and love your neighbor. (There are actually a number of principles that the bible expresses on economic life that a lot of us might not like; forbidding the giving or receiving of debt is one of these.)

3) As I think and write, I will try to separate 'What works' from 'What should be'. I will recognize that 'What should be' doesn't always work well. In separating the two principles, I intend to avoid what seems to me to be a usual problem in Christian economic thinking: 'That operational method doesn't work, therefore it is unjust'.

That is a very good start, and I recommend that people who are interested in the topic read the whole series.

If one is really going to discuss such things properly, however, blog comments are rather inadequate. It is the kind of thing worth discussing in the Christianity and society forum.

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And you can see my take on it at Notes from underground: The Invisible Hand.

Seminar - "How To Love Your Enemies".

Pragmatic - Eclectic: Seminar - this weekend - "How To Love Your Enemies".:

When was the last time you went to a Seminar on, How to love your enemies? How to bless those that curse you? Or, maybe, How to do good to those who hate you and pray for those who spit in your face? Here’s another – how to conduct our business or profession on behalf of Jesus Christ.

Now there's a thought -- it seems that these are not frequently to be seen among the topics for Christian self-help seminars, or among the titles of self-help books in bookshops. When can we expect one by Dr Phil or T.D. Jakes or Joel Osteen? Don't hold your breath!

Random acts of political correctness

Yesterday I posted some thoughts about giving money to street beggars as an act of Christian charity that some people wanted to outlaw. A couple of commentators seemed to have a problem, or at least a query, about my calling this Christian. Then Notes from a Common-place Book: Those Wacko 'Love Thy Neighbor' Christians pointed me to this:
I'm Not One Of Those 'Love Thy Neighbor' Christians | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

I'm here to tell you there are lots of Christians who aren't anything like the preconceived notions you may have. We're not all into 'turning the other cheek.' We don't spend our days committing random acts of kindness for no credit. And although we believe that the moral precepts in the Book of Leviticus are the infallible word of God, it doesn't mean we're all obsessed with extremist notions like 'righteousness' and 'justice.'

It's good to be reminded of the need to live a balanced Christian life and to avoid fanaticism and extremism. Perhaps that's what it means to be "a moderate".

Synchroblog on leadership

Today we are having a Synchroblog on leadership -- a group of (mostly) Christian bloggers around the world are blogging on their thoughts on leadership, and what leadership means.

• Jonathan Brink - Letter To The President
• Adam Gonnerman - Aspiring to the Episcopate
• Kai - Leadership - Is Servant Leadership a Broken Model?
• Sally Coleman - In the world but not of it- servant leadership for the 21st Century Church
• Alan Knox - Submission is given not taken
• Joe Miller - Elders Lead a Healthy Family: The Future
• Cobus van Wyngaard - Empowering leadership
• Steve Hayes - Servant leadership
• Geoff Matheson - Leadership
• John Smulo - Australian Leadership Lessons
• Helen Mildenhall - Leadership
• Tyler Savage - Moral Leadership - Is it what we need?
• Bryan Riley - Leading is to Listen and Obey
• Susan Barnes - Give someone else a turn!
• Liz Dyer - A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Polls…
• Lionel Woods - Why Diverse Leadership is Good for America
• Julie Clawson - Leadership Expectations
• Ellen Haroutunian - A New Kind Of Leadership
• Matt Stone - Converting Leadership

There is quite a variety among the posts, but also some common points. Some have focused on political leaders (it is the American general election today), and others have focused on church leaders, and some have compared and contrasted them.

My own contribution is on Servant leadership.

One of the most interesting ones, in the light of the US general election, is John Smulo's blog. In his actual synchroblog post he compares Australian and American styles of leadership, but immediately preceding it is a poll, in which he asks readers to indicate which way they will vote in the US general election.

He has two polls, one for Americans, and one for non-Americans -- the latter are asked to say which way they would vote if they were Americans.

Since John Smulo's blog is a Christian one, and most of his readers are presumably Christian, it shows an interesting difference between American Christians and Christians in the rest of the world, at least at the time of writing.

American Christians are split equally between the two main parties - 32% say they will vote for the Democrats, 32% for the Republicans, a few Libertarians and a few more "other".

Non-Americans show a very different pattern. None (so far) support the Republicans. It's 72.7 Democrat and 27.3% Green.

Perhaps that pattern will change as more people vote, but it seems to have important missional implications. American missionaries often travel to other parts of the world, but often do not realise quite how much the culture of other people, including that of other Christians, differs from theirs.

People in other countries, however, often have a better perception of American thinking, because American news media are all pervasive, and propagate the American worldview to most parts of the world. But even if people are aware of that worldview, they don't always accept it, as John's poll seems to show. Of course it's still a very small sample, but it will be interesting to see how it changes as more people vote.

Atheist evangelism

A group of people in Britain are engaging in "atheist evangelism" by sponsoring bus advertisments with the slogan "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life".

Simon Barrow: People are as likely to be sceptical about the 'atheist bus' as they are about being sold religion:

This week the 'atheist bus' project finally gets wheels. After scrambling around for a few thousand quid, the money has finally come in to perambulate an inspiring message ('There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life') around our streets, bringing merriment to millions...

To those without a huge vested interest in promoting or dissing religion, this probably looks a slightly odd initiative. Frankly, the slogan is a bit anodyne. It's the non-believing equivalent of 'God may very well exist. Now have a nice day'. But it will probably still be enough to upset counter-evangelists of the kind who like to tell everybody they are going to hell for not subscribing to their particular doctrine, and who think atheism is very, very naughty.

Simon Barrow also comments about it in his blog FaithInSociety, and several others have also commented on it. In fact, so many people have commented on it that further commentary might seem to be redundant.

I tend to agree with Bishop Alan’s Blog: London Atheist ads: Shome mishtake?, when he says: "Perhaps this particular ad is more agnostic than atheist, and we still have to await a genuinely atheist poster ad."

But what interests me are the values expressed by the ad, which are assumed rather than explicitly promoted. They are not really atheist values, because there can be no specifically atheist values, since atheism is the absence of something. Atheists may have all kinds of values, and all kinds of reasons for holding them, but the values and the reasons for holding them owe nothing to atheism. Marxism-Leninism, for example, is strongly atheist, but the values it espouses are not based on atheism, but on a particular theory of economics and history. Ayn Rand, who detested Marxism-Leninism, and proposed an alternative, capitalist ideology, was also an atheist. One could multiply examples, but the point is clear -- there are no specifically atheist values.

I don't know whether the sponsors of the bus ad are calling what they are doing "evangelism". But "evangelism" means "spreading good news", and the sponsors clearly believe their message is good news and they are spreading it, so it is evangelism of a sort.

But what is the message that they intend to convey? And what is the message that people receive?

I can't speak for others, but I can say what message I receive from the ad. Whether it is what the sponsors intended to convey, I don't know. But if any of them read this, perhaps they can tell me if I've got it right or wrong. And if the intended message doesn't get across, then it means that there is either something wrong with the sender, or with the message, or with the recipient.

So what is the good news?

"Behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy: There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life".

And that sounds like another message I've been hearing a lot on TV lately:

"You only have one life, so make it a full one with world-class entertainment."

Both messages seem to have the same underlying values, the same basic message:

Eat, drink, and be entertained, for tomorrow we die.

The advertisements are being placed on British buses, so they will be read by rich and well-fed Westerners. Simon Barrow notes elsewhere (Cold water, buses and shared humanity | Ekklesia) that it raises interesting issues about "the extent to which the philosophy reflected in the bus slogan - ‘There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ - is widely shared (much more than many church leaders seem aware), and so on."

And yes, that philosophy is widely shared in prosperous Western societies, even if that prosperity is under threat of a recession.

And we see on TV how people "enjoy life" in Britain -- teenagers getting drunk. They send each other inane messages on their cell (mobile) phones, with scarcely a thought about the fact that in parts of the Congo armed groups are fighting to control access to coltan, one of the ingredients that makes such "enjoyment" possible, and that people, including teenagers and young children are being enslaved or killed as a result.

Will the message on British buses come across to people in strife-torn Congo as good news, so that they can "enjoy life", and have a full one, with "world-class entertainment"?

Oh yes, the message, the philosophy, of the slogan is widely shared in the rich West.

So how do I interpret it?

There is probably no God, so go ahead and enjoy your life, even if it is at the expense of other people. There is probably no God who cares about them, so you don't need to care about them either.

Forty years ago I was studying for a Christian doctrine exam, and instead of reading the text books for the course I read a book written by a Methodist minister in Zambia, Colin Morris. It was called Include me out: confessions of an ecclesiastical coward, and this is how it began:

The other day a Zambian dropped dead not far from my front door. The pathologist said he'd died of hunger. In his shrunken stomach were a few leaves and what appeared to be a ball of grass. And nothing else.

Colin Morris's book wasn't aimed at rich well-fed atheist evangelists, but rather at rich well-fed Christian ones, and at ecclesiastical bureaucrats, and he challenged them to think about how the message they put across, in words or deeds, in what they did and what they didn't do, could have come across as good news to "an ugly little man with a shrunken belly, whose total possessions, according to the police, were a pair of shorts, a ragged shirt, and an empty Biro pen."

There is probably no God, so it doesn't really matter if your leaders, using your taxes, rain down bombs on people in Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, just so long as you continue to enjoy a full life, with world-class entertainment. There is probably no God who cares about them, so don't let their plight interfere with your enjoyment of life.

Some of the things Colin Morris said 40 years ago are just as valid today, and they apply to all rich well-fed evangelists, atheist as well as Christian, including me.

Much theological writing is a highly elaborate conspiracy against that little man with the shrunken belly and his skeletal brethren. It is an exercise in endless qualification, dedicated to showing why we cannot take the words of the Galilean Peasant at their face value or follow His example simply. Let some Manchester bus conductor murmur that he can follow the words of Jesus but cannot follow the words of some of the men who followed Him, and he will earn himself a lecture. This would be to the effect that Jesus cannot be understood except within the whole framework of the History of Salvation and that he did not actually say many of the words reported of him in the Gospels, so he must take our words for what is fact and fancy, because we know!

The biggest problem for Christians with the philosophy behind the bus advertising is not that it is unacceptable, but that its message of hedonism is accepted all too easily by so many Christians. Again, to quote Colin Morris:

Our failure towards the little people of the earth is more than a lapse of simple charity for which sincere contrition can atone. When our Churches have crumbled and our vestments have rotted and the wind blows through the ruins of our ecclesiastical structures, all that will stand and have eternal significance are creative acts of compassion -- the effectual signs of the presence of the Kingdom.

Because the Gospel is simple, the judgement is immediate. It awaits no historical summing up of all things. It can be put plainly and in first-person terms. I saw a starving man and there was no gnawing pain in my belly. I saw a hunchback and my own back did not ache. I watched a pathetic procession of refugees being herded back and forth sleeplessly, and I slept well that night.

Time to curb the ‘asset strippers and robbers’ who ruin the financial markets, say archbishops -Times Online

For more than thirty years the ideology of neoliberalism has spread throughout the world. It was enthusiastically propagated in the Reagan-Thatcher years and led to the mania for privatisation, which continues in South Africa and has led to the deterioration of our roads, the quality of our water, and many other things.

Church leaders have been slow to speak out about these things. It takes a well-publicised financial crisis to get people like the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to start using words like "idolatry" when referring to it in public.

Time to curb the ‘asset strippers and robbers’ who ruin the financial markets, say archbishops -Times Online:

Leaders of the Church of England launched fierce attacks on the world’s stock market traders last night, condemning them as bank robbers and asset strippers and calling for a judicial review into Britain’s financial services.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York demanded stronger regulation and an end to speculation and living on debt.

Dr Rowan Williams spoke out in defence of Karl Marx, defending key aspects of his critique of capitalism and gave a warning that society was running the risk of idolatry in its relationship with wealth.

(Hat-tip to Fr David MacGregor)

The hidden and unintended consequences of the privatisation mania are now beginning to appear. Mutual building societies and insurance cooperatives went commercial, bribing thier members with "windfall" shares (actually, it was only part of their investment received in advance -- they were mortgaging their future value to external shareholders). Some of them, like the Old Mutual, continue to use the word "mutual" in their names, to deceive the public. The Old Mutual should actually be called the "New Commercial". One result of this can be seen in the collapse of Northern Rock in Britain.

Another unintended and unforeseen consequence of the privatisation mania can be seen in the deterioration of the quality of South Africa's water.

News - Environment: SA water quality is fast deteriorating:

South Africa's water quality is fast deteriorating but the shrinking scientific and engineering capacity to counter this is emerging as the 'real crisis' to strike the country.

This is according to Dr Anthony Turton, a senior water researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), who maintains that up to 50 percent of municipalities 'do not even have one qualified engineer' on their staff...

"The original work for that was done in the 1980s in massive programmes based at the CSIR," says Turton. "Those programmes generated many PhD graduates, but also did the primary science on which future management will be based.

"Those programmes are no longer in existence and this is a national crisis of note. We need to recover the bits and pieces we can and then develop new national capacity," says Turton...

"Nowhere else in the world is this happening so we cannot turn to other countries and say: 'Please help us'. We as a nation will be required to solve this problem as a nation. This is where national science councils come in. They are national assets, but the current funding models are so restrictive that their potential is being reduced and the capacity they have is being privatised."

The privatisation of national resources like the CSIR was begun under the National Party government in the 1980s, and has continued under the Thatcherist policies of the ANC. One of the reasons that our water supply has deteriorated under privatisation is that nobody stands to make a lot of money out of water research.

And only when it is actually staring them in the face do Christian leaders publicly speak out, and then mostly against the symptoms, not about the causes of the disease, which has been growing unchecked in the Western world since the 1980s, and metastatising throughout the world through globalisation.

The gospel of consumption

Information Clearing House - ICH:

Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

In the sidebar of this blog there is a widget that shows what books I'm reading. I put it there because it might interest someone else who is reading or has read some of the same books. But I was always a bit worried about the name and the philosophy behind it: All Consuming. It actually doesn't show which books I'm reading, but which I am "consuming". But such is the world today that an act like reading is transformed into an act of consumption, which has, as the article quoted above suggests, become an ideology.

The immediately preceding article in this blog, about the New York Times's views on Vladimir Putin's views on religion illustrates this -- the author of the NYT article clearly proceeds from an assumption that the consumer ideology is good, and evaluates everything else, including religion, in those terms.

One of the books I have been consuming (or rather "reading") is Henry Thoreau's Walden, which starts from an almost diametrically opposed point of view, as the following extract shows. Thoreau, while fishing, is caught in the rain, and takes shelter in a hut that he thought was unoccupied, but finds it inhabited by John Field, an Irishman, and his family, who worked "bogging" for a neighboring farmer.

I tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter nor milk, nor flesh meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat again to repair the waste of his system, -- and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous things which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.

When I've finished reading Walden I think I shall rate it as "worth consuming".

Moral regeneration, degeneration, confusion

There is much talk of the need for moral regneration. There is much talk of the need for values.

But it also seems that while many people agree that there is a need for values, they can't agree on what those values are, and are determined to force other people to conform to their values rather than find what values they share in common, and agree to work together to promote those, and agree to disagree about the ones they don't share.

There have been some examples in the news lately, and various people have blogged about them as well, including me.

Let's start with the need for values.

Christian values only thing holding Britain together, says Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor:

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster and head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, on Monday said that “Judeo-Christian values” were the only thing holding British society together, the Guardian reports...

"People are looking for a common good in this country. A very large number of people are saying, 'What is it that binds British people together?'" Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said. “There is no other heritage than the Judaeo-Christian heritage in this country." Replacing that heritage with a “totally secular view of life,” the cardinal said, would lead the nation down “a very dangerous path.”

Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that many Jews find the "Judeo-Christian" epithet pretty offensive, regarding it as an attempt by Christians to co-opt them willy-nilly as part of a Christian agenda. Let's look at the British "Judaeo-Christian heritage". I can't remember when it was that Jews got the vote in Britain, but I think it was some time after the Catholics.

So let's leave aside the Jews for the moment, since they were excluded from contributing to the heritage for so long. Let's look at the Christian part of that heritage. The Anglicans in England and Wales had votes before the Jews and Catholics did, but today they are tearing themselves apart because they can't agree on sexual morality. As I noted in a post on my other blog, African Anglicans and homosexuality, the Anglican Communion seems to be having its very own clash of civilizations between Western and African civilizations.

In that post the point was that African Anglicans who lived in close proximity to Muslims, as they do in Nigeria and Uganda, recall the very beginnings of their church, which began with the martyrdom of Christian pages at the court of the King of Buganda, who "had adopted Arab customs of pederasty, and he expected the young men of his court to submit to his demands. But a growing number of Christian courtiers and pages refused to participate, despite his threats, and an enraged king launched a persecution that resulted in hundreds of martyrdoms".

Think for a moment of those "Arab customs of pederasty", and now switch to something I blogged about just a few days ago in this blog: Notes from underground: Muslim parents ask UK schools to shelve pro-homosexual storybooks for 5-year-olds.

It seems that the Anglicans are not the only ones who find it hard to agree on sexual morality.

And who was it who represented Britain's "Judaeo-Christian heritage" -- the school authorities who prescribed the story books, or the Muslim parents who objected to them?

Now the accuracy of the story has been questioned, but assuming that it is true in outline, what is doing on here?

Ostensibly the reason for prescribing such stories is to prevent bullying in schools.

Now I haven't read the stories, and the descriptions in the news media may not be accurate, but the parental objections seem to be not that the stories are aimed at preventing bullying, but that they are teaching their five-year-old children sexual ethics that the parents disagree with, and don't say much about bullying. I wonder if those stories would have dissuaded the King of Buganda from bullying his pages?

It seems rather disingenuous.

Think about it another way. I bet that quite a number of Muslim kids in Britain are bullied by non-Muslim kids who tease them and say that their big brothers are making bombs in the attic. So how should this bullying be dealt with? Write story books for little kids showing that it's cool to make bombs?

One could go on multiplying examples to show that one of the main difficulties in the way of promoting moral regeneration and education in values is that people simply cannot agree which system of values to promote, and this leads to unedifying power struggles, with Anglicans in America suing one another over ownership of church buildings as a result of their failure to agree and determination to impose their set of values on everyone else.

In the mean time, things continue to get worse, as we see in an incident that took place closer to home, right here in Gauteng.

clipped from www.thetimes.co.za While police are still in the dark about the identity of the driver who shot and killed a 12-year-old smash-and-grabber, it appears many South Africans have little sympathy for the young boy. Comments on The Times website seemed to weigh in favour of the unknown gunman who killed the boy in Boksburg on Friday, with some even suggesting the killing of the youngster rid the country of a future criminal. The boy was shot after he apparently smashed the window of a white Citi Golf on Rondebult Road in Boksburg, East of Johannesburg, and stole a cellphone. A witness claimed the boy ran away, but was chased by the driver who shot him in the chest and then fled the scene in his car.

Yes, there does seem to be a need for education in values in our society.

It seems that nobody taught this boy "Thou shalt not steal."

And nobody taught the driver of the car, "Thou shalt not kill."

Or perhaps someone taught them that, but they didn't learn it. As they say in edu-jargon, the learning outcomes were not achieved.

And the reported response of people to the incident shows that that failure is widespread throughout our society.

Quaker teacher fired for changing loyalty oath

With all the hoo-hah about introducing a pledge of allegiance in South African schools, I was quite interested in this story:

Quaker teacher fired for changing loyalty oath:

California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word 'nonviolently' in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.

and

A veteran public school math teacher who specializes in helping struggling students, Kearney-Brown, 50, had signed the oath before - but had modified it each time.

She signed the oath 15 years ago, when she taught eighth-grade math in Sonoma. And she signed it again when she began a 12-year stint in Vallejo high schools.

Each time, when asked to "swear (or affirm)" that she would "support and defend" the U.S. and state Constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic," Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote "nonviolently" in front of the word "support," crossed out "swear," and circled "affirm." All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.

The school districts always accepted her modifications, Kearney-Brown said.

But Cal State East Bay wouldn't, and she was fired on Thursday.

Quakers have a reputation for that, and I say more power to their elbow. South African law courts are supposed to give you the choice of swearing or affirming, but in my experience they rarely do. I get the impression that objecting and asking to affirm would prejudice the judge or magistrate against you for wasting the court's time.

I'm in two minds about the proposed pledge of allegiance in schools. Some have objected to the wording, saying that recognising the injustices of the past makes kids responsible for things that happened before they were born. I don't see that it does. I think it's OK if kids recognise that certain things that happened in the past were unjust, and resolve not to allow them to happen again in their generation.

The problem I have with it is that making that kind of thing compulsory in schools smacks a bit like the indoctrination of the young, which was one of the injustices of the past. It leads to the kind of patriotism that overflows into chauvinism and jingoism and leads in turn to imperialist wars like the US invasion of Iraq, and a spirit that can be seen on so many right-wing American blogs that are all over pictures of bald eagles draped with American flags, like this one, or this one, or even this one. Do we really want to promote those kinds of attitudes in our schools?

Yes, there is a concern that is sometimes expressed about the need for moral regeneration, and the fact that the youth of today often seem to want it all and want it now, unlike the self-seacrificing Spirit of the Youth of '76. But where are they now, and what are they doing? What is the example they set, with everyone wanting to be the next tycoon? Rather than forcing the youth to recite pledges, let their elders set an example that doesn't exalt greed to the highest of the virtues.

I think that one brave Quaker teacher is worth 1000 recitations of a pledge of allegiance.

Whatever happened to Liberation Theology?

Up to 1994 many Christian groups in South Africa were in the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. Some took an interest in Liberation Theology and used some of the ideas of Liberation Theology as a spur to action in the struggle against apartheid.

But since 1994 these very same Christian bodies seem to have lost their way. There seems to be a lack of cohesive vision, and I've sometimes wondered whether we actually need a common enemy to give it to us. Is it easier to unite around a common enemy than a common Lord?

I was reminded of this when I read a blog post in which Mike's Bursell muses about: Liberation theology -- challenging

I've just been reading Gorringe, who cites Segundo talking about the bottom line commitment for liberation theology is the option for the poor. I think the thing I'm trying to come to terms with is that although I absolutely accept the enormous inequalities - unchristian inequalities - that riddle our society, and the impact that has on the poorest in society, I'm not sure that I'm ready to take on board what seems to be the central tenet of liberation theology: that our first and foremost task must always be the reconstituting of society in such a way as to alleviate - and remove - economic poverty.

And that in turn reminded me of what a friend of mine, Shirley Davies, used to say back in the 1960s -- that when South Africa solved the problem of the black and the white, it would come face to face with the real problem: the problem of the haves and the have-nots.

And that has in fact happened, as can be seen, for example, in the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, and the harassing of the homeless by the police and government officials. Of 1500 homeless people and refugees arrested recently at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg only 15 were eventually charged with being illegal immigrants. As in the bad old days of pass raids, most of those arrested were not allowed to fetch their documents to show that they were in the country legally.

I've written about liberation theology before, in Christianity - North and South, and Orthodoxy and liberation theology, so I will try not to repeat too much of what I have said before here.

In 1994 we had our first democratic and nonracial elections, and it was a vast improvement on what went before. We have free and democratic political institutions and a start was made on the dismantling of apartheid.

But though there was a lot of political rhetoric about the poor, and jobs, and things like that, very little was actually done. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) which was supposed to deal with some of these problems was abandoned within a year. Instead there was "Black Economic Empowerment" (BEE), which might more accurately be described as Black Elite Enrichment. It was a preferential option for the rich. My wife worked for a BEE company for a while, and met many people, both in the company and those it did business with, whose sole motivation appeared to be greed. They didn't just want to be rich, they wanted to be inordinately and excessively rich. And in part that is because we live in a society that espouses and accepts those values. This is not unique to South Africa. But it is something to think about when we talk of "moral regeneration".

Before 1994 a lot of money flowed in to South Africa to NGOs, both faith-based and secular, that were involved in trying to improve the lot of the poor. After 1994 such funding went to the government. That might have been a good thing, if the government had followed through on the RDP, but it didn't. It abandoned the RDP.

Back in the 1970s some Christian groups in Zululand were anxious to do something about community development. They brought in a community development expert, Milton Rosner, who told them that they were dreaming -- nothing smaller than a government could do community development. But since the government was more interested in destroying communities than developing them, then if the churches wanted to do something they needed to pool their resources. "We must work ecumenically and not denominationally" became the mantra (overlooking a better slogan, that might have sounded a warning, "Small is beautiful").

So the Anglican Church's Zululand Diocesan Health and Welfare Association (known as HelWel or Zisizeni for short) became the Zululand Churches Health and Welfare Association. But because everyone's responsibility is no one's responsibility it became administratively top-heavy, and consumed more and more resources to achieve less and less development.

Better to remember that "small is beautiful", and we should work denominationally rather than ecumenically. Could an ecumenical bureaucracy provide shelter for 1500 homeless people as the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg has done? I very much doubt it.

All this has little to do with the often convoluted expressions of liberation theology, which are often even more abstract and difficult to understand than other forms of theology. But one of the things that most exponents of liberation theology did manage to convey was that practice (or praxis, as they called it) was more important than the obscure theories.

So when the Christian groups in South Africa lost their way and became rudderless and directionless at the end of apartheid, perhaps one of the things they could have done (and could still do) would be to pick up the RDP, which the government dropped, and run with it. Have a look at the ANC's document on Reconstruction and development -- there's a lot of good stuff in it -- and see what can be applied.

But it would be important to learn from the mistakes of the past. We should work denominationally, not ecumenically. Ecumenical bodies, like councils of churches, should play a coordinating role, rather than being involved in micromanagement of projects. That should be done by their member churches. Bureaucratic centralisation should be avoided at all costs.

But perhaps even more important is what one of the earliest advocates of liberation theology, Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, advocated. We must conscientizar the masses. Later that was translated into English as "conscientise", along with a lot of other obscure jargon.

But the conscientising and moral regeneration must begin at home. Before we can achieve anything we must convince our church members that greed is not a Christian value.

November Synchroblog: money and the church

The theme for this month's Synchroblog is Money and the Church.

I have posted my contribution this month at The Church and Money on my Khanya blog.

Here are the links to all the contributions:

The Check That Controls at Igneous Quill
Pushing The Camel: Why there might be more rich people in Heaven than in your local Church at Fernando's desk
Sally Coleman at Eternal Echoes
Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz at Hello Said Jenelle
Zaque at Johnny Beloved
Walking with the Camels at Calacirian
Greed and Bitterness: Why Nobody's Got it Right About Money and The Church at Phil Wyman's Square No More
Wealth Amidst Powers at Theocity
Money and the Church: A Fulltime Story at The Pursuit
But I Gave at Church at The Assembling of the Church
Moving Out of Jesus Neighborhood at Be the Revolution
Money and the Church: why the big fuss? at Mike's Musings
Coffee Hour Morality at One Hand Clapping
Bling Bling in the Holy of Holies at In Reba's World
Magazinial Outreach at Decompressing Faith
Money's too tight to mention at Out of the Cocoon
Bullshit at The Agent B Files
The Bourgeois Elephant in the Missional/Emergent Living Room at Headspace
When the Church Gives at Payneful Memories
Who, or What, Do You Worship at at Charis Shalom
Greed at Hollow Again
Silver and Gold Have We - Oops! at Subversive Influence
The Church and Money at Khanya
Tithe Schmithe at Discombobula

The benefits of privatisation

Walton Pantland, discussing the recent postal strike in the UK, notes some of the benefits of privatisation in Red Star Coven: It's not just about your letters arriving late.

It is not only Britain that has suffered from this process, because the Thatcherist policies of the ANC (and of the Nats before them) have led to a similar process here in South Africa. The Nats introduced toll roads, and the ANC government is extending the system. Life expectancy and literacy rates in some parts of Africa, because the free market enthusiasts demand that governments spend less on health care and education.

Abandoned places of empire

In the Emergent Africa blog Carl Brook wonders about one of the twelve marks of a new monasticism, which is relocation to the abandoned places of empire.

What does it mean, and what does "empire" mean in that context?

I suppose the simplest thing might be to ask the people who created the "new monasticism" web site what they meant by it, and how they understood the phrase. But it might be more fun to let one's imagination run loose, because it evokes all kinds of romantic images, for all sorts of people. For example, some people have a fascination with the abandoned places of the Soviet empire. I saw many such places in Albania a few years ago, most notably the abandoned steel works at Elbasan, and the hundreds of abandoned concrete bunkers on the hillsides, monuments to the war psychosis of Enver Hoxha, where it could be said that the Orthodox Church has indeed relocated to the abandoned places of empire.

Another image that it evokes is the book From the holy mountain : a journey among the Christians of the Middle East by William Dalrymple. Dalrymple is a journalist and travel writer, and his journey follows in the footsteps of two monastic pilgrims centuries earlier. Western Christians are fond of talking about "The Constantinian Era", but often fail to realise that for many Christians the "Constantinian era" lasted less than 300 years, and ended in the 7th century. In AD 578 John Moschos and a companion set off on a similar journey, to monasteries of the Near and Middle East. Dalrymple follows them, but few of the monasteries they visited still exist. They are among the "abandoned places of empire".

There is also a fictional recording of an attempt to relocate to the "abandoned places of empire" in Rose Macaulay's novel The towers of Trebizond.

These are just a few of the images evoked by the phrase "abandoned places of empire". And perhaps everyone will have their own images so that there can be many more.

When linked with monasticism, it might be given another twist, and it could be understood as being places outside the ekoumene -- the wild and uninhabited places of the earth. The early monks left the cities and went to the deserts, and lived in caves and ruins, which could likewise be seen as abandoned places of empire. Could a neo-monastic community take root in the ruins of the steelworks at Elbasan?

But the phrase can also be seen to have a metaphorical sense. Abandoned places, not just in the sense of being uninhabited, but, from a Christian point of view, being culturally alienated from the Christian faith, and perhaps abandoned by the Church. At least one Christian writer sees it as referring to the inner city, which has often been abandoned by the Church. There is an example in Johannesburg, where the Orthodox Cathedral of SS Constantine and Helen (diagonally opposite the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King) has a congregation that has relocated to the outer suburbs, and commutes to the church on Sundays almost to a foreign country. Around the church are the inner-city suburbs of Joubert Park, Hillbrow, Doornfontein and Bertrams, cosmopolitan, with a high proportion of illegal immigrants, many of whom earn their living through crime, while others are poor and exploited. The church was built by immigrants of an earlier generation, whose grandchildren have prospered and moved to places of green lawns and swimming pools (and often gated communities, ghettoes surrounded by electric fences, like medieval castles).

Perhaps another book, written by another Orthodox priest (though before he was Orthodox), could give a hint of how to minister in such a situation. The book is A new way of living by Father Michael Harper, and describes how an Episcopalian parish in Houston, Texas developed urban Christian communities as members of the church began a reverse migration from the outer suburbs to the inner city to form urban communities. This too could be seen as relocating to the abandoned places of empire.

But if the Christian Church has physically abandoned geographical areas of cities, there is also a kind of cultural abandonment. A conservative blog for peace gives an example of reality TV shows, where sometimes the reality gets too real.

One of the first of these "reality" TV shows was Big Brother. There was a great deal of media hype about Big Brother before the first series here, and it struck me that the very concept was immoral. It was not "reality" -- it was a public experiment on live human beings, encouraging manipulation of others for public entertainment.

I'd like to have seen the result of introducing a hesychast monk into that setup.

But even if one had applied they would probably have been rejected, because the producers of such shows are not looking for people who reject the values of the virtual reality they are trying to create for voyeurist entertainment. But why not?

In the ancient world, the equivalent of reality TV was the gladiatorial games, where gladiators fought wild animals or each other for the entertainment of the public. But they didn't seem to object to having unarmed Christians facing the wild animals, on occasion.

Do reality TV shows create or reflect the values of our societies and cultures? And which aspects of culture constitute the abandoned places of empire?

Guitar Priest: Dorothy Sayers on Christian Work

Now this is worth a read: Guitar Priest: Dorothy Sayers on Christian Work

The only Christian work is good work done well. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery, or sewage-farming. As Jacques Maritain says: 'If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.'

When I was a student (more than 40 years ago) I used to attend St Alphege's Anglican Church in Pietermaritzburg, which at that time was a thriving Christian community. A new priest came to the parish, and complained that people were not doing enough "Christian work", meaning arranging flowers for the altar, baking cakes and so on. Several people objected, saying that for many people their Christian witness in the secular world of jobs, education and working for NGOs and even political parties was their Christian work.

Harry Potter as a Christian allegory - gullibility as a horcrux

Sue has posted some interesting thoughts about the Harry Potter series in Abstractions: Harry Potter as a Christian allegory.

While I don't think it is really accurate to describe the series as an allegory, there are some allegorical tendencies within it, for example the satire on educational bureaucracy I pointed out in an earlier post on Zemblanity in Education. But satire is not necessarily allegory.

One of the things in Sue's post can be accurately described as allegorical though -- (warning, spoilers ahead) -- when Sue describes the process by which a satirical post in The Onion was believed as literally true by some Christians in the USA, and was propagated as truth.

The way in which Harry Potter himself turns out to be a horcrux in which part of Voldemort's soul is hidden is perhaps an allegory of the way in which the gullibility of some Christians led them to believe and propagate an urban legend that was not merely untrue, but harmful.

I was able to observe this at first hand because someone sent the piece from The Onion to me by e-mail, with no indication of its source, and urged me to pass it on to many others in a kind of spam operation. I read it, and suspected that it was probably satire, as it was too over the top to be true. I did a web search for Harry Potter and The Onion, and bingo - there it was. I wrote to the person who had sent it to me, warning them that they had been duped into accepting a satire as true. So yes, the way Harry Potter became a horcrux that contained part of Voldemort's soul is indeed an allegory of the way in which the devil gets a foothold in the souls of Christians, and incites them to do his work by spreading malicious gossip in the belief that by so doing they are serving God.

Utopian communities - synchroblog

Utopia has been a recurring theme in literature since Thomas More, an English lawyer and statesman, wrote his book with that title in the early 16th century. He described an island with an almost perfect society of peace, justice and freedom.

Many have had such a vision of a perfect society, but acknowledge that no actual examples can be found in the everyday world. Utopian literature was revived in the 19th century, with Samuel Butler's Erewhon, a satire on nineteenth-century Britain, and Gilbert and Sullivan's Utopia Limited, in which the inhabitants of a remote island believe that the best way to achieve perfection is to turn their country into a joint stock company on the British model. I don't think it has been performed much since Margaret Thatcher came to power.

In the nineteenth century there were also a number of "utopian communities" -- groups of people who, while recognising that a perfect society could be found nowhere on earth, nevertheless tried to criate a microcosm that would reflect this vision.

In this sense, the Christian Church has always been utopian.

In the Christian vision, the perfect society is the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that is "not of this world" in the sense that there are no borders, nowhere you can show your passport to get in. But the Church itself is to be an ikon, an image of the Kingdom.

This applies even to the Christian family, as Father Alexander Schmemann points out in his book For the life of the world. The crowns in the Orthodox marriage service are symbols that the husband and wife are to be king and queen to each other in a little kingdom that reflects the heavenly kingdom. The vision may be lost, perhaps even in a single night. But the fact remains that every Christian family is a utopian community, trying to reflect in this world something that is not of this world.

Immigrants to new countries often gather for celebrations to remember their distant homeland. In many parts of the world one finds Caledonian Societies to gather emigrant Scots, Hellenic Communities for the Greek diaspora and so on. In a way Christian Churches are like this, in that Christians gather to remember a distant homeland. The difference is that those who gather to remember earthly homelands remember a place they have come from. Christians gather to remember a place they are going to.

As Peter Abelard put it once in a hymn:

Now in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high
We for that country must yearn and must sigh
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land
Through our long exile on Babylon's strand.

Some Christians, however, have found that the weekly gatherings of the Christian community are not enough. The "little kingdom" of the Christian family is not enough. They have looked for a more permanent expression. And so there have been monastic communities, which are, in the sense in which we are discussing it, utopian communities par excellence, trying to live the life of the heavenly kingdom on earth. As one monk put it, monasteries are the lungs of the church. In this world we breathe the polluted air of a broken and sinful world, but in the monasteries we breathe the pure air of heaven.

Christians are essentially eccentric, and Christian communities are eccentric communities. Eccentricity is another way of expressing the idea of utopia. It is having a different centre.

In his novel Perelandra C.S. Lewis conveyed the idea of eccentricity by describing eldila (angels) as appearing to people looking at them with earthly eyes as standing at a slant. When we stand, a line from our head through our feet, if extended, points to the gravitational centre of the earth. But the eldila are aligned on a different centre, and so to earth-bound mortals they appear slanted.

The "utopian" theme of this Synchroblog was inspired by an earlier post by John Morehead: Morehead's Musings: Searching for Utopia, and it has also been discussed a little in the Christianity and society discussion forum. John's post is a good introduction to the theme, and he includes some examples of utopian intentional communities.

Communes or intentional communities are not necessarily utopian. Many of them have quite mundane aims. To qualify as "utopian" a community needs to have an intention not merely to live together, but to create or express a way of life that is different from that of the society around them, or at least based on different values. A utopian community must be, in some sense, countercultural -- in other words, eccentric.

I've written about this before, then, as now, inspired by something that John Morehead wrote: Notes from underground: Morehead's Musings: Symbolic Countercultures and Rituals of Opposition, so I won't reiterate the whole thing here. The main point then was that the so called new monasticism needs to be supported by and linked to the old monasticism.

There have been many more dreams and visions of utopian communities than there have been actual examples. We need the dreams and visions, perhaps, but there is also the danger that Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns of in his book Life together:

Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream... He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and ernest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions the visionary ideal of a community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself. Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ long before we entered into common life with them, we enter that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients.

Other synchrobloggers:

• Nudity, Innocence, and Christian Distopia at Phil Wyman's Square No More
  
• Utopia Today: Living Above Consumerism at Be the Revolution
  
• Nowhere Will Be Here at Igneous Quill
  
• A This-Worldly Faith at Elizaphanian
  
• Bridging the Gap at Calacirian
  
• The Ostrich and the Utopian Myth at Decompressing Faith
  
• Being Content in the Present at One Hand Clapping
  
• Eternity in their Hearts by Tim Abbott
  
• Relationship - The catch-22 of the Internet Utopia at Jeremiah's Blog
  
• U-topia or My-topia? at On Earth as in Heaven
  
• A SecondLife Utopia at Mike's Musings
  
• Mrs. Brown and the Kingdom of God at Eternal Echoes
  
• John Morehead at John Morehead's Musings
  

Health and healing - private profit from public misery

Pickled Bushman reviews Michael Moore's latest documentary: Sicko (or American refugees in Cuba) showing the ravages wrought by the privatisation mania on the American health-care system, which has slipped from being among the best in the world to 32nd place, just above Slovenia.

The same thing has struck South Africa, since neoliberalism took off in the Reagan/Thatcher years.

Actually the problem is not so much privatisation as commercialisation. One of the things that caused a huge slide in South African health-care services was the nationalisation of all church hospitals in the "homelands" in 1973. This has been documented by Dr Darryl Hackland, who had been Medical Superintendent of Bethesda Hospital (Methodist) in Zululand, and after it was nationalised became a senior official in the KwaZulu Department of Health. The church hospitals were run by "private enterprise", but the difference was that they were not run for profit.

In the 1980s there was a reprivatisation of health services, but this did not take place in the poorer areas of the country, but in the rich ones. The government at the time (under PW Botha) followed the Reagan/Thatcher ideology, and encouraged the formation of commercial clinics, in which doctors owned shares. It was privatisation for profit.

Medical Aid schemes have been infected as well. They were formerly socialist bodies, owned and run by their members, as a form of mutual aid. Now many of them are owned by outside shareholders. They no longer speak of members, but "customers". They no longer provide health care, but "products". They advertise, and refer to themselves as "financial services providers". Beware of any "financial services provider" that tries to sell you a "product". Whenever anyone uses the term "product" for a service, financial or otherwise, it is a pretty sure indication that they are simply out to rip you off. They offer "rewards", like club memberships, and cards that give you discounts in stores -- but be sure of one thing, you are paying for these things, even if you don't use them, and what these frivolities mean is that you get less health care for your money, because your money is being wasted on advertising and promotion and putting money into the pockets of shareholders.

The ANC when it came to power in 1994 has basically continued the policies of the National Party under PW Botha. There have been ritual pronouncements to placate their alliance partners, like Cosatu, but basically nothing has changed.

One thing they could do, for a start, would be to set up a tax structure so that not-for-profit mutual Medical Aid schemes are not taxed, and that commercial ones, making profits for outside shareholders, and ones that run superfluous "incentive" schemes not related to their core business are also taxed. (The same should be done for mutual building societies and life assurance providers.)

Also, "faith-based" and other non-profit private health service providers should be encouraged in a similar way.

I can't speak for other faiths, but from a Christian point of view, Jesus sent out his disciples to preach and to heal, and said "Freely ye have received, freely give." Before 1973, when the provincial governments subsidised church hopspitals, they got a better service for their money than they did when the central government nationalised the services, and then later devolved them to the "homeland" governments. Why? Because Christian doctors and nurses went to work in those hospitals, not for the sake of financial gain, but because of a desire to obey the command of Jesus to "heal the sick". When the government took them over, they found it difficult to get staff willing to work in the mainly rural areas where the church hospitals were to be found, and resorted to using army conscript medical students. Secular doctors were out for money, and only wanted to work in the big cities, where they could specialise in the diseases of the rich.

Doctors in private practice did, of course, have to charge fees in order to make a living. Even healers have to eat. But when they worked on their own, or in small partnerships, they could treat the poor and needy for reduced fees, or even, in hard cases, waive the fees altogether. Where, however, they work for clinics run as for-profit companies, this is much more difficult when the fees are paid to the company, and every reduction of fees for poor patient means a reduced profit for the shareholders.

The Orthodox Church has several saints who were medical doctors, and known as "anargyri" (silverless ones), usually translated into English as "unmercentary doctors". Among them are three pairs of brothers called Cosmas and Damian, perhaps because the later ones consciously followed the example of the earlier ones.

Until now the ANC government has done little more than try to force mercenary doctors, clinics and medical aid scemes to serve the poor. But it might do better to encourage the unmercenary ones, for example by differential taxes, as suggested above.

George Bizos -- lawyer for social justice

On Youth Day last year, George Bizos, the human rights lawyer, was the main speaker at the Youth Day commemoration aranged by the Orthodox Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Now George Bizos has published a book about his life and struggles, and was interviewed on the radio yesterday. South African bloggers don't seem to have had much to say about him or his book, but I did find a mention on this blog, which apart from a couple of minor inaccuracies, is a very good article.

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