By and large British politicians have followed the advice that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s erstwhile spin doctor, had given his master: “We don’t do God.” Most British politicians, in contrast to their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic, used to keep their faith to themselves.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has just ignored Campbell’s advice. In an uncommon remark about what he believes, Cameron emphasised the importance of instructing children about the religious aspects of Easter.
He told BBC Radio Norfolk he wanted his children, Nancy, Arthur and Florence, to understand that the festival was more than just “chocolate eggs”.
In parenthesis, I note that this is very well spoken but at the same time ask if it is very well executed in the welfare and immigration policies adopted by his government. A number of Catholic bishops would definitively answer in the negative. But, I digress.
Then just a few days ago Cameron held a reception for Christian leaders to commemorate Easter. He does the same with leaders of other religions celebrating Eid, Diwali and Vaisakhi. This is how things should be even though Cameron says he is proud of being a Christian and speaks of Jesus as “our saviour”. During this reception, he shared with Christian leaders his ‘Easter reflection’. I was impressed by the fact that during his short welcoming address he used the word “ashamed” five times.
One usage is a personal reference. He feels ashamed that he is not a weekly participant at the morning sung Eucharist beautiful service in St Mary Abbots. The other four references have a more macro and cultural significance.
Twice he says that “we shouldn’t be ashamed to say… that we are a Christian country”. On the contrary, he says they should be proud.
After saying that “our religion is now the most persecuted religion around the world”, he added that one should not be ashamed of fighting persecution against Christians and other religious groups. (One now expects that Cameron backs words with action not only overseas but also in his own country.)
He also says that they (the Christian leaders and him) should not be ashamed of getting involved in more evangelism defined partly in secular terms as changing “people’s lives and make a difference and improve both the spiritual, physical and moral state of our country”.
Why should one feel obliged to say that one should not be ashamed unless there is a feeling that people feel one should be ashamed? Unfortunately, such a feeling does exist. In our contemporary culture, one finds oneself in many circles where people look down at those who take a Christian position. The culture contemporary to the early Christians tried to force on them a feeling of fear for being Christian. In contrast, our own contemporary culture tries to foist on us the feeling of shame on two fronts: you are outdated and you are irrelevant.
Christian positions are deemed to be passé by those who believe that humans are the measure of all things and espouse the secular dogma that reality is solely socially constructed with no reference to the nature of things. Body identity as given by nature is being questioned; the fundamentally natural definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman is challenged and ridiculed; the naturally proven genetic characteristics of the foetus and, later on, the embryo as the possessor of all that is needed to develop fully into a human being is ignored.
One of the latest jibes in this shaming strategy is that one does not qualify to be a European if one does not agree with gay marriage or gay adoption! Grow up or shut up is the affront reserved to people of faith.
The second front of the pincer attack is the accusation of irrelevance. This is often garbed in a diluted version of Christianity that is projected as being all things to all men and women. Easter, for example, is seen simply and solely as the embodiment of the belief that goodness can come out of suffering and that death is not final. This purely secular perspective does make it appealing to many but Easter is definitively much more than that! It is the unique event of Christ the Saviour that can only be grasped and lived in its entirety through faith.
Following this downgrading of the real meaning of Easter, secular philosophies project a roadmap that outlines the way how the Christian vision of future hope can be achieved without the Christian God. They state that it is, most of all, science together with technology that can help us create a humanly constructed utopia or, in Huxley’s terms, a brave new world. This Promethean belief promotes humans not only to be the measure of all things but also sees them as the doers of all things.
The fundamentally natural definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman is challenged and ridiculed
Humans’ ability to make a better world is unstoppable, they say. The Easter event is thus not considered to be the beginning of a new world; God is just a sop to a primitive mentality and religion a form or alienation.
Even a cursory look around us shows how this promised secular paradise turns sour as it leads to a subjectivist, utilitarian and relativistic meaning of reality. As Benedict XVI clearly explained on so many occasions, the dictatorship of relativism is no utopia.
Christians should not be intimidated by this dual attack of shaming and irrelevance. It is a pity that many in all level of the ecclesiastical domain have chosen to retreat to the safety of the sacristy than face the challenges of the agora.
As Easter helped the early Christians to confront fear, it will empower contemporary Christians to overcome these two negative feelings that others attempt to impose on them.
Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Salvadorian martyr, explains why this is so:
“Easter is a shout of victory! No one can extinguish that life that Christ resurrected. Not even death and hatred against Him and against his Church will be able to overcome it. He is the victor!”
Cameron was right to say that Easter is indeed not just the season for chocolate eggs.
PS: I wish my readers a Holy Easter.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt