Clergyman faces inquiry for ‘Sir Tom cult’ remarks

[Onholiday(somemightsay)]

Have we reached a point in society where we see racism when it isn’t there?

I think over the summer last year, it got to a point where people were accused of being racists, not for saying or doing something actually racist, but for saying they didn’t think something was racist.

Now we have this, this week, a national hero, the most humble and unassuming guy possible, a guy who fought against the most racist state in living memory in Europe, a guy who wanted to do a fundraiser, without expecting it to be £1000, never mind what it did, a man that has the support of everyone in Britain, save a few trolls, a man that received donations from 160+ countries, his support being labelled as not only a cult but a “white nationalist cult”.

We have seen it on this forum somewhat, within minutes of the laughable
Handforth Council video going up, someone was moaning about how white everyone is in the video.

Is this the new issue? Will the so-called “anti racists” make sure we will never let go of racism, as they’ll find it everywhere and make a point of it?

Is the national response to Captain Tom “white nationalist”?

Personally, as someone who is Church of England, I do not want this clergyman representing my church.

Clergyman Rev Jarel Robinson-Brown faces inquiry for ‘Sir Tom cult’ remarks

A clergyman has been condemned by colleagues and faces a Church of England investigation after describing efforts to commemorate Captain Sir Tom Moore as a “cul

www.thetimes.co.uk

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Apologies if I am being slow on the uptake, is the accusation that should Captain Tom have been black that we wouldn't have applauded his life and achievements?

Didn't realise you were a man of faith @Ban-jani.............

 

[Ban-jani]

Apologies if I am being slow on the uptake, is the accusation that should Captain Tom have been black that we wouldn't have applauded his life and achievements?

Didn't realise you were a man of faith @Ban-jani.............

I don’t think it’s directed at Tom himself but apparently those celebrating him are white nationalists.

I think “the movement” have become a parody of themselves.

 

[Ban-jani]

Queer theology is also mentioned by Robinson-Brown. Unfortunately, this is not something that I know all that much about. Presumably it is some kind of extension of the theology of liberation to those who have been discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. My guess would be that this theology takes its inspiration partly from philosophers like Foucault.

I'm not too confident that I understand him all that well but Michel Foucault was a French philosopher who built his philosophy around the idea that ‘knowledge is power’. If you reject the idea that there is any such thing as absolute truth, Foucault thought that all you would then be left with is what most people in a society at any one time decide is true. In other words, consensus dictates the moral agenda when it comes to what is normal and abnormal, natural and unnatural as far as human behaviour is concerned.

From his study of history and , in particular, the history of sexuality, Foucault found that what was regarded as perverted sexuality varied according to time and place, depending on who was in charge and got to decide on this. So Foucault was an ethical relativist in this respect. For example, not so long ago, the power and influence of the Christian church was sufficient to ensure that homosexuality was regarded as unnatural , while more recently, psychologists like Freud and psychiatrists have been regarded as experts when it comes to deciding what is and what is not morally acceptable sexual behaviour. In particular, Foucault thought that all attempts to classify human sexuality in this way were misplaced and dangerous because they are designed to get people to conform to the moral standards of the most powerful and marginalise those who fall into the abnormal category. Foucault believed that we should not allow our sexual behaviour to be dictated by what he referred to as these dominant ‘discourses’. Foucault’s ideas have been developed by his followers into what is sometimes called ‘queer theory’, where the word ‘queer’ is intentionally used to question existing fixed views of sexuality.

One person who I do know a bit about is the Catholic theologian John Boswell. I will therefore end this series of posts with a quick summary of his research, as he might also be an influence on contemporary Queer Theology.

Boswell was a professor at Yale University, a remarkable scholar who read or spoke seventeen languages. Boswell was also openly gay and therefore understandably concerned about the wider issue of religion and homosexuality, and specifically the historical treatment of homosexuality within the Christian faith.

Boswell therefore deployed his linguistic skills to produce two controversial books. In the first of these, the 1980 American Book Award-winning Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, he challenged the traditional readings of Old and New Testament passages that are typically invoked to demonstrate that homosexual behaviour is sinful and proscribed. Some of his alternative interpretations of these passages have accordingly been incorporated into these notes e.g. see the discussion of Leviticus above.

Here’s a little extract from the book to give a sense of the line he takes :

‘In sum, there is only one place in the writings which eventually became the Christian Bible where homosexual relations per se are clearly prohibited – Leviticus – and the context in which this prohibition occurred rendered it inapplicable to the Christian community, at least as moral law. It is almost never cited as grounds for objection to homosexual acts.

The notion that Genesis 19 – the account of Sodom’s destruction – condemned homosexual relations was the result of myths popularized during the early centuries of the Christian era but not universally accepted until much later and only erratically invoked in discussions of the morality of gay sexuality. Many patristic authors concluded that the point of the story was to condemn inhospitality to strangers; others understood it to condemn rape;most interpreted it in broadly allegorical terms, only tangentially related to Christianity.

There was no word in classical Greek for ‘homosexual’, and there is no evidence, linguistic or historical, to suggest that either the kadeshim of the Old Testament or the arsenokoitai of the New were gay people or particularly given to homosexual practices. On the contrary, it is clear that these words merely designated types of prostitutes: in the case of the former, those associated with pagan temples; in that of the latter, active (as opposed to passive) male prostitutes servicing either sex.’

Boswell also argued that the Roman Catholic Church had not always been hostile to gay people, and until the 12th century, had regarded homosexuality with considerable tolerance with some prominent Christians even expressing the love between men through the medium of poetry. In a later publication, Boswell’s primary argument was that throughout much of Medieval Christian Europe, unions between figures of the same sex and gender were socially acceptable and he claims to have discovered a liturgical manuscript that appears to describe a ceremony for sacramental union between two men.

Given ongoing opposition to same-sex marriage within some denominations of the Christian Church, it is perhaps to be regretted that Boswell’s thesis – controversial and well-known in its time – does not receive much attention these days.

So there you go. Make of all this what you will.

Good posts as always mate, the truth is, as often is, in the middle when it comes to homosexuality and the church.

One side claims Christianity hates gays, the other says it should get involved in the gay rights movement.

Neither are true and any clergyman on a LGBT parade is lost.

 

[ZenHalfTimeCrock]

Have we reached a point in society where we see racism when it isn’t there?

In this instance, I think the answer might be 'yes'.

Those who remember Mary Whitehouse may recall that she was an ardent critic of the BBC and their role and that of the wider media in helping to create 'the permissive society'.

But one person I knew back then described her as having what he called 'the filthiest mind in Britain' because she was seeing it everywhere.

Maybe a downside of Identity Politics, however well-intentioned it may be when it is invoked to oppose discrimination, is that it can sometimes have a similarly detrimental effect.

Having said that, click-bait media, by often focusing on radical perspectives rather than more mainstream ones, can also do this.

In his excellent Judging Religion: A Dialogue for Our Time, John Holroyd has this to say:

'A lack of knowledge about religious organisations, structures and influence means that journalists all too often fail to identify the right representatives so as to shine light on an issue, beyond highlighting controversy....We might... consider the interviewing of Anjem Choudhary by Channel 4 News and on BBC2's evening news programme Newsnight about the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013. Choudhary is a sufficiently unrepresentative Muslim voice in the UK that there is good reason to ask why he was given the oxygen of publicity in relation to an audience that is not necessarily aware of how unrepresentative he is.'

Same possibly applies to Robinson-Brown. In my longer posts on this thread I have attempted to show that he is no 'crackpot'. But I wouldn't say that he is representative of what most CofE members think about racism and clapping for Captain Tom.

So maybe the BBC was right not to bother mentioning him.

 

[Onholiday(somemightsay)]

I don’t think it’s directed at Tom himself but apparently those celebrating him are white nationalists.

I think “the movement” have become a parody of themselves.

Then we won't be able to celebrate anything or anyone's achievements as there will always be someone with unsavoury views that also celebrates it / manipulates it to their own advantage.

Great......

 

[stonerblue]

I'm more concerned by the other nonsense this guy spouts every day for his job.

 

[ZenHalfTimeCrock]

Oh, I agree, but this sort of idiocy has been replicated by the Top Dogs
in the church, and it's another nail in the coffin.

Sorry but when someone like Pope Francis speaks out against the excesses of capitalism, the sort that produced the 2008 crash and needless austerity economics, even as a non-Christian he gets my attention.

In his global history of ethics The Quest for a Moral Compass, Kenan Malik also makes this point:

‘By 2008…the possibility of change, at least in the way that Marx would have understood it had become negligibly small. The depth of the economic crisis led to talk of ‘a crisis of capitalism’. And yet there was no political challenge to capitalism. Workers organisations had been destroyed, the left had imploded, as had the idea that there could be an alternative to the market system. The resurrection of Marx challenged none of this. Those who turn to Marx these days look upon him not as a prophet of capitalism’s demise but as a poet of its moral corruption.’

Personally, I am therefore quite happy when senior figures in the CofE and the wider Christian church speak out against increasing social inequality and injustice, as Justin Welby did when it came to pay-day lending companies like Wonga, and as others have done about food banks. Somebody needs to.

Additionally, I do sometimes wonder how anyone who votes Conservative can possibly think of themselves as being Christian, as there is simply is no way that a capitalist outlook can be derived from the gospels.

This is because Acts 2v43-45 is absolutely clear about this. The passage says of the early Christians that ‘All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all as any had need’, a practice echoed in the story of the Anointing at Bethany, a pericope found in all four gospels.

Biblical passages like this, which emphasise the virtue of charity, suggest that possessions are gifts from God that should be shared, according to the principle of koinonia or ‘things held in common’.

This explains theologian D. Stephen Long's conclusion (see his OUP introductory guide to Christian Ethics) that, “ ‘Socialism’ was Christian before it was made ‘scientific’ and was fundamentally distorted by Marx”?

Michael Moore also conveys the same point rather amusingly in this clip from Capitalism: A Love Story.

 

[Ban-jani]

I'm more concerned by the other nonsense this guy spouts every day for his job.

You would be you satanist ;-)

 

[Ban-jani]

Then we won't be able to celebrate anything or anyone's achievements as there will always be someone with unsavoury views that also celebrates it / manipulates it to their own advantage.

Great......

Yep.

I was talking to my nan around the time he did his walk, on the phone, and she was telling me how great it was, what he was doing.

If only the Nuremberg trials were still active and I could send her there.

 

[BobKowalski]

Yep.

I was talking to my nan around the time he did his walk, on the phone, and she was telling me how great it was, what he was doing.

If only the Nuremberg trials were still active and I could send her there.

Bit harsh...