Why so many BLM ultras are white - Spiked, July 3, 2020

Why so many BLM ultras are white

The race wars they are stoking won't blight their affluent neighbourhoods.

Patrick West


Many people have made the observation that most Black Lives Matter activists aren’t actually black. To judge by television coverage, photographs and YouTube videos, most BLM protesters indeed seem to be white, middle-class students. In a further paradox, it is becoming more evident by the day that many black people and ethnic minorities vehemently oppose BLM.

On Tuesday, the black comedian and actor Terry Crews, known to UK viewers from E4’s cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, warned that Black Lives Matter shouldn’t morph into ‘Black Lives Better’. The devout Christian tweeted: ‘If you are a child of God, you are my brother and sister. I have family of every race, creed and ideology.’ Crews was consequently subject to online denunciation, which is not surprising, as he was essentially saying that all lives mattered – a sentiment that infuriates BLM advocates.

Closer to home, this week also saw the mixed-race former footballer Karl Henry publicly call into question BLM UK. ‘I think the majority of the UK have now had enough of that organisation’, he tweeted. ‘Black people’s lives matter! The divisive #BlackLivesMatter organisation, however, DOES NOT!’

Another British mixed-race former sportsman, Matthew Syed of The Sunday Times, asked of BLM whether ‘toppling another statue’ will ‘help the black person cowering from gangs in a drug-infested neighbourhood, the graduate denied promotion because of unconscious bias, the child growing up without hope in a tower block?’.

While in Britain we have the brave Trevor Phillips, in Australia one of the best-known detractors of woke politics and BLM is the journalist and television presenter Rita Panahi, who this summer has described BLM as ‘anti-police, anti-white, anti-capitalist but also proudly neo-Marxist’.

America’s veteran conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza has said that ‘the left has deployed a paramilitary’ in militant anti-racist protesting. ‘It’s not just Antifa. It’s all the other groups: Refuse Fascism, Black Lives Matter, and on it goes… This is something that Mussolini had, the black shirts… A roving band of thugs that are protected by powerful people in Hollywood [and] the media.’

It’s not only conservative ethnic-minority voices who reject BLM. Last week Africa’s elder stateswoman, the politician and humanitarian Graça Machel, formerly of Mozambique’s freedom movement and widow of Nelson Mandela, criticised BLM’s tactic of pulling down statues of slave-owners. They should remain, to ‘tell generations to come, this is how it started, and this is how it never should continue to be’.

In Britain, Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor, has campaigned for years for explanatory plaques to accompany statues of slave traders. He believes toppling monuments will only erase the memory of their crimes against humanity: ‘You remove the evidence, you remove the deed.’ Indeed. Many black Americans have this summer come out in defence of the Emancipation Statue in Washington DC, paid for by freed slaves.

This paradox veers into genuine irony. Witness the spectacle of a white man attacking a black man for trying to remove BLM posters from a fence. Observe the white man scream at his uppity, negro inferior.

What’s behind such dissonance between whites who think they know best for blacks, and many blacks who disagree? Why are there black people proposing constructive ways of dealing with the past, but nihilist woke white protesters hellbent on destruction of statues, and capitalism itself, who offer no vision and no future?

It’s because for black people racism is a real-life everyday potential experience. It may not be as bad as times past, and race relations are worse in the US than the UK, but racism remains in black folk memory and its shadow is always there. Hence the real desire to educate and to offer positive solutions that encourage mutual understanding and erase superficial differences. Many black people are also more concerned about the present than the past: in 2018, 2,925 black people were murdered in the United States, 2,600 of that number by other blacks.

For Black Lives Matter – the very name epitomises its philosophy of division – it’s all a bit of a posture and a pastime. Racism rarely affects white liberal twentysomethings. But street protests do afford a feeling of righteousness, an opportunity to virtue-signal, to satiate that young man’s power-lust and feeling of importance – and to alleviate the boredom of lockdown. The white BLM protesters don’t think about the dangerous consequences of their actions or politics because they won’t be affected by them. The race wars that they are stoking won’t blight their affluent all-white neighbourhoods.

Black Lives Matter are dangerous narcissists whose driving force is self-aggrandisement. Let’s hope the tide really is turning against them.


There’s nothing racist about White Jesus

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has called for a review to decide which representations of Jesus should remain in Anglican cathedrals and churches, given that most of them portray Christ as white and north-European looking, whereas he was Middle Eastern.

This literal-mindedness is dubious – and for the church, dangerous. Christ is white in most churches because, before Windrush, so was England. Religious icons are always traditionally portrayed in accordance to the ethnicity and culture of worshippers, with Jesus being black in Sub-Saharan Africa, Filipino in the Philippines and resembling previous depictions of Zeus in Greece.

Most cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages, when most people didn’t even leave their hometown in their lifetimes let alone travel to the Middle East. There was very little comprehension of there being people who weren’t white.

The archbishop’s literal-mindedness sets a perilous precedent. If Jesus should be rendered ‘realistic’, should the Bible be rewritten to make it historically accurate?

I really wouldn’t recommend going down that path. The ‘virgin’ Mary was originally the ‘maid’ Mary, and Lazarus was returned from social ostracism, not brought back from the dead. Such are the legion translation mistakes from the Hebrew to the Greek.

The real reason there aren’t more women on Mock the Week

The female comic Katherine Ryan has attacked the gender tokenism on BBC panel show Mock the Week.

I can explain why the programme has always been dominated by men, despite efforts in recent years to introduce more gender balance. It’s because the format of the programme is competitive, and men are more competitive than women.

It’s also because on average men are funnier than women. As Camille Paglia famously argued, men are given to extremes: there are more men of genius for the same reason most serial killers and lunatics are male.

Comedy is fundamentally about cruelty or the distortion of reality: it appeals to the dark side of humanity found mostly in the male of the species.

Spiked, August 19, 2016

The age of belligerent victimhood
From BLM to feminism, too many want to play the victim.

Spiked November 20, 2015

'I stand with Paris, but...'
We must engage with the real motivation behind the Paris attacks.

Spiked, November 13, 2015

Blind altruists shall not inherit the earth
Teaching children to be discriminating is an important life lesson.

in The Catholic Herald, March 13, 2015

in The Catholic Herald, January 30, 2015

Does Ireland owe Oliver Cromwell an apology?

Cromwell was Framed: Ireland 1649

By Tom Reilly, Chronos, £14.99

Of Oliver Cromwell, Ireland’s pre-eminent historian Roy Foster once wrote: “Few men’s footprints have been so deeply imprinted upon Irish history and historiography.” It could be added, too, that no historical character has come to personify more English misrule and callousness in Ireland, not least within the nationalist narrative.

So it would take a brave soul to take to task the perception that Cromwell was villainy personified. It would be even braver for an Irishman to do so, let alone a native of Drogheda. But this has been the ambition of amateur historian Tom Reilly, who hails from the town that lives on in infamy, in which 3,000 men, women and children were butchered in 1649 at the behest of the future Lord Protector.

The fable of Drogheda, Reilly maintains, was created by Cromwell’s enemy propagandists seeking to “bind the various confederate/royalist factions together” and has been regurgitated over the centuries by Irish nationalists and republicans, and by the Church, each for their own means. Reilly dismisses the “non-primary, post-Restoration” sources of Church historians, with their “disreputable” motives and “baseless allegations”.

“To me, Cromwell was framed and I believe that this book proves it,” the author declares. “Therefore, I have a moral obligation, indeed I am duty-bound by history, to play my part in an attempt to overturn one of the greatest historical miscarriages of justice ever.” 

Although the author concedes it likely that parliamentary forces would have, and probably did, kill armed civilians, “no primary document whatsoever exists that provides details of the deaths of persons not at arms”. As a consequence, “we, the Irish nation, owe Cromwell an apology for destroying his reputation over the last 365 years”.

Reilly finds no recorded incident of strife between the military and civilian occupants of Drogheda in the two years preceding the 1649 slaughter. Rather, the New Model Army enjoyed “cordial relations with the civilian population of Drogheda”. 

He also notes that, while in 1641 there were 3,000 people living in the town, in 1659 that number had risen to 3,500. “If the civilian inhabitants had been practically wiped out, it is very unlikely that within a 10 year period the town’s population would have replenished itself.”

When Cromwell arrived in Ringsend, Co Dublin, on July 15 1649, he was “warmly welcomed by both the civilian and military populations of Dublin”. Cromwell was a fair fellow who had nothing against the Irish as a nation. 

On the contrary, on the march to Drogheda, when he discovered two of his men had stolen hens from an old woman, he had them hanged. “As for the people,” Cromwell once wrote, “what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach; but think it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suffer for the same.”

Nonetheless, Cromwell was a foe of the Catholic clergy, whom he blamed for stirring the impressionable natives into insurgency in 1641. It was the Catholic Church that was to blame for the “horrid massacres”, as Cromwell put it, of that year.

The author has certainly received much attention from compatriots over the years for his attempts to rehabilitate Cromwell. Yet his revisionism would have been even more contentious, say, 50 years ago, when the nationalist narrative and the Church were mostly immune to criticism. Indeed, his invective against the Catholic Church is far from daring. It’s quite in keeping with the anti-clerical mood that has become voguish in the past 20 years in Ireland.

It’s true that history is always moulded and distorted for contemporary purposes, not least in Ireland. And it’s always valuable – imperative, even – to question orthodoxies, as Reilly has sought to do. Yet his demographic study of Drogheda is dubious. In 1641, as he himself admits, Catholics outnumbered Protestants by five to one. In 1659, the undiminished population of the town was mostly Protestant. One can only assume that some ethnic cleansing and re-settlement occurred.

Cromwell was Framed can at times be tedious, pedantic and self-regarding, with much of it written in the first person. Reilly is also over-indulgent on his subject who, he concludes, “was tender towards children ... a family man who had a high moral threshold ... acutely aware of the folly that such action would be dastardly deeds that he clearly abhorred”.

Such an obsequious assessment of a man who “only” hated Catholics and killed armed civilians sails close to the kind of   “he loved his mum” hagiography beloved of people who write about East End gangsters. Cromwell might not have been the butcher and bogeyman of legend, but he was an anti-Catholic religious fundamentalist, nonetheless. Still, for those interested in the subject, and what really happened in 1649, Cromwell was Framed is worth a peek.

Patrick West

in The Catholic Herald, July 18, 2014

Even bishops are forgetting the community

Notebook, Patrick West

 

Whenever an Anglican bishop makes the headlines, I find it hard not to think of Dr Spacely-Trellis, the fictitious Bishop of Bevendon. The monstrous creation of the Daily Telegraph’s late Michael Wharton, he was the trendy, go-ahead cleric who wants to jettison such “outmoded” ideas as belief in the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, the Resurrection and so on.

 

The latest real-life candidate is the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev John Pritchard, who has called for an end to mandatory collective worship in schools. The 70-year-old legal requirement belongs more to the 1940s, he says, than to a 21st-century Britain in which Christianity is but one faith among many (and none). 

 

The comparison with Wharton’s grotesque is admittedly a little unfair. One of the Church of England’s greatest merits is that it’s never really been literal-minded. My father, for example, would always conscientiously go to St Giles-in-the-Fields in central London to sing hymns and hear sermons about the Somme, and he still enjoys Songs of Praise. But like many church-goers, he’s never been especially interested in the theological aspect of religion. And like many conservative Anglicans, he is suspicious of Evangelical "do-gooder” types.

 

To my father, being an Anglican and singing hymns is merely part of being an Englishman. And now that the Irish community in England has to all intents completely assimilated, a similar case could be made for the ritualistic, congregational, community-centred nature of English Catholicism.

 

In my mind, the real problem with religion, and indeed atheism, is when it forgets its communal role and starts to become too literal-minded. Witness the wilful ignorance of young earth creationists or bellicose homophobes who cherry pick Leviticus – or, even worse, intolerant Islamism. Richard Dawkins’s reported disapproval of telling children fairy tales is a milder version of this mindset, as is the Bishop of Oxford’s opinion on daily prayer in schools. Both the bishop and Dawkins overlook the role of communal ritual, religious narrative and England’s Christian heritage.

 

Far from creating imaginary divisions, daily acts of communal ritual bind people together. As Jonathan Sacks argued in his splendid 2009 book, The Homes We Build Together, the best way to bring people together is encourage them to do things together. This is the key to creating harmony in a multi-ethnic country such as ours – not to “respect” or “celebrate” difference, but rather to ignore difference.

 

Of course. a lot people do take their theology very seriously. But my hunch, as an ex-atheist, born-again agnostic, is that most Catholics and Anglicans go to church on a Sunday more for the ritual, the stories, the sense of community and the sheer mental escape, rather than for answers to the big questions. Even religious groups who aren’t big on theology, such as the Quakers, recognise the importance of communal ritual. 

I have a friend, who now works on the Guardian, whose Hindu parents came from India, and yet he attended a Quaker school in Reading. He’s an exemplar of how multicultural Britain is a success story when we don’t make a fuss about cultural difference, but instead concentrate on what we have in common. A basic Christian daily ritual offends only attention-seeking self-flaggellants.

 

This brings me to another fictitious cleric, Fr Dougal Maguire from Father Ted who, when asked his thoughts about religion, replied: “Ah, come on. You’re not meant to take it seriously.” Most of you wouldn’t agree, of course, but these words are worth thinking about the next time you’re at Mass: the very act of communal prayer might sometimes be as important as what is said during it.

in The Catholic Herald, July 6, 2012

Give me Opus Dei and Richard Dawkins any day, by Patrick West

The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith, by Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp, OUP, £16.99

One characteristic shared by fundamentalist believers and hardened atheists is a predilection for literal-mindedness. The former assert the literal truth of revealed holy texts, which the latter dismiss as stuff and nonsense easily refuted by science and philology. On the other hand, tacit ambiguity has been a constant among mainstream Christian believers, many of whom have tended not to regard the Bible as a historical text, but a holy book rich in metaphors, symbols and parables. Quarrels as to the exact nature of transubstantiation or the reality of miracles are testament to Christianity's long relationship with doubt.

This is particularly true among more liberal and progressive elements within the Christian fraternity. And herein lies the problem. Once a believer accepts the dubious historicity of and contradictory elements within the gospels, and attempts to square the New Testament with science, his faith invariably becomes emptied of theology. All that will remain in its place is the system of ethics upon which it is built. This is why you usually hear calls for "social justice" from progressive, borderline agnostic Christians - because they no longer believe so much in divine justice (think Richard Holloway, for example)

The authors here could be described as progressives, but they are adamant that Christianity should not be stripped of its spirituality. Indeed, in an otherwise polite tract they are derisive of liberal post-Christians, who "critical of inherited doctrines, cheerfully jettisoning convictions that once defined the core commitments of Christianity... subject their own proposals to rather less critical attention... Whatever is deemed worthy of preserving - an experience of 'new being', a commitment to environmental stewardship, or resistance to racial, sexual, or economic oppression - is often put forward with the same unwavering passion of religious conviction with which the traditional beliefs themselves were once advanced". 

The authors fully acknowledge the scientific and historic challenges to Christianity. The New Testament is an unreliable guide to faith, they write. The gospels, for instance, differ as to who was at Jesus's execution, what was said by Jesus and those around him and what happened afterwards. Evil will always be with us. God cannot stop bad things happening because that would break the laws of nature; if He violated natural law once he would be compelled forever to do so again. 

There are also contemporary, social challenges. They speak of the dilemma of pluralism "and the consequent difficult of asserting with any confidence that specifically Christian claims are actually true,". Being a Christian is often merely the result of being raised as one. They confess, almost ruefully, that their own theology has a "christological tinge", and if The Predicament of Belief wasn't mired with verbs in the conditional and subjunctive moods, one could conclude that the authors were certified cultural relativists.

Yet, they maintain, these obstacles need not lead us to refute the claims of Christianity. They "find the either/or challenge - the demand either to accept the biblical narratives at face value or to abandon distinctively Christian claims altogether - unhelpful". Their alternative would not demystify Christianity, and would acknowledge the "axiological and theoretical power" of religious accounts. Thus they call for "Christian minimalism": a pared-down belief system that asks us to adhere to fewer of the Church's claims, and of those that remain, with less certainty.

A cynic might call this watered-down Christianity. Invoking the "anthropic principle", the argument made by some scientists that the Universe is "fine-tuned" for life, they extrapolate that there must be an "intelligent designer", or what they call a "not-less-than-personal" cause to everything - something like a mind, which has intentions and desires, and seeks our well-being. What exactly this is, we will never know: "God is involved in every instance of human action and experience in ways that infinitely exceed our comprehension". But this doesn't really matter, because humans have the capacity to willingly suspend disbelief, to play make-believe. Of supernatural rituals they affirm: "one striking characteristic of adept practitioners is their ability to enter into such moments with great regularity and frequency, all the while preserving a tacit awareness that the claims in question may well not be literally true". Jesus of Nazareth retains "a uniquely authoritative role ... in determing the relation of that divine reality to human beings"; in other words, He matters because other people think so. And in any case, we need to believe in God: "the contemplation of our finite selves, in isolation from any broader communal or spiritual context, quickly becomes a source of nausea or claustrophobia, leading to despair or madness". This is a model example of confusing is with ought. 

The Predicament of Belief is written in a measured and courteous tone, and its exhortation to embrace truths contingently is superficially quite reasonable. Yet it seems simultaneously cynical and feeble. It asks that we believe in something because it's better than believing in nothing, that Christianity is probably true, and even if it's not, let's pretend it is anyway because it makes us happy. This is expedient Christianity. 

While too much conviction can be a dangerous thing, I actually prefer the certitudes of evangelical Protestants or Opus Dei, and judging by the former's ascendency in South America in the latter's packed seminaries in the United States, so do millions of others. Likewise, give me the clinical rationalism of Richard Dawkins any day. They adhere to beliefs because they think them to be true, not because they want them to be true.

from The Catholic Herald, January 20, 2012

God, the brain and the myth of 'rude atheism'

'War of the Worldviews', by Deepak Chopra & Leonard Mlodinow

In the 21st century’s “war” between religion and the New Atheists, both sides often like to protest that they are the underdog. The former point to aggressive secularism in the workplace and public sphere, while the latter lament the persistence of Christian Creationism, especially in the United States, and the appeal of violent Islamism. In a society that places a premium on victimhood this is not surprising, but is it true? And as they say, can the two sides ever be reconciled?
This series of dialogues between Deepak Chopra, “a world-renowned authority in the field of mind-body medicine”, and the theoretical physicist Professor Leonard Mlodinow, mercifully avoids repeating the cliche that “science explains the how and religion explains the why”. Instead, it is a measured exchange that seeks to address pithily all the big questions: how did the universe begin? Why is there something rather than nothing? Can there be a mind without a brain? And is God an illusion?
The authors’ central point of contention is the mind-body division, and if there really is one. This, it transpires, is the key to determining the meaning (or lack of it) of existence. If there is no “mind”, only brain activity, there is no soul, and therefore no God (as we know Him). Mlodinow, a materialist, doesn’t believe that there is a “ghost in the machine”, elaborating that neuroscientific experiments demonstrate that thoughts, feelings and sensations in subjects’ minds can all be traced to specific areas and activities in the brain. “Every day more evidence emerges to support the idea that mental experiences like beauty, love, hope, and pain are produced by the physical brain,” he writes.
This is most commonly seen in people who suffer damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, with a consequent loss of empathy and reduced revulsion to hurting others. Strokes also can alter personalities. Last November it was reported that after suffering a stroke while playing rugby, a 19-year-old man from South Wales recovered to find he had become gay. Other stroke victims have woken up with hitherto unknown artistic skills or speaking in a foreign accent, which adds weight to the argument that who you are is what you are made of: literally.
Mlodinow’s counterpart remains unconvinced, regarding the mind and brain as working in symbiosis. “Human consciousness created science, which ironically is now moving to exclude consciousness, its very creator!” he says. And he is even less keen on atheists than he is on scientists. “We live in a time of rude atheism,” writes Chopra, repeating a now familiar cry, that at the mere mention of God, your average atheist will become enraged, start shouting and throw furniture around the room. If you read the journalism of the late Christopher Hitchens or listen to Richard Dawkins on the radio, you could be forgiven for thinking this. But most atheists are not so intolerant (and thus not so vocal), and Dawkins the author of science books is far more measured than Dawkins the crabby media personality.
Dawkins has argued that the straw man of the “militant atheist” is the creation of those who believe it taboo to have their belief system questioned. And some people do not like having their feelings hurt. Rather than seeking to refute the argument that those who experience visions or mystical experiences may be suffering from brain lesions or epilepsy, Chopra decries such judgments as “foolish” and “insulting”. This is not a rational retort, but it is befitting of our culture in which being “offensive” has become a secular sin (witness the disproportionate opprobrium recently heaped upon footballers who’ve said stupid things), and being a “victim” bequeaths one secular sainthood. Chopra may bemoan the hegemony of science (“Now we are paying the price... Homo sapiens is in danger of extinction”), but Mlodinow replies similarly by complaining about how many Americans don’t believe in evolution, and that America would never elect an atheist president. “Science is not the lord of modern life Deepak imagines, but its under-appreciated servant”.
In an age of being inoffensive, Chopra’s perspective is appropriately “spiritual” and “non-dogmatic”. His response to dealing with life’s big questions is therapeutic: “I believe every home should have a nook devoted to divinity – a shrine or roses, or an altar of scented lavender. A shard of crystal would do, or a small bronze Buddha placed where the sun can warm it.” Ultimately, in a logical dead end, he announces: “Belief becomes knowledge that can be trusted.”
Urging us to be “open-minded”, not “empty-minded”, Mlodinow is more circumspect, asking what, if there is a designer, explains wisdom teeth and the appendix. There needn’t be Intelligent Design either, he says: beauty can emerge from randomness, in the form of rainbows and snowflakes. “Whereas Deepak and I both would like to see a better world, one in which people have transcended their worst impulses, as a scientist I cannot let the way I want the world to be drive my apprehension of the way the world is,” he writes.
This strikes me as a more honest appraisal of your average atheist, who is sceptical rather than cynical, a slightly gloomy borderline agnostic, and more likely to be a secularist than a dogmatist.
Despite the inconclusive nature of War of The Worldviews, the sober dialogue is refreshing, and far removed from the shrill certitudes held and insults often exchanged on this matter.

Patrick West is a music columnist for Spiked-online.com

in spiked, June 30, 2011

Father Kit: neither monster nor saint

It’s a shock to the system when you discover that an old family friend was once a ‘paedophile priest’.

From The Catholic Herald, September 24, 2010

This was a PR disaster for atheism

Full text of an article that appeared in The Catholic Herald

Well, I think we can safely say that the Pope's visit to Britain was something of a triumph. The vast numbers who came to greet the Holy Father dwarfed the coterie of angry atheists who came "to protest" him. And as much as I regret to admit it, the whole affair has proved to be something of a public relations disaster for atheism.

Some reasons for this are obvious. There was the shrill invective of the likes of Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling, who both continue to ignore the first rule of proselytising, in that you are not going to win friends or influence people if you call them horrid names all the time. There was also the idiotic innuendo about the Pope being a Nazi; calling someone a "Nazi" is invariably a substitute for seeking to refute their arguments. And it's juvenile. "You're just like Hitler!" is the kind of cry made by teenagers when told to tidy their bedrooms.

Moreover, there was the omnipresence of celebrities giving their two pence worth. You always know there is something suspect about a cause when it is endorsed by actors and pop stars.

The garrulous Stephen Fry was the best-known culprit, referring to the Vatican thus: "It is a rump accident of history that this place has an autonomous, or autocratic, absolute monarchy of one organisation". This line, that the Vatican is not a real country, and consequently that the Pope didn't merit a state visit, was bandied around routinely. But it ignores the fact that no states are essentially natural, and that the creation of the Vatican City in 1929 only gave back to the Holy See what had been taken away from it in 1870, when the Papal States were incorporated into a united Italy.

Then there was the singer Sinead O'Connor calling for the entire Catholic hierarchy to resign over child sex abuse. The comedian Stewart Lee, the fantasy writer Terry Pratchett and restaurant critic Jonathan Meades also voiced their opposition to the visit on the grounds of the Pope's views abortion, condoms, human rights... you know the rest.

People often bemoan our "celebrity culture" as manifest in tabloid newspapers and magazines such as "Hello!" and "OK!". We are told that it is vacuous, and resembles a kind of ersatz religion. I don't think in itself this is a bad thing. People need their circuses as well as their bread. And it is not necessarily a new thing. People gossiped as much about Nelson's affair with Lady Hamilton and George IV's disastrous marriage to Caroline of Brunswick as much as they discussed their roles as statesmen. In his day Joshua Reynolds was as much a celebrity as he was a painter.

What is novel and objectionable, roughly since Jane Fonda's opinions on the Vietnam War were given publicity, is the notion that we should take seriously the opinions of performers. After all, actors are, literally, professional liars: they earn their living by pretending to be someone they are not. Comedians and fiction writers are by definition fantasists. These people shouldn't be allowed to vote, let alone be indulged by the media so generously.

I had hoped the marvellous 2004 film "Team America: World Police" had put an end to all this nonsense. The movie lampooned the self-importance of actors and their political opinions, featuring marionettes representing the likes of George Clooney, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, all parroting left-liberal, anti-American dogma. It featured a grotesque representation of the film maker Michael Moore, whose rampant egomania was not too far removed from the real thing. In it we had Penn's character declare: "Last year I went to Iraq. Before Team America showed up, it was a happy place. They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles".

It was not a particularly partisan film. It also satirised America's aggressive and reckless foreign policy (all the best satire targets both the Left and the Right, from Jonathan Swift to Monty Python.) "Team America"'s essential message was that the US was wrong to invade Iraq, yet it was equally wrong for us to listen to the opinion of Hollywood stars. It should be mandatory viewing for anyone who assumes that people who appears on television are automatically conferred special wisdom as a consequence. We should pay no more attention to Stephen Fry's views on Catholicism than Mel Gibson's pseudo-Catholic reflections.

Ultimately, the Pope's visit was a triumph because it demonstrates that people full of resentment, self-pity and spite are unappealing, where as Benedict, who exuded humility and grace, put a smile on millions of faces. You don't have to be religious to recognise this basic lesson in human nature: be nice and people will like you.

in The Times Online, August 26, 2010

Articles of Faith: Ireland and The Angelus

Full text of an article that appeared thetimes.co.uk/articlesoffaith

The Republic of Ireland's transformation from a predominately Roman Catholic country into a broadly agnostic and multi-religious one has been well-documented in recent years. This, however, has not been to the liking of the many practising Catholics, who suspect this transition has been exaggerated, and who also feel secularists have been overbearing in their crusade to purge Ireland of the vestiges of its religious past and present. A microcosm of this debate can be witnessed in the quarrel about the existence of The Angelus on radio and television.

Predominately a Catholic devotion, The Angelus is broadcast at noon and 6pm daily on Raidio Teilifis Eireann's (RTE) flagship television and radio stations. Consisting of a bell chiming languorously, and for decades accompanied by Catholic imagery, The Angelus celebrates 60 years on RTE this month. And the debate about its place on a publicly-owned broadcaster is almost as old as the broadcast itself.

Its existence continues to irk secularists who perceive it as an anathema and anachronism, especially as RTE is state-funded; it vexes Ireland's campaigning atheists much for the same reasons BBC Radio 4's Thought For The Day antagonises Britain's. Michael Nugent, chairman of Atheist Ireland, believes that The Angelus is little more than a free advert for the Church. "If RTE was to broadcast a minute of atheist propaganda at prime time every day, most people would intuitively realise that this would be inappropriate," Nugent asserted last week. "In a religious state, the state broadcasting system would be promoting religion. In an atheist state, the state broadcasting system would be promoting atheism. In a secular state, it would do neither".

Former Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble once quipped that Southern Ireland was the only country in Europe in which the six o'clock news began at one minute past the hour. Yet the vitriol levelled at The Angelus has become more acute recently as Ireland has become less religiously observant - and certainly as attacks on the Church itself have become commonplace. Revelations of child abuse by the clergy have persisted here since the early-1990s and the country continues to have chronic episodes of anti-clericalism.

RTE has sought to ameliorate objections to The Angelus by making it more "inclusive". Its television version was rebranded last September so that traditional images of old master paintings and of the Virgin Mary were replaced by "visual reflections" - featuring among others, a working fisherman, a grieving mother and Zambian office workers - designed, according to RTE religious programmes editor Roger Childs, to take time out from "the weariness, the fever and the fret" of contemporary life. "With this new series of The Angelus we are seeking to reflect modern Ireland while still retaining the integrity of the original broadcast some 49 years ago."

This has riled secularists further. "Recent attempts to soften its impact, by illustrating it with nonreligious images and rebranding it as a pause for reflection, simply make it worse," writes Nugent. "This suggests that people of all religions and none can unite under a Roman Catholic call to prayer." The Catholic community seems to have accepted the reinvention - which has seemingly reinterpreted a religious call to prayer as an ersatz television advert for bubble bath lotion - grudgingly.

If, however, the new incarnation of The Angelus seeks to reflect modern Ireland, so does the discourse employed by its detractors. I caught a debate on a Dublin radio station last week in which the claim was made that it is "offensive" to agnostics, atheists and those of other faiths. The accusation that it is "offensive" is a common one, and indicates that many who would otherwise call themselves children of the Enlightenment are just as guilty of turning the political into the personal, of appealing to emotion not reason, of employing the language of victimhood. "I find that offensive" is code for "you can't say that", a censorious plea unbefitting for those who often cite Voltaire with such reverence. Seeking to abolish something because it hurts your feelings, or because you find it aesthetically displeasing, is a profoundly irrational argument.

What is more, as with comparable debates over race, religion, culture and ethnicity in Britain, those deemed to feel "offence" in these matters often feel nothing of the sort. The Clonskeagh Mosque in Dublin, the Church of Ireland broadcast committee and the outgoing Chief Rabbi have voiced their support for The Angelus's continuation on RTE. Ali Selim, based at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland, Dublin, told the BBC: "We see it as something that belongs to people of another faith," remarked Selim, who arrived in Ireland from Egypt in 1999. "If it is exclusive for Catholics, then what's wrong with that? Muslims have their prayer call and it is exclusive for them."

"The secularists pretend that Protestants, Muslims, Jews find The Angelus offensive. When you actually ask them they say 'not me'," David Quinn, former editor of the Irish Catholic and now head of the Iona Institute, told me. The campaign to seek its abolition, he says, is "equivalent to having a guest in your house and taking down every picture unless you offend them."

As it transpired, protests against The Angelus this year have been pianissimo, and I predict that it will be on the Irish airwaves for many years to come. It will be for the same reason that many pillar boxes here still bear the monograms of British monarchs, or that you can still find The Royal Irish Academy and Royal Dublin Society in a republic that hasn't had a monarch since 1948. The Republic of Ireland might be a post-Catholic, and post-colonial, country, but this doesn't mean everyone wants to eradicate its culture and history in a pique of literal-mindedness.

The Angelus is comparable to the 1701 Act of Settlement prohibiting Catholics from the English throne: logically indefensible, but in the wider scheme of things, a trifling and harmless anachronism. Militant secularists could well use a dose of common sense sometimes, and certainly stop getting things out of proportion.

in spiked, August 20, 2010

Where else could you get a minute’s religious devotion and a show in which contestants cook their own takeaways?

Welcome to the wacky world of Irish TV

In Culture Wars, August 19, 2010

The internet: made for Islam?

in spiked March 13, 2010

Going all Jesus freaky over the solar system

Professor Brian Cox is an engaging guide to the wonders of space. But he might be just a bit toowide-eyed.

in The Times Online, December 30, 2009

Catholic education: a church divided