Spong and British politics
Leo Abse
'My Christian ideals are that I'm proud to be British and white,' Thus last week came the challenge from a chaplain at Brixton prison to his Bishop who had insisted membership of the National Front was incompatible with Christian principles. Is the Reverend Spong, fresh from Rhodesia, barmy and Dr Stockwood civilised, or is the clash of view an ugly echo of the basic conflict within OUT Judaic-Christian culture, between the exclusive and the universalist?
The devil may quote Scripture for his purpose and, if he is not so dotty as his clerical opponents allege, so could the Reverend Spong. The story, after all, begins with Noah: and the tale, like all racial justifications, has strong sexual overtones. Ham and his descendants, destined to be black as sin, were cursed for ever, doomed to be 'a servant of servants': unlike Japhet, the true Britishers' good ancestor, the bad brother Ham had mocked at his father's nakedness as Noah lay impotent in a drunken stupor.
This Jewish myth of the origin of the divisions among the peoples of the world has indeed a sinister vitality: and has been accepted with a terrifying literalness by the Bible-reading Protestant. From the Biblebelt of USA to the Dutch Reformed Church's bastions in South Africa, the theological justifications for White supremacy have shored up the ruling groups. In recent times only in Catholic countries has the Christian leadership distanced their flock from the particularist scheme running through the Old Testament: the Catholic Church reserved its hostility for the Jew, but that was primarily because of their beliefs and not their race. The Catholic-dominated countries, unlike. Protestant lands, having avoided the ultimate insult to the black and coloured peoples of excluding them from ham sapiens by an enforced taboo against miscegenation, find that the collapse of empire and the revolutionary mood of the Third World have given them elbow room and new opportunities: the Catholic Church's expressed hostility to the conduct of Smith's Rhodesian government may rouse the Conservative party conference to fury, but it finds a claim throughout Black Africa. But simple Spong belongs to the Church of England: cradled within a British empire where his traditional Protestant ethic remained unsullied, he has now returned to Britain to find that his Bishops are belatedly preaching that all men, including blacks, are brothers of Christ. Understandably he feels betrayed — 'I am appalled', he despairs, 'by what has happened to the country of my birth.'
This emphasis on 'birth', their own and, even more, others', is a prurient preoccupation to be noticed in not a few who, like Enoch Powell, advertise their commitment to Christianity while subverting healthy race relations: it is a puritanical syndrome and one of the less benign aspects which Protestantism has contributed to our weal. Excessive preoccupation with the births of immigrants' families as compared with white births, barely masks fear of the immigrants' capacity for copulation.
It is ironic that St Paul, the most cosmopolitan of Jews, who flayed the narrowness and exclusiveness of his own firstcentury community, should, by his fierce antagonism to sexuality, have provided to those Christians, ill at ease with their own sensuality, the desperately needed corroboration for their own xenophobia: now such soldiers of Christ, while lying sleepless fantasising on the procreative activities of blacks, can compose their Armageddon speeches, confident that their evil words have a divine sanction. In a television study in which his wife and daughter participated, Powell once insensitively declared his wish to be a monk: men more confident of and comfortable in their sexuality do not so yearn to escape to celibacy. Yet they can ease their agony by condemning the lovemaking of others and, in particular, that of potent blacks: for sin is black, and sex is black and dirty, and their fears of the dark passions are the precursors to their fears of and antagonisms toward the dark man.
Christian insistence on the dichotomy between body and soul can lead to strange intellectual perversions. A terrible price can be paid for an implicit devaluation or repudiation of the flesh and the conjunction of a claimed Christianity and racialism, as a visit to a pub or factory floor confirms, is unhappily not confined to idiosyncratic clerics or to suburban Messiahs in the Commons.
But if repressed sex will out, albeit in ugly racialist doctrine, so will disavowed aggres sion. The pacifism of Christianity can place unrealistic demands on Man: to demand that one should do unto others as they do unto you is a tolerable request but to enjoin that one must love your enemy, or even to love others as yourself, is too severe a mor tification of our nature. In any event, a love that does not discriminate forfeits part of its own value by doing an injustice to its own object: not all men are worthy of love, and it is an affectation to claim that they are. We can no more annihilate our aggression than we can rid ourselves of the toxic waste of a fast-breeder reactor. The buried aggression seeps through: and so we have the Church Militant. The pacifism of Christianity unhappily leads not to the New Jerusalem but to Belfast. And in the environment of Ulster the Reverend Ian Paisley and Enoch Powell can in their pulpits preach doctrines which guarantee the continuation of the admixture of race and religion which is destroying the province.
The danger of their doctrines is, of course, their terrible exclusiveness. They are envious of the claims of the chosen people whose Book they read, and overcome their jealousy by usurping the Jews and either explicitly or gnomically present themselves as the new elect, undeterred by the eatastophe that the Jews, by hubris, brought down upon themselves. Their creeds, like those of the Reverend Spongs of this world, have a long and sometimes ugly tradition: the ideal of the superior Holy People, the true Israel, separate, scrupulously protecting its identity through adherence to the Law, always brought with it the corollary of intolerance to foreigners and prohibitions against marrying out of the community. The Nehemiahs and Ezras of Judaic literature are the source books of our contemporary chauvinistic Christian preachers and politicians.
Fortunately, however, there are alternative Judaic—Christian traditions which can be extrapolated: the wondrous articulations by the unknown second Isaiah of the implications of monotheistic faith, with all the consequent universalism he expounds, and with all the emphasis upon the salvation of all the nations, have never had a greater urgency than today. In a few weeks the new Parliamentary session will commence and, yet again, the exclusives and the universalists will be embroiled in battle. The spurious ethnocentricity concealed under the claim for administrative decentralisation will emerge in two devolution bills: and the sick dynamic behind the opposition to the Direct Elections to Europe bill will be seen to be a selfregarding nationalism. The racialist Reverend Spong is small fry, but the mood he brings will invade the House. It remains to be seen whether the Commons will vote for the racialists, or for the human race.
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