AND ANOTHER THING
Whited sepulchres, spin-serpents, the world, the flesh and the Devil
PAUL JOHNSON
The Archbishop of Canterbury is so dis- mayed by his Church's public image, and his own, that he is to call in a 'high-powered publicity firm' to improve both, or so the newspapers say. I can think of few things more likely to damage the cause of religion. Note, to begin with, the secular calculation behind the decision. The Archbishop is not Proposing to make his Church more godly or himself more virtuous. He seeks merely to alter the outward appearance by applying Professional skills: another coat of pietistic paint, a re-gilding of the haloes. Was not this the custom of those whom Jesus called 'whited sepulchres'? One can imagine Caiaphas saying to his father-in-law, Annas, `That man from Nazareth damaged our rep- utation. Now he has been dealt with, would it not be prudent to carry through some ele- ments of refurbishment at the temple? A new high altar, perhaps?'
Then again, the kind of treatment the Archbishop thinks desirable is itself not only brutally secular but thoroughly iioChristian. Christianity is about truth, or it is nothing. St John's Gospel has Our Lord say, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.' Christ's message, St Paul insists, is 'the truth that sets you free'. There is nothing here about images or perceptions. The kind of firms the Archbishop has in mind are not, let us be frank, primarily concerned with truth. They say to those hiring them, 'If your Product is really as good as you say it is, you don't need us, old man.' Their object is not to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They employ their skills to Select and emphasise certain truths, and ignore or suppress others; they deal in near- truths, half-truths, hyperbole and embellish- ment. Their technique is not to lie — that would not work and the Advertising Stan- dards Authority might not permit it — but to deceive, in such a way as to make it hard to catch them out. There is dissimulation even in their duplicity.
Why should the Church need PR? The truth of Christianity is stupendous in its nakedness, overwhelming in its plain, awe- some impact on men and women, provided it be preached with conviction. It needs no shifty flakman or brazen drummer. It is an amazing fact that we are about to celebrate 2,000 years of a faith now shared by more than two billion people, which was founded by an unknown man of poor family who came from a much despised part of what was a backward province of the Roman empire. Jesus of Nazareth could read and write and he knew the scriptures. But he had no special training in evangelism, no resources whatever, and the men he called to follow him were illiterate fishermen or, like Matthew, from unpopular trades such as tax-gathering. The ablest of them, St Paul, was a tent-maker. Their leader was subjected to the most humiliating form of execution the empire could devise: total failure, as it seemed, of a pathetic, amateur, underfunded mission. Yet within a few decades it had set the world of antiquity ablaze, and its flames continue to flicker in the hearts of men and women across the world. How so? Might it not be that the truth Jesus Christ told, and which his fol- lowers spread, is so uncompromising in its rejection of the world's values, so unadorned in exalting the spirit above the flesh, as to have a mysterious and powerful appeal to large numbers of people, of both sexes and all ages and classes, of every race and from every part of the world and, most remarkably of all, of all periods from then until now, precisely because such people are made to see, by Christ's teaching in all its truthful simplicity, that the world is a fraud, and should be rejected?
We had an exhibition of that world, in all its glittering self-satisfaction, at Bucking- ham Palace last week, when the great and the good — or at any rate the high-placed and successful — congregated to pay homage to the Chinese communist dictator. They bowed and simpered, they raised their glasses to this evil little monster, because he represented the world's largest con- sumer market from which untold riches are to be made. It mattered little to them that he also represented a regime which, since it assumed power in 1949, has killed more than 60 million people, holds another 20 million in labour camps and political pris- ons, and is engaged in systematic Onocide of those within its empire who reject its val- ues. The occasion was about trade, money- making, filthy lucre. It was about exchanges of worldly goods, which in China's case' contain, almost invariably, an element of slave labour, for the country now has more slaves than any other regime in history, more perhaps than all previous slave-own- ing regimes put together. Here, indeed, is the world Christianity is bound to reject. Yet there was our Archbishop, sitting high up on the top table, bowing and toasting with the rest. I imagine him saying to the dictator, sitting next but one to him, '1 hear you have a bit of an image problem too.' Today provides excellent opportunities for Christian Churches to differentiate them- selves from the world and to emphasise their commitment to truth — for the present gov- ernment, elected with such high ideals, now reveals itself concerned solely with success in its most clayey form: the exercise of power, to reward its friends and paymasters and punish its enemies. And to perpetuate its power it conceals, distorts, twists or (to use its favourite euphemism) spins the truth. Scarcely a day goes by without a minister being caught out lying. The Chinese visit was an example of 'ethical foreign policy'. I am coming to believe that Labour's ideology is deceit, its god is guile, its ultimate ideal is the perfect lie. Here indeed is the world, the flesh and the Devil, huge and hideous for all to see, and for Christians to abhor. Yet it is precisely the presentational skills, the smoothness of the whitewash over the sepul- chral bones, that the Archbishop seems to admire and seeks to emulate.
Happily, there are many good Anglican parsons, Catholic priests and non-con- formist ministers who keep true Christiani- ty alive in parishes across the land. The whole world is pitted against them. They are ridiculed on television and in the movies. The press pays them attention only when they are in trouble. They are under- paid, often badly housed, overworked, bur- dened; expected on the one hand to suc- cour the countless failures of society, but faced, on the other, with empty pews which break their hearts. Their superiors often humiliate them by foolish words and acts they read about in the papers. They receive no encouragement whatever from the secu- lar world — quite the contrary. But they struggle on, praying they may keep their faith, hoping they may not despair, loving the poor who are the only ones to love them. It is good to think that their succes- sors will still be there at the end of the third millennium, when the last communist empire is as one with Nineveh and Tyre, and the Downing Street card-houses are dust beneath countless other archaeological layers of fraud and self-deception. Chris- tianity does not need a fork-tongued spin- serpent to survive. It has truth, the long-dis- tance runner of history.
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