Je Suis Charlie: thinking and praying in the shadow of a massacre

As I write this, a vast crowd is gathering in Paris in a defiant cry for freedom and unity following last week's terrible massacres. Many world leaders are joining them, among them David Cameron. I wish I could be there too. Yet I am there, wholeheartedly, in spirit, in imagination, in sympathy, in everything except body.

Much has been written about these events and their aftermath. The Twitter hashtag #jesuischarlie has trended beyond all expectation. I have added to the volume of tweets expressing sorrow, prayers, outrage, and condemnation. Above all I have wanted to join the worldwide chorus of Non!, the refusal to cave in before the fear violence is meant to evoke. Bombs and guns will never, ever, intimidate the pen. Not in any society that treasures democracy and is pledged to live by it. 

What have been my thoughts in the past few days? They have swung this way and that, I admit it: when events are so wicked, it can take time for our initial responses to stabilise. At first I entertained the notion that when religion is mocked or insulted, as in the long tradition of satire in which Charlie Hebdo stands, we should not be surprised if its committed practitioners react violently. But that's the first step on the dangerous path where understanding an evil can veer into subtly shifting responsibility for it. We can start to think that when people say certain things or draw certain pictures, they should expect a retaliation. So while we are appalled, we toy with the thought that they partly brought it on themselves: whether through malice, unwisdom or just carelessness, they were responsible. But this is absolutely how not to see it. Responsibility for this atrocity lies with those who pulled the trigger - with them alone. 

What they did was an act of hatred of the freedoms our democracy stands for. We need to calibrate those freedoms. In any society, rights are not absolute. They have to be negotiated and consented to. Freedom of speech, precisely because of the power it gives, has to be handled responsibly. Paddy Ashdown tweeted last week: 'Some say that because you can say something, it doesn't mean you should. But free speech means that because you shouldn't say something, it doesn't mean you can't.' To put it that way round is clarifying. There are things I shouldn't say or write; if possible, I shouldn't even entertain the thought behind them. Not because I am not free to, or am afraid to, but because it erodes the value of another human being, damages people, or is exploitative or hurtful or just plain rude. That is a judgment everyone must make. And within the boundaries of what is lawful, we should expect a huge range of opinion as to what is or is not responsible in an environment where so many freedoms are given us. Charlie Hebdo is not everyone's cup of tea. But however people use these freedoms, and even if they abuse them, violence is never the answer. 

Voltaire has predictably been much quoted: 'I disagree with what you say, but shall defend to the death your right to say it'. It's hard to improve on that. I guess that saying that makes me what I have realised in a new way I am: a citizen of modernity, a child of the Enlightenment. The assault on Charlie Hebdo was a clear attack on the values of the Enlightenment at the very heart of its French homeland. Freedom to speak, equality before the law, toleration of dissent, all this was in the sights of the Islamists as they named their victims and gunned them down. They did what they did not out of reverence for truth and justice on behalf of the Prophet. It was an act of naked fear. 

To be a post-Enlightenment society means standing for the belief that the tyranny of ideas, any ideas, even the best, can never belong in a civilised society, let alone the distorted and debased doctrines of radical Islam or other extreme fundamentalisms. The principle of laïcité lies at the heart of the secular French Republic. That clear separation of the state from religious belief and practice is the direct heir of Enlightenment thinking. It's not that religion is to be repressed, but that everyone should be allowed to practise it according to their conviction in an environment of toleration. Or not, as the case may be. It's important for people of faith to understand that liberal secularism, so hated by some strands of Christianity, is not the tyrannous proscription of faith but the guarantor of a space in which it can find its free expression. At its best, it is the ally of good religion, not its enemy.

This much has become clearer to me in the past few days: that we must speak and act not out of fear or hatred but out of the love of truth. Yes, the Enlightenment itself did not always live up to its own best vision of a civilised society: witness the Terror that followed the French Revolution. But just as in Christianity and Islam, we need to rise to the highest aspiration of a noble movement, not the corrupted versions certain periods of history bear witness to. And the Enlightenment has given us gifts we should celebrate and be profoundly thankful for. It's arguable that it could only have happened in a Christian environment with its respect for the individual, for personal freedom and for the pursuit of truth. 

The preacher in the Cathedral today got it right. He said that he certainly did not like it when his Lord was maligned or mocked or his name used as a swear word. It is hurtful and grievous. Yet nothing anyone can say or do to Jesus Christ today can go beyond what he has already suffered in his passion and crucifixion. He stands before us as the Lord of truth and love. And, as the New Testament tells us, he did not resort to retaliation when he was ridiculed and insulted. 'When he was abused, he did not abuse in return.' 

Islam honours the same God of Abraham as Christians and Jews. He is not a coercive tyrant; on the contrary, as the Qur'an insists, he is 'Allah the compassionate and merciful'. We do not confuse those who follow the noble path of Islam with the crazed extremists who have so violently twisted its meaning and practice, and by wreaking havoc on the streets of France brought the name of a great world faith into disrepute. Jesus prayed from the cross for those who did not know what they were doing. These atrocities are beyond comprehension to us, beyond our capacity as mortals to forgive. We burn with anger on behalf of victims who can no longer cry out for themselves. Yet is it not precisely in the heat of our rage that we must pray that hardest of all prayers that Jesus uttered at the darkest moment of his passion: 'Father, forgive'? Or try to?

J'Accuse!...Dreyfus and the Principalities and Powers

In 1895 in Paris, Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer, was convicted of handing over French military secrets to the Germans. He was condemned to life imprisonment for treason, was ceremonially stripped of his military rank, his insignia were removed and his sword was ritually broken before he was sent to Devil's Island for the rest of his days. He was 35.

Evidence subsequently came to light that suggested that Dreyfus was not the traitor after all. A new head of intelligence, George Picquart, reported that he had scrutinised the documents on which Dreyfus' conviction had been based, and deduced that another man, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was the spy. However, a re-trial astonishingly affirmed Dreyfus' guilt, a verdict that sent my predecessor Dean Hensley Henson into an 'unspeakable rage'. It took four years of tortuous legal process for him to be pardoned and a further seven before he was officially exonerated. He was re-instated in the army, and served with distinction in the Great War. He died in 1935.

The story is the subject of Robert Harris' latest novel An Officer and a Spy. Not knowing anything about Dreyfus beyond the bare facts of this cause célèbre, I found it to be an absorbing read. As in all his books, Harris, an ex-journalist, researches his material with meticulous care - and in the case of the Dreyfus Affair, there is a lot of it. Harris' makes Picquart his mouthpiece and his use of the historic present (how John Humphrys must hate it!), together with his mastery of the plot's endless twists and turns, makes the novel a superbly vivid read. 

You don't necessarily expect beach reading to be memorable, but (always the mark of a good book) I am continuing to think about its big themes. For make no mistake: this was the most dramatic political scandal in modern France, and one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in western judicial history. It sharply divided public opinion at the time, led to protests on the streets, and even now more than a century later its consequences continue to reverberate in French political and religious consciousness.

Three factors made it so toxic. The first is that Dreyfus was from Alsace. He came from lands that had been occupied by the Germans since the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870. France's humiliation in the generation before Dreyfus was an open sore that was never going to heal (as the Great War demonstrated). So anyone accused of treason in relation to this bitterly hated enemy would inevitably incur huge public wrath. And this was perhaps the first example of an event where the power of 'public opinion' would count for so much.

The second is the conduct of politicians and the military. What came to light during the affair was the extent to which the very highest echelons of the French army had colluded with lies, forged documents and falsified evidence all because of an a priori doctrine that if Dreyfus had been convicted by a military court, its findings had to be sacrosanct. It took courageous 'intellectuals' (a word first coined during this affair) to insist that the conduct of the case raised serious questions about the integrity of the nation's senior leadership. The novelist Émile Zola was in the forefront of this 'Dreyfusard' protest against the corruptions of power and the comprehensive culture of the cover-up. He wrote a famous article that appeared on the front page of a national newspaper, J'accuse! as a result of which he was also arraigned before a court of law. 

But by far the most powerful forces at work in the affair were due to the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew. His conviction played right into the barely-suppressed anti-semitism of the fin de siècle. This ugly strain ran from top to bottom of French society. A torrent of abuse towards Jews was rapidly unleashed, some of it acted out as physical violence. Jews were not only mercenary and manipulating. Dreyfus had demonstrated that they were not to be trusted. Their claims to assimilation as authentic French citizens were exposed as hypocrisy. And even when Dreyfus was reinstated, the anti-Semitic genie would not willingly get back into the bottle, as is evidenced by the treatment of French Jews under Nazi Occupation, and the spate of anti-Jewish episodes that continues to this day. 

So Robert Harris' book, while it doesn't set out to moralise, does offer food for thought about our contemporary society: how we deal with one another as nation-states, how we lead with integrity in public life, our covenant with the armed forces, how we conduct judicial processes, how we listen to victims, and above all, how we handle religious, ethnic and cultural difference in society, especially when it comes to minorities. All this could be said to be about how we 'speak truth to power'. Dreyfus was an historical watershed whose central issues are still very much with us, in Britain no less than France. We need to be vigilant if we care about our values as a nation.

It's amazing how much you can learn from what you read on the beach. 

Sunday Trading: a human right?

Sunday trading is back in the news again.  The coalition Government promised that the current relaxation of the Sunday trading laws would be ‘for the Olympics only’.  Now, it seems, they are considering rescinding the legislation for good. 

What do we think about this? 

When it comes to Sunday, I am not a sabbatarian.  For one thing, it isn’t the sabbath (which is Saturday, the seventh day).  For another, there’s no evidence from the New Testament that the early church transferred the Jewish sabbath to the first day of the week, the day of resurrection.  They seemed to have believed that sabbath observance belonged to the ceremonial law of the Hebrew Bible and like circumcision, should not be imposed on gentile Christians. Strict sabbatarianism of the kind you get in the Hebrides is, I think, a misreading of the gospel.  

However, I have a lot of sympathy with those who want to keep Sunday as a day of rest and recreation, and who do not want to see Sunday trading laws deregulated still further. Let me say at once that I am not thinking of the corner shop, the souvenir outlet at a leisure facility, the small-scale operation on the high-street where things are still done on a human scale.  It’s the might of the megastore that concerns me, the gravitational pull of out of town shopping malls that have done so much to suck the life out of many town and city centres.   

Here’s why I am against this idea. 

1.      It isn’t good for human life to be tramlined by the same routines day in, day out. Sunday offers a different rhythm.  It’s a gift that opens up other possibilities for how we spend our time.  Time for family and friendships.  Time for the things we enjoy.  Time to ponder and reflect.  Time for relaxation and renewal.  Time to give to others through volunteering and service.  Time for sport, exercise or culture.  And if we are Christians, time for worship, fellowship, prayer and spiritual growth. 

2.      Specifically, those who work in the retail industry (including many of our poorest paid workers) deserve a weekly break like anyone else.  It is one thing for the legislation to protect the rights of such people.  Experience shows that it can be hard for employees at the bottom of the pyramid to resist strong pressures from the top to work in their free time. The unions are right to point out that if the law is further deregulated, these pressures will increase, risking a high cost to employees’ mental and physical health, and to their relationships and quality of life. 

3.      Most important of all is what such a move would say about our values.  It would carry the strong message that what matters most in life is the freedom to shop when we want for however long we want.  This supposed public appetite for shopping is being elevated almost to the level of a human right.  We should resist this vigorously.  The relentless tide of consumerism is possibly the most eroding of all the forces of modern life that are eating away at our wellbeing as individuals and as a society.  It says that what matters most is what can be traded, bought and sold as commodities.  It proclaims that the endless quest to acquire more and still more should be endorsed.  It encourages greed, and in particular, envy, possibly the most deadly sin of the seven.  It says that we are in love with money and the power it gives us.

As regular readers of this blog know, my wife and I spend time regularly in France.  There, Sunday trading is tightly regulated.  In a country that is officially far more secularised than the UK, whose mantra is laïcisme, this is not because of the influence of religious faith.  It’s more to do with the strong bonds of family life and the unions’ resolve to uphold it.  So Sunday is a marvellously peaceful day with its own pace of life.  Families make the most of it.  Sport and leisure flourish.  It’s true that people do not go to church in huge numbers.  It’s also true that in some towns, some smaller shops are open for business.  But not the big supermarkets and megastores.  So the traffic is lighter and the atmosphere less febrile.  The continental Sunday, once much maligned in protestant England, has a wholesomeness about it that we have now almost lost here. 

I have to say that I am gloomy about the future.  By a curious act of group-think, the coalition has got itself believing that unregulated Sunday trading will encourage greater consumer spend and therefore help get the economy out of the pit in which it has been stuck for so long.  I doubt this very much.  At best, it will attenuate the public’s shopping habits across twelve hours rather than six.  But the evidence of this economic crisis is that the public is not as naïve as the government appears to think. We are not inclined to part with more money than we can afford simply because more shopping hours are available to us. Internet shopping is available 24 hours a day, but it is not encouraging consumers to spend in ways that stimulate demand and therefore create capacity and productivity. 

My concern is as much with the symbolic effect of this likely change, and for what it says about our collective understanding of what our life together in our contemporary society should be like.  There is something worryingly cynical about a government that smuggles in this unwanted change under the banner of the Olympics when the original rhetoric promised otherwise.  So I hope that Christians will resist it, not for spurious sabbatarian reasons, but because we care about human life and its flourishing.  And because we follow a way that points the human heart to where treasure truly lies.