TEXT II.
Christianity faces day of judgement. Church fears modern beliefs are undermining traditional values
"My parish church is so cold, damp and little attended that I always wear my thickest coat - why, there are even fungi growing in great numbers round the communion table".
That was not Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor but a friend of Tennyson's in 1843, when Christianity's official hold over Britain looked every bit as shaky as the Catholic leader fears it is today.
But in spite of history's catalogue of empty churches and hopeless priests, the cardinal's warning that Christianity "has now almost been vanquished" is not being brushed aside as just the umpteenth re-run of a 2,000-year-old story.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, told a conference of priests on Wednesday that Christianity was being pushed to the margins of society by New Age beliefs, the environmental movement, the occult and the free-market economy. The influence of Christianity on modern culture and intellectual life had been hugely diminished, he said.
Even believers who back the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey's view that it is "an exhilarating time to be a Christian" share the cardinal's alarm at the relentless fall in church membership -often in contrast to other faith's success in winning new recruits.
"In the case of Islam - Britain's fastest-growing religion - I think a sense of tradition and certainty is an important part of the appeal", said Sayed Ameli, head of the interfaith department of the British Islamic Centre. "When I talk to converts from Christianity, they talk of their unease that so many changes are happening in the churches. They say: 'There is too much modernisation in the Catholic church' or, if they were Protestants, we could no longer feel a proper sense of religion".
A Policy Studies Institute survey of religion's importance to different faith communities offers similar evidence, recording a 75% "very important" rating among British Muslims compared to 11 % of white Anglicans. Tariq Moddod, of Bristol University, who conducted the research, said: "The exception in Christianity was among churches like the Seventh Day Adventists or the New Protestant churches which are mostly Afro-Caribbean or South Indian. The New Protestants had a "very important' rating of 71%".
The staff of the British Humanist Association (BHA) have meanwhile seen support leaching from the churches in the opposite direction. Madeleine Pym, who has researched social action by humanists and Christians, said: "A lot of people who in the past would have prayed to God to change the world now go out and try to change it themselves. If a child is being abused, they no longer have to turn to God for help. They can phone Child-line".
Clare Rayner, one of the BHA's prominent supporters, said her experience of soup runs and similar initiatives run by the churches is that "half those involved are non-believers". Ms Pym says: "We admire what Christians do in these fields, but perhaps there are fewer and fewer people who feel they can't get involved without a transcendent being and a set of rules to sort life out for them".
The lack of overt worship or ritual among church activists gets a different spin from Christian optimists, including the Archbishop of York, David Hope. Giving a lecture in Portsmouth fast night, he said: "Many Christians are no longer there primarily to build the church but to build the kingdom. The outstanding thing is that whilst the actual numbers of those attending church on Sunday in all the denominations is low, there is no doubt whatever that church members see that concern, compassion and care for others must be their clear priority".
The view was echoed by the Methodist church whose early-19th century fervour revived British Christianity from the sloth described by Tennyson's correspondent. The church's spokesman, Murray White, said that all activities by congregations were now rigorously audited to try to insure that they were purposeful.
He rejected the notion of attracting people by offering stable, unchanging formulae, saying: "We must find new ways of working and appealing to people. Yes, we are more marginal today, but we are not small. Over 300,000 members is a considerable number these days".
Rev Rob Marshall, an Anglican priest now running a PR company, agreed - citing experiments like the controversial Anglican posters aimed at young people, with slogans comparing body piercing to Jesus's fate on the cross. He said: 'This isn't a joining-up and becoming a member time - ask the Rotarians, ask the political parties. Any organisation which tries to get people together in large numbers isn't succeeding. But there are so many new and interesting ways to get the gospels heard".
Dr. Ameli, who is preparing for interfaith sessions on the family and the Bible with mixed groups of Muslims and evangelical Christians, agreed. He said: "One different but encouraging message from converts to Islam is that they didn't just want a "Sunday religion". They wanted something that would involve them and purify them all the time.
"I do not say this in a hostile way to Christianity, because an "everyday religion" is one of the many things which Islam, Christianity and Judaism can all share. We have much to discover about that and about the effect on all of us of secularisation and the idea that religion is just a "childish thing".
The Guardian
Exercise 1. Give Russian equivalents:
the communion table, the umpteenth re-run of a 2000-year-old story, Christianity is being pushed to the margins of society, different faith communities, soup runs, overt worship, controversial posters, interfaith sessions, secularization
Exercise 2. Find in the text the English equivalents:
приходская церковь, тревога по поводу уменьшения количества прихожан, самая быстрорастущая религия Великобритании, перешед шие из христианства в другую религию, если ребенок подвергается насилию, неверующие, все конфессии, прихожане, евангелие, очищать
Exercise 3. Answer the following questions:
In what connection is Tennyson's friend quoted in the text?
What New Age beliefs are, according to Cardinal O'Connor, pushing Christianity to the margins of society?
What are the reasons for the decline in church membership?
What is Britain's fastest growing religion?
What are the reasons why some Christians choose to be converted to Islam?
Why is the Archbishop of York, David Hope, called a Christian optimist in the article?
TEXT III.
RELIGIOUS HATRED IS EVIL BUT IT SHOULDN'T BE A CRIME
Melanie Phillips
The home secretary, David Blunkett, faces a formidable challenge in holding the balance between civil liberty and laws to protect us from terror. Some might think his proposed new crime of incitement to religious hatred is a response to widespread public outrage at the violence being preached by various Islamic militants here in Britain.
It is not. It is rather an appeasement of the long-standing Muslim demand to criminalise anyone who insults Islam. As such, is the wrong response to the wrong pressure. Militants are a fifth column in a time of war and a threat to public safety. But there is no effective proposal to tackle them. Instead, the new law will criminalise not deeds that threaten life and liberty but thought itself.
Certainly, innocent British Muslims should be protected from attack. However, the religious hatred law is unlikely to prevent threatening conduct. It will instead criminalise the wrong kind of opinion.
If we are properly ready to defend our liberal values, it's essential to realise what freedom of speech entails. It is the freedom to say things that cause offence; it is the freedom to say things that may cause people to dislike others. Once you try to prevent that by legislating against hatred, where would you stop?
Attacks on Jews, for example, have significantly increased as a result of the demonisation of Israel and the implicit anti-semitism in the double standards being used. Does this mean that foul comments about Israel should be censored? Absolutely not. They must be exposed and opposed in open debate. Anti-semitism is one of the great evils of the world, but to make it a crime would mean censoring vast swathes of western literature, not to mention elements of the New Testament and the Koran.
Just look at what happened when Baroness Thatcher criticised Muslim clerics for not speaking out loudly enough against the American atrocities. Whether or not one approved of what she said, it was surely her privilege to say it. Yet Lord Heseltine promptly accused her of fomenting prejudice against Muslims, the editor of The Muslim News demanded that her "case" be sent to the Crown Prosecution Service and George Galloway MP said that if the law against incitement to religious hatred had been in place, he would have insisted on her prosecution.
Now comedians such as Rowan Atkinson are worried that they could be sent to jail for poking fun at religion and lampooning religious figures. What about the crucifixion gags in the Monty Python gang's Life of Brian, for example; or the skit in Not the Nine O'Clock News where worshippers in a mosque bowed to the ground while a voiceover intoned: "And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomenej's contact lens"? Stop giggling, jailer, and take these criminals down.
Blunkett protests that the freedom of jokesmiths wouldn't be threatened by the new law. After all, he says, the present law against incitement to racial hatred hasn't resulted in comedians being prosecuted for racist jokes. But that is because nobody has wanted to stop them. Racial groups don't generally conceive humour as an attack on their very being.
But some religious groups do. As the chairman of the Liverpool Islamic Institute has said, the real targets of the religious hatred law would be the "mockery and ridicule" of religion. So be warned. Even Christianity has poked a pair of handcuffs from beneath its surplice. The headmaster of Lichfield Cathedral school has said that a critic of religion "will not be locked away so long as he refrains from mocking".
In other words, this law is nothing to do with the war against terror. It is all about insult. And the pressure for it has come from Muslims who have waged a long campaign to make insults against their religion a crime. Such a perceived insult was the reason why Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for writing The Satanic Verses, the reason why Muslims wanted the book banned and the reason why they wanted the law of blasphemy extended from protecting Christianity to protecting Islam.
Blunkett's religious hatred offence would represent precisely such an extension of the blasphemy law (which should be abolished) by the back door. It would not only deliver a final victory to the enemies of Rushdie's life and liberty, but also to those who threatened or committed violence against the book's translators and dealers. In short, it would be a victory for terror, not a blow against it.
There is certainly a need to deal with individuals who threaten-people they dislike on racial, religious or any other grounds. But there is no shortage of legal remedies already. The real problem is that they are hardly ever used. There are claims that the laws are badly worded but the real reason is surely a failure of political will.
Five men who were arrested a year ago for allegedly distributing anti-semitic literature in the ultra-orthodox area of London's Stamford Hill were freed after the director of public prosecutions decided not to proceed with charges of racial hatred. The Jewish Chronicle has reported the police as saying the charges were dropped because the material was targeted "only" at a local Jewish community with no likelihood of civil unrest. So much for action against group hatred.
The British prosecuting authorities are too terrified to act against any utterances that might be "political", even if they openly incite violence. Partly they fear the inflammatory effects of any show trials; partly they are fearful of being seen to suppress any political expression. That's why they are so reluctant to take legal action against the British National party, for example, even when its members march into northern mill towns and incite violence against Asian minorities.
Personally, I don't like the existing law against incitement to racial hatred. I would prefer such people to be prosecuted for incitement to violence or disorder since I believe we should outlaw deeds, not thought. But a law against incitement to religious hatred is even more illiberal and dangerous.
Racial hatred, after all, is directed against people who have no option but to be what they are. Religion, however, is a principal site of impassioned argument and disputation. Outlawing incitement to religious hatred has the potential to criminalise such debate.
It is also yet another milestone in the steady introduction of hate crime into English law, which has less to do with preventing harm than extending identity politics and the victim culture into the field of crime and punishment. Ostensibly seeking to destroy prejudice, it hands power to self-designated victim groups to use against others.
The irony is that it is likely to be used against the Muslims who have agitated for it but who refuse to accept that some of their own utterances are full of hatred It is also likely to be challenged by the very human rights law which is preventing Blunkett from adequately responding to terror. The only people likely to benefit from all this are the lawyers. Some things, alas, never change.
The Times
Exercise 1. Answer the following questions:
Melanie Phillips' article is a response to a proposed law to be introduced in Great Britain, Which one? What are her arguments against the law?
Exercise 2. Give Russian equivalents:
the home secretary faces a formidable challenge, incitement to religious (racial) hatred, the long-standing demand, a fifth column, to realise what freedom of speech entails, foul comments, foment prejudice, to wage a campaign, on racial (religious) grounds, the blasphemy law, legal remedies, arrested for allegedly distributing anti-semitic literature, ostensibly seeking to destroy prejudice, self-designated victim groups.
Exercise 3. Find in the text the English equivalents:
проповедь насилия, угроза общественной безопасности, нанести обиду, Новый завет, Коран, быть приговоренным к смерти, показательный процесс, гражданские беспорядки, подстрекать к насилию.
TEXT IV.