Into the breach

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Into the breach

Katharine Jefferts Schori is a feminist, pro-gay liberal — and now the most senior woman in the Anglican communion. So will her appointment split the church?

Interview by Stephen Bates Photograph by Paul Vernon
The Guardian
24 Jun 2006

When Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, heard the news that the US Episcopal church had elected a new presiding bishop as its primate last Sunday night, he must have thought all his nightmares had come at once. The new bishop was radical, feminist and gay-friendly. Most problematic of all, she was a woman.
Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is arguably now the highest-ranking woman in Episcopal history, pauses to consider the telephone call that passed between them the next day. “He was ... a bit anxious,” she says.
As well he might be. Jefferts Schori’s unexpected election to be the 26th presiding bishop of the Episcopal church — part of the Anglican communion, of which Williams is nominal head — was an indication that the Americans were not going to roll over and allow conservative forces elsewhere to dictate to them.
Over the past three years, the Episcopal church has proved a considerable headache for Williams — coming close to splitting the 77 million-strong worldwide communion by its endorsement, at its last general convention, of the election of the openly gay bishop Gene Robinson in 2003. Note “elected”, by parishioners, not appointed by the prime minister on behalf of the Queen, as bishops are in England.
That liberal, democratic tradition comes close to explaining why presiding bishop-elect Jefferts Schori is about to lead the Episcopal church, whereas the Church of England is still dithering over whether women can become bishops in the first place. (And had she remained in the denomination of her birth, Roman Catholicism, she would never have been able to be ordained a priest at all.)
Last Sunday, the 188 US bishops attending the Episcopalians’ general convention retreated to a local church to vote by ballot for one of seven candidates to be their next leader: Jefferts Schori and, it must be said, six rather uninspiring male bishops. No one, even among their number, thought she would win, but she led on every ballot, momentum built up, and by the fifth round she had her majority.
“It was wonderful,” said Bishop Robinson. “A number of us were always going to vote for her and then we saw more and more people joining. Even our Latin American member bishops came over.”
Jefferts Schori herself is a model of self-possession. Asked how she felt, she gives a one-word answer: “Awe.” She arrived at the convention 10 days ago as the relatively obscure bishop of Nevada, a tiny diocese of 6,000 members in a huge, sparsely-populated state (as a qualified pilot, she flies between parishes). Yet she leaves ready to take charge in November of a national church teetering on the brink of an historic schism from the rest of the Anglican communion.
The conservatives are desperate to find something against her — other than that she’s a woman, of course. They were jubilant this week when she referred in a convention sermon to “Mother Jesus”, exclaiming that she was preaching heresy.
Jefferts Schori looks puzzled: “It was very deliberate and conscious. I was wrestling with the image of blood on the cross, the image of labour. It’s medieval imagery actually, Julian of Norwich. It seemed appropriate to the text and the hard work we are trying to do in this place.”
Her intensity and seriousness may make many quail: “I think it is the Evil One who is at work here, distracting us from our central focus, which ought to be on feeding the hungry, relieving the needs of the poor, healing the sick. This obsession is keeping us from doing that. To focus on issues of sexuality when people are dying is a distraction from our mission.”
Her own record on those issues is that she voted to endorse Robinson and, when asked about blessings services for same-sex couples in Las Vegas, has said she supports the idea of gay partnerships: “I said that a parish wishing to do so would have to get the congregation to agree, to show that it was not an isolated event, divorced from the rest of its activities. The couple would also have to receive counselling, like anyone getting married.
“So far only two congregations have done the work, and I believe there have been two blessings in the past three years.”
But that is quite sufficient to damn her in the eyes of church conservatives, most notably Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, who has been.... read more...

The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale

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The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale
Priyamvada Gopal
The Guardian
28 Jun 2006

Aresurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre apparition of “benevolent empire”. It takes the form of documentaries and discussions steered towards the conclusion that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all and that something of a celebration is in order. Trouble is, to get there, some creative reworking of the facts is needed. After a recent brouhaha about Britain’s imperial history on Radio 4’s Start the Week — in which I took part — the presenter Andrew Marr worried that the debate had been “pretty biased” against empire: there was a lot of enthusiasm and a “warm nostalgia” for empire, he suggested in the subsequent phone-in, even in former colonies, “still something there, absolutely”.

Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that was empire can explain the elevation of the neoconservative ideologue Niall Ferguson to chief imperial historian on the BBC and now Channel 4. His aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right, is being presented as a new revelation. In fact, Ferguson’s “history” is a fairytale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism — a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, landgrabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement — is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.

Soundbite culture thrives on these simplistic grand narratives. Half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of academic protocols such as footnotes, can sound donnishly authoritative. The racism institutionalised by empire also seems to be back in fashion. The book accompanying Ferguson’s current Channel 4 series on 20th-century history, The War of the World, tells us that people “seem predisposed” to “trust members of their own race”, “those who are drawn to ‘the Other’ may … be atypical in their sexual predilections” and that “when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high … that only the first child they conceive will be viable.” Not far from the pseudo-scientific nonsense that once made it possible to punish interracial relationships.

Behind such talk and the embrace of the broadcasters is the insistence that we are being offered gutsy truths that the “politically correct” establishment would love to suppress. This is the neoconservative as spunky rebel against liberal tyranny. Yet Ferguson peddles nothing more than the most hackneyed, selfaggrandising myths of empire, canards once championed by old imperialists such as Macaulay and Mill and rehashed now by the Bush administration: western imperialism brings freedom, democracy and prosperity to primitive cultures. The myth decorates US and British foreign policy spin while trendier versions have also emerged in platforms such as the Euston Manifesto. By anointing Ferguson and his fellow imperial apologists such as Andrew Roberts as semi-official historians, the British media are colluding in a dangerous denial of the past and lending support to contemporary US imperial propaganda .

The evidence — researched by scholars such as Amartya Sen, Nicholas Dirks, Mike Davis and Mahmood Mamdani, Caroline Elkins and Walter Rodney — shows that European colonialism brought with it not good governance and freedom, but impoverishment, bloodshed, repression and misery. Joseph Conrad, no radical, described it as “a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly”. Good governance? More famines were recorded in the first century of the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation subsidising colonial wars, and relief often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.

Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious identities and governed through these divisions. As with the partition of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between “tribes” in Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed. Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers appropriated 12,000 square miles and ... read more...

Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed, it enslaved us (Guardian, 21 Jun 2006, Page 16)

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Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed, it enslaved us
Peregrine Worsthorne
Guardian
21 Jun 2006


Liberalism has much to its credit. But as John Stuart Mill said about Christianity, “all truths need fundamental re-examination from time to time”; and if that was true of Christianity in the 18th century, I think that it is just as true of liberalism in the 21st. For today the great and the good, at any rate in the west, intone their belief in liberal pieties as mindlessly as their predecessors in the 18th century proclaimed their belief in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.



Take freedom of the press. The liberal argument for the importance of a free press was that it gave voters the necessary information on which they could vote intelligently. Of all the British newspapers today, only the Guardian even tries to do that. The rest concentrate on misinformation or even disinformation — sophisticated and clever disinformation in the case of the broadsheets, and untreated sewage in the case of the tabloids. So, far from helping to guide the reader into the real world — the world for which he or she is meant to take responsibility — they offer him or her a way out of that real world into one of fantasy, muddying rather than clarifying the democratic waters.



The same goes for that other liberal piety, the autonomy of the individual. Of course this was an important principle 200 years ago when the individual had far too few rights. But today it is very plain that man standing alone — as against man locked into society — is beginning to get too many rights. So what was once a noble principle has been degraded into a crass and selfish form of “me-firstism”: an attitude wholly incompatible with the team spirit required to make any institution — family, school, college, regiment, hospital, police force or even government department — work. Even the foreign service has been infected, with our former ambassador in Washington not hesitating to ... read more...