Most Unholy Alliance: Conservative Attitudes to Christianity in East and West

Abstract

It is now nearly a decade since Edward Norman’s controversial Reith lectures, subsequently published as Christianity and World Order, helped to generate a great deal of debate about the appropriate sphere of Christian moral concern.Dr Norman’s view is clear:...the teachings of the Saviour clearly describe a personal rather than a social morality.Any attempt to outline a Christian social morality—to ‘involve the Church in politics’—means compromising the proper concern of Christians with what is transcendent. It entails sanctifying whatever prevailing political world-view is current at the time. Among Western nations, Norman argues, this means supporting what he calls a ‘Human Rights Ideology’. The Human Rights movement ‘has elevated Western liberalism to the apparent authority of eternal truth’. As a consequence, ‘... the Churches now see Human Rights as the essence of the Christian message’. Christians in politics are engaged, then, in a process of absolutising a relative (Human Rights), identifying the essence of Christianity, which must be changeless, with a prevailing political ideology which represents only the view of a liberal twentieth century establishment in the West. In doing so, they obscure the truly changeless essence of Christianity, which lies in eternal values, values which by definition cannot be political.Criticisms of Norman’s thesis have been numerous, and the arguments on both sides are now well-rehearsed. Any attempt to outline a Christian personal morality, no less than a Christian social morality, involves the apparent compromise of associating with current secular ideologies, it has been pointed out.