FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Blair Unbound

Rant Number 582 bis         25/4/14 Tony Blair is smart. A Promethean man. OK, he is also wicked but so what? Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Thatcher - not awful, too? Yet they were smart. Can you deny their statesmanship? Their spectacular success? Similarly, Tony is a phoney but a very gifted one. No leader who transforms his party and wins three elections can be a fool. And Blair isn’t. He is crafty. When such man speaks, never mind your loathing him, you should listen. An enemy, a spectre is haunting our world, Blair cries out. Its name is radical Islam. A worldwide, growing threat. It spreads like a virus. It destabilises countries, nations and continents, he warns. Europe. The Middle East. Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Indonesia. World’s peace is at stake. Tony posits a universal ‘essential battle’. Ranging from Morocco to Chinese Turkestan. Ya Allah! Only the word ‘apocalyptic’ is missing! Professor Huntington of Clash of Civilizations’ fame, are you back from the dead? You loathe this man. Because of Afghanistan and Iraq. His forthright speech makes you hate him even more. Fine but…pause, peruse and reflect. It is about religion, he says. Not just the economy, stupid. It is about God. Namely, the God of Islamism. An ideology holding that religion or faith has a pivotal, central role in public life. Religion must determine ‘the nature of society and the political economy’. Islamism fights for that, hence it is the foe. Voltaire might say: voila’, ecrasez l’infame! Down with the infamous one! Shock and horror have followed. The BBC, Chatham House, atheist Ed Milliband, Nick Clegg, the Guardian, the Left, the Arsehole of Canterbury, the Churches and sundry interfaith aficionados - all throw up their arms in dismay. Can’t be true! Surely religion is not the point? And Muslims too feel targeted and hate this but, groan – look, Tony has got a point. Naturally, crafty Tony hedges his bets. It is not Islam that is the problem, oh, no. It is an interpretation, ‘a perversion of it’, he asserts. Which raises the question: what right, what authority, what credentials has this kafir to decide which is the correct interpretation of Islam, if any? Answer: none. What Blair won’t tell you is that Europe, America – the West – also are possessed by an ideology. It is a doctrine called secularism. Or, as in France, laicite’. A hard dogma, held with the same devotion Christians have for the Incarnation and Muslims for the uncreated Qur’an. And secularism’s benchmark is simple: religion is a private affair. It belongs to what you do for an hour on Sunday morning – or Friday – and then forget about it and get on with real life. Religion should not intrude in vital matters. Policy making. The Law. The market place. The banks. The stock exchange. Finance. Social morality. Sex, marriage…anything that actually makes a difference to how to live. Keep religion out of those, for God’s sake! Whoever maintains the opposite is perverse, a monster, a medievalist or…an Islamist. Which makes the priest a kind of Islamist, too. Because, you see, Christianity has never been non-political. (Don’t we have in Britain 26 bishops sitting by right in the House of Lords?) Caesar and God, yes, but God is infinitely higher than Caesar. And Caesar, the State, must be subordinate to God. Conform to God’s laws. That has always been the Church’s position. Indeed, Cardinal Bellarmine held that the Pope has jurisdiction over secular rulers, if indirectly. And the secular Left rejoices when religion is congenial, like Liberation theology, never mind if it supported violence. Doesn’t a Pope like Francis becomes a hero when he bangs on about the poor and attacks the evils of globalisation? What’s that if not bringing God into politics? Blair’s theological geopolitics is grandiose. To fight the Islamist God he invokes a dizzying counter-jihad. An alliance with the current bad boys, Russia and China, the other nightmares of the secular West. However wicked they are, they can be good allies against the Beast, the ‘essential struggle’. It means taking a side and ‘sticking with it’, he concludes. Like Moses confronting the worshippers of the Golden Calf, Tony has no doubts as to which is God’s side… The thing is, Blair is sincere. He can live with a liberal, ‘reformed’, tame version of Islam. A sort of Muslim Anglicanism. And many Muslims crave getting absorbed into the Establishment and sharing crumbs of power. It is the Islam, any religion, that makes a difference that he cannot bear. That is what secularism is all about. So the fearsome battle is on, apocalyptic Tony tells you. The future of modernity, humanity is at stake. You must take sides. Indeed. The priest already has. Revd Frank Julian Gelli