A Christian country wouldn't abandon the Afghans
We're called to make disciples of all nations, writes George Pitcher. That means serving their best interests
St Augustine of Hippo is charged with having first defined what is a “just war” in his early 5th-century book City of God:
“…the wise man will wage Just Wars... for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars.”
More recently, what is called the prayer of Sir Francis Drake (but actually fashioned by a Dean of York during the Second World War) has is that
“it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same, until it be thoroughly finished, that yieldeth the true glory.”
On both counts, those who sat on the Government front-bench this week during parliament’s extraordinary session to consider the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan fall way short of the just and glorious.
Admittedly, these three – foreign secretary Dominic Raab, prime minister Boris Johnson and defence secretary Ben Wallace – are not noticeably wise men. You don’t go on holiday at the start of the biggest foreign-policy crisis since Suez if you are.
But if they’ve ceased waging war, then logically it must have been unjust. But if it was just, then in ceasing to wage it they have covered themselves in something other than true glory. As is often said of Afghanistan, you can’t win.
It used to be said that ours is a Christian country. That may have been recognisable in God-botherer Tony Blair (though it was a God that his press officer famously said he didn’t “do”). But if Blair was accused of being US president George W. Bush’s lap-dog in going to war in Iraq, it’s quite something for Johnson to manage to be Democrat president Joe Biden’s poodle by running away from war in Afghanistan. Churchill he ain’t.
It’s still worth asking what it means to offer a national response that is Christian to the Afghan crisis. One looks in vain to a PM for whom, by his own admission, the Anglican faith fades in and out like Magic FM in the Chilterns – though apparently he can turn up the volume when he needs a quickie wedding in a catholic cathedral.
We might expect the Archbishop of Canterbury, as leader of both the Church of England and the Anglican communion worldwide, to have a view. But Justin Welby’s speech this week to the House of Lords confined itself to the matter of refugees from Afghanistan, rather than what is causing their flight:
“This is about morals not numbers. Will the Government confirm that their policy will reflect moral obligation and not be controlled by numbers?”
This manages to say that we should not simply be counting the number that we’re rescuing from their plight, while concurrently saying that we should be counting to a high number.
Moral obligation
What it doesn’t say is whether we had a moral obligation not to abandon Afghanistan to its fate in the first place, beyond a catch-all assertion that “[w]e must renew commitment to freedom of religion and belief everywhere”. What does that commitment look like? Words in the ether, or boots on the ground?
The Judeo-Christian tradition is rich with the idea of exiled peoples being welcomed home. Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery towards a homeland promised by their God. The prophets look forward to a time when such a birthright will be returned to their people from Babylonian exile. And they don’t mean just a few thousand lucky ones, as would be the case if home secretary Priti Patel was in charge.
The new covenant of the Christian bible is rather more universal. We are to love our neighbours as ourselves and those neighbours aren’t just those who live next door, but Jew or Gentile, slave or free. Despised foreigners, such as Samaritans, are to be greeted as friends and, as in the parable of the good one, are as likely to nurse and to nourish as to need care themselves.
That directs us on how to respond to the fall-out from the Afghan betrayal. So far, so Welby. But more is required of us than simply a compassionate response to suffering.
Great Commission
In the Great Commission, the risen Christ tells his followers (and therefore us) to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Note that this isn’t a direction to make new disciples in all nations, but to win the hearts of whole countries.
This could be a kind of holy imperialism, a command to subjugate other peoples to the faith, were it not for the codicil of neighbour-loving that is servant ministry at the heart of the Christian way.
Without that, mouthed platitudes of “Global Britain” from our politicians are pretty meaningless for an island off the north coast of Europe, whose instinct is to raise its drawbridges and peek at the world through its clenched fingers.
Being Britain is fairly useless if it’s just a folk memory of Empire, when we tried (and failed) to tell Afghanistan how to behave. The imperative of our Christian tradition is to serve its people’s best interests. In that sense, to abandon them to their fate isn’t just a failure of nationhood, it’s an abomination.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.