COP26: Time for gospel in action not just words
Church leaders must stand up for the poor who suffer the most, writes George Pitcher
As a vicar, you get used to hearing things from parishioners that, shall we say, aren’t entirely compatible with the gospel. On two separate occasions with different people, for example, I have been on the receiving end of the view that (and in one case this is verbatim) “the trouble is, no one ever tells the positive side of the slave trade.”
Whether this was going to develop into the unsung benefits of travel and seeing the world I can’t tell, because I didn’t pursue the point, as I was wearing my dog collar and feared I might punch him. In the other instance, the case rested on the observation that a lot of schools and hospitals were built in Bristol out of proceeds from slavery. That’s okay then. Apparently it’s fine to murder thousands of children over there if hundreds of children over here get a better education (presumably better than my interlocutor had anyway).
I cite these incidents because the Church of England is regularly accused in conservative quarters of being a hotbed of liberal lefties pursuing a woke agenda. If only. In my experience of rural parish ministry, there are not a few worshippers that are all for turning leaky migrant boats around in the channel, bulldozing climate demonstrators off motorways (literally), keeping all UK-produced vaccinations for ourselves and celebrating a lack of local diversity that keeps our local ethnicity “pure” (all these are real opinions I’ve heard in church circles).
Cogent expression
With all that in mind, I wonder what chance there is of the Church of England leading a cogent expression of the needed action from participants at the climate summit COP26, which opens for a fortnight from Monday in Glasgow. On current evidence, the view from the pew is likely to be that the air around here smells perfectly nice, that a little global warming would be welcome at the cricket club and that the whole climate panic anyway is got up by a bunch of neo-Marxists out to destroy capitalism.
Part of the problem here is that our Church leadership leaves climate action very firmly in that pew. Visit the Church of England website and all the information leads on what we can all do to get our churches to Net Zero carbon emissions by 2030. This involves taking action such as reading the Practical Path to Net Zero for Church Buildings for its “guidance on heating principles and on energy efficiency”. So far, so individual responsibility.
Today, we’re not far from where we were 10 years ago, when I worked for an archbishop and when we were urged to cycle to church and recycle hymn-sheets. There’s something rather reminiscent of holy wars, fiddling while Rome burns, but it may be what’s happening, figuratively at least.
To be fair here, current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby does look outwards from the Anglican Church he leads, saying on his website that “responding to climate change is an essential part of our responsibility to safeguard God’s creation” and, more specifically, in a video of a speech declares that unaddressed global warming will prove “fatal for the most fragile countries and regions on Earth and the billions of people who live in them.”
To wit, as I’ve written here before, it hasn’t rained in Madagascar for four years. One million of the billions to whom Welby refers face starvation in the famine there. That is the price that’s being paid in the poor southern hemisphere for the industrial prosperity of the north. If there is compassion fatigue in the nations of the European Union (and Britain) for the plight of undeveloped economies, then the prospect of unlimited migration from them might just re-focus attention on our priorities.
Litany of managerial imperatives
Those priorities have to be political, in the sense of interrogating what our leaders are doing on the global stage, rather than a litany of managerial imperatives about individual, domestic churches managing their carbon footprints. True, as the former Archbishop Rowan Williams says: “When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the sure foundations for change at the national and international level.” But unless those foundations are built on with some urgency, we’ll be like the rich man who built barns to hoard his grain – and then died without any benefit.
That gospel allusion can be matched by any number of others. In Matthew’s account, for instance, those who ask in innocence “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes... and did not help you?” are told unequivocally “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” Pretty sure that doesn’t mean the priority is solar panels on the rooves of cathedrals, however important it is to put our own house in order.
So those gospel questions have their resonance in other, secular ones we might ask: Who is cutting foreign-aid budgets? Who exploits supply chains that keep the poorest even poorer?
As a start, I’d want to see the Church of England’s House of Bishops glueing themselves to the streets of Glasgow next week, rather than issuing well-meaning statements about how we’re all in it together. As our Queen, the Church’s Supreme Governor, affirms: It’s time for action, not more talk.
Our Church’s leadership is often accused of being out of touch with the views in the pews. That’s probably just as well, given congregational appetite for bulldozing demonstrators and repatriating refugees. The time for talking is over. Authentic witness calls for authentic action.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.