Christina Odone's TV documentary Godless Britain was shown on Channel 5 in mid-September. The often outspoken Roman Catholic journalist made a simple point. She claimed that the present moral vacuum of modern British society has arisen because British people having largely turned away from God, and from the Church. The consequences of this loss of faith can be seen everywhere around us. They include the rise in general lawlessness and particularly violent crime, with drugs gangs terrorising many cities with their gun wars; sexual promiscuity leading to disease, unwanted pregnancies and the highest ever number of abortions; broken families; damaged children; binge-drinking; selfish materialism and a lack of concern for the needy; and a general sense of cynical lostness.
I felt like saying, Well, this is no surprise: the Church has been saying all this for years. But Odone blamed the churches for not having taken a strong enough line on morality. According to her, they have been taken over by wishy-washy liberals who have preached a message so bland that people have deserted the fold in droves.
This is simply not true, of course. The dilemma for preachers and church leaders, is how to show that sex outside marriage, divorce, abortion and the like are wrong, while not condemning and excluding people who for one reason or another, perhaps not even through their own fault, have found themselves having to make such flawed choices. Surely Jesus would have found this balance. He was, after all, the one who said to the woman caught in adultery that he did not condemn her, as everyone else was doing, but that she should "Go, and sin no more."
The Church we need is a Church that is strong on morality, but weak on condemnation. Strong on compassion, but weak on judging others. So often, Christian groups that claim firm moral standards are singularly lacking in love. But the morality we need does not leave room for prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, fundamentalism, creationism or militarism - all of which are common in so many of the more traditional expressions of Christianity.
So what is the essential message about Christian morality, and what Christian living entails? There are two answers:
God first! There can be no Christian living without an active faith in God. What this means is that every Christian devotes time to private prayer, the practice of his or her relationship with God. Every Christian also joins in public worship as an active member of the church, the local community of believers. Unless you're marooned on a desert island, there is no such thing as a solitary Christian, just as you can't play cricket alone. In addition to prayer and worship, every Christian lives in obedience to the moral tenets of the faith: you obey the Christian rules set out in Jesus' teaching, the Ten Commandments, and so on. Why? The reason for doing it is not because you're afraid of being punished if you don't, but because you love God and trust that his 'commandments' make the best sense. In other words, they are good for you, and for other people. I can never understand why this isn't glaringly, transparently obvious. But so often people seem to think life can be more 'fun' if they ignore God's rules, only to be surprised when the mess they make of their lives turns out to be anything but fun.
Neighbour second! Jesus' summary of the law, after saying we must love God with every fibre of our being, goes on to add: And love your neighbour as you love yourself. It's just another way of teaching the Golden Rule: Do to others, what you would like them to do to you. The simplest common sense is also the very deepest wisdom about human behaviour. If only everyone lived by this rule, what a different world it would be. If I treat others the way I'd like them to treat me, I'm not going to steal from them, lie to them, kill them, blow them up, make war on them or deny them justice in any way.
Morality isn't a complex, difficult or onerous thing. It's really very straightforward. And if Britain is in a mess because it has turned away from God, the remedy is, in part, in the hands of every individual, everyone who watched Christina Odone's documentary or who reads these words. Come back to God! Come back to the Church! And tell everyone else to do the same!
Published in the Marston Times, October 2005