MATTHEW PARRIS
Give me t he A nglica n option
cates the second of these two responses,
disapproves of the Church of England’s fre-
quent accommodations with secular soci-
ety. I do not. Like many atheists, agnostics
and searchers, I find myself rather drawn to
a church that, however fitfully, seems to be
trying to stay open to ideas, differences and
influences outside.
Connecting a religion and the culture
within which it lives, the metaphor of a length
of elastic is illuminating. The two may diverge,
but each exerts a pull on the other. In its
long, turbulent history, the church has some-
times run ahead of secular culture, some-
times lagged behind. It has a proud record
in questions such as the abolition of slavery;in education, welfare and prison reform it has
sometimes lit the way. On overseas aid and
concern for the homeless, the church has led
where secular society first looked away.
On the other hand, the church has had
a chronically difficult relationship with the
advancement of science, and, in recent cen-
turies, has had to be dragged reluctantly to
a recognition that religion is not the seat of
learning about the material world. Wherever
sex or gender are involved, the church has
tended to lag a good few paces behind the
rest of society. Mr Dreher might disagree, but
I think that — pulled by secular society and
with the elastic often stretched very tight —
the church’s agonised progress towards the
recognition of divorce and the acceptance
of contraception (with of course powerful
pockets of resistance among Roman Catho-lics) has been good for the world. Though I’m
not myself opposed to abortion, I think Chris-
tianity’s anxiety about careless disregard for
human life has also been good for the world.
But bear in mind that elastic rope. Mr
Dreher wants to cut it. If you are a believer,
it would certainly be emotionally and intel-
lectually easier to stop trying to connect your
way of life and belief with that of the soci-
ety in which you live. You could turn inward
and talk to fellow believers alone. You could
reject the world as the domain of the flesh
and the Devil. It need then no longer bother
you that your secular friends and neighbours
don’t agree and behave differently. So what if
other people divorce, practise birth control,
tolerate same-sex relationships? Let them
take the primrose path.
You and your friends are an island, entire
unto yourselves. You found special schools
for your children and tell them not to play
with the sons and daughters of secular evil.
You don’t think of our society as your soci-
ety any longer. These unbelievers are no long-
er part of your world. You go your own way
and leave them to go — perhaps literally —
to Hell. You care about humanity, of course
you do, but you hope that by maintaining the
unsullied integrity of your own beliefs, your
island community may one day become a
beacon to the world. You are waiting.
In Beni Isguen they are still waiting.
I don’t think that’s brave. In a curious way
I think it’s the opposite: it is self-indulgent, a
kind of petulance. That unwavering Catholic
Chris Patten put it best when (championing
the life of Pope John XXIII on my Great Lives
programme recently) he said: ‘Our church has
too often given the impression that it doesn’t
actually like the century it’s in.’
Often enough I rage against simpering
Anglicanism. I beat my atheist’s fists against
the church’s refusal to decide what it actual-
ly believes. I mock trendy vicars and hand-
wringing bishops and their attempt to stay
friends with a Britain increasingly uninter-
ested in their friendship.
But in this issue Dreher shows us the
alternative, and in me is born a sneaking
admiration for the Church of England’s often
perplexed but ever hopeful struggle to carry
on liking the century it’s in.T
he Algerian government’s official
tourist guide describes ‘the walled
town of Beni Isguen — normally
closed to foreigners — where the women,
clad entirely in white, reveal only one eye to
the outside world’. Rod Dreher’s Easter call
to devout Christians (p. 12) to separate them-
selves as a community from what he believes
to be the degeneracy of our western culture
puts me in mind of that sad, disturbing place.
Beni Isguen is one of the oasis towns
near Ghardaia in southern Algeria. I vis-
ited many years ago and can be sure there
has been little change since, for the com-
munity has clung to unchanging and uniting
beliefs for hundreds of years. In an attempt
to keep their own version of Islam free
from pollution by north Africa’s evolving
mainstream cultures, Beni Isguen’s inhab-
itants allow no outsider in and no inhabit-
ant out between dusk and dawn; and marry,
it seems, only among themselves. They
appeared not unfriendly but entirely closed
to visitors like me. The children looked
strangely alike, with pallid faces and wide
foreheads. I wondered about inbreeding, as I
did more recently when noticing the children
in a self-imposed ghetto in north London of
the ultra-orthodox Jews we Gentiles some-
times (wrongly) call ‘Hasidic’.
I am not suggesting that Mr Dreher wants
devout Christians to retreat to walled towns
but his argument does expose a real tension
within modern Christianity — one which
afflicts all world religions. When doctrine
clashes with modern ways, should believers
retreat metaphorically into the 21st- century
equivalent of walled cities?
A Judaic ultra-orthodoxy which will not
permit the operation of a refrigerator door
on the Sabbath; Mennonite Christians in
their closed colonies in Paraguay; a Hebrid-
ean branch of Scottish Calvinism that would
padlock swings in children’s playgrounds on
Sunday — and Beni Isguen. All are grotesque
examples of Dreher’s ‘Benedict Option’
taken to an extreme, but not illogical conclu-
sion. How far should modern Christians try
to be part of the culture in which they live,
or how far should they turn their backs on
a mainstream whose values may clash with
some of their own? Mr Dreher, who advo-
However fitfully, the church seems
to be trying to stay open to ideas,
differences and outside influences‘He’s at that awkward age.’