What do the bishops know about politics and war anyhow? There is the story of Stanley Baldwin faced with a miners' strike and a threatened intervention by the bishops in his day. Baldwin said, "I'll let the bishops mediate between the government and the strikers if they'll let the National Union of Mineworkers revise the Athanasian Creed".
But the bishops have never let doubts as to their actual competence in any matter impede them from poking their crooks into matters a mile away from their proper expertise. Bishops and Synods in the Church of England have pronounced on every issue from glue sniffing to the hydrogen bomb these last twenty-five years. They want us to believe that they are lending us the divine perspective on matters too intransigent for professional political or military remedies. Thus they declare on the rightness or wrongness of all wars, they enter the minutiae of every aspect of social policy from the future of the inner cities to the operation of the coffee market.
And don't look for the Church of Scotland to join in either. The Rev. David Lacy, the Church of Scotland's moderator, says extremist Muslim clerics should leave the country.
"If we are their enemies they should have nothing to do with us, but they don't. They speak out against us from within and get heart operations and care on our system. And we are happy to do that for them, to have rights and care, but we expect them to love us in return and accept our right to be who we are."
Lacy also criticised civil liberties campaigners, whom he accused of stressing rights while underplaying the need for individual responsibility.
He added that those who believed it was Christian to "turn the other cheek" to such extremism were misunderstanding the Gospel message and claimed that believers had a duty to "confront evil".
Via Marcus.
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