If this is hate speech then what future for pluralism?

In June 2019 the Reverend Dr. Bernard Randall delivered a sermon at Trent College, the private boarding school of which he was then chaplain, in which he sought to voice his concerns regarding the college's plans to develop an "LGBT+ inclusive curriculum". Full details of these events can be found here (and elsewhere), but since the sermon appears to have been the catalyst for, amongst other things, the reporting of Dr. Randall by the school to the anti-terrorism unit of Derbyshire Police it seems as worthy a document as any for judging the state of free speech in general and freedom of religion in particular in British education.

For more than thirty years, Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) has been excoriated for its prohibition of  "promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." Regardless of one's views as to what constitutes an authentic marriage (and many opposite sex and ostensibly Christian partnerships would fall short of the desired standard), I doubt that Section 28 did little actively to promote family life and I fear it may well have further contributed to the diminution of the human dignity of those whose manner of living it condemned. Sadly, the same mindset that inspired the authors of Section 28 now appears to inform the views of the present generation of LGBT activists who are disinclined to entertain the possibility of constructive dissent

At a time when the language of activists (liberal and conservative alike) is characterised by a 'take no prisoners' mentality, it is telling that the words of Dr. Randall (is it not interesting, in a world that tends to dismiss traditional religious teaching as the preserve of the uneducated, that the individual at the centre of the controversy is the holder of a PhD and the headmaster of Trent College is not) can be deemed "inflammatory, divisive and harmful".   

"We should not descend into abuse," declares Dr. Randall, "we should respect the beliefs of others, even where we disagree. Above all, we need to treat each other with respect, not personal attacks – that’s what loving your neighbour as yourself means." And further, "Whichever side of this conflict of ideas you come down on, or even if you are unsure of some of it, the most important thing is to remember that loving your neighbour as yourself does not mean agreeing with everything he or she says; it means that when we have these discussions there is no excuse for personal attacks or abusive language."

It can be enlightening to reflect, as I sometimes remark to my students, on the evolution of the understanding of the term "toleration," particularly as it applies to religious communities. In the late 17th Century it was acknowledged that the transformation of the religious landscape effected by the Reformation could not be reversed and those states with religious minorities would have to find some means of accommodating them (there were, of course, exceptions to this principle, notably the French Huguenots either expelled or forcibly converted by the terms of the Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685). However, such religious toleration was far removed from the freedoms accorded Christians in North America after the Revolution. Membership of the state church was usually a requirement for active involvement in the life of the community and for holding civic office, with "Dissenters" excluded from the public square. The story of toleration in Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries is one of the devlopment of a much more inclusive approach to religious minorities in which political constraints were lifted and their communities encouraged actively to contribute to the life of the wider society. Such a welcome carried with it a readiness to recognise that those who dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy had a right to do so without fear or favour.

I reproduce the text of Dr. Randall's sermon below. It seems to me to be as reasoned (and reasonable) expression of the 'minority' position as one could hope to find in this polarized age. "It is perfectly legitimate to think that marriage should only properly be understood as being a lifelong exclusive union of a man and a woman;" writes Dr. Randall, "indeed, that definition is written into English law. You may perfectly properly believe that, as an ideal, sexual activity belongs only within such marriage, and that therefore any other kind is morally problematic. That is the position of all the major faith groups – though note that it doesn’t apply only to same-sex couples. And it is a belief based not only on scripture but on a highly positive view of marriage as the building block of a society where people of all kinds flourish, and on recognising that there are many positive things in life more important than sex, if only we’d let them be. This viewpoint is recognised by many people as extremely liberating. And it’s an ethical position which could also be arrived at independently of any religious text, I think". 

Many may disagree with his views, but pupils at Trent College are entitled not only to hold them but to express them without fear of sanction. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," insists Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984. "If that is granted, all else follows." I can't help but wonder if that premise is ever more under threat in the increasingly intolerant West.   

Text of Dr. Randall's sermon, June 21, 2019

 I have a theory about Brexit. It seems to me that people who voted to leave the European Union voted for largely political reasons – to do with democratic self-determination; and people who voted to remain did so for largely economic reasons – to do with prosperity and jobs.

Of course I’m simplifying here, and both sides claim to consider both, but it seems to me that which set of ideas, which ideology, takes priority determines which way many people voted.

And while we can easily discuss facts, and try to find the truth behind factual claims, ideals aren’t true or false in the same way.

And so the problem with the often very heated and unpleasant debate ever since the referendum is that people haven’t managed to cope with there being two competing sets of ideals – two ideologies.

Now when ideologies compete, we should not descend into abuse, we should respect the beliefs of others, even where we disagree. Above all, we need to treat each other with respect, not personal attacks – that’s what loving your neighbour as yourself means.

By all means discuss, have a reasoned debate about beliefs, but while it’s OK to try and persuade each other, no one should be told they must accept an ideology. Love the person, even where you profoundly dislike the ideas. Don’t denigrate a person simply for having opinions and beliefs which you don’t share.

There has been another set of competing ideals in the news recently. You may have heard of the protests outside a Birmingham primary school over the teachings of an LGBT-friendly ‘No Outsiders’ programme.

In a mostly Muslim community, this has been sensitive, because many parents feel that their children are being pushed to accept ideas which run counter to Islamic moral values.

And in our own school community, I have been asked about a similar thing – and the question was put to me in a very particular way – ‘How come we are told we have to accept all this LGBT stuff in a Christian school?’ I thought that was a very intelligent and thoughtful way of asking about the conflict of values, rather than asking which is right, and which is wrong.

So my answer is this: There are some aspects of the Educate and Celebrate programme which are simply factual – there are same-sex attracted people in our society, there are people who experience gender dysphoria, and so on.

There are some areas where the two sets of values overlap – no one should be discriminated against simply for who he or she is: That’s a Christian value, based in loving our neighbours as ourselves.

All these things should be accepted straightforwardly by all of us, and it’s right that equalities law reflects that.

But there are areas where the two sets of ideas are in conflict, and in these areas you do not have to accept the ideas and ideologies of LGBT activists. Indeed, since Trent exists ‘to educate boys and girls according to the Protestant and Evangelical principles of the Church of England’, anyone who tells you that you must accept contrary principles is jeopardizing the school’s charitable status, and therefore it’s very existence.

You should no more be told you have to accept LGBT ideology than you should be told you must be in favour of Brexit, or must be Muslim – to both of which I’m sure most of you would quite rightly object.

I am aware that there will be a good few in our community who will have been struggling, if they feel they are being told that they must accept ideas which run counter to their faith – or indeed non-faith – based reasoning about the world.

So I want to say to everyone, but especially to those who have been troubled, that you are not obliged to accept someone else’s ideology. You are perfectly at liberty to hear ideas out, and then think, ‘No, not for me’.

There are several areas where many or most Christians (and, for that matter, people of other faiths, too), will be in disagreement with LGBT activists, and where you must make up your own mind. So it is perfectly legitimate to think that marriage should only properly be understood as being a lifelong exclusive union of a man and a woman; indeed, that definition is written into English law.

You may perfectly properly believe that, as an ideal, sexual activity belongs only within such marriage, and that therefore any other kind is morally problematic. That is the position of all the major faith groups – though note that it doesn’t apply only to same-sex couples.

And it is a belief based not only on scripture but on a highly positive view of marriage as the building block of a society where people of all kinds flourish, and on recognising that there are many positive things in life more important than sex, if only we’d let them be.

This viewpoint is recognised by many people as extremely liberating. And it’s an ethical position which could also be arrived at independently of any religious text, I think.

In other areas you are entitled to think, if it makes more sense to you, that human beings are indeed male and female, that your sex can’t be changed, that although the two sexes have most things in common, there are some real, biologically based differences between them overall. And if you think that, you would be in accord not only with the tradition of most Christians, and other faiths, but much of the biological and psychological sciences too.

You are entitled, if you wish, to look at some of the claims made about gender identity and think that it is incoherent to say that, for example, gender is quite independent of any biological factor, but that a person’s physiology should be changed to match his or her claimed gender; or incoherent to say that gender identity is both a matter of individual determination and social conditioning at the same time, or incoherent to make claims about being non-binary or gender-fluid by both affirming and denying the gender stereotypes which exist in wider society.

And if these claims, which do seem to be made, are incoherent, then they cannot be more than partially true. Yet truth is important as we try to make decisions about the consequences of these ideas.

And you might reasonably notice that some LGBT activists will happily lie about gender identity being a legally protected characteristic (which it isn’t), and from that observation wonder whether there are other areas where their relationship to truth is looser than might be ideal.

But, by way of contrast, no one has the right to tell you that you must lie about these matters, to say things you sincerely believe to be false – that is the tactic of totalitarianism and dictatorship.

On a more positive note, Christians will want to have a discussion about human identity which focuses on the things we all have in common, rather than increasingly long lists of things which might divide.

You might be concerned that if you take the religious view on these matters you will be attacked and accused of homophobia and the like. But remember that religious belief is just as protected in law as sexual orientation, and no one has the right to discriminate against you or be abusive towards you.

Remember too that ‘phobia’ words have a strict sense of extreme or irrational fear or dislike, like arachnophobia, fear of spiders, or triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number thirteen – well, there’s nothing extreme about sharing your view with the Church of England, established by law, and of the majority of the world’s population who belong to these faiths.

Nor is it irrational to hold these views, since they can be based both on secular reasoning and on scriptures – and if, on other grounds, you are sure that the scriptures reflect the mind of God, then they provide the very best reasons possible for anything.

But ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’ have come to be used in a looser sense to mean often simply, ‘You disagree with me and I’m going to refuse to listen to you, and shame you to shut you down’. In other words, they have sometimes come to be terms of abuse, used in a dictionary-definition, bigoted and bullying way. You can safely ignore these uses, although that takes real moral courage, I know.

And you may think that LGBT rights are different somehow, because no one chooses to belong to the varied groups represented by these ideas. To which I would remind you that equalities law does not recognise that distinction – all equalities are in fact equal.

So, all in all, if you are at ease with ‘all this LGBT stuff’, you’re entitled to keep to those ideas; if you are not comfortable with it, for the various especially religious reasons, you should not feel required to change.

Whichever side of this conflict of ideas you come down on, or even if you are unsure of some of it, the most important thing is to remember that loving your neighbour as yourself does not mean agreeing with everything he or she says; it means that when we have these discussions there is no excuse for personal attacks or abusive language.

We should all respect that people on each side of the debate have deep and strongly held convictions. And because, unlike Brexit, this is not a debate which is subject to a vote, it is an ongoing process, so there should be a shared effort to find out what real truth looks like, and to respect that that effort is made honestly and sincerely by all people, even if not everybody comes up with the same answers for now.

Enduring Colonialism?

Over the past year there have been a number of historical commentaries in the mainstream press that endeavour to explain the philosophical underpinnings of such movements as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. Some are more convincing than others. One account that caught my attention was Simukai Chigudu's 'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes', with much of which I had no quarrel but which at times suffered from the same Manichaean tendencies that inform commentary of this kind. A month ago I wrote to Dr. Chigudu, assuming that, as one scholar to another, a conversation might develop that would be mutually beneficial. Since no reply has been forthcoming I must assume that Dr. Chigudu sees nothing worthy of a response, so I am posting it here.

From: BONNER, JEREMY
Sent: 16 February 2021 09:41
To: simukai.chigudu@qeh.ox.ac.uk <simukai.chigudu@qeh.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: My life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes

 

Dear Dr. Chigudu,

I found the account that you provided to the Guardian most thought provoking. It has taken me a while to compose this, but, wearing my historian's hat, I thought I should articulate some of the concerns that it provoked in me.

One of the problems that I have with the narratives of institutional racism and white privilege that have arisen of late is the way in which they interrogate the past by the standards of the present and, at the same time, treat current mores as if they were indistinguishable from those of sixty years ago. The idea that some of my white working-class neighbours (I should note here that my background is certainly economically privileged) in the Northeast enjoy "white privilege" as compared with, for example, the present MP for Spelthorne (whose middle-class background is undoubtedly privileged) bears little relation to reality and I would further point out that in 1975 - when Kwasi Kwarteng was born - no Home Counties Conservative association would have considered adopting a candidate of colour, regardless of his or her political views. Does that mean that the UK is free from racism? Far from it, any more than it is free from ageism or prejudice against those with unpopular religious convictions (Muslims and traditionalist Christians alike), but that makes it no more institutionally racist than it is institutionally anti-religious.

Your thoughts on the situation in Zimbabwe inspire me to take the issue a little further. My understanding was that with the Lancaster House Agreement, Robert Mugabe reached an understanding with the white minority by which he secured to them their economically privileged status in exchange for a gentleman's agreement to stay out of politics and ensure that Zimbabwe remained the breadbasket of Africa, securing Zimbabwe against fifth columnists as it transitioned from an ally of South Africa to a frontline state. That state of affairs remained in effect until the 2000 referendum, which the MDC opposed less on the grounds of land reform than on the new powers assigned to the executive. You state at one point in your narrative that "Little to nothing was said (in the early 2000s), in the media or elsewhere, of Zimbabwe’s colonial legacy, or of the suffering of Black people under Mugabe’s regime." I can't speak with confidence to the first point, but reporting of the use of terror by the war veterans knew no colour bar and an event like Operation Murambatsvina did draw attention.

You also mention your learning for the first time of Gukurahundi. In recent years many negative aspects of postcolonial Africa (from the Rwanda genocide to Nigeria's Special Anti-Robbery Squad) have been explained with reference to colonial failings, and yet there are African states that have - for the most part - handled multi-party democracy well for most of their post-colonial history (Senegal and Botswana come to mind). Equally, the tradition of strongman politics seems to take a long time dying; I can remember in the early 1990s Frederick Chiluba vanquishing Kenneth Kaunda at the polls and almost immediately thereafter going after political opponents much as Kaunda had done in his political heyday - plus ca change. And then there are the tragedies like Gukurahundi that seem to defy easy explanations of a colonial legacy. I suppose one could argue that where colonial administrators played off one ethnic group against another, such animosities might subsequently spill over into violence, but was not Gukurahundi an attempt by Mugabe to eliminate the only alternative ethnic political power base (the Ndebele) in Zimbabwe? The fact that North Korean mercenaries were employed to do it speaks volumes. The remark of the Balliol academic that you quote was certainly obtuse (and unworthy of a scholar), particularly to someone whom they did not know, but I could have imagined saying much the same about the politics (and politicians) of Northern Ireland in the past (and even today). It doesn't have to be an expression of derision so much as one of despair. Look at the recent metamorphosis of Ahmed Abiy or the police state that is Eritrea. How do you fix that may not be the most delicate of questions, but one can surely not deny that something needs fixing? If the West tries to act (except in the case of apartheid, of course) it's denounced as colonialist, if it holds off, it's denounced as indifferent.   

I have never set much store by statues myself (except where the individual in question is of historical interest to me), but I can appreciate that some feel differently. The recent trend towards iconoclasm typified by Rhodes Must Fall, however, makes me uneasy. It seems to be driven by the same impulse to obliterate the past that you so eloquently document in discussing Rhodes's insistence that the Great Zimbabwe statues were not African in origin. Doubtless you would insist that the place for contextualizing such statues is in a museum not in the public square, but the truth is that iconoclasm rarely stops with the great offenders. We're already seeing a drive to eliminate public representations of many who have been found to offend against present-day orthodoxies of one sort or another and I see no signs of this trend relaxing. Far more efficacious is the erection of new statues that celebrate those previously excluded from the pantheon, and the introduction of suitable contextualization for those already on display. Human history is, ultimately, an exercise in documenting the interplay of darkness and light, of the demons and angels of human nature, as indeed your article makes very clear.

Sincerely,                  Jeremy Bonner            

The Pettiness of Home Office Bureaucracy

As one who lived for twenty years as a student and freelance historian in the United States, I know something of the struggle to obtain permanent residency (as a spouse) and at times felt irritation both at the bureaucratic hurdles and at the costs imposed on one whose family had contributed to the well-being of the American economy, both through tuition fees and direct financial support. I clearly didn't know when I was well-off.

It came as a considerable shock to learn of the appalling treatment meted out by the Home Office to Dr. Paul Hamilton, an American scholar who, having completed a doctorate at the University of Birmingham and while applying for fellowships with the Leverhulme and Wellcome Trusts, sought further leave to remain, for which he paid a handsome £650. Not only was this application apparently denied on December 9, but the authorities failed to inform Dr. Hamilton of this fact and had him detained at an immigration centre on January 17 on the grounds that he did not have "enough close ties (eg. family or friends) to make it likely that you will stay in one place." Dr. Hamilton had already purchased an open return ticket to the United States (worth £800) and had he been notified of the denial of his application would have made his own arrangements to depart.

The present government is only too happy to encourage "entrepreneurs" to resettle in the UK if they bring in sufficient assets, but apparently disdains a foreign academic willing to spend upwards of £100,000 of his own money to boost the resources of the British education system but who then seeks - not unreasonably - to secure a postdoctoral fellowship on the same basis as a British academic. The fact that Dr. Hamilton is a Shakespeare scholar only heightens the irony. The only official who comes out of this affair with any credit is the police sergeant at Leamington Spa who called the proceedings "completely ridiculous" and initially refused to process Dr. Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton is clearly owed both an apology and the return of his visa processing fee as partial compensation for his mistreatment. The precedent that it sets, if this judgment is allowed to stand, is alarming for the academic community at large. I have written to the Vice-Chancellors of my home institution and the University of Birmingham, as well as to the Home Secretary (copied to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Education). I hope others will be moved to do the same.

Update, January 29: Carolyn Pike (who appears to be the University of Birmingham's Director of Legal Services) informs me that "the University is not at liberty to discuss personal matters relating to alumni with third parties." I would never have imagined that one academic asking whether or not a Vice Chancellor would offer his support to another academic would provoke such a response (and from a legal officer rather than the official to whom the appeal was addressed to boot). Let us hope that this will not be another case of the "rich" getting the pleasure and the "poor" getting the blame.  

Further Update, January 29: It appears Dr. Hamilton is now a free man. Somehow one doubts that any official apology will be forthcoming.