What form did this ‘high ground’ take? According to the Harvard student who introduced her 2019 commencement speech at the Ivy League college with a litany of her good deeds: “She has passed Germany’s first minimum wage, closed Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear explosion, promoted marriage equality, led progress in tackling climate change, and opened her country to over one million refugees from the wars of the Middle East.”

Merkel’s junior coalition partners the Social Democrats would no doubt roll their eyes if they heard that; the policies listed by the Harvard student were all theirs. Take the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Merkel, a conservative, actually opposed it for all of her career, but, sensing a shift in the Zeitgeist, let it pass through parliament in 2017.

But that was typical Merkel. She always let the public mood determine her policy choices: she was the first German chancellor to receive a weekly detailed briefing on opinion research from her press department. Perhaps that’s why she was synonymous with dithering, sitting on the fence and remaining quiet on key issues — so much so that a neologism was spawned: merkeln, the Langenscheidt dictionary’s 2015 word of the year. “To Merkel” is defined as “to do nothing, make no decisions, issue no statements”.

It was not her strong convictions that endeared her with German voters. It was her lack of them. She is the opposite of a visionary; once asked what she associated with Germany, she said “well-made windows”. Not Germany’s rich cultural heritage, not its landscapes, not its football squad, not even its robust Grundgesetz (a set of basic laws put in place after the war, essentially a constitution). Far more important are its… well-sealed windows.

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Why Macron snubbed the EU

By Peter Franklin

So, is she really the “liberal West’s last defender”, as the New York Times would have it? Much of the ‘moral compass’ talk is based on Merkel’s momentous decision to open the German border to more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere in 2015. No doubt it was an event of historic importance that changed Germany and Europe forever. But was it really on par with Willy Brandt’s epic 1970 genuflection in Warsaw, as some have suggested? Or, as some commentators said at the time, a monumental, healing gesture that showed the world that Germany had finally shaken off its Nazi baggage and become a force for good? Not quite.

Only two months before she opened the borders, Merkel had appeared at a townhall-style event called Living Well in Germany, in which she engaged with a group of teenagers from across the country. There, Reem Sahwil, a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee who spoke flawless German and had stellar marks in school, expressed her fear that her family would be deported, extinguishing her dream of attending university in Germany. Without a hint of empathy, Merkel told her that if everyone like her stayed, thousands of other refugees from the Middle East and Africa would flood into Germany, something the country couldn’t cope with. When Sahwil began to cry, Merkel said: “But you’ve done really well for yourself. Let me give you a stroke.” (Something she actually did.)

When, just two months later, tens of thousands of Syrians were passing through Hungary and Austria towards Germany, Merkel first considered taking a hardline approach and mobilising thousands of police officers to secure the southern frontier. Opinion polls, however, suggested most Germans favoured a compassionate, welcoming approach. So without consulting EU partners, she opened the borders. Within days, she was shooting selfies with young Syrian men.

In a matter of months, however, Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) started to haemorrhage support. And the supposedly moral Merkel was soon replaced by her old pragmatic, shape-shifting political self. She tried to export the refugee problem to the outer borders of the EU and brokered a dodgy deal with the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stem the tide of human beings fleeing across the Aegean. To placate the conservative wing of the CDU, she spoke at a December 2016 party conference of banning the burqa — to jubilant applause. She also started to take a harder line on the deportation of refugees and asylum seekers who had committed crimes, even to war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.

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When will Germany grow up?

By Katja Hoyer

But for many it was too late. The massive influx of refugees was the boost the odious, far-right AfD had been waiting for. Largely thanks to Merkel’s shambolic immigration policy, the party is now a permanent fixture of German politics and commands a majority in two eastern states.

Merkel’s political contortions extend well beyond immigration, however. On climate policy, too, she has been immensely disappointing. Granted, she had a few successes on the diplomatic stage, such as persuading Russia’s Vladimir Putin to sign up to the Paris Agreement. But when it comes to actually reducing Germany’s climate footprint, her governments’ actions have been woefully half-hearted. Following a tiny slump during the pandemic, carbon dioxide emissions are up again, and it looks unlikely that Germany will hit its target of a 65% drop in emissions from 1990 levels.

Meanwhile, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Merkel rushed to fast track Germany’s plan to drop nuclear power. Yet renewables haven’t picked up enough to fill in the gap in power production. Instead, Merkel has pushed for the Nord Stream pipeline (admittedly initiated by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who now even sits on the operator’s board) through the Baltic Sea, enabling Germany to pipe in Russian gas directly without paying fees to those pesky middlemen such as Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Did her moral compass slide off deck?

And then, as always in Germany, there is das Auto. Successive Merkel governments have been slavishly beholden to the car industry. How else are we to explain Dieselgate, where it took the US authorities — and not the corrupt or incompetent German regulators — to reveal that Volkswagen was installing software that enabled its cars to cheat during emissions testing. Sales of German cars fell briefly. But few heads rolled.

Instead, Merkel merkelled: she held ‘diesel summits’ at which the hitherto extremely profitable carmakers — the perpetrators — begged for and received mountains of cash in the form of subsidies and government-funded customer incentives to prop up demand for electric, petrol and — yep — diesel cars of the slightly cleaner variety.

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Angela Merkel saved the West

By James Hawes

But Dieselgate was, for the most part, unexceptional. The Merkel years were defined by scandals of incompetence and corruption, none of which, incredibly, stuck to the chancellor herself. She had a knack for outsourcing difficult decisions to commissions, for delegating hot button issues to her foot soldiers. It was always easy for the press to point a finger to one of her flailing ministers. She remained aloof from the mudslinging — while working on her ‘moral compass’ act with earnest speeches and high-profile international negotiations.

Yes, she was Germany’s first female leader, and the first chancellor from the East. But the fact that she was a protestant pastor’s daughter in a communist country — a tale of humble origins spun in every English-language profile — didn’t make her the deeply moral politician so many made her out to be. Rather, during the Trump years, when it felt that the world was being taken over by blustering male populists, her plodding, unflashy style made her stand out. Against that backdrop, her measured mediocrity was mistaken for a moral virtue.

That probably isn’t what Obama had in mind when he spoke of her saintly principles. But let’s not forget that even saints are only human.

Like much in contemporary liberalism, this response combines high-minded hysteria with ignorance of history. The Human Rights Act became law in 1998 and came into force in 2000. Was the UK a tyranny until then? Power was significantly more accountable. Judgements involving basic political values were not the property of a judicial elite, but made by legislators who could be removed in democratic elections. Attacked by liberals and some Conservatives as a species of “elective dictatorship”, this was in fact a system that secured self-government. There was no Supreme Court standing above government that could nullify its decisions. Political choices among conflicting goals and values were made openly in parliament.

Only 20 years ago, the British judiciary lacked the capacity, and probably the will, to become seriously involved in politics. Judicial independence was never in doubt. At the same time — and not unrelatedly — the judiciary did not assert the authority to overturn acts of government. It would have been unthinkable for it to pronounce, as the Supreme Court did unanimously in Miller 2, that a decision on proroguing parliament would have “an extreme effect on the fundamentals of our democracy”.

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Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

Clearly, this is political language — and of a crude, silly, over-heated kind. Equally clearly, that is not how the judges see it. In their minds, their views on political questions are so self-evidently correct that they are not political views at all. For them, it seems, the fact that politics remains a sphere of irresolvable disagreement shows that collective decisions about basic freedoms are best decided by an elite that is not politically accountable. It is no accident that the dominant strand in liberal thinking over the past generation has been a species of anti-political legalism.

A compelling case can be made for returning to the pre-1998 regime. Whether the Supreme Court is allowed to continue in its present form is not the most important issue. Disestablishing the Court, and returning it to a more limited role as a Lords committee of final appeals, could have a useful symbolic role in curbing judicial overreach. But whether a body with the title of Supreme Court continues to exist is not the real issue. Nor is the central question of how judges are chosen. An American-style system of political nomination should be firmly rejected. The proper remedy for the politicisation of the judiciary cannot be to make the judiciary yet more political. Instead, judges should be deprived of the powers that enable them to make political decisions.

The Conservative manifesto suggests derogations from the HRA where it hobbles government in its most essential tasks. Human rights laws have obstructed the deportation of terrorists and other criminals and limited the terms under which they are sentenced and released, exposed the armed forces to vexatious historic law-suits and dictated the conditions in which prisoners are held in British gaols. Amending the Act to prevent these abuses would be an advance, but would not remove the power of judges to impose unjustified limits on the authority of government. The single most direct route to this end would be by repealing the Human Rights Act, and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.

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The deluded cult of social justice

By John Gray

It will be pointed out that the ECHR, which the HRA incorporated into UK law, was framed largely by British civil servants. But in the nearly 70 years that have followed since it came into force, the scope of the Convention has expanded greatly, as European judges have interpreted its provisions ever more broadly (Judicial over-reach extends beyond the inflation of rights; the ruling by the Court of Appeal that a third Heathrow runway would be unlawful shows courts acting as arbiters of public policy).

A British Bill of Rights has been proposed as an alternative, but would not necessarily reduce judicial over-reach. Drawing up such a bill would be a protracted process, and with much of the legal profession in thrall to theories that enhance their own standing and scope of operations, the resulting rights would probably be little different from those in force at present. The rule of law would still mean rule by lawyers. If the HRA were repealed, and the UK no longer signed up to the ECHR, the situation would alter fundamentally. Britain would become like Australia, a modern democracy that operates without a national bill of rights.

Liberals will respond with horror to any suggestion of returning to the pre-1998 British ancien regime. Yet it secured the values an earlier generation of liberals rightly prized. Homosexuality between men was legalised in 1967, as was abortion except in Northern Ireland. (In a civilized reform, same-sex marriage became lawful in England and Wales in 2013, and Scotland a year later. Extending the benefits of marriage, it widens the good life available to gay people. Human rights are irrelevant.) The Race Relations Act making it illegal to refuse housing, jobs or public services to people on the basis of their ethnic origins, was passed in 1968. In all these cases, liberal values were secured by legislation, not the judicial adjudication of rights.

Relying on parliament rather than the judiciary for our freedoms is a distinctively British liberal tradition. John Stuart Mill never supposed human freedom could be embodied in a list of rights. Having himself served as an MP, he assigned to legislators the task of determining the scope and limits of freedom. Parliamentarians, not a jumped-up collection of lawyers, was supreme. Legislators should ask whether harm to others is at issue, and if so, which mix of freedom and restraint would best promote general well-being. Unlike basic rights, liberties could would vary widely according to changing circumstances.

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Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

There is much that is wanting in Mill’s utilitarianism, not least his assumption that harm and well-being can be assessed in easily agreed terms. But Mill’s account of how questions of freedom are to be decided has crucial advantages over the rights-based legalism that has effectively replaced it as the official philosophy of the British governing classes. Mill recognised that vital freedoms may conflict with one another, and when they do, the conflict should be settled by elected law-makers not judges.

The decline of this British liberal tradition began well before the passing of the Human Rights Act. Writing in 1990, I noted:

“If there is a single characteristic that typifies liberal political philosophy over the past quarter of a century, it is its domination by a jurisprudential paradigm…It has generated a series of intractable conflicts, which portend deepening division, growing ungovernability and even a sort of chronic, low-intensity civil war…of these conflicts the abortion question is only the most obvious, but it serves well enough to illustrate the fateful implications for political practice of the hegemony of a rights-based jurisprudence that has been inflated by the inordinate claims of liberal theorizing—that, since fundamental rights cannot be moderated, their judicial interpretation can only mean unconditional victory or complete surrender for the protagonists in the dispute. This is not a recipe for civic peace, or for a stable liberal civil society.”[1. “An epitaph for liberalism”, Times Literary Supplement, January 12, 1990, reprinted in Post-liberalism: studies in Political Thought,1993, pp. 238-9.]

A diagnosis that may have seemed hyperbolic 30 years ago may look less so today. The effect of turning practically every major public issue into a question of human rights is to make conflicts of values intractable. The abortion issue was only the beginning of a culture war that has left American politics hopelessly polarised. Britain has followed America down a road that leads to a war of all against all, fought out between contending social groups armed with inordinate rights.

Contrary to the legalist philosophy that has shaped liberal thinking over the past 30 or more years, human freedoms are not a system of dovetailing rights. Protecting often divergent human interests, they are the site of unending value-conflict. A failure to recognise this fact has created the hyper-liberalism that now attempts to impose on society a particular set of values that much of the population does not accept.

Like human identities, rights are not unilateral acts of self-assertion. In order to be enforced, they need recognition in society, which is particularly problematic when one right collides with another. The right to free speech is at odds with the right to be protected against hate speech, the right to stage protest marches with the rights of people to go about their daily business, the rights of transgender people with those of people who demand single-sex facilities, and so on.

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Why I was wrong about liberalism

By Giles Fraser

Liberal legalists say warring rights can be moderated, and their conflicts resolved, by judicial process. But the conceptions of public interest and social wellbeing to which judges appeal in order to revolve these conflicts are not themselves matters of legal judgement. They are inherently and unalterably political, and the political opinions of judges have no more authority or value than anyone else’s.

The legalist philosophy in which rights insulate freedom from the hazards of politics is an illusion. All the majestic panoply of the American constitution will not stop Trump turning America into an illiberal democracy if — in a scenario the time-wasting fiasco of impeachment has made more likely — he wins a second term.

In Britain, liberals often ask what life would be like under a Corbyn government without the HRA. The answer is that it would be not much different from life in Britain with the HRA. When it suited his purposes, Corbyn would ignore, override or circumvent human rights, as he has done in regard to the investigation of Labour anti-Semitism. It was not a regime of rights but the moral decency of voters that prevented an institutionally racist party coming to power in this country. In contrast, the European rights regime has not stopped far right parties advancing to the point where they have entered government in several countries. Human rights have no magical power to shield freedom from political challenge and defeat.

If the government is serious about reviewing the position of human rights laws in this country, it should not be put off by hysterical claims of a slide into despotism. Inspired by legalist ideologies that are at variance with the British political tradition, the regime of rights that has been imposed over the past two decades need not be accepted as permanent. Clinging to a faddish orthodoxy is not the most authentic kind of conservatism, or the most effective way of protecting freedom.

The critique of this position is easy to make. It is true that in the period since the 19th century, Western societies in particular have seen a steady increase in standards of living and an increase in the accumulation of personal freedoms. Of course there were at least two very serious interregnums in that steady march – namely World Wars One and Two. And in many non-Western societies (not least central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century), the idea that history moves in one direction might look especially fanciful.

Still, a version of the progressive fallacy seems almost embedded in the modern Western mind. For such people when a piece of territory is conquered and occupied by liberal attitudes it is then held for all time. It is not hard to see the idea’s attraction. What is hard to see is why it is so little refuted. Or rather, why when evidence emerges for its possible refutation, it is reacted to as though it is no evidence at all.

Further reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

Take the example of gay rights. In the last half a century the situation for gay people in western democracies improved immeasurably. From relations between people of the same sex being illegal in countries such as Britain, we have arrived at a position where gay people are able to marry, where the visibility of gay people in public life has never been greater and where corporations and arms of government positively fall over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to gay rights.

This last element – a positive bragging about a commitment to gay rights (sometimes described as ‘woke capitalism’) – is one that disturbs some of us who do not share the presumptions of inevitable progress. As Pride day has moved into Pride week and now Pride month there has (in the UK at least) emerged a sense of over-reach. This is a personal feeling, obviously, and not one that everybody will share. But I might as well express how it prickles in me.

I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.

Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym.

The sense of slight over-reach, or over-protesting, in part comes from the sense that some bigger picture may be being missed. And sure enough this year’s newly-released British Social Attitudes Survey gives a good jolt to this instinct.

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The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

For the new BSA report includes an interesting statistic. Over the last 30 years there has been a steady change in attitudes towards gay sex among the majority of the population. In 1987, (when the AIDS crisis was at its height) nine out of 10 people thought that there was something wrong with sexual activity between adults of the same sex. Each year since then the figures have shown an increasing tolerance of same-sex relations.

Until now. At the end of this 30 year movement in one direction, there has been a change. The data suggests acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships.

There might be many reasons for this shift. Not all will be caused by an objection to the M+S sandwich counter. But it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes.

For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.

In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic).

Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?

Further reading

Bigotry dressed as victimhood

By James Bloodworth

Again the press coverage is of little help. But there’s one reason that does spring to mind, which is that the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one.

Lest this be thought to be the observation of some terrible hater, it is worth mentioning the facts. A poll carried out in the UK 10 years ago found that exactly 0% of British Muslims had ‘tolerance’ for homosexuality. Some research shows that this figure may be shifting. But a survey carried out three years ago for Channel 4 found that a majority of British Muslims wanted being gay to be made illegal in Britain now.

Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.

But here we return to that liberal presumption about ground occupied being ground held. Amid the Pride Month celebrations and the woke capitalism and much more, I see no special reason to regard the accumulation of further rights by gay people or any other group in society as being inevitable, even where it is desirable.

Indeed, I can see plenty of reasons to reflect that in the lifetimes of many of us now living, we could see a significant deterioration in public (and eventually political) support for the rights in question. But over the years, I have always been struck by how unnecessarily hard and painful it has been to make this point.

Conservative denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention have unsurprisingly argued that transgender identity – or anything that does not conform to a binary, biologically based notion of sex and gender – should be considered incompatible with Christian theology.

Even those conservative churches, such as the Assemblies of God, that advocate for a holistic approach that does not reduce members to their gender identity, do so in the context of “help[ing transgender members] experience increasing integrity between their birth sex and their gender identity.”

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Sex, sin and the Catholics

By Christopher Rhodes

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, progressive denominations, such as the Unitarian Universalist Association, not only confirm various forms of gender identification, but go as far as opposing or advocating for particular pieces of legislation in the name of expanding transgender rights.

Meanwhile, major churches such as the Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) have yet to come up with an official stance on transgender members, for the time sidestepping the thorny issue. Their silence can only last for so long.

Now, the loudest voices within global Christianity have chimed in. Last month, the Vatican released its first major statement focused on the issue of gender identity. It’s quite, shall we say, conservative: it’s entitled, Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education. This title reaches all the way back to the Bible’s very first mention of sex differences – in the very first chapter of Genesis – to take a hardline approach to sex and gender.

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The Church's disturbing rush to judgment

By Catherine Pepinster

The new guidelines are meant to inform Catholic school teachers and professors, as well as “parents, students, school leaders and personnel” and so forth, on how to approach gender by elaborating upon the stance conveniently summarised in the title itself. Gender, in the Vatican’s eyes, is determined by biological sex, and sex is both binary – “male and female” – and immutable – “created.” Any alternative ideas work against God’s creation and help “to destabilise the family as an institution”.

The Catholic document goes further: it argues that ideas of gender as non-binary, fluid, distinct from biological birth sex, or influenced by personal choice or social construction are all part of a “gender theory” that emerged in the mid-20^thcentury. While Gender Theory may sound like a course one takes at university, the Vatican’s phrasing here is reminiscent of creationists’ labelling of evolution as “only a theory.” But whereas the creationists placed science in opposition to faith, the Vatican has flipped this argument on its head, claiming that the Church has science on its side – an assertion that might be contested by many scientists themselves – and that LGBT advocates are the ones being driven by ideology.

In other words, the Holy See is not merely telling transgender Catholics that their identities contribute to the breakdown of social norms; it’s telling them that their identities don’t actually exist.

Reactions to this statement are about what you’d expect. Representatives of the generally conservative Catholic hierarchy, including those in both the US and UK, have hailed the documents as providing necessary guidance. LGBT communities and supporters, meanwhile, have condemned the official Catholic stance. New Ways Ministries, an organisation of Catholic LGBT advocates, argues that the statement “perpetuates and encourages hatred, bigotry, and violence” against members of their community.

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How Africa is converting China

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Meanwhile, given all the chaos within the Anglican communion, which has nearly torn itself apart over issues of sexuality, you’d be forgiven for not having noticed that the Church of England released its own pastoral guidance concerning trans members late last year. Guidelines for Anglican clergy included avoiding stereotypes about gender nonconforming people and respecting parishioners’ preferred names and pronouns – seems reasonable so far – as part of an overall stance that seeks to establish the Anglican Church as one that “welcomes and encourages the unconditional affirmation of trans people”.

The Anglican document is in many ways the antithesis of the Catholic statement; it’s no accident that whereas the Catholic Church harkened back to the first mention of gender categories in the Bible, the Anglican bishops quote the last mention, from Saint Paul’s letter to the church of the Galatians. In case you do not remember it from Sunday School, this is the passage where Paul declares:

“As many of you as were baptised into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28).

The Anglican bishops not only home in on the dismissal of gender categories (among other social or identity distinctions) in this declaration, but also key in on the concept of baptism, the central ceremony of declaring membership in the Church.

This document has evoked a new controversy, because it proposes to establish an Anglican ceremony to celebrate gender transitions. The House of Bishops, having previously considered creating a new ritual to mark gender transitions, ultimately decides in this document that the Church could utilise its preexisting rituals such as Confirmation, Baptism, or Affirmation of Baptismal Faith (a sort of renewal ceremony for the already-baptised) to celebrate these transitions.

While these guidelines aren’t actually creating a “transgender baptism”, as has been reported in the press, the association between baptism and gender (re)identification has concerned some Anglican clergy.

A group within the Church known as the Church of England Evangelical Council  – one of the many to form in opposition to the Church of England’s liberalisation concerning LGBT clergy – issued a long response questioning the process, theological basis and practical wisdom of the bishops’ decision. The CEEC accuses the Anglican hierarchy of taking an issue upon which many within the church disagree and simply deciding on a position – a theologically dubious one – by fiat.

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No, you can't pray the gay away

By Tom Chivers and Julie Bindel

Even though the critics of both sets of guidelines are coming from opposite sides of the theological and ideological spectrums, they are both right. The leaders of the two churches have gone too far to one extreme or the other, and their resulting guidelines are painfully naïve at best and disingenuous at worst.

The Catholic document claims to want to create a dialogue while offering a stance that leaves no room for discussion with those who disagree: ‘you’re wrong, delusional and dangerous, but if you’d like to talk, I’m listening’ is not an effective opening salvo for a productive conversation.

The Vatican’s statement ostensibly calls for identifying common ground between the Church and LGBT advocates, such as combating “bullying, violence, insults or unjust discrimination” (leaving the door open, not so subtly, for “just” discrimination). But such calls for unity are sandwiched between much more extensive rhetoric declaring that those who disagree with the Vatican are “confused” and “provocative” ideologues who seek to “annihilate the concept of ‘nature.’”

Sounds dangerous, no? New Ways Ministries, the Catholic LGBT group, warns that the document is a “harmful tool that will be used to oppress and harm not only transgender people, but lesbian, gay, [and] bisexual people, too.”

The Anglican bishops, meanwhile, attempt to pull off a theological sleight of hand that sidesteps the controversy that would come with the creation of a new sacred rite for transgender people by instead redefining an existing holy rite for a purpose it was never intended to serve. The bishops cite Paul’s words while missing their meaning. Paul was not intending to denigrate ethnic, social or gender identities – he was, you may recall, a very proud Jew who felt called to recruit Gentiles to this new religion.

But the purpose of this passage, and the letter from which it’s excerpted, is not to highlight these difference either, but to subsume them within the shared identity of ‘Christian’ that every member takes on upon baptism. The proposal to use baptism ‘creatively’, even if well-meaning, obscures the sacrament’s primary purpose.

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Trans athletes make a mockery of women's sports

By Meghan Murphy

Maybe I should give the church leaders a break: even the LGBT community itself has often experienced difficulties and divisions in how to incorporate the ‘T’ – and both transphobia and trans-separatism have been issues within Queer circles. For organisations run mainly by straight, cis-gender men, there may simply be a steep learning curve as they figure out what to do in a newly-relevant set of social circumstances.

But beyond flaws in the specifics of each church’s proposal, both sets of bishops have made the more fundamental mistake of resorting to rules and regulations while at best only paying lip service to actual dialogue.

In this, the Holy See and the House of Bishops could both look to a smaller organisation, the Church of Scotland, which quietly issued its own document last year. Diverse Gender Identities and Pastoral Care is explicit in that it offers no theological interpretations or overarching regulations. Instead, the booklet simply allows transgender persons and their loved ones to tell stories of their individual experiences, inside and outside of the Church.

Rather than carving out rigid positions rooted in dogma or reshaping existing beliefs in ad hoc fashion, the Scottish Presbyterians have come upon a simpler but seemingly more effective way for Churches to work out what it means to be transgender and Christian: ask.

And the Most Reverend Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church wasn’t going to let this opportunity go to waste.

A descendant of enslaved African ancestors, he had been handed the opportunity to preach about the virtue of love to an estimated audience of two billion – including the British monarchy, which was in no small way implicated in the history of African enslavement and exploitation.

As a preacher, I envied Bishop Curry’s opportunity. And I was also curious: how would he play it?

Ordained over 40 years ago, the Bishop is highly skilled in the art of the black preacher: the use of the body, rhythmic repetitions, call and response to convey his theological message. He used it to powerful effect.

Taking his text from a love poem in the Song of Solomon that is rarely read in churches, his intention was to persuade us that “There is power in love”.

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What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

Time and again we heard him emphasise the power of love; love is the balm in Gilead that his enslaved ancestors sang about as a rebuke to their enslavers; love is not self-serving but self-sacrificing; love is the way; sacrificial love is redemptive; the discovery that harnessed love is as powerful as harnessed fire could change the course of human history; imagine a world of love rooted in the source of love – God.

It was an erudite, theological tour de force. It brought as witnesses Old and New Testament references, popular historical figures such as Martin Luther King and arcane ones such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

But there was more going on too. Let us not underestimate the political dimensions of his sermon. He clearly relished this opportunity to preach truth to colonial power. The bride and groom were the mere catalyst.

And rumour has it that someone else was playing politics too. It has been suggested that it wasn’t Harry and Meghan who chose Curry to preach, but the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Episcopal Church is, after all, part of the Anglican Communion. It is also one of very few churches in the Communion to accept same-sex marriage. It’s the radical part of the family.

Bishop Curry is an ardent supporter of same-sex marriage too. And the Anglican Communion is in a bit of a mess over same-sex marriage. Could it have been the Archbishop’s idea, perhaps, to encourage a black American preacher supportive of this new world thinking to tell two billion citizens of the world that “all kinds of love” is of God because God is love?

Such a wedding would be the perfect opportunity to encourage progressive change in the Communion. This diverse modern couple aren’t simply of the establishment – they are the establishment. And they are about to freshen it up.

Inevitably, conservative Evangelicals and Pentecostals have gone on the offensive. Attempting to discredit Curry’s progressive, theo-political ideas, they have charged him with misappropriating scripture, tearing love from its ethical moorings. Some have been quick to point out that he didn’t mention “man and wife” once in the 14-minute sermon.  But might they be over-reacting?

Suggested reading

Moved by the Spirit: the phenomenal rise of Pentecostalism

By Andrew Davies

What is undeniable is that Bishop Curry is an outstanding preacher who gave an excellent account of himself last Saturday on a stage that would be intimidating for many a preacher (even if he did over-run).

What is also undeniable is that love of God and of neighbour is at the heart of the Christian message, and when such a stunning preacher as Bishop Curry plies his craft, even royalty should tune in. Those who go to bed hungry tonight will thank Bishop Curry for reminding two billion of us last Saturday, rich and poor, that there is power in love. And that when love is the way, poverty will be history and no child will go to bed hungry.

Let us imagine and work towards a world like that.