Church intervention on Rwanda ‘not playing politics’
THE Church of England’s Rwanda intervention was not “playing party politics”, the Archbishop of York has said.
The Most Rev Stephen Cottrell has responded to claims that religious leaders should not comment on government policy as Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, revealed that she is planning to deport people to Rwanda by this summer.
The plan, which was agreed in April 2022, has been mired in controversy.
Writing in his Easter message, the Archbishop, also writing in The Sunday Telegraph today, said that his criticism of the policy “is not about playing party politics, far from it, but rather a deep and considered plea from the very core of Christian faith”.
His latest comments form part of a sustained attack from Church of England leaders on the policy.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has repeatedly warned of the moral impli- cations and faced criticism that they are meddling in matters of state.
“The Church has never lost the gift of causing irritation, however,” The Archbishop of York said: “When [The Most Rev Justin Welby] and I argue for the establishment of safe and legal routes for refugees to enter the UK this is not about playing party politics, far from it, but rather a deep and considered plea from the very core of Christian faith. Though Christians – myself included – so often fall short of what we preach, my prayer is that in politics, in our communities, and in the Church we might first approach difference by seeking the gift that is so often within it.
“Difference can be approached with inquisitiveness, openness and humility, before our minds turn to addressing any problems. The temptation to declare difference intractable and to stop listening to each other must be rejected.”
The Archbishop has previously described the plans as “truly appalling and distressing”, amid a full-scale attack on government policy. He also raised concerns in Parliament in October, claiming that the UK is not “doing its bit” to face the global refugee crisis.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has also said that there were “serious ethical questions about sending asylum seekers overseas”.
Meanwhile, last week a statement signed by more than 1,450 church leaders opposing the Illegal Migration Bill was handed in to Downing Street, saying the proposals are “incompatible with our Christian conviction that all human beings are made in the image of God”. They are appalled by the plans which would “detain, punish and reject thousands of people seeking safety”.
A Home Office source said: “The Church is obviously entitled to have its views. We’d always hope they base any view on the facts.
“We have admitted almost 500,000 people through .... safe and legal asylum routes since 2015. We are a generous, compassionate country but we can’t allow uncontrolled illegal migration.”
It has also emerged that the Church of England is hiring a £28,000-a-year refugee officer to be based in France.
Can there be any hope for our world, our nation, and for the Church when we face so many seemingly intractable differences and disagreements? Is difference the death of community? Must it be feared?
A moment of fear experienced at an empty tomb on Easter dawn gives me great hope that difference can bring life rather than death. In an early account of Jesus’s resurrection, the first witnesses to the empty tomb respond with neither sighs of relief nor jumps for joy. Rather, they “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them”.
They flee in holy fear because the dead do not rise. Jesus’s resurrection is utterly unprecedented, so there’s no way of “processing” it. This awe-full moment proclaims that if Jesus is risen, then God’s saving power is overwhelming. These witnesses, three women, don’t race away to hide. They flee to play their part in beginning a new community, one that will be defined by the jaw-dropping wonder of Jesus’s resurrection. A resurrection community, which we call the Church, that – despite its ever-present flaws – will strive to model a whole new way of living together. It will reject uniformity as the epitome of unity. Therefore, it will be seen often as both a nuisance and a threat to the world’s usual standards.
How the Church looked and acted was (and is) regularly of greater concern to opponents than its theological claims. Some early critics of Christianity derided its remarkable social and cultural make-up as much as they derided its claim that Jesus had risen from the dead. The resurrection community – spreading without regard to geographical, political and social boundaries – became the most diverse institution in existence.
And, confusingly, this diversity expressed the community’s purpose rather than any ambition for power. The outcast and powerless didn’t merely hold equal status with the wealthy and influential: Christians were to give “the greater honour to the inferior member”.
For all its impressive early growth, to many, the resurrection community looked ridiculous and doomed. The philosopher Celsus mocked that the Church brimmed with “only foolish and low individuals, and persons devoid of perception, and slaves, and women, and children”. Christians, he scoffed, appeared to reject the “wise or prudent” in favour of the “ignorant or unintelligent… the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children.”
So how did this community gather such disreputable difference into unity? The Bible reveals that this was hard (and imperfectly) won.
Yet the New Testament speaks of a unity that is not blandly uniform but full of life-giving difference: from Jesus’s ethnically (and morally) diverse family tree with which it opens to Revelation’s description of a “great multitude” before God “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages”.
When the Holy Spirit comes in the book Acts, the diverse origins of the crowd are explicitly listed. The apostles then communicate with those gathered in their own languages, rather than merging them into a single universal tongue. Those differences do not threaten the community: rather, God uses them to build community.
The New Testament’s letters are full of the struggles and strains of communities navigating differences. But Paul, who wrote many of them, strongly criticises those imposing alien uniformities onto cultural differences. In one passage, he says of this community: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Paul doesn’t deny these distinctions exist around him. He teaches that the superiority of one over the other, which was completely unquestioned in his culture, was to be rejected. Those differences would not be merged nor erased, but transformed into a new and diverse unity “in Christ”. Many centuries later, we are still working out the full implications of this while learning from our failures.
The Church has never lost the gift of causing irritation, however. When the Archbishop of Canterbury and I argue for the establishment of safe and legal routes for refugees to enter the UK, this is not about playing party politics, but rather a deep and considered plea from the very core of Christian faith. Though Christians – myself included – so often fall short of what we preach, my prayer is that in politics, our communities and in the Church we might approach difference by seeking the gift that is within it. It can be approached with openness and humility, before our minds turn to addressing problems. The temptation to declare difference intractable must be rejected. There is no naïve hope in Christianity that everyone’s simply going to get along. Instead, there is a fervent belief that God is drawing us together, even despite ourselves. We are called to look on those who are different to us first with hope and delight, rather than fear and suspicion.
This Easter, I encourage you to peer into the empty tomb and be filled with awe. Jesus’ resurrection means that difference need not mean death, but rather new life and new community. This is good news for our communities, our nation, our world and for every one of us.
Christianity embraces true diversity while holding the fervent belief that God is drawing us together, even in spite of ourselves
Paul teaches that cultural differences would not be merged nor erased, but transformed into a new, diverse unity ‘in Christ’