What is in Kelvin's Head?

You can’t bomb people into being nice Westerners

27/09/2014
In a way, watching the debate yesterday in the House of Commons on whether the UK should join in with Air Strikes against the so called Islamic State felt different to me from the last times we’ve had similar debates.

This time I felt I was open to persuasion. As the debate began, I hadn’t made up my mind what I thought was right. I accept the arguments that such action this time is legal. (In the past I’ve marched against UK involvement convinced that it was illegal and wrong from the outset). I’m not a pacifist and don’t automatically assume that using force is wrong. That means that each time I need to be persuaded.

As I’ve said before, I once had aspirations to be a Member of Parliament and when crucial votes come around I find myself inevitably absorbed by them wondering how I would have voted. In this case, I’m sure that I would have entered the chamber undecided and left having firmly made up my mind.

The more speeches that I heard in favour of military action, the more troubled I was about it. In particular, I was troubled to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury throwing his lot in with the government and advocate new bombing missions.

It seems to me that the following points remain unanswered.
- Likelihood of success. This is a key point for anyone trying to assess using Christian criteria whether military action is just. How many bombs do we need to drop before we realise that air strikes alone are not sorting out the conflict in Iraq? The lessons of the past do not point to an easy or quick solution. I was particularly alarmed by the suggestion by the Prime Minister that this could take three years. I don’t believe any0ne can see what lies ahead in three years time in Iraq. These are not air strikes – this is a war. What’s more I don’t even know how we will judge success.
- We are not fighting a conventional enemy but a set of ideas. Bombs do not destroy ideas they disperse them. The “Islamic State” people may claim to have territorial claims to a part of the world but that doesn’t mean we are fighting another state in the way that the West understands that. Controlling territory on the ground doesn’t mean that you control people’s minds. ISIS and al-Queda are as much a set of ideas as an army controlling a people. We need concrete strategies for making lives better and the underlying philosophical principles that are behind the terror attacks need to be taken to pieces and few of us know how to do that.
- What about the innocents? In this week when we’ve remembered St Adamnan again in the church, again we are reminded that attacks which kill or harm the innocent are never justified. Collateral damage is terrorism by another name.
- Finally, that you can’t bomb people into being nice Westerners. It seemed to me that many in the House of Commons were responding to the barbarity of recent hostage beheadings with the notion that we can somehow fly 6 RAF aircraft over Iraq, drop some bombs and stop people being beastly. It won’t do. You can’t bomb people into being nice Westerners. If there are any solutions they will be far more complex than what is currently proposed.
For all these reasons, though I would have gone into the chamber undecided, by the end of the day I would have made my mind up.

I would have voted against military action.
air strikes, church, Iraw, just war, military action

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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