Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 April 2009 09:04:01
Reading Peterson Toscano's latest blog post and following up on an article in this weeks Baptist Times I have been reminded that a religious right exists at all in the UK. Yes we know that the CofE has groups like Reform and that Christian Voice exists, but they only represent a miniscule number of people don't they?
Well, here's the thing... the Christian right does in it's strongest form only represent a small number of people, but amongst their more "respectable organisations" the think tanks and organisations, (which one suspects may be recieving their funding from elsewhere, where the religious right is much more stronger and financially sound), actually influence thinking beyond their own boundaries. By this I mean they are organisations which know how to use the media and the law to give their ideas a wider hearing and make themselves known. They also know how to present material to make it seem more reasonable than it actually is, on occassion. This means they will put forward an argument or statement that most of us agree with, but then use it to promote other less healthy attitudes.
One of the key ways they do this is through their promotion of marriage and family life. Before I start on this section I want to make clear that I believe that marriage is the ideal state for the majority of people and that sex is a gift from God which should only take place within faithful, monogomous, committed relationships. I also believe that the abolition of married persons tax allowance was not one of the better things to have happened. Therefore, in many ways I agree with what organisations like the Christian Insitiute and Care say about marriage and family.
However, if one reads their material further it becomes clear that they use this as the basis to promote a range of views which are at best dubious and at worst down right dangerous and prejudiced (and in my mind against the gospel they are seeking to proclaim).
Firstly, I respect there are different interpretations on the gay issue and regular readers will know my own position on this one. These differences of opinion are fair enough..... but what isn't fair enough is when individuals are becoming harmed by the activities of those seeking to promote the "biblical" line, (or indeed sometimes by the militancy of some elements of the secular "gay lobby"). According to the Christian Insitute report the sponsors of the ex-gay conference Peterson explains about the dangers of are Care and Anglican Mainstream.
Secondly, whilst I support family life and feel marriage should be supported I do not agree this should be done through the stereotyping and misrepresentation of single parents. (I have to be careful on the next bit due to the overlap with my research). The Christian Institute recently published this report, which was then taken up on by the Baptist Times in their article. The Christian Institute report uses the latest set of official statistics, published in Social Trends 39 (by the Office for National Statistics), to show how the majority of children still live in married families and how some press reports have been misleading. They then, however, go onto be equally misleading. They talk about the neglect and disadvantage of children being linked to single parenthood and co-habitation of parents. Now, whilst I wouldn't seek to deny that single parenthood isn't the ideal they only give part of the story. The Social Trends figures actually tell us that proportionately more single mothers stay at home with their children than married mothers. They also tell us that the majority of lone parents are not having their children out of wedlock, rather seperation and divorce are the main routes into being a single parents.
The Christian Institute report then ends by taking up a Care claim that the benefits and tax system stops people taking up marriage, saying: " campaigners have highlighted evidence showing that the British tax and benefits system can have the effect of discouraging marriage. A recent study from the Royal Economic Society shows a mother is £100 a week better off if she splits from her husband. The Christian charity CARE has also produced a report showing that British traditional families receives less support than their counterparts in many other developed countries because the tax and benefits system here is skewed towards single-parent families"
Care itself links to this Daily Mail report, aswell as the Royal Economic Society report, (link given earlier).
The picture they paint here is misrepresentative. Referring back to the Social Trends data what it shows us is that majority of single parents are not feckless young women, but rather people who have been in stable relationships which have broken down. They are proportionately less likely to be educated to degree level or above - a majority of single parents are educated to GCSE A*-C level. Therefore, they are more likely to be in low paid jobs than their married counterparts. This is one of the reasons that many of the working single parents, (and the majority of single parents do work), have to claim tax credits to the extent they do. Equally because they only have one wage coming in not two they are more likely to claim tax credits. The example on the front of the Mail indicates how the married couple on a low income is living on £24,481 whilst the single parent family is living on £10,927. To say that the lone parents maximum income should only be half of that of a married couple, (which is what is effectively being said by these articles who try to compare single mothers with married women), is simplistic. It is also the type of attitude which would lead to an even larger number of lone parent families living in poverty.
Yes we should support family life. Yes we should make it possible for women, (in all types of family) to be at home with looking after their children rather than paying others for childcare if that is the choice they want to make. Yes we should be seeking to reduce the level of divorce within this country. BUT this is not done through the scapegoating of lone parents or others.
Thirdly, having gone through the material produced by these think tanks it is also apparent that there is a rather nasty anti-Islamic element within their work, which is more implicit than explicit. For example within this report on Marriage Support Services they criticise government funding for an Islamic project which describes itself as "attempting to professionalize and standardise Islamic family support service in the UK" as not sounding "very marriage specific".
Other examples of the way the religious right has been working has been through the recent descrimination cases bought by Christians who feel they are under attack because of their beliefs. These cases are supported by the groups mentioned above and also by Christian Concern for our Nation which is an offshoot of The Lawyers Christian Fellowship.
In addition to worrying about the way Christianity is sometimes being misrepresented and presented by some of this work, I am concerned about the way it often plays into the hands of far right organisations. These types of reports are exactly the type of things being used by the BNP to claim they are representing a Christian position.