Post by pchallinor on Dec 23, 2011 15:13:18 GMT
Towards the end of his speech on Friday celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, David Cameron told his Oxford audience: "Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them."
If you think you recognise these phrases, then you're right. The fact that this passage was transferred – word for word – from his February anti-multiculturalism speech in Munich, suggests that literary commemoration was not the prime minister's primary objective.
A year ago, on 20 December 2010, the then canon chancellor of St Paul's, Giles Fraser, wrote in these pages of his fear that the King James Bible's anniversary would be hijacked by American fundamentalists, nostalgic public-school bores, and atheists who seek to claim it as merely a cultural resource. Now it has been appropriated by a Tory leader (not for the first time) to promote a political agenda: to support the "big society", to excoriate the August rioters and, most important, to claim the King James Bible as a national document and Christianity as a national religion.
So, while generously acknowledging that other belief systems may imply a moral code, much of Cameron's speech promotes the Christian character of the values he feels are an essential component of Britishness: "to belong here is to believe in these things" is another Oxford phrase lifted from Munich.
Cameron's (arguable) contention that the King James Bible gave us constitutional monarchy, the abolition of slavery, democracy and women's emancipation clearly complements the demand by the education secretary, Michael Gove, for the teaching of our inspiring island story (after all, Gove is writing a foreword to the Bible that he plans to distribute to every English school).
And it's no surprise that Cameron has borrowed so liberally from his February speech: his target is the same. To believe in essentially British, Christian values is to oppose multiculturalism. At a recent meeting at the Institute for Government, Gove was defended by commentators such as Phillip Blond and David Goodhart, for whom patriotic history is necessary precisely in order to combat the multiculturalist heresy. By contrast, Nick Clegg's speech on Monday attacking Cameron's 1950s view of the British family echoes an earlier challenge to Cameron's instinctive social traditionalism. In March, Clegg spoke up for plurality of values and for a multiculturalism in which "values compete but do not conflict".
There is a huge irony here. Although Cameron drops a nod both to the Bible's radical influence and to earlier translations of the Bible, he underplays the extent to which King James's comfortable clerics stood on the shoulders of the radical Tudor translators who preceded them. Of the seven ringing biblical phrases quoted in Cameron's speech, only one is original to the King James (as it happens, it's "how are the mighty fallen"). And, far from being heroes of our island story, those earlier translators who didn't flee our island risked – and in one case, suffered – death at the stake. Four of the major Tudor bibles were – and had to be – published abroad. The first translator of a printed English bible, William Tyndale – who provided 90% of the King James new testament – was to die at the hands of the Catholic church in Flanders, after being betrayed by an English adventurer, probably in the pay of Sir Thomas More.
The fact that the translators of the Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthews and Geneva bibles were outlaws and religious revolutionaries does not make them liberals or democrats. Like fundamentalists today, they believed in the literal truth of their holy book, distrusted music and images, revered martyrdom and sought to unite church and state. Tyndale's major original work insisted that Christians owed unquestioning obedience to kings as well as God. But the very act of removing papal and priestly authority – allowing each man to be the judge of the meaning of a book in his own language held in his own hand – made a pluralism of opinion both possible and inevitable.
In the same way, the transformation of an essentially static, visual culture into a portable, dynamic, written one laid the foundations of shared information and imaginative thought, which was essential to the creation of the modern world. As civil war historian Christopher Hill put it, the ultimate effect of the vernacular Bible was "to force men and women to rely on their own intelligence rather than citations from a holy text. They cut off the branch on which they sat."
If the vernacular Bible in the hands of every ploughboy (in Tyndale's phrase) was the precursor of pluralism, then it's certainly too important to be hijacked for narrow and partisan political purposes, by political leaders seeking to reverse one of its greatest, if unintended, legacies.
Guardian
If you think you recognise these phrases, then you're right. The fact that this passage was transferred – word for word – from his February anti-multiculturalism speech in Munich, suggests that literary commemoration was not the prime minister's primary objective.
A year ago, on 20 December 2010, the then canon chancellor of St Paul's, Giles Fraser, wrote in these pages of his fear that the King James Bible's anniversary would be hijacked by American fundamentalists, nostalgic public-school bores, and atheists who seek to claim it as merely a cultural resource. Now it has been appropriated by a Tory leader (not for the first time) to promote a political agenda: to support the "big society", to excoriate the August rioters and, most important, to claim the King James Bible as a national document and Christianity as a national religion.
So, while generously acknowledging that other belief systems may imply a moral code, much of Cameron's speech promotes the Christian character of the values he feels are an essential component of Britishness: "to belong here is to believe in these things" is another Oxford phrase lifted from Munich.
Cameron's (arguable) contention that the King James Bible gave us constitutional monarchy, the abolition of slavery, democracy and women's emancipation clearly complements the demand by the education secretary, Michael Gove, for the teaching of our inspiring island story (after all, Gove is writing a foreword to the Bible that he plans to distribute to every English school).
And it's no surprise that Cameron has borrowed so liberally from his February speech: his target is the same. To believe in essentially British, Christian values is to oppose multiculturalism. At a recent meeting at the Institute for Government, Gove was defended by commentators such as Phillip Blond and David Goodhart, for whom patriotic history is necessary precisely in order to combat the multiculturalist heresy. By contrast, Nick Clegg's speech on Monday attacking Cameron's 1950s view of the British family echoes an earlier challenge to Cameron's instinctive social traditionalism. In March, Clegg spoke up for plurality of values and for a multiculturalism in which "values compete but do not conflict".
There is a huge irony here. Although Cameron drops a nod both to the Bible's radical influence and to earlier translations of the Bible, he underplays the extent to which King James's comfortable clerics stood on the shoulders of the radical Tudor translators who preceded them. Of the seven ringing biblical phrases quoted in Cameron's speech, only one is original to the King James (as it happens, it's "how are the mighty fallen"). And, far from being heroes of our island story, those earlier translators who didn't flee our island risked – and in one case, suffered – death at the stake. Four of the major Tudor bibles were – and had to be – published abroad. The first translator of a printed English bible, William Tyndale – who provided 90% of the King James new testament – was to die at the hands of the Catholic church in Flanders, after being betrayed by an English adventurer, probably in the pay of Sir Thomas More.
The fact that the translators of the Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthews and Geneva bibles were outlaws and religious revolutionaries does not make them liberals or democrats. Like fundamentalists today, they believed in the literal truth of their holy book, distrusted music and images, revered martyrdom and sought to unite church and state. Tyndale's major original work insisted that Christians owed unquestioning obedience to kings as well as God. But the very act of removing papal and priestly authority – allowing each man to be the judge of the meaning of a book in his own language held in his own hand – made a pluralism of opinion both possible and inevitable.
In the same way, the transformation of an essentially static, visual culture into a portable, dynamic, written one laid the foundations of shared information and imaginative thought, which was essential to the creation of the modern world. As civil war historian Christopher Hill put it, the ultimate effect of the vernacular Bible was "to force men and women to rely on their own intelligence rather than citations from a holy text. They cut off the branch on which they sat."
If the vernacular Bible in the hands of every ploughboy (in Tyndale's phrase) was the precursor of pluralism, then it's certainly too important to be hijacked for narrow and partisan political purposes, by political leaders seeking to reverse one of its greatest, if unintended, legacies.
Guardian