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Happily, we're laughing at the awful Borat Sagdiyev, not with him.

Sacha Baron Cohen has followed his rude-boi Ali G spoof with a new character, Borat Sagdiyev, a foul-mouthed TV reporter from Kazakhstan, who tours America "promoting" his home country with a stream of sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic views. The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is outraged and has commissioned a $40m movie celebrating Kazakhstan's noble history to counter Cohen's pastiche and has complained to President George Bush about Cohen's portrayal in a recent visit to the States.

I think President Nazarbayev spectacularly misses the point and is in danger of confirming Borat's case for Kazakhstani bone-headedness. If you watch Cohen's film of his tour of the US as Borat, note the expressions of bemusement on the faces of Americans he encounters, watch how they accept at face-value some of his outrageous attitudes, see how by their inaction they implicitly endorse some of his views. Now consider that Borat arrived at a film premiere in Toronto in a cart drawn by peasant-women in traditional Kazakstan costume, that he claims the national drink of Kazakhstan is fermented horse urine and that his main hobbies are mud-wrestling and goat-punching.

Just as the target of the satire in the show at the Edinburgh Festival entitled Jesus: The Guantanamo Years was not the Christian faith but the horrors of Guantanamo Bay, Cohen's satirical target is not Kazakhstan - though some of his gibes at it are undoubtedly very funny - but those who might believe him. We're not laughing at Kazakhstan. We're laughing at the Americans who believe that central Asia might really be like that.

Rather than po-facedly commission a heroic film, Kazakhstan's President might smile wryly when he meets President Bush and say "Mr President, you'd have to be really dumb to believe that Kazakhstan is like that". Or he could commission his own cod documentary, depicting a Fox News reporter touring Kazakhstan, telling its natives that the United States is commanded by a warmonger who dodged the draft himself, who electrocuted or lethally injected poor blacks to get elected and who has declared world war on an abstract noun. Only that wouldn't be funny, because it's largely true.

Then there are those who complain about the anti-semitism of Cohen's character Borat. Yes, there is truth in the observation that Cohen can get away with it because he's Jewish himself and I have some sympathy with the view of a Jewish stand-up comic I met recently who said that Jews cannot truly be free of the burden of the Holocaust until non-Jews can do gags about it too. But I believe the more fundamental point is that ridicule is one of the most potent political weapons known to humankind (ask any senior politician). Cohen has us laughing at him in his pantomime anti-semitism. Not, thankfully, with him.

Posted by George Pitcher on November 20, 2006 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This essay is edited from a sermon by The Revd George Pitcher at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, on Sunday 13th August 2006

I was listening vaguely to the radio at my desk on 10th August 2006 when President George Bush called the putative Heathrow bombers "Islamic fascists". Ten minutes later, I was called by an old friend at the Church of England Press Office, who asked if I'd be prepared to go on Club Asia. This turned out not to be an exotic travel operator offering priestly perks in the sub-continent, but one of the short-wave specialist radio stations.

They were having trouble finding a Christian voice to go on their 6 o'clock news to condemn the foiled plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic. They had other faith-leaders - a Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh and a Jew - but no Christian priest. Perhaps they were all on holiday. Perhaps they were stuck in the pandemonium of Heathrow.

I said I'd be delighted to go on. But not to condemn the bombing attempts - who wouldn't? And there had been more than enough of that all day - but to condemn President Bush for what he'd just said. And so I did. I called the juxtaposition of the words Islamic and fascist "dangerous and inflammatory" and said it was unreasonable to make Islam responsible for the attempted atrocities. It moved the story on - Club Asia led its news with my response.

Since then, there have been those who have argued that the phrase "Islamic fascist" is perfectly reasonable. These were people planning the murder of thousands of innocent strangers in an act, if you like, of ethnic cleansing and in the name of Islam, even if that name was taken in vain.

But how would we react - at least those of us who profess the faith - to a world leader who spoke of "Christian fascists"? There were a few of those around in Britain in the 1930s, but I'd suggest that most of us would consider the phrase something of an oxymoron, believing Christianity and Fascism to be somewhat contradictory creeds. Those of us capable of taking offence at such nonsense would do so. I suggest that Muslims are entitled to be similarly offended, that terrorists can't act in Islam's name any more than Bush can act in mine.

And something else intrigued me in what Bush said: "They want to hurt our nation...". This was undoubtedly more accurate - suicide bombers want to hurt America and her allies, such as Britain, deeply. But the idea of a generalised "they" (Muslims), who want to attack "us" (the Judeo-Christian West) is intriguing for its implication that the War on Terror is a territorial, even nationalist, conflict. Further, it implies that our territory - The West - in some way owns the Judeo-Christian faiths.

The documentary-maker Mark Dowd recounts a story of how, on a research trip in the States, he met religious publishers who had printed the Bible with the American Stars and Stripes on the cover. They explained that they needed some self-confidence rebuilt after 9/11 and it made them feel better - it wasn't going to offend anyone because they weren't going to export it (a false supposition, as it turns out). We could laugh at them if the implications of this weren't so profoundly awful - what they're saying is that this is our creed, our story, our gospel; nationhood and faith as one and indistinguishable; Church co-extending with State; the Christian-state model that for centuries was indistinguishable and inseparable from oppressive colonialism. Flag and Cross united. The creed of the crusader.

Leave aside that the Underground bombers of 7/7 were born and bred in the UK. Never mind that the Heathrow atrocities were planned substantially by western converts. The very real danger of this kind of arrogance is that it fuels the very clash of civilizations that the abstruse Bush/Blair War on Terrorism pretends to seek to avoid. History shows that all holy wars of ideology destroy those who wage them, as well as those who suffer at their hands. There is theology behind this prophecy - the arrogant are brought low; the first are last.

So it's worth recognizing that spiritual arrogance when it emerges. There was something of it that directs the lack of audible response from Christian leaders when something like the events of the failed Heathrow plot occur. There was perhaps an unconscious sense of superiority that this is not to do with our faith, the faith of Christendom, but acts of the unspeakable heathen, the infidel - or, in the language of the moment, "Islamic fascists".

A major part of the problem here is the apparent exclusivity of the Christian faith. The Protestant fundamentalist will point to John's gospel for justification: "I am the way, the truth and the life...no one comes to the Father except through me." That's Jesus speaking, not Muhammed. But we need to recognize that his interpreter, the apostle John, was writing this account decades after the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth's life and the mystery of Christ's resurrection; an account that is bound to blur the edges between the ministry of Jesus and the theology of an eternal logos, the universal truth. Too often we confuse these two - the earthly and the eternal: The earthly Jesus, like us possessed of his time, owned and indeed trapped by the context of the historical time in which he lived, and the Christ of all time, from the beginning of times (as John helpfully points out in his introduction) to the end of times.

Jesus could be and was owned by the Jewish nation and its Roman occupiers. The Christ could not be so contained. It's why Jesus progressively realizes in the gospel accounts that his ministry is not just to Jews but is universal - clock the moment that the Syro-Phoenician woman crushingly tells him that even the dogs might eat the crumbs from his table. And it's why the risen Christ can't be possessed by Mary of Magdala at the tomb in the (excuse the pun) deeply touching injunction "Noli me tangere" ("Do not touch me"). Jesus was of space, place and time; the Christ is universal and eternal - and defies nationhood.

To this end, it's simply absurd to lay territorial, nationalistic claim to the gospel, as the Crusaders or the Romans did - and some Americans now do. But the injunction is clear - it is to be constantly engaged with the whole world in which we live. That includes, not as an optional extra but as a matter of centrality for faith, Muslims and Jews and Hindus, those of other faiths and none.

The core belief that drives that is that the universal truth and life that drives our creation is not owned by us, not by George Bush's administration, nor by Tony Blair, nor by our Church, but is universally to be recognized in any and every revelation of truth. We have to hope that this truth is bigger than nations, powers and dominions. And, as and when that hope is fulfilled, we really can have a war against terror.

Posted by George Pitcher on November 15, 2006 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is an edited version of a sermon delivered by The Rev'd George Pitcher at St Bride's, Fleet Street, on Remembrance Sunday, 11th November 2006

The Act of Remembrance is a difficult one for those of us born since the last World War. Not just emotionally difficult - how do we engage emotionally with events from before we were born? But practically difficult too. To focus on the sheer scale of the lives lost to war is meaningless - we can't comprehend the scale of the loss and the suffering. But to concentrate on an individual might be invidious - a single person's story misses the collective narrative...that is, how among the many thousands who fought and died, the individual becomes truly selfless. Nevertheless, it is the latter path that I choose to take. I want briefly to tell you the story of Royal Medical Officer Captain Brian Brownscombe, of the South Staffordshire Regiment and a paratrooper. Brian had what people of his generation would call a "good war", until of course the day when he had a very bad war indeed. He was part of the battle for Sicily and fought in the Italian campaign. Flown in by towed gliders in 1943, his glider was once released early by its tug-plane and ditched in the Med. As the craft sank, Brian's batman, Pvte B W Dukes, announced with impeccable timing that he couldn't swim. Brian Brownscombe held him up in the water for 5 hours until they were rescued by a landing craft, an action for which Brian was awarded the George Medal. Later, in the Italian campaign, Brian - a heavy sleeper (as well as drinker) - slept through a German counter-offensive and evaded capture by driving through German-occupied territory and swimming out to sea, where incredibly he was hauled from the sea by the same landing-craft commander with the words: "Not you again!"

On Sept 17th 1944, he was part of the paratroop drop into Arnhem, where his luck ran out. In the fierce fighting, he and his fellow medics set up a Field Hospital at the back of the Municipal Museum in Arnhem. It was very full of wounded and more casualties were being brought in continually. The position at the museum became untenable and those who could do so withdrew from it. Brian Brownscombe and two medical orderlies stayed with the wounded. On Sept 19th the Germans overran the museum and they were taken prisoner, the medical officers being taken to the Municipal Hospital, where they continued to treat both British and German wounded in the days that followed. The following Sunday evening, Capt Brownscombe was talking to a Danish propaganda officer at the door of the hospital when a drunken SS officer, Karl Lerche, shot him through the head with a Luger from some nearby bushes. Brian's fellow officers did what they could, but they say the only surgeon that could have operated on the wound was the one who bore it. Brian Brownscombe was dead. He was 29.

Brian was my uncle, my mother's elder brother. I say he was my uncle but I wonder whether I should say he would have been my uncle, for I was born a little over a decade after he died. His presence nevertheless was huge in our family. He was not often spoken about, but the stories we did hear were about his fun, his riotous medical training, the carousing in London, my mother, a nurse, going out drinking with him and falling off the back platform of a bus as it cornered in Regent Street. The skeleton he kept under his bed that he would dance with to entertain medical students. The human hand that he threw from his University College window to startle a passing nurse.

I have often dwelt on Remembrance Sunday on what might have been and what might not have been had Uncle Brian lived. And today I ask: What are we to learn from one story among so many? My elder sister recently visited Uncle Brian's grave at Oosterbeek and walked for almost an hour among the immaculate headstones in search of one that recorded an age as high as Uncle Brian's 29 - most were in their early twenties; very many were 18 or 19. So, in a week when we have heard much from a church group called Ekklesia of pacifist white poppies to mark the folly of war, let me mark my generation's profound gratitude to that generation that I and my children do not live in a world run by the kind of man who pulled the trigger of his Luger in the bushes outside the Municipal Hospital of Arnhem.

In our condemnation of violence and war, we sometimes overlook the magnitude of the evil that those young men took on. Of course today we remember the waste of precious life among all nations in war. German, Japanese and Italian soldiers were victims too. But we're also entitled to remember with special gratitude and pride those who stood up to and prevailed over perhaps the most evil regime that Europe has ever faced, "made more sinister by the dark lights of perverted science".

It is the very ease with which we can identify that evil - Nazi Germany - that raises my next question: What are we to learn from the way my uncle and his colleagues lived, as well as from how they died? In our Anglican funeral liturgy, we commit ourselves to renewal of purpose in the time that is left to we who are left living. And so today we commit ourselves to renewed efforts to be vigilant, to be appreciative of our freedoms, to be fully alive out of respect for those who sacrificed their lives to save humankind from tyranny. But our difficulty today is that our world is so much more complex, the threats indistinct. Nazi Germany 60 or 70 years ago was a tangible enemy. Today we are told our war is not with a nation state, not with a regime, not with an army, but with an abstract noun - "terror". How can we aspire to live our lives in a manner worthy of the heroic man and women that went before us in, dare I say, more straightforward conflicts?

I return to my Uncle Brian and his colleagues in the Royal Army Medical Corps for inspiration. It is too simplistic to say that they were soldiers at the same time as being healers, the men whose Hypocratic oath, their commitment to the preservation of life, overrode their military obligations. But it's true that they took some different kinds of risks - such as staying with the wounded when the time came to retreat. And then treating the wounded irrespective of their nationality. There is a defiance of death in that, an acknowledgement that healing and making good and human life transcend the darkness of war. That view, that faith, can have no room for those who tell us that Islam is an evil, that we are civilised and others are not, that we are safe if only we stick among our own. The risk that we are called to take is not just to stand up to our enemies, but also to move among them, to recognise our common wounds and our common humanity, to heal.

In peacetime as in war. The abiding image I have of the uncle I never knew is of this big man waltzing in the arms of a skeleton, a man who took risks on London buses as well as in the streets of Arnhem. And in combining healing with fighting, let's take the risk of standing up for what we believe while engaging with our enemies. Let's defy not just those who wish us dead but those who wish our enemies dead, by even going among them, taking the risk that, even there, there may be healing that can be done. Let's fight for what we believe, but let's take the risk of staying with the wounded, moving among our enemies, doing what we can to heal. Let us in that way defy those, among our friends as among our enemies, who would deal only in darkness and death. Let us confront our mortality. Let us dance with skeletons.

Posted by George Pitcher on November 11, 2006 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This essay is edited from a sermon by The Revd George Pitcher at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, on 17th September, 2006

David Smith, better known as Dave or Smithie to his colleagues, is the verger of St Bride's. He's also been licensed as a lay reader in the Diocese of London. He greets visitors to the church and is a man of not a few words; a man for whom conversation is not so much an art as an obsession. Perhaps that's how they make them in Derbyshire. Why tell an anecdote when an entire history of Derbyshire will do?

I was happy to bump into him on my train into work, because I knew I could ask him about his impending readership and he would talk about it from Herne Hill to City Thameslink, suspending my need to talk. Dave was characteristically exhaustive. He told me that readers were first licensed in the 19th century, so-called to read the morning and evening offices in those secular locations - schools or factories - where (hard to credit now) priests couldn't be expected to go in those days; that sometimes they were given little homilies from the priest to read out; that his view is that they are a kind of lay diaconate, an exemplar of how to conduct lay ministry.

This set me thinking about the difference between lay and ordained ministry. Those of us who are ordained to the priesthood rarely have a clear idea why. I have some sympathy with our rector David Meara's view that being ordained is the only thing that gets me into church on Sundays. And I'm not sure who it was who said: "God calls to ordained ministry those he doesn't trust in the laity" but I can see some truth in that too.

A slightly more serious analysis relates to the sacramental side of our priestly ministry and how that relates to our pastoral work - and Dave went into that too. But it seemed to me, as I dwelt on what Dave had been saying, that there is something essentially authentic about the lay ministry of readership - like the first Christians in Rome or Asia Minor. I say that because I think the church all too often gets in the way of Christian ministry.

When readers were first licensed by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in 1866, the churches were full, but Christian service and witness among the laity was altogether less organized. Some 140 years later, I suspect it's the other way around. Our churches are emptying, but the Christian experience is much more vibrant and alive in the street, in workplaces and, yes, even in our schools. I don't mean faith schools - I mean the apparently secular ones. We may not beat the catechism into our children with the cane, but I would venture that the love and leadership of Christ is more apparent in our universal and inclusive education of today than it was in the Victorian model. And that speaks of authentic Christian witness.

This is to imply that priests are redundant. I'm not about to throw in my collar so soon. But at some levels the whole clobber of the church gets in the way of that authentic witness. I'll give just two examples. I'm always meeting people - mostly media people - who tell me they're "atheists". We recently held a one-day conference at St Bride's on Xenophobia and Disinformation in the Media, with the Next Century Foundation - I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase "Speaking as an atheist". And I went on BBC Radio the other day and both my fellow guests, one a Jew, one a lapsed catholic, claimed atheist credentials. But all these people also happen to be into love and hope and self-sacrifice and joy and celebration of the human spirit - even faith ("I don't know if I would put my life on the line for my children, but I hope I would"). It strikes me that they're not atheists in the sense that they don't believe in God - they just don't believe in me, or rather in my priesthood or my church. They're not atheists, in my view, they're church anarchists. And there's a respectable tradition in that. It was that great social-reformist Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who said: "It would be a mistake to believe that God is exclusively, or even principally, interested in Religion."

Secondly, a member of my family recently saw a woman in her village, striding out with her dog in a sweatshirt and slacks, with a broad smile on her face. Nothing terribly odd about that, perhaps, except that on Sundays in church she was a little old lady who could barely hobble to her place. So many of us have personas that we adopt for church, because it's a different life we have there.

It seems to me that Dave's kind of ministry can cut through those pretences and prejudices and expectations of church life, in an authentic Christian way. Not I hope as a replacement for ordained ministry, but as part of a vibrant and living faith that should reach every part of the society in which we live.

And one final thought: Dave promised in his readership vows to endeavour to promote peace and unity, to conduct himself as a worker for Christ. He will be an exemplar of Christian lay ministry. Unless and until the body of Christians takes back the gospel from the bishops and the popes and lives it out in the presence of those of other faiths, such as Islam, who have similarly re-claimed their ideologies from the self-appointed leaders who don't speak for them, we will be bound for hell in a handcart. Dave can't solve that on his own; none of us can - but his promises are at least a signal of hope in a wounded world, the authentic ministry of the living Christ among the mass of loving people, proof positive that our handcart isn't necessarily bound for hell.

Posted by George Pitcher on November 7, 2006 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This essay is edited from a sermon by The Revd George Pitcher at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, on Sunday 30th July 2006

Not being a particularly scripturally-based Christian, I tend to miss the subtleties in Bible stories, the little phrases and grace notes that make the texts real and human. One such is the John's gospel account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, a miracle narrative that has lots of iconic moments - the loaves and fishes, the baskets left over - that eclipse one little opening order from the tired Jesus of Nazareth to his burly bodyguards and associates, as he faces a large, hungry and potentially hostile crowd: "Make the men sit down". It's a peaceful, ameliorating, hospitable, even feminine, injunction and speaks against the male grandeur of the Judaic tradition.

Miraculous feeding stories were not new to Jews. The greatest of Hebrew prophets, Elijah, who is figuratively seen talking with the Christ and Moses at the Transfiguration, had performed, nine centuries before Jesus's ministry, many of the miraculous acts that would later be ascribed to Jesus Christ. He healed the sick and raised the dead. He was said even to have transcended death himself, in a precursor of Christ's resurrection. And when the first fruits of the harvest are offered to this great high priest, the scriptures say that he fed 100 men with just 20 loaves of barley. Jews venerate Elijah at their Passover meals and such is the impression that he made on his people that his return was held by exiled Jews to be a necessary prelude to the deliverance and restoration of Israel.

The Jews were to be fed in perpetuity by this "promised land". But 20 centuries after the Christ and nearly 30 since the time of Elijah, it's hardly a land flowing with milk and honey - at war with its neighbours, suffering terrorist attacks and blasting the civilian population in southern Lebanon apparently indiscriminately in retaliation. The recent history of Israel might lead us to conclude that, if this is God's chosen people, he may not have chosen very carefully.

You will actually struggle to find much reference in the Bible to the Jews as a chosen people. But it is the belief that is at the root of Neo-conservative American support for Israel. Forget the "Jewish lobby" in Washington - American Jews predominantly vote Democrat. It is the southern Baptist view of Israel as God's chosen elect that drives George W. Bush's foreign policy in the Middle-east. Chillingly, it's a policy that will support Israel, right or wrong, because that is the will of God. It's also a man's gospel.

That's not a gospel that I recognize. As the bloodied and terrified faces of desperate Lebanese families, some holding the bodies of their dead children, appeared on the front pages of our newspapers, I realized that I'd had enough of balanced, "on the one hand, on the other" journalism that declines to take a position. Israel has suffered terribly from terrorism. But no democratic nation state should meet terrorism with terrorism, as Israel has done. When Britain faced "Irish" terrorism, it didn't respond by bombing Dublin. As with Britain's incendiary bombing of German cities in the Second World War, there can be no justification for responding to slaughtered innocents by killing more children. Israel's response to Hizbollah has been an abomination of Biblical proportions.

But simple condemnation is an inadequate response. The Christian paradigm does not condemn. But it doesn't prevaricate either. The example from our scriptures is definite and direct. When a crowd threatens to stone an adulterous woman, the founder of our faith doodles in the sand, but says "let he who is without sin throw the first stone". He holds his tongue before the Roman governor, but then makes it clear that he has no earthly power other than that granted by God. Truly extraordinarily, he prays forgiveness for his judicial murderers even as they nail him to the cross. And on a plain in the mountains of Galilee he faces a crowd that could at any moment turn ugly with words that must have struck the young apostle John as important enough to include: "Make the men sit down".

Men under pressure tend to stand their ground and look hard, get belligerent, spoil for a fight. When the fighting starts they try to assert and control and, in war zones, to grab what they can and to kill to defend their families. But it's difficult to throw your weight about when you're sitting on the grass, having a picnic, at the same eye level as the women and children. I doubt many men of war could bomb children if they looked them in the eye.

In the end, the fighting in southern Lebanon ended when the men were made to sit down. But the fighting will start again - there, or in Iraq, or Iran, or Afghanistan, or North Korea, or Darfur. And it may be for the women witnesses, faced with men of aggression and violence, whether Hizbollah, or Israeli militia or the Government of the United States, to echo the Christian imperative that is held in five words that ring down the centuries.

Posted by George Pitcher on November 2, 2006 6:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The internet has memorably been described as "garbage at the speed of light". We have instant access to almost limitless rubbish as never before. But it seems to me that this offers two encouraging implications. First, low standards are a symptom of healthy pluralism - there's a lot of rubbish in our newspapers too, but that's because we have a free and competitive press serving all parts of the market and that's better than the alternatives. Second, blogs like this can only be as good as their content and contributors. As the spiritual home of journalists, St Bride's ought to be a forum for a high quality of dialectic among its dispersed congregation - and for many more besides.

The media deal with issues that are critical to the future of our planet on a daily basis - global warming, genetic engineering, poverty and natural disaster, war and terrorism. Then there are issues that seem closer to home: family breakdown and violence, drugs and drunkenness, gender politics and issues of human sexuality. And, before it all sounds too bleak, we live in a time of unparalleled access to much of what we want, fuelled by prosperity and economic independence. And, while there's much to worry about, there's much to laugh about too.

St Bride's should be an exchange for such currencies. A Rialto Bridge, rich in conversation, spanning the old Fleet Street and the new. We were the home of the first commercial printing press which revolutionised the spread of the printed word. We span the diaspora of the newspapers and the transformation of Fleet Street from geographical to metaphorical locus. Now, a little over 500 years after that first printing press arrived, the internet has sparked another media revolution. And, again, St Bride's has the opportunity to widen its reach and we hope that this site can be a public place in which we can discuss and revise our views and attitudes to a rapidly changing world.

We very much hope that you will post comments and views spontaneously or in response to articles written by contributors representing as broad a gamut of opinion as possible. Contributions will be moderated - and I reserve the traditional, though accountable, rights of editorship. No comment can be posted without it first being monitored and assessed. We aim to publish as many comments as possible, but we won't publish any which are gratuitously abusive or offensive - or, in the finer traditions of Fleet Street, which are downright boring.

Comments should be based around the original post and any subsequent discussion. If you want to make a more general comment, or to submit an article for consideration, then please email us. If we don't always respond to every email, we will at least read them all.

Please join in. In a wounded and wounding world, communication can only be healing.

Posted by George Pitcher on November 1, 2006 3:20 PM | Permalink