Author: Tom Heneghan

Are Britain’s Methodists planning a return to the Church of England after more than two centuries of division? That’s what their president, Rev. David Gamble, suggested to the Church of England General Synod in London today. The two churches entered a covenant in 2003 that committed them to deepening unity and cooperation.  His presence at the synod, and plans by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to attend the Methodists’ conference in June, were visible signs of this link, he said.

But the results leave something to be desired, Gamble acknowledged:  “It has to be said that around the country the situation is patchy. In some places there are very close working relationships and exciting new initiatives. In others you could spend quite a long time trying to find any sign of the covenant in practice.”

After reviewing the two churches’ cooperation in various fields, he ended his speech by saying: “We are prepared to go out of existence not because we are declining or failing in mission, but for the sake of mission. In other words we are prepared to be changed and even to cease having a separate existence as a Church if that will serve the needs of the Kingdom.”

The Methodist Church of Great Britain split off from the Church of England in 1795. It proposed unity with the Church of England in the 1960s but a Church of England General Synod in 1972 voted against it.  As Gamble said in his address, “when I entered theological college, at Wesley House in Cambridge, in 1971, I really expected to spend my ministry as minister in a united, Anglican/Methodist Church. I still remember our great disappointment in 1972.”

The religion think tank Ekklesia said many Methodists and Anglicans wanted stronger links and maybe even a merger, and thought the process was going too slowly. “The Methodist leaders’ words today may be seen as an attempt to move things on more quickly,” it wrote.

On her blog Articles of Faith, Ruth Gledhill of The Times went further, saying the Methodists (who have no bishops)  might accept them in a merger if women (who can hold any Methodist leadership position) are allowed to become bishops in the Church of England.

“It is possible to envisage a scenario where those Anglo-Catholics who would oppose unity with Methodists leave for the new Roman Anglican Ordinariate as the Church of England proceeds towards women bishops, paving the way for full Methodist Anglican unity,” she writes.  “The joint church then gets the squillion pound Westminster Central Hall (just £94 million in fact), one of the top pieces of real estate in the entire country, if not the world.”

No discussion sighted yet on what this could mean for Methodists outside of Britain. The British Church has 267,000 members and says: “There are over 800,000 people in Britain who have an active connection with the Methodist Church. There are 70 million such people across the world.” That’s about the size of the Anglican Communion worldwide.

Any comments from Methodists and Anglicans in or outside the U.K.  about a merger?

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France is building up an interesting paper trail in its campaign to ban full-face Muslim veils. The latest twist in this story is that Immigration Minister Eric Besson has denied citizenship to a foreign man said to have imposed the wearing of a full-face veil on his wife, a French citizen. “He was depriving her of her liberty to come and go with her face uncovered and rejected the principles of secularism and equality between men and women,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, Prime Minister François Fillon said he would sign a decree Besson had drafted to make this kind of constraint an obstacle to naturalisation.

This is not the first piece of paper on this trail. A veiled Moroccan woman was denied citizenship in 2008, a decision the State Council upheld on appeal. That occurred before the “ban the burqa” activism that led to the parliamentary commission that recommended last month France explicitly outlaw the full veil. The argument in the 2008 case was not about the veil itself, for example as a security risk because the person cannot be easily identified, but about a “radical religious practice that is incompatible with the essential values of the French community.”

According to the newspaper Le Figaro, the man is Moroccan and needs French citizenship to settle in France with his wife. It says they are both members of Tablighi Jamaat, a deeply conservative Islamic missionary movement whose members strive to live according to the model of the Prophet Mohammad. Le Figaro said the man argued that his wife should either stay at home or leave home only if fully covered, and the wife agreed to this.

In approving Besson’s draft decree, the State Council did not mention the veil itself, but rather the husband’s behaviour which it said was incompatible with French values, Le Figaro said. Again, the argument is defence of women’s rights and gender equality, not religious or individual rights.

Fillon pushed the paper trail back even earlier than 2008. “This has been French law for a very long time. The Civil Code says one can refuse naturalisation to someone who does not respect the values of the Republic,“ he said in his radio interview. “This case is about a radical religious person … He has imposed the burqa (on his wife), he imposes a separation of men and women in his own home and refuses to shake hands with women. So, that’s it, if this man doesn’t want to change, he has no place in our country. Anyway, he doesn’t deserve French citizenship.”

This is interesting. Readers of this blog will have read and heard my argument that the only issue I think can stand up is the security and identity question — should people be allowed to walk the streets fully masked? In the anonymous mass of modern society, individuals have to be easily identifiable and the face — “nature’s identity card” — is the best way to do this. Recognising a face is important to identify friends, detect hostile intentions or otherwise communicate with another person. If it were not, why are our brains hard-wired to recognise faces separately from other objects our eyes see? When we’re in public in a Western democracy, we interact primarily as equal citizens, not as people of a certain race, creed or political affiliation.  A Muslim woman can still wear a hijab, just as a traditional Catholic nun can still wear her veil and wimple, and show “nature’s ID card” to others  (while also clearly signalling her faith). A burqa or niqab breaks this human communication.

Defending women’s rights and gender equality is an excellent goal, one that clearly upholds the values of modern Western democracies against more traditional views such as those preached by the Tablighi Jamaat. There is a clash here and it is hard to see a middle ground on which the two sides could agree. This leads to some interesting questions, both for Muslims defending the niqab and for the French fighting it:

• Should the Tablighi Jamaat and other such groups that effectively preach against French values be banned in France?
• Should other new (for France) religious groups, such as the Mormons or African evangelical churches, also be investigated to see if they uphold women’s rights and promote gender equality?
• A bit closer to home, what about the Catholic Church or many Jewish and Protestant groups that bar women from their clergy? How about asking how much égalite (equality) they allow in their ranks? Should the French state be as vigilant with them as it is with Muslims?
• And, while we’re at it, what about the French National Assembly itself? It has one of the lowest proportions of  female members among all parliaments in Europe.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity) is one of history’s great political battle cries. It is also one of the hardest to live up to.  When the French decide to argue the issue on these terms, it warms their hearts and rallies many of them around the tricolour flag. However, every shortfall in realising any of the three goals becomes a stick to beat them with. Questions such as those above are bound to come up once the National Assembly gets down to writing that veil ban. Legislators supporting a ban will try to bulldoze their way through the thicket of contradictions with Gallic panache, but we can expect sparks to fly in France and outside when they do.

Here is Fillon’s interview in French in an Europe 1 video. The question about the man denied citizenship starts at 3:09:

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How does a rabbi get involved in dialogue with Muslims? On this blog, we often write about interfaith dialogue, for which personal contact is crucial, without talking much about the background of the personalities involved.

Given the constraints of journalism, that’s not surprising. But it does leave out some of the insights I gain from talking at length with rabbis and imams about themselves and their work.

One of these rabbis, Burton Visotzky of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, has now filled in part of this gap for me by giving a video interview to the Journal of Interreligious Dialogue. Vistozky is an occasional blogger for our GUESTVIEW series of outside contributions.

Starting with his initial work in Jewish-Christian dialogue, he explains how he got increasingly involved in contacts with Muslims — to the point of speaking at Friday prayers in New York’s Islamic Cultural Center, hosting its imam, Shamsi Ali, at the JTS synagogue and visiting Muslim countries for dialogue sessions there. He was in the first group of Jews invited to meet King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia when the monarch hosted an interfaith conference in Madrid in July 2008.

Here he is telling it in his own words:

Apart from nine scholarly books, Visotzky has also worked with Bill Moyers on the 10-hour PBS television series Genesis: A Living Conversation in 1996 and published a novel about Jewish-Muslim relations in 11th century Cairo, A Delightful Compendium of Consolation, in 2008.

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Germany should set up centres for Islamic studies at two or three state universities to educate Muslim scholars, teachers and pastoral workers for its large Muslim minority, an academic advisory council has said. The Council on Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) said the lack of such institutes at universities, which already teach Christian and Jewish theology, “does not do justice to the importance of the largest non-Christian faith community in Germany.”

Muslim organisations should join advisory boards to help develop Islam institutes and choose faculty members and all main Muslim views in Germany should be represented, it said in a report (here in German) on Monday.

“For me, this is part of a modern integration policy,” Education Minister Annette Schavan told Deutschlandfunk radio in Berlin. “The main question will be who the partner is in developing this.”

Since the September 11 attacks in the United States, several European countries have been seeking ways to educate Muslim imams and teachers in Europe rather than importing them from Islamic countries out of step with modern western societies.  France has set up an imam training course in Paris run jointly by the Grand Mosque and Catholic Institute, which stepped in after the Sorbonne university declined to join because it might violate the separation of church and state.  Private schools operate in several countries, but the German report advised against this option, saying Islamic studies needed to be in the university system to ensure they met the same academic standards as theology studies of other faiths.

The report said Germany, where around four million Muslims live, has about 700,000 Muslim pupils and would need 2,000 Islam teachers if all states offer religious education for them. Only a few states now teach Islam, often with teachers from Turkey.

Many German universities teach about Islam in Middle Eastern studies or history courses, but none teach its theology, law and languages in an academic curriculum similar to that used in their Christian theology faculties.  The only German university training Muslim teachers is in Münster, but several Muslim organisations have criticised it because one professor — a German convert to Islam — has questioned whether the Prophet Mohammad actually existed.

The report said the advisory councils meant to help universities develop Islam studies should be made up of representatives of the main Muslim organisations, which are often organised along ethnic or political lines.  “Various theological schools of Islam should be represented,” it said.

This would include non-affiliated Muslim academics and minority groups such as the Alevis, “insofar as they consider themselves as belonging to the Muslim religion,” it said. The Alevis, a Sufi group based mostly in Turkey, are considered heretics by many mainstream Muslims.

UPDATE: The council’s proposal was widely welcomed in German political parties, teachers’ unions, Muslim organisations and the Catholic Church, according to Die Zeit and Die Welt. DITIB, the association of Turkish mosques that is the largest Muslim group in Germany, has denied reports that it said it did not need German-educated imams itself because it has imams from Turkey, but has not yet clarified its stand. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that several universities, including Tübingen with its famous faculties of Protestant and Catholic theology, have expressed interest in setting up institutes of Islamic Studies.

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The World Economic Forum, whose annual Davos summit opening today is a favourite gathering for the rich and powerful, has issued an opinion poll showing two-thirds of those surveyed believe the current economic crisis is also a crisis of values. Almost as many singled out business as the sector that should stress values more to foster a better world. “The poll results point to a trust deficit regarding values in the business world,” the Forum said in a statement.

The fact the Forum conducted this poll may come as a surprise to those who know Davos only from the “CEO in the snow” interviews that flood some cable TV financial broadcasts at this time of year. However, he Forum has widened its scope beyond its initial role as a European management seminar. Since 2001, it has been working with faith communities in inter-faith dialogue, especially between the West and the Muslim world, and more recently a Global Agenda Council on Faith to explore “the challenges that lie in the interactions between religion and society, religion and peacebuilding and religion and business”.

My news story here on the poll gives a summary of its findings. In a few bullet points, they are:

• 67.8 % said the global economic crisis was “also a crisis of ethics and values”. Only 62.4 % of younger respondents aged 18-23 agreed here but the total jumped to 78.6 % for those aged over 30.
• 60.9 % said businesses large and small should stress values more, compared with 23 % for politics and 16.1 % for global institutions.
• Only 12.9 % of the 130,000 people polled said businesses were primarily accountable to their shareholders. 18.2 % said clients and customers, 22.9 % named employees and 46 % cited all of them equally.
• 39.3 % said honesty, integrity and transparency were the most important values to stress in the global political and economic system, 23.7 % chose respecting others, 19.9 % said considering the effect of actions on others and 17 % said preserving the environment.
• 54.2 % believed that universal values existed. Among rich countries, Germany was far ahead (64.9 %) of the United States (49.9 %) and France (37.6 %) here.

New York’s Trinity Church dwarfed by Wall Street buildings,18 Aug 2008/Wikikela

The quick takeaway from this is that lots of people believe the economic crisis reveals a crisis of values but they are less clear about what to do about it. Clearly they are not strong on the “shareholder value” school of business thinking.  And only a bit more than half believe that universal values — a possible basis for a more ethical approach to business — actually exist.

The full report includes plenty of interesting information about the countries where the poll was conducted and also short essays by 16 world religious leaders. The essays all stress such fundamental values as concern for the common good, but none get into the nuts and bolts of suggesting policies that businesses can implement to make up for their perceived ethical deficits.

What do you think? Do you have an ethical argument about reforming business that might catch the attention of the rich and powerful now gathered in that luxury village in the Swiss Alps?

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Being an English-speaking religion editor in Paris these days means being invited to try to explain the story to foreign audiences. Here are videos from BBC World Television today, after a parliamentary report on face veils was issued, and from a France24 television debate broadcast last Thursday but only just posted on its website yesterday. Apart from explaining my analysis of the issue, both show why I didn’t go into television!

France24’s site has no “share” option so click on the images to open the France24 page and watch the videos.

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The French parliamentary commission studying the issue of full Muslim veils has produced its expected result — a recommendation that the National Assembly denounces these veils as contrary to French values and votes a law to ban them in public. They could not propose a full draft law because there are some doubts about whether a total ban would be constitutional. But the lawmakers made it absolutely clear they wanted to rid France of the veils — known here as “burqas” even though most are Saudi-style niqabs — and the fundamentalist Islam they said the garments represent.

Our news report here gives the main details of the story. At the news conference presenting the report, commission chairman André Gérin was his usual outspoken self, lashing out at “gurus of fundamentalism” who he said were forcing women to wear full veils and warning the veil phenomenon was only “the tip of the iceberg.” The veil hid what he called “scandalous practices of sectarianism and fundamentalism.” His deputy chairman Eric Raoult was more moderate and even defended the commission against charges it was “monomaniac” in its focus on the veil.

While the politicians said France was a welcoming country that did not want to stigmatise any group, the commission’s proposals betrayed a narrow view of veiled women and how to deal with them. The proposals defined veil wearing in the context of pressure on and violence against women. They stressed its foreign nature by suggesting tighter procedures when issuing visas, affording resident status, offering integration courses and granting citizenship through naturalisation.

But Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux himself has said that, of the 1,900 women wearing full veils in France, 2/3 are already French citizens and 1/4 of them were actually French converts to Islam. Many of the measures proposed would not really apply to them. In addition, many veiled women say in interviews that they were not forced by male relatives to cover up and decided for religious reasons to do so. One cannot assume that all veiled women wear the garment voluntarily, but assuming they are all forced to do so seems equally one-sided. But that’s the approach underlying the commission’s suggestions.

Burqas and niqabs present a problem for an open society because they prevent a woman from being identified by her face, which one MP called “nature’s ID card.” Civil servants being asked to enrol a voter, pay child benefits, answer questions about tax returns, release schoolchildren to their parents or treat someone in a hospital have to be able to identify the person involved. The question is whether, by passing a stiff ban, the parliament ends up wielding a sledgehammer when a less blunt method could have been just as efficient, if not more so.

Here’s a Reuters video on the presentation of the commission report:

Here is a summary of the commission’s proposals:

1. Pass a resolution condemning the wearing of the full veil as contrary to the values of the Republic and condemning discrimination and violence against women and affirming France’s solidarity with women who are victims of it throughout the world.

2. Dialogue with veiled women and their entourage to understand their motivations.

3. Reinforce civics instruction in programs to integrate foreigners.

4. Train civil servants in secularism and methods of dealing with aggressive behaviour.

5. Evaluate measures to prevent sexist violence and teach gender equality at schools.

6. Give a role to the Observatory of Secularism (laïcité) created in 2007.

*7. Create a National School for the Study of Islam.

*8. Launch a parliamentary study of Islamophobia and the fight against discrimination of Muslims.

9. Study ways to assure a proper representation of spiritual diversity.

10. Instruct public servants to report to county authorities (conseil general) any cases of minors wearing full veils.

11. Plan to create an offence of applying psychological violence within a married couple.

12. Expand the law to include provocation to violate the dignity of a person.

13. Ask the Miviludes panel on fighting sects to list possible sectarian excesses that could have occured in groups where the full veil is worn and for which the veil is an indicator.

14. With requests for asylum, take the veil into consideration as a sign of persecution.

15. Adopt a measure to ban hiding the face in public services.

16. Modify visa and residence codes to mention gender equality and secularism as values to be respected by people seeking long-term visas and to allow refusal of resident status to people who practice a radical form of religion incompatible with the values of the Republic.

17. Introduce into the civil code on naturalisation a clause saying that practicing a radical form of religion incompatible with the values of the Republic — especially concerning gender equality — is a sign of insufficient assimilation.

*18. Ask the Council of State for advice on a draft law banning the hiding of faces in the public sphere.

N.B. The proposals marked with an asterisk — #7,8,18 — were included in the report but did not win full support from all members of the commission.

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U.S. General David Petraeus has criticised a company that embossed Bible citations on rifle scopes sent to forces fighting in Muslim countries. “This is of serious concern to me and to the other commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan because, indeed, it conveys a perception that is absolutely contrary to what it is that we have sought to do,” Petraeus said. Read our news story and tell us what you think in the following poll.

France’s parliament is likely to call in a resolution for a ban on Muslim face veils in public but take longer to turn that policy into law, deputies said on Thursday. A parliamentary commission studying the sensitive issue, which has been discussed alongside a wider public debate about French national identity launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is due to publish its recommendations next Tuesday.

Polls say most voters want a legal ban on full-length face veils, known here by the Afghan term burqa although the few worn in France are Middle Eastern niqabs showing the eyes. Critics say a law would stigmatise Muslims and be unenforceable.

Jean-Francois Copé, parliamentary floor leader for Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party, told France Inter radio said the plan was for “a resolution to explain and then a law to decide.” André Gérin, head of the commission, agreed that deputies needed more time to draft a law, but told the daily Le Figaro: “The ban on the full facial veil will be absolute.”

A parliamentary resolution would not be legally binding, but it seems to be the most that can be done before France’s regional elections in March. Sarkozy’s critics accuse him of launching the national identity debate — which some Muslims here say has turned into a debate on Islam and immigration — to rally conservative voters to his UMP party before that poll.

Read my full report here. Since that ran on the Reuters wire, the daily La Croix reported that the parliamentary commission had fallen apart in dispute, with Socialist members boycotting its last meeting on Wednesday. It has posted what it says is a partial text of the commission’s report (here in French) which is due out on Tuesday. The whole issue has been a political football and conservative parliamentarians have competed with each other to make ever tougher proposals.

Copé, for example, didn’t even wait for the commission’s report before announcing he would introduce a bill proposing a total ban on full facial veils in public. His announcement came just before an opinion survey said 74 percent of French voters favoured such a law. Upping the ante, UMP spokesman Frederic Lefebvre even suggested cutting off child benefit payments to veiled women.

Here’s a Reuters video report on the debate including comments by the immigration minister and a visit to the home of Aya Touati, a French convert to Islam who now wears a full black Muslim veil and robe says a ban would force her to stay at home.

Here’s an earlier video with Copé explaining in English why he wants to ban the full facial veil.

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Bishop Richard Williamson, the ultra-traditionalist prelate whose denial of the extent of the Holocaust created an uproar in the Catholic Church and with Jews early last year, has said the discussions at the Vatican to rehabilitate his Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) are  a “dialogue of the deaf.” Williamson, one of the four SSPX bishops whose bans of excommunication were lifted by Pope Benedict only days after his controversial views were aired on Swedish television, said the two sides had “absolutely irreconcilable” positions.

In a 15-minute interview posted on the French video-sharing website Dailymotion, Williamson discussed a number of issues with a man identified by the Paris Catholic daily La Croix as a minor French far-right politician named Pierre Panet. When asked about the negotiation under way at the Vatican to reintegrate the once-shunned SSPX into the Roman church, he said in fluent French:

“I think that will end up as a dialogue of the deaf. The two positions are absolutely irreconcilable. 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 are irreconcilable. Either those who say 2+2=4 renounce the truth and agree that 2+2=5 — that is, the SSPX abandons the truth, which God forbids us to do — or those who say 2+2=5 convert and return to the truth. Or the two meet halfway and say that 2+2=4-1/2. That’s wrong. Either the SSPX becomes a traitor or Rome converts or it’s a dialogue of the deaf.”

Williamson’s negationist views of the Holocaust caused such an uproar early last year that the head of the SSPX, Bishop Bernard Fellay, issued a gag order for him. It was so embarrassing for Benedict that he had to issue a letter to Catholic bishops around the world explaining his decision. Williamson was quickly removed from his post as head of the SSPX seminary in Argentina and sent home to Britain, where he lives in an SSPX home in the Wimbledon section of London. Asked about his life there, he said with dry British humour: “This is an unexpected but quite agreeable sabbatical year.”

Asked how he spends his days, he said: “Dormir et manger” (sleeping and eating), as well as writing his blog Dinoscopus, which was quickly turned into a private blog after the controversy last year.

When Panet asked for his views about Israel, Williamson said: “Many people think this state is legitimate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.”

La Croix quoted a Rev. Jacques Masson, a former member of the SSPX, as saying of Williamson: “He belonged to the group that was the most intransigent with Rome. I suspect that they pushed (SSPX founder) Archbishop (Marcel) Lefebvre to harden his line and finally go into schism.” The SSPX, which rejects the Second Vatican Council and the Catholic Church’s reconciliation with the Jews, broke from Rome in 1988 when Lefebvre disobeyed Pope John Paul and consecrated four bishops, including Williamson. Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications in 2009 and the negotiations with the Vatican aim at finding a way to reintegrate these traditionalists into the Church.

Pope Benedict recently said he hoped to reestablish full communion with the SSPX.

Here’s the video, in French:

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