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More religious extremism, please!

More religious extremism, please!

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the issue of who pays their tax has been much in the headlines recently.

Donald Trump doesn’t want to say how much tax he’s paid. Big companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Starbucks have been hauled over the coals for avoiding corporation tax while making significant profits. Politicians like John Mcdonnell and Jeremy Corby say that it’s patriotic to pay tax. On Wednesday the Prime Minister pledged that she would chase down the tax dodgers. We’re coming for you, she said in a slightly sinister voice.

Which brings to mind the incident in Matthew 22. Some lawyers approach Jesus with a tricky question. Is it right to pay taxes to our hated oppressors, the Romans?
A good question – and a well laid trap! Either Jesus says yes – in which case his cause would be undermined by seeming to align with the Romans; or he says no – in which case he can be cast as a rebel and an extremist. Then as now, not paying your taxes was a big deal.

What does Jesus do? He asks them to show him a coin. They do. Who’s image is on the coin, he asks? Caesar’s, they say. Well, give Caesar what belongs to him, says Jesus. Give him his coin. But give God what belongs to Him. Matthew records that they’re amazed by his answer, and they leave him alone. Jesus seems to have snatched victory from the jaws of a PR defeat.

Now, I don’t know if Jesus can be said to have regretted anything he ever taught, but perhaps he might regret this. The phrase, “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s”, has become a way of justifying a division between the material and the spiritual, between the real world of politics, economics, business, and the intangible world of religious belief. Religion, it is said, is a private hobby – a matter of what you do with your Sunday morning and nothing to do with the practical realities of life. Let’s keep them separate! To paraphrase Alistair Campbell, spin-doctor for former Prime Minister Tony Blair, politicians have no business ‘doing God’. Look, people say, even Jesus taught that politics and religion should be kept apart.

Superficially, this sounds like common sense. Isn’t religion a cause of conflict and violence? Isn’t faith, by definition, irrational – an evidence and reason free zone? Isn’t it ridiculous to even consider allowing these bronze-age desert myths to influence our lives in the secular age? Haven’t we got beyond all that?

Those arguments have been addressed at length elsewhere. But let’s turn our attention back to Jesus. Let me say that he was not arguing that politics and religion should be kept separate. Such a thought would have been unthinkable for a first century Jew, which is of course what Jesus was. But if he didn’t mean that politics and religion were to be kept apart, what on earth did he mean?

Look at any £5 note. The note doesn’t have much value in itself. Its value lies in the fact that it expresses a commitment. It’s a symbol of the part we take of the national wealth, of our commitments, contracts and the obligations. On one side is a picture of the Queen; on the other, a picture of Winston Churchill. They’re more than decoration. They too are symbols of stability and continuity of the political order under which all those economic exchanges happen – the context in which the promise to “pay the bearer” is meaningful.

Jesus says yes to that – all those things are important parts of our lives. Even if we don’t always like them, far better that they exist than they do not. Pay your taxes. Keep the integrity of the system, even if aspects of it are profoundly unjust.

But what belongs to God? Now, look at someone to your left or to your right. Who’s image does he or she bear? Who do they look like? Genesis 1.26 says, “Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image”. You look God-like. In fact, from Jesus' point of view, all of humanity bears his image. So, give to God what belongs to Him, which is to say – everyone belongs to Him. Even the Queen. We have to pay a divine duty, and that tax is our whole lives.

At which point I feel I will have lost many of you. This sounds like fundamentalism, a dangerous extremism. It is an extreme view. Perhaps we’d be better keep religion out of politics after all? What a mess people who believe such things could make.

Allow me to quote from Dr Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. He was frustrated that even his non-violent civil rights campaign had been called ‘extremist’, but then he thought again.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvery's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime -- the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation, and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Today is Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s eighty-fifth birthday. What would you say? Would the world be a better place if religious extremists like him kept their beliefs to themselves?

Paul Bickley is Director of Political Programme for Theos

This is the text of an address given at Westminster Abbey to the staff and pupils of Westminster School on 7 October 2016. 


Image by the Skoll Foundation under Creative Commons 2.0

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