Q: Who is a Bigot/Racist/Homophobic?

A: Anyone who’s winning an argument with a liberal.

One reason for believing that orthodox Christians are winning the intellectual war with liberal revisionists is the frequency with which the latter employ terms of abuse towards us. One is reminded of the proverbial advice to Defence Counsel faced with a hopeless legal case: "No Plea; abuse the Plaintiff’s Attorney!"

Another reason is the speed with which any particular line of thought is abandoned once its shortcomings are brought into question. Its proponents seldom fight their corner but move on to another boxing-ring. For example, the Self-Evident Truth [SET], which I have written about in the Rock previously, used to be one such popular device. A proposition of dubious worth was claimed to be self-evident, implying that anyone who questions it must be as blind as the proverbial bat.

Bats, of course, can "see" perfectly well. They just happen to use a their sense of hearing which is better developed than that of humans. Objective reason is the bat-faculty that enables us to see through the sleight-of-mind that lies behind the SET scam.

SET with her sister Natural Justice beat a hasty retreat to the belfry. They’ve been replaced by the concept of Self-esteem Deficiency [SED]. In popular PC-parlance SED is the one thing above (or perhaps one should say below) all others at the root of present-day dissatisfaction with life: the chief if not the sole cause of under-achievement, stress, frustration, illiteracy and the consequent rise in drug-taking, crime, suicide and family dysfunction.

Now, it would seem, SED itself is falling out of favour as an explain-all for our woes.

For this we have to thank Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at Kent University. He recently delivered a lecture entitled Making People Feel Good About Themselves in which he called into question the whole validity of self-esteem as a construct. If correct, he cuts devastatingly at the root of much political, sociological and church policy. If so, we should listen to what he says very seriously indeed.

For Rock-readers Furedi’s importance lies in the fact that the arguments employed by those people, both men and women, in favour of the ordination of women as priests have depended precisely on those concepts of self-worth and self-esteem. An all-male priesthood, it is said, demeans and undervalues the contribution women make to the Christian commonwealth, turning them into second-class citizens causing those women so devalued great pain by lowering their self-esteem. Answering any argument that originates in others’ feelings is extraordinarily difficult because it excludes from the start any objective criteria. No matter how conclusively rational our reply, the other party continues to say "well that may be true but I still feel undervalued!" But if Furedi is correct, then the use of Self-esteem as a foundation for any policy is deeply flawed from the start.

Historically this claim of under-valuation is patently untrue. One need only consider the esteem in which such women as the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, St Teresa of Avila, Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Julian of Norwich have always been held by Christians for the contribution they have made in the service of God and his Church, to realise that not all women are undervalued all the time. Further back too such Old Testament heroines as Hannah, Deborah, Judith and Ruth demonstrate that women have had a big, sometimes critical, part to play in God working his purposes out through them.

Turning to the present there is an equal discrepancy between that picture drawn by the disciples of SED, of thousands of underachieving, oppressed Christian women held in thrall by a male-dominated institution, and what actually happens in the average parish. The majority of really important jobs in Church life – like reading lessons, leading intercessions and prayer-groups, visiting the sick, doing the accounts and secretarial work, teaching in Sunday School, acting as Churchwardens, to say nothing of the upbringing of children in Christian families, are largely done by women. The fact that their contribution to church life is taken for granted in some churches is most regrettable; if they suddenly withdrew their services my prediction is that the Take-it-for-Granted folk would soon notice the difference.

So it is evidently not all women who suffer from low self-esteem as a result of the way they are treated by the Church, but only, one suspects, a minority. If this is indeed the case we next need to consider what part this sense of self-esteem should play in the Christian life.

Here it is instructive to read what Professor Furedi says in the final paragraph of his lecture. He writes as follows:

His implication is perfectly clear. If we major upon the concept of self-esteem the most likely outcome is that we shall succeed in yet further accentuating to an individual his or her perceived inferiority. It resembles uncannily the recent attempt by the British state-education system to make the school examination system more "fair" by introducing lower pass-marks for those from "underprivileged" backgrounds. The only effect of this chicanery is to discredit the whole examination system and render any qualifications of achievers dubious and those of underachievers worthless.

However, the greatest objection to esteem-raising as an end in itself is not because it’s unfair to everyone (though it is), but that is simply doesn’t work. We can see this in the way in which the ordination of women as priests as a remedy for SED has failed so significantly, particularly in the Church of England.

It all began with the conviction, dealt with above, that women were "undervalued" by the Church. So it was decided to have women deacons (there were already, and had been for many years, deaconesses and accredited parish workers). There was a tacit agreement that it should be seen how that worked before process went any further.

Within a very short period of time, however, far too soon for any proper evaluation of this novel concept of the diaconate to have taken place, complaints were being heard that women were being excluded from the priesthood and hence subjected to a glass ceiling above which they could not rise. So it was decided to have women priests. The attendant legislation specifically excluded the whole question of women bishops. Today, just ten years later people are yet again clamouring for the glass ceiling to be removed and for women to be consecrated as bishops (as a matter of Natural Justice, needless to say).

All this despite the fact that during this period, and for whatever reason, the Church of England has seen the sharpest decline in living memory in its number of adherents, and many of the blessings which it was confidently predicted would ensue from women priests have not materialised. Women priests, significantly often, have emptied the churches in which they are ministering. Of course there have always been plenty of male priests who have done precisely that, so no facile conclusions should be drawn; but the specific gifts which it was claimed women priests, as women, would bring to the priestly ministry have not been appreciated to anything like the extent predicted. Moreover, as the recent Survey (described in December’s Rock) conclusively showed, the beliefs of women priests in critical items of the Christian faith are significantly more tenuous than those of their male counterparts.

All of this suggests that a policy deriving from the desire to elevate individual’s self-esteem is no more likely to succeed in the Kingdom of God than in the Kingdom of Caesar.

Profesor Furedi again:

This recognition accorded to an individual's worth represents an important shift from the previous concept of social equality to that of the idea of 'equality of esteem'. As a psychological/pseudo moral concept, equal worth has little in common with previous ideas about either equality of opportunity or equality of outcomes. It also has little in common with the distinction often drawn in moral philosophy between respect and esteem.

And a few paragraphs later he says:.

It is with a consideration of that last sentence that I wish to conclude this article. Long before Furedi’s lecture I found myself asking the question as to where, in the whole corpus of Christian teaching one could find such a concern about self-esteem. For the most part Scripture majors on the sinfulness of man, his failure to keep God’s commandments and the consequent misery and alienation both from his God and his fellow-men that is consequent upon that sin. The New Testament is not a record of man’s successful achievements but his failures, and (to quote Martin Luther) the Proper Man’s victory over sin – on sinful man’s behalf. The Gospel is not about the enhancement of our self-esteem but the truly incredible transformation of ourselves, our souls and bodies that God has made possible through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and his atoning death.

In other words, the Gospel of Self-esteem starts at the wrong end of the track. Of course there have always been certain Christians who, in their commendable desire to banish any idea of our "merit" being a significant factor in the process of our salvation, have by disparaged and minimalised the importance of our response to God in the process of salvation, and thereby succeeded in distorting the truth in the opposite direction. One error is not to be corrected by perpetrating another: but that must be the subject of another article

If the Gospel of Self-esteem is going to go the same way as its predecessors like Natural Justice, Self-evident Truths and the Gospel of Human Relationships, to name but three, it will, like them, soon have disappeared down the drain of discarded false theologies. Our thanks are due to Professor Furedi for kindly pulling the plug out for us.

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