Whenever church leaders get into trouble with the government of the day – as they are today over food banks – I think of George Bell, bishop of Chichester, a thorn in the side of the Church of England and of Whitehall for decades. He did so most courageously when vocally opposing the RAF’s systematic bombing of German cities – and civilians - in the second world war.
It doesn’t take as much guts to stand up for the poor in today’s church-backed cross-party report on hunger in modern Britain, which has the public endorsement of Justin Welby, the oil executive-turned-clergyman who has improbably ended up as the 105th archbishop of Canterbury.
When the Daily Mail thunders: “Welby faces food bank backlash” and David Mellor pops up, irony-free, on the other side you must be doing something right. Iain Duncan Smith, who has a righteous line in piety, is against you too.
In the 1940s the Church of England was very much part of the imperial British establishment, which has been swept away in succeeding decades. That process has made it easier for the clergy to behave as non-conformist, Catholic and Jewish religious leaders did – British Muslims too now – and align with the needy, not the mighty, something that always strikes a better note.
That doesn’t mean they’re always right or that they are never silly. For all his intellectual gifts the last archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, often hit a highbrow bum note and is safer now back in an Oxbridge college. His predecessor, Mrs Thatcher’s choice for Canterbury, Dr George Carey, could (still can) be a woefully inadequate figure in different way: just not up to it. All the churches have been found wanting over child abuse – their offence worse than secular society’s neglect, Welby confirmed when I asked him about it at a Westminster lunch last month.
I suspect that Bell (here’s a radio profile) could be a nuisance too. Winston Churchill, who was very unchurchy and saw himself as a buttress of the church, not a pillar (“I support it from outside”), was mightily offended by his criticisms and is said to have ensured that the more worldly Geoffrey Fisher, not the fancied Bell, got the vacancy when Archbishop Temple died in 1944.
Cast your eye over Bell’s distinguished career and you may see why. He was an evangelical Christian – much less influential then than now – which is usually a troublemaker’s indicator. He protected Indian Lutheran missionaries in India in the first world war when their German colleagues had suffered internment. He worked with poor relief in the Great Depression and became a close friend of the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, later a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, who was murdered by the regime weeks before the war ended.
Bell knew about the doomed 20 July bomb plot through Bonhoeffer and tried to persuade wartime coalition leaders to distinguish between the Nazis and the German people in the hope that a post-Hitler regime could negotiate terms instead of the unconditional surrender put in place. Such talk would have been fatal to the western allies’ fragile coalition with Stalin’s paranoid Russia, which was still doing most of the fighting.
As with the RAF’s bombing campaign – for so long the only means Britain had to strike back at a brutal enemy – it’s not hard to see both sides of the argument. But the courage of people such as Bell to stand up against the majority view is always attractive. Peter Hitchens (yes, that one, brave men attract awkward allies) draws our attention to his great speech in House of Lords in 1944.
I liked the sound of Welby when I heard him speak last month. Clever, funny, modest, humane and prepared to speak out – against sinful bankers and the excesses of markets too, we have learned. Under the humble Argentinian Pope Francis, the papacy seems to have taken a better turn of leadership too: generosity of spirit and concern for the downtrodden is what counts.
That’s not to say the argument is all one way, just as it wasn’t when the RAF was burning German cities, railways and factories to destroy the enemy’s capacity to wage the terrible war it had unleashed on its neighbours.
Here’ a solid reply from Robin Aitken, a founder of the Oxford Food Bank, warning governments, the opportunist left, and bishops, to stay out of charitable, voluntary endeavours.
Aitken – who was on Radio 4’s Today and turns out to be an ex-BBC leftie-basher himself - is also concerned about the national scandal of food waste in Britain. It’s an excellent point, though surely not the same as the hunger which Welby saw and today’s report confirms.
I’m with Welby on this one. He’ll read better too in decades to come.
