The Sunday Telegraph revealed that the Bishop of Carlisle is under the impression that the judgement of ‘God’ was responsible for the flooding in Yorkshire and elsewhere last week as punishment for moral behaviour as well as environmental degradation. In particular, he is quoted as saying:
We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate
and
In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as ‘the beast’, which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want
and that:
The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance.
In trying to lessen the implied homophobic intent behind the comments of the Church of England Bishop, it was explained this evening on the BBC Radio 4’s PM program that the Bishop did not really mean what he appears to say, after all. Rather, he meant something a little more complicated, to do with human actions (of which moral actions are only part), which then affect the environment, which then causes global warming, and which finally may have caused the flooding. Quite why one needs ‘God’ in that chain of events was not really explained.
However, it can be questioned as to whether Bishop Dow did actually mean something as benign, only for it to be mangled by the Sunday Telegraph. He has, after all, expressed concerns in the past before on the way in which Government has apparently usurped the moral authority of his god in connection with legislation outlawing the discrimination against gays by Church-ran adoption agencies.
When the Bill outlawing discrimination against gays with respect to Church-ran adoption agencies was before Parliament, the Bishop, in his monthly dioscean notice of March this year he commented that:
Once God is removed from the scene, where ultimate moral authority should be located there is then a vacuum. Not surprisingly, the vacuum is then filled, frequently by an institution, in this case by the government [...] if the trend to ignore God persists, we will find many other situations where an institution takes to itself the role of ultimate moral authority and endeavours to enforce its moral judgement with law or rules, be it on a national scale or simply in the institution itself.
For the Bishop, the Government’s stance on the issue of Church-ran adoption agencies is a case in point of the way in which Government has usurped the moral authority of ‘God’.
It’s clear that the Bishop’s recent speech reported in the Sunday Telegraph follows a favourite theme about Government taking on the role of “ultimate moral authority”, to the point of citing the same example, that of gay lifestyles, as an example of “permissiveness”.
It would seem, then, that – despite the semantic gymnastics on Radio 4’s PM by the Church’s spokesman – the Sunday Telegraph was right in its intepretation of the Bishop’s remarks, and that he meant what he said: that the floods in Yorkshire and elsewhere are “God’s judgement” on our perceived moral failings.
