Angling for approval

The greatest challenges we face today are those that seek to sow confusion regarding a question that once would have seemed simple: What does it mean to be human? In their most obvious form these come from those broad phenomena grouped together under the umbrella terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “Transhumanism.”

In recent years their most aggressive champions have been associated with the politics of transgender ideology. And in their more subtle forms they connect to debates surrounding the beginning and the end of life. Is the fertilized egg a human being in any meaningful sense? Does the person in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s Disease still qualify as a person? And touching on all of the above, the tastes of our therapeutic culture play a disproportionate role, undergirding and informing a popular taste for overturning old norms and reconstructing ethical principles on the basis that whatever brings most happiness, in the sense of a sense of psychological well-being, to most people is a self-evident good.

In an ideal world, the church would be the conscience of the culture, speaking uncomfortable truths to a world that needs to hear them. Sadly, her spokesmen are too often there to give a sanctifying spiritual thumbs-up to whatever worldly wisdom is the flavor of the day. In the United Kingdom, Lord Carey, erstwhile archbishop of Canterbury, recently offered an instructive, if depressing, example while speaking in the House of Lords on the proposed bill to allow for voluntary euthanasia of the terminally ill.

Carey’s speech was remarkable for its simplistic assumptions about the nature of voluntary consent and the dangers of coercion within the context of medical care. Still less did he demonstrate the imagination to anticipate how such death policies transform how societies as a whole come to understand what constitutes a life worth living. Once human beings seize control of death, then the criteria for such a judgment become a function of public taste. One need only look at the other end of life, at its beginning, to see this: Iceland’s pregnancy prescreening policy has, so it boasts, eliminated Down Syndrome. That is a euphemism for “eliminated people with Down Syndrome on the grounds that their lives are not worth living.”

Carey’s concerns were for the legitimacy and the credibility of the Church of England and her bishops. “I pray, indeed pray, that both these institutions [the C of E and the House of Lords]—which I hold so dearly for the importance of our role in public life—do not risk our legitimacy by claiming that we know better than both the public and the other place [the Commons].” It seems that archbishop emeritus sees the Church’s credibility as depending upon public approval, which in turn depends upon pronouncing a blessing on whatever the world demands.

But credibility with whom? The wider taste of the progressive cultural classes, of course. And that crowd is a fickle mistress indeed. Who knows what it will demand next week before it grants that precious credibility? Far from selling her soul to the rabble, the church needs to seize her moment and witness to the truth of what it means to be human. That is what Jeremiah did in ancient Israel, and it is what Paul did in the first century. The message is not that of secular tastes flavored with pious claptrap but a clear declaration that the true church worships a sovereign God who even cares for sparrows and thus can be trusted to care for those made in His image. And that she is—or at least should be—a community where what it means to be human comes as close to being realized as possible this side of glory. She is to be marked by a supernatural mutual love and care where people do not die alone or uncared for but where everyone sees others as part of the one body with a consequent responsibility towards each other.

Carey’s task is to promote that message, not fret about an atheistic culture considering him to be outdated and irrelevant. God’s revelation, not public opinion, is the guide to relevance. That Carey can make this speech is for him to acknowledge that he, as a former leader of the Church, no longer has any real grasp of what it means to be human and no confidence in the God who has called the Church into being. He need not worry about any vote in the House of Lords making him irrelevant. That pony has already left the stable.