Not Great

One of the pleasures of freelance life is that it furnishes an excuse for not reading any of the neocon and anti-Catholic bilge behind the Murdoch paywall.

"You can't expect me to pay to read that at all, never mind to give money to Murdoch, of all people, for the privilege?" Who could argue with that?

But there are those who, at shareholders' expense, read it so that the rest of us don't have to. According to them, Oliver Kamm - yes, this Oliver Kamm, who is also this Oliver Kamm - has been ranting on against the teaching of Theology in universities.

That is an old standby of a certain sort of lower-middlebrow pub bore, the sort that ever thought very much of Tony Blair, or who tries to post comments on here complaining that I do not write in the popbitch style that they can understand on a good day.

Go and read popbitch, then. This blog is for educated people.

Bringing us back to Oliver Kamm.

Kamm has three interrelated reasons for his attitude to Theology.

One is horror at such concepts as compassion for the poor, disgust at wars of aggression, revulsion at the lying of countries into such wars and at gargantuan personal profiteering from them, hostility to drugs and to sexual promiscuity, disapproval of campaigns of criminal harassment against those who give bad reviews to one's daft books, and so on.

Another is the inability of a signatory both to the Henry Jackson Society and to the Euston Manifesto (defunct) to forgive the ultimately successful critiques, lived out as anything properly theological is by definition, both of apartheid South Africa and various Nazi-harbouring monetarist regimes in Latin America, and of Marxism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.

Leaving aside fringe aberrations, it was the churches, in specifically theological terms, that opposed Botha and Pinochet without siding with Brezhnev, and which opposed Brezhnev without siding with Botha and Pinochet.

No one else managed that, because no one else had the necessary resources, which were and are theological.

Those resources alone are able to critique the whole of the indivisible campaign of vandalism that has been waged socially since the 1960s, socially and economically since the 1980s, and socially, economically and constitutionally since 1997.

Kamm is totally committed to that vandalism, and he has correctly identified the only threat to the totality of it.

But the main one is that my friend Phillip Blond has dared to fail spontaneously to acknowledge Kamm's greatness and grandeur, including the self-evident brilliance of his petulant attacks on Red Tory (not a faultless book, I should add), and instead dares to exercise more influence than Kamm has ever enjoyed, or ever will enjoy.