If this business about using the black churches to get out the black vote really comes to anything, and it hasn't in the past, then it will make a very significant difference indeed.
For one thing, just as the church served by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a congregation of the almost comically "mainline" United Church of Christ (it is sometimes referred to as "Unitarians Considering Christ", and it owns the church built by the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock), so numerous congregations of the Church of England and the older Nonconformist denominations are now largely or entirely black. Likewise, many a Catholic priest on these shores is now in or approaching the same position as Fr Michael Pfleger. The Cathedral Choir at my friend's recent Ordination in Nottingham was overwhelmingly black.
If your main concern is to organise against Islamisation, then you could want no voters more than churchgoers from West Africa and the belt across the centre of that continent. Only three groups are as reliable in this cause. One is the Greeks in general and the Greek Cypriots in particular, of which latter one in six in the world already lives in the United Kingdom. Another is the Slavs, among whom the Poles predominate in this country. And the third is the ancient indigenous Christians of the Middle East, with their brethren in the Indian Subcontinent.
No wonder that the National Secular Society objects to immigration by West African Pentecostalists specifically as Pentecostalists, and to immigration by Polish Catholics specifically as Catholics, although the liberalism of the Catholic Church here has up to now resulted in only one in 10 Poles in Britain being a practising Catholic, whereas 80 per cent of people in Poland go to Mass at least once every week.
The Middle Eastern Christians know what it is to live between the Zionism and neoconservatism with which the NSS and its wider lobby largely share many roots and much culture, and the political Islam that those forces have either called into being or brought into the mainstream. The Christians of the Indian Subcontinent know what it is to live between political Islam and the Hindutva to which those forces are significantly and increasingly allied.
No wonder that the National Secular Society objects to immigration by West African Pentecostalists specifically as Pentecostalists, and to immigration by Polish Catholics specifically as Catholics, although the liberalism of the Catholic Church here has up to now resulted in only one in 10 Poles in Britain being a practising Catholic, whereas 80 per cent of people in Poland go to Mass at least once every week.
The Middle Eastern Christians know what it is to live between the Zionism and neoconservatism with which the NSS and its wider lobby largely share many roots and much culture, and the political Islam that those forces have either called into being or brought into the mainstream. The Christians of the Indian Subcontinent know what it is to live between political Islam and the Hindutva to which those forces are significantly and increasingly allied.
London has a higher level both of professing Christians and of regular churchgoers than the country as a whole, which in the former case is saying quite something when you consider that the national figure is 72 per cent. The huge London statistics are because of black Londoners. Up to now, though, they have been unregistered, or abstaining, or disorganised.
If they were not so by the time of the next Mayoral Election in 2016, then the question would be which leading pastor would carry the torch for all three of social justice, peace, and traditional family values against the candidate of rapacious global capital, the sexually louche and pro-drugs incumbent who believes that Christianity overthrew a superior civilisation. Whichever leading pastor had not been made a Labour MP the year before.
Assuming, of course, that any leading pastor had not been made a Labour MP the year before. A lot of them, and I do mean a lot of them, have very close ties, and I do mean very close ties, to Maurice Glasman and Blue Labour. There is ample time for them to sign up their entire congregations to the locally dominant Constituency Labour Parties. As the Catholic Church more or less used to do. And as the Methodist chapels actually started the Labour Party by doing. Community organising, indeed.
If they were not so by the time of the next Mayoral Election in 2016, then the question would be which leading pastor would carry the torch for all three of social justice, peace, and traditional family values against the candidate of rapacious global capital, the sexually louche and pro-drugs incumbent who believes that Christianity overthrew a superior civilisation. Whichever leading pastor had not been made a Labour MP the year before.
Assuming, of course, that any leading pastor had not been made a Labour MP the year before. A lot of them, and I do mean a lot of them, have very close ties, and I do mean very close ties, to Maurice Glasman and Blue Labour. There is ample time for them to sign up their entire congregations to the locally dominant Constituency Labour Parties. As the Catholic Church more or less used to do. And as the Methodist chapels actually started the Labour Party by doing. Community organising, indeed.
And not only in London. Not only in London at all.
A lot of them, and I do mean a lot of them, have very close ties, and I do mean very close ties, to Maurice Glasman and Blue Labour.
ReplyDeleteAs of course do you.
Not for the first time, you are saying just enough to let on how very much more you know.