Mick Hartley

Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins in the Lambeth debate. From the Telegraph:

It is easy to condemn Dame Sarah for this display of moral incoherence, to treat her as an isolated offender and demand her immediate resignation. I confess that was my first, impulsive reaction. But such a demand misses a fundamental truth: Dame Sarah is, above all, a product of her time. The prevailing norm across Britain’s leadership class, indeed across the elite institutions of the wider West, is one of institutional appeasement, historical atonement and systematic abasement.

For decades, Western elites have insisted on a rapid transition toward absolute multiculturalism, operating on the unexamined hope that diversity would somehow, against all historical odds, work out so long as they kept insisting it would. A core tenet of the modern establishment is that all cultural frameworks are equally good or equally bad. Dame Sarah, as the most senior cleric of the established Church of England, should know better.

The tenets of Islam treat sexual predation in men as entirely natural. It’s the responsibility of women, then, to cover themselves to ensure that they provide no temptation to these predators – who of course remain blameless.

By making the woman’s physical covering and spatial isolation the primary guarantor of social order, the responsibility for male purity is offloaded on to the female body. Men are treated as predatory, reactive actors stripped of internal moral agency, driven entirely by external visual triggers. Women, conversely, are reduced to guarded commodities whose basic human freedom of movement and public visibility must be permanently sacrificed to maintain social stability. “Free” they most certainly are not….

According to a landmark UN Women’s survey, 99.3 per cent of Egyptian women reported having been sexually harassed, demonstrating that external concealment does not guarantee public safety, but instead treats female visibility as a provocation that legitimises abuse. Across major metropolitan transit networks, such as the metros of Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo, and Tehran, authorities run dedicated women-and-children carriages. Public space is literally partitioned, structurally redesigned around the inability of the system to guarantee public safety through internal self-restraint.

Finally, the Archbishop of Canterbury must by now be aware of the impact on women in Britain and the rest of the West of the influx into our societies of millions of men raised to view women in these ways….

What is to be done? In continental Europe, nations including France, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands have all enacted legislation forbidding the concealment of the face in public. Yet such measures treat the veil merely as a functional security loophole rather than a deep manifestation of an asymmetric social theology. By reducing a profound civilisational difference to a routine policing measure, secular states miss the opportunity to defend the positive, foundational virtues of an open society – namely, the internal moral governance of the individual and the mutual public accountability between men and women.

This is precisely where religious leaders are called to step forward. Instead of pressing on with the one-way accommodation of militant Islam, Dame Sarah could use her platform to defend the core moral genius of the theological tradition of which she is supposed to be the custodian.

In the Christian framework, the ethical responsibility for sexual purity and social order is placed squarely on the individual conscience. Moral rectitude is defined as an internal victory of self-control, exercised within a society of shared public freedom. Christianity presumes that, though sinful, men are morally accountable beings fully capable of respecting the bodily autonomy of women, regardless of how those women are dressed or where they walk. This approach builds a culture of reciprocal respect: men are commanded to honour women as fellow image-bearers of God, and women are empowered to occupy public spaces uncovered, without their human dignity being diminished. The Christian model is in this and many other respects quite different from a system of spatial partitioning and external enforcement….

True liberation of our institutions begins the moment a leader finds the moral courage to step outside the consensus, replace passive appeasement with courageous defence and confidently assert the ethical superiority of the Christian inheritance.

Something we’re very unlikely to see anytime soon from the Church of England.