Anything theologically significant about a big Mac?

Macdonalds are getting a hard time in today’s Daily Mail for issuing £125 penalty charges to anyone lingering for too long in their car park [here].  Of course, where their customer car parks are being used as free parking bays for airport travellers then they’ve ever right to preserve their commercial interest. However, it’s the way that the parking monitoring company can purchase information from the DVLA in order to issue penalty charge notices to ‘offenders’ homes that is really troubling.

Our relationship with the state shifts when private companies are able to purchase our data given, quite appropriately, to those in authority for good government. If a private company can have access to the DVLA database rather than having to present a civil case first in court to which we could be lawfully summoned then there is no logical reason why they ought not also be able to secure a fingerprint or DNA identification if they want to issue us a ‘penalty charge’.  My issue is not with their right to protect the integrity and commerical viability of their own property - but with their direct access to government databases.

How is this a theological issue? First, our relationship with the state is theological because of its role in using authority and power. Next, commercial interest is elevated above rights to privacy - we ought not let our human dignity as those created in the image of God to be trumped by economic considerations. Furthermore, the tax collectors of Jesus’ day were despised because they were making excessive economic gain by doing revenue gathering on the behalf of the Empire. Jesus undermined popular prejudice by offering friendship to tax collectors; the private companies to whom the state has today devolved some of its duties are perhaps their contemporary equivalents.

That means that our response to such companies and their employees - as much as might detest their direct access to our data - are to be met with hospitality in God’s name. To me, that makes a drive-in big Mac and fries more theologically uncomfortable than I’d like.

‘Right-wing’ prison reform

Peter Hitchens draws Mail on Sunday readers to conditions in British prisons that go way beyond legitimate punishment, reaching the depths of inhumanity of prisoners to those they consider more evil than they. It’s heartening to hear a confessedly right-wing commentator adopting a measured and largely non-partisan call for reform. He’s critical of those who otherwise share his political stance but who turn a blind eye to prisoner-on-prisoner brutality. Hitchens’s article is here.

Credit where credit is due - there are very few online readers’ comments to this piece which perhaps says something in itself. Any help towards de-politicising prison reform ought to be affirmed.

Not ‘off with their heads’

The Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley is getting vilified by online commentators for her defence of a proportionate response to the New Labour funding debacle [here]. I’ve chipped-in with some support, see below, because if the ‘off with their heads’ mob get their way the possibility of a mistake is removed from our political system and replaced with an immediate ‘conviction’ of corruption. That’s short-termism that will come back to haunt us.

“Most of the posters are missing the point of Ashley’s argument which is that there should be a proportionate response to rules that are broken. It’s a well-trodden path - we have a variety of punishments when different laws are broken and, in most cases, a range of punishments for breaking a particular law.

If we deny politicians the possibility of making mistakes (even where this breaks a law) we lose much more than we gain. The result will make the temptation to hide irregularities even greater and will deter all but the bravest of souls from contributing to public life.

This doesn’t mean having one law for the elite and another for the rest of us. It means that criminal charges are brought but that the consequences (beyond that imposed by the courts) are clearly proportionate. Deliberate attempts to conceal funds or deceive are simply not the same as inadvertent mistakes. If we stop making such a distinction we might feel better in the short-term by claiming a few political scalps but the longer-term consequences will not be in our interests as a society.”  Posted as Eric61 around 10:45pm on 5th December.

Cohesion - a strange motto

I’ll be teaching an honours module again next Spring on Citizenship, from a practical theological perspective and have been working on some updates of my lecture material today. In trying to gather my thoughts about ‘the future of citizenship’ - the last lecture in the series - I was digging about in some of the New Labour initiatives and reports.

The Commission on Integration and Cohesion has recently published its final report, ‘Our Shared Future’ and its no surprise that it’s strong on finding ways of both expressing and developing community cohesion in the midst of increasing diversity. I don’t have any major problem with citizenship being instrumental as long as it doesn’t become too tightly focused around government policies. I don’t like the idea that citizenship might become only something that the government uses, and as a more socially (and perhaps politically) acceptable language for talking about substantial cultural differences.

The report opens with the Chair’s letter which begins with what appears to be the Commission’s motto: “A past built on difference, a future which is shared.”  Perhaps I’m missing something really obvious but I can’t quite get my head around this motto.  What follows seems to be an explanation: “As a commission our vision of society is one where people are committed to what we have in common rather than obsessing with those things that make us different.”

We didn’t build our past -  we built our future, then, which is now the present we’re living in.  The present we’re living in is also the product of our hopes for the future.  Whilst the sentiments of the vision are admirable I’m not sure that the full significance of the very different futures held by various faith groups is recognised. Some Christians expect a great dividing in the future, when the Day of Judgement comes. Other Christians anticipate a great ingathering and righting of injustices within the all-encompassing love of God - from no-one is excluded. The eschatological outlooks within other faiths can be similarly diverse.

I look forward to exploring this report in depth and maybe the finite horizon that features in its opening isn’t the only story it tells.  But if we only consider ways of sharing our temporal visions of the future we’ll be neglecting the even more powerful influence of religious eschatologies and how they have an effect, from the future, on the present.