BBC Radio 4 2016-02-20

BBC Radio 4 2016-02-20

Donald Trump was sore this week when his plans for ending immigration from Mexico received a severe rebuke from an unexpected quarter. ‘A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian,’ said the Pope, no less, fresh from a visit to the faithful of the USA’s southern neighbour.

The Republican frontrunner says the Pope has been misinformed and doesn’t understand the whole situation. ‘For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,’ he thunders. ‘I am proud to be a Christian.’ The pontiff went on to offer him the benefit of the doubt. But for some the damage had already been done.

So is it ever right to question a person’s faith? If someone says they’re a Christian, a Muslim, a Sikh or whatever, who are we to pronounce otherwise, when, as it’s often asserted, only God knows our hearts?

We’re rightly wary about being judgmental. I shudder to think how many people have been turned away from faith because at some point they’ve been dismissed as not being True Believers when they’ve aired doubts, expressed discomfort at a particular style of worship, or been made to feel that after some personal failure, there can be no way back. I’m reminded of the strong words of Jesus about not causing the simplest believer to stumble.

Like people of other faiths and none, Christians join political parties with divergent philosophies, disagree about how an economy should be run, about war, and migration, and sexuality, and Europe, and so much more. We’re taught not to impugn motives, dismiss the belief of those who’ve come to different conclusions.

Yet unless we squeeze faith into a purely private concern, narrowly spiritual, with no impact on the rest of life, it must be possible at some point to subvert that faith by the choices we make, the policies we endorse, the attitudes we adopt, or the evils we ignore. And that applies regardless of how often we turn up for worship, however passionately we affirm our orthodoxy, or claim to be defending a tradition.

Along with others, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw this clearly when the church in Germany came under pressure to implement the Third Reich’s antisemitism. He recognised that this would lead to fatal compromise of the heart of the Christian message. ‘I cannot sing psalms in the Gregorian chant with those who do not cry out for the Jews,’ he wrote.

It remains the case that whatever our formal profession, we can in practice stop living as people of faith. It’s by the fruit of our living that the reality or self-delusion of any faith is tested.