There is no question about it – the humanitarian crisis as people flee from war and poverty – is testing our sense of shared values. As far as I can tell, no-one knows how to solve this problem. Absolutely no-one, whether in politics, in the UN, in the NGOs, in the universities or in the church. Of course, if we can bring peace to areas from which people escape war and if we can improve the economic conditions in places from which people flee poverty there is a long-term solution.
Peace and social justice are what we pray for week by week and we must pray with confidence that the world will come to change. But no-one has a plan for dealing with these root causes of mass migration in a time frame which helps the 60 million people currently displaced and on the move. So human beings are stumped. We are also divided. Take any two people, each seeking a reasonable response in good faith, and they’ll disagree profoundly.
This, it seems to me, is an area of public discourse in which the church has a key voice. And our leaders haven’t remained silent.
“The response has to start with compassion and the human being”
Said the Archbishop of Canterbury on Friday.
“Just the dignity of the human being, which has been Christian teaching, the foundation of our value system, forever.”
Understandably, in a TV interview the Archbishop doesn’t go into detail of the scriptural basis for this foundational idea. But as St Paul said to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3: 28. We were, after all, all created in the image of God. Every single one of us. (1 John 3: 17).
So the dignity of the human being is the teaching of the Bible. But could a sceptic reasonably say that this is just words – that it offers no practical solution to these terrible problems?
In trying to puzzle out how we should act in an impossible situation, I believe Archbishop Welby’s insight (The response has to start with compassion and the human being) does offer a distinctive and practical way of breaking into the problem. It’s distinctive because this is a problem which could be broken into at a variety of points. For instance, you could start your thinking about this with the subject of security. Or you could start with the idea of the preservation of the wealth of those lucky enough to have it. Or you could start with the subject of the integrity of national borders. These starting points can all be heard in public discourse at the moment, and they all lead to different solutions. If your starting point is the importance of national borders, then you naturally start by putting up razor wire. What our Archbishop says is that we must start working out the solution by treating the dignity of the human being as the first consideration.
Our sceptic might question whether Christians are entitled to claim that something based on the Christian scriptures is foundational in a world populated by many who are not Christians? Well, I don’t believe that we need to be defensive about that, or even that we necessarily need to justify it. But actually, there is very broad consensus across the world, cutting across all religions, that human dignity is foundational. The opening words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are these stirring and crucially relevant words in this context: “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
If the European and other world leaders who are obviously and understandably stumped by this unique and terrible crisis can do as the Archbishop says and start at this point, I believe that we can move towards practical solutions. But start at some different point, and history will judge us very harshly. For “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of [us] are one in Christ Jesus.”