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Good morning. Those wonderful women and girls in Iran are continuing to show great courage in defying the regime despite being beaten and shot at, with a good number already killed or injured. But how optimistic can we be about their future? If you take Chairman Mao’s view that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, not very. But as Hannah Arendt pointed out in her influential book on violence, even the most repressive regime depends on some consent- the consent of people willing to hold and fire guns on its behalf for example.

Free consent is fundamental to politics. In 1647, at a time when democracy was both very restricted and under threat Colonel Rainsborough argued in St Mary’s Church in Putney

The poorest he in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he. Therefore every man that is to live under a government, ought first, by his own consent to put himself under that government
To which of course we now add the word ‘she’.

Political consent is in the end rooted in religious consent, the most fundamental of all freedoms. Sadly, still, religious freedom, including freedom of conscience, is denied to 70 % of the world’s population, living in a third of the world’s countries . But Christian churches have also too often disgraced the name of religion in this way. There is a famous scene in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov when Christ returns to earth and confronts the grand inquisitor. But the inquisitor, far from being sorry for persecuting people accuses Christ of treating people as free when they did not want freedom and adds ‘We have corrected your great work’.

As Dostoevsky saw, the capacity to consent or dissent is fundamental to what it means to be a human being. It is both a right and a gift. From a Christian point of view it is rooted in the very act of creation. For we have been given a life of our own, a mind of our own, a will of our own. We can stand up to governments-and we can stand up to, or kneel down before, God. That is the risk God took in making us; that is the risk Christ took in coming among us and inviting us to live in the Divine milieu. Those brave women in Iran are risking their lives for something that is fundamental to all of us, however much we might now take it for granted in our own country.

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