麻豆社

Good Morning.
Resilience has been the watchword of the last few days, politicians across the parties choosing to follow up the Prime Minister鈥檚 recent focus on the idea. For some, the key dilemma is military resilience - how should Britain defend itself in an age when the USA is no longer a certain ally? For others, the question is energy resilience, shielding ourselves from the volatility of world oil prices. Both are important questions. But for me there is a deeper dimension to this word of the moment, one that requires urgent attention. Put simply, how do nations, including the UK, shore up, and indeed improve, their moral resilience?
Moral resilience is the willingness and ability to hold on to core ethical values under pressure. In his passage on love, often read at weddings, St Paul enumerates some of the qualities that I see lying at its heart: patience; kindness; lack of rudeness, boastfulness, envy or arrogance; delighting in truth. Sadly, these are qualities I and many others now find lacking, not least at international level. Few, if any, moral constraints appear to inhibit the actions of those who have both unrestricted power and the willingness to use it. Meanwhile, within nations, the so-called Overton window, describing what ideas and opinions are considered acceptable in society, has shifted dramatically towards anger, hatred and abuse.
Yet, despite institutions of all types falling short, there are examples to the contrary. I saw moral resilience vividly on a recent visit to Manila with the global Anglican Mission agency I chair. Over the last 125 or so years, what began as a small working people鈥檚 church has not only survived but thrived. At the same time, it has continued to speak up boldly against the abuse of human rights so endemic among the Philippines ruling classes. Bishops have been murdered, church workers imprisoned without trial, but the Iglesia Filipina Independiente has not only remained resilient in the face of all its trials but has grown to a six million strong denomination.
From its motto, 鈥淟ove our God and love our country鈥�, emerges a theology that is fiercely inclusive of sexual and gender identities, alongside roundly rejecting the racial and social hierarchies it was founded to resist. Its social projects are among some of the most inspiring I have seen on my travels. If it sounds like Christian Nationalism, then it springs from a very different foundation from what those words often describe elsewhere. Faith is not the excuse to reject and demean others, but rather to embrace and affirm them. For me, this is what love of Christ and love of one鈥檚 country should be about. Well beyond churchgoers, this is the moral resilience that I believe Britain as a nation now needs more than ever.