Wise Words From Across The Pond

John
Sentamu, an exile from Idi Amin’s Uganda

who was appointed earlier this year as the first black Archbishop of York,
has brought a rather distinctive style of ministry to England’s second most prominent
church.

This week, Archbishop John Sentamu of York, in England, delivered a
lecture entitled “Uncovering
the Purposes of God,” in which he challenged the growing secularism of British
public life. Admittedly, the relationship between faith and politics is an utterly different
one in the UK than it is in
the US. But at the same time, Sentamu’s remarks are a
rallying cry for those who would put their politics at the service of their
faith commitments.

John
Sentamu, an exile from Idi Amin’s Uganda
who was appointed earlier this year as the first black Archbishop of York,
has brought a rather distinctive style of ministry to England’s second most prominent
church. Wearing traditional African
vestments and playing the bongo drums at what would otherwise have been a very formal, stiff-upper-lip installation ceremony was a sign of things to
come.

This week, Archbishop Sentamu delivered a
lecture entitled “Uncovering
the Purposes of God,” in which he challenged the growing secularism of British
public life. Now, it’s important to bear
in mind that fewer than 7% of British citizens regularly attend religious
services: the relationship between faith and politics is an utterly different
one in the UK than it is in
the US. But at the same time, Sentamu’s remarks are a
rallying cry for those who would put their politics at the service of their
faith commitments.

Sentamu meets head on the idea that
religious values have no place in the public square:

…as I will be
arguing in this lecture, the relegation of religious thought and of religious
motivation to the lowest form of knowledge, not only runs the risk of negating
the role played by Christian champions of social justice but more importantly
risks removing those core and essential values of human worth which are
essential in discovering God’s purposes.

In Britain, Sentamu argues, Christian
activists were responsible for ending the slave trade, establishing public
elementary and high schools, providing housing for the homeless, and improving
the dismal conditions of Victorian asylums and prisons. In the US, too, people of faith from Sojourner
Truth to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King have in immeasurable ways helped to
make our nation more socially just.

Of course, Sentamu and the Church of England
have the luxury as well as the liability of being an established, even if often
neglected, part of British society. Here
at home, our faith and politics can come together more spontaneously, more
organically. But we confront a similar
challenge: needing both to talk convincingly about our own faith commitments
and, just as more importantly, to construct policies that will help the
activists, social workers, and reformers on the front lines of the battle for
social justice. Else, as Sentamu so cleverly
puts it, we run the risk of rewriting Matthew’s parable of the sheep and the
goats (25:31-46):