- Reverend Dr. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes is Chaplain and Solway Fellow of University College, Durham. The opinions expressed are her own. -

A controversial decision by a committee drawing up legislation to allow women bishops has been met with criticism from women who are seeking equal representation at the highest levels in the Church of England.

Women have been ordained as priests in the Church of England since 1994, but cannot currently become bishops.

Since 2006, the Church of England has been preparing draft legislation to remove the legal obstacles to women bishops. In 2008, the General Synod voted to reject a range of options which set up separate structures within the church for those who could not accept women’s ordination, and instead asked the  Revision Committee to draw up simple legislation without discrimination, alongside a separate code of practice to "protect" those who objected to women’s ministry.

But last Thursday, the Revision Committee issued a statement saying that they had decided to reject this route. Instead, they propose to prepare legislation which would  enforce the transfer of powers from the diocesan bishop to a special anti-woman bishop, if the diocesan bishop were either a woman, or a man who agreed with the ordination of women.

I am deeply concerned about this decision. In the first place, the remit of the revision committee based on the synod debates last year was to prepare simple legislation with a code of practice, and I fail to see any justification for the revision committee taking it upon themselves to reject the will of synod in this way. I, along with many of my colleagues on Synod, feel betrayed by this disregard for the hard work and serious thought which was put in by us all in that debate.

Apart from the issue of process, there are very serious concerns about the substance of the proposed way forward. To set up legislation in which powers are transferred to bishops selected purely on the basis of their views on the ordination of women is invidious and unsustainable.

Were such legislation to be prepared, the Church of England would then be in the position of asking Parliament to pass primary legislation which was inherently discriminatory, which would be to put both them and us in an invidious position. And for members of Synod, the vast majority of members of the Church of England generally, and especially for ordained women, such legislation would be an affront, since it returns to the idea of having male and female bishops who are not bishops on equal terms.

At the base of the desire for such discrimination is the discredited and discreditable idea that women are inherently less in the image of God than men, and the Church of England must stand firm against any such suggestion.

The fact that some members of our church believe wholeheartedly that women cannot be ordained does not make them right in that belief. And it does not mean that as a church we should undermine the very thing we are legislating for by framing the legislation in such a way as to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the new women bishops and to make the remit of their ministry less comprehensive than that of their male colleagues.

I have heard it said in recent days that this proposal for the new legislation is not discriminatory because men who agreed with women's ordination would also be affected by the transfer of powers. This is such a disingenuous argument that I am astounded it can be made with a straight face.

It is of course discriminatory on grounds of gender to discriminate between individuals either on their own gender or on their views about gender. Furthermore, the precedent of allowing individuals or churches to pick and choose their bishop based on their theological opinions is an extremely dangerous one.

It goes against the fundamental principle, expressed in the 39 Articles, that the worthiness of the minister does not affect the validity of their ministry, and it opens the door wide to a complete fragmentation of the church, at a time when unity and division are real and urgent questions not just for us in the Church of England but for the whole Anglican communion.

In this context, this proposal is to make the question of gender the key defining question for the Church of England. Theological opinion on the gender of ordained ministers would be enshrined in our legislation as the one opinion the holding of which is legally sufficient to render a bishop unacceptable to certain parishes, and for which an alternative bishop would be officially provided. Is this really the intention of the revision committee?

Both are Muslims. Both are chaplains. Both are in the military. But one is French and one is American. That alone ensured there would be enough to talk about when Mohamed-Ali Bouharb and Abu- hena Saifulislam met in Paris to discuss their work with chaplains and academics from the United States.

(Photo: Bouharb (l) and Saifulislam with CIEE’s Hannah Taieb. Note the Islamic crescents on Bouharb’s cap and Saifulislam’s sleeves, 7 June 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Muslim chaplaincies are relatively new additions to the armed forces in Europe and North America. Establishing their place alongside the traditional Catholic, Protestant and Jewish offices of religious services has not always been easy, even though both imams reported the top brass in their countries strongly supported the effort. While they tend to the spiritual needs of their co-religionists in the ranks, as other chaplains do, these imams also spend much time explaining their religion and its practices to their non-Muslim superiors.

Both spoke of the obvious issues such as getting halal food or having time and space for Muslim prayers. Both had encountered questions from both within the forces and outside in the Muslim community asking why they had agreed to work as imams in the military. Their presentations were part of a seminar entitled “Religious Diversity in Everyday Life in France” organised by the U.S.-based Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) and the Institute for the Study of Islam and the Societies of the Muslim World in Paris.

Bouharb, 32, is a French-born Muslim with Tunisian roots who studied Islam at a private Muslim institute in Paris and graduated from a special training course for imams at the Catholic Institute here. He is chaplain to the National Gendarmerie, which comes under the Defence Ministry. France only launched its Muslim chaplain corps in 2005 and it is still finding its way. “I first got a two-year contract. It’s just been extended by four years. Nothing is certain. We’ll see the results in 20 years,” he told the meeting on Sunday. Bouhard stressed how tricky the issues he faces can be as he discussed the delicate bridge function he has to play with the example of five French Muslim soldiers who refused to go to Afghanistan:

“If a Muslim soldier doesn’t want to go to Afghanistan for religious reasons, that’s his right. My role is not to convince him. But if he doesn’t want to go, he shouldn’t be in the army. That’s not a religious opinion. Sometimes the Muslim chaplain has to put aside his religious role and deconstruct what is religious and what is not. What I do is go see the soldier and ask him about his vision of Islam. I can help him to understand things better, but not to make a decision… If a soldier’s not clear in his mind (about shooting at Taliban), he might hesitate for a moment. That could endanger the troops around him…

“To the commanders, I say I’m not the representative of a Muslim soldiers’ trade union. When those five refused to go, people said the Muslim chaplains weren’t doing their jobs. It was all over the media. But the chaplain’s duty is not to ensure the cohesion of the troops. (The doubting soldier) could endanger others. My religious duty is not to put those others in danger… We Muslim chaplains asked for a right to reply to the media but the Defence Ministry press office said it was not worth the effort… They were right. A few weeks later, all was forgotten.”

Another issue was whether Muslim soldiers due for commando training had to fast if the session occurred during Ramadan. “They get up at 3 a.m. and march for 25 kms with backpacks weighing 25 kilos. It’s very difficult to fast,” he said. Muslim soldiers asked him what to do. “I told them that, if you signed up to do this training, you have to respect that contract. You can stop your fast and catch up on those days after Ramadan is over.” Ten Qatari soldiers in France for advanced training could not understand why the session was not rescheduled, as it would be in their majority Muslim society, but Bouharb said it could not be and the Muslim soldiers had to adjust. “There is only one Islam, but there are many ways of expressing it,” he said.

Saifulislam, who emigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1989 and became a U.S. Navy imam 10 years later, had a slightly different approach. “If there is special training during Ramadan, I ask the commander if it can be moved to another date,” he said, stressing he was giving his personal opinion and not speaking in an official capacity. “I tell the Muslims that they’re away from home while on training so they can not fast and make it up later. It’s his or her call. I provide the counsel.”

(Photo: Bouharb and Saifulislam, 7 June 2009/Tom Heneghan)

He said there were about a dozen imams in the U.S. armed forces, which appointed their first Muslim chaplain in 1993. That compares to over 800 Christian and Jewish chaplains in the Navy alone, he said. “They don’t necessarily need us for the number of Muslim soldiers but to advise them on religious inclusiveness, like about how Islamic practices can affect a mission, before they deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. They get training in cultural sensitivity.”

Possibly because imams have served in the U.S. military for longer than in the French, the American Muslim chaplains seemed more integrated into the overall chaplain corps. Saifulislam said:

“Ninety-nine percent of the people who come to me for counselling are from another faith. They come to you with issues, it could be about family, stress or violence. People can get more religious in boot camp, also in prison. I’ve also been trained in suicide prevention, PTSD recognition and crisis management. We also do grief counselling, regardless of the religion. Of course, we don’t perform services for other religions. You’re not going to see me baptise a baby! But we facilitate things. If someone comes to me as a Wiccan and asks for a place to pray, I help them. The Department of Defense recognises over 290 different religions and denominations. If a Muslim asks one of the other chaplains to help him get a copy of the Koran, he has to help him.”

U.S. President Barack Obama may face a new minefield on the battlefields of Afghanistan — one that combines a potent mix of religion and culture.

Explosive allegations have emerged that U.S. soldiers have been attempting to convert Afghanis to Christianity, a scenario sure to stir passions and even anger in the overwhelming Islamic country. You can see our story on the issue here by my colleague Peter Graff in Kabul.

The U.S. military denied Monday it has allowed soldiers to try to convert Afghans to Christianity, after a television network showed pictures of soldiers with bibles translated into local languages.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera television showed footage of a church service at Bagram, the main U.S. base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, in which soldiers had a stack of Bibles in the local languages, Pashtu and Dari.

A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: “The special forces guys — they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down.”

Critics have long contended that parts of the U.S. military have been unduly influenced by a powerful evangelical Christian wing which has pressured men and women in uniform to convert or conform.

Many U.S. military events often feature public prayers which some also say blur the line they say should be drawn between church and state. We have blogged on this issue before.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has for years tried to raise public awareness about this issue and has in the past accused the military of sanctioning missionary activity in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Headed by former U.S. air force judge advocate Mikey Weinstein, it said on Monday that: “His (Weinstein’s) calls for action have been met with a full assault of denials, baseless and anti-Semitic accusations, and most recently imprecatory prayers against him and his family. But now there is VIDEO PROOF that Mikey has been right all along.”

The U.S. military has said that the comments from the sermon shown in the video were taken out of context and that it firmly prohibits soldiers from proseltyzing while on duty.

Whether this is true or not, there is no question that at least some damage has been done.

Here’s the Al Jazeera video:

(Photo: U.S. Marines bow their heads in prayer before the arrival of President Barack Obama at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, February 27, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES))

(Photo: Brooklyn, with Manhattan in the background, 21 Sept 2008/Ray Stubblebine)

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Matthew Weiner is Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York and Raffaele Timarchi is the Interfaith Center’s education director.

By Matthew Weiner and Raffaele Timarchi

Why should students in urban high schools learn about religion?

The Interfaith Center of New York recently received a call from Penny Kapanika, a social studies teacher at Nazareth Regional High School in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. Canarsie lies on the eastern edge of Brooklyn, next to Jamaica Bay. To get to the school, you take the number 4 subway train to the end of the line, hop on a bus down Utica Avenue and finally walk to a sparsely populated neighborhood that was once an Italian and Jewish hold out against white flight.

Nazareth, a Roman Catholic school, is now ethnically African American and Caribbean. In the old days, students came from the neighborhood, but now most of them take the bus from Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant. Only 51% of the kids are Catholic, but most are Christian. The kids, though, live amongst Hasidic Jews  in Crown Heights, where a history of racial conflict still looms large, and Muslims in “Bed Stuy,” one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods.

“I found my students asking me questions that I could not answer,” Kapanika explained. “They don’t understand why the Jews dress like this, or won’t talk with them. And honestly, I don’t know too much about it either. There are stereotypes and we need to address them.”

Kapanika found the Interfaith Center, which was interested in her case. The Interfaith Center, a secular non-profit that educates religious communities about one another, worked with Nazareth to locate religious leaders from these communities who could come in and talk with the students. They also worked with the New York Police Department’s community affairs bureau. Detective Michael Theogine, whose job is religious outreach, invited other Catholic educators to see how a school-based interfaith project could work. Theogine himself is African American and went to Nazareth in the 1980s, when he was one of the very few people of color. “It was sure different then,” he says with a smile.

The Interfaith Center’s goal was not to invite top-tier leadership but rather grassroots workers who could show a human face to the students. “Most of these kids, maybe none of them, have talked to a Hasidic Jewish person,” Kapanika said.

(Photo: Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, 28 Nov 2008/Brendan McDermid)

But now they have. The meeting took place in the school’s library with about forty students. Rabbi Avi Lesches spoke about growing up in Crown Heights with his five brothers and sisters. Lesches is in his mid-twenties, has a reddish beard, dresses in dark slacks and a blazer and wears a yarmulke. He became a chaplain for the 88^th Brigade of the US Army.

“Why do you wear the hat on your head?” one student asked.

“First, to acknowledge that we are a different from the larger community,” the rabbi said. “But also we wear it to remind ourselves that we are not the final authority. There is someone above us, and that someone is God.”

Another student was more daring: “I understand you don’t believe in Jesus, and that ya’ll still waiting for the messiah?”

That’s right, Lesches said. “There are still a lot of problems on the Earth. The messiah hasn’t come yet.” But he went on to say that Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher, praised Islam and Christianity for their monotheistic orientation.

Hesham El-Meligy is an Egyptian-born Muslim who moved to New York. “Egypt is on the Horn of Africa, so now I am an African-American,” he says to laughter from the class. Soon after he arrived in New York, he married an Italian-American. “Her family understands that I don’t drink, and they try not to drink around me,” he explained. Why is he serious about his faith? “When I was a kid, around your age, I began asking myself, ‘who am I?’ But I also noticed some people who saw the world as us vs. them, and I didn’t like it.”

Shaykh T.A. Bashir is an African American Muslim who grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood known for its confrontational climate.  ”I’m from the ‘vill’, never ran, never will,” says Bashir with a tinge of pride. He is a tall strong man in his sixties, with a reddish beard and a wide smile. He wears a blue jean vest and a black Vietnam Veterans baseball hat. Bashir explained that his primary concern was preventing domestic violence, because violence in the family creates violence the community.

Besides guests from the Interfaith Center, Kapanika had invited several other speakers: an alumnus who grew up Catholic and is now a member of a megachurch called Christian Cultural Council, and three students: two Muslims and a Hindu. One of the Muslims, Sharear Kabir from Gyana, said it was hard being Muslim in a majority community. He said he was supposed to pray five times a day, but couldn’t when he was in school.

To this, Shaykh Bashir said that it was important to pray, and that the school should let him. “That’s one of my jobs, making sure that there is religious accommodation. So I will speak to your teachers here,” he said. The teachers all smiled.

The Hindu student, Umaysha Samlall, a shy but articulate girl, explained that her family was part of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement that emphasizes the oneness of God and the promotion of social justice. Other students seemed to know that she and the Muslim student were a couple. Many students giggled when she said, “No one wants us to continue, because what are the kids gonna be?”

(Photo: Brooklyn Bridge with lower Manhattan in background, 23 May 2008/Lucas Jackson)

Difficult questions can come from unexpected quarters, but the discussion was open and answers were honest. When the program was over, students spoke with the panelists. The guests wished they had more time to talk with each other as well. The chance meeting at a Catholic school, it seems, was a good opportunity for interfaith dialogue. El-Meligy the Muslim said of Lesches the Jew: “He seemed like a good man, and I hope we have time to talk more in the future.”

Kapanika talked with them as well. She was interested in learning more, but also wanted to have local contacts in case one of her kids had a problem in their community. “We are a Catholic school, but we don’t necessarily know those around us,” she explained.

For her the program was educational, but also an act of civic participation. It can lead to networks that create trust in times of trouble. Sometimes thought of as spiritual exploration, interfaith in this case was a teaching tool.

Ever since the mid 1800’s, when New York Bishop John Hughes argued that Catholics needed their own schools  to insure a social, moral, and spiritual identity distinct from the Protestant majority, the Catholic Church has made good on its emphasis of education. But how to develop a Catholic identity in an increasingly diverse setting while maintaining a positive relationship with others remains the question? This is the question that all of the participants at this program, all New Yorkers, and indeed all citizens are struggling with. It begins with learning about each other: through their stories and a conversation.

“For me, the worst thing in the world is ignorance,” Lesches told me the following day on the phone. “This is an opportunity to undo some of that.”

There are many things that will test a person’s religious faith and war is among the strongest. “Faith Under Fire: An Army Chaplain’s Memoir”, which will be published this week, is Roger Benimoff’s moving account of his battle with the demons of war that almost cost him his faith and his family. He did two tours in Iraq and you can read my interview with him here.

The Iraq war of course remains fraught with religious overtones. Former U.S. President George W. Bush saw many of his policies as driven by his Christian faith (and aimed at his conservative evangelical base); Iraq itself has been riven by religious and sectarian conflict; and many people of faith question the morality of the U.S.-led war there, now six years old.

When I asked Benimoff if the Iraq war has been worth all of the sacrifice, he became very emotional and found that it was a question he is still wrestling with. As he describes in his book, asking such hard questions lead him to question his own faith and made him angry at times with God (while he also battled with post-tramautic stress disorder or PTSD).

The war will no doubt continue to be a religious battlefield — and one that, like many other armed conflicts, also tests the faith of those caught up in it.

(Photo: Courtesy of Randam House)