Religion - A peripheral Issue?
Ranald Macaulay
We have daily reminders in the press that for some at any rate religion is not a peripheral issue in public life. Muslims believe that all human experience lies under the authority of the Koran. This is normative in Islam – though many object to the extremists. The fact of the matter is that the principle behind this belief itself is both right and inevitable. The ordering of society as a whole (politics) cannot help but involve deeply held moral convictions, convictions which are grounded in ‘religious’ or ‘world-view’ commitments. The secular humanist, for example, sees nothing sacrosanct in marriage, particularly Christian marriage. So the dismantling of that tradition in Britain becomes right and necessary. He or she is, of course, expressing a ‘faith-principle’ as much as the Muslim. Yet the West has indulged in the illusion, fostered by John Locke and others in the 17 and 18 th centuries, that politics is a neutral, no-go-area for religious ideas.
Sadly evangelicals in the last half-century have often acquiesced in this neutrality idea. It was not always the case. The Clapham Circle, for example, believed and acted upon the indivisibility of public action and private conviction and their achievements are now legendary. A little-known illustration of this occurs in two commemorative plaques in Magdalene College chapel, Cambridge. The one honours David Brown, the other Robert Grant. David was to become the inspiration for Haileybury School which aimed at reforming the Indian civil service. Robert and his older brother, Charles, entered Magdalene in 1795, the former to become the Governor of Bombay, the latter Lord Glenelg, Palmerston’s colonial secretary. Their historical contexts are best understood by starting with Charles Simeon who, three months after his arrival at King’s College in 1779, came to an assurance of salvation. By then William Wilberforce had finished at St. Johns and was setting out on his brilliant parliamentary career. He too would be converted but not until 1785.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away the worldly ambitions and lifestyle of a young Scottish couple, employees of the British East India Company (BEIC) in north India, had been shattered by the sudden death of their two young daughters. Charles Grant, their father, was almost undone by the experience, but his wife despite her own grief found comfort in God sufficient for both. Sustained by this he too came to a living faith. In 1778 & 1779 the birth of two sons, Charles jnr and Robert, afforded them a double comfort.
But this is to anticipate. Charles Grant himself had been raised in adversity. He was named Charles, for example, after Bonnie Prince Charlie in whose cause, hours after his birth, his father was killed at Culloden Moor. It was a poor prospect for the boy. However, a kind merchant friend in London procured him a place in the service of the BEIC. His subsequent conversion heightened his earlier concerns about his own and his countrymen’s behaviour in India. Corruption was rife; the natives were shown little respect or humanity. He wondered too why the company excluded Christian missionaries. Hadn’t the gospel liberated England and Scotland? Why should it not liberate Hindu India?
He then met David Brown in Calcutta. Brown had earlier come to faith under Charles Simeon’s (left) teaching in Holy Trinity church as a young Magdalene student (1782). In November 1785, at Simeon’s suggestion, Brown took ship for India. His mentor and father-in-God had found a way to circumvent company policy: he would send young evangelicals as company chaplains - who could then influence Indians also!
A year later he and Charles Grant wrote a letter called ‘A Proposal for establishing a Protestant mission in Bengal and Bahar’ and sent it to Simeon in Cambridge. It signalled the start of a relentless pressure to change British attitudes in India. Wilberforce and his friends took up their cause. The Clapham Circle in London aimed not only to abolish slavery but to ‘reform manners’ as much in India as in England. Charles Grant later joined them himself, by now a senior director of the BEIC. So great was their combined influence that by 1830, a Clapham associate, William Bentinck,(right) was appointed Governor General of India. Heathen practices such as suttee and infanticide were abolished and western education, technology, criminal justice introduced – and Christian missions encouraged.
Given the connection with Simeon it was hardly surprising that the Grant boys should be sent not just to Cambridge but to David Brown’s old college, Magdalene. What remains significant for us today, however, surrounded as we are by the assumption that politics can be religiously neutral, is their subsequent careers. They too became involved in public life and continued the tradition of their illustrious father and his friends who changed the course of Indian history. It is a tradition we desperately need to recover today and an example, if imitated, which could change western history also.
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Ranald Macaulay, 29/11/2005 |
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