Bashing the bishop

Revealing interview with the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, in the Guardian today.

The dear old Bish got a lot of mileage out of his announcement last year that flying on holiday was 'a sin'. Now, I'm no fan of organised religion, but it seemed at the time to be quite a useful contribution to the debate.

Today's piece sheds a somewhat different light on the matter. (The fact that it's penned by Leo Hickman, as part of a seemingly endless stream of advertorial for his book on flying, is probably a subject for another post.)

It seems the Bishop only pledged to refrain for flying for one year. Even this, he moans, 'has produced all sorts of inconveniences'. These inconveniences, it transpires, consist of having to turn down invitations to speak at international conferences. But despite such cruel and unusual hardship, the Bishop remains stoic: 'The year comes to an end at the beginning of November, but I don't resent it because it's a fast.' So great is his concern for the environment that he's even considering cutting out recreational flying altogether.

Whoa there! Either flying is a 'sin' - religious or environmental - or it isn't. I'm not exactly up on the latest theological developments, but I wasn't aware that the church advised giving up sin for a limited time, only to return to one's wicked ways with a clear conscience. (Unless you're a Catholic, of course.) Surely cutting out recreational flights should be an absolute given for a man with such strongly stated environmental beliefs. And how much flying is really required in his line of work anyway? I wouldn't have thought that participation in international jollys was an essential part of tending to his metropolitan flock.

What irritates me is the implication that giving up flying is so difficult. Plenty of people have stopped flying. If the Bishop can't take this step, let's not judge him. But to set him up as a spokesperson for the anti-aviation movement is ludicrous.

Needless to say, the toothless Hickman didn't pick him up on any of this. He did, however, probe further on the environmental implications of the Bishop's decision to have four children. The Bish admitted that there were 'probably too many people in the world'. He then went on to add:

But we live in a continent which is not, on the whole, reproducing itself. There are so many people who are so bloody selfish that they don't even want one child. There is nothing that converts you to this cause more than your children nagging you at the breakfast table wondering what sort of life they are going to lead in the world that we have devastated.

What I love about this statement is that it contains three of my all-time Pro-Natalism Myths:

1. What the world needs is more Europeans. Not too hard to pick the holes in that one.

2. Those without children are selfish. There are all sorts of reasons for not having children. Infertility, allergy to garish plastic toys, love of expensive foreign holidays, environmental concern, and voluntary human extinction are just a few. Equally, people have children for all sorts of reasons: a workforce for your subsistence farm, a tribe of environmentally aware Monbiots, a reason to shop at Baby Boden. Selfishness or not doesn't really come into it.

3. That parenthood makes you more environmentally aware. In some cases, this may be true, and let's give the Bishop the benefit of the doubt. But look around you, dude. Plenty of those 4x4s have children in the back. And did Swampy have a kid? I think not.