Last Monday, flicking through the channels on my television in search of BBC Two’s excellent programme on the Battle of the Somme, I found myself faced with an array of naked male buttocks. They were being assessed by two clothed women, one of whom had to select, through a process of elimination, which appealed to her least. I had inadvertently landed on Channel 4 and a programme called Naked Attraction, “a new dating show in which mate-seeking singletons get to check out a line-up of potential partners posing in the nude”. The torso and legs of the contestants were hidden by a screen, but when instructed, they turned so that their genitals could be scrutinised too.
At the risk of dignifying this tawdry programme by giving it a historic significance, I would suggest that it marks a new low in our post-Christian culture. Even in the slave markets of ancient Rome, or those of the Saracens in Tunis and Algiers, men were evaluated for their strength, and woman for their beauty, not by scrutiny of buttocks and genitalia.
In the Garden of Eden, after eating the forbidden fruit, the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened “and they realised that they were naked. So they sewed fig-leaves together to make themselves loin-cloths” (Genesis 3:7). Shame was born, but so too modesty. If the purpose of the grotesque immodesty of Naked Attraction is to bring us back to a primordial innocence, then it singularly fails.
Nudist camps are one thing, but here there is a specifically sexual intent: we start, the programme’s producers state, “where a good date often ends”. No longer is love ignited by a look or a smile. Here is a sub-bestial crudity that shames not just the producers and contestants, but the entire culture of 21st century Britain.
And do not programmes such as Naked Attraction give credence to the claims of Islamists that Western culture is irredeemably depraved? Muslims too look to the Book of Genesis as a guide to the fundamentals of the human condition, and are disgusted by the immodesty of Western society. Why, then, instead of attacking the perpetrators of this decadence, do they murder Catholic priests such as Fr Jacques Hamel?
The answer is, I suspect, because Fr Jacques was both Catholic and French. France is not a Christian country: it is a republic defined since 1906 by atheist laicité. French bombers raid ISIS targets in Syria and northern Iraq but, as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-styled Caliph of the Islamic State, must know, the pilots are under the orders of the secularist (indeed, atheist) President Hollande.
Nor has the French Church been a vocal critic of Islam. Indeed, apart from some pockets of vitality in lay movements and religious orders, the Church in France is enfeebled, as the advanced age of Fr Jacques makes clear. However, talk of a Western “crusade” taps into folk memories in Muslims going back to Middle Ages. For generations, mothers in Muslim countries would threaten troublesome children with Richard the Lionheart. Hence al-Baghdadi’s call to his followers to “break the cross” and launch more attacks on the “cross-worshippers and democratic pagans of the West”.
The crusades also trigger guilt in many in the West who still accept the now discredited view of historians such as Edward Gibbon and Steven Runciman that the Crusaders were inspired not by faith but by greed. The leading role taken by the French in the Crusades made France the European power that, in subsequent centuries, protected the interests of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Maronites in Lebanon. In the 19th century, the French colonised Muslim north Africa, and it was France which, after the defeat of the Turks in World War I, took control of Syria.
Although the imperialism of France and other European nations had nothing to do with the Catholic religion, churchmen such as Archbishop Lavigerie of Algiers took advantage of the French conquest to proselytise among the Muslims. And it was a Carmelite, Thierry d’Argenlieu, who, after taking leave of absence from his monastery to command the Free French Navy during World War II, led the force sent by de Gaulle after the war had ended to re-establish French colonial rule in Indochina.
Thus, historically the Church was undoubtedly compromised by its comp-licity with European imperialism, and it is part of al-Baghdadi’s propaganda to point this out. It is perhaps a feeling of embarrassment, if not shame, over this record that accounts for the Church’s pusillanimity in the face of al-Baghdadi’s jihad. It is left to the indigenous Christians in the region, free of this taint, to provide boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS, many of them in the army of Bashar Assad.
Piers Paul Read is a novelist, historian and biographer
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