Interview
Civilization in the Balance
An Interview with Michael Nazir-Ali
by Rory Fitzgerald
In the August heat of Karachi in 1949 a boy was born into a Shia Muslim family. Pakistan was only two years old, a fledgling and chaotic nation, free of British rule and trying to find its own way in the world. Michael Nazir-Ali’s mother could not have imagined that her son would one day sit as a member of the British House of Lords.
Nor could she have imagined that in the early twenty-first century, her son would become one of the most outspoken defenders of Christian civilization. Her child was to become a prominent Anglican bishop and an eminent Christian thinker, schooled in Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard.
Dr. Nazir-Ali was Bishop of Rochester until his retirement in March 2009. He still lives in Kent with his wife and two children and now ministers to persecuted Christian minorities abroad. He speaks pleasantly, each word enunciated with a trace of a soft Pakistani accent.
Nine years before Nazir-Ali was born, London came under attack by the Luftwaffe. The vicar’s house on Giltspur Street in central London, where I interviewed him in February 2010, was hit by a Nazi bomb. In 1940, Churchill spoke these immortal words:
I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. . . . [I]f we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
I open the interview by referring to Churchill’s words.
. . . . .
Rory Fitzgerald (RF): Do you believe that Christian civilization is in peril now, as in 1940?
Michael Nazir-Ali (MNA): I used to speak of a moral and spiritual vacuum that was created by the catastrophic loss of discourse in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the public place. I think that vacuum is now giving way to a hostility to the Judaeo-Christian worldview, in terms of family, respect for the beginning stages of life, and respect for the end of life.
I am pursuing a twin track on this: On the one hand, you have to uphold the Judaeo-Christian tradition as a basis for making the most important moral decisions that need to be made: just-war criteria, ethical decisions on the dignity of the human person and family.
Rory Fitzgerald is an Irish journalist who specializes in religious and political affairs.
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