According to Mrs May, 'If you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere'!
Really?
What an astonishing statement. Surely we are all wherever we are born, or raised or indeed live are citizens of both our local place and of all other places.
I was born and bred in Manchester, in Ashton under Lyne, a citizen of the UK, a Northerner, with my feet firmly planted on the ground of my City and my neighbourhood, but even as a child at school it was being made clear that I was also a citizen of something greater, and that 'something greater' was the world of which I was part.
Each crisis that impacted on the security of that world, affected me, Suez was the first crisis I became aware of, I was young but understood that it was significant in some potentially disruptive way for our security, Cuba and the bay of pigs came later but I spent days and weeks aware of the crisis and the potential for a conflagration that would engulf the whole world.
But what makes Mrs May's statement even more questionable and astonishing is that she is a daughter of clergyman because as I came to discover later when I found myself caught up in the life of the church and its liturgies the theology of the gospel and the essential teaching of the church is that 'here we have no abiding city' we are all citizens of a wider community that is not bounded by hard frontiers.
I was struck by one memory described in the newspaper, of Mrs May as a young woman receiving communion in her father's church whilst wearing a conservative party badge, clearly we have in Mrs May a person whose beliefs were established early and have not wavered.
As Home Secretary she authorised the infamous vans that drove around London advising those who were here illegally to 'Go Home or face arrest'.
Now we understand that whatever else might be negotiated, Brexit means Brexit and that means freedom of movement will be curtailed at whatever cost to the economy and the political stability of the country where the Governor of our national bank is presumably, by Mrs May's definition, a citizen of nowhere.
Perhaps what we are being told is that if you describe yourself as a world or global citizen you are by definition not a citizen of UK plc and therefore are not welcome and have no place here, this narrow, insular nation will not be your 'abiding city'.
As Jem Eskenazi wrote in the Financial Times:
'climate change, pollution or epidemics know no frontiers ... extreme poverty in one region has implications for the whole world; .... terrorism is a global problem with global solutions;'
When I moved to Birmingham in 1987, having lived briefly in the USA, I had a powerful sense of making a new home in a global city, the intermingling of cultures, the strong memory of having been 'the workshop of the world' here there was no sense of civic small mindedness rather a sense of a global city in which cultures and communities were working out new relationships, expressed most powerfully in the music of UB40.
My job in Birmingham was based in Selly Oak, where a constant stream of Muslim and Christian scholars came to learn and study.
In that multi-cultural context it became clear that 'citizenship' was a key term to describe and promote the idea of participatory democracy, a theology of citizenship inevitably points us towards internationalism as the only practical way to move towards a more peaceful and responsible world order.
Now in retirement my work in the Anglican Diocese of Europe has helped me to recognise and value the emerging vision of world citizenship working towards the possibility of peaceful co-existence across and beyond borders.
I am sure that on occasions such as Armistice Day, Mrs May will have sung in her father's church the hymn I vow to thee my Country.
The origin of the hymn is a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice, who in 1912 was the British Ambassador to the United States, the poem was entitled, The City of God, and describes how a christian owes loyalty to both their homeland and the kingdom of heaven.
The poem was set to music by Gustav Holst (British but of Swedish,, Latvian and German ancestry) in 1921:
The hymn's opening line 'I vow to thee my country', might well have appealed to the young Mrs May as it appears to appeal to the older, but those who sing this hymn are invited in the second verse to reflect that: 'there's another country' whose ways, as the last line affirms, 'are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace'.
Those of us who seek the dual citizenship of the land of our birth and the world of which it is a part do so because we believe that all nations should discover and practise gentleness as they follow the path of peace and that makes us citizens of somewhere greater and more hopeful than the present.
Really?
What an astonishing statement. Surely we are all wherever we are born, or raised or indeed live are citizens of both our local place and of all other places.
I was born and bred in Manchester, in Ashton under Lyne, a citizen of the UK, a Northerner, with my feet firmly planted on the ground of my City and my neighbourhood, but even as a child at school it was being made clear that I was also a citizen of something greater, and that 'something greater' was the world of which I was part.
Each crisis that impacted on the security of that world, affected me, Suez was the first crisis I became aware of, I was young but understood that it was significant in some potentially disruptive way for our security, Cuba and the bay of pigs came later but I spent days and weeks aware of the crisis and the potential for a conflagration that would engulf the whole world.
But what makes Mrs May's statement even more questionable and astonishing is that she is a daughter of clergyman because as I came to discover later when I found myself caught up in the life of the church and its liturgies the theology of the gospel and the essential teaching of the church is that 'here we have no abiding city' we are all citizens of a wider community that is not bounded by hard frontiers.
I was struck by one memory described in the newspaper, of Mrs May as a young woman receiving communion in her father's church whilst wearing a conservative party badge, clearly we have in Mrs May a person whose beliefs were established early and have not wavered.
As Home Secretary she authorised the infamous vans that drove around London advising those who were here illegally to 'Go Home or face arrest'.
Now we understand that whatever else might be negotiated, Brexit means Brexit and that means freedom of movement will be curtailed at whatever cost to the economy and the political stability of the country where the Governor of our national bank is presumably, by Mrs May's definition, a citizen of nowhere.
Perhaps what we are being told is that if you describe yourself as a world or global citizen you are by definition not a citizen of UK plc and therefore are not welcome and have no place here, this narrow, insular nation will not be your 'abiding city'.
As Jem Eskenazi wrote in the Financial Times:
'climate change, pollution or epidemics know no frontiers ... extreme poverty in one region has implications for the whole world; .... terrorism is a global problem with global solutions;'
When I moved to Birmingham in 1987, having lived briefly in the USA, I had a powerful sense of making a new home in a global city, the intermingling of cultures, the strong memory of having been 'the workshop of the world' here there was no sense of civic small mindedness rather a sense of a global city in which cultures and communities were working out new relationships, expressed most powerfully in the music of UB40.
My job in Birmingham was based in Selly Oak, where a constant stream of Muslim and Christian scholars came to learn and study.
In that multi-cultural context it became clear that 'citizenship' was a key term to describe and promote the idea of participatory democracy, a theology of citizenship inevitably points us towards internationalism as the only practical way to move towards a more peaceful and responsible world order.
Now in retirement my work in the Anglican Diocese of Europe has helped me to recognise and value the emerging vision of world citizenship working towards the possibility of peaceful co-existence across and beyond borders.
I am sure that on occasions such as Armistice Day, Mrs May will have sung in her father's church the hymn I vow to thee my Country.
The origin of the hymn is a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice, who in 1912 was the British Ambassador to the United States, the poem was entitled, The City of God, and describes how a christian owes loyalty to both their homeland and the kingdom of heaven.
The poem was set to music by Gustav Holst (British but of Swedish,, Latvian and German ancestry) in 1921:
The hymn's opening line 'I vow to thee my country', might well have appealed to the young Mrs May as it appears to appeal to the older, but those who sing this hymn are invited in the second verse to reflect that: 'there's another country' whose ways, as the last line affirms, 'are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace'.
Those of us who seek the dual citizenship of the land of our birth and the world of which it is a part do so because we believe that all nations should discover and practise gentleness as they follow the path of peace and that makes us citizens of somewhere greater and more hopeful than the present.
You're quite right and TM is wrong - even though Theresa and Philip Hammond came and welcomed Jan and me with a hamper from their congregation to my second job in south London! But at the risk of muddying the waters I'd put it differently and in the form of a question, namely, What does it imply for all national citizenships and indeed all identities and memberships that 'our citizenship is in heaven' (Philippians 3.20)? And my answer to that question is that our heavenly citizenship does not cancel out the various citizenships and memberships we have but it does put them in a new context, critiquing all membership claims that are used to disadvantage or exclude others. It is, therefore, an obligation on me as a citizen of heaven to ensure that all persons who are stateless or who are forced to abandon their country of citizenship are accorded citizen rights somewhere. If TM meant (and I don't believe she did) that the solution to the problem of statelessness and migration is not for all of us to become stateless and renounce our citizenship but to ensure that all have citizen rights somewhere and are welcome everywhere if they have need, then I'd agree. The solution is not universal statelessness but universal welcome, living out the promise that all human beings - and indeed all creatures - have an ultimate welcome. Thanks for the post.
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