Righteous indignation, moral outrage, threats to social order, unethical and unmoral … Jim West, Scott Bailey and others are horrified at the suggestion from the Rev. Tim Jones, Anglican priest at St Lawrence and St Hilda in York, UK, that the poor and destitute should help themselves to a tiny bit of the vast wealth of shopping chains. Here’s a snippet from his sermon, which was dealing with the poverty evident in the story of Joseph and Mary:

My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift. I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither. I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices. I would ask them not to take any more than they need. I offer the advice with a heavy heart. Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift. The observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are. Rather, this is a call for our society no longer to treat its most vulnerable people with indifference and contempt. When people are released from prison, or find themselves suddenly without work or family support, then to leave them for weeks with inadequate or clumsy social support is monumental, catastrophic folly. We create a situation which leaves some people little option but crime.The strong temptation is to burgle or rob people – family, friends, neighbours, strangers. Others are tempted towards prostitution, a nightmare world of degradation and abuse for all concerned. Others are tempted towards suicide. Instead, I would rather that they shoplift. The life of the poor in modern Britain is a constant struggle, a minefield of competing opportunities, competing responsibilities, obligations and requirements, a constant effort to achieve the impossible. For many at the bottom of our social ladder, lawful, honest life can sometimes seem to be an apparent impossibility.

Scott reckons he was on grog when he wrote the sermon, while Jim opines that it is a sign of total depravity, the beginning of the slippery slope etc. A sin is a sin is a sin.

But, as Tony Buglass points out in the discussion, the righteous condemnation misses the desperate situation of in increasingly larger number of poor in the UK. And Jones was suggesting that instead of robbing your poor neighbour or the local shop, or engaging in prostitution, a little ‘proletarian shopping’ is a far better option.

However, let’s take this a step further. Not only is there a tradition of clergy making such worthwhile suggestions, but the fact that the archdeacon of York was not taken with the idea and that the local Tory MP was outraged suggests Rev. Jones is onto something. Given that the laws of the land are made by the ruling elite, that ethics is the universalised morals of the propertied class (as Aristotle shows so well), that the gospels tell stories of Jesus and his bunch of ratbags explicitly breaking such laws and going against such ethics, Tim Jones may well be expressing a deeper unethical and unmoral practice that runs through the Bible. And I take unethical and unmoral in a political sense, namely undermining the dominant ethos and mores, which are none other than the ruling ideas of the ruling class (to gloss Marx).