Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Westminster Abbey praises God for the NHS
Westminster Abbey praises God for the NHS
Apr 26, 2025 1:07 AM

Westminster Abbey held a service on memorating the 70thanniversary of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). At the service Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, said that the “NHS is the most powerful and visible expression of our Christian heritage, because it sprang out of a concern that the poor should be able to be treated as well as the rich.”

Holding a service for the NHS raises two questions: Why does the Anglican Church no longer believe itself to be the “most powerful and visible expression” of the UK’s Christian heritage? And should the Anglican Church be holding a service for the NHS at all?

During the service at Westminster Abbey, the Very Reverend John Hall praised the NHS for its presence at every point of life, whether at the “blessing of new life or the intrusion of our own mortality.” But unlike the sick calls from caring clergy, thecradle-to-grave presence of the NHS is less forting.

The NHS is a Bernie Sanders-style single-payer healthcare system, which means there is no upfront cost to British citizens for medical care. This “free” system is what mended as “concern for the poor.” This single-payer system, es with severe drawbacks. Whenever the state offers healthcare, the state must ration care. This creates a huge problem that has already manifested itself in the United Kingdom: When the state rations care, innocent people die.

In the case of Alfie Evans, a toddler who was taken off life support, his parents had no choice whether he lived or died. In the case of Charlie Gard, who had a debilitating genetic condition, he died after his parents were barred by the government from taking him out of the country for treatment. In the case of the Liverpool Care Pathway, the NHS made a policy in which doctors decided when the elderly were no longer worth the investment of hospital services, placing them on heavy drugs and what patients call “the road to death.” In instances like these, the family is the best institution to make difficult choices about human life, but is too often usurped by government control.

Yet the NHS’s problems are not limited to individual outliers. Compared to the healthcare systems of countries with similar wealth, the NHS does an atrocious job of caring for its citizens. According to economist Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs, “In parisons of health system performance, the NHS almost always ranks in the bottom third, on a par with the Czech Republic and Slovenia.”

In today’s sermon, Hall quoted Aneurin Bevan, a founder of the NHS, who said, “I’m proud about the NHS. It’s a piece of real socialism; it’s a piece of real Christianity, too.” This quote sheds light on the real issue at stake. The Anglican Church’s love of the NHS does not necessarily spring from a love of the institution itself, which does not provide the best possible quality healthcare, but from the misconception that the only way for a Christian to care about healthcare is to have the government provide it. In John 21:17, Jesus tells the Apostle Peter to “feed My sheep.” In this and countless other verses, Jesus taught that it is the role of the church to care for the hurting in the world. The church is the best institution to passion and practical service. Hall and Welby are confusing the charity of the church with the charity of the government and diluting the power of the church by denying its ability to minister in the world.

So, yes, the Anglican Church should hold a service for the NHS, but it should either be a Service of Lament or a Funeral.

(Photo source: Crux.CC BY-SA 2.5.)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved