Giles Fraser

Fraser in 2008

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Giles Fraser (1964–) is an English Anglican clergyman and a writer and broadcaster on religious topics. He is a priest at St Mary's, Newington, South London, and a contributor to BBC Radio 4's regular religious sermon slot "Thought for the Day" and philosophy show The Moral Maze. He has written columns for Church Times and The Guardian. In his journalism, he often seems to be functioning as a devil's advocate, taking extreme or eccentric political positions, as often not comes down on the side of the left as the right.

He has been described as "one of the country’s leading Anglicans" (by Edge Hill University in Lancashire, which gave him an honorary doctorate). The Guardian described him in 2011 as "an unlikely hero for the Church of England" and "the media's favourite anti-vicar". The Daily Mail called him sneeringly "the toast of London’s Left-wing intelligentsia".

His father was Jewish, although he has been Church of England since childhood; he has been married to an Israeli Jew since 2016. He is a strong defender of Judaism as a religion, although has also been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause (or if you're a right-winger, he believed "it was acceptable [for Hamas] to deliberately kill innocents").

Politics

Fraser's politics are contradictory, but have elements of Christian socialism combined with a hatred of liberalist individualism. In 2011 he quit a position as canon chancellor at St Paul's Cathedral, London, over his support for the London branch of Occupy. He has criticised Donald Trump and Israel's right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for their tolerance towards neonazism.

However, Fraser has also expressed traditional, conservative viewpoints on women's role in society. He opposes liberalism, believing the community should come before individual rights; in this context he aligned atheism with liberalism and Christianity with socialism. He takes the traditional attitude that people should look after their parents, rather than expecting society to look after them, and condemns those who leave their communities to pursue educational opportunities or move overseas rather than stay at home to care for their families. He was particularly condemned as sexist for saying, "it is the daughter of the elderly gentleman that should be wiping his bottom", although this gender division of labour was explained by discussing the case of a woman who was inquiring about care for her elderly parent (to avoid sexism he could still have asked if the elderly gentleman had any sons). Professor Steve Peers has questioned what Fraser's attitude is to people who leave their families to pursue or study religious vocations or evangelise in distant lands.

In the case of the abusive evangelical Christian John Smyth who beat at least 130 boys in his charge, however, Fraser condemned disciplinarians; his prep school headmaster had an extensive collection of canes in his study and beat the future priest several times a week for minor infractions. After a report into Smyth's history of abuse in which Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury was held to be among those responsible for concealing Smyth's behavior, Fraser commented in a November 2024 BBC Radio interview: "This needs to be our watershed moment in the church, where we look at the culture of deference, the way in which many of our senior leadership rally to defend each other". Welby resigned the next day.

He is an advocate of Brexit, apparently because Remainers are all liberals.

Circumcision

He is strongly in favour of circumcision, opposing a court judgment in Cologne that banned male circumcision and Icelandic proposals for a similar ban. He argued that circumcision was central to Jewish identity and Germany introducing a ban would be "to do Hitler's work for him" (Zing! Godwin's Law alert!) His dislike of liberalism is central to this, and a belief that history and tradition are more important than personal choice. He did not mention the tradition of female circumcision. He also spoke in favour of circumcision on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze (when Iceland was considering a ban), claiming opponents of foreskin-snipping were trying to restrict the practice of religion (when they believed circumcision should be a choice for an individual) and comparing medically-accurate accounts of the harm caused to the blood libel falsely-levelled against Jews. Susan Blackmore called his comments on circumcision, "utterly repellent, as well as unfair and ludicrous."

LGBT issues

He is in favour of gay clergy and homosexuality generally, but took the interesting moral viewpoint that gay clergy should lie about their sexuality if the church prohibited homosexuality (rather than e.g. telling the truth or joining a different church).

Secularism

He has defended the BBC's "Thought for the Day", a regular platform for religious leaders (but not atheists) to deliver a little moral lesson to Radio 4's audience (described by Radio 4 presenter Justin Webb as, "They are all roughly the same… If everyone was nicer to everyone else, it would be fine"). Fraser manages to turn the BBC's reserving airtime for religion into an assault on religion by the sneering atheists of the BBC.

He once debated Richard Dawkins on BBC Radio 4 and, according to conservatives, thoroughly defeated the atheist scientist. After Dawkins produced figures showing that most Christians based their opinions on secular influences rather than Christianity, Fraser asked Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, which Dawkins struggled with.

External links

• His Twitter account, @giles_fraser