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Pope Francis and a church for the poor

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(Courier article)
You will doubtless have been aware of a significant puff of white smoke recently, which declared the election of a new Pope. His Holiness Pope Francis has talked about that significant moment, whilst he was sitting next to a fellow South American cardinal: “When things became a bit dangerous, he comforted me, and when the vote for me reached the two-thirds majority, a moment in which the cardinals started applauding because they had chosen a Pope, he hugged me, he kissed me and he said ‘don’t forget the poor’. “That word, the poor, lodged in me here,” Francis said, tapping his head. “It was then that I thought of St Francis. And then I thought of wars and about peace and that’s how the name came to me – a man of peace, a poor man … and how I would like a church of the poor, for the poor.”

Don’t forget the poor. The Bible is very clear about the priority that God gives to social justice – it is a theme running throughout both Old and New Testaments where there are over 2000 texts dealing with how the poor are to be treated, and included within wider society. Put simply, where there is no social justice, God is provoked into righteous anger. It is absolutely of the essence of the gospel that Christians have care for those who are excluded from participating in our society; it is not possible to be a Christian and to have no concern for social justice; it is, in sum, right at the heart of what we talk about when we Christians discuss ‘the Kingdom of God’. So I am delighted to see the new Pope making such a strong, clear and symbolic stand at the beginning of his pontificate. And yet…

When Jesus is asked what is the most important commandment to follow, he does not say ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor’ – that teaching comes in the context of specific instructions to a particular young man whom Jesus loved (Mark 10). No, when Jesus is asked what is the most important commandment, he says this: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

I view one of the most dire problems that the church faces, and which vitiates all of its attempts to engage critically with the world, as salt and as yeast and as light, as being due to the evacuation of the sense of the first commandment into a comfortable affirmation of the “second, which is like it”. There is a reason why Jesus says that the first commandment comes first. The first commandment contains a distinct meaning, which cannot be disregarded. Yes, there is an intrinsic link between love of God and love of neighbour – and where there is no love of neighbour then that is a clear sign that the love of God is deficient – but I believe that Christians have become very comfortable with the idea that by doing good works for our neighbours we are doing all that we need to do in order to love God.

I believe that this is false, and is the principal reason why the church in all its forms is now so regularly trampled underfoot. There is more to the church than being just another charity, just another non-governmental organisation, just another group of people who do what seems to be right in the eyes of the world. I believe that if the church gets the first commandment right, the second will naturally follows. I am not persuaded that it happens in reverse; indeed, I suspect that the inverse is eventually self-defeating.

There is something non-negotiable and inescapable about the worship of God when it comes to actually living out a Christian life – and in writing these words I am aware of how strange it might seem that this needs to be said! The worship of God is not simply another particular hobby to be placed alongside other hobbies – some people like to play bowls, some like to sail, some like to sing strange songs in old and draughty buildings. No, in terms of a discussion about poverty there is a much more direct, internal and organic link between the right worship of God and the quest for social justice. If we in the church do not worship God correctly, then we do not discern our values correctly, and we inevitably end up engaged in something which can be called idolatry – and the Bible is very clear that the necessary consequence of idolatry is injustice. In contrast, the Bible is equally clear that where God is worshipped properly then the world and all of us within it are enabled to flourish. Christians cannot separate out the one from the other, for when we do, both commandments are broken.

I am sure that, as a Jesuit (some of the best teachers I have ever had), Pope Francis knows this in his bones. So my delight in his appointment and his pursuit of the second commandment is grounded in an assurance that the first will indeed be placed first. I had high hopes for the leadership that Pope Benedict was able to give, and those hopes were fulfilled. I have faith that my high hopes for Pope Francis will be met likewise. May God bless the work of his hands.

Who do we think we are?

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Courier article.

Once upon a time, there was a gifted writer who told a story entitled ‘The Dream of a Thousand Cats’. In this story, we learn that in the deep history of time life on earth was remarkably different. Cats were the dominant species; humans were merely their playthings. The conceit of the story is that slowly, the humans began to talk and dream of a different world – a world where they would be free of the tyrannical oppression of the cats, where they would be in charge. One day, enough human beings dreamed the same dream – and when they woke, from the dream, they discovered that the world had been changed. It had become what we would recognise today – where humans are dominant and cats are merely pets. The story itself is told from the perspective of a cat who has learned the truth, and who has dedicated his life to telling all other cats the same tale. If only a thousand cats would dream the same dream, they could once more rule the planet! But of course, as soon as that criterion is mentioned, any cat-owner will see why humans are safe from feline revolution…

Our imaginations are vastly more powerful than the official narrative of our society leads us to accept. The imagination is good for children – all those fairy tales! And it’s good for entertainment – all those wonderful movies! But when it comes to the serious business of life, imagination just gets in the way. Those with imagination are seen as lacking in common sense, as being woolly-thinkers lacking a concrete connection to reality. Yet – ponder for a moment; look around you, wherever you are, and ask yourself what things that you see were not first conceived in the imagination of another human being? One obvious exception would be living creatures; another exception would be the sky – but what else? Every building, every street, every object in a house – all were first dreamed up by the imagination of one person or another.

The imagination is yet more powerful, for the simple reason that all of our understandings of the world resolve down to a level of story. Even the “hardest” of scientific facts take their place within a particular narrative – whether that be a narrative of the Big Bang or the narrative of evolution or something else. We are a story-making species, and it is the imagination that gives birth to the stories that structure our lives. The imagination determines the colour of the glasses that we wear, and through which we see the world. So it is not simply the objects in our world that are born in our imaginations, but the meaning that all those objects have, and the meaning of all our experiences besides. Put simply, the story that we tell about something or someone determines how that something or someone is understood – and therefore, what sort of activities and changes and lives might be possible.

This is why, in the Bible, the first and foremost task of the prophets – those people driven by the Spirit of God to engage directly with the political authorities of their time and place, from Moses to Jesus – was to engage people’s imaginations. This would often be done through something called ‘prophetic drama’, which was an acting out of a scene or a parable which engaged people’s imaginations. Jesus casting out the money-changers in the Temple is the most famous example, but there are many others. What the prophet first had to do was enable the people to dream; principally to dream that ‘it doesn’t have to be that way’. Always and in every case, it was the response of the political authorities to scorn such imagination, to repress and ridicule it, and, often, simply to terrorise and silence the dreamers. Yet, in just the same way that a ‘war on terror’ can never be won – for how is it possible to make war upon an abstract noun? So too is it impossible to eradicate a dream, once it has got into the bloodstream of a society.

This is what I believe we as a nation and a society have to talk about in the context of a referendum about our EU membership. What sort of a people are we? What is our dream of who we are? A previously dominant dream was one of Empire, but what is to take its place? Who are we? I can’t help but feel it was a reaction to loss of Empire – to the breaking of a dream – that led to a loss of national self-confidence, and which in turn led to our engagement in the structures of European Union. It was if the guiding story was – we are a fading nation, we are not strong enough to make our own way in the world any more, let us join in with our neighbours and seek safety and prosperity through their strength. That particular story – a story perhaps most closely associated with the anarchic 1970s – is not one that holds true for us any more. My own sense is that our ‘national story’ is much more effectively told through something like the wonderful 2012 olympic ceremony – we are not the Imperial people that we used to be but, actually, it’s good to be British.

I believe that this sort of story-examination applies on an individual basis too – we literally become who we imagine ourselves to be (obviously, there is such a thing as delusion; that’s not what I’m referring to). In other words, if we imagine ourselves as not worthy, we actually become less worthy – we defeat ourselves before we have ever stepped into the arena. This is the realm of faith – this is the realm of what Christians call ‘spiritual warfare’, which is the struggle between the voice that says we are weak and worthless and wicked, and the voice which much more quietly and more persistently says ‘you are loved’. It is when we allow that latter voice to dominate the story that we tell ourselves about who we are that we are enabled to work creatively and imaginatively to heal and restore our broken world.

Who do we think we are?

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Courier article.

Once upon a time, there was a gifted writer who told a story entitled ‘The Dream of a Thousand Cats’. In this story, we learn that in the deep history of time life on earth was remarkably different. Cats were the dominant species; humans were merely their playthings. The conceit of the story is that slowly, the humans began to talk and dream of a different world – a world where they would be free of the tyrannical oppression of the cats, where they would be in charge. One day, enough human beings dreamed the same dream – and when they woke, from the dream, they discovered that the world had been changed. It had become what we would recognise today – where humans are dominant and cats are merely pets. The story itself is told from the perspective of a cat who has learned the truth, and who has dedicated his life to telling all other cats the same tale. If only a thousand cats would dream the same dream, they could once more rule the planet! But of course, as soon as that criterion is mentioned, any cat-owner will see why humans are safe from feline revolution…

Our imaginations are vastly more powerful than the official narrative of our society leads us to accept. The imagination is good for children – all those fairy tales! And it’s good for entertainment – all those wonderful movies! But when it comes to the serious business of life, imagination just gets in the way. Those with imagination are seen as lacking in common sense, as being woolly-thinkers lacking a concrete connection to reality. Yet – ponder for a moment; look around you, wherever you are, and ask yourself what things that you see were not first conceived in the imagination of another human being? One obvious exception would be living creatures; another exception would be the sky – but what else? Every building, every street, every object in a house – all were first dreamed up by the imagination of one person or another.

The imagination is yet more powerful, for the simple reason that all of our understandings of the world resolve down to a level of story. Even the “hardest” of scientific facts take their place within a particular narrative – whether that be a narrative of the Big Bang or the narrative of evolution or something else. We are a story-making species, and it is the imagination that gives birth to the stories that structure our lives. The imagination determines the colour of the glasses that we wear, and through which we see the world. So it is not simply the objects in our world that are born in our imaginations, but the meaning that all those objects have, and the meaning of all our experiences besides. Put simply, the story that we tell about something or someone determines how that something or someone is understood – and therefore, what sort of activities and changes and lives might be possible.

This is why, in the Bible, the first and foremost task of the prophets – those people driven by the Spirit of God to engage directly with the political authorities of their time and place, from Moses to Jesus – was to engage people’s imaginations. This would often be done through something called ‘prophetic drama’, which was an acting out of a scene or a parable which engaged people’s imaginations. Jesus casting out the money-changers in the Temple is the most famous example, but there are many others. What the prophet first had to do was enable the people to dream; principally to dream that ‘it doesn’t have to be that way’. Always and in every case, it was the response of the political authorities to scorn such imagination, to repress and ridicule it, and, often, simply to terrorise and silence the dreamers. Yet, in just the same way that a ‘war on terror’ can never be won – for how is it possible to make war upon an abstract noun? So too is it impossible to eradicate a dream, once it has got into the bloodstream of a society.

This is what I believe we as a nation and a society have to talk about in the context of a referendum about our EU membership. What sort of a people are we? What is our dream of who we are? A previously dominant dream was one of Empire, but what is to take its place? Who are we? I can’t help but feel it was a reaction to loss of Empire – to the breaking of a dream – that led to a loss of national self-confidence, and which in turn led to our engagement in the structures of European Union. It was if the guiding story was – we are a fading nation, we are not strong enough to make our own way in the world any more, let us join in with our neighbours and seek safety and prosperity through their strength. That particular story – a story perhaps most closely associated with the anarchic 1970s – is not one that holds true for us any more. My own sense is that our ‘national story’ is much more effectively told through something like the wonderful 2012 olympic ceremony – we are not the Imperial people that we used to be but, actually, it’s good to be British.

I believe that this sort of story-examination applies on an individual basis too – we literally become who we imagine ourselves to be (obviously, there is such a thing as delusion; that’s not what I’m referring to). In other words, if we imagine ourselves as not worthy, we actually become less worthy – we defeat ourselves before we have ever stepped into the arena. This is the realm of faith – this is the realm of what Christians call ‘spiritual warfare’, which is the struggle between the voice that says we are weak and worthless and wicked, and the voice which much more quietly and more persistently says ‘you are loved’. It is when we allow that latter voice to dominate the story that we tell ourselves about who we are that we are enabled to work creatively and imaginatively to heal and restore our broken world.

Of weights and measures and a mess of pottage

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Courier article – a couple of weeks old!

So the Prime Minister has introduced into the bloodstream of our body politic the virus of an ‘In/Out’ Referendum – and as with a virus, it will multiply and cause a fever. This is a very good thing, although, as with his strategy on changing marriage, I doubt that Mr Cameron will get where he expects to get with it. It is primarily a very good thing that we are going to be able to express our view as a nation on whether we wish to remain part of the ‘ever-closer’ EU. There are of course many things that have to fall into place before we get to being able to express our views, two of them major. Firstly, Mr Cameron will have to win the next election (and, clearly, he calculates that making this offer will enhance his prospects of doing so) – this is fairly unlikely. Second, the negotiations with our EU partners will have to proceed in such a way that Mr Cameron feels liberated enough to return to the UK waving his piece of paper from the runway saying that he has achieved the hackneyed ‘good result for Britain’ – this I regard as very unlikely. So Mr Cameron has, with a good speech, sought to increase the short-term prospects for the Conservative party at the next election, leaving the details and haggling for another day – and time will tell how wise his decision has been.

Our own local MP, Bernard Jenkin, released a very interesting paper recently, seeking to point out several elements of the ‘mythology’ associated with our EU membership, for example that ‘3 million jobs’ depend on our being in the EU, or that the single market has reduced the cost of doing business in the EU. I recommend the paper for anyone interested in looking at the nuts and bolts of this question. It seems to me, though, that, as and when it comes to the referendum – which I do now see as inevitable – we need to do more than weigh up our economic interests. That is, the economic questions are indeed very important, but I do not believe that they are the most important – and it was viewing the question through this economic prism that misled us (or that enabled the political class to mislead us) in 1975.

To explain this, I want to take a detour around the question of weights and measures. This has received a fair amount of publicity through the years, not least when market traders are prosecuted for using Imperial measures (pounds and ounces) rather than the metric system (grams). What is at stake on a question like this? Clearly it is perfectly possible to live life using a metric system – to have a 500ml glass of beer rather than a pint. Rationally speaking, it makes little difference what label is attached to a particular quantity, so long as the system is easy to understand and everyone goes along with what is being used. More than this, there are some strong purely economic arguments in favour of our using the same systems of weights and measures as the rest of the EU. For those multi-national corporations that have driven the development of the single market (and have also driven the expansion of the Euro currency) it makes for better economies of scale if they can calibrate their factories purely to one set of measures rather than two. For those who are working on a continental scale it is a simple matter of efficiency that the continent is harmonised, and that local idiosyncracies are ironed out.

Which makes me want to ask the question: is making our country safe for Starbucks really what we have been reduced to? For so long as we are asking the question about whether to remain a member of the European Union in purely economic terms we are missing what I believe is the most fundamental element that needs to be discussed. We are also, of course, if we oppose the Starbucks of this world, placing ourselves in opposition to vested interests with extremely deep pockets. I think that they have enough of an institutional advantage without conceding the high ground to them as well.

What I mean is that there is far more of value to our national heritage and character than simply an ability to make money. I wouldn’t for one moment wish to scorn the ability to make money, to earn a living, to generate employment for others through our own hard work – but the world has many opportunities in it (many of them likely to become much larger if we are not in the EU) and to reduce this question to economics is, I feel, to miss the central point. What is lost to our national conversation if – on the remote chance that our children will still be studying Shakespeare in the future – we have to explain to them that Shylock’s ‘pound of flesh’ is referring to a measurement of weight and not to a matter of finance? Our weights and measures are knitted in to our history in all sorts of surprising ways, and by allowing alleged economic benefits to wipe away all these threads that connect us to our past, we are also becoming a people who have forgotten ourselves, who have forgotten the distinctive greatness that makes us who we are. We will be safe for Starbucks, simply another agglomeration of economic units, not a free people of unique and irreplaceable individuals, valuing the local, the eccentric, the uncoventional.

In the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, Esau is persuaded to relinquish his inheritance because he is unable to see past a temporary hunger – in the words of the King James Bible, Esau ‘sold his birthright for a mess of pottage’ (lentil soup). Our mess of pottage would seem to be a bundle of alleged economic benefits, which in our straitened economic times may well seem immensely attractive. Yet there is so much more to our national story than this! I hope to expand on this in future articles.

The wisest man brought myrrh

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Latest Courier article.

I was all set to write a jolly article suitable for Christmas festivities when the news came through about the tragedy in Connecticut. So much doesn’t seem appropriate any more, even though, in a cynical sense, there is nothing new about what has happened. One of the things that I have most come to believe over the last several years is that God is never in “the drama”. That is, whenever there is a conscious desire to attract attention – to ‘glamourise’ in other words – there is also a turning away from God, a turning away from that same source of life and vitality. Consider a previous act of slaughter, the attacks of 9/11 in the United States. These were the very definition of a spectacle, and yet – despite what was claimed – I cannot believe that God was behind the spectacle, in the sense of desiring it, or having his purposes accomplished through it.

There is something of a truism here – that evil is banal and repetitive, whereas it is only goodness that is creative and capable of bringing something new into existence. When a soul is turned away from the living source of life and vitality it often seeks to artificially induce that vitality through a quest for stimulation, like Frankenstein charging his monster from the storm. So we have the epic spectacles of terrorism and slaughter where the monsters inside people are unleashed upon the world.

There is a passage in one of my favourite works of Christian spirituality – Kahlil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’ – which says this: “Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts, it drinks even of dead waters.” Souls turn to the darkness when the light which they crave is denied to them; and sometimes, which I take as the definition of evil, that darkness is embraced, justified and celebrated. The sorrow of our society is that we have become a place which has lost an awareness of the distinction between the light and the dark.

How are we to try and understand this, to regain an appreciation of the light, in order that we may, as a community, move back towards the light? One aspect is, I believe, to recognise that there is such a thing as evil and to accept that we will never be able to achieve a society which has banished sin and suffering, no matter how many well-intentioned programmes are undertaken. We need to have a greater sense of realism about the world that we live in, not to become cynical, but to recognise the cost of pursuing goodness, and the inevitable element of tragedy in human existence.

Which is, after all, the hidden side of the Christmas story. After all, we see and hear the story through the prism of two thousand years of telling; consequently, many of the most substantial elements can be missed. The point about a new king being born amongst the animals, resting in the trough, where there is no room in the inn – this is the very ‘anti-drama’ that is the sign of God’s presence. I sometimes have the sense in reading these classic stories that the original writers could not be content with God’s choice to be born as a nobody from a nothing town, and so all the elements of angelic messengers and visits from kings had to be imported to try and dignify God’s activity with human hyperbole. It is too staggering for our imaginations to believe that God might just simply be present as a naked and mewling infant.

An infant, of course, who would one day be slaughtered by the state for being inconvenient to the projects of power. This is an aspect to the story that is present from the start – the cost of standing for life and truth when the established powers are bent on a course in opposition to such life and truth. A few days after Christmas, a few days after Jesus was born, the order was sent out to slaughter the innocents – those who had done nothing wrong other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Holy Innocents and all who loved them bore the pain at that time, yet Jesus himself was destined for pain, humiliation and death himself. It was the wisest man who brought the myrrh – the ointment used for preparing bodies for burial, the sign of Jesus’ own fate. Right at the beginning, amidst the cherubs, nestled in the arms of his mother, the undertone of pain and suffering was present.

There is so much to be thankful for, and to rejoice in, through the Christmas season, most especially for those who have much – much family, much friendship, much good cheer and wealth to celebrate. Yet there is this hidden side of Christmas, where the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not comprehend it. The story of Christmas is that the Lord came to be with those who have nothing – those who can find no place of shelter, those who hunger, those who are lonely and bereaved – those who bear the cost of tragedy in human life. For those of us who suffer – and, if truth be told, I believe that we all suffer in our different ways, we each have our own cross to bear – the message of Christmas is that God is with us. Despite all the ways in which our world distresses us, despite all the ways in which we fall short of our own hopes and desires and each other’s expectations, despite all the ways in which we are most conscious of not becoming the people that God intends us to be – the message is that God has not abandoned us, and that, mysterious though it is, the way through our vale of suffering can be found by hearing the story of a baby boy, born out of wedlock and shunted into the stables two thousand years ago. May the light and peace of the Christ-child be with you and all whom you love this Christmas time.

Why I joined UKIP this summer

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Latest Courier article

We learn to be ashamed before we walk

On the principle that I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, I’d like to use this article to explain why I joined UKIP this last summer. One of the key elements of the English religious settlement after the Civil War was that religion was given a particular place – one that forbade any political involvement. This is why there remains something of a taboo about religious figures getting involved in political affairs in this country, although that taboo is, thankfully, beginning to break down, alongside all the other elements of our national life that are breaking down.

Religion and politics have always gone together. If we consider some key figures from history – look at Desmond Tutu, or Martin Luther King, or Gandhi – then the idea that religion and politics can be easily separated is seen as a nonsense; or, if not a nonsense, then as a particularly local English eccentricity, and whilst I am very much in favour of particularly local English eccentricities, this is not one that I can respect any more. When priests are ordained we are charged to ‘let the good shepherd be the pattern of our calling’ – in other words, we are to try to walk the walk that Jesus walked. As he was someone who was executed by the state for being politically inconvenient, I have some idea of how he would react to being put into a corner and told not to startle the establishment.

So why UKIP? Well, it won’t come as a surprise to many that I have always seen myself as being conservative – with a small ‘c’. In other words, I look to things like the development of character and virtue as the key way to move towards a better life, for an individual and for a community, and I see such things as being best cultivated by the ‘small platoons’ of local institutions, church and family life. The other side of that positive vision is that I share a profound distrust of the over-mighty state (actually, of any over-mighty institution or corporation, there’s not much difference between a mindless bureaucracy and a mindless supermarket chain for example). In the context of the economic devastation that has been working its havoc on our lives for several years now – with no prospect of improvement for at least a decade, if ever – what will enable us to get through the hard times is the quality of our social interactions, the strengthening of our community fabric, our capacity for good neighbourliness and looking after each other. I see the rise of the state through the twentieth century as a systematic dismantling of that social fabric, an intrusion of bureaucracy into areas that are best left to personal or local resolution, and consequently we are suffering much more from the economic consequences of political incompetence than we need to have been.

There were two key issues that made me change my mind about actually joining in with a political party – something that I haven’t done since my student days, when I used to campaign for the Green party. The first is becoming aware that the existing Conservative party would never hold an honourable referendum on leaving the European Union – they would do to the anti-EU cause exactly what they did to the Liberal Democrats on the referendum for electoral reform. The established leadership will mouth sufficient platitudes to keep enough euro-sceptics on board to preserve their access to power, but they will not entertain the radical step of withdrawing from the EU with any honesty. Clearly, that is only an issue in so much as withdrawal from the EU is an issue – and a large part of my changing mind on this is because I have come to see that particular issue as having such significance. Perhaps I can spell out why in another article; for now, let me say simply that the centralisation of power and authority in an unaccountable bureaucracy remote from the people that it claims to serve is the apotheosis of all the things which I instinctively distrust – and I am more and more convinced that it is the political equivalent of the dinosaurs after the asteroid had struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago. The world is changing very rapidly, and the future belongs to the local and the flexible – all the things which the EU most definitely is not.

There is a second issue that triggered my change of thinking, however, and this is more directly related to religious questions – the debate about gay marriage. This is not so much an issue about the ultimate substance – it is at least possible that I could be persuaded that there might be such a thing as ‘gay marriage’; I do, after all, have no problem with the idea of a religious blessing for gay civil partnerships. No, the key issue for me is the way in which this very significant change is being pushed through in such a fool-hardy fashion. For those of a conservative disposition issues around family and social formation are absolutely central, and any changes to the existing framework have to be considered extremely carefully. It is quite obvious that the existing political leadership have not thought through their understanding on this question, and that they are being driven by a particularly metropolitan form of political correctness. All the right people are in favour, therefore it must be a good thing. As a result, a huge change in our society is being pushed through at a fast pace and, quite simply, this is not a conservative way of doing things. It is not surprising that so many conservatives are deserting the Conservative party over this question – what is the point of something which doesn’t do what it says on the tin?

At the heart of my understanding, however, is a sense that I am fed up with a political culture that has an instinctive repudiation of all that is most noble and elevated in our own political heritage and national story. In the words of one of my favourite songs “we learn to be ashamed before we walk, of the way we look and the way we talk; without our stories and our songs, how will we know where we’ve come from? I’ve lost St George in the Union Jack, it’s my flag too and I want it back…” I am proud of my country – not blindly, not without an awareness of all that is terrible in our history from Amritsar to Dresden – but fully consciously, accepting that no country will ever be perfect and without sin, but still proud of the contribution that our society has made to things like the abolition of slavery and the establishment of human rights. The remarkable thing from my point of view is that so many of the things that are valued by the politically correct – a culture of humane tolerance for difference, of care for minorities, the weak and vulnerable – these all depend upon the prior existence of a healthy society which positively inculcates such virtues, and actively teaches the young not just that these are good things (we’re still paying lip service in that direction) but that the achievement of such good things is hard work and requires motivation and discipline, character and virtue. That is where we’ve gone wrong. We have forgotten the practical implications of living in a sinful world.

Ultimately, I want to ask – who are we as a nation? Are we really so weak and pitiful that we are dependent upon outside help and assistance in order to be the best that we can be? Do we need to depend on outside authorities to do good, and what is the cost of accepting such outside help – costs borne by our fishermen and farmers, our market traders and so on? Of course, I don’t agree with everything that UKIP stands for (seeking a party that perfectly conforms to our own ideas is one of the more self-indulgent of vanities) but it’s a question of priorities. I see the EU as having an entirely baleful influence upon our national life and economy, and I don’t think that we are going to be able to see any serious progress in addressing the mire of our political culture until there is a complete break with the EU. Hence – I am now a member of UKIP, out and proud!

The crisis of political correctness

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Courier article – written before the UKIP fostering fiasco in Rotherham, which is a remarkably timely demonstration of what I’m talking about.

In his seminal work on the philosophy of science, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Thomas Kuhn describes what happens when one way of viewing the world gives way to another. Essentially, any way of viewing the world – what Kuhn calls a ‘paradigm’ – is always going to be incomplete. Slowly, over time, that incompleteness gives rise to ‘anomalies’, that is, there are things which are seen which cannot be explained in terms of the existing paradigm. So, for example, the Ptolemaic paradigm for understanding the movement of the planets (which had the earth at the centre) slowly gave way to the Copernican paradigm (which had the sun at the centre) because the former had to start making exception after exception in order to account for what was actually being observed. In other words, the old ways of thinking, the old paradigms, break down when they can no longer account for the piling up of new evidence – there are too many anomalies, things which don’t fit. What is most interesting about Kuhn’s account is the way in which he describes the resistance that takes place to the transition to a new paradigm. According to Kuhn the consensus of opinion changes, not because the majority are convinced by reasoning and evidence (which is the mythology of scientific progress) but rather that those coming into the field for the first time, without preconceptions, find a new paradigm to be more intellectually interesting, and those committed to the old paradigm simply and literally die out.

I find this understanding of intellectual change quite persuasive, and I believe that it applies to other fields just as naturally as science. A paradigm, a way of looking at the world, gets taken up and used for a long period of time because it seems to work. However, when the anomalies – those things that can’t be explained within the paradigm – accumulate too far, then there is a revolution of understanding. The old guard is never persuaded, they are simply left behind as new thinkers develop more fruitful lines of enquiry. I believe that just such a process is now taking place with regard to ‘political correctness’, or, put differently, the established left-wing pieties are now being pitilessly exposed as inadequate to address the major problems that we face. As a result political correctness is in crisis.

To explore this further, I want to look at the BBC and some recent stories that they have been involved in. I want to look particularly at the BBC, not because I don’t support it – I very much do – but because I see it, along with the Guardian newspaper (which I read daily) as the repository of this particular pattern of thought. So what are the recent stories?

The first is the Jimmy Saville scandal. One particularly telling detail about this was the way that the organiser of the Children in Need event had barred Saville from having any involvement with it. Why did this not set off any alarm bells? It would appear – and obviously a proper understanding needs to await the results of the relevant inquiries – but it would appear that there was a culture of ‘protect the celebrity’ in place at the BBC. Where there is no understanding of virtue, celebrity is the plastic substitute for character, and this blindness to the importance of classical values leads directly to such horrors.

In contrast to the protecting of celebrities there remains, on the other hand, a culture of ‘hate the Tories’ in place. There are plentiful examples of this stretching back over a long period of time, but the attitude has been brought into particular salience through the catastrophic Newsnight programme which led to the calumnies against Lord McAlpine. The default assumption amongst the politically correct is that to be right-wing is to be uncaring. Anyone remember the vilification of Margaret Thatcher after she made the comment ‘there is no such thing as society?’ Studying her remarks now, it is clear that she was making an important point – yet the coverage at that time simply assumed that as a Tory she was by definition heartless, and that this was the point that she was making. So alongside the blindness to classical virtues runs a self-righteous smugness and sense of moral superiority.

What do we actually need from the BBC? Something like a fair and balanced coverage of the issues that confront our society, and, perhaps, some indication of how to treat with them in order to make progress – to reform the bad and affirm the good. Some of you may have heard about the appalling situation in Rochdale where young girls were groomed and sexually attacked by groups of Muslim men – but of course, to use the word ‘Muslim’ in this context is to breach a taboo. For some reason the racial epithet ‘Asian’ is preferred, despite being so broad as to be meaningless (and also profoundly racist). Now, of course, it is not the case that being Muslim of itself means that a man is more likely to perpetrate such barbaric acts, but it is the case that there is a toxic fragment of ‘Muslim’ culture that fosters an attitude of treating white women as disposable trash. We are not going to be able to deal with such a situation unless we are able to speak honestly and openly about it. (I should add, for clarity, that the vast majority of similar grooming and sexual attacks is carried out by nominally Christian white males – that doesn’t alter the point that I am making here). Alongside the blindness to classical virtues, and the self-righteous smugness, there is such a fear of being accused of racism or Islamophobia that mealy-mouthed equivocations and circumlocutions have to be employed to dance around the shocking truth.

Finally I want to touch on the coverage that the BBC is providing with regard to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians – a conflict which is likely to become larger in due course. That the BBC is anti-Israel is something of a truism, yet it is in such coverage that the contradictions of political correctness seem to me to come into very visible focus. The organisation Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel – it is a part of their founding charter – and if they succeed in their aims then the one place in the entire Middle East where a gay man, or a woman, or a Christian or Hindu can live in peace will be destroyed. Somehow, the need to support the apparent underdog against Israel trumps all the other elements of political correctness.

There is, I believe, an escalating disconnect between the claims being made by the adherents of political correctness, who pay lip service to issues of justice and equality, and the actual working out of their behaviour in practice. If we are truly committed to, for example, the rights of girls to be educated, to marry a partner of their own choosing, to work out their own path in life – then that also means at the very same time that the construction of sharia law in the United Kingdom is something that needs to be struggled against. It is not possible to be in favour of both – to support the rights of women, or gays, or religious minorities and at the same time to offer equal respect to an ideology that opposes such things.

I believe that the adherents of left-wing orthodoxy, political correctness, are being put to the test. What is it that they actually believe in? Put differently, I believe that what we are seeing is the working out of a contradiction that has always been at the heart of the secular enlightenment. The best of the enlightenment is, both as a matter of historical fact and philosophical necessity, bound up with the religious faith in which it originally formed. That is, a properly tolerant, rational and humane society can only exist on the basis of the religious and specifically Christian commitments which offer such things as their fruit. Where those religious commitments are discarded, the branches bearing fruit are cut off from the trunk and the roots – and so they die. There is a contradiction – an anomaly – between an enlightenment which accepts and rejoices in a full humanity open to all and an enlightenment which simply genuflects before the conventional left-wing pieties and is only concerned to be in with the crowd of ‘right on’ celebrities. If we believe in the former then we must, of necessity, reject the latter. It is not possible to straddle this fence – and that is the crisis for political correctness.

A good election to lose

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Courier article

I write this article on the morning after the US elections, as Barack Obama celebrates his re-election as president of the United States. I can’t escape the feeling that, rather like the Conservatives in 1992, this might have been a good election to lose. In 1992, a little surprisingly, John Major led the Conservatives to a small victory, and the following September the pound was ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Whilst this was clearly a good thing for the British economy, it was just as clearly a very bad thing politically for the Conservative party, whose reputation for economic competence took such a hit that it has arguably not yet recovered, some twenty years later. I think that a similar sort of ‘black swan’ type event – in fact, several – lie in wait for the President of the United States, and I want to briefly indicate the sorts of things that might be lurking.

Firstly, the economic issues, which I have touched on in this column several times before. The Western economic system is bankrupt, and at the moment is persisting purely via a sequence of confidence tricks – that is, lots of measures, principally printing money, designed to keep confidence in the financial system going. If at any point that confidence is damaged, then people will start to seek a safer place to park their financial assets. In other words, debts will start to be called in, and instead of the value of any debt being an abstract item on a putative balance sheet, that debt will become a very real obligation. As there is not enough wealth in the world to balance out the existing debts, there will be defaults – that will make people more nervous, causing them to call in more debts, which will make more people go bankrupt, making people more nervous… Rinse and repeat until enough of the bad debt has been properly accounted for and a solvent economy – at a much smaller size than the present economy – emerges from the wreckage. Human nature being what it is, this is likely to take the form of some very visible event, like a stock market crash or a spectacular bank failure – and the person in power, whether innocent or not, will have to take responsibility.

Another aspect of the economic situation is the US government’s own financial position. As a result of the huge level of deficits built up over many years – but massively accelerated over the last four – the US government is practically bankrupt. It has been able to fend off the implications of this situation for the simple reason that the US dollar remains, for now, the ‘reserve currency’ for the world financial system. In other words, for a great deal of international trade, especially oil, the transactions take place in dollars. The US government can therefore keep printing dollars because people need them, and there is a lot of ‘wealth’ in other government accounts that people do not wish to see collapse in value. However, that is not a situation that can or will last forever. Indeed, this aspect may come to a head very soon, as unless the US government agrees a new budget in the next few months, it will drive off a ‘fiscal cliff’ – there are some $600 billion worth of tax increases about to take effect, and if that is allowed to happen then it will have a severe impact on the US economy. There will be lots of coverage on this topic over the next few weeks.

Thirdly, an under-reported but major factor in our ongoing economic problems is the developing impact of Peak Oil. Ignoring the ‘blip’ in 2008 (when oil hit $150 per barrel) the price of oil has been significantly increasing year on year for nearly ten years now. The reason for this is simple – there is less oil available than there is demand for it, and that is because there has been no significant increase in the oil supply since 2005. Indeed, if you break the numbers down, the amount of oil available for export (in other words, the amount of oil not being used by the nations that produce the oil) has been declining by about 0.7% a year since 2005. This problem is not going to go away, it is only going to get worse, and for an indication for how it might affect the United States, just look at the coverage of ‘superstorm’ Sandy, and what happened there when the fuel supply was interrupted.

Of course, economic issues aren’t the only ones that can cause problems to a President, although I suspect that they will be the major ones. The field of foreign affairs is also looking scarier as time goes on. Principally that relates to the Middle East. I tried to explain to a friend the other day why the situation is so bad, and simply tried to list the different actors and their motivations. I stopped when I had reached eight! The situation is obviously very complex, but it seems equally obvious that things like the accession to power in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their shift from a pro-US stance to one that is, at the very least, independent and welcoming to Iran, will have significant long-term consequences. More broadly, the increasing level of hostility between China and its neighbours in the Far East is worrisome, and if the Chinese leadership elects a more ‘hawkish’ new President, that would be a dark omen.

As MacMillan once put it, ‘events, dear boy, events!’ are what govern political careers. It is quite possible that there will be one particular event that triggers a cascade of consequences bringing all of these issues to a head. Imagine, for example, that Israel launches an attack on Iran, triggering a wider war involving Saudi Arabia; that the oil supply through the Straits of Hormuz is interrupted, even if only briefly; that the resulting spike in the oil price causes many of our fragile financial institutions to pass over into bankruptcy; and that the US dollar – as a result of political hostility to the United States – loses its role as a reserve currency. I don’t want to say that these problems will be impossible to solve only that, as I said at the beginning, if you’re going to lose an election, this isn’t a bad one to lose. Barack Obama’s in-tray is unlikely to have much good news in it for many years to come.

I’ll finish by sticking my neck out and making a bold prediction (containing just a smidgen of wish-fulfilment) – either at the head of a purged Republican party, or at the head of an independent ‘Tea Party’ ticket, the US will elect Sarah Palin as president in 2016. You read it here first…

The benefits of having three in a marriage

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Latest Courier article

Do you remember Princess Diana saying, on Panorama in 1995, “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”. That was clearly a deeply unhappy situation – but I regularly tell couples who come to me seeking to get married in church that one of the major benefits of a church marriage is that it allows a third party to get involved. No, this isn’t the Rector getting racy, I’m still very orthodox! What I mean is that getting married in church is inviting God to get involved with the relationship; that this is the most important thing that happens in a wedding in church; and that this has distinct practical benefits in terms of the health and longevity of the relationship. Let me explain.

First off, there is more going on with a church wedding than with a wedding that is conducted through a Civil Registrar, and by that I don’t simply mean things like hymns and prayers. Consider the vows that are going to be spoken. With a Civil Ceremony, as you would expect, the emphasis is upon the legal and contractual nature of the wedding. This is a typical example of what needs to be said: “Declaratory Words: I declare that I know of no legal reason why I ………….. may not be joined in marriage to …………..; followed by Contracting Words: I ………….. take thee ………….. to be my wedded wife/husband.” Compare this to the vows that are spoken by each party in a church service: “I, N , take you, N , to be my wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward; for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part; according to God’s holy law. In the presence of God I make this vow.”

I usually remark to couples that the vows are the most important element of the wedding day – everything else, the dress, the cake, the reception and so on, all of that is just setting. Of course, making such vows is wonderful and marvellous and beautiful and a totally reckless thing to do. It is a radical act, a brave act, one that goes against the grain of our culture which doesn’t seem to value long lasting promises quite so much as it used to, which has become so obsessed with passing feelings. The vows make the wedding what it is, and it is by holding fast to the vows, no matter what the provocation, that the marriage endures and the fruits of holy matrimony start to show. Essentially what the vows form are a safe space within which a person is set free to be themselves. This other person has stood up in front of all their friends and family and said these remarkable words, which resolve down to ‘I promise to stay here’ no matter what – and that gives a profound reassurance to their loved one. It is the definition of unconditional love – and it is that aspect which makes the matrimony holy.

All marriages have their bumpy patches, it is an inevitable consequence of being sinful human beings. One of the most practical benefits that inviting God into a marriage entails is that there is a third party to whom conflicts can be referred. Where there are only two people, and when those two people start to fight, it can quite rapidly descend into a simple conflict of willpower – he wants this, she wants that, who will win, who will lose? Very little creative can happen in such a situation. Yet if there is a shared invitation to God to be involved, suddenly there is a meaningful question that can be asked when the couple have become stuck: what does God think about this? Where does God want to take us? How can we best become the people that God is calling us to be – full of abundant life and love? How can we be healed from all of the things that have wounded us until now?

I actually believe that, rather like the grains of sand that end up making the pearl, marriage needs frictions. It is only when we face such frictions in our closest relationships that we are brought up against the reality of the other person, and we have to pause, take stock, and face this wondrous, marvellous, beautiful human being whom God has created and with whom we are walking for a while on this earth. This is where the real work of love begins – this is where a marriage becomes truly holy matrimony – because it is when we see the full, real, unvarnished truth of who another person is – and when at that point we remain committed to our vows and are still prepared to say ‘I love you’ that we begin to know what it means to share in the love of God.

It is in sharing in this sense of unconditional love that a marriage starts to become sacred, for this is how we start to understand what it means to say speak this language that ‘God is love’. Does this mean that God is slushy and sentimental and fond of pink flowers and Celine Dion? I think not. For love is not a feeling. Love is not something that can be captured if you buy the right card from Clinton’s. Love as Christians understand it is rooted in a decision, a settled choice to act in a certain way irrespective of how we feel. Our feelings will change over time, they will go up and down and all over the place – but love is a decision, a decision to keep faith with the commitments that we make to each other, in the marriage vows most of all.

In the story of creation in Genesis there is a consistent repetition of ‘God created… and saw that it was good’. The first mention in the Bible of something not being good comes when God says to Adam that it is not good for him to be alone. We are meant to be in this business of life together, rubbing up against each other, snapping off our sharp edges, breaking our hearts of stone and turning them into hearts of flesh. That’s why God gave us the great gift of marriage, a gift that not only keeps on giving, but like a fine wine gets better and better with age.

The sin of being offended

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(Slightly revised version of blogpost written in 2006, after the Muhammad cartoons)

Should a Christian be offended by blasphemy, in the way that various Islamic groups have – according to the official story – been offended by an obscure film on YouTube? I believe not, and I’d like to explain why.

There is no shortage of material that could be cited as offensive to Christians but I’d like to focus on the graphic novel ‘Preacher’, written by Garth Ennis, partly because it is a cartoon/ comic, and partly because it is a work that I am familiar with.

To understand ‘Preacher’ you must imagine a tale composed of a blend of three other stories, but then put through the blender of a particular film. The three stories that ‘feed’ it are: Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood western; Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (although it predates the Da Vinci Code – it’s actually drawing on the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail); and Anne Rice’s ‘Interview with a Vampire’; and all of this is then fed through the stylistic blender of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”. It is certainly blasphemous, also obscene, disturbing and very funny. I believe it also makes some interesting theological points – not as profound or interesting as I had once hoped, when I was first reading it, but interesting nonetheless.

The basic plot is this: an angel and a demon come together and conceive a child; when the child is born it is immediately expelled from Heaven, and God vanishes from His throne. Genesis (the child) plummets to earth and is ‘united’ with Jesse Custer, a preacher (probably Episcopalian) who was raised by some rabid and violent fundamentalists in the Deep South of the United States. You could say he has some problems with his faith… However, once Genesis is united with him, he gains the Word – the power to command people to do whatever he tells them. Through various adventures involving the Priory of Sion and his best friend, an Irish vampire, he ends up producing a confrontation between God and the Angel of Death. God, of course, isn’t the God that a ‘normal’ Christian would recognise – God is schizophrenic, in the popular sense, in that there is sometimes a raging Old Testament father figure full of righteous anger, and sometimes there is a radiant New Testament figure seemingly all sweetness and light. The end of the tale is the death of God – and the continuance of the world without Him, seemingly all the better for it.

Ennis grew up in Northern Ireland, and there is clearly a kinship between the God in ‘Preacher’ and the attitudes of someone like Ian Paisley. I had hoped that there would be something theologically creative at the end – that was what kept me reading – along the lines of Genesis becoming a renewed God, essentially a retelling of the Christian story but in a modern idiom. Instead, Preacher is profoundly atheistic, and is in fact much more of a story about the importance of friendship than anything about theology. It remains deeply memorable, and the set-up I think is wonderful, but in the end there is little engagement with ‘mainstream’ Christianity – Christians within it are portrayed as either fundamentalist fascists or as idiots, and the ethics that are vindicated are those of the western, ie righteous violence.

Now, in the face of such a sustained and offensive criticism – how should a Christian react? Should a Christian shun any contact with such writing, with a view to avoiding ‘contamination’ from its blasphemy? My reading of Christianity, influenced from what I know of the work of René Girard, is rather the opposite, and that the degree of our ‘offence taking’ is the degree to which we remain to be converted to the gospel.

A key word in Girard’s analysis is skandalon. It means the taking of offence, seeing something as shocking or blasphemous. As part of his anthropology, Girard argues that scandal is contagious and reproduces itself across a society, forming a major way in which a society polices its own customs. The practices of societies are founded in sacred violence and scapegoating – in other words, societies reinforce their identity by choosing a person or group as the ‘cause’ of all their problems (think Jews in 1930’s Germany) and the society achieves a sense of unity by combining against that person or group, expelling them violently from their midst, and then telling a religious mythology justifying their actions. This practice persists over time, for the society is never able to completely eradicate tensions within itself, due to the maintenance of rivalrous desire, when one person wants what another person has.

Girard describes this contagion of scandal as the way of the world, and sees the Satan, the ‘lord of this world’ as that force which seeks to reproduce scandal, the taking of offence – for it is in the shared nature of the offence taking that the social solidarity is affirmed and reinforced. A society has a vested interest in ensuring the maintenance of scandal, for that is how the society itself is maintained. What such a society cannot accept is the continued existence of the source of scandal.

I believe this can be seen rather clearly in the case of the video posted to YouTube. When it was first uploaded, nobody took offence – hardly anyone even noticed! Yet certain authorities have a vested interest in shoring up the unity of Islamic societies over against the West, and so the West is then scapegoated as the source of the problems (internal tensions) experienced in Muslim countries. Thus it is Islamic sources which seek to generate a sense of scandal about the film – to great success – and at the cost of, amongst others, the life of the American Ambassador.

Christianity, however, begins with the scandal of the cross. That is, in the story of Jesus we have the unmasking of this process – a scapegoat who isn’t simply a victim, but one who is understands what is happening and who forgives those who take part in it. In other words, a victim who does not take offence. This “non-taking of offence” is central to Jesus’ entire ministry – indeed, he is regularly criticised for eating with sinners and tax collectors, and memorably criticises the religious authorities saying that the prostitutes will get to heaven before them! Through not taking offence, through not seeing religious pieties as things to be defended, Jesus changes the social dynamics and enables a non-violent reconciliation with the excluded to take place. That is the essence of the Kingdom – an unmasking of this process of scandal, scapegoating and violence, in order that a new common life, not built upon these elements, can come into being.

Thus, for a Christian, it is wrong to take offence, it is a sin. To take offence is to play the devil’s games, to enter into antagonism between the ‘righteous’ and the ‘unrighteous’, the ‘sinner’ and the ‘saved’. In letting go of any sense of offence, one is released from the mythological pressures embedded in all stories of ‘them and us’, and is set free to become the sort of person that God originally intended – living in peace and loving the neighbour. This is what lies behind the striking language in Matthew’s gospel (5:29), where Jesus commands us to pluck out our eyes if it “causes us to sin” – language taken up by a great many moralists seeking violent self-harm, as it is, of course, to scapegoat a part of oneself. The original language used in Greek, however, is related to this word skandalon and the passage means ‘if your eye is scandalized, pluck it out’ – in other words, if you are offended by something that you see you should blind yourself, for the fault lies in you, not in what is outside you.

This I find profoundly helpful, in terms of guiding my engagement and interest in the world. We are not to seek to preserve some sort of moral purity – that runs counter to Jesus’ own well documented practice. Nor are we to protest at being offended. If God does not take offence at the murder of his Son, how can we take offence at anything milder? It is precisely because of this bias against ‘offence’ embedded in Christianity from the beginning that Western society has grown up with this remarkable notion of free speech and free enquiry, which is what is now at stake in the confrontation with the Islamists. It is the unmasking of the sociological processes of scapegoating and sacred violence by Jesus on the cross that fundamentally enables the fruits of Western society that we presently enjoy – including, most especially, modern science. Girard puts it well: “The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit … is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text.”

Western civilisation is under threat and it is worth defending, but not by being offended by those who hate it, whether the Islamists, or even artists like Andres Serrano.