Monthly Archives: August 2016

Mad Men: Bad End (or, how bad it gets when scriptwriters lose the plot)

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So – we finished Mad Men last night…

SPOILERS after a picture of Joan and Don

mad-men-women

These last two series or so have been so incredibly frustrating. The writing quality seemed to have declined so much, with no integrity or care for character arcs.

So: Megan chops and changes between liking Don and hating him, with nary an explanation in between as to why she is changing.
Ted got divorced? When did that happen?
Everyone hates Don? Why? Oh, they’re friends again now – why?
Don – let’s give him an affair with a neighbour we’ve hardly seen, obviously his plot line is getting boring.

What seems to have happened is that a bunch of soap opera writers got drafted in with a brief to keep things interesting. In doing that – ie, in bringing in ‘incident’ to the narratives – all coherence and integrity for particular characters was sacrificed.

Grrr. It all started out so well.

What future for faith?

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What is the future of Christianity in this country?

The received narrative of secularism – which is the dominant form of understanding in our media and academies – argues that Christianity is simply the local example of the general form of irrationality known as ‘religion’, and that as the world progresses into a brighter future, so the levels of attachment to religious forms of belief will diminish, until all that is left is a memory to be investigated by historians.

That myth of secular progress is now only argued for by those who are ignorant of the true state of affairs. The idea that we all are marching – or being dragged – towards a faith-free future is now recognised to be itself a form of faith, in the sense of something for which there is no evidence but which provides great emotional relief to those who accept it!

The trouble with this narrative is that the contradictions of atheism are all around us, and the atheist/secular world-view is being comprehensively disproven with the headlines each and every day. We are faced with so many challenges that cannot be engaged with at a shallow level, but only at a level that takes religious belief seriously on its own terms, and which sees the religious impulse in human beings as worthy of respect.

This is why it is so essential for schools to teach religious studies – and, I would argue, if we are to preserve our historic culture, with all its benefits, we need to ensure that those studies are principally of Christianity. Without this we will not know who we are.

So I do not see the future as one that belongs to the atheist/secularist point of view. It lacks the capacity to fully engage human beings in a project of shared endeavour, and this is most seen by the correlation with the rate of reproduction of more atheistic societies. Put simply, the future belongs to those who turn up for it – and it’s the religious who are having children.

So if atheism is not the future, what about Islam? After all, if the future belongs to those who are having children now, aren’t we destined to be a much more Muslim nation in the coming decades? I suspect not.

The trouble with Islam is that it cannot cope with modernity. The principal root of Islamic terrorism today, which is the Saudi-based Salafi or Wahhabi form of Islam, has its roots in a reaction to the development of modernity in the West, to which it set itself in opposition. That opposition is what has led to the terrorist atrocities of today, as the fanatics seek to accomplish by terror what they could not accomplish by reason or invention.

Sadly, this form of Islam is inherently self-destructive, and will simply ensure that the Middle East descends into a vortex of violence from which Islamic culture will find it ever more difficult to emerge. The West is already moving away from its dependence upon oil, which is what has propped up the prosperity of the Muslim world for so long (such as it is) and it is unclear to me that there are the intellectual and mercantile resources available upon which an alternative economy might be made to stand. No, I think it much more likely that Islam will suffer an existential crisis and begin a long slow death after its homelands have been destroyed.

So the future for faith lies almost certainly with a form of Christianity. I have no doubt that Christianity will become the majority world faith some time in the next thirty or forty years – I regard that as already ‘baked in’ due to demography and the rapid growth of churches in Asia, especially China (where there are more committed Christians already than in Western Europe).
Where I am more unclear is what that Christianity might look like in this country, for we are far more steeped in secularist thinking that almost anywhere else in the world (Scandinavia might be the only place that ‘beats’ us).

When Rome was breaking down and starting to decay as a culture, it was a small and marginal sect on the edges of that Empire that ended up providing the religious belief structure for the next several centuries. Nobody at the centre of Rome would have predicted it, and it may well be that something similar happens in Western society over the coming decades.

My suspicion is that the faith of the future will be the one that is most able to help people navigate a highly technological and urban society in such a way that their deepest human needs are still met. This will undoubtedly still involve meaningful human (face to face) contact for that is how we have been made, and if we do not participate in such things then we will suffer from an unfulfilled longing all our lives.

People will still need guidance on how to live their lives, and helped to navigate the emotional storms of human living in a way that enables proper integrity and fulfilment. It is because the Western church in general, and the Church of England in particular, has lost sight of this part of religious faith that we have been pushed to the margins and reduced to emotionalism and navel-gazing. This too will pass.

Of one thing I am certain. In a hundred years time there will still be people worshipping at St Peter and St Paul’s, sharing bread and wine and telling the greatest story ever told – simply because it’s true. We have, after all, been there doing it for 1500 years or so thus far, despite all that the world has thrown at us.

On a more personal note I have been writing this Rector’s Reckoning almost without interruption since March 2010, and like all good things it needs to come to an end, so this is the last one. My aim has always been to make people think, in which task I hope I have had some success. Thank you for reading, and God Bless.

Cultural discrimination: the rights of British women

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I came under some criticism following my last article on “one land, one law, one language”. In particular I was challenged to identify what the classical British values look like.

Sometimes this sort of questioning is nihilistic – a request for some sort of conceptually pure vision that can then be academically picked apart endlessly, as a way of not engaging with the presenting issues themselves. It is a way of muddying the waters and avoiding discussion.

Yet answering the question about values is also an opportunity to spell out a little more about what the “one land, one law, one language” vision acutally looks like in practice.

So I want to talk about women, specifically British women, and even more specifically the idea in British society that women have rights, rights to determine their own paths in life in order that they might be enabled to become all that they might be.

These rights have been built up over many years, through progressive political battles – the rights to property, to vote, to be educated and so on. One key right is the ability that women in our society have to make their own decisions over their sexuality and fertility. That is, they have the right to make decisions about what to wear, who to associate with, who to have sex with, when and how to conceive a child and so on.

This is where the sort of cultural clash that concerns me manifests itself clearly. For there are other cultures that deny these rights to women; where, for example, what clothes are worn, what men are associated with, who to marry, whether to have children and so on – these are matters decided by the dominant relative male, normally the father.

Consider the recent case of Amina al-Jeffery, a girl born in Wales to a Saudi Arabian father. When she was 17 she was taken to Jeddah by her rather, purportedly for a holiday, and then placed under and effective ‘house arrest’. Her father is trying to exercise control over Amina in accordance with his own cultural norms – yet Amina grew up in Wales, has a Welsh accent and follows Welsh norms – she kissed a boy, thus displaying ‘un-Islamic behaviour’, and was taken away into exile as a result.

The High Court has now ruled that Amina should be returned to Britain by 11th September. This is good, but will Boris Johnson actually act in accordance with the High Court? I rather doubt it, simply because we know that the Saudi Arabian government is allowed to get away with all sorts of terrors simply because they pay for large military contracts like Al-Yamamah. As is so often the case, it is not just a matter of the law but of the will to apply the law in particular cases, in particular ways.

This is simply one example of the much wider trend related on the one hand to ‘honour’ killings in this country – that is, those women who choose differently to the dominant male of their families are murdered in cold blood – and the systematic child abuse and rape of white women in this country, in staggering numbers, as with Rotherham. In sentencing some of the perpetrators of the Rotherham case, Judge Gerald Clifton told the men “All of you treated the victims as though they were worthless and beyond any respect – they were not part of your community or religion.” Both forms of criminality arise out of a rejection of the British value that grants women a significant measure of authority and autonomy in their own lives, equivalent to that enjoyed by men.

It is clear that there is a particular strain of South Asian Muslim culture which comprehensively rejects our approach, and which has taken advantage of a politically correct culture to embed itself in several of our cities. So do we actually believe that these hard-won rights are worth protecting? Is a woman born in this country entitled to the protection of the British state when she tries to assert British cultural values? Or do we look the other way out of fear of being called racist?

This is the dilemma of the politically correct – which of these two competing values are worth defending? Do you virtue-signal solidarity with women or with minorities? Reality is forcing the choice. We either say that we must discriminate between different cultures, in order to protect British women from the violent exploitation of these minority cultures; or we say that it is always wrong to discriminate culturally, and condemn those British women to yet more decades of abuse.

For me the choice is clear – I want my daughters to grow up in a place that respects their full humanity and their capacity to make informed choices for themselves. That seems to me to be a ‘British value’. The same thing applies to other questions of gender and sexuality – I don’t want to live in a society where gay people are afraid of admitting who they are, or where trans people are scared of being beaten senseless by morons. Yet if we do nothing, that is a present reality for some and an increasing reality for others.

I want to live in a place which is tolerant and accepting, where every single human being is enabled to make decisions about their own lives in a way that makes it most probable that they will be able to live full and fulfilling lives. That’s a British value worth defending, but if we are to defend it, we need to wake up and realise just how undermined those values have become. We need to discriminate culturally and say – some cultures are worse than others, and we choose the better one.

A Jeremy Creake article for the Courier

The grounds of our identity

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Have you ever heard Mersea described as the “easternmost inhabited island” in the UK? I know I have. The only trouble with such a statement is that it isn’t true. Horsey Island, in the Walton backwaters, is also inhabited, and is several miles further East from our blessed isle (Horsey is featured in the Arthur Ransome novel Secret Water).

Why mention this? Simply because when Mersea gets described in such a way it seems to be a source of some pride, as if such a geographical feature was important, rather than simply a random fact.

Why is this (false) fact something that gets repeated so often? I wonder if it is because we have lost a sense of what is truly important in our lives, and so we clutch at random bits of information about ourselves to plug the gap.

After all, this is what children do as they grow up. When I was much younger my bedroom wall was plastered with posters, often of Marvel superheroes. The choice of which character to emphasise through such a display felt like a way of asserting my own identity. Such ‘hero-worship’ definitely has a place, as it helps to form a child’s own identity.

Of course, when such adoration persists into adulthood it becomes more of a sign of immaturity. By the time we have reached physical adulthood we are meant to have put away childish things and instead be ready to take part in the shared conversation which is our culture, bringing to it those things which are unique to our own identity.

By that time, all being well, we will have found a sense of who we are that does not depend on trivial, accidental facts – like how tall we are, what hair colour we have, where we were born and so on – but rather on substantial elements of character and virtue, such as a capacity for courage or hard work, or the ability to show mercy and compassion to those in need.

Of course, I am writing this from a Christian point of view. An excellent example of what I am describing was shown recently by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after he discovered that his biological father was not the person that Welby had previously assumed. Welby wrote this, “I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes.”

Fundamental to the Christian view of the world is the understanding that what the world can offer is of no ultimate importance. Worldly values are for the Christian only ever of intermediate importance, they are means to ends rather than ends in themselves. This includes all forms of material wealth but also all that connects with our material bodies, what St Paul describes as ‘the flesh’ – thus, all the things about ourselves over which we have no control. Rather, what matters for the Christian is who we become through our choices. Do we choose to become more grateful and more gracious, or do we choose to become more cynical and sinful?

As I say regularly when I take a funeral, “We brought nothing in to the world, and we can take nothing out”. What that truth obscures, though, is that our souls do pass on, and our souls bear the indelible marks of our choices in this life. When Christians talk about Heaven and Hell, this is what is meant – that if our choices tend to the good, then our souls will have been enabled to express themselves in this life. If, however, our choices tend to the bad, then in just the same way will our souls have been marred or defaced.

This is one of the most important meanings of the resurrection. All the worldly powers had rejected Jesus – the religious authorities had despised him for his teaching, the political authorities executed him for his insubordination, the crowds cried out for his blood because he had disappointed their hopes. What they then chose to destroy was Jesus’ body. The resurrection is God’s way of saying: the religious authorities are wrong, the political authorities are wrong, the crowd is wrong – Jesus was right! More than this, the resurrection is showing that those who can control the body cannot control the soul, and in the end it is the soul that matters and the soul which is vindicated.

To put that in a different way, it is the soul that determines who we are in the sight of God. The soul is that part of ourselves which is unique, irreplaceable and not subject to decay – that is, it is eternal, it shares in the nature of God, it is the light which draws us on into truth, goodness and beauty.

To walk in the light, for the Christian, means to seek the good, to pursue the Kingdom of God, to combat injustice, to fight oppression, to exercise mercy and forgiveness and seek reconciliation between enemies. These are the things by which we are assessed in eternity. We will not be assessed by how much material wealth we have accumulated but by how much we have shared; we will not be assessed by how famous we are but by how much we have loved.

This is not easy, especially in our present society, which shouts so loudly that the opposite is true – that it is what we own that makes us who we are, that the acclamation of the crowd is what validates us. How then, do Christians gain the strength to pursue the good against such a strong headwind of cultural pressure?

I believe it is because we know for certain that we are loved, loved irrespective of anything we might be able to do or achieve. There is a feeling of absolute safety that can come from being held by God, an assurance that nothing the world can do can touch what is most essential to who we are. More than this, this assurance is bound up with a sense of knowing and being fully known, that all that is most essential to who we are can never be damaged by anyone else.

Our identity, in other words, is found in a relationship with the one who created all things, including us. When that source is acknowledged then we do not need to bolster our identity with random facts about who we are. Rather than identifying Mersea by some spurious geographical locator, let’s instead seek an identity for Mersea which is soulful – that here is a place where we look after each other, where the old are cared for and not left alone, where young people have the opportunity to fully express their talents, where we belong to each other and enable each other to be creative and fully human. That’s something worth working for.