In this second of two blogs for the new decade, Director of Research Chris Baker identifies the role that religions can play in Ulrich Beck’s ‘metamorphosis’ of society.
In last week’s blog, I took Ulrich Beck’s idea of metamorphosis as a central idea for trying to understand where we are at the start of the new decade. His thesis is that something completely new and different is emerging (or metamorphosing) out of the rapid disintegration and extinction of our civilisations and ecosystems brought about by climate catastrophe—a new consciousness and politics based on what he calls a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’. He defines this outlook as a global-centric perspective, an ethical and political willingness to open up new spaces and cultures of cross-border co-operation and civic responsibility.
In an earlier book, entitled ‘A God of One’s Own’ (2011), Beck reflects, like several secular social scientists and philosophers, on the strange re-emergence of religion as a global, political and cultural force towards the end of the 20th century. Beck detects in religion—particularly in Protestantism—a collusion with neoliberal capitalism in its appeal to increasingly individualised understandings of salvation and the ability to create a market place in commoditised religious goods, tailor-made to one’s own worldviews and desires.
He also recognises, however, the collective power of religions to radically change systems for the better given the billions of people who affiliate with a religious identity (currently 84% and rising) and the material and financial assets religion controls. Yet a positive outcome will require the willingness and ability of religion to preach a cosmopolitan message, and not a universalist one. Universalism, says Beck, is essentially a form of fundamentalism and doctrinal purity that insists, usually through the use of coercive violence, on a single narrative and identity to which everyone else must conform to varying degrees. But, he argues, religion can also present a cosmopolitanism, which ‘is based on the actually existing historical impurity of world religions: the recognition that they are intertwined, that they are both one and the same’. This viewpoint, Beck suggests, enables faith traditions ‘to enrich their own religiosity, mutually reinforce one another, and in this way … practice and develop anew the public role of religion in the postsecular modern era.’
So, how might we begin to understand this new ‘public role’ as we journey into this vital decade for the future viability of the earth’s civilisations? I would like to propose two dimensions to this new public role.
The first is spaces of dissent. This week, the UK government disingenuously identified the promulgation of climate extinction as a radicalising political doctrine (on a par with religious and far-right terrorist ideologies), though they stopped short of actually labelling climate extinction activists as terrorists. This move, however, is of a piece with the tactics of increasingly authoritarian regimes across the West, from the US, the UK, China and other European States, whereby lawful, democratic and peaceful public protest is being supressed. Religious leaders must increasingly be prepared to call out these legislative tactics, and lead by example in joining peaceful public protests in defence of human and animal rights and the freedom of public and journalistic expression. Part of the growing suspicion or indifference towards institutional religion in our society is that people are looking for alternative narratives and movements to join that highlight inclusion and connectedness, not exclusion and othering. Much of this political search for cosmopolitan alternatives has an overtly spiritual dimension. The apparent inability or unwillingness of the church to appear to be able to speak out beyond its own housekeeping issues (usually involving issues of sexual behaviour or identity) leaves the secular world bemused, but also disappointed.
The spiritual dimension of much political activism leads to the second public role of religion: that of firekeeper. This image emerged from a recent, and packed, event I attended exploring the Deep Adaptation framework, which aims to prepare humankind for the deep psychological, spiritual and cultural realities of climate catastrophe. Irrespective of whether you endorse the premises of the Deep Adaptation movement or are sceptical of them, there is a huge resurgence in interest and demand to reconnect with older and more traditional sources of wisdom, ritual and community. These include Sufi, Buddhist and indigenous traditions, but also feature the Abrahamic faiths.
People are understanding afresh that a sense or resilience and grounded hope can be nurtured and deepened by a connection with spiritual and religious perspectives. Institutional religion has a vital role in curating public and accessible spaces where these issues can be explored—and also has much to learn by listening to and participating in these debates. Religious and spiritual traditions reflect the glowing embers that will contain vital elements of Beck’s metamorphosis, and which will need to be breathed upon and nurtured in the dark and troubled days that lie ahead.
These two roles, when combined, allude to the vision of religion that my friend and colleague at the Foundation, Revd Dr John Reader, is developed in a forthcoming Temple Tract on the work of the French political philosopher Bernard Stiegler and, in particular, his thinking on the role that digital technology is already having on human identity and consciousness. Stiegler suggests that our ubiquitous tethering, indeed addiction, to the digital so overloads us that we lose the ability to really desire, to dream and imagine beyond those frameworks devised for us by the Big Six technology companies. John asks: how do we construct a new public in this context, so that we no longer sacrifice our freedom, our democracy and even our planet? Rather than inanely copying digital tropes in a desperate attempt to be ‘current’, the role of religion and the church, John says, could be vital to the construction of this new public by ‘assembling, linking, connecting, gathering, and creating those alternative times and spaces for engagement’.
Here, I suggest, is a five-fold framework for exploring the role a cosmopolitan religion can play in shaping and bringing to birth the metamorphosis so compellingly identified by Beck: assembling, linking, connecting, gathering and creating. It is a contribution to the spiritual and political act of resistance to the aftermath that is already upon us.
In this first of two blogs for the new decade, Director of Research Chris Baker reflects on what comes next with the help of Ulrich Beck’s understanding of metamorphosis.
Happy New Year and—it being the first year of a new Decade—Happy New Decade!
Of course, the national media have been making much of this fact, with several commentators and leader writers confidently predicting a post-Brexit sunny upland of economic growth and prosperity—a return, no less, to the ‘Roaring 20s’. Am I the only one feeling somewhat disturbed at this parallel?
The current revival of the stage version of The Great Gatsby in London captures the quintessentially dark paradox at the heart of the 1920s. The eponymous hero, Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire from illegal drug stores, is portrayed as a moral and ethical dark star, corrupting and ruining those who yearn to be in his ‘court’ of summer evening parties on Long Island. Beneath the undoubted glamour and elegance of the age—art deco, travel, fashion, jazz, urban and architectural design, all of which represented a yearning for human optimism after the nihilist horrors of the First World War—a deep narcissism and fatalism was festering. The glittering excess of this decade ended in the global financial crash of 1929, the Great Depression and the subsequent rise of political totalitarianism which ultimately led to renewed global conflict and holocaust. There is, I am afraid, every reason for seeing grim, not happy, parallels.
In the days leading up to this new decade we have seen: the return of anti-Semitic graffiti daubed on London streets; continued public attacks on Jewish and Muslims citizens; and the horrendous bushfire infernos claiming lives in Australia. All these events should serve as adrenal jolts to the body politic to fundamentally change its direction and rhetoric. But will the jolts be too little and too late to convulse us into effective and decisive action? It is easy to be fatalistic and pessimistic on this point.
This Christmas I received a copy of Ulrich Beck’s last book, The Metamorphosis of the World, an incomplete manuscript due to his sudden and untimely death in 2015. Beck was a highly original sociologist and political theorist whose work speculates on the future of human societies in light of high impact events such as climate change and globalisation.
His prescient thinking and research in the late 1980s unerringly predicts our current ecological and political crises with his concept of the ‘world risk society’. This describes how the increasingly interconnected nature of global systems means that global ‘bads’ such as climate catastrophe, disease epidemics and financial collapse are more likely to happen as ‘good’ intentions get lost within chaotic and unaccountable feedback loops that can no longer be regulated or controlled.
Despite this prognosis there remains a fundamental optimism to his work. Metamorphosis is no exception. The sheer speed and magnitude of the challenges facing us in the current zeitgeist means that traditional and linear ideas of change such as ‘evolution’ or ‘revolution’ are no longer adequate. Rather, ‘metamorphosis’ describes an era in which the old order has catastrophically failed and something totally new is emerging—what Beck describes as ‘a different reality and a different mode of being in the world, seeing the world and doing politics’.
All modern institutions are failing in the face of climate risk, as are categories such as ‘progress’, ‘control’ or positive and negative side effects. In this situation two things become necessary. The first, says Beck, is to insist on failure, a move that creates a new point of reference for a better world. The second is to adopt what he calls a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ which involves moving from a nation-centric to a global-centric perspective, and an ethical and political willingness to open up new spaces and cultures of cross-border co-operation and civic responsibility. The good news, as far as he is concerned, is that this metamorphosis is already underway as a lived, personal and local reality as people radically adapt their cognitive and spiritual resources in line with a cosmopolitan outlook—what he calls a ‘declaration of interdependence’. His visionary conclusion is that climate catastrophe is a metamorphosis that is good for the world, since it contains within it the very ‘navigation system’ by which the earth’s human and non-human inhabitants may secure a new and hitherto unimagined co-existence.
Of course, nothing is certain. Yet, this prophetically grounded view of change should profoundly influence our political, economic and spiritual agendas, and the extent to which this decade can be won or lost for future generations.
In a previous volume, A God of One’s Own (2011), Beck identifies the huge impact global religion and belief can play in this metamorphosis. He argues that the future of the planet now hinges on the extent to which religions can marshal their billions of followers, as well as their material and financial resources, to act as cosmopolitan global actors. The evidence to date is mixed to say the least. In the second part of this blog, I will outline the missional and political challenges for theology and religion in the light of Beck’s radical call to arms.
Chris Baker reflects on his recent trip to Denmark and wonders whether a harbourside bathing house might already be providing the perfect meeting point between the urban, the social and the religious.
Last week, I was invited by the Danish Lutheran Church in the Diocese of Aarhus to contribute to a series of strategic discussions between the university, the diocese and the municipality about the future development of the city.
As Denmark’s second biggest city, Aarhus is a post-industrial port with serious aspirations to be a global hub of both investment and culture. Already, the docklands area—in a series of visual tropes already familiar to those of us living in East London—is being rapidly transformed into a series of highly desirable and ‘iconic’ postmodern housing zones, with expansive views across the North Sea.
The discussions I attended focussed on the role of the church in these developments. Much of the conversation revolved around the proud Lutheran heritage of the city, epitomised by the looming presence of the beautiful cathedral which is still at its heart.
But people were genuinely interested in finding out whether the church—and indeed religion more broadly—should have a more significant and strategic role in defining the values and the ethos of these new urban spaces. As part of my visit, I was taken to a ‘postmodern bathing house’ situated on the edge of one of the new developments, with a prime site on the harbour. Bathing huts hark back to a long-running Danish tradition of taking a daily swim in the frigid North Sea as part of a regime of health and fitness. The Lutheran Church, instead of committing large funds for a traditional church building, has taken the strategic decision to create an open space in the form of this new bathing hut.
The interior of the bathing house was furnished in plain pine, with space for about 20 people to meet and a kitchen facility attached. It stands out from the other bathing huts that have been built on account of a slightly higher roof. I spoke to the community development worker attached to the project whose job it was to advertise the hut to the new population living there. She spoke of the importance, and indeed the freedom, of having an open space with an open agenda. Since its launch four months ago, the bathing house has already become an important site for young people looking for somewhere to study, to create art and music, and to discuss wider issues of belonging and identity. It has also a popular venue for impromptu unplugged concerts by local musicians.
The community worker speculated that the space was attracting sections of the population who would not ordinarily have darkened the doors of a church, but who were nevertheless interested in exploring questions of spiritual belief, identity and culture. For her, the bathing house was a space for individual or small-group reflection and engagement; an exercise in belonging and place-making. And she was optimistic that these new points of contact and searching could ripple out and up into both church and wider society.
It seemed to me that this was, potentially, a successful way of linking the religious to the urban and the social in ways that encompass both traditional forms of belonging, but also engage with what we know, from current research, about the extensive searching for spiritual meaning and connection amongst those who are no longer formally affiliated to church traditions. Later, at a more formal event with leaders of the municipality, university and diocese, I reflected on my response to the bathing house, connecting it to a recent article written by Chris Ives, a Geographer at the University of Nottingham. He is currently developing the idea of ‘inside-out sustainability’. What he wants us to recognise is the significance and power of our own beliefs, values, worldviews to affect our behaviour. This intimate connection between our values and our behaviour means that we can also think of values as playing a key role in how we change and shape our systems.
Ives talks about our ‘inner world’ as being a point of ‘deep leverage’, which we should apply to systems at all levels of their production. Currently, he says, the values that shape our individual lives, as well as those of our institutions, lie hidden below the surface; they are subterranean. His view is that we should consciously allow our values—because they are points of deep leverage that encompass the wider picture, as well as shaping our behaviour—to seep upwards, as it were, into all aspects of the decision making process, so that the inner world has a much greater traction with the outer world that institutions produce.
And so, I wondered if this was what was already happening in Aarhus. The fact that, at the very highest level in the municipality, there was a conscious debate about the role of religion in shaping planning priorities for the future showed that there was already a successful rippling out of understanding about the importance of beliefs and values from the micro to the macro. This will increase the possibility that Aarhus will be sustainable in the future, both environmentally but also socially—because its planning will be deeply rooted in a longer-term and more inclusive vision of what it is to build not only a new city, but also a good city.
In a virtuoso William Temple Foundation annual lecture last night, Archbishop Justin Welby laid out a realistic but hopeful assessment of the state of the nation, the place of the church and religion, and the prospects for a revitalised social and public sphere. It was a lecture brimming with intellectual and theological ideas, but also characterised by down-to-earth and personal anecdotes.
The lecture’s wide-ranging reference points were held together throughout by a metaphor, derived from Archbishop Justin’s earlier career, of an oil rig in tumultuous seas with the ‘barometer rapidly falling’. The key to structures like oil rigs surviving raging storms is to maintain an equilibrium between stability (or inner coherence) and flexibility—between anchors and movement. Too much rigidity from the anchors tying it down, and the system will not be able to bend; too much flexibility, and the structure will be unable to withstand the forces placed upon it.
Of course, this metaphor could apply to church institutions, like the Church of England itself, but it could also refer to other political, public, and private institutions—and indeed nations. The Archbishop’s analysis was that too many years of complacency, fostered by the success of the post war-welfare state and Bretton Woods arrangements—anchors which provided a sense of stability and order—have led us to forget the importance of anchor institutions and ideas, and how they can represent things beyond themselves, like the notion of a more common good.
But the global financial crash of 2008/9 changed everything. When that storm came, the resilience in our institutions wasn’t readied, or its need anticipated, and we have been playing catch-up ever since. Into this vacuum, Archbishop Justin reflected, we have seen the rise of both nationalism and populism which have become narrow in their scope and intimidatory intent. Part of the rise of these narratives is attributable to broader changes in technology and the growth of digital and social media. At its best, social media creates spaces for people to explore, discuss and organise. But at their worst, these spaces expose us to ridicule and abuse that sees ‘diversity as a menace and disagreement as a threat’, in ways that are increasingly unaccountable. The Archbishop finished this compelling analysis with reference to two key thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt, who argue that the ‘will to power’, and the categorisation of another as your enemy, are essential to the formation of identity. These ideas now have dangerous social resonances at a time when people feel their sense of stability and identity to be most under threat.
In the final third of his lecture, Archbishop Justin asked: ‘Can Faith be an anchor in a world of stormy change?’. The answer is Yes, provided it can be alive to the possibilities of ‘traditioned innovation’—returning to core basics, but in ways reflecting what Archbishop Michael Currie refers to when he says: ‘Often change is not about discarding the past so much as revisiting it in a new way for a new time’. For Archbishop Justin, this refers to three core tasks that lie at the heart of Christianity’s call to engage with the public square.
The first is prayer, which ‘relates the common good as we experience it back to the source and origin of all good, namely God and which places all our relationships into a common and wider humanity’.
Second, living out the intent of our prayers as a form of embedded community in ways that model authentic alternatives to our ‘hyper-individualised modernity’ through recognising, in the words of the recently departed Jean Vanier ‘that we are strongest when we recognise our interdependence, not our independence’. The role of the church, along with the temple, the synagogue, and the mosque, the Archbishop said, echoing the words of William Temple, is to exist as the ‘fundamental intermediate institution’.
Finally, there is a mandate to live out individual and community expressions of prophetic action; speaking out against injustice, and symbolically enacting alternative Kingdom values. The Archbishop highlighted the recent intervention by Pope Francis as a good example, when he kissed the feet of the leaders of the warring factions in South Sudan.
What particularly struck me, however, was that the Archbishop never once mentioned Brexit. And yet this was the stunning achievement of his lecture. He spoke ‘into’ Brexit without referring to it, with compassion, clarity, and vision, by recognising that the sources of hope and reconciliation we need as anchors far outweigh in their import, necessity, and timelessness, the temporary albeit very dangerous realities that Brexit embodies at this time, not only for the UK, but also for Europe as a whole.
I for one caught a welcome glimpse of a post-Brexit future. For this reason, this lecture was able to raise its gaze to deeper and longer lasting sources of ethics and values in the service of that future, and, above all, to practical sources and expressions of hope by which we can re-imagine Britain, and a more common good.
Chris Baker, Director of Research for the William Temple Foundation, argues that Brexit has already happened psychologically. It is time, he says, to follow William Temple’s lead and work on re-imagining our national future.
As I write this blog, it is clear that the UK is about to enter the most momentous period of political and constitutional upheaval in its life for 50 years. Our future place and role in the world is profoundly uncertain. Most scenarios promise economic and political isolation at least in the short to medium term, even if Mrs May manages to get her version of a ‘softer Brexit’ through Parliament, which, at present, looks unlikely.
Although it seems to have come upon us from nowhere, Brexit has had a long gestation, built up over many years of complacency and lack of vision, both nationally and across Europe. The last decade of ideologically and economically misjudged austerity by successive UK governments, on the heels of the 2008 financial crash, has exacerbated regional and financial gulfs, and steadily extinguished hope and opportunity outside the London bubble. As the latest Joseph Rowntree report on poverty highlights, 30% of our children and 16% of our pensioners now live in poverty, whilst 47% of working age adults on low incomes spend more than a third of their income on housing costs. These are truly horrendous statistics that have been allowed to creep ever further upwards as we have become embroiled and fatalistically entranced by the whole Brexit sideshow.
But beneath the technical outcomes and debates about the ‘sort of Brexit’ we will have to confront, there are deeper fissures and ‘leavings’ that have already taken place. The damage to our national and local sense of wellbeing has already been wrought. We have already, over the years, psychologically ‘exited’ the country that we thought we knew—a country that we understood to have worked reasonably well. We have already Brexited the UK, never mind Europe or the rest of the world. We have lost touch with who we once were, and we no longer have a sustaining vision of the sort of society and nation we aspire to be.
To that extent, the technical dimensions of Brexit are actually less potentially damaging to us and our European neighbours than the psychological ones. By which I mean that if and when we manage to lurch to a more stable economic equilibrium at some point after March 29th, if we have not addressed the fundamental question of who we are, what we aspire to be, and what our sources of inspiration are, then we will be doomed to live out the toxic legacy of Brexit far longer and at much greater cost to our psychic and national wellbeing.
Given the severity of where we are at as a nation, it is not at all fanciful to remind ourselves of what William Temple did in 1941, at the height of the darkest days of the second world war. He dared to imagine, even then, a process of national debate about the sort of nation that should be rebuilt out of the ashes of an old order that was bent on propagating violence and fear in the form of totalitarianism. In 1941, he convened the Malvern conference which drew together, in the blacked-out landscape of threatened aerial bombardment, artists, writers, scientists, economists as well as the serried ranks of the Church of England. Entitled ‘The Life of the Church and the Order of Society’ the conference met ‘to consider how far the Christian faith and principles based upon it afford guidance for action in the world today’; to ‘encourage Christians to think about the general implications of these fundamental Christian principles in relation to contemporary needs,’ and via middle axioms, ‘to think out actual political programmes or support those drawn up by others which in their judgement give effects to these fundamental principles’. (1941, viii). Temple’s six middle axioms addressed issues such as life-long education and decent housing and working conditions, and, as we know, became the basis of the universal and comprehensive welfare state (a term coined by Temple himself) that was developed by Beveridge and implemented by the post-war Labour government of Clement Atlee.
The purpose of reminding us all of Temple’s great work at a time of national crisis nearly 80 years ago is not to wallow in pointless nostalgia, but to highlight two things that seem particularly pertinent to where we are now. The first is that Temple didn’t think or act sequentially: he didn’t wait for the crisis of the Second World War to pass before he undertook his critical and strategic re-imagining. He took control of the narrative and the process in the midst of the crisis; and we must do the same now.
Second, the idea of a national conversation focusing not on technical solutions, but on fundamental questions of moral purpose, identity and imagination could be helpfully resurrected. Today, of course, the style and constituency needs to change: we need all faiths and none, all walks of life and experiences, and especially the perspectives of the young whose future is so directly impacted by the narrow-sightedness of current debates. Mrs May has mooted the possibility of a new Festival of Britain in 2022 to restore the narrative of hope and energy that the 1951 attempted to do after the long and meandering recovery following WW2. But we need to sow the seeds of a new narrative now if this festival is to be a success.
Who should curate such a conversation and where will the large resources needed come from? The Archbishop of Canterbury, very much in the spirit of Temple, has begun the conversation decisively in his book published earlier this year entitled Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope. Its title echoes a Malvern-type colloquium that the William Temple Foundation hosted at St Georges House, Windsor in 2017 (albeit on a small and experimental scale). We are delighted that Archbishop Justin Welby will continue the debate at our next annual lecture on 13th May 2019 at Lambeth Palace entitled Reimagining Britain: Faith and the Common Good.
These are important first steps. But we need to build the momentum over the next 12 months if we are to turn the pain of our self-imposed exile from ourselves, epitomised by Brexit, into a new opportunity for rebirth and renewal for the sake of the many and not the few.
Professor Chris Baker on an ingenious Hollywood-inspired fundraising campaign outside his local church.
St Mary’s, Stoke Newington (where I am a regular attender), like a lot of churches and faith communities in the capital, does a huge amount of social and welfare outreach. Our rather battered and frayed ‘church rooms’ as we euphemistically call them, play host to a weekly food bank, a winter night shelter and a migrant advice centre. This is on top of hosting innumerable community groups (Weightwatchers, dancing classes, choir rehearsals) needing access to affordable public space, of which there is less and less due to cuts in council funding. The already heavy demand on our facilities has grown exponentially in the last two to three years. All areas are packed to overflowing and groan under the weight of the demand. With this increasingly unsustainable situation in mind, we have embarked on an ambitious programme to raise a very substantial sum of money to upgrade the premises that will allow us to continue to meet, but also expand, our provision for the local community.
Part of the fund-raising strategy has been to erect three massive red billboards outside the church, which is blessed to be in a very prominent position in the heart of Stoke Newington. The idea is clearly borrowed from the Oscar winning move Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri. If you have not seen the movie, the plot revolves around a grief-stricken mother hiring three billboards outside a small-town to bring attention to the fact that her daughter’s brutal murder remains unsolved. She blames the local police department’s lack of action on a combination of ineptitude and lack of interest. This simple act at the start of the movie exposes the fault lines of division and resentment in a small-town community that lead to violence and retribution, but also, in the end, a measure of reconciliation and forgiveness.
The message on the three billboards outside St Mary’s church read: 6167 homeless in Hackney; Shelter and Foodbank Here; Be informed, Get Involved, Donate, with the address of the information and fund-raising page. The messages are designed to be as stark as possible (as in the original movie) and to draw attention not only to the welfare work already being done on the church premises, but to encourage a wider sense of knowledge and ownership within the local community around a commonly-shared problem. The amount of interest has been phenomenal on several levels. One simply has to watch the reactions as people walk pass the billboards and the message slowly drops. Out come the phones and people take pictures and talk to each other about it in very animated way. People engage you in conversation about it, as I get my haircut or buy food in the local stores. There has been a strong and positive interest from both local and national media. And yes, slowly but surely donations are beginning to come in from strangers and passers-by with no connection to the church, as well as many offers to volunteer.
Now a number of local factors may explain the success of this campaign. There is a vibrant existing base of volunteers and organisers beyond the church congregation who are involved its social welfare and outreach programmes, perhaps around 100. They will see the message as an endorsement and validation of their commitment, and it will make others want to join in. Local businesses willingly donate food and free resources for the church to use. The local church school has huge engagement with poorer families in the borough, and so is well networked in to the local fabric. In other words there is a resilient and well-established local web of relationships and good will which provided a solid base from which the message and sentiments of the billboards can be proclaimed.
But it feels as though there is more behind this resonating message than some well-earned and positive local PR. The campaign seems to cut through the ongoing miasma of anxiety, uncertainty and fear that currently dominates our local and national life. This campaign has to be seen against the backdrop of the resurgence of gun and knife crime within North and East London, which seems to many to herald a return to the bad old days of 1980s. The decline in public services and the so-called welfare safety net which has led to the visible return of homelessness, poor mental health and poverty on our streets. There is the ongoing spectre of Grenfell, the anxiety of migrants in the light of the recent Windrush scandal and current Brexit uncertainties for EU residents, many of whom live in Stoke Newington and attend the church. On top of that, there is a general unease about the future cohesion of Britain as a nation, the future of Europe, and the peace and stability of the wider world.
The billboards, it seems to me, offer a stark invitation to local people to take active steps to take back some sort of agency and control, and come together in order to create a sense of hope and stability. It’s a message clearly comes from a religious setting, but its secular resonances help it come across as an invitation for everyone to be involved and co-create an alternative narrative of hospitality, care and compassion.
The context in which these billboards are being received, with their direct and stark appeal, feels more politicised than it would have been even five years ago. But this mix of the spiritual, the political and the local seems to be tapping into a hunger for political change – not so much based on ideology, but on an appeal to an ethical, emotional and even spiritual dimension of our citizenship that has been steadily eroded and undermined by 40 years of ‘me-first’ politics.
The impact on the community is palpable. The impact on our church is also palpable. More and more people, especially young couples and singles in their 20s and 30s have joined the church in recent years. They want to belong to an institution that welcomes their gifts and idealism and provides them with the chance to offer something back to other people, without a price tag or a piece of meaningless and cruel bureaucracy attached to it. As in the movie, the three billboards point to a dark and disturbing image of the sort of society we have become. They are also perhaps, the means by which new networks of reconciliation, dialogue, communication and hope can emerge.
For more information on St Mary’s, or to donate to the church, please visit stmaryscentren16.org
Professor Chris Baker reviews Justin Welby’s new book, Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope.
Today sees the publication of Archbishop Justin Welby’s much anticipated contribution to the post-Brexit debate. In it, he calls the country to take this historic moment, long in the making but brutal in its sudden execution, to radically reimagine the sort of society we want Britain to be. Only this re-imagination, he believes, will help us as a nation identify the right sorts of values, and therefore the right sorts of policies, by which we can attain a national rebirth. As a new tone of sober realism begins to sink in, undermining the more stridently jingoistic visions of Brexit, this book is a much-needed source of both intelligent balm, but also a stirring call to moral and policy reimagination.
The book is cleverly and almost seamlessly constructed around a series of triads. The road map to the UK’s spiritual and political rebirth, says Welby, lies in the interaction between three sets of values; community, courage and stability, each of which have three or four ‘sub-values’. So, for example, stability is underpinned by the values of reconciliation, resilience and sustainability.
These interweaving sets of values are then applied to three areas of policy that Welby rightly identifies as key to Britain’s rebirth; namely health, education and housing, whilst also feeding into debates about how these policy areas resource intermediate institutions such as the family, businesses and schools/universities. Foreign policy also needs to be shaped by these values in relation to global challenges such as migration, and climate change.
These values are themselves held in creative tension by a methodological triad of public theology; namely values, virtues and practices. By this, Welby means that values cannot be imposed from above (like British values) but must be discerned in practice. The practice of values in turn develops virtues, which in turn then profoundly shape and motivate our practices. The importance of what the book refers to as ‘spiritual capital’ is reinforced by a clever and recurring motif; the idea of ‘deep magic’, borrowed from C.S.Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and spoken by Aslan the Lion. In such deep values, says Welby, lies ‘the force that drives us forward and corrects our errors. When the deep values are fractured then all hell breaks loose’. He continues, ‘The link between our policies and expressed values and deep magic is what enables us to embrace change without losing continuity with the past or the ability to makes sense of the facts before us’.
This is a fantastically neat and fluid way of getting over the clunky language of concepts like middle axioms, by which William Temple, at the last great re-imagining of the British nation and the role of the church post 1945, linked Christian doctrines such as the incarnation and imago Dei into a set of broad policy objectives that created the post-war universal and comprehensive welfare state. The idea of deep magic really speaks into the search for authenticity and re-enchantment being undertaken by the Millennial generation, and it is tellingly juxtaposed against the ‘false magic’ of financial markets whose promises of a happier life are divorced from any reality other than their own.
Another structural feature that helps give real coherence to the book is that each chapter is firmly rooted within a biblical narrative (such as the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son) and ends with a number of middle range policy recommendations, that are themselves well supported and justified by empirical research.
So, this is a quite subtly structured book that is well written, very well-researched and accessible. Its consistent structure allows it to cover a lot of ground but in a sustained and interesting way, and its ‘triads within triads’ structure allows the complexity of the required debate to be built dialectically, rather than in a linear fashion. There are however one of two lapses of tone. Some biblical passages will be too obscure for a general readership (the succession of King Solomon by King Rehoboam anyone?). The churches’ internal wrangling on issues of human sexuality and equal marriage for example are by no means glossed over but are justified on the grounds that this represents a proper diversity from a so-called secular liberal modernity. At this point, it begins to read more like a General Synod report rather than a bold and confident proclamation to the nation. The chapter on church and faith engagement in society also seems somewhat tired and formulaic. Again, this makes the mistake of looking at this issue from the churches’ viewpoint, rather than seeing the issue from the perspective of the outsiders, who are joining church-curated social projects in droves because they want to be reconnected to each other, and to something deeper than shallow materialism. This chapter would have much more depth if it had talked about how these spaces offer re-imagination for how the church can be in society, rather than just assuming it is a one-way street.
That being said, this book does strike a very well-judged, and one might add, very Anglian balance between the visionary and the pragmatic. Welby never loses sight of the appalling legacy of poverty and inequality that needs to be addressed if we are to be born again as a nation (Ken Loach’s I Daniel Blake is tellingly deployed), but neither is he locked into a powerless sense of guilt and fatalism. What really drives this book is the call back to an ownership of a hope that is distinctively Christian but universally applicable and understood, and is transferrable into policy agendas. This is the hope we all need to claim as part of the collective task of re-imagining Britain.
Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope is published by Bloomsbury and available to order online here.
Chris Baker considers the collapse of construction giant Carillion, and a re-imagination of the relationship between the state and the market.
The breaking news of the collapse of the major British company Carillion is a hugely significant event. For 20,000 UK employees directly employed by the company this is a deeply worrying moment. For thousands more employed in subcontractors chains, there is an equal amount of worry and uncertainty. However, the collapse of Carillion is sending political shockwaves as well as economic ones because of the sheer range of contracts it had secured to supply front-line public services such as schools, prison and healthcare facilities; from hospitals and operating theatres down to school and hospital meals, as well as delivering major infrastructure projects such as HS2. The contracts to deliver public services offered to this private company run to several billions of pounds. The decision not to let the taxpayer pick up the tab for this market failure is welcome, but the long-term costs to the public realm of lost contracts and the reliance on expensive last-minute replacements will far outweigh the supposed cost savings from outsourcing to the private sector.
Key questions will need to be answered. Despite unsustainable debt warnings emerging several months ago, new contracts appear to have continued to be issued. At the heart of the problem is the state’s increasing reliance on large scale contracts to a few favoured companies, otherwise known as outsourcing conglomerates (such as the £2.43 billion of health care currently being run by Virgin Health). Carillion, which started out as a construction company, took on too many areas of responsibility for which it was ill-equipped, both financially and in terms of skills sets. As Professor Karel Williams from Manchester University reflects in the Observer, ‘With outsourcing you have to continually bid for new contracts and the stock market expects to see continuous growth. But sooner or later you take on a contract that makes huge losses and the operation can’t sustain those losses.’ This is what seems to have happened with Carillion.
But there are wider narratives here that now need to be challenged. As Mariana Mazzucato argues in her excellent book, The Entrepreneurial State, we need to put an end to the false assumption promulgated at the heart of the neo-liberal narrative for the last 40 years, that the state stands in the way of investment and innovation and only the market has the skills to provide goods and services. In this narrative, the state’s role is simply to regulate and manage the market in the case of failure, rather than actively shaping the market to create innovation and investment in areas that strengthen the public sphere; namely technology, health care, environment and so on.
This narrative is factually wrong. Global private-tech companies like Google and Apple were only able to develop their products thanks to pre-existing state-sponsored research which undertook the necessary early and risky development. These companies arrive late in the R and D process when funding is easiest to raise from venture capital, and then claim the ownership of ideas and technologies that have been created through state and tax payer investment. These companies then take extreme measures to avoid or evade the tax revenues that have been generated by the initial and indeed ongoing state support.
Mazzucato argues that this lopsided and ill-informed narrative of partnership has other repercussions for the public sphere. First, the state is denied revenues that it could reinvent in other risky developments. Second, the notion that the state is simply a lender of last resort rather than proactive market shaper denies it the full range of young entrepreneurial talent who might be led to invest their creativity for the greater good, and who instead join the market. Third, the management of risk falls disproportionately on the state in what she calls the socialising of risk and the privatisation of rewards – a strategy that always favours private shareholders and venture capitalism rather than being reinvested in the fabric of the public sphere at large.
And without that continuing investment in the public fabric, citizens lose a sense of trust and hope in the power of the state to safeguard them and have their best interests at heart. This, in turn, Mazzucato implies, generates the cynical apathy that leads to the unaccountable actions of large companies to act with impunity as to the impacts of their decisions. It is time, says Mazzucato to reimagine the relationship between the state and market. At present the market is allowed to engage in a parasitic relationship on the social and intellectual capital of the state, rather than in a far more healthy and symbiotic partnership, whereby the state, from its own values and principles, decides the key areas of policy and investment that should be adopted for the greater good, and then shapes the investment streams and regulations towards the delivery of those common goods and services for the benefit of all.
We need, as part of this new thinking, to not only develop a ‘political-economy’ reimagination of the state, but also a ‘theological’ one. Part of that re-imagining would be to recall some of the realist Christian tradition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Ronald Preston that worked on the idea that certain dimensions of public life (called Orders of Creation) are ‘certain basic structures of life (…) not chosen by humans, but are found to go with the mystery of human life itself.’ Eve Poole, in her excellent review of Christianity and Capitalism outlines four such orders: “marriage and the family, the economic order, the political order, and the community of culture (…) these Orders affect humans before they are able to notice or make choices, and act as evidence for the incoherence of the argument often made by proponents of a free-market economy, that suggests the need to focus primarily on the changing of individuals rather than structures.”
More needs to be done on this, but for now I would argue that the state is integral to the fair and just ordering of both political and economic domains. Carillion, unfortunately, is a case study of how a distorted over-dependent narrative of the market leaves us not only financially poorer, but also innovatively and technologically poorer. It’s time for a rethink!
Professor Chris Baker reflects on two recent publications that consider the transgression of boundaries.
Transgressing boundaries has been much in the news recently – and for all the wrong reasons. From the Hollywood hills to the corridors of power in the Palace of Westminster, victims have bravely found the power of voice and called out the daily examples of sexual harassment and abuse they encounter from the hands of those in power. They have brought home to a public sphere that would still rather not confront these issues the psychological and mental scars that remain powerfully invisible long after historical events have taken place; low self-esteem, fear, stress, a sense of loathing and lack of confidence, and the multiple addictions that can then take hold as a form of ‘numbing the pain’. At the heart of the issue is the inappropriate use of power and coercion that allows the perpetrator to transgress with impunity, and invade both psychological and physical spaces that are designed to protect us.
Two recent volumes written by public theologians both happen to address this current sickness at the heart of our body politic. Nick Spencer from Theos has produced a highly timely paperback, The Political Samaritan: How Power Hijacked a Parable, describing the persistent deployment of the Parable of the Good Samaritan within British political life, and across all political parties. This story is of course a parable about transgressing boundaries. The injured and isolated human being, lying at the side of the road, is ignored by those religious and cultural figures who prioritise cultic and ethnic purity as the reason for a non-intervention of human compassion and solidarity on their part. The one who finally intervenes to provide care in the short-term but also long-term provision, is a person who is an outsider to the cultural world of the injured man – in fact, from a cultic point of view, a mistrusted Other. This Other nevertheless chooses to unconditionally intervene to alleviate his plight.
Jesus’ command to go and do likewise, says Spencer, is both a powerful call to action, but also an indictment on those who, on the one hand, affirm the parable in the political realm, but curtail its moral power for the sake of narrow, party political interpretations; or who fail to take the risk of crossing over to the other side of the metaphorical road to occupy a different and alternative counterspace. How transformed politics would be, muses Spencer, if this semi-abused parable, itself a metaphor for public religion in the UK as a whole, was liberated from the aspic jelly of cultural over-familiarity on the one hand, and religious illiteracy on the other.
The second volume by Alison Webster, entitled Found Out – Transgressive Faith and Sexuality is a personal biography, narrative, advocacy and theological reflection based on several interviews with women of faith who have struggled to engage identities, experiences, and sexualities with the rigid institutionalism of the church and the provocations it often offers. Like some of the characters in the parable of the good Samaritan, Webster argues, the church opts for cultic purity for the sake of maintaining its power, despite obvious and well-catalogued abuse and harm such power causes women and the LGBTQI community. She reflects on the engagement of Jesus with women, and those on the margins, and indeed his own suffering caused by engagement with the ‘powers of the world’. She offers powerfully, but without rancour, a challenge to the church to transgress its space of power and coercion, and step into another space of welcome, and reflect and affirm the experiences and perspectives of countless women and men of faith who are currently having to live incomplete, double or inauthentic lives.
This transgressive stepping from a space of fear and control into welcome and reflection is not only for the healing and wellbeing of the those so often at the wrong end of prejudice and unrealistic fantasies and projections. It is also for the sake of the healing and wholeness of the body of Christ itself. As Webster says, “Power structures make sharing difficult…what we share is the temptation to fear. Those with privilege often inhabit it with a sense of ambivalence, afraid of not being up to the task entrusted to them, or of losing their positions. Those locked out of it feel a sense of injustice, and a fear that power will be used against them. But our faith is counter-cultural. Again and again we are exhorted by God to ‘fear not’ [and to] risk finding freedom in being known, accepted and loved.”
Of course, one must be very wary and discerning in arguing for transgressing spaces under the impulses of love and compassion – such a move can be a hideous and distorted proxy for the continuation of further emotional dependency and sexual control. However, we will judge the wholesome transgression of boundaries by their results. It will create individuals, spaces and institutions who flourish under mutual conditions of respect, courtesy and deep friendship, characterised by an eagerness to hear and affirm the stories of others, and in doing so have their own stories and experiences affirmed. The Church of England’s new guidance for schools on challenging homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying is an excellent example. Every time this happens I believe that the desire to inappropriately transgress boundaries starts to diminish. The culture of permissive transgression that abuses and controls, that is so endemic in the entertainment business and politics, seems finally destined for a long overdue change.
In their different ways both Nick Spencer and Alison Webster call the church and religion to account by reminding it that we transgress boundaries only in order to liberate and empower those on the other side, not control them.
Professor Chris Baker writes on neo-liberalism, spiritual capital and finance, ten years after the global financial crisis began
Next month sees a series of important public events – lectures, panels, seminars – curated at the Royal Society of the Arts entitled 10 Years After the Crash. This series will take stock of what we have learned about the economy, finance, globalisation and social inequality ten years after the run on Northern Rock Bank (formerly a mutual building society). This run heralded the disastrous global banking and financial crash which fully exploded the following year. Contributors to the RSA event include those who lived through the traumatic occurrences themselves; Alistair Darling, Ed Balls along with noted economists and commentators such as Ann Pettifor, Steve Keen, Martin Wolf and Robert Peston.
The event has been devised by a not-for-profit company called Promoting Economic Pluralism. As their name suggests, they are interested in developing a whole of range of perspectives and solutions on how we can prevent such global events happening again rather than relying on a ‘one-trick pony’ approach. Historically, this has been a de-regulated approach to economic activity that stresses personal freedom and autonomy as essential consumerist rights at the expense of state, and therefore public, control. This neo-liberal approach has been blamed by many for the series of increasingly numerous, disjointed and unaccountable forms of lending and debt management that led directly to the run on Northern Rock. This run exposed the trillions of dollars of bad or unsecured debt upon which most mainstream banks had based their liquidity and security.
Part of the economic pluralism being promoted by the conference is a seminar entitled Beliefs, Values, and Worldviews at Work, which is named after an innovative interdisciplinary research project devised by Dr Maria Power (Liverpool University and Good Works), Professor Peter Stokes (De Montfort University, Leicester) and myself (Goldsmiths, University of London and William Temple Foundation).
The project explores how different people, across both religious and ‘no-religion’ backgrounds, translate and negotiate their beliefs, values and worldviews in the work-based and business environment. It analyses the impacts this has on visible dimensions of the workplace such as structures, systems and working environments, as well as invisible ones such as company ethos and ‘feel’. A core concept at the heart of this enquiry is that of spiritual capital – namely the motivating energy that we derive from our faith and/or beliefs and worldviews and which influences or public actions. We sense that the time is right to explore the potential added value of this form of capital in the workplace, because spiritual capital is not only related to issues of identity and authenticity, but is also the basis of other forms of capital – social, human and economic.
Our seminar will share early findings on how beliefs, values and worldviews impact on the business and work environment based on some pilot research conducted with English Roman Catholics in an innovative retreat setting.
Our thesis, already supported by other research, is that the more we can bring our authentic selves into the work place, including our identities and our deepest beliefs and values, the more contented, resilient, loyal and productive we will be. Frankly, this idea is not rocket science. We know how alienated and demotivated people become when they face prejudice or bullying, or simply have their creativity and individuality squeezed out by autocratic or absent leadership. Or when production processes simply stress the bottom line without accounting for the processes by which we as humans want to personally invest in what we are creating.
And yet, part of the reason for the Crash was because we forgot this simple principle. We allowed the practices of business and finance to become separated from deeper sources of ethics and values that stress the importance of trust, self-sacrifice, being connected to a wider whole, tolerance and respect. The ‘why’ question always needs to be asked. Why are we doing what we are doing? Is it creating a good environment for all? Is there a deeper purpose to what we are doing and what is it? We all need to remind ourselves of these questions, otherwise our moral compasses get disorientated, both as individuals and institutions.
Under neo-liberalism, one feels a pressure not to raise the deeper ‘why’ questions because any moral ambiguity, or stepping back to reflect, was seen as an impediment to the free and efficient flow of goods and services. It was assumed that the raising of deep or awkward questions would get in the way of increased efficiency and innovation.
10 years after the Crash there is a growing awareness that the opposite is the case. Sustainable and resilient innovation and efficiency is only possible precisely because you ask the deeper questions and do not suppress them – precisely because you look for deeper meanings that lie behind material surfaces, and do not treat the material surfaces as the only level of value.
We hope that this growing realisation, and the new leadership practices it is creating, will be a deep and global legacy arising from the aftermath of the events of 10 years ago. We can no longer create economies and financial systems that can’t be bothered, disciplined, or which indeed try to actively suppress the ‘why’ question. To do that is to create the conditions for another perfect storm of instability, conflict and a lack of hope. We need to fashion a new model of capitalism and investment that reconnects the ‘why’ to the ‘what’ – the means back towards the end.
