I am not likely to forget the morning of June 24th. The evening before I was in Worcester Cathedral listening to my colleague Prof Chris Baker delivering the opening address to the joint Worcester University and William Temple Foundation conference on social justice to commemorate 75 years since the first Malvern conference. Chris talked about the legacy of Temple and the 1941 conference, suggesting that what faith now has to offer to the public square is a vision of reconnection in an age of accelerating disconnection.
I awoke the next morning to receive an email from a distressed friend and colleague about the result of the referendum. I had somehow convinced myself that the vote would be to remain. The atmosphere in the university as people began to gather for the first keynote session was one of disbelief, depression and even barely suppressed anger. Then just before I moved off to the opening session the message came through that John Atherton had passed away earlier that morning. How much worse could a day get? It felt as though worlds we had known and taken for granted had been swept away overnight and it left me feeling as though I no longer knew how to get my bearings. A week later and things do not seem much better. A morning to forget but never to be forgotten!
Fortunately, the content of the conference began to lift the spirits – and hopes. In addition to the four keynotes on the subjects of health and social care; ageing in contemporary society; a New Materialist approach to education, and then Philip Goodchild on Temple and the role of debt in our economy, there were some excellent and thought-provoking presentations by other contributors. Some of these are being gathered and will be published in a conference edition of the Journal of Beliefs and Values at the end of the year.
Much was made of the Temple tradition, albeit in a critical vein, and I wondered what John Atherton would have made of this. Had he been fit he would have been there himself and offered his own particular perspective.
But the tenor of the conference was less about paying tribute to the past and more about looking forward to an uncertain future, and the events of the previous 24 hours added to the importance of that theme and the subsequent discussions. By the close it was clear to us as the organising committee, that this had only been the beginning of a process and that more now needs to be said and thought through.
In the midst of the turmoil created by the Brexit decision and the ensuing unseemly sight of the major political parties descending into personal rivalries, it would appear that what is lacking is the space for an open and honest public debate. How can there be any reconnection now that the fault lines in our society, culture and politics have been so clearly brought to the surface? But perhaps that is what has to happen if progress is to be made? As some have commented, the cracks were there beneath the surface, whether we are talking about the failings of our economic system, attitudes towards others, the general disenchantment with professional politics let alone the sense of disenfranchisement of those at the sharp end of the policies of recent decades. These underlying echoes have now been given a voice so it should be no surprise that they have registered their discontent by the only means available to them. If something new can be born from this radical disconnection, then maybe, just maybe, a different and better way forward can emerge.
With that hope in our hearts and minds, and with another voice from the Foundation ringing in our ears not to be too idealistic, we intend to move onwards exploring the themes and ideas that emerged from the Worcester conference. Although the individual issues raised, ranging from gender equality, welfare provision, economic policy, to the environment are each of critical importance, what seems to be most urgent is to create that space within which all can feel their voices will be heard. We have a hope that faith groups can both contribute to, but also – as Chris Baker would say – “curate” those opportunities. Not dominating nor even setting agendas, but helping to set up those safe spaces where the reconnections can at least begin. If Malvern 1941 in the midst of the turmoil and uncertainty of that crucial period in the conflict at least facilitated that process for that generation, perhaps Worcester 2016, and even June 24th, can be part of a process for our own time, one that pre-empts the most damaging consequences of our divisions and prevents us slipping back into “business as usual”.
With the voices of Temple and Atherton urging us on we have to move forward in more radical and creative ways, pursing paths that even they could not have foreseen.
John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation
We page tribute to our esteemed colleague and friend John Atherton here >>>
Mapping the Material: Religious Practices in Changing Times
by John Atherton and John Reader is available to download now >>
A small village church in North Oxfordshire. I conduct the funeral of an 89-year-old lady originally born in Germany. The eulogy begins with a quote from Hildegard of Bingen – a namesake – continues with a reading in German by a member of her family, and closes as we leave the church to the strains of Edelweiss. She has two families present, her German one from her first marriage, and an English one from her second marriage to an American and their life together in the UK from the late 1960s. Earlier in the day a discussion with a young mum whose two-year old son is awaiting a bone marrow transplant. Now a potential donor has been identified they wait for further tests. I learn that donors now come from all over the world, but that many are from Germany as they have built this principle of donorship into their culture from school age onwards. This is confirmed by a radio programme at lunchtime talking about how the UK needs to emulate this. Another report on staff shortages in the National Health Service comments that over 60% of NHS trusts try to recruit from abroad. So are we not all global now? Do we not all need each other for a whole host of reasons that go beyond the purely economic or political?
When I was a teenager and all the talk was about The Common Market – an early version of the EU – I was instinctively in favour of the European project. I still am, as it has always seemed to me a positive and necessary way forward and an appropriate response to a Europe that tore itself apart in two world wars. On June 23rd the UK must vote whether to remain in the EU or to withdraw (Brexit as it is being called!). Political theology has a stake in this as it impacts upon issues of democracy, the role of the nation-state in an era of increased globalization, and indeed the ways in which religion apparently feeds into the sources of conflict which are just beneath the surface of European life. As has been argued in a recent publication, faith groups can make a positive contribution to counteracting religiously inflected violence through cooperation at the level of civil society, but this dimension is sadly lacking from the current Brexit discussions.
So what appear to be the key issues in the debate?
First, whether or not there is going to be a move towards ever closer political union and the creation of a United States of Europe. It is clear from the terms negotiated by the Prime Minister that the UK would not be part of this, just as there is no appetite for joining the Euro, even though many believe that the common currency could only be effective within a closer political structure.
Second, how trade relationships and terms and conditions of tariffs on exports would function if the UK withdrew. This is a difficult matter to judge and is a matter of conjecture on both sides of the debate. Just as no one can say how Europe would have looked had there been no EU, so no one can say with any certainty how it would look should one of its major members decide to exit and renegotiate the basis for its economic transactions. Listening to the comments of other European leaders, there is obviously a concern that if one member country leaves and then renegotiates what might appear to be more advantageous terms, others countries might decide to do the same and then the whole EU begins to unravel.
Third, the vexed issue of immigration, but given that workers can cross borders anyway, it is difficult to see how this can be addressed either within the existing arrangements or under any new regime.
Fourth, the question of greater control over welfare payments within the UK, and it would appear that the recent negotiations have delivered what the Prime Minister wanted, although his opponents within his own party are less convinced. Fifth, a concern about security and whether or not the UK would be more susceptible to terrorist attacks if it remains in the EU, although much of this is again the result of media speculation rather than hard evidence. Finally perhaps, the concern for business over ever more intrusive and expensive governance and regulation requirements, particularly for small businesses rather than larger organisations, and, again, the claim is that this will be addressed through the new negotiated settlements.
The problem in making an informed and balanced assessment, is that each contributor to the debate approaches it with their own economic and political interests in mind and therefore the uncommitted have little in the way of wider or objective evidence to go on. Even those who argue on economic grounds that the UK would be better off out of the EU tend to admit that the evidence is inconclusive. Both clear-cut and unforeseen consequences of a Brexit are difficult to predict in detail. One can argue that the current EU structures are wasteful, inefficient, and have grown beyond the scale that was originally envisaged, but one cannot know what might have existed had the EU not taken shape as it has. One could also suggest that economic power blocs based on geographical proximity are rapidly becoming a thing of the past given greater globalization since the original vision behind the EU, but this again requires staring into an unknown and uncertain future.
Faced with 3 months of interminable media coverage and political grandstanding on the issue, most of us reach for the sedatives and hope that we can find something else to talk about. Sadly, this tells us more about the state of UK (and European and US?) politics than it does about the substantive issues. The Conservative Party in the UK (and therefore the current administration) has always been divided over Europe. So now we have the unedifying scenes of a party tearing itself apart once again whilst pretending to preside over a coherent foreign policy. The “debate” has already been dumbed down to a battle between the current Prime Minister and one of his potential successors (Boris Johnson, Mayor of London), plus other cabinet members who have now declared against remaining in the EU. Great media coverage, but poor politics! What is really depressing though is that both sides in the conflict present their arguments in largely negative terms. One flags up the inherent dangers to security and sovereignty by staying in, the other the threats to economic stability and wider influence by coming out. I have yet to hear a truly positive argument for doing either! Based on those current arguments I find it difficult to identify with either the pro or anti parties.
Is it possible to shift the debate to a more coherent political, let alone theological level? What should be at stake in this? This from Douzinas and Zizek from a recent book on the Idea of Communism commenting on the positive aspirations of Habermas and Beck for the EU:
The Union is no longer a model but a dysfunctional organization of fanatical right-wing government and supine social democrats imposing unprecedented austerity measures, unemployment and poverty on working people in order to return to ‘fiscal discipline’. All pretense of social solidarity and justice, always an exaggerated assertion of the EU, has been abandoned……Socialism for the banks, capitalism for the poor became the modus vivendi of the 2000s”.
In other words, the whole project is now so corrupt and dominated by the neo-liberal agenda that it is beyond redemption. Quite what the alternative might be is less obvious, and one cannot imagine that appeals to return to the communist idea, in whatever form, are going to be a factor in the forthcoming vote! However, as an extreme left response to the whole project, such criticisms have to be taken seriously.
What does Habermas have to say? He refers to Europe as “the faltering project” and suggests that the problem of the inadequate decision-making power of the EU involves 3 urgent issues. First, global economic conditions militate against the capacity of nation states to draw upon the taxation revenues they need to meet social welfare claims and for collective goods and services. Demographics and immigration – now one of the major challenges facing the EU with questions of hospitality and fortress Europe – aggravate this, and require that the EU recuperate its lost regulatory power at the supranational level. Then there is the pressing question of foreign policy and relationships with the other global power blocs, especially the USA, Russia and China, not to mention the conflicts in the Middle East which have spread into Europe. Can the EU offer a genuine alternative to these? Third is the status of the EU within NATO and, once again, the issue of whether it can represent a different approach to that of the USA and what Habermas calls “a loosening of the normative standards” which used to inform its (USA’s) government policy.
Such a level of debate setting the vision of the EU in a wider global context has yet to appear in the run up to the UK referendum. Perhaps it now seems wildly idealistic, but it surely has to figure as an ethical as well as political dimension of the discussion. Europe as a project is indeed faltering, but given the challenges we now face in terms of climate change, its impact upon future migration, plus current security issues and deeper economic instability, is there not still some validity in a vision that goes beyond the purely internal nation-state agenda? If faith groups have a positive role to play in this, it is surely that of widening the scope of the debate and getting people to lift their eyes above the immediate self-interest horizon in order to see the ways in which we need each other and must work together.
A whole dimension that appears to be missing from the debate so far is the role of Civil Society and its impacts upon wider political and economic culture, and it is here that faith groups also have a contribution to make and should have a voice in the debate. Yes there is the question of a wider political vision, but there also has to be concern for the local and regional as represented by those intermediate structures that are more in touch with most people’s lives than national politics. As described in my opening examples, the reality is that we are already fully entangled and interconnected on a whole series of different levels or assemblages, and there has to be an infrastructure that supports and enables these in positive ways. My instincts have not changed, although knowing how best to operationalize the vision has become ever more complex and demanding.
John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation
From 1993 until 2007 I served as a board member of what was one of the early stock transfer housing associations, based in the West Midlands. On transfer we were forced to split the local authority housing stock into two associations, which left us with 2,750 properties – many thought at the time, almost too small to be viable. Now 23 years later and following two mergers, the organization is responsible for 15,000 properties across a much wider area, and apart from the Chief Executive, there are very few people still involved from those early days. One of the concerns in those distant times was that only the largest housing associations would be allowed to be developers of new housing, and would instead simply be managers of existing stock, and thus vulnerable to take-overs by larger groupings.
I now serve as a Director of a diocesan multi-academy trust (MAT), partly because of my local involvement with two voluntary church aided primary schools, but largely because of my previous experience with the housing association world, and the challenges of setting up local authority replacement organizations from scratch. Although a serious merger process has yet to begin, one can foresee the time when the various MATs are also too small to be viable, and the way ahead will be the growth of ever larger units. One danger of that is of becoming an ever more distant centralised group who lose the personal knowledge of, and relationships with, the individual schools. There are many church schools now wanting to join, more than can quickly be absorbed into the MAT, but who need to be part of the “church family” now that government policy is that all schools must be become academies or belong to academy chains.
These are the worlds of housing and education in 2016, 75 years after the Malvern conference associated with Archbishop William Temple, and which helped to lay the foundations for the Beveridge report of 1942 and thus the early days of the Welfare State. So where are we now, and how does the current context relate to the original ideals and aspirations of its founders?
With those questions in mind, the University of Worcester in conjunction with the Foundation, has planned a conference looking at social justice, and examining the areas of concern identified by the original legislation: education, health, housing, welfare policy, in addition to other areas that have emerged since such as gender and the environment. It is time to take stock and examine how faith engagement might evaluate what has happened in the intervening years and what the future now holds.
Each child should find itself a member of a family housed with decency and dignity, so that it may grow up as a member of that basic community in a happy fellowship unspoilt by underfeeding or overcrowding, by dirty or drab surroundings or by mechanical monotony of environment. Every child should have the opportunity of an education till years of maturity, so planned as to allow for his peculiar aptitudes and make possible their full development.
This paragraph closes with the proposal that all of this should be inspired by faith in God and find its focus in worship. How times have changed!
One obvious difference is that the Church of England no longer plays such a significant role in the formation of public policy, much as it would like to think otherwise, and is seen more as another provider of voluntary labour to plug the gaps left by the withdrawal of government funding. Another is what now appears to be the political consensus over limiting the role of the state in welfare and education provision; much of what remains of left wing UK politics would like to think it represents a viable alternative. The vision and models of the welfare state from the 1940s appear to be disintegrating before our eyes, to be replaced by patchy and financially driven private provision that is more concerned with generating profits for its funders than with levels of service for its “customers”. The only resemblance between the current context and the 1940s is that of rationing, but in this case a situation in which only the privileged few will be guaranteed access to the best of education, health and housing. One might predict that such an approach would be a seed bed for a resurgence of socialism, but there are no real signs of that.
The explanation for this could be that offered by Ulrich Beck when he argued that the process now underway is a turn away from the collective and towards the individual, where it is lone agents who are deemed to be responsible for their own welfare rather than either government or society as a whole. So one might suggest that the whole concept of “social justice” no longer carries any credibility. In fact, in the words of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, the welfare state model has itself contributed to its own demise:
The legal norms of the welfare state make individuals (not groups) the recipients of benefits, thereby enforcing the rule that people should organize more and more of their own lives… Today even God himself has to be chosen. And the ubiquitous rule is that, in order to survive the the rat race, one has to become active, inventive and resourceful, to develop ideas of one’s own, to be faster, nimbler and more creative.
The argument as expressed here is that one has to construct a “life of one’s own in a runaway world”. In this context, faith becomes just another resource in this task, either that, or a source of practical support when other resources are no longer adequate or available. The irony of course is that one large and impersonal organization – a local authority – is simply being replaced by another. But this time one essentially privatized and no longer democratically accountable, so “the individual” is even more vulnerable than before. In that context, how can faith groups represent and embody a different form of collective?
Perhaps it is from the more recent struggles for justice through concerns for gender and environmental issues that these different forms will yet emerge. For instance, instead of the categorizations of the individual, civil society, the corporate and then the state, what we learn from environmental thought is that we must study assemblages made up of the human and the non-human, the latter including also the technological. It is within specific assemblages that relationships form and function. When it comes to matters of welfare concern we need to attend to the appropriate assemblages of care crossing the old boundaries of individual, voluntary, civil society, and state, and to how those are to be resourced and funded. In this way the models of the collective more consistent with faith commitments can once again be brought into the equation.
John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
When John Atherton wrote his contribution to our “Christianity and the New Social Order” (see pp.125-129 in particular) and constructed his own updated version of Temple’s original guidelines for a good society, his first two focus on children and education. The flourishing of every child, he writes: “involves the nurturing of children in the material and the immaterial, including spiritual experiences of life”. He then extends this to education as lifelong learning for all which should “encompass efforts to increase our knowledge of the world, ethics and religion, with the acquisition of skills as only part of such processes”.
These are concerns which tend to slip through the net of the work of the William Temple Foundation, yet, as Atherton says, they are fundamental to building a good and better society. So it is time to take the temperature of the current context to see how well we are doing. Scholarship is largely agreed that “childhood” is itself a social construction going back no further than the 17th and 18th centuries (see for example, Phillipe Aries “Centuries of Childhood”) who argues that it was the work of philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau who laid the groundwork for this understanding. Up until then “children” were simply smaller and younger adults and not the subject of particular concerns or protection. The rise of developmental psychology and writings such as those of Piaget and Kohlberg in the 20th century added evidence to support this new approach.
Having recently had an OFSTED inspection in our village school, one of the main areas that governors have to address is safeguarding, now extended to include concerns about radicalisation and the government’s “Prevent” agenda which requires all staff and governors to undergo an on-line training package. This also impinges upon RE and the wider debate about “British Values”. In the meantime, other deeper concerns go unaddressed, including the numbers of children now living in poverty and those dependent upon foodbanks. Flourishing and wellbeing appear to have been reduced to national security issues. The family lives of children determine much that happens in our schools but present more intractable challenges. When I asked our primary school children at the end of an assembly about “Daniel and the Lion’s Den” if they could give me examples of their own “lion’s dens”, one child answered that it was when a loved one was sent to prison for committing a crime yet one still wanted to love and care for them. Another put his hand up and said that his dad was about to take his mum to court. It would seem that we are not doing a very good job of protecting children from the harsher realities of life, even in a village primary school. At the school harvest we will be asking why it is that we are collecting goods for the local foodbanks. Considering such daily challenges, there is little surprise perhaps that a survey of teachers has revealed that 53% are considering leaving the profession in the next two years.
Moving on to adolescence and the problems being stored up with that age group, there has been recent research which documents the disturbed sleep patterns of many young people who take their mobile phones to bed and keep them switched on all night because they are afraid of missing any communications. So they arrive at school weary and unable to function as one might expect. There has also been international research which suggests that the use of technology in schools does nothing to enhance the educational progress of young people and may even detract from it. As I noted in a previous blog on the impact of the digital, we do not appear to have developed appropriate disciplines for making the best of these advances, and instead allow the technology to shape us in ways that are detrimental to our wellbeing. I also learn from other colleagues who work at the secondary level, that there is an increasing incidence of young people self-harming, and to which the counselling services are struggling to respond.
Finally, these concerns extend to undergraduate level and evidence of increasing mental health problems now emerging. Perhaps it is the case that there is now less stigma attached to acknowledging these, but it is still a cause for worry. The pressure to “succeed” in purely academic terms which itself will lead to better employment prospects and greater material wellbeing, appears to impinge from day one of undergraduate existence, and detracts from the capacity to enjoy as well as learn from the overall experience. Student isolation is also on the increase from listening to those who have a responsibility for their welfare. So what exactly are we doing to our children and young people, despite all the grand claims about safeguarding and personal development?
As I listened to a parent of a teenager telling me that her daughter would not consider becoming a doctor because the pay wasn’t good enough, and she wanted to go into accountancy instead where the rewards were more lucrative, I ask myself what aspirations and ideals we now present to our young people. (This needs to be seen against the background of student tuition fees and the cost of attending university, which I have seen calculated as around £52,000, also the difficulties of entering the property market for younger generations). Has the material, understood in purely financial terms, become the only objective worth pursuing? Where is the immaterial, and the thirst for knowledge and insight, which can counter the requirement to produce skills and command of the technology? Education was always motivated by the need to produce a compliant and skilled workforce for the economy, and indeed the need to “warehouse” children so that both parents could participate in that economy, so perhaps the ideals that Atherton mentions were only ever a gloss on the realities. Yet there is clearly a growing cost to this for the mental wellbeing of the young people themselves, let alone the impact upon families and educational establishments and their staff. It would be good to see a faith agenda which promotes flourishing and wellbeing above the purely pragmatic concern to retain a stake in education, but this particular “entanglement” is difficult to negotiate in the current climate (see Chapter 6 in my co-authored book “A Philosophy of Christian Materialism”).
At the moment we run the risk of colluding with an approach that will create a new scandal of childhood (and beyond).
John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
“This is a horse. Either you get on it or it dies”.
This quote from Yanis Varoufakis in his first interview since resigning as Finance Minister of Greece, and a comment made to him during the course of an earlier set of negotiations. The current set has apparently yielded some sort of “compromise agreement”, although it would seem to be the Greek nation who have done the lion’s share of the compromising! So much then for democracy in the EU, and so much also for most of us in a culture that offers only illusory choices.
At the conference I have just attended of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion “Political Theology: The Liberation of the Postsecular”, one comment initially amused and then increasingly disturbed me. Exploring the idea that capitalism is a form of religion, the speaker suggested that credit rating was not to be equated with piety. In other words, we do not earn our relationship with God through good works. I commented that this is now exactly the discourse that has invaded ecclesiastical life, and that even existence at parish level is being evaluated in this way. Poor credit rating, meaning poor attendances, levels of giving, activities for young people, rates of conversion, and you may well be facing closure! The same is true in the educational world of course. Poor credit rating, coasting school, failure to show significant levels of progress, requires improvement, and you will appropriated by a “successful” academy down the road.
Credit, apparently, is the criteria by which we are all to be assessed, and in terms of which we all risk failure and judgement. Piety is precisely a matter of our credit rating. Of course, we are supposed to know better from within the theological world – salvation by grace alone, not through good works. So which is it? Is capitalism a form of religion, or religion now another form of capitalism? Is there an antidote to this?
As I listened to the various papers and presentations, it became clear to me that whatever the postsecular might be, it cannot be a return to an uncritical valorization of religion. Yes, we recognize that religion has not disappeared and still plays an important part in public as well as private life. But not just any old form of religion will do. Who decides what is the acceptable face of faith though, and on what grounds and according to whose criteria? If “the secular” is not to be allowed to impose upon us some limiting and alien criteria according to the priorities and directives of the politicians or the media – so we are OK as long as we contribute to social cohesion, or to social capital – do we have our own means of rating our practices and beliefs? Can we choose our own horse please? Much of the discussion centered on different candidates to become the trusty nag. Should we rate faith commitment in terms of, for instance, its capacity to catalyse civil society?
Or perhaps to generate the material religious practices that offer genuine alternatives to the damaging impact of a consumer driven culture? Is it possible that faith can enable rather than inhibit reflexivity and a critical consciousness? Do we have something to contribute to the need to acknowledge and respect difference, including that of the human from the non-human so required by planet earth? Are there insights into the limitations of human autonomy that could counter the hubris of the Enlightenment project which was based upon a confidence in achieving a maturity freed from the constraints of external authority and tradition? Each of these was offered as a possibility during the course of 48 hours, and quite reasonably so, but they all of them seem somehow instrumental – they present a means to an end.
The problem is that the telos or purpose of these approaches is not articulated nor debated. It is not simply a matter of having our own horse upon which to leap, but of knowing why we should have one at all, let alone where we intend to go once we are on board. There perhaps the analogy breaks down. Set a determinate goal or trajectory for the journey and one might as well be back with the credit rating as we can then claim to know the extent to which “we are getting this right”. And there’s the rub. A life of faith, setting out in trust, not knowing where it will lead, or even knowing why, cannot be reduced to or equated with those sort of judgements. We do not know what “the end” might be, and it is that indeterminacy and uncertainty which defines the journey.
It is possible that this is neither capitalism nor religion, nor even a hybrid version. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse”. Varoufakis turned away rather than mounting that particular steed. Fine for him perhaps, but not so good for the nation as a whole. But perhaps he is right to want this particular mount to perish, and that is the real choice that will have to be made? Unless the seed falls to the ground and dies etc.
No credit rating can take account of that.
John Readeris an Associate Research Fellow of William Temple Foundation.
One of the joys of taking assemblies in our local primary schools is that one never knows what responses will be elicited from the children. Focusing on the subject of creativity and important inventions, and having gone through the wheel, clocks and drugs, with the children to quickly realize that each of these can be both good and bad, I got to the subject of the internet. One little boy, who, according to the staff, is normally “off with the fairies”, put up his hand to everyone’s surprise and said “it is elite”. Stunned silence for a few moments; but, of course, he is correct. This is one of the downsides of our digital revolution – the existence of the digitally deprived or excluded. “Out of the mouths of babes” etc. Although where he had got this idea from is an interesting question. He had probably seen it on the TV or encountered it through the internet!
This may seem of peripheral concern for faith communities, but this is one of the determining factors of the context in which we now operate and to which we have to respond. What we now call “material religious practices” are themselves being shaped by this revolution. So who is shaping whom and to what ends? For instance, the benefice in which I work has now set up its own website, linking to other village websites across the patch; increasingly accesses the Facebook pages of two of the more active villages in order to promote events; and is setting up an email network across our 8 villages for the same reason. Here I am writing a blog post for William Temple Foundation.
As the education researcher Maggi Savin-Baden recently suggested, we are increasingly “digitally tethered”. You only have to travel by train to realize that people no longer talk to each other because they are too busy talking to “distant others”. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? When do we reach the point where form determines content, and can we even make that distinction any longer? What is happening to our capacity to relate to those around us?
The mistake that we often make, both historically and ethically, is to imagine that the technologies we develop are “neutral tools” that we simply manipulate to our own advantage. Whether it was the wheel, writing, clock time, drugs or the internet, it is as much the case that they re-shape us and our cultures as that we shape them. In less familiar language that does better justice to this insight, we are always already part of the “assemblages” or constantly shifting and developing combinations and configurations of the human (material) and non-human materials that are the components and “machines” of our existence. Examples from real church life: couples construct their wedding services from resources accessed on the internet; individuals no longer have to rely on the external authority of church, tradition and minister in order to explore for themselves the varied faith resources on the web; a few weeks ago Anglican bishops produced their pre-election pastoral letterto their congregations, available as a 57 page downloadable document. For those digitally deprived parishioners the only access is through a hard copy from Church House. Would they not have been better to produce the standard 1000 word blog? Who but academics are going to read that length of document on-line? Form determining content again?
So how are we to get a grip on these assemblages and to begin to make critical judgments (like our little boy in assembly) about which are life enhancing and which are life denying? Challenging though this may be, it demands of us a new terminology and conceptual framework – the old assumptions about human autonomy are not “fit for purpose”.
Before I propose some possibilities, I refer the reader to a book on contemporary Russia: “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia” by Peter Pomerantsev. The writer argues that the authoritarian control exercised by President Putin is established through control of the media and deliberate manipulation of the population by playing on their fears and nightmares; one of which is the narrative of hostile Western imperialism. The route to critical thought and reflection that we might associate with an Enlightenment ideal of reflexivity, is short-circuited by the blatant use of the technology to play directly into what I would call a pre-autonomous level of what it is to be or become human. Emotions and fears come before critical thought and questioning. The even more worrying aspect is that the example of Russia is a more extreme version of what happens (perhaps a little less blatantly) in the West. What is required here is a better grasp of human psychology, and another understanding of how we humans operate, that can at least recognize when we are being manipulated in this way, and can counter this through a level of critical reflection. If the digital technology is being employed to “rewire” a passive population, where is the hope for political change?
The resource that I am finding helpful in this respect is the work of Bernard Stiegler, a French philosopher of technology, who can at least open up these other levels of thought through a different analysis of our digitally tethered assemblages and addictions. Obviously a blog will not allow me to elaborate, but two crucial insights are his use of the term “pharmakon” a Greek word that means both remedy and poison, close to my own understanding of being entangled, and pointing to the double-edged sword which is the digital revolution. The other is his less accessible ideas about human psychology and development, building upon the work of Winnicott and Simondon, which do indeed suggest that technology is being used through commercial exploitation to manipulate those pre-critical dimensions of human behavior, and to short-circuit the longer processes of reflection and questioning which are essential, ethically, politically and pastorally. His counter to this is a reconfiguration of education and the university, but, for those of faith, we might want to explore how and to what extent material religious practices can be, to paraphrase Stiegler’s term “a therapeutics of faithful dissent”. Perhaps it is possible to enable content to triumph over form after all.
One thing is certain, we cannot return to a point pre-digital any more than we can to a time pre-wheel, pre-clock time or pre-drugs, we can only progress from where we are, fully entangled in the material assemblages which are made up of the human and the non-human.
John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of William Temple Foundation.
Government statistics published at the end of December show that the poorest 10% of the UK population may be at risk of malnutrition. Following what is traditionally a period of over-indulgence at Christmas, these figures are even more disturbing. Rising food prices are one possible cause, but it is also to do with the actual food that is being consumed and its poor nutritional value. Significant numbers of poor people are consuming fewer calories than they need to maintain their full body weight. Last year the poorest 10% of the population spent over 20% more on nutrition than in 2007, but received 7% less in return. Furthermore, there is a widening gap between the rich and the poor. Does this matter? Apart from obvious issues of justice and equality, such statistics bring to the surface one of the immediate effects of poverty and its impact upon the whole of people’s lives. Without appropriate diet and nutrition, none of us will be able to function effectively as we might, and other problems of health, wellbeing and economic and social activity will be set in train.
So whose fault is this? Although the churches and related charities have been drawing to the policy makers’ attentions the growing demand on foodbanks and the fact that it is people already in work who are becoming increasingly dependent upon them, there is a tendency in government to point the finger at the victims themselves. A Conservative peer, Baroness Jenkin of Kennington, asserted that poor people are going hungry because they do not know how to cook; basic cooking skills have been lost with the result that poor people are unable to produce nutritious meals from scratch. This is but one example of what has become an established mantra within both political and media circles — if there is a problem, look first (and even solely) at the individuals concerned, and ignore any structural or system failures resulting from government policies.
A recent book emerging from the growing body of literature known as behavioural economics brings such an interpretation into sharp relief. In Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir present a series of concepts to suggest that any of us placed in a situation of poverty and scarcity would find ourselves facing the same problems and challenges. Their basic concepts are: tunneling/focus; myopia; bandwidth (capacity); slack in the system; shock; quick fixes; attending to the urgent but not to the important. Without going into the details of these, it is possible to see that this is, in some ways, an expanded version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In other words, one has to be able to operate at the more basic levels of human needs, food, warmth, shelter, and we could add nutrition and diet, before one can begin to function effectively, let alone think about the demands further up in one’s life. When the immediate concern is to buy enough food, and therefore have enough money, just to feed oneself (and one’s dependents) for the next week, one is less likely to be able to think beyond this and to engage in even medium-term, let alone long-term, planning or strategies to counter the deeper problems. When a person has only limited bandwidth (or what I would call capacity) to begin to think about and address a host of immediate issues, other concerns get put to one side. Those who rely on payday loans, for instance, live from short-term loan to short-term loan, often getting deeper and deeper into debt, in order simply to deal with the immediate shortage of money. To the extent that this is the case, the political culture of “blaming the victim” is a deliberate ploy to deflect attention from the underlying issues and their causes.
Another term that we might use to describe what becomes scarce in this context is energy. The problem with a deficit of nutrition is that one is left without the requisite energy to tackle or address the myriad problems that one is faced with. Anyone suffering from even a short-term illness will recognise that one becomes so focused on the immediate symptoms and their hoped-for relief that other concerns slip rapidly down one’s personal agenda. As horizons narrow (as they also tend to do for those in older age) and one tunnels into the immediate, the energy to deal with wider issues diminishes and dissipates. One could even extend this to current UK politics with its narrow focus upon austerity and deficit reduction: all the energy goes into these objectives at the cost of other concerns such as health, education and environment. The effect of this, as the churches have been only too ready to point out, is that overall levels of wellbeing then suffer and inequalities increase at the cost of the whole; even tax returns diminish!
So our energies need to be expanded and redirected. This impacts both upon our understandings of economics and how humans function in practice, rather than according to the theories; hence the potential value of some aspects of behavioural economics and the insights it gleans from research in psychology, and also upon Religious Studies which now moves towards a greater acknowledgement of the material nature of our existence. As my colleague John Atherton has pointed out in his recent book Challenging Religious Studies: The Wealth, Wellbeing and Inequalities of Nations, calorific or nutritional deficiencies are sources of deprivation, and there was a point in the early 19th century when 20% of Britain’s population was unable to work because of this problem. Further, in a forthcoming book, A Philosophy of Christian Materialism: Entangled Fidelities and the Common Good (Baker, James and Reader, Ashgate 2015), we argue that recent developments in philosophy can broaden our understanding of what it is to be human, taking into account the interrelationships or assemblages that constitute a realist approach, and the crucial challenge of seeing the human in relation to the non-human (which would include the food that we eat). The scarcities that we face relate both to food, income and welfare, but also to political and religious imagination, all of which are required to redirect our activities towards the greater good.
John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
Join the discussion on foodbanks and more at our pre-election conference, in partnership with Church Urban Fund and the Joint Public Issues Team.
Last Thursday evening I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the first of the Faith Debates on the Future of the Church of England organised by Linda Woodhead and colleagues at the University Church. This opening debate was on the future of the parish system. Four distinguished speakers offered their thoughts: a representative of Radical Orthodoxy from Cambridge, deeply committed to a vision of both church and theology which felt like a throwback to a different era; an entrepreneur who provided upbeat examples of what churches with extensive capacity could do; a sociologist of religion, himself a non-stipendiary Minister who advocated this pattern of ministry as the way to the future; and then a Canon Missioner from Exeter who actually had some recent parish experience. My role was to throw a spanner in the works and to challenge each of their interpretations of where the parish system is in reality, although the speaker from Exeter was also close to the mark on this.
Had there been more chance to expand my brief contribution I would have pointed out that “parishes” are no longer the correct unit of currency, certainly in the more rural areas, and that it is benefices or clusterings of parishes that make up the majority of charges for rural clergy. As it was I could only mention lack of capacity as the major inhibiting factor, along with a lack of critical mass of people to populate new initiatives and the problem of lack of continuity of contact for most rural clergy who do not even see their regular congregations sometimes for weeks on end, as they dash from church to church and meeting to meeting. I was informed by the entrepreneur that this was a problem of “mind set” not capacity, and I would love to have invited him to my own benefice where we have worked on a raft of new initiatives, but without the people to cooperate on these, success is inevitably limited.
Two other factors are worth a mention. The first is that there is a glut of clergy of my generation coming up to retirement over the next five years, more than will be replaced by new recruits, and that the policy in my Diocese at least, is to redeploy the remaining resources into the urban areas and new towns. This will further reduce the numbers of clergy for rural benefices. Then there is the challenge of recruiting ministers in the first place into the ever expanding rural empires. Who, in their right mind, wants to be running a scattered benefice of 12 small churches struggling to pay their parish share let alone for the upkeep of their buildings? One can generate as many exciting new ideas as possible, such as that of ‘Festival Churches’ which are only used for occasional offices and Harvest, Christmas etc., but none of this is, in itself, going to stem the continued decline of rural churches and congregations. A friend who was with me has the experience of worshipping in a remote rural deanery with 27 churches where, at the moment, there are only two full time stipendiary incumbents and one lone curate. The development of lay ministry which should have been further encouraged 25 years ago when there was still time and energy seems to have been blocked by a hierarchy afraid of losing control, or simply not interested in the smaller benefices out on the margins. So, like the other denominations before it, the CofE is effectively abandoning its rural presence and focusing its resources on the centres of population.
Only four days later, a report was published on the future of church rural primary schools which concluded that “the days of small autonomous rural primary schools are numbered”. Despite subsequent attempts to row back from what reads as a very negative response to the problem, there is a failure to face up to how and why this pressure on rural schools has come about. In an article in the Daily Telegraph by the Bishop of Oxford, current Chair of the Board of Education, the reason given for the threats of closure and amalgamation are simply those of financial pressures. Those pressures have been there for well over 30 years and led already to the closure of rural schools. I would suggest rather the current pressure is a direct effect of government policy of Academies which results in any school with less than 250 pupils not being financially viable as a stand-alone Academy and thus facing merger or closure. Somehow this stark fact is being lost or quietly buried beneath the “spin” of all the new initiatives which such schools can take such as hosting Post Offices on their premises!
The reality is the Church of England is so worried about losing government funding (which accounts for 90% of its funds for schools) and thus its stake in the formal education system, that it is prepared to collude with Coalition education policy rather than rock the boat by challenging it. The hope is that its own Diocesan Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) which become the umbrella replacement LEAs for some of its church schools, will be effective enough to maintain a church presence in at least some areas. The impact, however, is that those small church schools on the margins of the urban areas and often with challenging financial and teaching scenarios, will not be wanted by such Diocesan MATs as they are desperate to recruit “good schools” rather than problematic ones. Once again then, this is a policy for abandoning the rural. It has been pointed out that for many rural clergy it is their contact with the local schools that is the main channel of outreach. Remove the schools, or absorb them into larger units managed from outside the benefice, and that channel is closed for good.
I am not arguing that abandoning the rural is a deliberate strategy of the Church of England – that would be to assume that the CofE is capable of a deliberate strategy on anything – but that, like it or not, this will be the impact of current trends and decisions. Perhaps it is time for a dose of honesty and realism so that those of us who continue to be committed to some form of rural ministry can at least know where we stand.
Revd. Dr John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
John Reader will be running a workshop at ‘Reclaiming the Public Space’on 10th November in Manchester. Other speakers including Linda Woodhead, Craig Calhoun, Elaine Graham, Raymond Plant and more. Book Now!
In 1989 Hans Kung and David Tracy published Paradigm Change in Theology based on a symposium held at the University of Tubingen. Contributors included such high profile names as Moltmann, Schillebeeckx, Boff, Gilkey and Cobb. The subject areas covered included hermeneutics; scientific theory and theology; political dimensions of a new theological paradigm; feminist and liberation theologies and relationship with other faiths. Were they right to flag-up such fundamental changes, and, if so, where are we now?
Looking at theology within the Church of England twenty five years on, one might be forgiven for concluding that far from signaling a paradigm change, what we have seen is a regression to a pre-Enlightenment understanding that plays into the hands of a hierarchy nervous about its loss of authority, and a communitarianism which extols the virtues of practical action at the cost of any serious theological reflection. Like political culture the emphasis is upon presentation (or “spin”) rather than substance or critical engagement. Although forms of political engagement were driving forces behind the original book, nothing much has come of these since, and those who look for a more radical approach have been marginalized by both church and theological establishment. So it is time to revisit the notion of a paradigm change for theology in the light of recent philosophical and political developments.
In recent blogs and publications my colleagues at the William Temple Foundation have used and adopted the language of“blurred encounters” in relation to faith engagement with social action and the inevitable crossing of boundaries, cultural, geographical and intellectual, that accompanies such engagement. Whilst this is correct and in the spirit of the original book, Blurred Encounters: A Reasoned Practice of Faith, it does not refer to the subtitle of the book nor what I intended to be the more radical nature of the work. This was not supposed to be simply about pragmatic responses to challenging contexts that required a willingness to compromise and to be “eaten well”, but also an attempt to produce a post-foundational theology by challenging the strict demarcation between faith and reason that has characterized theology since the time of Kant. If that sounds too demanding and theoretical, then it probably explains why even my colleagues have shied away from that dimension of the book, and my aims of providing criteria by which one might assess the validity of the actual blurred encounters.
In engagement with the book, there have been no references to the notion of a post-foundational theology, nor any sense that others understand what this means. Others more critical of the work imagine that this is a matter of having a certain fascination for the writings of particular philosophers and thus not essential to the project. In the light of new publications I want to restate the argument that “Blurred Encounters” was pushing towards a paradigm shift in theology.
Ten years down the line and others have been able to pursue these ideas more effectively. Whitney A. Bauman, in the recently published Religion and Ecology: developing a planetary ethic, has taken further the concept of the crossing of boundaries and argues that religion and science, humanity and nature, sacred and secular, are always already intertwined, and that attempts to separate them have been the result of a particular metaphysics that itself leads to damaging consequences, notably those associated with globalization and its detrimental impact upon humans in less advantaged parts of the world, and indeed the planet as a whole. He also draws upon sources that I have since been able to pursue such as Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad and Catherine Keller. I will attempt a summary of his ideas.
Bauman describes what he calls Agrippa’s trilemma which lays out the three main possibilities for how we claim to justify our knowledge (pp18-21). The first two of these are representative of the domination exercised by globalization and are, foundationalism and circularity. “Foundationalism operates (most often) by digging down to what is perceived to be a base of reality: whether material (as in scientific materialism) or ideal (as in the creation of the world according to divine laws by a good God)”. Circularity is a particular version of the same form of argument. The third option and the one favoured by Bauman is that of infinite regress, where instead of trying to bring the process of truth discovery to an end, instead somewhat in the manner of Latour who sees that truth is a matter of keeping the references circulating, the acknowledgement that we are all contextual, perspectival, embodied and changing creatures, means that our knowledge claims are always on shifting grounds. A post-foundational theology would thus recognise that our knowledge is always provisional and contingent, and that it is when we try to stop the references circulating – which is always an arbitrary decision – that power dominates over truth, and both humans and non-humans find themselves on the wrong end of that power.
Following this alternative approach to its logical conclusion, Bauman suggests that we need to abandon a foundational metaphysics, to acknowledge that agency “goes all the way down” including therefore that which we see as non-human, that human exceptionalism is to be left behind, and that the boundaries between subject and object are always permeable. (p162). This applies also to our own sense of personal identity: “Our internality is nothing without the multiple others with which we are in constant interaction, and our bodies are made up of multiple biological, historical and cultural others. However one draws the boundaries around a concept or identity, that entity is always already multiple” (p163). This will lead to a different approach to environmental ethics and issues of political power. So the question for a new theological paradigm is whether it can cope with a post-foundationalism and acknowledge that its truth claims are subject to challenge and uncertainty.
There are now two main strands in such a developing approach, one associated with what is known as the New Materialism and the other related one we are calling Relational Christian Realism. The latter will be spelt out in detail in the book A Philosophy of Christian Materialism: Entangled Fidelities and the Public Good, (Baker, James and Reader, Ashgate: forthcoming). Both yield a theology more modest in its truth claims, and a conceptual discourse more appropriate for engagement with contemporary political and scientific issues and, we will argue, a paradigm change for the discipline as a whole. The difference between this and the global ethics advocated by Kung and colleagues is that: “the not-yet space of emergent newness is just as much a reality for the rest of the natural world as it is for humans” and the task facing us is to discern which particular emergent assemblages will lead to the flourishing of both human and non-human (Bauman, p153).
So whereas the original paradigm shift envisaged by Kung, Tracy and colleagues involved only the human, in this new context as described by Bauman, Crockett and ourselves, it is the whole human non-human nexus which emerges as the site for discussions of the ‘public good’ and for revised religious and political activity.
As the controversy about certainBirmingham schools continues to rage, along with the spat in cabinet which is in danger of diverting attention from the deeper issues, it is worth asking ourselves, ‘Who are the real Trojans?’ This question was brought to the fore as I watched an interview with local priest Revered Oliver Coss – a governor of one of the schools – on the day that the OFSTED reports were made public. Rev’d Coss appeared to be arguing that the matter should be resolved locally by those aware of and trying to respond appropriately to local constituencies and issues. Further he suggested that equating Islam with extremism and terrorism is dangerous, inaccurate and damaging to relationships within and between communities. Without commenting further on the Birmingham issue, except to say that I find those comments above convincing and legitimate, there is a much wider debate here about control, independence and power within the Academies and Free School movement now sweeping through our education system.
I comment as a trustee of a Diocesan Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) in the Diocese of Oxford set up three years ago to establish an umbrella body for church schools in the Diocese who are not big enough to become stand-alone academies, or who wish to join a larger organisation. What is effectively the founding document of all such trusts is the Scheme of Delegation. As the name suggests, this is the document which sets out the relative responsibilities of the local schools and the central trust. This is hugely important for a number of reasons. The reality is that the buck stops with the trustees on all crucial matters — they are the ones directly accountable to the Department for Education now that Local Authorities have been removed from the picture. So the questions that arise are multiple: how much power and responsibility is delegated to local level? What are the local bodies to be called given that they no longer have the same powers as former Boards of Governors? Without the term “governing” in some way in their title, (thus suggesting they are simply ciphers with no real authority), who will be prepared to give the time and effort to serve on such bodies given that it is already difficult to find such volunteers? If considerable powers are still delegated to local level where and how is the line to be drawn, let alone exercised in practice?
As a matter of principle, and because we believe that local autonomy and responsibility are something we should foster in church schools as we value local community involvement, this particular Diocesan MAT has decided to leave Local Governing Boards with a fair degree of freedom. However, every time it comes to discussing and putting in place such policies as discipline, grievance, capability and anything related to performance of the school and its staff, the tension between the local and the Trust comes back to the fore. If the school begins to fail in any way, it is not the local board who are accountable but the trustees. How much can trustees therefore, afford to trust the local delegates and what powers need to be reserved in order to be able to take control if and when things go wrong?
At the end of the day it is the trustees who will be called to account by Michael Gove – a reassuring thought – not the local governing body or whatever they are called. Therefore whilst the Academy and Free Schools movement is presented as a means to granting and gaining more local control and autonomy for schools, it is in fact a smokescreen for the constant threat of central government intervention. This is surely exactly what is becoming evident in the Birmingham example. In which case, who are the real Trojans here, slipping into the local apparently unnoticed, always at the ready to exercise their true power as and when they see something they find threatening or politically unacceptable? Clearly the Trojans are central government and the Department for Education, themselves running scared of being held to account for any supposed failings further down the system.
The real issue therefore is that of appropriate governance and of the balance of powers between local communities and central authorities now that an intermediate level – itself politically unacceptable and thus to be removed – has been disbanded. Like my colleague Rev’d Coss, I would agree that more should be left to local communities who have a grasp of what is happening and can respond accordingly. But – and this is a huge “but” – this brings its own risks and fears, and one can see why those at the centre would be nervous of this. Who is to be trusted with our schools and the welfare and wellbeing of our young people? The consequence of removing the intermediate level of governance has been to highlight the lack of trust between the remaining levels.
