Professor Chris Baker, Director of the William Temple Foundation, speaks on Easter Sunday with Shaun Ley of BBC World News about Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s recent criticism of the Rwanda asylum seekers plan.
“[Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury] is reminding British society and British establishment of core principles, which are around the Christian values of hospitality, providing refuge, support, and working for the well being and development of all humankind.”
Justin Welby criticises UK’s Rwanda asylum seekers plan | BBC World Interview with Chris Baker
Review of Jarel Robinson-Brown, Black Gay British Christian Queer (London: SCM Press, 2021), by Yazid Said, Liverpool Hope University
Yazid Said, Lecturer at Liverpool Hope University and trustee of the William Temple Foundation, reviews Jarel Robinson-Brown’s recent book. Said applauds Robinson-Brown’s call for repentance but wonders whether human nature can really be viewed so optimistically.
Jarel Robinson-Brown’s book articulates critiques and reconstructions of the Christian understanding of grace from his experiences of living as a member of the Black LGBTQ+ Christian community in Britain. He is concerned with the ways in which being black and gay can encourage individuals and the whole Church to reimagine grace and to challenge some teachings and practices in the Church. The book is therefore mainly on how grace determines our understanding of divine action in the Incarnation (Chapter 2) and the crucifixion (Chapter 3) and its relationship to human action (Chapters 4 & 5). Drawing on several experiences of other gay, black, and queer individuals, he argues that genuine grace means walking alongside people in a position of powerlessness rather than in exercising power over them (pp. 72, 105-106).
The book’s importance lies in its emphasis on justice and its calling for a common repentance; it highlights the importance of the Church as a place of welcome for everyone and the significance of encountering the face of our victims for the release of grace (pp. 72 & 80).
Some issues raised in the book, however, require some unpacking. Grace itself remains a highly contentious concept in Christian history, reflecting a wide range of views on sex and sexuality. The implications, therefore, of how the author engages with Christian doctrine are mixed. He points to the Incarnation and crucifixion as an alternative to the emphasis on God’s transcendence, which he often links to human power structures (pp. 52, 56-58). Jesus’ story expresses divine immanence (pp. 50-58). Divine impassibility (Greek apatheia) would be rejected (pp. 69-70). In this way, the book draws on familiar themes and insights from other liberation theology traditions, emphasising the humanity of Jesus, as someone who stands alongside the outcast (p. 84). However, unlike other writers in this tradition (such as Carter Hayward’s The Redemption of God) Robinson-Brown subscribes to the orthodox definitions of Christ (pp. 104-106).
The author, evidently, has a view of grace that reflects a particular liberal philosophy. When it comes to the salvific effect of grace, he reads it as salvation from within, rather than an external challenge for change (106). This suggests that he maintains a highly optimistic view of human nature in line with liberal philosophy. He draws on other activists who have a shared sexuality and a common intellectual heritage with him. Robinson-Brown is not subscribing to liberal individualism, however. He believes that if communities and members of the Body of Christ cooperate, they can achieve true justice in response to the revelation of God in Christ (Chapter 5).
There is no discussion of the Christian understanding of original sin. Indeed, he talks of ‘silencing our sin-talk’ (p. 38). The book does not struggle with the implications of sin for all, when grace includes God’s judgment on sin for the benefit of the sinner (Matthew 9: 10-13). This is reflected in the manner of using scripture. We are rightly reminded that Jesus is more at home in the company of tax collectors and sinners (p. 84). However, whilst Jesus enjoyed the company of sinners, he did not see them as other than sinners. The woman found in adultery is still a sinner: ‘go and sin no more’ (John 8: 1-11). Zacchaeus was still a greedy person (Luke 19); they all need the grace of God in Jesus.
Whilst dependence on Christology and salvation remain striking in the book, the ambiguity of discussing ‘sin’ explains the ambiguity around his discussion of the crucifixion too. The cross becomes for the author a weapon (pp. 63, 67, 69). He identifies the suffering of Black LGBTQ+ Christians with Christ’s suffering. But this identification cannot reflect what is truly radical and new in the cross. It is the darkness of death on the cross that judges all our systems, not simply the suffering that makes us more ‘righteous’. It is difficult to assess whether Jesus suffered more than the millions who suffered in the twentieth century. This is neither here nor there. Rather, the cross silences us—all of us, white, black, gay, or straight—as it reminds us how we all tend to reject the truth when it comes among us.
Similarly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘cheap grace’ is susceptible to misuse in the book (p. 40). Though Bonhoeffer was influential in radical ‘secular’ theological writings such as that of John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963), Bonhoeffer was certainly not trying to push for the usual liberal argument that claims to make God ‘relevant’ to ‘the modern world’. Rather he was trying to confront the evils of the modern world with the radical worldliness of the gospel.
It would also be good to unpack a little more of what the author means by ‘White Supremacy’ in Britain today (pp. 112 & 157). Some might distinguish between supremacist ideology and a ‘hidden’ racism. The latter is more personal. An argument, for example, from Rowan Williams’ chapter ‘Nobody knows who I am till the judgment morning’ in On Christian Theology (pp. 276-289) discusses the question of racism as part of a larger task of defining a human crisis overall.
It is evident today that the earlier blanket condemnation of sexual minorities is no longer tenable or indeed desirable. There are enough signs across different church traditions to move away from the condemnatory language of the past. Robinson-Brown refers critically to the Church of England’s document Issues of Human Sexuality (1991) (p. 10); he could have clarified that further in pointing to an aspect of legal hypocrisy here. The document goes as far as to see committed homosexual relationships as a valid option for Christian living whilst attaching celibacy to the legal expression of committed homosexual relationships. It therefore denies a key dimension of gay identity.
Robinson-Brown’s book deserves support for its cause and its apt call for the church to live out its call for repentance; but one still needs to ask to what extent this kind of ‘identity-focus’ theology is able to prosper where the liberal philosophical tradition is less influential. The book seems to assume that people who share the LGBTQ+ identity all share the same experiences, either private or social. This may not necessarily be the case either. Many who may be sympathetic to the cause, may not embrace the optimism that seeks to erase the importance of human sin. A strong consciousness of our fallenness helps deliver us from the kind of binaries that identity theologies—and politics—seek to work with.
You can also read John Root’s review of Israel’s book here.
The death of George Floyd in May 2020 happened at the beginning of a global pandemic. Whilst the issue of racial injustice has been with us for a while, the pandemic did help the global community to be more conscious of the suffering that many people of colour have been facing for decades.
Many of the questions people are asking today revolve around their humanity and their identity. There are questions around sexuality and identity, gender and identity, disability and identity, race and identity, and so on. It is the last of these questions, on race and identity, that I want to narrow down on in this conversation—because the murder of George Floyd has led to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet the Black Lives Matter movement, like any of the other issues highlighted above, has become politicised and potentially controversial. Some people view it as controversial because they think saying that black lives matter means saying other lives do not matter.
Let me start to unpack this by reflecting on the issue theologically. An anthropological view of scripture affirms that humanity, that is everyone, is created in God’s image (see Genesis 1:26; 2:7). We are all bearers of God’s image irrespective of colour, nationality, social status, ethnicity, religion or culture. This means that our humanity is rooted in God; in essence, our human identity is derived from God. We bear God’s image because we are the signature stamp of God’s creation—and therefore all lives matter. All lives matter to God and are valuable because we are God’s handiwork. Our humanity, bearing semblance to God, also reveals a collective human identity and therefore a shared human identity.
If we agree that all lives do indeed matter and we share this understanding that we have a shared humanity rooted in God, then it should concern us all when black lives are made cheap. Black lives are made cheap when they are not seen as human, when they are enslaved, colonised, indentured, raped, exploited, seen as inferior, marginalised, oppressed, lynched, segregated, disproportionately imprisoned, murdered, and neo-colonised. The best way for us as a church to understand the message of Black Lives Matter theologically is through Paul’s body metaphor: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26, NRSV). Black Lives Matter is saying that people of African descent worldwide, as part of humanity, are suffering from various forms of injustices—and their pain matters. Will our collective humanity seek to understand this pain and respond, or will we neglect that part of the human family? For the church, this is an even more pressing issue, because if we fail to address the hurt in God’s family, that is the body of Christ, we are inadvertently neglecting ourselves.
If the UK church in its breadth of diversity is going to be relevant today and be able to speak into issues of racial inequality, we must seek to engage intelligently. The church cannot afford to keep Black Lives Matter at arm’s length. It is important for the church to engage as Black Lives Matter raises questions around the issues of race and identity for many, particularly young people. If the church is going to make the gospel relevant to millennials and Generation Z, then we must engage some of the concerns of Black Lives Matter. During the Windrush period (1940s-1960s), the UK church lost a generation of African Caribbean youth because they saw how the church had mistreated their parents, and many of them turned away. If the UK church does not engage the concerns of Black Lives Matter, we will not only loose black youth, but also other young people, because Black Lives Matter is a multicultural international movement.
One of the impacts of the pandemic is that people are asking more questions about their humanity and their identity. This is because the Black Lives Matter movement has raised critical questions around what it means to be black in a western context. Whilst I am aware that Black Lives Matter is controversial for some, I believe that the UK church must find ways to engage some of the questions being posed because they are theological questions that require missional engagement.
The book takes as its starting point the theologies of Christian thinkers including William Temple, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Niebuhr brothers who were concerned to always root their theology in a dialogue with empirical facts and insights from other disciplines (offering a realist rather than idealist view of God and human experience). The book uses this inclusive and open (but not uncritical) approach to engage with ideas from modern Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion that are pointing in similar directions – i.e. a renewed interest (following the demise of socialism and other forms of political solidarity) in the material practices of religion and the way it embodies powerful alternative ideas to the current neo-liberal view of the world.
The book engages strategically with key ideas associated with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou, and Rosi Braidotti, as well as anthropologists such as Tim Ingold and Manuel Vasquez, and sociologists of religion such as Linda Woodhead. Three case studies – urban community empowerment, education, environmentalism – are emblematic of the ways in which Christian realist theology (what the book defines as relational Christian realism) can combine practically with the insights of modern Continental Philosophy, to create a new political and theological agenda resulting in new solidarities of hope for a complex, pluralised and uncertain age.
The Foundation’s Associate Research Fellow Greg Smith has edited a new book which suggest that evangelical Christians put the welfare of those in greatest need above their own interest.
Over 9 out of 10 evangelicals want the UK government to speak out more strongly on issues of human rights and religious liberty in countries with oppressive regimes; the same number think we have to continue to campaign hard if we’re to make poverty history.
The findings come in a ground-breaking new book, 21st Century Evangelicals, based on five years of surveys into the beliefs and actions of evangelicals in the UK. This research backs up the conclusions of the recent Evangelical Alliance report Faith in politics? showing high political activism among evangelicals.
The book draws together leading academics in theology and the social sciences who looked in depth at the data and contributed their analysis and reflection. The chapters tackles subjects including social involvement, politics, global mission, gender, and families, and each chapter includes a response from an experienced practitioner.
According to the book, 4 out of 5 evangelicals say they have volunteered in a church activity serving the wider community in the last year and over a third do this each week. Over half consciously try and buy Fairtrade and nearly as many are involved in child sponsorship (43 per cent). The book also reveals that 4 out of 10 evangelicals have been overseas for mission or development work.
Greg Smith who edited the volume said, “The data sets we have compiled are a treasure chest of information about Evangelicals in the UK. In the book we have been able to delve deeper than in the initial reports, and our team of authors has been able to set out their analysis of the data in the framework of contemporary academic debates, while writing in a style which should be accessible to all.”
21st Century Evangelicals is out now, published by Instant Apostle. The volume is edited by Greg Smith and includes contributions from a wide range of academics and practitioners.
The leaders of Britain, politicians, intellectuals and churches, invariably focus on what’s gone wrong with life, whether it’s the economy, the NHS, education, inequality or foodbanks. Yet that’s to start with the carts of life. There are some useful lessons we might draw from economics, offering a message on Lent and sin. Without the horse, the cart is pretty useless, so let’s rather begin with the horse. And, by that, I mean I’m grateful that I’m neither dead nor am I dirt poor. And that’s astonishing progress, because only 100 years ago my uncle John Robert Atherton (after whom I was probably named), was born and died in 1900, one of the 20% who tragically died in childhood of incurable infectious diseases. The remainder often suffered from great undernourishment, and from lack of education. In contrast, I’m 76, highly educated, have a modest pension, and therefore the freedom to be and to do. And these great and historic achievements have beneficially affected more and more people increasingly across the whole world in terms of incomes, life expectancy and education.
Of course, these are not as yet a universal achievement. A very significant but diminishing minority do not share in the benefits obtained by the Industrial and then the Mortality Revolutions. A billion still live in absolute poverty, and, in rich economies like Britain and the USA, a significant minority still suffer from relative deprivation. These deeply disturbing situations reflect what is called the paradox of development; the great achievements in wellbeing in the last 200 years have also been accompanied by deeply negative forces, including grave inequalities (throughout history, and including today, these paradoxes of development, or ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’, traditionally included famines, epidemic, climate changes, migrations and state failures).
So this analysis is therefore about putting the horse back where it belongs: before the cart. Don’t begin, as our leaders in academia, politics and churches do, with the downsides of life, with the paradoxes of development. No. Begin with the ongoing historic achievements in income, health and education in only the last 200 years. Then, and only then, also address the paradoxes of development.
What on earth has Lent and sin got to do with this? Well, for most of its history Christianity has regularly put the cart before the horse, and especially in the season of Lent, and especially with its focus on sin. And that’s again putting things the wrong way round. Let’s think a bit more about this.
So much of the church’s historic views on sin are pathological, and are now also profoundly inaccurate and unhelpful. Let me give you a few examples:
In medieval churches, the walls were often covered with paintings regularly featuring vivid pictures of hell as the punishment for sin if the parishioners didn’t confess to a priest. The fear this inevitably injected was also a powerful way of controlling the population.
If a newborn baby died before it was baptised, it was, until relatively recently, buried in unconsecrated ground outside the consecrated church yard – because its original sin, addressed only through baptism, therefore ostracised it beyond the pale.
When I was a young Rector of Hulme Church in inner city Manchester in the late 1960s, I was frequently asked to ‘church’ a young mother who had just given birth to a child. Now, this old ‘churching’ service wasn’t a ‘thanksgiving for childbirth’ as it later became. It was a (grandmothers won’t let the daughter out till she’d been churched), going back to the Christian doctrine that original sin was transmitted to new generations through the sexual act, through the woman’s birth of a child.
Why on earth did Christianity and the churches have such views often well into the twentieth century? My ongoing research in economics and religious studies indicates that for all human history, until the 19th century, the vast majority of people lived lives, as the great 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, which were ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’. They died at best by middle age, they lived in poverty and squalor, and they often suffered violent deaths. Reflecting and deepening such experiences, no wonder such views of sin, of the self-inflicted darkness of life, so pervaded Christian thinking and preaching. But now life is quite different. For most people life is long, peaceful and relatively prosperous, with increasing healthcare and educational opportunities for a growing majority.
So I now begin with the lovely and accurate Anglican collect or prayer for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent: ‘Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made…’ That’s where I begin, with the fundamental goodness of the created order. Then, and only then, do I address what’s also gone wrong in terms of sin and finitude (don’t confuse them, and do recognise both as severe, distinct and different constraints on our social development – including as the paradoxes of development). And that’s certainly not to therefore acknowledge my ‘wretchedness’, as the collect for Ash Wednesday goes on to declare! Whatever I now feel and understand as my sin and finitude, I would thankfully, not normally refer to it as wretchedness.
How then, to define sin today, post-1800? Well, I go to the New Testament’s interpretation of it as ‘missing the mark’. In other words, we aim for, in Paul’s words, ‘what is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable’ (Philippians 4.8). And then, and only then, do we recognise and face up to where we get it wrong personally and collectively (the latter including what we call structural sin in terms of defective or bad institutions, markets or nations). Now this is called ‘putting the horse before the cart in Christianity, church life and history’. It’s about Christian beliefs, urgently updated in the life of the most historic changes in human life, continuing to give greater depth and greater meaning to our ordinary human experiences.
For the three economic perspectives on the wealth, wellbeing and inequalities of nations, namely income, health and subjective wellbeing, I have developed a model for relating Christianity to each. In terms of subjective wellbeing it is clear that Christianity has been demonstrated by secular research to score better than other sources. The following introductory section illustrates this and how Christianity achieves it. I am pretty sure that the same could be done for its contribution to health but it is engaging the first perspective – income – where Christianity is weakest. Recent publications such as ‘Just Money’, published by Theos, and Peter Selby’s ‘An Idol Unmasked’ illustrate these inadequacies. The second part of this blog begins to set out an agenda for correcting these grave Christian limitations.
Although contemporary research on religions’ contributions to wellbeing (particularly subjective wellbeing) is of recent origin, ‘In survey after survey, actively religious people have reported markedly greater happiness and somewhat smaller life satisfaction than their irreligious counterparts’. That conclusion is confirmed by economists, for example by Layard who states, ‘one of the most robust findings of happiness research: that people who believe in God are happier’, and by Graham arguing that, ‘In most countries, respondents that express faith or religious affiliation – as well as those who practice their faith – are, on average, happier than others … In most of the rest of the world’; by psychologists like Seligman: ‘survey data consistently show religious people as being somewhat happier and more satisfied with life than nonreligious people’; and finally, by sociologists, for example Putnam: ‘As with good neighbourliness, the correlation between religiosity and life satisfaction is powerful and robust … Other things being equal, the difference in happiness between a non-churchgoer and a weekly churchgoer is slightly larger than the difference between someone who earns $10,000 a year and his demographic twin who earns $100,000 a year’.
Why is the relationship between Christianity and subjective wellbeing so positive? Answering that question will occupy the rest of this chapter. But that is not its principal objective. The task is rather to explore the relationship between Christianity and wellbeing, initially and principally through a focus on subjective wellbeing. That entry point will then be extended, at the end of this chapter, to engage health and income, so together embracing the three great perspectives on the wealth and wellbeing of nations that are at the centre of Chapter 2’s agenda. The subjective wellbeing perspective has been selected as the main entry point of this research at this stage because achievements in this field, in terms of the contributions of economics, psychology, sociology and religious studies, are most comprehensive, robust and consistent. And it is out of these relationships addressing this shared area of concern – subjective wellbeing – that there emerges a model for Christian engagement with both this perspective, and probably the other two; health and income. The model can therefore also be deployed to address the relationship between Christianity and economics. As the introductory Chapter 1 noted, one of the tools to be used in exploring this relationship is the deployment of models, reinforced by statistical evidence and located in historical contexts. So the following elaboration of the chosen model will also involve reflection on the nature and role of measurements in religious studies, and the following Part 2 and Chapters 4 and 5 will explore the historical contexts of such research.
The following material focuses particularly and initially on the task of mapping as a way into modelling in some detail those practices, ethics and beliefs of Christianity that resource its robust and positive contributions initially to subjective wellbeing. These are drawn and confirmed from both secular sources and Christian traditions, recognizing their correlative and causal relationships, with their principal features further elaborated with reference to the main Christian denominations, major world faiths and secular spiritualties. This section will conclude with a brief exploration of the model’s transmission processes, showing how Christianity influences the development of greater wellbeing in society. The following section will then examine the implications of such a mapping and modelling exercise by developing appropriate measurement tools for religious studies’ contribution to human wellbeing and for religious studies itself. The final brief section will then begin to explore the feasibility of deploying the model in relation to health and then income, the other perspectives on the wealth and wellbeing of nations.
Part 2 of the book moves onto examining Christianity’s contribution to greater wellbeing through the details of historical contexts…
Exploring the great escapes from poverty and premature death and the resulting great inequality divergences is a profoundly modern and contemporary story, as is the development of a Christian engagement with such a grand narrative. Yet it’s an account that needs enlarging and enriching but also qualifying and analysing. And that best requires locating it in historical contexts that are both long in extent (and I really mean long, going back to the end of the last Ice Age and before!) and more recent in intensity (since 1750 CE). That will also enable us to see the importance of religious contributions to social development in the more general context, for example through the radical operations of the axial age in the last millennium BCE, but then also in two nations in more recent history since 1700 CE, in the USA and UK.
Such evidence will certainly confirm and elaborate the provisional conclusions emerging from Chapters 2 and 3 that life is getting better for more and more peoples and nations and that Christianity has a robust role to play in that improving of wellbeing. Yet it’s equally clearly getting better-ish, with the dramatic damaging increases in inequalities both between and within nations. And it’s in that order that hard evidence now locates them, as nations getting better, then that ‘better’ being qualified. Both these trends, positives and negatives, will also play a prominent part in the long history, with certainly as much emphasis being placed on the negatives through the repeated bumping against robust ceilings of increasing social development, and the regular violent eruptions of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
There are four brief stages in this introductory argument of locating the themes in historical contexts. They begin by first using contemporary multidisciplinary surveys of the very gradual progression of social development from the end of the last Ice Age, about 13,000 BCE, until the eighteenth century in modern times. The archaeologist and historian Morris’s work, including his deployment of a Social Development Index, is of particular value in tracing and illustrating the improvements in wellbeing over such a long period of time.
On Christianity, incomes and material wellbeing: Addressing the first perspective
At first sight this is the most difficult task of all. For so much of certainly Christian history, the concept of money dominated understandings of income and material wellbeing. And it has a terrible press, not least through the influence of the Christian Scriptures’ pronouncement that money is the root of all evil and Jesus’ call to the rich young man to sell all and follow him and his refusal to do so, because he had great wealth. The painting on the Markham Chantry Chapel from the early 1500s, used in my first blog, says it all, with the rich young man, with his hand on his purse, warned by Death that even the wealthy cannot buy him off. All these pressures led to the continuing theme regarding money as a god, including by some leading theologians today. This is confusing, unhelpful and inaccurate (I almost said plain stupid!). Historically, money’s place in resourcing human life was very limited until at least the eighteenth century. As we have seen, the vast majority of people had very little of it, because they were poor and lived very straitened lives. In such situations money often becomes a symbol of the reality of their marginalization and oppression. When the Industrial Revolution increased and improved the lives of more and more people, income understandably occupied a much bigger part of their lives and the lives of nations. Then it really does become a god for so many theologians and church leaders despite its liberating consequences for the majority poor. What this book tries to do is to correct such general moral confusions, and this is a particular point where that is absolutely essential. Any contemporary consideration of income must recognize its central contribution to contemporary wellbeing both in itself and as key facilitator and contributor to other foundations of wellbeing, from the provision of the basics of housing, food and clothing, to health care, education and governance.
And doing that effectively and adequately is what my model has to be able to engage. That is a particularly difficult task because it involves entering the engagement between Christianity and economics (and therefore recognizing and addressing the great gulf between them), and then also developing Christian practices, ethics and beliefs in relation to income and what and how income helps to resource other key foundations of wellbeing, and only then, and from such evidence, can the nature and extent of Christianity’s contribution to this first perspective be tested in terms of the viability, or otherwise, of my model.
The title is taken from the bracing, and stark, prognosis offered by Steve Chalke MBE, founder of the charity Oasis UK, as he concluded a public lecture at theUniversity of Chesteron ‘The Progressive Power of Religion in the Public Sphere’. Steve’s words, those of a highly successful social entrepreneur (he repeatedly quipped that Oasis has a higher budget than many Local Authorities) offer a profound challenge. How can we salvage something of the spirit and ethos that created the welfare state and reinstate that ethos back into public life and the fabric of our localities? This clarion call, whilst offering many opportunities, also holds many dangers.
The twin policy drivers of localism and austerity are creating new spaces of hands-on engagement and partnership between local authorities and local communities, with faith-based organisations often taking a lead. As I outline in my book The Hybrid Church in the City – Third Space Thinking faith groups are also pioneers in innovative forms of social care and community empowerment, and often where they lead, secular agencies will follow.
The faith sector, as Steve Chalke showed, can also take advantage of the neo-liberalisation of the welfare state by pitching for procurement contracts to run key public services in areas such as housing, health and education. Oasis now runs over forty primary and secondary schools and several housing and care schemes for at-risk young people and the homeless. A key welfare innovation that faith groups are offering is the concept of the ‘hub’ or co-ordinating centre for a series of other outreach activities aimed at increasing local resilience and social capacity. These hubs include children’s and youth work services, debt advice and credit unions and foodbanks.
As Steve himself remarked, this local engagement grows the church as well as the community. New members of Oasis churches are asked if they would like to volunteer on one of many community programmes. It is an invitation to get stuck in, to discover God (if you like) in direct, no-strings attached service for one’s fellow citizens. And it is the prioritisation of orthopraxis (doing the right thing) over orthodoxy (believing the right thing) that lies at the heart of so much faith-based engagement since the financial crash of 2008. This stripping back of the idea of ‘church’ to bare essentials of praxis and forms of civic engagement that creates a sense of hope also brings to life other significant ideas about how we construct a new expression of politics.
These new, emerging political spaces are based on shared concerns and a new openness to engage with others who are shaped by different worldviews – including other faiths, but also across the faith/no religion divide. As I have written elsewhere, ‘The reality is that increasing numbers of leaders and citizens are more open than ever to allowing space for progressive (i.e. outward–looking) religion to deploy its wisdom, experience and resources. Not only in leading debates, but also acting as political hubs for emergent networks and affinity groups committed to creating flourishing localities. It is a two-way, dialogical model of the public sphere where wisdom, resources, expertise and political leadership is shared – and not a one-size-fits all model where one version of the truth dominates and suppresses any others.’ What is not to like?
And yet there are grave dangers associated with this emerging post-welfare/localism economy and politics in which the faith sector finds itself increasingly centre stage. Firstly, there is the issue of the lack of resources in many faith communities. Then there is the ecclesial equivalent of postcode lotteries. Not all religious leadership is as dynamic and progressive as that exemplified by Steve Chalke and other ‘new evangelicals’, and not all faith groups can aspire to fill the huge gaps in social care that are now opening up. Especially when we factor in the knowledge that austerity budgeting is scheduled to last for the rest of the decade.
But there is a deeper danger than even these trends. The success of Oasis, and other faith-based organisations in providing ‘cradle to grave’ welfare in some of our local communities, normalises the idea that the state is no longer there to protect its citizens and provide the economic and social framework by which we have the basic rights and needs that allow us to flourish. The modern state has become the stumbling block to the people, not its friend and enabler. It is a world away from William Temple’s vision of the state which he saw in terms of a covenantal relationship with its citizens based on mutual moral interaction.
Based on Biblical notions of divine covenant, this relationship or bond between the state and its citizens was a prophylactic against a decline in the ethical ordering of economic and political life; a decline that would either lead to political forms of totalitarianism or to individualised forms of life. His moral ‘contract’ was designed to safeguard a communal form of life that creates the right conditions for human fulfilment. In return for the guaranteed basic needs laid out in his famous six middle axioms articulated in Christianity and the New Social Order (i.e. access to universal healthcare, education and housing irrespective of income or status), the citizen had the moral duty to improve their own material and non-material standards; to increase the human capital investment already provided by the state. But this self-improvement was not to be done in a selfish or solipsistic way. Rather all citizens (but especially Christian citizens) had the moral duty to undertake politically engaged and ‘responsible’ forms of citizenship so that the investment of that state in its own people was distributed evenly at the local associational level, in the form of membership of institutions designed to strengthen civil society such as resident groups, trades associations, trades unions, faith groups, adult learning groups, and parent teacher associations.
Now clearly Temple’s vision of the relationship between the state and the citizen, and its relevance to the present age, is up for debate, and one we will be precisely addressing at ourforthcoming conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of his death.
But the real danger for the church, as one of these intermediate distributive bodies, is that in the absence of an increasingly unaccountable state we end up propping up a form of political economy that is decimating the life chances of so many of our citizens. A recent University of Bristol report highlights the continuing social inequality in the UK and the its shocking impact on everyday life: 1.5 million children live in households that cannot afford to heat the home; more than half a million children live in families who cannot afford to feed them properly; 15% of all workers are still trapped in poverty by low wages.
It falls to us therefore, not simply to plug the gaps in welfare spending but to transfer our social and spiritual capital into real political power: to articulate a better alternative based on the rebuilding of national and regional infrastructures providing proper protection and a decent life for everyone; especially for those who are most vulnerable. Let’s not call it the welfare state – let’s call it the enabling state.
Of recent religious stories, the one generating the biggest splash across my Twitter feed was a scathing take on the BBC TV comedy Rev. Writing in the Guardian James Mumford describes the show as ‘pernicious’, undermining the church and a, ‘failure of representation’. Needless to say, numerous followers of this popular show jumped to its defence both online and via the Guardian’s Letters page. Prize for the wittiest tweet goes to cartoonist Dave Walker who wrote, ‘Saying Rev damages the church is like saying Fawlty Towers undermined hotels.’
Although less prevalent (at least amongst the Tweeps I follow) there was some agreement with Mumford’s criticism of Rev. P.M. Philips for example, tweeted, ‘in all its brilliance, [Rev] offers the same views of clergy that is the stock view of the beeb/media’. Mumford’s accusations follow swift on the heels of Tim Stanley who lambasted Rev for being too nice, and offering an inaccurate representation of Christianity. The ‘too nice’ argument incongruously arises in sharp contrast amidstrecent criticisms of American TV shows which depicted Christian characters as viciously judgemental, argumentative and even murderous.
A supportive comment under Stanley’s piece suggests, ‘The show [Rev] is created by the luvvies in the media, so it doesn’t have a lot to do with real Christianity.’ The secular media, according to this line of thought, is unable to adequately portray “real” religion, for they know so little about it. Yet this begs the question of the media’s clear attraction to religion, faith and belief. Time and again these secular “luvvies” turn to religion and religious themes to provide a space for compelling narrative, drama and comedy.
Across the Atlantic, Time magazine recently ran the story, ‘God is Dead. Except at the Box Office’ depicting an increasingly secularising American audience which increasingly produces and consumes films with religious content. Such a phenomenon might be described by my William Temple Foundation colleague Chris Baker as yet another paradox of the post-secular age: the more that institutionalised religion appears to be in decline, the more people appear to talk about it.
I recently reviewed the book Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred by Knott, Poole and Taira (the review will appear in the next edition of Crucible journal) in which the authors suggest that religion and religious themes receive greater media attention than some religious groups presume. They suggest that for people of faith, ‘it is not so much the absence of coverage that should be of concern as the wrong kind of coverage’. For Mumford and Stanley, the ‘pernicious’ Rev clearly falls under the ‘wrong kind’ category; an unsuitable portrait of the Church of England, and Christianity in general.
Another current example of religiosity presented in the media, comes in the form of the film Calvary, an extraordinarily dark comedy which follows a curious week in the life of rural Irish priest Farther James. This time the media “luvvies” take on the Irish Catholic Church and paint a grim depiction of child abuse, ‘bad priests’ and morally loose congregants openly lambasting the church’s increasing irrelevance. Yet Father James is cast as the (albeit flawed) hero throughout, drenched in humility and, as described by director John Michael McDonagh, a ‘genuinely good’ person. The film may be a secular take on the sacred but it leaves the viewer struck by relevant and important questions of death, sin, virtue and forgiveness as it intersects themes of God and godlessness, goodness, sorrow and pain – often in surprising ways.
But for all its merits, Calvary is very clearly a highly dramatized work of fiction. And according to the authors of Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred, so often missing from media representations of religion are, ‘the everyday practices, beliefs and lives of ‘ordinary’ religious people.’ The eponymous Rev Adam Smallbone strikes me as a pretty ordinary religious person. In fact, he is a bit of a loser really, often coveting other people’s success and regularly saying and doing the wrong thing. But perhaps it is this ‘everyday’ representation which holds such appeal. With 1.7m viewers tuning in each week, as tweeter Keith Hitchman points out, this is almost the same number as those who regularly attend church so, ‘Perhaps Rev is how people want Christians to be?’.
Whilst it may be possible to argue that examples such as Rev and Calvary undermine religious institutions (certainly they both take pot-shots at church hierarchy, hypocrisy and institutional corruption) it’s much harder to suggest that they undermine religion or Christianity per se. Rev’s Adam Smallbone and Calvary’s Father James both offer portraits of church leaders who are far from perfect, who fall and fail like the rest of us, yet guided by God, they keep going and aim to do better. Representations of the flawed clergyman for some, might support the claim that the media colludes with the very worst stereotypes of the church. Yet people are watching, debating, and reflecting on Rev in droves – as my Twitter feed testifies. Religious and secular audiences alike are finding these imperfect clerical characters, these candid public representations of Christianity, to be both compelling and relevant. As such, these portraits of very human, clearly flawed, contemporary Christians perpetuated by the secular media, might indicate opportunities for the continuing role of the church in this complex post-secular society, rather than suggesting its undermining and demise.