The current rash of policies across universities (aided by disastrous successive government policies on Higher Education) closing departments of Theology and Religious Studies, let alone other subjects in the Humanities, will one day be an interesting subject for some sociological analysis. Apart from the fact that their view of ‘religion’ is so misinformed so as to evacuate a number of social and political systems of any meaning, they seem to be totally oblivious to the implications of our deeply uncertain and fluid international situation at the moment, where it would be very unreflective (to put it mildly) not to engage with the study of religion and theology. Part of the problem of course is that for a great deal of people around, although religion seems to be very much back in the public domain, ‘religious belief’ is still considered by many to be a private matter, and as such, an anomaly in a vast ocean of human rationality; therefore, it is often considered as faulty, or irrelevant and weak. In some circles, a greater emphasis is put on what is called ‘worldviews’ or ‘spirituality’ without engaging with how these terms actually work.
Very few people can deny that we have moved on from the 1960s analysis of Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society, when there was an overly optimistic view that religion has become irrelevant. The sustained influence and increasing visibility of religion in the United States led some observers to believe that secularisation was unique to Europe. Meanwhile, historical research into religious developments in individual countries over the last two or three centuries has revealed that patterns of religious expansion and decline frequently do no match the expectations of secularisation theories. Although most Western societies have experienced secularisation, its scale and underlying causes are still unclear. Recent research by Professor Stephen Bullivant at St Mary’s University suggested that secularisation may have peaked in Britain too.
Shifts of opinion on matters that were taken for granted has been evident in different ways. The Brexit referendum ten years ago here suggested a broad frustration with supranational institutions such as the EU; the credibility of the UN has also been under strain with the dominance of a single power, such as the USA. Fast forward ten years on, as America attacks Iran, the dominance of this single power is now itself under question as Britain seeks closer ties with its European neighbours; this is partly because sovereign states are increasingly aware that global crises such as the environment, terrorism and migration cannot be solved by detached states alone, even if these states dislike global jurisdictions. So, the first lesson we have from these initial remarks is that we cannot see the world around us in arbitrary single-eyed ways. There is no one way of understanding the world, which any fool is going to easily discover. We need to develop a range of skills that enable us to make connections and understand one event by viewing it through the perspective of other phenomena.
The American/Israeli confrontation with Iran cannot clearly be understood only through the lens of pure politics. America’s project of deposing Middle Eastern tyrants with the hope of turning their states into ‘Switzerland’ has failed miserably. This is a project that united both the politically Liberal Right and the European liberal Left. Both assume that Enlightenment liberalism is the evident creed of rational human beings, whilst many such Liberals are unconscious of the fact, as Tom Holland’s book Dominion argued, that the historical development of Liberalism is not possible without Christianity. Liberalism is, otherwise, inexplicable. The cultural and religious varieties in play between Europe and the Middle East are not superficial private matters that can easily be ignored.
The Iranian regime thinks of itself as ‘the virtuous city’, to use the term of the Arabic philosopher Al-Farabi (reshaping some Platonic terms); in practice, it is more a group of sad old men leading a rather dysfunctional constitutional model; it appears to be a contradictory combination of public representation with the absolute rule of the Jurist cleric. The assumption for this kind of regime is that the common good is obvious, and any sensible Shi’a Muslim must surely agree with the same policies and vision of the religious rulers. The Ayatollah figures are there to guide and direct everyone in the same direction. When ‘democracy’ was finally imposed on Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the same type of constitution (under American supervision) was developing in a context where Shi’ites formed the majority and religious leaders had to play a role in the decision-making process.
Understanding Islamic law and society here is important. Scholars of Islamic law, such as Wael Hallaq, have pointed to the ‘impossibility’ of establishing a modern Nation State based on Sharia as statutory civil law, simply because Islamic law is not meant to be a centralised system in a bureaucratic state; as such, the concept of a civil law, or civil society, where ideas of natural law and reason as fundamental human properties, are historically alien to traditional Muslim societies. Liberal democracies have not been possible in most of the countries in the Middle East. Whilst there are some contemporary Muslim thinkers, such as Abdullahi An-Naim and Anver Emon, who are trying to engage with these questions, the Middle East has oscillated between secular despotism and the so-called Islamist rule. In Iran, it seems, those who question the authority of the jurist cleric and his ability to interpret the divine will are bound to suffer.
Islam of course is not monolithic. However, one might argue that it is a great deal easier to develop this illiberal view when the religious tradition understands the Quranic revelation as hegemonically frozen in time. This is different from the historical evolvement of doctrine that St John Henry Newman talks about in reference to the Truth as a dead man on the cross, when the saeculum of St Augustine of Hippo sits between the Incarnation and the Parousia. Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, like Martin Heidegger, believed in a particular understanding of union or annihilation in Being; for Khomeini, this is based on a type of Sufi thought and practice, solving the Cartesian riddle of mind/body at a stroke. But as we know, Heidegger was a Nazi.
Therefore, the assumptions made about democracy in the Middle East suggest a good level of ignorance about the history of where the liberal democratic tradition comes from. The justification for the offensive against Iran as regime change is vulnerable to the kind of unhistorical optimism which characterised the American invasion of Iraq.
However, if you thought that was enough religion to engage with, Tim Stanley added in one of his Telegraph op-eds recently, with his characteristically good satirical humour, how ‘Trump’s reckless Iran war is underpinned by bad theology’, namely eccentric American Christian Fundamentalism. Similarly, in a recent Spectator podcast, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams, spoke of America’s ‘demonic’ political climate, adding his voice to Pope Leo’s critical interventions, the Pope being someone who got to his position at a very challenging time in international relations indeed.
How can one distinguish between good or bad theology? First, it is important to remember that contemporary American Christian fundamentalism is essentially modern. As George Marsden pointed out, the fundamentalist conception of truth is derived from a scientific age. It is formed on the analogy of natural science as seen in the Newtonian mould. Therefore, fundamentalists tend to have a ‘scientific view’ of the bible; a series of ‘hard facts’ apprehensible by the ‘common sense’ of the sincere believer’.[1] It is an interesting fact that this movement flourished in North America more than in any other traditional context.[2] Its foundational method of reading the Bible is not dissimilar to the foundation of modern America with its disregard for history, local tradition, and law. The immigrant whites came to consider America as the new free land, where they can do what they wish with total disregard to the local traditions and no sense of belonging to the indigenous culture.[3] This formative narrative, one might suggest, is fertile soil for eccentric fundamentalisms. It has allowed America to look in the eyes of Middle Eastern peoples today as a counter ‘Jihad state’. Indeed, Trump’s foreign policies are not new American policies. When I visited Washington DC in February/March of 2025, I was told by those who should know better that Donald Trump looks back to the example of the 25th US President William McKinley (1897-1901), who had similar expansionist and tariff policies.
If Tump and some of his Right-Wing allies like to talk of the Christian heritage of the West, we need to ask what this means; for this is not simply about Christianity being the dominant faith. Rather, it is more importantly about remembering that the history of the Church and its engagement with political powers in Europe made it clear that political power in Europe was to be argued about; political leaders were always answerable to justifying their legitimacy before the law and before God. This much we can learn from the medieval text of Thomas Aquinas too. Without denying the Church’s illiberal past, many contemporary thinkers remind us that the Enlightenment protests that shaped modern Europe did not come from nowhere; much of it rests on theological arguments that would not have been possible if the Church were not a distinctive body in the society challenging those with various interests and agendas vying for power.
Both the Trumpian model and the purely secular rhetoric in Europe have left us vulnerable to different types of unhistorical optimism, because both of them either disregard the Church as an enemy (Trump vs the Pope) or at best consider it a private institution; this has allowed our assumptions about liberal modernity to turn into an absolute, tyrannical, pseudo religious ideology, not dissimilar in fact to radical political Islam. The rise of what some regard as unwelcome elements in European politics comes with the gap created by this total disregard to this aspect of the Christian history of Europe; a forthcoming book by Dr Michael Bonner, The Crisis of Liberalism, argues that without faith in God, Liberalism faces an existential crisis.
The challenge in the West, therefore, is to be able to engage critically with this history, preserving a European distinctiveness in the midst of all of this requires that we ask what is the specific moral and European substance that shaped European history and that can engage with the world of Islam in a clear and productive manner. In the absence of any such clarity, many religious and non-religious thinkers have warned, we find ourselves in the postmodern dilemma of competing relative narratives vying for power without any clear perception of the wider common good; not to have a clear moral and spiritual foundation today means being trapped in violent reactions.
The challenge in the Islamic context, whether in the Middle East or in Europe is to go beyond the dangers of essentialising the text and turning it into a system. There are limits to the Quran’s claim to textual finality, as a purer account of the divine. As a friend scholar of Shi’ite thought once noted to me: ‘A divine voice that seeks to remain aloof to the complexities of history risks falling victim to it’. Is it possible for an Islamic tradition to raise anything equivalent to the biblical argumentation with God, as opposed to the power play of who can provide a better exegesis of sacred texts? This is not only characteristic of Iranian religious institutions. It’s also there in other Sunni establishments.
As I noted elsewhere before, the path forward in Muslim contexts lies in focusing more on certain elements of Islam’s mystical dimension and the quest for a “humbler” position where the revealed text’s contingency and human limitations are more clearly recognised. It might be a difficult position to take given the insecurities of the post-colonial Muslim majority states. But it is this kind of acknowledgment that will encourage a culture of argumentation and intellectual humility that the best of the Enlightenment brought. Whilst there are complicated and rich debates in classical Islam on questions of Theodicy, God’s law and justice, it was my medieval Muslim friend, al-Ghazali who came closer to the Christian understanding of natural law, albeit not entirely the same either. Without this exploration, or perhaps even transformation, ‘the common good’ of the Middle East is going to end up simply being defined by tyrants of different types.
The challenge for us here in Britain is how to revive greater engagement with theology and religious studies for the common good so that our universities can be havens for arguments and a better culture of political negotiation; the government has a responsibility to promote such collaboration for universities and indeed fund it. Theocracies, or pseudo theocracies as well as ideological secularism provide a final claim that might be functionalist, but they are an escape from the complexities of history, and they see the world with one eye. The society deserves better, and they won’t get there if the focus lacks engagement with theology, because, as Aquinas noted, theology is the sort of subject that relates to everything; its pedagogy is that of wholeness, inviting us to an entire process of engaging with all the sciences through our participation in wisdom. We ignore it at our peril.
Rev’d Dr Yazid Said is a Senior Lecturer in Islam at Liverpool Hope University. After being ordained an Anglican priest, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2010) on the medieval Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). His research is focused on medieval Muslim political and legal thought and on Christian-Muslim theological encounters, with reference to the manner in which Greek philosophical thought was appropriated in both Christian and Muslim texts.
[1] Marsden, George, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 7-8.
The world, we are told, is in “polycrisis” – a mutually compounding collapse of socio-economic, environmental and geopolitical security on multiple, interlinked fronts. We have overwhelmingly many reasons, you would think, to lament.
But we won’t get anywhere with that sort of attitude, we are also told.
According to social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, the US is locked under the grip of a diversely-expressed “positive thinking ideology” that, at minimum, imposes positivity as a moral obligation and, in the extreme, ascribes it magical powers. She traces the emergence of this ideology to the 19th century New Thought movement, whose eclectic ideas about mental states manifesting in the material world helped to birth the self-help industry. Early self-help writers extended New Thought’s predominant focus on bodily health to matters of material prosperity and social status, inviting readers to “Think and Grow Rich,” per the title of Napoleon Hill’s 1937 classic of the genre. President Trump’s childhood pastor and life-long mentor, Norman Vincent Peale, propelled the idea towards ubiquity with his 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking, which taught methods for receiving power from God through visualisation and the repetition of Bible verses. Twenty-first century belief in a supernatural “law of attraction” that rewards positive thought is most archetypically represented by Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006), (in)famously favoured by Oprah Winfrey. Following a trend within the genre, Byrne appeals to quantum physics in an effort to boost the scientific legitimacy of her proposals.
But not all expressions of positive thinking ideology take such ritualised mystical forms as “visualisation and declaration” practices, or presume religious, spiritual and/or pseudo-scientific mechanisms for success. Proposals for the efficacy of positive thought have also been offered on the basis of psychological and sociological factors. Positive psychology has become a flourishing research field, providing a more academically respectable case for positive thinking, and thereby helping to secure its ideological diffusion. As Ehrenreich notes, its claims are not uncontested and are often overegged (Smile or Die, chapter 6), but its reach is widened and strengthened by press coverage that itself is biased towards amplifying positive findings, and by its serviceability to corporate interests.[1] Workers who have internalised the belief that upbeat resilience is the key to their personal success can be made to work harder and to endure cost-cutting erosions of working conditions and rights without complaint. As such, the motivational industry readily finds a large and wealthy business market for its books, conferences and training courses. Positive thinking also serves the interests of corporations and wealthy elites via neoliberal politics: it is much easier to secure consent for austerity policies from voters who are willing to blame their own and others’ lack on a lapse in resilience or a failure to “think and grow rich.”
The UK might seem – on its sardonic, self-deprecatory surface – to have spurned this particular US export. But the caricatured “stiff upper lip” that commits Brits to “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life” can be similarly harnessed towards victim-blaming narratives that deflect attention from structural injustice and help to normalise austerity and worker exploitation. Moreover, one sphere in which US-style positive thinking has taken overt hold is (I suggest) UK Christian culture. In neocharismatic circles like my own, internationally-influential groups like Bethel Church encourage habits of self-policed thought, selective information intake, and declarative prayer that bear strong resemblance to quantum mystical techniques for manifestation. But even within the wider mainstream where such teachings remain controversial we have bought in to the idea that good vibes get good results (as measured in audience numbers and customer satisfaction). We can see this in the way that Christianity is “marketed” to outsiders – promo videos that intersperse stunning aerial cinematography with soundbites from beautiful successful people whose happiness was made complete by an Alpha course. We see it in our filtered fragmentation of Scripture (Lamentations 3:22-23 fridge magnet, anyone?) and the worship songs that get popularised (if there’s always and only “Joy In the House of the Lord” where are our grieving and hurting household members to go?) We also see it in the way that “bad news” stories, including abuse revelations, are covered up – leading to perversions of justice, further traumatisation of victims, and continued safeguarding failures. As one CofE priest told the Makin investigation into the four-decades-long open secret of John Smyth’s abuses, “I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public.” And we see it, on the flip side, in our uncritical enthusiasm for “good news” stories that are more complex in reality than we choose to investigate.
For example, even in the act of retracting the much-celebrated Quiet Revival report due to the recent discovery of flawed data, Bible Society has been keen to preserve the optimistic message at its heart. But the question marks over that research have, since its publication, been qualitative as well as quantitative. Granting a perceived atmosphere of increased openness to the Bible and to Christianity, particularly among young men, there is a pressing need for cautious discernment regarding the source, form and implications of this openness. Because not only does the apparent increase coincide with the emergence of a Christianised far right, attracting much the same demographic; it has also been associated with at least some of the same prominent influencers. Jordan Peterson, for example, is mentioned in the original report as a “key public figure” whose open engagement with Christianity has encouraged interest among his many followers. He has also been described as part of the pipeline to the far-right, and played an instrumental role in growing the support base of islamophobic former-EDL leader (and recent Christian convert) Tommy Robinson.
None of this is at all to say that churches should withhold welcome from those whose curiosity for Christianity has been kindled by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Jordan Peterson. But the twin tasks of encouraging them to disentangle faith and Scripture from ideological baggage, and standing in solidarity with those victimised by that baggage, are going to take stronger stuff than positive thinking. They’re going to take the type of courageous realism that is only possible from a place of deep, God-trusting hope. Because the so-named polycrisis that the far right is leveraging to mobilise support is real, even while their scapegoating deflections of blame are absurd. And for the church to feign cheerful ignorance or pious innocence or naive optimism is to treat the “wounds” that we helped to inflict carelessly; to say ““peace, peace,” when there is no peace,” like the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day. People (those being radicalised, those being victimised, those experiencing loss from a diversity of more or less entitled starting points) need a place to go with our grief that is neither hatred, nor despair … nor either the immobilising self-deception of obligatory positivity that the Christian mainstream all too often seems to mean by “hope.” As Walter Brueggemann recognised, true hope begins in lament: the courage and honesty to grieve like Jeremiah did, discerning the heart of God, breaking the numbness of denial, offering and inviting solidarity, and making way for new beginnings – even ones we don’t yet have the imaginations to “visualise” and “declare.” For the sake of ourselves, our neighbours, and the living world we share as home, it’s time we turned away from the bright side.
Carolyn Whitnall is a PhD student with the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence. You can find out more about her work here: https://www.carolynwhitnall.co.uk/
[1] This is not to deny the potential for positive psychology, in both its clinical and popular forms, to have real psychotherapeutic benefits for some individuals when appropriately matched with needs and circumstances.
The world right now can feel like it is falling apart. Power dynamics that have existed from long before I was born are changing. Many of the institutions in which people have put their hope have weakened, collapsed, or been shown to be toothless. The political parties which have held sway for generations have lost vast amounts of support and new, radical leaders are trying to take their place.
When the Church Father Jerome heard about the sack of Rome in 410 CE, he was distraught. Rome, the greatest city in the world, the symbolic head of an empire that had ruled the known world for hundreds of years had been pillaged by an army of Visigoths. In Jerome’s eyes, “the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city” (Preface to Book 1 of his Commentary on Ezekiel). He could not comprehend that Rome had collapsed and many of its people forced to flee and seek refuge throughout the empire. (Prefaces to Books 3 and 7 of his Commentary on Ezekiel).
Jerome represents a view that had become common amongst the Christians. Since they had gained a significant level of political power they had wrestled with how to understand their new role and responsibilities, and more importantly how to understand how God was working. They often arrived at a very close association between the outworking of God’s will, and the continued success and triumph of the Roman empire.
The view held by Jerome is epitomised by the Christian historian Eusebius. Eusebius argued that Constantine was God’s instrument to bring the known world to Christ. He was a conqueror who brought the Kingdom of God through military victory. (Life of Constantine Book 1 Chapters 4 and 6). There was a clear association between the Roman state and the Kingdom of God. They were inextricably linked. Eusebius interpreted the predictions in Psalm 72 and Isaiah 2:4 that wars would cease when God’s Kingdom would come as having been fulfilled in the Pax Romana, the ‘Roman peace’, an idealised understanding of the world Rome had created. (Preparation for the Gospel Book 1 Chapter 4).
These interpretations were taken up by other prominent fourth century theologians like Jerome’s mentor Ambrose. Ambrose argued that the defence of the Roman Empire was necessary for the defence of the faith and was prophesied in scripture.(Exposition of the Christian Faith Book 2 Chapter 16). Like Eusebius, he associated the peace of God with the Roman Empire, and the defence of that peace with the maintaining of God’s Kingdom. The Roman Christian poet Prudentius described the empire extending its boundaries into the heavens now that it was under a Christian emperor. (Reply to Symmachus Book 1)
In all these Christian thinkers there was an interweaving of the political and the eternal. God’s salvation plan was seen as being worked out through Roman political power, through Roman conquest. They were operating within the ancient classical view of the state, where the political institutions were at the centre of the society and were seen as the place where human flourishing was brought about.
But, if the state is seen as synonymous with the outworking of the Kingdom of God, how then does one respond when the empire’s stability crumbles, when its security seems uncertain, and the symbol of its unchanging might is sacked by an enemy army.
Another student of Ambrose was Augustine. Much of his theological reflection took place after the sack of Rome, where the widespread Christian political understanding had been severely shaken. Augustine challenged the traditional classical understanding of the role of the state and how it related to the divine. He saw in classical Roman thinkers the argument that a state was united by a shared understanding of what was right, of what was just. (The City of God Book 19 Chapter 21).
But Augustine believed this to be impossible. He understood humans to be fallen, our desires disordered, so that we would not choose what was right; we would not choose power over peace, or loving God over love of self. (The City of God Book 19 Chapter 13). In an earthly state, true justice is impossible and injustice is unavoidable.
Augustine argued that only through the transforming power of Jesus’ sacrificial, humble love could humanity’s desire be reordered so that God was our supreme concern, and we could seek and understand true justice. In light of this there were two groups of people, the Heavenly City and the Earthly City. The Heavenly City were those who were in Christ and had had their desires reordered, and the Earthly City were those who were not. The Heavenly City were defined by love of God and care for others, whilst the citizens of the Earthly City were focused on themselves and sought to dominate others. (The City of God Book 14 Chapter 4). Whilst Augustine used the word ‘City’ he was not referring to physical political entities like the Roman Empire. Augustine saw the time in which he lived as the saeculum, a period where the members of both Cities were intermingled on earth and inhabited the same social structures. Whilst we live in the saeculum, no human society can fully realise true justice, no nation or institution can be considered the embodiment of the Kingdom of God.
Augustine does not argue that political structures and engagement in legislative affairs are unimportant. Where he lived in North Africa, most of the Church was made up by a Christian group called the Donatists. They were a separatist Christian movement who wanted a clear division and segregation between the Church, the people of God, and Roman society and politics, because they believed the holiness and internal integrity of the Church was primary. Augustine disagreed. In the saeculum no such divide between the Church and society could exist. But more importantly we have moral duties to our neighbours. Politics may cause us great upset because it can sometimes lead to harm, and justice will not be perfect. But Christian participation in political rule, in seeking temporal good is something we are obligated to do. (The City of God Book 19 Chapter 6). Augustine understood the role of a Christian as to preach the Christian gospel and advocate to the state policies which reflected the Kingdom of God. If this was done it would be to the benefit of the state. This can be seen in Augustine’s engagement with the pagan former official Nectarius. Augustine sought to convince Nectarius that Christianity was better for social reconciliation than his pagan philosophy (Letter 91). The example Augustine used to demonstrate a Christian engagement with the state was not Eusebius’ Constantine, but Theodosius I’s public atonement in AD 390 for the massacre of many of his own people. This repentant figure was portrayed as the opposite of those who sought their own glory. (The City of God Book 5 Chapter 26).
In the Augustinian understanding no political party or social movement can truly save. It would be naive to believe an ideal society can be created through human effort. But this does not mean that Christian’s should not seek the common good and protect the marginalised and oppressed. Whilst we await Christ’s return, and the restoration of all things, those who follow him are called to faithful witnesses to the God and King we profess to follow.
Alex Smith is a Parliamentary Researcher and an Ambassador for Christians in Politics.
Democratic politics in Japan and the UK are entering a period of instability. Populist movements are gaining ground, established parties are losing authority, and political debate is marked by anger, resentment, and distrust toward political elites. In Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has repeatedly faced allegations of corruption and political funding scandals, as well as controversial ties with the Unification Church, widely described as a religious cult.[1]
Yet the outcome was striking. In the February 2026 general election, the ruling LDP secured a landslide victory, winning a record two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. Under Japan’s electoral system, however, a vote share of only around thirty percent was sufficient to produce an overwhelming parliamentary majority. Opposition parties, including centrist parties that presented themselves as moderate alternatives to the ruling party, suffered heavy defeats.
‘Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic party won two-thirds of the seats in the lower house in the Japanese election’. Photograph: Yuki Sato/AP. Source: The Guardian.
Meanwhile in the UK, confidence in the established parties is weakening as both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are expected to face significant losses in the forthcoming local elections, while the right-wing populist party Reform UK’s national vote share could rival or surpass that of the major parties.[2]
At the global level, instability has taken an even more violent form. The recent joint airstrikes carried out by the United States and Israel against Iran exemplifies this. Geopolitical rivalry can rapidly escalate into large-scale military confrontation.
In such an atmosphere, what spreads through society is not hope but anxiety and cynicism. Another temptation emerges: accelerationism, the idea that the collapse of existing institutions should be welcomed – or hastened – to clear the ground for a new social order. Accelerationism is often accompanied by a cold political cynicism: institutions are corrupt, society is already collapsing, so why not hasten the breakdown and prepare the way for renewal? Yet this posture, while it may appear intellectually sharp or daring, serves to justify the abandonment of ethics. To surrender to such thinking is to participate in the logic of destruction; what follows is not renewal but further violence. The radical ethical command of the Gospel becomes relevant again.
It is precisely in such circumstances that the command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44) acquires renewed significance. At first glance this command appears almost impossibly demanding, and it has often been reduced to a principle of personal morality. Yet biblical scholarship – most notably that of Albert Schweitzer – has long recognised that this teaching carried a far more radical meaning within a historical situation in which the end of the world, the imminent expectation of the eschaton, was understood as a concrete and pressing reality.
As Albert Schweitzer famously argued in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the ethics of Jesus did not arise from historical optimism. Rather, they emerged within an imminent eschatological expectation. In what Schweitzer described as Jesus’s ‘consistent eschatology’, the ethics of Jesus appear not as moderate moral advice but as uncompromising ethical demands, recognising that history would not be completed through human effort. For the Matthean community, ‘enemies’ were not distant moral but referred to the concrete reality of life under Roman imperial rule – a world marked by humiliation, oppression, and persistent political tension.
In some contemporary Christian responses to political crisis, emphasis is placed on the importance of presence with others in situations of suffering and conflict. Such language rightly stresses solidarity. Yet when presence itself becomes the primary theological response, Christianity risks drifting back toward an older moral optimism. Nineteenth-century liberal theology, especially in the tradition associated with Albrecht Ritschl, portrayed Jesus primarily as a moral teacher guiding the ethical progress of history. Schweitzer’s historical scholarship famously challenged this interpretation, showing instead that the radical ethics of Jesus emerged from an imminent eschatological horizon rather than from confidence in historical progress.
What, then, might this command mean in our present political circumstances? ‘Enemies’ cannot simply be identified with particular far-right populists, the parties associated with them, or the voters who follow them. Nor should such voters be dismissed as merely foolish, ignorant, or morally inferior. The ‘enemy’ may lie elsewhere: not in particular opponents, but in the political atmosphere itself – an atmosphere in which anxiety, resentment, and the imagination of violence increasingly shape public life. In such a climate, people cease to encounter one another as persons and eroding personal encounter in public life.
In such circumstances, the danger is that political life becomes governed entirely by impersonal logics of hostility and suspicion, in which individuals are no longer encountered as persons but reduced to positions within a conflict. It is precisely within such a climate that the command to ‘love your enemies’ must be reconsidered. In this sense, this command does not mean beautifying one’s opponents, abandoning political confrontation, or staging a forced reconciliation. Rather, it calls for a refusal to be drawn into the discourses of fear and hatred that flourish in desperate circumstances. Nor does it mean forcing oneself to love those who cannot honestly be loved, or pretending that hatred or fear do not exist. It means deciding not to adopt the logic of violence, and refusing to become complicit in its atmosphere.
Consequently, love appears here not primarily as a feeling but as an ethical decision. It is not a strategy for political victory, but a form of ethical preparedness for a world that may have to begin again after collapse. From an eschatological perspective, history is not necessarily accomplished through human effort. Politics fails, institutions decay, and societies sometimes collapse; refusing to abandon ethics becomes preparation for the future. When the moment arrives in which society begins to rise again from its lowest point, what will be needed are not those who have surrendered to cynicism and destruction, but those who have refused participation in the surrounding atmosphere of violence.
In an age of collapse, the command to ‘love your enemies’ does not mean political non-resistance. Rather, it signifies a deliberate refusal to surrender to the political discourses generated by fear and hatred. Accelerationism seeks to hasten the collapse of institutions in the hope that a new order might emerge from the ruins. The ethics of the Gospel, by contrast, refuses to compete in the race toward destruction. Instead, it demands that we sustain both ethical commitment and reason for the sake of a future that is yet to come. The direction of history is never guaranteed; refusing participation in the logic of violence and sustaining ethical responsibility may be the only condition under which a renewed social order remains possible. To love one’s enemies, in this sense, is not to soften conflict but to prepare ethically for the world that may begin after the collapse of the present one.
Loving one’s enemies is not sentimental ethics.
It is a strategy for surviving an age of political collapse.
It may be the last form of hope once optimism has vanished from history.
[1] The Unification Church is a religious movement founded in South Korea by Sun Myung Moon in 1954. In Japan the organisation developed extensive links with conservative politicians during the Cold War, through networks associated with former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of Shinzo Abe. Abe’s assassin stated that his family had been financially ruined by the church and that he believed Abe had supported the organisation through these political connections.
Masko Hayashi is a social welfare theorist and theologian specialising in welfare state theory, Christian social thought, and theological ethics in social policy. Her research focuses on the social ethics of R. H. Tawney and British Christian Socialism. Her work examines how theological concepts shape social institutions, especially the welfare state and the third sector. She has held visiting research positions at Goldsmiths, University of London and Wesley House, Cambridge, and was a recipient of a doctoral fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She teaches social policy and comparative welfare state theory at Rikkyo University (Tokyo).
Life on the Breadline: Theology, Poverty and Politics in an Age of Austerity
Chris Shannahan
SCM Press, 2025, 226 pp., pbk, £26.00.
Review by Dr Joseph Forde, Honorary Research Fellow in Historical Theology, Urban Theology Union, Sheffield.
Drawing on detailed in-depth empirical fieldwork across the UK, ‘Life on the Breadline’ was as a three year (2018-2021) research project that analysed the nature, scope and impact of Christian engagement with urban poverty in the UK, set in the context of the austerity drives stemming from the 2008 financial crash. It was also the first academic, theological analysis of Christian responses to UK poverty during that period. [1] Chris Shannahan was a core project team member and the project’s lead researcher. In this book, he provides an authoritative, accessible and illuminating exposition of the theological influences that shaped the project, and that he argues have sown the seeds of an austerity-age theology of liberation. He also provides a summary of the project’s core findings.
In chapter 1, he analyses the, ‘nature, causes and impact of contemporary poverty’ (p. 4). Chapter 2 focuses on the project’s methodology; what Shannahan describes as, ‘the ‘nitty-gritty’ grounded approach to hermeneutics’ (p. 5). In chapters 3 to 6 he analyses four approaches to Christian engagement with austerity age poverty. The first, is what he calls the ‘Caring’ approach, which emphasises the Church as being a servant community, motivated by a theological vision of the common good and human flourishing as central to meeting the needs of those experiencing poverty. The second, is what he calls the more politicized ‘Campaigning and Advocacy’ approach, which he connects with God’s ‘preferential option for the poor’ and, ‘the framing of the Church as a liberative movement called to speak truth to power’ (p. 6). The third, is what he calls ‘The Self-help and Enterprise’ approach, which emphasises self-reliance and aspiration as being key motivators necessary for transcending poverty. The fourth, is what he calls the ‘Community Building’ approach, that sees the Church as ‘a companion community’ and that emphasises ‘grassroots solidarity and relational Incarnational spirituality as the building blocks for a holistic engagement’ (p. 6) with poverty and its causes. In chapters 7 and 8, he draws on the arguments he has developed to begin to shape what he calls, ‘the methodological and thematic foundations for an austerity-age theology of liberation’ (p. 6).
A key theological theme running through his analysis is that poverty is structural; hence, systemic in its origins and causes. This is in line with the way Gustavo Gutiérrez, the father of Roman Catholic liberation theology, in his seminal work of 1971:‘A Theology of Liberation’, described it as being a result of structural sin. Thus, while Shannahan acknowledges, ‘As individuals we are accountable for our actions and decisions’ (p.18), he argues we are not accountable for, ‘the structural injustice that limits our opportunities and the choices we make’ (p.18). Therefore, from his perspective, in an age of austerity, a credible theology of liberation must, ‘move beyond flawed analyses that divorce poverty from its structural roots and apolitical visions of the common good’ (p. 18). Hence, for Shannahan, poverty is political, and, for an austerity-age theology of liberation to be credible and effective, it must be a political theology, capable of speaking truth to power and of bringing about changes that address the structural causes of poverty. Shannahan sets his analysis in the period of austerity that began in the UK in June, 2010 with the austerity budget, passed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, that saw significant cuts to public expenditure, including to the funding of the Welfare State. This, and later legislation, such as the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 that brought in cuts to welfare benefits, resulted in a deepening of inequality and a consequential rise in poverty levels. From Shannahan’s perspective, ‘such policies rupture the social fabric of British society and a shared commitment to the common good’ (p. 21). Indeed, he sees poverty as, ‘an insidious form of violence that can suffocate the life out of us.’(p. 22). In the struggle to overcome and eliminate poverty, Shannahan is unambiguous in his view that each of the four theological approaches to tackling poverty which he examines, have a role to play in shaping our response to it; hence, a role ‘in the forging of a new austerity-age theology of liberation’ (p. 199). However, he is more sympathetic to the ‘Community Building’, ‘Caring’, and ‘Campaigning and Advocacy’ approaches, than he is to the ‘Self-help and Enterprise’ approach, seeing the latter as being capable of deepening, ‘inequality by addressing individual poverty without challenging the structural injustice that causes it’ (p. 120).
Shannahan’s analysis is particularly strong in the skilful way in which he handles the historical contribution that Christian theology has made to tackling and reducing poverty. In this regard, his summaries of the contributions that traditions such as Catholic Social Teaching, the Social Gospel Movement, Christian Socialism, Christian Realism (of the kind espoused by Reinhold Niebuhr and Archbishop William Temple, Ronald H. Preston and John Atherton), and, more recently, the Christians on the Left movement, are informed, accurate and relevant. Again, he is of the view that all of these traditions can and should contribute to sowing the seeds of an austerity–age theology of liberation, and offers suggestions for how this might be achieved. He also touches on the British Liberation Theology tradition developed by Revd Dr John Vincent at the Urban Theology Unit (later renamed as the Urban Theology Union) in Sheffield, though with important contributions from Professor Chris Rowland and others. I would have liked to have seen more on the contribution that urban theology has made (and can make) to the alleviation and reduction of austerity-based, urban poverty. However, this does not in any way reduce my admiration for the comprehensive way in which Shannahan’s analysis covers so much ground, in ways that are clear and apposite.
Shannahan concludes the book by identifying a number of challenges he considers are essential for developing and sustaining a ‘rigorous and contextually authentic austerity-age theology of liberation and [to] ensure its traction within and beyond the academy’ (p. 199). These cover inter alia the work of the theologian, the church, the role of charities, the need for theological reflection, the need for a more proactive and sustained commitment from all participants in poverty alleviation by engaging in the political arena and with political purpose, and a need for solidarity to become a key feature of this movement for change. Roman Catholic values that place an importance on every person’s dignity, agency and the capacity for achieving solidarity in the field of human endeavour, feature prominently, in what is a call for action. As he puts it: ‘For the sake of all whose lives have been lost to the slow systemic violence of austerity-age poverty there can be no more delay’ (p. 206).
Shannahan has produced an important book on poverty, especially poverty caused by austerity, and the consequences for those who experience it, as well as on possible ways of overcoming it. It is a book that is based on a considerable amount of qualitative and quantitative research, which has benefited from a project group methodology that has been characterised by a multi-disciplinary approach to its information gathering and analysis. I have no hesitation in recommending it to all who share an interest in poverty, its causes and consequences, and possible ways of overcoming it.
Notes
[1] ‘Life on the Breadline: Christianity, Poverty and Politics in the 21st Century City, a Report for Policymakers in the UK’, is available for download via a Google search.
The question is hardly new: it must however be posed and reposed in every generation – not least our own, in which the Church in question appears ever more diminished, and at a moment when the concept of England is in danger of ‘capture’ by a new faction. Whether or not ‘religion’ or more precisely ‘Christianity’ is part of that takeover is a complex issue. That said, those involved are likely retain a Christian identity if not a Christian belief, and crosses are wielded in processions alongside flags. Like it or not, religion – Christianity even – is part of that package.
Faced with this conundrum, Linda’s presentation gave us 5 Ps and a B: these were parishes, presence, prayer, place, the past and beauty. I found this an intriguing way to start the conversation and will expand on two of them: prayer and place.
The first caught my imagination in so far as Linda stressed the accessibility of prayer as opposed to the disciplines of worship, whereas I had always assumed the reverse: that, at least in my youth, relatively large numbers of people went to church, but only the keen ones prayed – or so I thought. More than half a century later, churchgoing has declined markedly but given an opportunity to pray, significant numbers of people respond positively. But what should they say and to whom are they speaking? Do they do this alone or does the propensity to pray generate (unseen) communities? Either way, how should the Church respond?
With respect to place, Linda underlined the shared ecclesiologies of Northern Europe’s Protestant churches, most of which have a ‘national’ resonance as opposed to the universalism of the Catholic Church on one hand and the denominationalism of the United States on the other. I agree, but the Church of England is distinctive within this category for number of reasons. Its theology is Anglican rather than Lutheran and it has no concept of membership in the sense that this is not only understood but paid for in the Lutheran churches which – unlike the Church of England – have been virtual monopolies until relatively recently.
Even more important is the so far indissoluble link between the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. In much of the Communion, Anglicanism is not only growing fast but is conservative in both doctrine and culture, and thus, out of sympathy with significant sections of the Church of England and the society of which it is part. Put differently, it is hard to see a way forward for Living in Love and Faith while the Archbishop of Canterbury remains the assumed head of the Anglican Communion as well as the English Church. Might the Anglican Consultative Council find a positive way out of this impasse at its forthcoming meeting in Belfast (June-July 2026)? And where might it look for inspiration? To the rather more flexible Lutheran World Federation, possibly.
John Denham took a different approach, addressing the complexities of nation, nationhood and nationalism at a time of considerable sensitivity, provoked at least in part by Brexit, but even more by the arrival of significant numbers of migrants into Europe, including England. The migrant issue has proved hugely consequential: prompting new political parties all over Europe, at least some of which merit the term extremist, which have in turn promoted the kind of demonstration referred to above.
Where do/ should Anglicans stand on this matter? I was challenged to think deeply about this question when reviewing The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity, edited by Helen Paynter and Maria Power.[1] The editors reject the notion that the ‘Christianity’ displayed by the far right is something distinct from Christianity per se, thus letting ‘real’ Christians off the hook in terms of their responsibilities for what is happening. In parenthesis, exactly the same question can be addressed to centre-right political parties vis-à-vis their more extreme alternatives. In both cases, a line must be drawn between what is and is not acceptable, but where? Even more urgent is the need – indeed the duty – for all Christians to understand better those groups in society who for a variety of reasons are attracted to populist parties. There are good grounds for being disillusioned with the mainstream.
Putting these various points together, I am minded to return to an idea that has grown in my mind over several decades of reflection about the Church of England vis-à-vis its comparators in Europe: that is to recognize – and then to build on – the advantages of a weak ‘established’ church. It is abundantly clear that strong state churches run the risk of being both excluding and exclusive. A weaker, but nonetheless, established church has different opportunities. Discerning its strengths from a distinctive past – that of a partial monopoly – it can use these imaginatively (just as Linda suggests) to welcome rather than exclude, and to encourage rather than to condemn.
Take, for example, the still evident convening power of the Church of England, which can be seen at national, regional and local level. Might this be deployed among other things to foster a better quality of conversation about ‘religion’ in English – indeed British – society. The ‘problem’ – an ill-informed and ill-mannered debate – is easy enough to identify but harder to resolve as diminishing religious practice necessarily undermines not only the knowledge but the sensitivities required to generate constructive discussion about religion in public life. At the same time, and as John Denham reminded us, growing numbers of migrants from many different parts of the world demand that such discussions happen almost on a daily basis. Anglicans can and should take a lead is speaking well about religion, both our own and that of others.
We first met Precious two years ago when she turned up to morning worship. She had recently arrived with her nine year old child from one of Britain’s former colonies. She asked for prayer that she might be able to find additional care work with a better employer, and a school place.. The vicar and I arranged to meet up with her during the week to find out more and to see how the church could help. Thus began a long relationship, involving advice, advocacy, prayer and practical help for two fellow Christians trapped in a desperate situation, and a steep learning curve about a great social injustice.
The care crisis
As a church with an ageing demographic we were familiar with the local adult care system as church and family members needed help from home carers, or places in care homes, some of which were visited by our ministers and congregations, especially to sing carols at Christmas. Some of our working age members worked in the NHS or in social care. Some of us had anxieties as to whether we would be cared for well when the time came, and whether we would need to pay for our own care out of savings or by selling our house.
The older population in England is getting larger. In the last 40 years, the number of people aged 50 and over has increased by over 6.8 million (a 47% increase), and the number aged 65 and over has increased by over 3.5 million (a 52% increase).
The number of people aged 65-79 is predicted to increase by nearly a third (30%) to over 10 million in the next 40 years, while the number of people aged 80 and over – the fastest growing segment of the population – is set to more than double to over 6 million.
Post pandemic there was a crisis in recruitment of staff in the social care sector documented in a 2023 Health Foundation report. In order to meet the labour shortage in 2022 the UK government introduced the health and care worker visa scheme and promoted recruitment of overseas nationals. The visas were dependent on finding an employer who would offer sponsorship for particular posts in the sector. Care homes and care recruitment agencies were able to register rapidly as sponsors, and to advertise job opportunities across the globe, and made attractive promises about working conditions, salaries and help with housing. Visas issued for health and care workers and their families peaked at 348,000 in 2023, falling to 111,000 in 2024. Precious arrived in our city in 2023, having borrowed around £15,000 to finance what she hoped was a new start and a more prosperous life in the UK.
No Recourse to Public Funds
One of the key elements of this scheme is that care workers recruited under sponsorship have minimal rights. They are only allowed to work for their sponsor, other than that they may take 20 hours a week in a second job in a similar role. Of course they pay income tax and National Insurance contributions on any earnings.They have no recourse to public funds, meaning they can claim no benefits if sick or laid off, and have no rights to apply for social housing or other housing assistance. Women who are single and destitute are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
They can access the NHS for medical care, and dependent children can go to school (if they can find a place) but not receive free school meals or child benefit. However, changes made in 2024 prevent new applicants from bringing dependents into the UK.
For Precious, who arrived with her child before the ban on dependents came into force, this meant she had to accept a low quality rented room in a shared house (HMO) where no child should be allowed to live. It meant accepting a primary school place three miles from home, incurring travel costs of £12 a day, and persuading the school to offer free meals from its own discretionary budget. Working any long shifts at unsocial hours meant child care costs, which she could not afford to cover, therefore leaving a child alone at home or with risky informal free care from friends and neighbours. Worse still one icy January morning she slipped, fell and broke her wrist. For several months she was unable to work, with no rights to any sick pay or other benefits. They only survived because of very generous financial help, pulled together through the local church and their wider Christian network.
The Crooked companies
The system is made far worse because of extensive corruption and brutal exploitation among many of the employing companies. Charging large fees for arranging the sponsorship visa is commonplace; we have heard of rates between £12,000 and £28,000 being asked, many times the official fee of £304 per person. Many of the sponsoring companies are no more than employment agencies providing temporary and occasional cover staff to care homes, or bad employers offering “gig economy” work in the poorly regulated home care industries. We know of agencies that offer shifts to students and migrants with no legal right to work on a cash in hand basis at rates below the minimum wage. Some of these companies lack secure long term contracts with local authorities, meaning they fail to offer full time work to their employees. In the worst cases they provide false monthly pay slips to show HMRC and the Home Office that full time hours have been worked, and make deductions for tax and National insurance at commensurate rates. There are sometimes further deductions for uniforms, transport costs, and to repay loans.
Precious fell victim to one of the worst of these companies. Her pay slip always showed she had worked 40 hours a week for a gross monthly salary of £2000. Most weeks she was offered no more than a couple of shifts via a second company, at unsocial hours, in another town nearly 20 miles away, requiring a long bus, or expensive taxi journey. Several times she and colleagues were (illegally) offered alternative work packing frozen food in a warehouse. Whatever she actually earned, and after her accident it was nothing, the employer demanded payment of the income tax and NI contribution based on her false payslip. Eventually HMRC became suspicious and sent a team of investigators to interview the employer and some of the workers. They were blackmailed into telling lies to match the employer’s story, because of their vulnerability and fear. The terms of the sponsorship visa state that if they cease to work for the original employer they have only 60 days to find an alternative sponsor, after which their visa is revoked and they become liable to removal from the UK.
Exploitation, slavery and vulnerability
From 2023 onwards there has been growing awareness and campaigning about the failings of the scheme spearheaded by the trade union Unison. Government action was set in the context of populist demands to greatly reduce immigration numbers., so in May 2025 government announced an end to the scheme. With growing concern about exploitation verging on slavery, and law breaking 470 companies had their licenses removed and 39,000 workers were left without an employer. Precious and many of her colleagues were among this number, left in limbo and desperately seeking new employers. Suitable jobs remain hard to find, especially ones with family friendly hours and decent working conditions. Most employers still charge huge fees for new sponsorships, despite this being against the new regulations. The government has set up an agency to help find care jobs for these unemployed people, but it has had limited success, and amounts to little more than distributing regional lists of employers who still have a sponsorship licence.
At the present time Precious remains jobless and destitute, despite making hundreds of job applications online and visiting many local care homes to ask about vacancies. Last month she was offered a part time job by a local care home as a housekeeper, rather than a care assistant. When the employer checked her right to work with the Home Office they were informed that she had no right to work in this particular role, and had to withdraw the offer.
What would Amos say?..
The whole sorry story illustrates how far the UK has moved away from William Temple’s conception of the post war welfare state. The failure of social care policy in the face of growing need for support of older people, and the exploitation of low paid overseas labour with limited rights has made us into a care-less society. A faith based approach from within the Christian, or other traditions would surely demand something better. The prophet Amos (5; 10-15) still speaks to this situation today.
What can be done?
In the light of these experiences churches and community groups need to be on the lookout for people who are trapped in similar situations. We need to offer emotional, spiritual and in many cases costly financial support and advocacy and signposting to statutory and voluntary organisations who can help. We need to join campaigns such as those organised by trade unions to lobby for workers rights. If we know of, or have suspicions about, care homes and employment agencies that treat their overseas workers badly, we should not be afraid of asking challenging questions directly. We can write to MP’s and Council Leaders, who commission adult social care services, to raise these issues with stories and other evidence.
The government needs to hear and admit that the care worker scheme was ill thought out, and open to corruption and abuse, as well as being mean and unfair to overseas workers. The Labour government has made some progress in investigating and enforcing corrupt practices of “employers”, but still needs to be more vigorous and effective in enforcing the regulations. Finally we should call on the government to offer help to workers who have had their sponsorships revoked and face destitution, by offering them benefits (Universal Credit) for up to six months. Job centres should then provide more serious help, such as a work coach who would match workers with local vacancies in the care sector, ensure this was secured with a proper contract of employment with no hidden fees. A few simple steps would put an end to this scandal and abuse of workers rights.
Greg Smith is a Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation. He has worked for over forty years in urban mission, community development and social research in London and Preston. He has published extensively on religion in the inner city, faith involvement in urban regeneration, and urban theology. See more on Greg’s work and publications.
Ken Loach’s latest film set in the North East opened in cinemas in late September and Dr Val Barron was privileged to have a small part in its creation. You can see her wearing a dog-collar in the publicity poster above!
In this interview, she talks about her involvement in the project and some of the key messages of the film about the role of local churches and communities, hopefulness and the courage to take action.
How did your association with The Old Oak start?
Almost 5 years ago, my husband John (a real vicar) and I were introduced to Paul Laverty, Ken Loach’s script writer of almost 30 years. They had previously collaborated on two films in the North East ‘I Daniel Blake’ and ‘Sorry We Missed You’, and Paul was exploring a third film based on Syrian refugees moving into communities in the area. The government had committed to resettling 20,000 Syrian refugees and a number of local authorities in our region signed up including Gateshead, where we were at the time. The socio-economic geography of the region resulted in many families being rehomed in isolated communities with high levels of poverty. People were struggling to cope, and the awful ‘Breaking Point’ posters that were being used in Brexit campaigns didn’t help to make the transition to the North East an easy one.
What was your and John’s role in the early stages of the film’s development?
Paul is a gatherer of stories! He does this by spending time with people, building relationships and sharing stories with one another – as well as drinking copious cups of tea. Our role, as well as sharing our own stories, was to introduce Paul and later Ken, to all the amazing people in our community.
Working with the local Methodist’s, our church folks ran language classes and meetings where we shared food and fellowship as well as weekly community football sessions in the estate where the refugees had moved. These gatherings brought people together and helped build relationships across the community as well as with our new friends who had come to us as refugees. Paul came and joined in and got to know the stories of local residents and their new neighbours.
What is your role in the film and how did you feel?
It’s fair to say I haven’t missed my vocation in life and I didn’t feel comfortable in front of the camera, unlike our community organiser colleague Claire Rodgerson who plays Laura so wonderfully in the film. On the first day of filming Ken made a point of saying that my role was in the film to represent all the work that churches are doing in their communities to support refugees. That felt important. John reminds me that I do say some of the first words in the film (although it’s off-camera). Maybe, if I had been more comfortable, I would have been less on the cutting room floor – but that’s OK! The first scene was very daunting for us all but right from day one there was a sense of everyone looking out for each other. The most enjoyable was the people involved. It was also a very emotional process. I live in these communities and care deeply about them and the film highlights many of the challenges. On the first day filming I was with some of the Syrian actors and she asked whether people lived in these street as, in her words, ‘it looks like a war zone’.
Watching a film being made must have been fascinating – what did you learn about it?
I had to pinch myself at times. I was on set for Ken Loach’s last film (probably!). Watching Ken and the team at work was phenomenal. They cared so much about the story and more importantly the people taking part. Ken knew everyone’s name, including their name in the film and that really made you feel valued. It was really tough at time and so there was a huge amount of trust in him and the team, especially as the majority of the cast were not trained actors. But the overriding thing I took away was the collaborative working. We were all in our own little way helping to shape a story that was important to us for different reasons and I met and made friends with some wonderful people.
What do you see as the message and how do you think it will be received in the North East?
I am sure the film will receive mixed reviews, as Ken’s films always do. The language is tough and uncomfortable at times, however I doubt anyone will watch it and come away unchallenged. The North East has the highest rates of child poverty and a recent study by Shelter found that the region had the highest proportion (31%) of homeless households, including those living in temporary accommodation. Per capita the North East has the highest percentage of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. Given these tough facts you might not expect the key message of the film to be hope, but it is. Hope that despite all the challenges in our communities we can come together and build beautiful relationships across difference.
Throughout the whole process Ken and Paul were always asking where the stories of hope were. The second message is ‘solidarity not charity‘. This is an important issue for us to discuss in our churches. The natural response of providing charity may not be the most appropriate. Providing spaces to build relationships and learn each other’s stories, whether through sharing food or playing football, could be the most prophetic ministry.
How does the church come across in the film?
The story of the film was inspired by church projects – the film tells a different story but it remains faithful to the truths that were told in the stories of the projects. Rather than being set in a church, a local pub (‘The Old Oak’) is at the centre of the film which will perhaps enable more people in our communities to readily relate the story to their stories. While there isn’t a local church building featuring in the film, the church’s social action very much shaped this venture. There is a beautiful scene in Durham Cathedral in which the character Yara says:
“It takes strength to build something new, it takes strength to build something beautiful.”
I see churches in the North East, and across the country, somehow finding strength to build things new and beautiful, inspired by their Christian faith to make the world a better place to live.
The Bishop of Durham, Paul Butler who speaks for the Church of England on refugees, tweeted after the premier:
“The Old Oak made me cry, feel angry, ashamed, disturbed, cry again, but also hope and have a sense of pride in what has and can be done to welcome refugees well. Ken Loach and team have once again produced a superb, timely, film.”
We arranged community showings of ‘I Daniel Blake’ and produce resources to be used alongside these. We will be doing the same again with this film.
Paul Laverty, when talking about the film has quoted St Augustine of Hippo:
“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
My prayer for this film is that people feel anger at the injustice that face many in our communities, not just refugees, and courage to take action.
Dr Val Barron is a William Temple Scholar. Val has worked as a community practitioner in Durham Diocese and she is the lead development worker at Communities Together in Durham. Val is passionate about community organising, social enterprise and working with local churches in challenging social injustice and helping communities to become fairer and more inclusive.
2023 marks 40 years since Archbishop Robert Runcie set up the Archbishop’s Commision on Urban Priority Areas. This approach of bringing together a Commission of “the great and the good” to report on a pressing social issue was possibly the last hurrah of the William Temple tradition. It assumed that the established Church had considerable soft power, and could influence national policy. The report made 61 recommendations: 38 of them to the Church of England, and 23 to the government and nation. Almost all the policy recommendations on unemployment, housing, benefits, education, local government, and policing involved increased public spending, and an attempt to empower local urban communities. The underlying assumptions of the report were that a wide consensus around the post-war welfare state, that Temple and his colleagues had promoted, would ensure that progress towards justice, equality and human flourishing would continue.
Faith in the City represented a moment of prophetic truth-telling by the Church of England but Government Ministers labelled it “pure Marxist theology”. The storm surrounding the report exemplified a broader secularist narrative that sought to restrict religion to the private sphere.
Since 1985, Church of England attempts to influence national policy seem much more modest and have had little impact. The Faithful Cities report 20 years later is now largely forgotten. A new report from the Archbishops’ Families and Households Commission ‘Love Matters’ makes a series of recommendations about how families and households can best flourish, but was not even mentioned by the BBC, and a google search reveals only two articles in the secular national press. Where the bishops in the House of Lords have made what might be called “prophetic” comments on issues such as refugees, food poverty or personal integrity of politicians they appear marginal to the prevailing political narrative, or are eclipsed by the interventions of footballers, such as Gary Lineker and Marcus Rashford. The established church can, of course, still do spectacular public rituals like the Queen’s funeral or the Coronation, and in that context deliver a good sermon that points people to Jesus. However, it is more likely than ever to be referenced for scandal or hypocrisy, especially in regard to safeguarding failures. The media wants to concentrate on internal disagreements on sexuality, where large and vocal sections of the church are out of touch with the prevailing culture. The statistics from the Census, and Church attendance data increasingly show an erosion of public support, especially among the young. While some right wing populist politicians advocate a return to “Christian values”, they are weaker than in the USA or parts of Europe, and are fundamentally a statement of white “English” identity, rather than serious Christian commitment. The Church’s soft power is not what it was in 1985, let alone 1945. What would William Temple do today?
Faith in the City on the other hand did have a significant impact on the churches, especially in a wave of urban mission activity over the following two decades. (See our Urban Tract No 1, and recent autobiographies from Laurie Green, and Neville Black). A major achievement was establishment of the Church Urban Fund and its support of local community projects, which continues to this day. The critique of this approach as “salvation by projects” flags up some of the weakness of the report in terms of theology and missiology; all the energy expended in its wake failed in making disciples of inner city people and integrating them into flourishing, self-sustaining urban parishes. The recommendations to the institutional church seemed worthy at the time, but many have come back to haunt us forty years later. The training of leaders, both clergy and lay, to equip them for ministry in urban parishes remains woefully inadequate, despite a few useful initiatives in the immediate aftermath of Faith in the City. The sharing of resources, especially finance, of affluent dioceses and parishes to poorer areas remains a pipe dream. The issue of institutional racism in the church was highlighted, but never adequately addressed. Although recently a new wave of awareness, and activism followed the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2020, the struggles of BAME Anglicans remain a battleground. Additionally, the reality of White Privilege and “whiteness” have been rejected by many who hold power and influence in the Church.
There have been major changes in the urban scene since 1985. Massive regeneration programmes have taken place in major cities such as London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Leeds, particularly around derelict dockland and post industrial areas. Land use has changed, land values have soared, but often original urban communities have been displaced, died out or moved out. Inequality has grown and concentrations of poverty and deprivation are now more likely to be found in peripheral estates, smaller post industrial towns, ex coalfield communities and coastal resorts. Globalisation and large scale immigration has produced a superdiversity of populations in metropolitan areas, and increasingly in smaller cities. The results and reaction to these trends seem somewhat contradictory; on the one hand xenophobia and the Brexit vote, on the other economic and cultural vibrancy in local communities. In the churches, the dominant forces now seem to be new congregations that serve particular ethnic heritage communities, or charismatic groups that attract individual consumers of religion. Yet alongside this, we also witness growing numbers of lively multicultural local congregations and parishes as discussed in John Root’s blog. Research undertaken by Goldsmiths during the pandemic lockdowns suggest that locally there are more opportunities for faith communities to partner in welfare work, as long as no one actually talks explicitly about faith or questions assumptions about equalities as defined in law, or unjust economic inequalities.
To be fair the Church of England, encouraged by Bishop Philip North, has invested new time and finance in estates ministry and the National Estates Churches Network. An attempt has been made to develop an estates theology in a recent book, Finding the Treasure edited by Al Barrett. Personally, I found this rather disappointing in its methodology of experts listening to local voices, rather than the local people leading theological reflection as advocated in Laurie Green’s Let’s do theology. It also fails to connect, and will most likely not be read by Christians who are concerned with making disciples, urban church planting and renewal, and who want to ground their theology in scripture, read, interpreted and applied in local urban contexts.
Such readers will find more resonance in the work of “settler” mission teams associated with organisations such as the Eden Network. I attended a day at their recent Proximity Conference and listened to numerous hopeful stories, sometimes related with what seemed youthful enthusiasm, but which in the light of experience has moved beyond naivety. Anna Ruddick, or Chris Lane have written important books drawn from reflections on involvement in this movement, tracing how long term commitment introduced more realistic expectations and measures of success, and transformed theologies from triumphalism towards a discovery of the Missio Dei in marginal places. It is in such movements that I see signs of God at work, and some of his people getting on board.
It is this sense, rather than in the soft power approach of Temple and the established church, with its condescending “effortless superiority”, that I believe we can still find Faith in the City.
This short book comprises a collection of reflections from the Church of England Estates Theology Project with five case studies from parishes on social housing estates in various urban and suburban settings across England. It is intended to be an encouragement to church leaders working in such settings and to break the stereotype that all is grim and the church is dead or dying in the less affluent areas. It arises from the Anglican commitment promoted by Bishop Philip North to strengthen and renew parish life and spread the gospel among people living in such neighbourhoods. In my opinion (and personal lifelong calling) this is exactly where Christians should be directing their prayers, resources, time and effort, not so much because there is spiritual, social and economic need, but it is in such places that we will find remarkable signs of God at work and encounter Jesus in surprising ways, not just on Sundays. Although this is the message the book attempts to convey, I am not fully convinced it achieves its aim.
First of all, the case studies in the book are exclusively Anglican. This fact will inevitably narrow the potential readership to clergy working in parish settings, and those tasked with training them. The Wythenshawe case study concentrates on a community weaving project based at the William Temple Church. It comes over as a good story of an interesting example of a community art project. At certain points, it touches Christian values and faith. But over the years I have heard or read numerous other accounts of church life in Wythenshawe, from different denominations and mission perspectives, which are not represented in the chapter. As a result I am reminded of a comment originally made by Anne Morissey (who wrote a foreword to the book) about the way the Church of England exudes “a sense of effortless superiority” in its approach to community ministry.
The rest of the book continues in the same vein. The majority of the parishes involved are from a liberal catholic or radical tradition. Only the chapter from Eltham, with input from the Church Army, uses any evangelical language in its theological framing of the local story. Yet in doing so it largely rejects the evangelical priorities of sharing the Gospel, and calling people to repent, believe, follow Jesus and be baptised into the community of his church. Long experience of urban mission has shown there are big problems with such a formulaic approach, and that preaching at people is mostly ineffective. However, if the local church on estates is to survive, become self supporting and self propagating, we should work hard on talking about Jesus, making disciples, strengthening socially diverse worshipping communities, who engage with and serve their neighbourhood, and developing local Christian leaders. There doesn’t seem to be much of this sort of good news reflected in the book, though there are many other places where it is happening.
I find the theological method of the book curious. It is based on pairing an academic theologian with a church leader and trying to listen to the voices of local residents. They reflected on what they heard and produced chapters which still feel rather abstract and academic in style. While listening is always to be recommended, and contextual reflection on local stories is foundational for urban theology, it might have been helpful to use a more participatory approach where local people (Christians and others) worked together to generate conclusions and linking with Bible stories and themes. It is only in the final section of the book that the editor makes reference to Laurie Green’s “Let’s do Theology”, which would have been my personal starting point for the whole project.
Reviewed by Greg Smith, Associate Research Fellow William Temple Foundation and Trustee of Urban Theology Union.
In my last blog I reflected on whether the findings in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report would send sufficiently strong signals to induce meaningful, global responses to the climate crisis. This week, the Earth Commission has published a report in Nature journal, which presents more evidence of signals from Earth systems to which we should devote considerable attention. These signals indicate that humans are taking colossal risks with the future of civilization, along with everything that lives on Earth. The FT headline about the report states simply that Earth is past its safe limits for humans. It haunts me that Steve Cutts’ chilling predictions about Man might come true.
Seven of Eight System Boundaries Have Been Breached
The Earth Commission’s report, “Safe and just Earth system boundaries,” assesses several biophysical processes and systems that regulate the state of the Earth system, including climate, biosphere, land use, water, nutrient cycles and aerosol pollutants. The researchers involved have identified the limits within which those systems operate effectively, and the harm that could ensue should those limits be breached. Of the eight boundaries reviewed by researchers, seven have been pushed beyond their safe and just limit into risk zones that increasingly threaten planetary and human health. As the report says, all the systems are interconnected, such that overshooting the safe limit for one could have consequential effects for others.
Natural and Social Limits
Although focussed on science and physical processes, the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report and the Earth Commission’s report both emphasise the effect that changes in earth systems will have on society. Environmental degradation and social justice are two sides of the same coin. The Earth Commission’s report exhibits a sincere concern for justice, focusing especially on intergenerational justice for people into the scientific analysis used to assess safe limits for the planet.
Global, Systemic Transformations Are Needed
The Earth Commission’s work is the first of its kind, building on the notion of Planetary Boundaries that were proposed over a decade ago. The result of work by more than 50 scientists from around the world has been to provide compelling evidence designed to advise key actors to achieve a safe and just future. The report calls for “nothing less than a just global transformation across all earth system boundaries to ensure human well-being.” Such transformations “must be systemic across energy, food, urban and other sectors, addressing the economic, technological, political and other drivers of Earth system change, and ensure access for the poor through reductions and reallocations of resource use.”
Leaping into the Path of Transformation
The report ends by saying that the path to transformation “will not be a linear journey; it requires a leap in our understanding of how justice, economics, technology and global cooperation can be furthered in the service of a safe and just future.” Two other recent news stories might give some insight into what that leap is like.
Leaping beyond growth?
First, the EU’s Beyond Growth conference at the European Parliament was attended by 2,500 people. It was described from day one as the Woodstock of Beyond Growth for two reasons: firstly, because it felt more like a festival than a conference; and secondly, because it attracted the rock stars of the beyond growth movement, and the halls of the European Parliament rang with rowdy ovations. The conference briefing paper provides many insights into possible futures beyond growth, and the fictional newspaper from May 2033 anticipates the news in a world of transformed policy making focussed entirely on the well-being of people and planet. Of course, as some commentators suggest, the conference outcomes do not yet offer a complete vision of an alternative future. Nevertheless, they give insight into what type of leap we need to take.
Artificially Intelligent Leaps
Secondly, debates about the role of Artificial Intelligence in managing our future continue to pepper the news. Will it save us or destroy us? If we humans cannot change course, will AI step in to curb our unsustainable behaviours and what are the associated ethics. These are the key questions that are considered by the William Temple Foundation’s Ethical Futures Network.
Conclusion
The signals that we must stop unsustainable behaviours and practices are overwhelmingly clear, whether from natural systems, or society or from specialists in technology. The William Temple Foundation is planning to convene interested parties from diverse disciplines to consider the contribution that faith-based organisations can play in crafting viable alternatives to current unsustainable practices and details will be forthcoming. Maybe we will get 10,000 participants, in a way that is reminiscent of how Archbishop William Temple attracted a large assembly of people in 1942 when he tackled the social issues of the day. It won’t be easy, but the signals clearly mean that our only choice now is to dig in and feel the fear of the leap into the unknown… It is best that we do it together.
Lois Tarbet is is also a Trustee of the William Temple Foundation.
