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.
Last Thursday evening I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the first of the Faith Debates on the Future of the Church of England organised by Linda Woodhead and colleagues at the University Church. This opening debate was on the future of the parish system. Four distinguished speakers offered their thoughts: a representative of Radical Orthodoxy from Cambridge, deeply committed to a vision of both church and theology which felt like a throwback to a different era; an entrepreneur who provided upbeat examples of what churches with extensive capacity could do; a sociologist of religion, himself a non-stipendiary Minister who advocated this pattern of ministry as the way to the future; and then a Canon Missioner from Exeter who actually had some recent parish experience. My role was to throw a spanner in the works and to challenge each of their interpretations of where the parish system is in reality, although the speaker from Exeter was also close to the mark on this.
Had there been more chance to expand my brief contribution I would have pointed out that “parishes” are no longer the correct unit of currency, certainly in the more rural areas, and that it is benefices or clusterings of parishes that make up the majority of charges for rural clergy. As it was I could only mention lack of capacity as the major inhibiting factor, along with a lack of critical mass of people to populate new initiatives and the problem of lack of continuity of contact for most rural clergy who do not even see their regular congregations sometimes for weeks on end, as they dash from church to church and meeting to meeting. I was informed by the entrepreneur that this was a problem of “mind set” not capacity, and I would love to have invited him to my own benefice where we have worked on a raft of new initiatives, but without the people to cooperate on these, success is inevitably limited.
Two other factors are worth a mention. The first is that there is a glut of clergy of my generation coming up to retirement over the next five years, more than will be replaced by new recruits, and that the policy in my Diocese at least, is to redeploy the remaining resources into the urban areas and new towns. This will further reduce the numbers of clergy for rural benefices. Then there is the challenge of recruiting ministers in the first place into the ever expanding rural empires. Who, in their right mind, wants to be running a scattered benefice of 12 small churches struggling to pay their parish share let alone for the upkeep of their buildings? One can generate as many exciting new ideas as possible, such as that of ‘Festival Churches’ which are only used for occasional offices and Harvest, Christmas etc., but none of this is, in itself, going to stem the continued decline of rural churches and congregations. A friend who was with me has the experience of worshipping in a remote rural deanery with 27 churches where, at the moment, there are only two full time stipendiary incumbents and one lone curate. The development of lay ministry which should have been further encouraged 25 years ago when there was still time and energy seems to have been blocked by a hierarchy afraid of losing control, or simply not interested in the smaller benefices out on the margins. So, like the other denominations before it, the CofE is effectively abandoning its rural presence and focusing its resources on the centres of population.
Only four days later, a report was published on the future of church rural primary schools which concluded that “the days of small autonomous rural primary schools are numbered”. Despite subsequent attempts to row back from what reads as a very negative response to the problem, there is a failure to face up to how and why this pressure on rural schools has come about. In an article in the Daily Telegraph by the Bishop of Oxford, current Chair of the Board of Education, the reason given for the threats of closure and amalgamation are simply those of financial pressures. Those pressures have been there for well over 30 years and led already to the closure of rural schools. I would suggest rather the current pressure is a direct effect of government policy of Academies which results in any school with less than 250 pupils not being financially viable as a stand-alone Academy and thus facing merger or closure. Somehow this stark fact is being lost or quietly buried beneath the “spin” of all the new initiatives which such schools can take such as hosting Post Offices on their premises!
The reality is the Church of England is so worried about losing government funding (which accounts for 90% of its funds for schools) and thus its stake in the formal education system, that it is prepared to collude with Coalition education policy rather than rock the boat by challenging it. The hope is that its own Diocesan Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) which become the umbrella replacement LEAs for some of its church schools, will be effective enough to maintain a church presence in at least some areas. The impact, however, is that those small church schools on the margins of the urban areas and often with challenging financial and teaching scenarios, will not be wanted by such Diocesan MATs as they are desperate to recruit “good schools” rather than problematic ones. Once again then, this is a policy for abandoning the rural. It has been pointed out that for many rural clergy it is their contact with the local schools that is the main channel of outreach. Remove the schools, or absorb them into larger units managed from outside the benefice, and that channel is closed for good.
I am not arguing that abandoning the rural is a deliberate strategy of the Church of England – that would be to assume that the CofE is capable of a deliberate strategy on anything – but that, like it or not, this will be the impact of current trends and decisions. Perhaps it is time for a dose of honesty and realism so that those of us who continue to be committed to some form of rural ministry can at least know where we stand.
Revd. Dr John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
John Reader will be running a workshop at ‘Reclaiming the Public Space’on 10th November in Manchester. Other speakers including Linda Woodhead, Craig Calhoun, Elaine Graham, Raymond Plant and more. Book Now!
3 CommentsIn the first of a three part series to celebrate the publication of his landmark new book‘Challenging Religious Studies: The Wealth, Wellbeing and Inequalities of Nations’ John Atherton introduces the key themes of his latest work.The following is an edited extract from the book’s introduction. It is published on 31 October by SCM Press.
The Argument Emerges
This book is about what matters most to most people, most of the time, whether as individuals, families, communities or societies. It is therefore deliberately and primarily about what the American sociologist Robert Bellah has called ‘the world of (the) daily life’ of people which they face with ‘a practical or pragmatic interest’.
That is how it is so often for most people, and it always has been since the dawn of the human about 200,000 years ago. For other commentators like the archaeologist and historian Morris, surveying human life from 15,000 years ago, it is about society’s ‘abilities to get things done in the world’ including in terms of the adequate provision of the basics for human life on earth, as food, clothing and shelter, and increasingly, too, in later periods, in terms of life expectancy, health and education. You can’t have a good life if you die before the age of five, and now we don’t. In other words, this story is simply about the ‘world of daily life’, but it is also significantly about, for the economist Angus Deaton, ‘how people have managed to make their lives better’, so often in terms of ‘what makes life worth living’. And, at the heart of these changes in human development lie the Industrial and then Mortality Revolutions from the eighteenth century, transforming human life in ways never achieved and never really dreamt of in the previous 200,000 years of human history. And all this so often allows and enables that concern to be developed into the pursuit of a good life, a life that turns out well, the basis of a flourishing life and community. It is, as John’s Gospel reminds us, the importance of not just having a life, but having it more abundantly. It is very difficult to have the second without the first, as liberation theologians have rightly reminded us.
But this story is also about how these amazing developments in human living have been intimately accompanied by what historians and economists call ‘the paradox of development’ or the often negative and destructive or damaging consequences of social change. For example, the astonishing improvements in economic growth, so important for nurturing, sustaining and progressing human wellbeing, have also been accompanied by breath-taking increases in inequalities, particularly between nations, but also within them. Such inequalities are symptomatic of that paradox of development, but clearly, as the story will recount, they stretch more widely to include, for example, increasingly destructive environmental damage, but also the historic other ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ namely hunger, epidemics, migrations and state failures.
Of course, what matters to people, communities and nations cannot be adequately summarized by their improving wealth and wellbeing, because the world of daily life, however central and essential for human survival and betterment, has always been, at least for 100,000 years, also accompanied by the field of religion, so often of such importance for sustaining and enriching human life. Sociologists talk therefore of humans inhabiting ‘multiple realities’, which inevitably and invariably constitute ‘overlapping realities’. So there is now, and always has been deep into human evolution, an acceptance that there is more to human living than the daily struggle for human existence in terms of achieving the necessary basics for human living, of food, clothing and shelter, and now of income, health and education.
So this story is about at least both, about the economics and biodemography of life and about the religious dimensions of life and how they have, and need to, come together in ways that recognize and engage constructively these most profound changes the human has ever experienced in the profoundly material, though never exclusively so, dimensions of life as income, health and subjective wellbeing.
Of course, religions in general, and, in my case, Christianity in particular, have at best, persistently refused to take these matters and these changes seriously. They have rarely prioritized them, as the world of daily life does, and has to, and they have rather and regularly focused on the negative consequences of the paradox of development and almost never on the processes of social development that contribute to the furtherance of human wellbeing. They have pursued the soft option of prophecy for the hard struggle for construction and reconstruction… That is the gulf that this story seeks to address.
What’s the argument of the book?
Its arguments are stated in only two parts.
The first part explores the growing and telling evidence for the wealth, wellbeing and inequalities of nations through the three perspectives of income, health and subjective wellbeing in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 then develops a model from the interaction between secular and Christian (and other religions) understandings of the nature and significance of the religious contributions to engage initially the third perspective of subjective wellbeing. This then recognizes the likely feasibility of the model’s transferability and adaptability to engaging the second (health) and then the first (income) perspectives. Together, they could constitute a model for Christian engagements with economics (and other disciplines concerned, say, with wellbeing studies, for example psychology). This represents the cumulative result of much research in various fields of religious studies. And it constitutes an ongoing field of activity, not least in terms of further testing and elaboration of the proposed model. It represents, probably, the heart of this thesis.
Yet the second part of the argument’s importance lies in the significance of locating this work in a historical context stretching back to the end of the last Ice Age, say around 13,000BCE, and forward to 2000CE. This illustrates how social development has gradually increased over that long period, in both the West and East, but how, highlighted by that context of continuing and evolving change, the developments in the last 200 years, from about 1800CE, represent the most remarkable changes in the whole of human history. This therefore illustrates and confirms the importance of the choice of the two following representative case studies engaging that decisive period from 1700CE to 2000CE, and drawn from the USA and UK, two nations at the forefront of such dramatic change. They illustrate what, how, and why Christianity has contributed to increasing human wellbeing.
I want to end this introduction with a picture from St Mary Magdalene church in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire (to the left of the text). It’s from the Markham chantry chapel dating from the early sixteenth century. It’s a remarkable survival given the targeted destruction of such chapels commemorating the dead particularly by Edward VI. It depicts a dancing skeleton flourishing a carnation and pointing to the grave, and next to it, a well-dressed young man with his hand on his purse. The pictures convey the warning that death awaits even the most well-to-do and wealth cannot buy him off! Both death and wealth were as much part of the late Middle Ages in Europe and much of the Middle East, as they are now. But with the most profound of differences which these two figures of death and prosperity signify.
Now death comes to most in old age, not as little children, and prosperity is no longer the prerogative of the elite few, but is increasingly the privileged possession of most people on earth. That’s called a better world of daily life for most people on earth. And that’s a first, maybe the greatest first, in human history. And you can see why it is from that chantry chapel 500 years ago.
Our Director Chris Baker has been appointed the inaugural William Temple Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Chester. This exciting appointment marks a new stage in the partnership between the University of Chester and the William Temple Foundation, who, since 2009, have worked together on several joint initiatives, including the Centre for Faiths and Public Policy. Professor Baker is Director of Research at the William Temple Foundation and leads research on religion, public policy, civil society and urbanisation at the University of Chester.
A major focus of the new role will be to curate and promote engaging events showcasing the relationship between religion and public life, as well as to continue attracting significant research funding to the University. Recent examples include establishing a major new AHRC funded research network ‘Reimaging Religion and Belief for Public Policy and Practice’. Together with Professor Adam Dinham of Goldsmith’s, University of London, Professor Baker will lead this significant discussion and networking hub, bringing together a diverse range of key thinkers from around the globe to analysis the role and impact of religion and belief on public life and policy.
Chris Baker said, “I am delighted and honoured to lead this work under the name of William Temple; an important figure who holds such resonance both in the Church and wider society. Through the partnership between Chester and the William Temple Foundation I have the opportunity to lead on, and to bring many others into vital conversations on the role of religion in contemporary life.”
Chris Baker is officially appointed as William Temple Professor of Religion in Public Life on Wednesday 1st October 2014.
In 1989 Hans Kung and David Tracy published Paradigm Change in Theology based on a symposium held at the University of Tubingen. Contributors included such high profile names as Moltmann, Schillebeeckx, Boff, Gilkey and Cobb. The subject areas covered included hermeneutics; scientific theory and theology; political dimensions of a new theological paradigm; feminist and liberation theologies and relationship with other faiths. Were they right to flag-up such fundamental changes, and, if so, where are we now?
Looking at theology within the Church of England twenty five years on, one might be forgiven for concluding that far from signaling a paradigm change, what we have seen is a regression to a pre-Enlightenment understanding that plays into the hands of a hierarchy nervous about its loss of authority, and a communitarianism which extols the virtues of practical action at the cost of any serious theological reflection. Like political culture the emphasis is upon presentation (or “spin”) rather than substance or critical engagement. Although forms of political engagement were driving forces behind the original book, nothing much has come of these since, and those who look for a more radical approach have been marginalized by both church and theological establishment. So it is time to revisit the notion of a paradigm change for theology in the light of recent philosophical and political developments.
In recent blogs and publications my colleagues at the William Temple Foundation have used and adopted the language of“blurred encounters” in relation to faith engagement with social action and the inevitable crossing of boundaries, cultural, geographical and intellectual, that accompanies such engagement. Whilst this is correct and in the spirit of the original book, Blurred Encounters: A Reasoned Practice of Faith, it does not refer to the subtitle of the book nor what I intended to be the more radical nature of the work. This was not supposed to be simply about pragmatic responses to challenging contexts that required a willingness to compromise and to be “eaten well”, but also an attempt to produce a post-foundational theology by challenging the strict demarcation between faith and reason that has characterized theology since the time of Kant. If that sounds too demanding and theoretical, then it probably explains why even my colleagues have shied away from that dimension of the book, and my aims of providing criteria by which one might assess the validity of the actual blurred encounters.
In engagement with the book, there have been no references to the notion of a post-foundational theology, nor any sense that others understand what this means. Others more critical of the work imagine that this is a matter of having a certain fascination for the writings of particular philosophers and thus not essential to the project. In the light of new publications I want to restate the argument that “Blurred Encounters” was pushing towards a paradigm shift in theology.
Ten years down the line and others have been able to pursue these ideas more effectively. Whitney A. Bauman, in the recently published Religion and Ecology: developing a planetary ethic, has taken further the concept of the crossing of boundaries and argues that religion and science, humanity and nature, sacred and secular, are always already intertwined, and that attempts to separate them have been the result of a particular metaphysics that itself leads to damaging consequences, notably those associated with globalization and its detrimental impact upon humans in less advantaged parts of the world, and indeed the planet as a whole. He also draws upon sources that I have since been able to pursue such as Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad and Catherine Keller. I will attempt a summary of his ideas.
Bauman describes what he calls Agrippa’s trilemma which lays out the three main possibilities for how we claim to justify our knowledge (pp18-21). The first two of these are representative of the domination exercised by globalization and are, foundationalism and circularity. “Foundationalism operates (most often) by digging down to what is perceived to be a base of reality: whether material (as in scientific materialism) or ideal (as in the creation of the world according to divine laws by a good God)”. Circularity is a particular version of the same form of argument. The third option and the one favoured by Bauman is that of infinite regress, where instead of trying to bring the process of truth discovery to an end, instead somewhat in the manner of Latour who sees that truth is a matter of keeping the references circulating, the acknowledgement that we are all contextual, perspectival, embodied and changing creatures, means that our knowledge claims are always on shifting grounds. A post-foundational theology would thus recognise that our knowledge is always provisional and contingent, and that it is when we try to stop the references circulating – which is always an arbitrary decision – that power dominates over truth, and both humans and non-humans find themselves on the wrong end of that power.
Following this alternative approach to its logical conclusion, Bauman suggests that we need to abandon a foundational metaphysics, to acknowledge that agency “goes all the way down” including therefore that which we see as non-human, that human exceptionalism is to be left behind, and that the boundaries between subject and object are always permeable. (p162). This applies also to our own sense of personal identity: “Our internality is nothing without the multiple others with which we are in constant interaction, and our bodies are made up of multiple biological, historical and cultural others. However one draws the boundaries around a concept or identity, that entity is always already multiple” (p163). This will lead to a different approach to environmental ethics and issues of political power. So the question for a new theological paradigm is whether it can cope with a post-foundationalism and acknowledge that its truth claims are subject to challenge and uncertainty.
There are now two main strands in such a developing approach, one associated with what is known as the New Materialism and the other related one we are calling Relational Christian Realism. The latter will be spelt out in detail in the book A Philosophy of Christian Materialism: Entangled Fidelities and the Public Good, (Baker, James and Reader, Ashgate: forthcoming). Both yield a theology more modest in its truth claims, and a conceptual discourse more appropriate for engagement with contemporary political and scientific issues and, we will argue, a paradigm change for the discipline as a whole. The difference between this and the global ethics advocated by Kung and colleagues is that: “the not-yet space of emergent newness is just as much a reality for the rest of the natural world as it is for humans” and the task facing us is to discern which particular emergent assemblages will lead to the flourishing of both human and non-human (Bauman, p153).
So whereas the original paradigm shift envisaged by Kung, Tracy and colleagues involved only the human, in this new context as described by Bauman, Crockett and ourselves, it is the whole human non-human nexus which emerges as the site for discussions of the ‘public good’ and for revised religious and political activity.
A Victorian Gothic barn of a church, with most of the pews still anchored in place, on a cold wet Saturday afternoon in February. The parish in a multicultural inner city in the North of England has struggled to survive, but remains committed to evangelical mission and community engagement. Twice a term now we put on a Messy Church session, advertised mainly through the majority Asian Church primary school that stands next door. The vicar’s wife, a retired teacher does most of the work of planning and preparation. The vicar himself does most of the platform presentation, and the team of a dozen or so volunteer helpers are predominantly aged over 60, white and English.
From 3pm the church fills with parents and children, mostly families who attend the school, and maybe two or three who regularly come to worship on Sunday mornings. It’s mostly women and children, though there are a handful of dads. There is a group of white working-class mums, some of them lone parents, who obviously know each other and spend a lot of time chatting and letting the kids get on with the activities. But as the number of people in the building rises to 90 we realise this is the most popular Messy Church since we started 18 months ago – and that over half of those attending are Muslims. One of the women is dressed in a black abaya, worn with a niqab – though she does remove the face covering when she has become comfortable with the social setting inside the church. Several other women and girls are wearing hijab (headscarf) and are in modest Asian dress.
One of the Muslim women who had encouraged friends to come is a single parent who first came along to a Messy Church a few months ago. We got to know her better through the midweek job club in the church hall. She had been unemployed, and destitute because she had been sanctioned for some trivial breach of benefit conditions by the job centre. We had helped her with food parcels, friendship and eventually to find a job in child care, and though she does not say she is a follower of Jesus or attend Sunday worship, she clearly feels herself to be part of the church family.
As usual Messy Church is a mixture of games, child-friendly Jesus songs, craft activities, a story and eating together. The vicar tells the story of Joseph, bringing out the importance of family and forgiveness. The crafts features coats of many colours, camels and silver cups. People are invited to write their prayers for forgiveness on coloured paper cut in the shape and size of their hands and to stick these to a board at the front of the church. We then share in food which church people have brought along – sandwiches, cakes, biscuits and some fruit (up North this is known as a Jacob’s join). Probably we should have thought more clearly about making sure there were halal options, but vegetarian items mean everyone found something they were happy to eat. By five o’ clock the helpers were anxious to start clearing up but several people just wanted to stop and chat, so it took a long time before we could all go home, tired but encouraged.
How do we reflect on what was happening here? The situation has all the characteristics of what William Temple Foundation’s Chris Baker and John Reader have labelled a “blurred encounter”. There were a wide range of expectations and motives in the room. Christians were there with the hope of sharing the gospel. Children from a variety of backgrounds were just happy to be together and to have fun. Parents of various faith backgrounds and none were pleased to have something for the family to do on a cold February afternoon, that didn’t cost anything, and had some free food thrown in.
Sociologically speaking it seems that the parish church, though its close involvement with the school next door, is able to offer a safe social space for the banal everyday encounters on which social cohesion can be built. The school and the relaxed informality of Messy Church, linked with other community involvements such as the job club offer a milieu for building bridging social capital, crossing boundaries of communities which some commentators suggest are trapped in parallel lives. Religion is not in itself a barrier, but rather seems to offer common ground where trust can be built. It is significant too that Messy Church is an environment where women and children go first – perhaps typical male approaches to faith would be more dogmatic and divisive. There can be everyday good neighbourliness, friendship and trust across faith communities at this level. However it is also the case that in the local community there are examples of barriers and racisms directed against Muslims, while we also know of painful and hostile experiences when someone from a Muslim background “comes out” publicly as a follower of Jesus Christ.
Theologically one can also ask what is going on in this situation and how is God at work? A classic evangelical answer would be that to some degree at least, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is being preached, if only implicitly, or at least proclaimed by deeds and attitudes. A more liberal approach would be to stress that the values of acceptance, friendship, trust, love and forgiveness are signs of the Kingdom of God, and of the Holy Spirit at work. Whether or not anyone discerns or names the name of Christ in this situation, God alone knows what is happening in people’s hearts, and He alone is the final judge of us all.
It might be worthwhile to reflect on NT Wright’s recent perspectives on Pauline theologywhere the emphasis is placed not so much on individual justification before God as on incorporation into the multicultural community of those who are “in the Messiah”. However, this raises many questions about how in such blurred encounters and ambiguous social and religious spaces, people may or may not find “salvation” — amidst all the competing definitions of that term one may come across in our theologically diverse environment.
On March 31st the details of the most recent IPCC report on the potential global impacts of climate change were made public. These include an increase in extreme weather events and thus more droughts and floods; subsequent shortage of certain food and other resources leading to social unrest and international conflict; the threat of rising sea levels to many coastal areas and cities, most notably in already vulnerable areas.
The prospects for a world in which human-induced climate change pervade, now look increasingly dire, and are worrying to say the least. With this in mind, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, entered the debate in his capacity as Chair of Christian Aid in an article published in the Sunday Telegraph. Williams lays blame squarely on the shoulders of the already industrialized West and lavish lifestyles now taken for granted. He points out that those on the front line of these changes are already suffering and that, therefore, there is a need to act now, not defer response to some indefinite future.
All of this is timely and appropriate, although the warnings have been there for well over two decades and go as far back as the World Council of Churches objectives for ‘Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation’ from the late 1980s. Is it already too late to avert some of the worst consequences of climate change and is it simply a matter now of mitigation and adaptation?
The challenge for the various environmental movements, including faith-based ones, during this period of growing certainty of what is happening, but growing uncertainty of what it might mean, has been that of balancing fear and hope. The initial strategy was to try to get policy makers and power brokers to take climate change seriously in order to prevent the worst occurring. But now that this appears to have failed, the only response left is to “man the lifeboats” in the hope that things may not be quite as bad as we had feared.
Both church and theology have struggled to know where to locate themselves, even when they have bothered to register the seriousness of the situation. With a few notable exceptions, we have arrived late on the scene, and even now many do not see this as a major agenda item as churches tear themselves, and each other apart on issues of sexuality, gender and internal authority. “Fiddling while Rome burns” perhaps?
And yet, each of the concerns above will play themselves out through the other major subjects of Political Theology, those of poverty, equality, justice, and striving for a better world. So, as Michael Northcott has argued in his recent book A Political Theology of Climate Change, the looming environmental crisis has to be an issue for Political Theology. Unlike many of his fellow travellers in Christian environmental movements, Northcott attempts a substantial contemporary theological engagement to add to the many practical projects that now exist. He also extends this into discussions of some of the less obvious but vital philosophical resources such as the work of A.N. Whitehead and Bruno Latour.
Northcott’s work is to be commended, taken on and developed further. But, even this might not go far enough. A full scale reassessment of the relationship between the human and the non-human, of the established wisdom of separating nature from culture, and indeed of how new scientific conceptualities on the themes of emergence and matter itself, need to be brought into the discussion. Those of us working on what we call a Relational Christian Realism are perhaps best placed to pursue these lines of thought. Relational Christian Realism, amongst other things, involves eschewing any form of Christian Imperialism; taking into account the insights of other disciplines; acknowledging the inescapable entanglements of faith-based material practices, and recognising the limits of human autonomy.
Time may be short, but the challenge to the human species is essentially still that which some of us raised over 20 years ago (see for example The Earth Beneath: A Critical Guide to Green Theology, eds Ball, Goodall, Palmer and Reader, SCPK, 1992). Namely, how do we need to understand ourselves differently in order to relate more appropriately to the creation of which we are only one part? This is the change of climate now impinging upon Political Theology.