Defending the faith

Adventures in the theology of disappointment

If you are a charismatic evangelical in the Church of England, I offer a few reflections to prepare you for a fight that you probably don’t want to get involved in, but very much should.

It’s not possible to avoid making assumptions, but it is possible to make them explicit. So forgive me for making a few guesses about the kind of worship you value, and hazard a few more guesses as to why that is.

I guess that you value worship that emphasises the saving work of Jesus, that emphasises Jesus’ uniqueness, that emphasises the dedication of our lives to Jesus, that emphasises the power and protection offered by Jesus, and that emphasises how close Jesus is to us.

And I guess that you value this because there is a clarity to be found here in a world of uncertainties, and community to be found here in a world of social fragmentation, and purpose to be found here in a world of meaninglessness.

This is a vibrant tradition, often in well-funded churches that are able to do a lot of important and valuable community outreach and charitable work. I worship in such a church, where I am also a volunteer Sunday School teacher for 10 and 11 year olds, with our work focused on Bible stories and prayer.

There have been some extraordinary developments in the meantime that are coming into contact with different parts of the church, and especially with some parts of the charismatic evangelical communities. These include some notable kinds of rejection and some notable kinds of affirmation.

These include a rejection of gay relationships, a rejection of reparations for slavery, a rejection of ethical investment by the Church of England, a rejection of a Gospel focus on wealth and its dangers.

They include an affirmation of traditional marriage, an affirmation of a church for all regardless of race, an affirmation of wealth (because this is necessary for investing in evangelism), and an affirmation of a Gospel focus on morality.

I think that most folk in my church value the kind of worship we do, (partly) for (some of) the reasons I identify. I do not think most folk are that heavily into the particular rejections and affirmations, though. They accept them, especially if they are strongly articulated by people in authority who they trust. But they also know a lot of gay people who they like, they don’t see themselves as racist, and if they have money they want to decide what to do with it without others interfering or moralising. They are, in fact, often willing to give quite a lot of their money to the church, to enable it to do its work.

In my line of work, at the intersection between theology and philosophy, there is quite a lot of talk about why people believe the things they believe. This is admittedly pretty specialised stuff: most of us, most of the time, are interested in what people believe. We are less concerned with why they believe it. But I think it’s worth asking the why questions sometimes. I’m interested in why many Christians think that homosexuality is a more important Christian issue than money. After all, Jesus talks a lot about money and not much about sex.

Two recent events have focused these concerns.

The first is an attempt to reclaim ‘Christian Britain’.

The second is to attempt to make Christians a political force through ‘Christians For Reform’.

There are quite a lot of beliefs in play here, for a variety of actors: this is not a homogeneous group at all (like the wider charismatic evangelical movement, which is also not at all homogenous).

Why do people believe the things they believe? There is a lot of debate about this, of course. But the important point to start from, for me, is one of my own beliefs. I do not believe that people are stupid. I mean, all of us have met astonishingly stupid people, yes. But they stand out, as exceptions. Most folk are pretty shrewd.

The second thing is that there is quite a difference between believing something you have believed for a long time, and believing something new. I say this because the attempt to reclaim Christian Britain and making Christians a political force may be new developments requiring some new beliefs.

It’s generally agreed that we more readily form new beliefs if they gel with our existing beliefs. And we are receptive to new ideas if we are afraid and the new ideas promise to fight something that we think threatens us.

And with due acknowledgement to Upton Sinclair: it is difficult to get someone to believe something if their salary depends on not believing it.

The idea that we should reclaim Christian Britain is a response to a threat.

So the first thing to ask is: are we under threat?

And the answer is, yes. Our society is under threat because two forces are radically opposed. The first is the force of environmental change, which requires us to reduce, reuse, recycle. The second is the force of economic growth, which requires planned obsolescence and ever increasing consumption.

And behind these two radically opposed forces is something harder to grasp but right in front of our faces: people are working harder, under more stress, longer hours. But people are earning less money, have more precarious employment, and have mounting debts.

This is hard to grasp because wealth is concentrated into the hands of a few people, and these few people also have a lot of control over social media and newspapers. They spend a lot of money on thinktanks: more tank than thinking. There are two main ways for them to get this wealth: pay us less, and charge us either rent (if we rent) or interest (if we mortgage).

This is all pretty straightforward, but we hardly hear about it.

What do we hear about?

Well no-one needs a theologian to point that out. We hear about the danger of immigrants, and the danger of Muslims.

How dangerous are they?

This is not a popular question because those who study of these things will readily tell you that modern economies desperately need immigration in order to run basic things like retail, health services, and education. I work in a university: we would simply fall apart without immigrant workers, and the same would be said by someone who works in a GP practice or a hospital. And places with significant Muslim populations are often great places to live. I live in Birmingham, where the roughly 2mn population (the second largest city in England) is roughly 30% Muslim. It’s a great place to live (and eat!). If you’re interested in Home Office facts and figures, Birmingham has the highest percentage of Muslims and but is 25th in the annual tally of non-fraud crime. The proportion of Muslims increases slightly each year, and the level of crime fell 3% last year. Correlation is not causation, but as the Muslim population slowly rises, Birmingham becomes marginally safer. There are no other cities (anywhere in Europe, in fact) with a Muslim population of 30%. It’s not even close.

Birmingham also has a thriving charismatic evangelical Christian scene, of which my church is an obvious part.

So you might wonder: why do we hear so much fear-mongering about immigrants and Muslims?

You might just as well wonder: why do we hear so much about sex and not about wealth in the Gospel?

What we hear is one thing: it largely depends on who we are hearing.

What is the case is quite another: it is a matter of finding out the facts. Sometimes this is time-consuming and difficult. But often it is quick and easy. For example, if you want to know about Birmingham and crime, that just took me less than a minute, and there was a pretty map, too.

Do we need to reclaim Christian Britain?

Not really. The churches are not doing well, but that’s because we don’t appeal to young people very much. And that, in part, is because we are perceived as bigoted, racist, and sexist. And with some very noisy Christians saying how bad homosexuality is, or how women need to know their place, that’s not entirely surprising.

It’s not far off establishing a group of English Christians.

Now that experiment was tried in the 1930s with the rise of the German Christians, which had been a minority within the German Evangelical Church, but eventually took it over, becoming known colloquially as the Reich Church. (Again, this is all easily discoverable: Wikipedia has informative articles on this stuff.)

And one may wonder: how did they take it over?

Again, it’s important to think about money. Germany had been economically crippled by the end of the First World War. And it took a second heavy blow in the wake of the Wall St Crash of 1929. Then, as now, there was an astonishing gap between the wealthy and everyone else. Who was to blame? Then, as now, this took the form of antisemitism and a violent pride in being white. It was also strongly anti-gay. The far right in Germany today (overwhelmingly in the former East Germany: economics again) is profoundly anti-immigrant.

British people have a weird view of German Nazis. It’s a lot of goose-stepping, and nazi salutes, and Sieg Heil. We have a pretty weird view of Southern racists in 1950s America. It’s a lot of white robes with hoods and cross burning.

What nonsense. German Nazis looked and talked like us. They were honest workers, hard working parents, upstanding members of their communities. The historian Susannah Heschel published a book, The Aryan Jesus, a few years ago in which she asked, where did all the Nazis in universities go? Well, often they didn’t go anywhere: they kept their jobs and preferred not to talk about it. Her findings really upset a lot of New Testament scholars in Britain (now in their 80s) who said, but we knew these people! They were such nice people!

What nonsense. Southern racists looked and talked like us. Those who watched the film Sinners will have noticed that the big threat is not the KKK, even though there is a KKK Grand Dragon, and we see his son’s peaked hood. But we see this right before he is turned by a vampire, becoming a massive threat to the black community, but never to wear his robes again. Interesting film.

But the point is: we have to unlearn what we learned from older movies.

Fascists often look and talk like us.

And they are in our churches.

They talk about pride in our tradition, about holding our heads high.

We want to be proud. We want dignity.

That is going to require some structural changes, where wealth is shared more equally. That is an attainable goal: everyone has a vote.

But that is not what is being offered.

What we are being offered is: let’s keep the economic status quo, but kill immigrants and members of minorities.

This is now in our churches.

There are particularly nasty and insidious voices who say, charismatic evangelicals have to hold their nose about all this racism, in order to get ‘balance’, in order to redress the damage done by liberal left wing Christians. This is really evil: it explicitly tells good people to stand aside while everything gets ‘put right’.

It is going to get worse unless we say, no.

Personally, I want to laugh in their faces: they are ridiculous.

But they are ridiculous people with weapons.

So: no to reclaiming Christian Britain. And no to Christians For Reform.

Yes to God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.