The Great Open Dance -a review

 What grabbed my interest in looking at this book was a bit of promo blurb:

"The Great Open Dance offers a progressive Christian theology that endorses contemporary yearnings for environmental protection, economic justice, racial reconciliation, interreligious peace, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ celebration. Just as importantly, this book provides a theology of progress—an interpretation of Christian faith as ever-changing and ever-advancing into God’s imagination.

Particularly was the idea of developing a theology of progress. In part this relates to something I've been thinking about for a little while (for quick way in, see here). So, what do I make of it? 

Well, from my point of view, there's a lot to like. It's well thought through and careful in explaining. I enjoyed the systematic sort of engagement and the wide range of it. It may fluster some and I raised an inner-eyebrow at starting with an exploration of non-duality and doing so by considering Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. But it is actually a really helpful starting place. I just fear that it means that I'd have to be careful lending or recommending it to some people I know who, I think, would actually really benefit from reading it. -That goes for the under-argued-for universalism about two-thirds of the way through. This is a bit of a shame because I think that Snydor makes a really good case for a biblically faithful, ultimately orthodox re-framing of Christian faith in a way that resonates for the age we're entering. 

I'm excited to see someone wrestling with the implications of emergence and integrating that into discussions of Trinity. I think he does a good job of understanding the frame-space that orthodox teachings about the Trinity are seeking to place around consideration of the concepts and then showing how the 'third way' offered by emergence and non-duality properly understood, is a help in this.

There was an interesting discussion of slavery in the latter part of the book relating Christian attitudes to it to how scripture is handled. I think that this is a key point of reflection (as well as how the inerrantist doctrines are historically contingent and adrift of how Jesus and Paul used scripture). What gave me pause for thought was contrasting the experience and (Christian) response of Frederick Douglas to being enslaved vs the advice of the epistle of Peter. The former literally fought back against brutal dehumanisation, the latter appears to advise patient endurance of it as a salvific road. I thought it interesting that at this point we are not invited to consider Paul's letter to Philemon which seems to set an anti-slavery trajectory whilst being careful of the 'Overton window' of the time (arguably) which might have protected many Christian slaves in less unpleasant circumstances.

This is a stepping stone in the argument towards apparently espousing, at one point, an approach to scripture which, to be frank, I suspect Luther would have characterised as 'a wax nose'. And it felt rather dissonant with the way that Snydor actually uses scripture up to that point. I do agree with a lot of what he says up to that point, but I do feel that some safeguarding of the approach, methodologically, against wax-nosing would have been good. Though, perhaps that's not entirely fair: the main argument is that agapic interpretation should be the keynote -I agree. And by contrast, again I agree, noting that inerrantists also have a canon within a canon -despite protestations to the contrary. There is a brief run through of examples of inconsistency of approach. In practice, most of them also don't propose or support slavery (though Snydor mentions that some, in fact, do think it might be okay) and I'd suggest that a consideration of why most of them would decry slavery today would be worthwhile. And indeed, what kind of hermeneutics would underlie that?

I did like the spirit of the final words of the book:

When this book is forgotten, which it will be, I pray that it will be forgotten because it has been replaced by more loving theologies that are more faithful to our loving God. These theologies will correct every accidental offense I have committed due to my own immersion in a specific place at a specific time with a specific set of blinders. For those theologies, and for their eventual appearance, I thank God, who is forever leading us into the reign of love.

As a final offering, here are some more quotes I particularly liked.

historians report that church leaders have always worried about church decline, church membership has always fluctuated wildly, and attendance has always been spotty. Today is no different

a third of young adults complain, “Christians are too confident they know all the answers.” 9 Increasingly, people want church to be a safe place for spiritual conversation, not imposed dogma, and they want faith to be a sanctuary, not a fortress 

pluralistic nondualism, the belief that reality is composed of real difference harmonized into perfect unity. ... pluralistic nondualism differs from monistic nondualism, which argues that ultimate reality is absolute homogeneity without difference. ... In our view, nondualism means indivisibly united yet internally distinguished. Nondualism discerns the unity in difference that underlies all things. ... perennial philosophy erases difference. If all religions are basically the same, then differences in thought, feeling, and practice are irrelevant. Nondualism, by contrast, finds wealth in difference.... Ramanuja’s personalist panentheism, in which God is a full- fledged person, better serves Christian faith than impersonalist Platonic idealism,... If nondualism is a fundamental ontology of relation, in which the one and the many are perfectly harmonized, then the Christian Trinity is a form of nondualism. That is, the Trinity is not either three or one. The Trinity is both three and one.

Given Christ’s revelation of God as agape, the Christian tradition must justify itself as agapic. Agape need not justify itself as traditional

people want faith to give them more life, and people want faith to make society more just, and people want faith to grant the world more peace.

Love is not the Godhead beyond God, a singular, pure abstraction. Instead, love is the self- forming activity of the triune God, the most salient quality of each divine person, and the disposition of each person toward the other— and toward creation. 

Metaphorically, we could say that quarks function only in communion.

God is empty of any excluding, occluding self. 105 All separation is illusion and God, as all- knowing, is not deluded. As a result of God’s perfect wisdom God feels perfectly, which is to love perfectly. In other words, God feels what should be felt as deeply as it can be felt. 106 Within God there is no capacity for celebrating another’s pain or envying another’s success, because God is perfect. “Perfect” does not mean unchanging, but changing perfectly.

Exclusively male language for a gender transcending God misrepresents the divine nature; hence, it is theologically inaccurate.

The margins have the clearest perspective. The margins see the hypocrisy in hierarchy and realize that “what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God”

Why does Jesus characterize a preaching that explicitly threatens the rich and powerful as “good news”? Perhaps because they (at least some of them, I hedge, because Jesus didn’t qualify his statements) need to be rescued from themselves

Theologically, the crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the unholy within the universe, useless suffering that freedom produces but God abhors. From the gift of freedom, something emerges in creation that is alien to Godself. God did not intend the unholy, but God allows it out of respect for our autonomy and moral consequence. Crucially, God suffers from this demonic fault in reality. God in Christ undergoes alienation from God through crucifixion.

Therefore, the church must seek truth in others, with others, and for others, including other religions, in an attempt to develop a common wisdom that will be validated by the flourishing it creates.

Prayer is a spiritual gift, but other spiritual gifts can become prayer, and prayer alone is never a substitute for action. When Joan Cheever was fined for feeding the homeless in San Antonio, she explained, “This is how I pray. I pray when I cook. I pray when I serve.”  

Links for The Great Open Dance  on Bookshop Jon Paul Sydnor on Google Scholar Jon Paul Sydnor on Facebook Tag #TheGreatOpenDance

About the Author Jon Paul Sydnor is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Emmanuel College, theologian-in-residence at Grace Community Boston, and a podcaster at The Progressive Sacred. He studied at the University of Virginia, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Boston College, where he received his PhD. He practices theology in conversation with other religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, whose concept of nondualism has highly influenced the trinitarian theology of this book.

In person and its accidental eugenics

In a recent article, a CofE bishop, Martyn Snow, talking about recent riots stirred up in large part by disinformation shared by groomed-enraged people in right-wind networks, proposed the following:

I don’t believe we will ever get beyond the need for face-to-face encounters. Despite social media changing the way we interact with one another, genuine, physical interaction is more important now than it ever has been. Those face-to-face encounters help foster empathy, strengthen our sense of community, and reveal to us the truth about our neighbours – and there’s no amount of disinformation that can counter that.

I'm interested in this and think that we should be wary of it. I'm hearing similar sentiments shared quite a lot in the church circles I'm in touch with and interact with. I'm wary of it because of my experience with the privileging of physical space sharing being deployed in such a way as to exclude various disabled and vulnerable people. In fact, in some cases to express fairly eugenic sentiments in relation to the vulnerable.
I think that the basis for this viewpoint is rooted in an affirmation of the incarnation and taking from that an appreciation of the embodiedness of human beings as something to be celebrated. This has a long pedigree in Christian theology beginning most notably with push-back against the dualistic and gnostic-leaning ideas around in the late classical period in the eastern Mediterranean.
I also note that this particular theological trope (if that's the right term) comes on the back of the move from the public-health measures put in place in the initial phases of the covid19 pandemic. My strong suspicion is that the emotional push-back is significant and that there is an unspoken fear or anxiety about things that recall or hint at those measures.
So we have a social-psychology-in-search-of-a-theology dynamic at work.
Let me make explicit something of the effect on disabled and vulnerable people. When the first responses to the covid19 pandemic were put in place, many disabled people got a taste of inclusion in church that they have rarely had. With the putting aside (or even demonising) of those measures, they have been re-excluded. In addition the effects of long-covid have added even more people to the roster of the excluded from ordinary church life. These latter are those who join those with vulnerabilities which make reinfection a potential death or further-disablement sentence. In addition the difficulties for some in the disabled communities come to the fore once again with the re-prioritising of "in person" meeting. In respect of my earlier use of the word "eugenics", I'm referring to an attitude expressed in a clergy gathering (!) whereby the old and vulnerable were verbally dismissed from being worthy of consideration in how to respond to easing of legal restrictions (a telling word in itself) even when it was pointed out that their fuller inclusion had been an un-sought benefit of using electronic means to gather and do faith together.
Now don't get me wrong here: I'm very much of the opinion that human embodiedness is significant and important. I do not think that we are primarily souls temporarily encumbered with material bodies. I believe that matter is something that God delighted to make and that God delighted to join with in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. So what I write here should not be taken as a call to return to dualism or some kind of gnostic spirituality, far from it! I agree that Christianity is a most materialistic faith and I very much lean into that.
However, I do think we should be alert to some nuance. Not least in noting that some of the pressing of embodiment language in this cultural moment comes from something of a moral panic about online meeting starting in the late 1990s when lots of people started to form communities and to find entertainment online. There was and is a lot of misunderstanding and unrecognised inconsistency in thinking going about online activity. A lot of the more panicky things I read seem[ed] to somehow imagine that online means some kind of disembodied brain-in-a-vat experience. Forgetting that the interactions were and are still physical. They require interfaces, use bodily processes both to project and to receive a variety of messages in a variety of media. Muscles, eyes, bloodstreams, breathing, digestion and so forth are all very much involved in supporting online interactions many of which are patterned after physical space and interactions. They are intrinsically bodily in action and conceptualisation. Just not occupying proximate space.
Some of the objections to meeting online do not bear the weight of history or deeper consideration. I don't find any in-principle objections being voiced to the use by the apostle Paul of letters to project himself and to remain in (and indeed, build) community with people not physically present to him. Is there a difference in principle to the 'remoteness'? Admittedly these letters (and other scriptural materials) attest to the desire to be with people, sharing the same space. But there is, in the epistolatory nature of much of the New Testament, a recognition of remote interaction as viable and useful. Indeed we are richer for it because we have preserved it.
And what is it about occupying closely adjacent space that we are prizing exactly? When bishop Snow says, "physical interaction is more important now than it ever has been" I'm not at all sure what we're supposed to understand by the words "physical interaction". Is this about shaking hands? Hugs? Making a cuppa and handing it over (maybe with home made cake or biscuits)? But how much quality do those things add. -A sharper question if the traditional English sang froid is in play, reducing the physical interaction to a bare minimum. So, are we supposed to be thinking smell? -Well, that is pretty specific to closer proximity: fair cop. Body language? -Well that can often be seen or inferred online and facial expressions and micro-expressions can possibly be seen more fully on screen. So can we please specify what physical interactions are meant and how it is that they give such clear improvement over electronically-mediated meeting? I call this out: it's exaggerated and an unfair comparison.
I think the case is better made in terms of what we are used to and the unease with meeting with others using media we are less familiar and confident with. This necessarily favours physical proximity but doesn't prove its superiority, merely its preferability given normal current life experience. We might do well to consider the way human cultures have adapted to telephones -despite the misgivings of the early days. And it's worth considering too the warnings about the negative effects on society of mass reading that printing enabled, or indeed of writing itself because of the changes these technologies produced in the way we memorise, learn and indeed relate to one another.
And again, there are problems with the assertion "face-to-face encounters help foster empathy, strengthen our sense of community, and reveal to us the truth about our neighbours". I take it that "face to face" is meant to imply close physical proximity but it could, strictly speaking, include a screen-mediated connection. In that list of benefits, I do not see one that is excluded by screen-mediation. What I see expressed by implication and connotation is a preference for gathering information, strengthening and building connection in the more familiar ways experienced in physical proximity. But I'd remind us how much we can pick up in a phone call (for example we can hear someone smiling as they talk) and how much of those things we gather in phone calls and even text interchanges -increasingly so as we collectively gain experience and reflect together on how to use short-text formats.
I submit that what the bishop is aiming for is not necessarily dependent on being in relatively close physical proximity but rather on attentiveness, openness, honesty, consideration, curiosity, good questions and generally non-violent communication -in whichever medium.
Pause for thought: it's easier to punch or kick someone else in close proximity! Sexual abuse is usually focused on physical access. I mention that only to recall us to the darker sides of what is being lionised. My sub-text is that we are seeing a comparison between the best of physical proximity and the worse of other forms of relating. Let's remember there are positives and negatives in all; the point is to properly understand and appraise what they are and deploy them skilfully, wisely and inclusively as possible. Also, we should notice how in the past, moral panics passed on by word of mouth where people were close enough in physical terms to 'catch' each other's misinformed emotional reactions. Although that contagion is clearly not just possible in close physical proximity, clearly, if there are advantages to close physical proximity, these also provide a putitively enhanced means for the demonising and organising of cruelty, bullying and murder. The fall, as many orthodox Christians repeat, affects everything. This would mean that there is no good thing that cannot suffer the warping of sin; that cannot be corrupted. This would include the aforementioned: "empathy, strengthen our sense of community, and reveal to us the truth about our neighbours" -all of those can be put at the service of ill-will and harm.
I'm noticing also that after celebrating how online meeting made it easier to gather people in a rural diocese as well as to lower implied carbon footprints and travel expenses claims, a recent glance at diocesan events and training showed that 'in person' events that probably would be better to be online, are now creeping back with no provision for remote participation being offered, apparently. This despite the know-how and equipment being available and relatively well-practiced. I continue to strongly suspect that the pull of the familiar and thus 'easy' is working its stochastic influence. The problem being, of course, that the familiar is ablist. And implicitly eugenicist.
Theologically, we should remember that no-one actually does disembodied relating. We continue to use the 'meat' of our brains to think, to produce messaging using vocal tracts and bodily movement especially facial expressions. We hear using ears and to a lesser extent eyes. Most of those channels have been formed and shaped by bodily proximate interactions. But as phone, writing and printing have already shown us, we can extend capabilities (htt Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong et al) and simply need to collectively learn the affordances of the media; to culturally receive them. We do this learning in relation to speech etc from the womb, and we can overlay further learning as we go.
We should also note that there is in Christian history a tradition of remote communication and a recognition of the importance of communications of ideas and attitudes -however they are communicated. We shouldn't mistake historical happenstance for principle: the historical happenstance is that we have lived in physical proximity to one another. However, that does not amount to an in-principle restriction of our modes of relating only to physical proximity. The use of epistles and writing of gospels if anything endorses extending our channels of communication, including those enable more remote communication.
About the only thing I can think of that may be 'better' about so-called in-person meeting is the informal before and after socialising. Of course, we could find ways to reproduce that -and some online meetings do that deliberately. I have heard of some churches deliberately setting up breakout rooms after a main meeting to allow it to happen.
And even if we were to grant that somehow physically-proximate meeting was better, let's note that 'better' is a comparative term and it is scalar. It should not be treated as polar as if by being better the compared-with term was rendered bad or exclusive of the other term.
I do understand that some people were traumatised by the abrupt life change, restriction and underlying panic of the early pandemic. So it is easy to comprehend that for some, a degree of dislike -or anxiety, even- may have become attached to the idea of e-meeting others. I see that in the preferences some now have to avoid it and how that preference is justified and the emotional flavour of how they justify it. On the whole, however, this can and probably will change as the 'new' possibility is culturally received and people become more aware of the affordances of the array of possibilities now open to us.
If we add to all of that a consideration of the inclusion of marginalised people, then we should surely be exploring these 'new' possibilities. This is rooted in the command to love neighbours as ourselves and to do to others as we would be done by. These commands amount to learning to look at the world through the eyes of those who are disadvantaged and marginalised. And this implies listening attentively and taking seriously the perspectives of, in terms of the starting point here, those who are immune compromised. It also implies trying to create conditions that don't, for example, add to the risk of (say) long-covid.
This topic leads inexorably to consideration of Eucharist and the debate about whether that can be celebrated extendedly using e-meeting technologies. Lots of church groupings have not had a problem with that. The CofE doesn't sanction it (though I'm aware of practical dissenters). I *think* that the reluctance is because of a suspicion that an electronically mediated communion lacks something important which may be found in a physically proximate congregation. But I haven't seen that spelled out. It's probably the lack of having thought about it and a worry that it could lead to abuses which are as yet unconsidered at a corporate level. However, I do think that many of the considerations mentioned above should be part of thinking about this.
I think for some people meeting online for corporate worship was difficult because it meant that they were not meeting in a familiar and beloved building which had rich connotations of godliness and a personal history of spiritual comfort and growth. Judging by the way some congregations actually act, I think that this must be a major issue. It's about atmosphere and associations but definitely not about interacting or meeting with others. I think the conversation that has been had so far confusingly lumps together the different kinds of physically-proximate events that we undertake together. On the one hand we have meetings which enable people to interact, converse, joke, transact matters of administration or work and so forth and on the other we have essentially spectating events which involve witnessing something but not making meaningful contact with others. Many an early communion service fits into the latter category. These latter may be ones where the atmosphere of where it takes place is a paramount consideration. However, this does not appear to be in the bishop's mind. So if we were to compare the 8am communion service just alluded to with most online meetings, it would be the latter where we would find most of the bishop's criteria met: empathy, community and discerning the truth of our neighbours.

It's true that the bishop is not dismissing online meeting, and his first quoted words are making a case for the recognition of the importance of physically-proximate meeting. What I am concerned with above is that the reasons given for the importance of such meeting do not really make the case and my further concern is that it plays into a lazy thinking which actually has a eugenic edge to it.

If the bishop wanted to make a case for physically-proximate meeting I think that it would be better to choose a bunch of other things which note the difficulties in some cases of e-meeting as it is currently configured.

I would note that eye-contact is difficult in e-meeting; that it is difficult to work conversational turn-taking according to some of the cues we use in physically-proximate conversation; we have fewer body-language cues; our sense of smell cannot be part of our meeting (or probably, more importantly, our sensing of odourless pheromones), there is also the matter of immersion in 'atmosphere'. And singing together is currently not easy online and the immersive experience of being among others singing is less involving online (although not impossible). However, we should note that these are not compelling advantages in a 'clear blue water' sort of way and have to be weighed against the advantages of e-meeting. These are things like inclusion of people with various disabilities, better time usage and hence 'productivity', often a lower carbon footprint and bringing together greater numbers of people because of these things. For many of the things included in the bishop's list of good things from physically proximate meeting, e-meeting can do well and sometimes better. In discipleship, it can do well and sometimes better. It can foster praying together -sometimes better. It offers tools for considering scripture together that are better online than off.

If discipleship is a central concern (and Rom.12:1-2 suggest that even worship together has this as a central aim), then online activity can and should be part of the mix the more so since it enables the participation of people otherwise unable to access the 'space'.

Praying against death in climate chaos

 Richard Beck has recently written a series of blog post on intercessory prayer which express well where I've been coming to in terms of seeing prayer as part of creation -more precisely creatio continua and itself an act of participation in continuous/continuing creation. This is very close to my own thoughts about the structure of creation in relation to justice and peace and the place of corporisations. The third post in Beck's series also puts the helpful perspective ... well, see here:

We have to know that, in this life, praying against death will be an experience of failure. You need to know that before going in. And yet, we also need to know that this failure isn't terminal or final, that Christ has defeated death. Eschatologically, God has answered every petition for life and healing with a resounding "Yes!" Easter is God's answer to every petition against death. All prayers against death have been answered in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I find that very helpful and my mind next goes to praying for /in climate and environmental crises about the things that are going on that makes them crises.  Beck goes on to say that prayers this side of the Last Day are a mix of lament and hope. It seems to me that to attempt to pray in climate and ecological crises is to pray, in some way, against death. Only here we don't only think about the death of people but of species, ecosystems, ways of life, biomes, civilisation ... and perhaps the same insight applies.  In Christ it is 'Yes, yes' but not necessarily before Resurrection. We will fail in our prayers and our physical efforts (which are also, in their way, prayers) for mitigating climate chaos: people and species and biomes will die. But all in the end is harvest, our work in the Lord is not in vain. Somehow. How does that, will that, look in the now-and-not yet, before the End? 

The tension is that we will not bring about the fullness of God's reign, and yet what we do, what we pray, now will be answered 'yes'. And even if it is not yet and not now the act of praying is hope. The act of praying is an act towards discernment whether this petition is for the now or the not-yet End, and if the former, then how are we called to petition with words and/or with deeds.

Christian England? Maybe not...

I've just read an interesting blog article from Paul Kingsnorth. I've responded to it elsewhere with regard to its consideration of the idea of the soul of a nation (specificially England).

Here I'd like to pick up a few other matters in it.

I think that I should take issue with this claim. "The 2021 census revealed that, for the first time in a thousand years, most people in England are not Christian"  Well, I think that is simply not correct in any helpful sense. Not because I want to deny that the census revealed that now less than half of the English are Christian but because I think that the idea that for the previous thousand years we/they have been. I actually think that a big part of what the census reveals is that people are now more ... honest? ... about their spiritual allegiances; rather than by reflex putting "CofE" people who would have done so 20... 30... 40 years ago, now put 'no religion'. The figures now, then, are more reflective of where people have actually 'been' spiritually for decades. I tend to think that the figure for numbers of Christians is likely to be closer to the numbers of those reasonably actively affiliating to churches. 

While there are people in those numbers who may be there for more social-status reasons than discipleship, these might be offset by those who are fairly Christian but find churches hard to stomach. I suspect the proportions vary over time. However, there have been times when the label Christian and being seen at church were marks of respectability which sometimes had little to do with any active affilition to Christ and the Good Old Way. And of course, we've only had censuses since 1851.

What I'd want to suggest is that probably for the last thousand years, there has rarely been a time when Christians in the sense of active Christ followers has been above 50% of the English population. To be sure there are times abundant when people have used the label of themselves because they have been baptised, were part of a "Christian" nation and/or thought having an opinion that there is a God made one a Christian. But that's not being a Christian. And at a national level there has indeed been rhetoric claiming Christian allegiance but the practices of government both in relation to the people inside and to the people outside of the nation have been sub-Christian at many, many points. Machiavelli has been more influential in practice than Christ.

I seem to recall that before Wesley started preaching, the spiritual scene was reportedly at a very low ebb. England was Christian in name only. Most people were, it would seem, deists in opinion and many were licentious in behaviour and morals. Including those leading churches since the qualifications for doing so seemed to forget the most specifically Christian details relying instead on family connections and having a degree from Oxford or Cambridge.

Maybe it's actually that for the first time in a thousand years many people have understood that the label "Christian" is not fitted to them. There are many different reasons for that no doubt. Some because the cultural connotations of the label "Christian" are no longer prestigious. Rather many are distancing themselves from much of what has become associated with the label: Trumpism, pedophile abusers, socially maladroit weirdness, inability to be other than dogmatic... For others it is recognising that their spiritual heart is not in it; they may be 'spiritual' but not specifically religious; they respect Jesus but not such as to follow his Way.

A few sentences later in Kingsnorth's article, I find the possible connotations of this sentence quite disturbing but not for the reasons I think Kingsnorth writes them; "By the end of this century, most people living within the nation’s borders will not have ancestors who shaped it" I fear that this framing plays into the hands of nationalists and racists by seeming to collude with the idea that ancestry grants title, somehow. Let's note that we are all immigrants (there were no humans here when the country was covered by ice). My own ancestry on one side is refugees from French religious tyranny, and on the other side I probably have more title than people who could only trace ancestry as far back as Saxon, viking or Norman ancestors. -My point here being that I don't think I have any more or less 'title' to live here than anyone else who call it home.

Though perhaps I do him a disservice since he goes on to write: "the spiritual energy in England today is coming from those who are crossing its borders in such unprecedented numbers. Many of them are Christian; many more are not. Will those traditions ever become English, in the sense in which Ackroyd uses in his book? It’s quite possible." 

I can't speak to Ackroyd's conceptualisation, but I do welcome the acknowledgement that our nation changes over time. If those who make home here from birth or from later in life, work for truth, justice, mercy, fairness and so forth, then that's great.

And then Kingsnorth adds something that is a good critique in my estimation, drawing on an older text: "In the Bible, they call it Mammon. It squats now over England like a wheezing, warty old toad, and we pay it obeisance every day. It is a very old god, and it never dies. And yet nobody has to worship it, and this is the secret and the escape. You can turn back towards the light instead, England." 

Quite: the important thing is not about ancestral title but whether we serve a common good or a mammonist agenda that's important. That's more consonant with God's agenda while exclusivising nationalism is not. I note that the nations are judged, according to the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for their treatment of Jesus who identifies himself with the poor and marginalised.

At this time, England is doing really badly in that respect. Mammonry has increased inequality (quite noticeably over the last 4 decades), doubled down on demonising the most vulnerable among us and has been actively harming the marginalised and failing to help the exploited. England is surely under judgement but not for selling out so-called "Christian values", rather for painting very unChristian values as virtuous while using them as cover for doing the things that Christ condemns the nations for in that parable.

Review: Undoing Conquest

 I'm doing a good bit of thinking lately about decolonisation and also about the Hebrew scriptures -among which is how to understand and take as scripture some of the horrific genocidal and ostensibly settler-colonial narratives. So this book got my interest. The commending blurb said, among other things: 

Undoing Conquest offers ways to incorporate archeological research into the life of the church to repair the harms of settler-colonialism and genocide, creating a more just future. Undoing Conquest interprets this new archeological research from feminist and decolonial theological perspectives and designs a new liturgical season, the Season of Origins. This season integrates archeological histories and centers justice work at the heart of the church’s annual rhythms.

... and that seemed to address my interests as stated above. 

I liked that it starts with a consideration of how the Christian social imaginary (and that term is explained) has at different times developed and how new discoveries and challenges affect what can be imagined. Noting that there is a kind of Overton Window (not a term used in the book -that's my analogy) whereby what is imaginible and usable by Christian disciples and publics needs to move by increments referring to what is already known or believed and not by complete breaks with the past. This is a smart move when trying to present and evaluate what new understandings of biblical origins are and how they might be assimilated. It was intriguing to learn of how the book The Tribes of Yahweh had played a part in liberation movements of the late 20th century, so it seems important to understand what the scholarship behind that book might offer to the wider Christian movement.

Of course, the elephant in the room for Judaism and Christianity when reflecting on Joshua 1-11 is genocide and the challenge of that elephant is how to handle it while still acknowledging the writings as Scripture. It's a more general question, but that part of the Hebrew Bible perhaps is paradigmatic in this respect. There is an issue for many more conservative users of the bible about how to think about scripture if/when some results of archaeological and historical research seem to show that things that had been considered more-or-less reliable history begin to look like just-so stories or quasi-mythological tales of origins. Is this in principle different from re-reading Genesis 1 in the way that Richard Middleton presents in The Liberating Image ? The big question for me is how to hear or read these stories as scripture in our context with our understandings of the world? Does reading them as in some way divinely inspired mean that we can receive them as other than historically accurate?

In this case, we are reminded that the archaeology appears to contradict the idea of a Conquest as a first-sight reading might lead the reader to imagine. We are invited rather to consider that these stories recount things "in ways that aim to shape culture and contribute to a shared sense of identity".

I found it helpful to be able to read a really well written overview of the the results of archaeology and reflection on it over the last century or so -much of which I only had a vague inkling of (because until recently, I was not as interesting the Hebrew scriptures as I am now).

There is a sketch in the penultimate chapter of how we might story for ourselves an archaeologically fair narrative which also allows us to take hold of the Exodus story in scripture. This is worth reflecting on -along with the call to find ways to bring this into popular Christian imagination. I think that this will be a tough job with the so-called Christian Nationalist crowd! That said, I'd want to see a bit more scaffolding to help more conservative readers to be able to rethink their own a priori understandings of what scripture is and how it 'works' in devotional and theological reflection. There are some pointers here, but it is not a strong thread.

I enjoyed the idea of having a liturgical season of origins to engender a liturgical and thus whole-church pedagogy. There's a reasonably detailed proposal for a Season of Origins. I'm taking it seriously as something to incorporate into my own Our Common Prayer in Climate Emergency liturgical collection. I felt that the proposal, though, needs to pay more attention to how such perspectives are made liturgical. Do it badly and the questions and skepticisms of the congregation will actually be counter-productive. (I'm reminded of the putative Josianic story that the book outlines -which succeeds, humanly speaking, because of it's political backing and the moment of history in which it is introduced). I suspect the idea of trying to give what might be seen as official credence to 'rejected' or 'dispreferred' texts of the past (non-canonical gospels etc), is not going to fly widely in the Christian world. I'd love to see a wider conversation about the idea, though, of a season such as this.

I'm also concerned because at the moment a lot of Christians are trying to encourage churches to adopt a 'new' Season of Creation. Another new season might be a bit hard to add to the pile of innovation -even though I've kind of been doing it myself with a season of Transfiguration in Our Common Prayer liturgies. The proposal is to situate the Origins season after Creationtide, in effect. -Though the existence of Creationtide is clearly not known by the author. So I'd want to invite a longer and wider conversation about how we're shaping the autumn Kalendar -I'd also want to discuss whether we should reconsider Advent and November (Kingdomtide) in terms of the foci of these seasons. That said, 'Origintide' after Creationtide seems a good fit -and then a contrast with the themes of death and decay that comes prominently in early November (Kingdomtide). Certainly the shape proposed for Origintide invites it to have a pentitential thread running through it which would be suitable since that thread has become so hard to maintain in Advent because of the wider societal context in which it falls. This means that in the northern hemisphere, the lengthening nights of  encroaching winter would be mirrored in considering the darkness in the moral world and our complicity in it.

While I was reading I found myself cross- referencing with the tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur -the former is briefly mentioned towards the end of the book. But it is worth considering how these stories originated (in as far as we know or suppose) and how they have at various points been picked up and reworked or elucidated with various ideological spins in them. This could help us to think about the stories of Exodus and Joshua before they become crystallised as scripture. -So that's another bit of further research for me!

In short, I have found this very intriguing and enlightening. What's more it is not a lengthy tome and while there are very thorough footnotes, it is not an especially academic dense text. I'd be pretty confident to put it into the hands of a reasonably educated non-specialist. There were some things being said which were repeated at times -but I guess that helps make for secure cross-referencing of materials in the book for some readers.

One of the things that this has done for me is make me want to dig into (pun intended) the archaeological findings and reflection on them. It's also got me wondering how this can inform and how it affects my own research on the way that The Powers and Principalities show up in Hebrew scriptures -given that I've been developing, in effect, a kind of corporisations narrative.

Kate Common’s Website
Undoing Conquest on Bookshop #UndoingConquest

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/i7u2ix4en0xb2l6kxrr93/ANcouHIrfzj7Ky6D7ucIsIw?rlkey=6l38lsatqxnv8iwp48kmkbyt0&e=1&dl=0

A review: One With The Father

I'm a bit of a fan of medieval mysteries especially where there are monastic and religious dimensions to them. That's what drew me to reviewing this one. My hope is that the history is well -researched and so the story gives, by its background a helpful view of the life of the times as well as hoping that the psycho-spiritual insights are well depicted and explored.

The blurb names well something of what I look for in general:

The mid-fourteenth century was a time not only of burgeoning towns, majestic cathedrals, and nascent universities, but also of debauchery and violence, the Black Death and Inquisition, torture and ordeals. In his encounters with noblemen and peasants, alchemists and hermits, monks and heretics, knights and revolutionaries, prostitutes and miscreants from the medieval underworld, Justin comes to realize that he is entirely on his own as he confronts his personal moral failings and struggles to find faith in a world where God no longer seems to exist.

So the question is, does this book do these things? 

Well, yes. And I quite enjoyed the moving from scenario to scenario which gave opportunity each time for characters and their circumstances and interactions to give expositions of the issues spiritually and political-economically. Admittedly there is a degree of anachronism in vocabulary, but that in necessary.

The revolt scenes brought home to me the issue of not having strategy or thinking through longer-term scenarios and I wondered if that was fair to peasant revolts -probably that is the way of things then: largely uneducated people with only hazy ideas of how the wider world worked might well have acted in 'haste' by today's standards and their vulnerabilities would have been viciously exploited by the powerful wealthy.  Also the human vulnerability to being carried along by emotional arousal which then dampens those who have misgivings from expressing them (to their/our own detriment) is portrayed and is salutary.

On the downside, I felt that I didn't quite feel I connected with the characters, perhaps they felt a bit not-fully three dimensional. I liked, for example, the hermit in the woods but I did feel he was a bit bombastic and not at all sure if I believed in him as a character. It was good though, to be reminded that people in the middle ages were not uniformly faithful Christians and of how much the established church worked as the propaganda arm of feudalism -also salutary given that there are forces abroad today which seem intent on getting us back into that sort of society -complete with appeals to divinely-ordained obedience to those in authority. I was amused, btw, when in the planning of the revolt a character who was presented as being very concerned for obeying authorities persuaded herself, apparently, to support her village's revolt reasoning that by electing the village elder to do this, he had become the authority to be obeyed. I wondered whether my skepticism about that move arose from feeling that maybe that way of thinking seemed quite 'modern' or whether our 'modern' sensibilities about such things actually do trace back to such perspectives back then (but among peasants...?)

It gave me pause for thought about how deep-set the deference to hierarchy seemed to be in the sense that the theory of feudal estates can be presented as a kind of covenant of mutual aid -but how easily it was subverted and became oppressive without real appeal or recourse when those at the pinnacles of the hierarchies failed to play their benign patriarchal role. I was shocked by the no-doubt accurate picture of a quota being presented as a having a share in produce when it was clearly nothing of the kind and resulted in imiseration of those producing the food when there were times of low harvest. The early chapters of Exodus came to mind.

The issue of anachronism for me came to a head when we were in the monastery. The Bartholomew character, and the prior, were mostly speaking in ways that would be more characteristic of mid-twentieth century evangelicals than medieval Roman Catholics -albeit with a deferral to the authority of the Church tacked on. I recognise the value of exploring the unhelpful answers and methodologies of evangelicalism of that kind and giving voice to the honest questions and puzzlements and even inconsistencies it raises. However, it did irritate me a bit. I guess I wanted rather to gain insight into how the putative thought-world of the novel would work rather than see it translated into more contemporary (and north American) idioms and even concerns. I did value the reaching past mere doctrinal rectitude and the noting of the polyvocalism of the early church fathers in reading scripture and it is important to bring that to the table.

As part of the review agreement, I have to post a review (however partial) within a month of getting the book and I'm still reading it! So it may be that some of my concerns are addressed as I read the rest. I am enjoying it and I may yet add to this review if there is more of significance to be said.

One with the Father on Bookshop
Richard Evanoff’s Website

#OneWithTheFather

I should put on record that I received this as an e-book for the purposes of review. I was under no obligation to review favourably or otherwise, merely to offer some kind of review within a month of receiving the book. 

This review was added to on 14 April to comment more on the monastery episodes.

British Evo's and the shape of national life

An article recently published in Prospect magazine under the header The Marshall Plan, has a lot in it that seems well noted and there's a degree of sympathy in the writing, allowing for it to transcend being simply a 'hit piece'. As someone who has commented on allied matters on this very blog over the years, it is interesting to see some lacunae of mine closed with further information. I've been on the edge of the kind of Evangelical-Charismatic Christianity examined in the article most of my adult life. So I do recognise the truths in this description.

I think there are two things I want to pick up from this article. One is to note the way that the narratives of this particular brand of Christianity are pulled to the political right (and need not be). The other is to consider how (or maybe if) it can be called more fully into a better force for the good of the "least and the lost" to borrow a phrase that is popular -ish in such circles. 

I'll pick some quotes from the article to comment on.

The first one is a 'credit where credit is due' sort of thing. "...he is worth around £800m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List—Marshall lives relatively modestly." And that is good to learn. Though 'relatively modestly' is an elastic concept, I don't doubt that it involves not retaining all his income for himself and his family and investments. I do think that there are wealthy evangelicals who do indeed take seriously biblical teaching about modesty and almsgiving.

The next quote is both to affirm and to question. "Marshall is worried by the displacement of the Christian ethic in society. He has said that “traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures... Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness” that is ultimately the consequence of the sins of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On this view, we are all sinners, redeemed only by Christ’s death for us, so anything we have is an undeserved gift from God. What we do with our time, money and talents is a response to what God has done for us. This outlook reminds me of what Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 12:48: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”

I think that I recognise this from my years of insider acquaintance with this brand of Christian discipleship. Both the worry about 'liberalism' and the core focus on fallenness of humanity (it's in most evangelical bases of faith). I also recognise -with sympathy and gladness- the sense of responsibility and humility that this engenders. This fruit is Evangelical Christianity at its best. That said, I would want to do a bit more work with the fretting about 'liberalism' and the heavy lifting it is doing in a culture wars /moral panic sort of way. I'd also want to think more about the way that the fall narrative is functioning and whether it is a fair theological move.

I pick up comment on the phrase "Judeo-Christian" further down the article. It's also important to pick up the issue of the work that the Fall is pressed into ideologically.

Marshall is quoted as saying in 2012: “I am a committed Church of England Christian, I believe we are all made in God’s image, that we all have gifts and that education is the key to realising our potential.” And again, I want to affirm something of that: making a starting point with being made in God's image and recognising human giftedness. I think that this might not be doing all the work it should, however, in this kind of world view.

Politically speaking it is interesting to learnt that "he co-edited The Orange Book, which was a plea for a return to the core liberal philosophies of choice and freedom" This is important, I think, because it already indicates a capture by right-wing talking points and I think is probably symptomatic of a lack of rigour in theological thinking. The Orange Book was was enabled the LibDems, essentially, to go into coalition with David Cameron's conservative government in 2010 (was it?) enabling support for austerity politics and economics.

 Of great concern to me is to read the following. 

Marshall invested £10m in GB News, taking over as interim chair when Andrew Neil—who had been the founding chairman—jumped ship. The following year, with the station in financial and technical chaos, Marshall stepped in with a further multi-million-pound investment and gained, with others, significant control of the company. Most of the rest is owned by Legatum Ventures, a private equity firm and cousin of the right-wing Legatum Institute, 

This is recent history and as such is concerning in that it may indicate a trajectory more fully into the political right, if not fascism -at least that form of paternalistic and individualistic moralism that gave cover for some Christians in the 1930s to support Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. I think that some sentences from later in the article raise similar concern: 

Marshall’s latest reform project is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (the acronym serving as a second take on the Ark theme). Its glitzy inaugural conference, attended by 1,500 people last November, culminated with a keynote speech from Jordan Peterson in the O2. This Arc is crewed by right-wing politicians, activists and influencers, whose aim is to repair what their research describes as “the fraying of the social fabric”. While not explicitly religious, it is clear that faith—in its Judeo-Christian expression—underpins the enterprise. Once again, Legatum is providing finance and infrastructure for the movement

Fascism, of course, won't arrive saying "Look, we think Mussolini got a bunch of stuff right". No, it's going to talk about traditional values, citizenship and it's going to pick up and amplify fears about the fraying of the social fabric and suggesting that we need to discipline people for their own good. -Without, of course, noting that the fraying is pretty much a direct result of the financial shenanigans let loose by 40 years of financialisation, privatisation etc which is driven by these same Old-school-Tie-ers making millions in usury, derivatives and hedge funds and eroding the safety nets and protections for the many vulnerable and precarious members of society. No, (they think): better redirect concern to personal morality and culture-wars and in doing so find a way to ridicule and blame those most concerned and who have ideas to address the inequalities that fray the fabric. (I note that Pickett and Wilkinson's thesis, based in good research, about inequality and worse social outcomes remains a standing rebuke to right-wing political postures -somehow Marshall et al manage to 'miss' that addressing this societally would actually help with a lot of the fraying they claim they are fretting about).

But of course, the blind spot about what works is probably rooted in a blind spot shared by background. 

"Culturally, Holy Trinity is rooted in the public school system and the ethos of English exceptionalism. Several of the clergy who have led the church into its current dominant position are Old Etonians, like Welby, and have been friends since meeting at Cambridge in the 1970s." 

And unfortunately, the Christianity that is sincerely and wholeheartedly taken up by these folk is so focused on individual salvation and evangelism that it cannot see the social except very blurrily. Their position in large part depends on not knowing the social. I know, because I've been there -not as public school product but by trying to be part of the Christian Union at university and beyond that, being in circles which were often significantly influenced and led by the public school Evangelical networks. These networks are very suspicious of people who don't 'fit' unless they have done the necessary gymnastics to pass soundness tests and the 'one of us' social-fit tests. This resonates with what is said later on in the article: "The view from Brompton Road is that the Church is divided between those who champion the true faith and those who do not, and that God is blessing the faithful." -Interestingly, the latter is a precarious proof, for many biblically aware Christians know that persecution is rather to be expected for being faithful. They then look at themselves and wonder why that's not the case, and wanting to justify themselves they find tiny little frictions where people disagree or push back against them and try to make out that this is persecution -so "See! We are the faithful". Never mind that much of the time they bring these 'persecutions' on themselves by being insensitive, not reading the room, arrogant and even bullying. It's a 'heads we win, tails you lose' sort of situation. See below in the quotation where Michael Gove is mentioned, it ends with 'signs that God is at work'. So heads -we are blessed by God and tails -we are persecuted, so we know God is at work with us which is also a blessing.

I'm also a bit suspicious of the work that the term "Judeo-Christian" is doing in this discourse. I think that the term is probably meant to capture something that is judged to be common to the two religious traditions, and the Hebrew scriptures and particularly the 10 Commandments probably lies at the bottom of that. "Judeo-Christian" is probably code for the 10 Commandments for the most part. I think too that for those in power, the more individualist morality of the commandments is congenial. What is omitted in this framing is the more social dimensions and redistributive elements as well as the ban on usury -charging interest, for example.

In relation to redistributive strands of the Torah, the vision is clearly of levelling, preventing the accumulation of power through the accumulation of wealth, enjoining a duty of the better-off to care in practical terms for the less well-off and so forth. To this end the laws of Sabbath and jubilee envisage a return of land acquired to the original holders, this would have had the effect of re-distributing wealth and re-levelling the playing field -by giving all families access to means of production- as well as putting back the accumulation of wealth and power to more equal terms. I find it funny-sad that the spirit of these laws is rarely invoked in evangelical Christian discourse about social and economic relationships and governance while far more marginal and dubious laws are made shibboleths for orthodoxy. 

I'd like evangelicals to consider the example of John Wesley who supposedly had an annual income of £28 when he started out and although his income rose during his life, he still lived on £28 pa and gave the rest away (hat tip to Howard Snyder, I think it was this book that first tipped me off about Wesley and money: New Wineskins ).

Going now to banning the charging interest as part of the actual Judeo-Christian traditions (and recall that it was only in the medieval period that usury was redefined by the Church as 'excessive interest'). This alone should give pause to many of the bank-roll-ers of western evangelical endeavours. It seems from this article that many of them are deep in the practices that the Judeo-Christian laws against usury are arguably meant to disallow or curtail. These would include the idea of making money from money rather than from production or offering goods or services. Money should 'stand for' actual goods and services and the licensed gambling in money markets, derivatives and the like should be very much looked at askance by inheritors of the Judeo-Christian traditions. It's salutary to read David Bentley-Hart's Jacobin article in relation to this.

Whatever we might make of wealth and usury in relation to modern life, I think we who claim to be Christians should be wary of straying too far from the concern for the perils of wealth accumulation and exploitative means for doing that. Since much of the political right wing is essentially about defending wealth accumulation and has shown itself extremely sanguine about unjust and exploitative practices which enable it, I think that as Christians we should be very wary, at peril of our souls, of supporting the political right.

Of course, we should look at the theological justification for supporting right-wing political-economics. This is where the prioritisation of the Fall comes in. The line of thinking takes greed and selfishness as givens in human affairs and these are taken to be signs that "Since the fall, the whole of humankind is sinful and guilty..." (UCCF Doctrinal Basis) and the harnessing of these fallen characteristics by the theory of free-market capitalism is taken to be a happy mitigation in a 'fallen world'. Never mind that the theory is a crock and the actual results of following that theory tend towards accumulation of wealth and power on the basis of injustice and exploitation. The point of the correlation being made is to provide cover for the mammonists to continue serving Mammon and to head-off measures that might substantially restrict that service or seek to make a more just and fair social settlement in relation to the common goods that God has bestowed upon the earth. 

"Don't resist this greed, make it work for the common good" is what they say, in effect -ignoring that the Market doesn't, in fact, do that. In fact, it's made into a way to avoid doing justice and loving mercy (Micah 6:8) -matters which would overwhelmingly benefit the poorer, the marginalised, the least. These are in such dire straights because of the injustice and lack of mercy in the political economy of the West. Shouldn't we rather be taking the idea of the Fall to mean that we need to set up systems to disable greed from producing such disparities, misery and unfairness? Shouldn't we rather follow the example of the Torah in putting in place measures to capture ill-gotten gains for re-distribution back to the society which actually enables the wealth so captured? -Especially to the poor and vulnerable who are often those exploited and extorted of their just rewards. That we are all 'undeserving' theologically, does not mean that those who are defrauded should continue to endure the fraud while the perpetrators get away with it.

And, let's also note that 'bearing false witness against your neighbour' covers maintaining falsehoods that prop up a system of extraction from the most powerless of our neighbours. That's a Judeo-Christian principle for you but the big money uses its muscle to commission think tanks to sow seeds of doubt about markets, inequality (and don't forget climate change) which is already impoverishing and immiserating many globally. I note 'against' in that commandment; a special emphasis on the harms that such falsity brings about?

"The resentment industry"

Germane to that prior observation, is this following quote which I have also seen and heard echoes of among Evangelicals I have been in fellowship with.

"He believes that large parts of the leadership of the Church have fallen captive to what his friend Gove, speaking in a broader context, has called “the resentment industry”. But in evangelical theology, attacks—whether from outside or inside the church—are to be expected. In fact, they are a sign that God is at work."

Let's notice what work Gove's rhetoric is doing and hiding: he doesn't argue but merely labels something as 'resentment'. By that he seems (in common with many on the political right) to imply that people noticing wealth and privilege and seeking ways to address the injustices produced and the lack of mercy involved, are acting from resentment. It's not a new accusation: I heard the like back in the Thatcher era to disparage the idea of taxing the rich at higher rates. In Gove's discourse "resentment" is a framing of legitimate concerns about inequality to imply they are not legitimate and the sour grapes of the losers -as if it was a 'fair competition' in the first place rather than the rigged 'game' where "to those who have, more will be given". A better word than 'resentment' might be 'fairness'. And once we've noted that, let's note too, that there might be actual resentments, and that they might be well deserved pointing to a need for redress. I may resent someone having stolen from me, disparaging the resentment doesn't make the injustice go away. It also obscures the possibility that a resentment might be just: you've had your efforts and fruits of your labour misappropriated by others through bullying tactics or systemic discrimination -that would be just cause for resentment, would it not?

So, there's no real reason to think that church leaders (which?) have fallen to the "resentment industry" -rather those that champion the poor and social justice are simply doing two things. One is to attempt to apply the teaching of Jesus and Torah in a world of system-built inequalities. The myth being constructed behind this word in Gove's discourse is that church leaders should be pushing the lines 'rich man in his castle/ The poor man at his gate/ God made them high and lowly/ And ordered their estate'. -A position which gives a free pass to the immoral means by which wealth and power were obtained and maintained. A position which elevates the expediency of the powerless to an eternal virtue -disallowing redress even when it is legally and strategically possible.

The second thing is to bring the truths about how inequality and poverty is formed and maintained in a world that is really pretty abundant. The actual resentment, it seems to me, is that of the rich at having their self-congratulatory narratives challenged and shredded by those they consider less worthy than themselves. The claim of those church leaders that Gove so dislikes is that the actual 'resentment industry' -more properly designated as movements for social and environmental justice- are a sign that God is at work: anointing people to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, setting prisoners free ...

British evangelicalism going forward

I hope that Graystone is right when he writes the following.

Despite all this, we’re not likely to see the emergence of a religious right in Britain comparable with the evangelical movement in the US any time soon. The historic social liberalism of the Church of England means the identification between evangelicals and the political right is nowhere near as potent. In the forthcoming UK general election, very few politicians will campaign on issues such as abortion rights, and few British pastors would dare to instruct their flocks how to vote.

 I think that in many ways this is correct. I hope it is right that British evangelicalism may resist the capture that we see in much of USAmerican evangelicalism. However, I'm not quite as sanguine about it as Graystone seems to be. There is clearly money being deployed from the USA to influence things on this side of the Atlantic. It's worrying that MP Steve Baker, a member of an evangelical church in High Wycombe, has become meshed in with climate denialist and oil-extraction interests.

British evangelicalism has been increasingly influenced by USAmerican evangelicalism through the greater output of books, songs, and other media products. Many of them are innocuous in themselves but by building brand loyalty and on-selling techniques, enable exposure over time to more noxious content veiled as Christian but in fact betraying the spirit of Christ and the church of the first centuries in relation to wealth and power and keeping faith with the spirit of the parable of the good Samaritan.

The veiling is accomplished through bringing to the fore less weighty matters with a particular spin on application and pushing them in such a way as, over time, to make them central in the consciousness of evangelicals to the point where the position so named can be activated without dissonance to what should be central matters of faith expression like compassion, mercy, neighbour-love and so forth. Abortion is a good example. 

I suspect that the abortive Franklyn Graham evangelistic campaign which was being planned in 2018-19 (if memory serves aright) was less an evangelistic campaign (and let's face it, the format is largely unsuccessful and a waste of money and effort, be honest; it's more a test of orthodoxy than a means to win hearts and minds of unbelievers) than a means to network British evangelical leaders with a significant chunk of USAmerican-based right wing pressure-groupees. I resent that our faith and notions of fellowship are being viewed as social capital for recruitment to causes that betray the spirit of Christ.

I think British evangelicals are not sufficiently aware and wary of these overtures and avenues of capturing the evangelical mind and I fear we may have reached a tipping point. In part this tipping point is because there are numbers of ex-evangelicals who have left evangelical churches or Christian corporate practice altogether and the drivers of the exodus are the increasingly uncharitable, insensitive, unnuanced teaching they are hearing, the bullying and abuse they experience and see and the failure of large evangelical churches to be able to resource spiritual growth beyond a certain point (so people leave for more spiritually nourishing churches). At this point my evidence is experiential based on the number of people I interact with who report having been evangelical at some point but left for the kinds of reasons implied by what I've just mentioned. I visit churches where people tell me this, I interact with students in ministerial training who have this in their personal history. There are a lot of ex-evos out there.

Philanthropy, power and democracy

As I was thinking about this article, I found myself considering Jesus' words in the gospels to 'sell all you have and give to the poor'. This because 'give to the poor' is a different dynamic to 'set up a charity to do things for the poor', though at first it might seem like they are outworkings of the same thing. The latter is actually a form of paternalism while the former actually puts the poor in charge of how they use the money given to them. The latter is usually based on a fear on the part of the donor that the poor will spend it frivolously or harmfully, and so a means to give is devised that prevents that but leaves the donor in charge and often breeds resentment. We should bear in mind that there is research to indicate that putting the poor in charge of their own affairs is actually better in general terms. This relates to the issue of philanthropy more generally. Philanthropists mostly give money for pet projects but do not open up a democratic door into the donation and use processes. "Nothing about us without us" should apply to receipt of charity and is generally regarded as good practice in third sector work while paternalism is rightly frowned upon. I note also that the same power-divesting dynamic is at work when Jesus sends his disciples ahead of him to the villages and towns around and effectively tells the disciples (12 at one point and 70 or 72 at another) to rely on the hospitality of those they are proclaiming to, to be vulnerable to their welcome. 

The other dimension of this is trickier for many of us which is the 'Sell all you have' bit. This is reinforced by the example of the church in Acts where people sold stuff and shared the proceeds with the church. It's also clear in the background of the epistles that there was quite a lot of looking after the poor going on.

At the very least, I think we should consider what it would look like to encourage discipleship built on John Wesley's example, mentioned above where the money is genuinely given away or at least put into democratically-run trusts like Marlene Engelhorn did with her inheritance.

My suggestion for Marshall, his fellow evangelical Old Etonians and their networks is to decide what the equivalent of Wesley's £28 per annum is and give away everything in excess -preferably by giving it over to citizens' assembly-like trusts (Christian or otherwise) drawn from the ranks of those likely to be beneficiaries. This latter because other research indicates that simply giving aid directly to the homeless or the poor results in better use of the money or assets. It may be that Marshall is doing this. However, I get the impression that his lifestyle far exceeds what could be afforded on a median-sort-of income which might be a better starting point for consideration. I would commend taking in the insights of limitarianism as a starting point.

Fall theology as ideology

As mentioned above, Marshall is quoted: “traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures... Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness”.

Ironically, as I mentioned above, the "sense of fallenness" has been selective: happy to see it in political opponents of mammonism but giving a pass to those benefiting from the channels of wealth accumulation and retention which are normally the flip side of misappropriation, wage-theft, and the use of power to suppress claims for just reward or fair shares. As long as the latter is dressed up with a veneer of legality, it is ignored. The Hebrew prophets and many a psalm would disagree that this is moral.

I guess that the "arrogance of the Enlightenment" is meant to be the idea that 'man (sic) is the measure of all things' and/or that reason is somehow not subject to fallenness. In the case of the latter, I think that this is in need of more nuance. Reason is properly a collective rather than individual matter, Enlightenment reason is the idea that some version of peer review will over time solve problems and come to better and better understandings of things -but the key is not to allow the formation of pockets of group-think, epistemic privilege or shared prejudice. I agree that probably considering that 'man is the measure' is a problem but mainly because it cuts us loose from our (God-given) ecological roots and embeddedness. In practice it also makes wealthy white males the actual measure of all things and without a sense of accountability (to God, ultimately) ends up justifying genocide, ecocide, misogyny, racism and so forth -basically treating other humans as lesser and forming systems of life and habits that sustain the lessening of these others. In Christian terms, this is neglect of love, justice and mercy -the weightier matters of the Law.

 A sense of fallenness would seek a Tower of Babel resolution -that is to decentralise power. It would put in place robust means to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power (and recognise that the latter is often a product of the former) or mechanisms for the removal of excess wealth and redeploying back into the ecosystems and social networks that enabled it to be created in the first place. And the means and mechanisms would themselves be scrutinised democratically.

Beware the Liberalism my son...

It's worth noting that the term is used in a weasely manner. 'Liberalism' can be a kind of way of thinking about politics, human rights, government and in the quotes above that is to the fore. However, we should notice that for evangelicals it is more frequently a boo-word designating churches and theologians who go 'too far' in adapting Christian thought to the culture and times. So we should be aware of this double-entendre when hearing evangelicals speaking. Part of what is being done often is activating the framing which disposes evangelical hearers well-trained in their tradition to put the concepts or ideas into the mental rubbish bin -and by association, the people who use the concepts and ideas. It is a logical fallacy but since it rarely reaches conscious thought, it is not seen as such and it then becomes simply a part of the outlook.

It's actually more a felt thing most of the time and because it's not fully conscious it is deployed inconsistently and hypocritically quite a lot.

In practice 'liberals' are Christians who might not express Christian ideas in vocabulary that fits the evangelical norm (this despite a professed desire to not speak or write 'Christianese'). One is becoming liberal if (too many and too hard) questions are asked about received ideas in the evangelical traditions -this despite setting up enquirers' processes which claim that any question is allowed; at some point one must put up or shut up.  Liberals are people who "don't accept the bible as God's word" this is a lie in many cases. I've come across many people who are looked at askance or written off by evangelicals who take the bible with utmost seriousness as an artefact which conveys to them the voice of God. And because thy take it seriously, they find they have to think about what kind of communication it offers, how to think around the inconsistencies it has in it and what those differences one part to another mean for how we need to read and receive it as God's word. (And, btw, never mind that the Word of God is theologically speaking, Christ primarily). Too often those who don't treat the bible as a kind of textbook are regarded as liberals and metaphorically booed. These 'liberals' are people who are often putting The Quiet Time into practice, and if you enquire of many of their evangelical detractors -these latter are often only reading scripture when they attend church or a bible study and relying on others to tell them stuff rather than hearing God for themselves in scripture.

Evangelicals may agree that "God has yet more light to break out of His Word", but all too often they are discouraged (both by authority figures and from internalised self-censorship) from actually listening to discern whether this might be so.

Explicit link to article: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/65415/the-marshall-plan-paul-marshall-gb-news

Further reading: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/christianity-poor-debt-jesus-moses-wealth/   

https://discipleshipresearch.com/2017/02/millennials-bible-readers-or-bible-admirers/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13644-013-0109-2

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2021/04/evangelicals-and-their-politics-dispatches-from-the-field/ 

"Here again we see that more Bible reading is positively related with higher scores on the liberal policy views scale." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235410637_Reading_the_Bible_in_America_The_Moral_and_Political_Attitude_Effect

Comment on evangelical recent history in USA by Barbara Bass Butler.