'Big Society –just continuing God's work' Is cameron right?

Speaking last night at his Easter reception in Downing Street, the Prime Minister reportedly said he was simply doing God’s work when he launched the “Big Society” initiative of volunteering and civic responsibility.

“Jesus invented the Big Society 2,000 years ago,” Mr Cameron said. “I just want to see more of it.”David Cameron: 'Jesus invented the Big Society – I'm just continuing God's work' - UK Politics - UK - The Independent: 

When I read this I felt that Cameron was both right and wrong: I warmed to his sense that we should be involved in the Mission Dei as defined by Jesus -the idea that God is up to something and that our task is to learn to be a part of it.



What the quote reminds me, though, is how easy it is to get something of our understanding of what God might be up to wrong enough to bring it into disrepute. in this case we need to think a bit about it to see where the difficulty lies.


There are two areas to check out, I think. One is characterising Jesus' teaching -or some significant aspect of it- as equivalent to 'The Big Society'. So, we are asked to identify the Conservatives' slogan with Jesus teaching in some way. Now this is being done without specifics. So first we have a vaguely defined political slogan which seems to be about people helping each other and supporting one another and we are being invited to link that up with, presumably, Jesus' teaching about loving one another. So far so good and in some ways fair enough. However, I would want us to notice that the very vagueness of the two ideas being brought together should be treated with caution. The Big Society sounds fine in headline terms but what dose it mean in context and in practice. On the other hand, Jesus' teaching also contains encouragements to forgive enemies, do good to the 'unworthy' and leave families (I know that needs nuancing but it should be there if only to undomesticate Jesus' teaching in this context) -which I don't see represented very strongly in Conservative visions of society -quite the reverse.

The second thing is more concerning, though. and it relates to the way that 'Big Society' or Jesus' message is framed within a 'bigger' narrative. In this case, it is a return to framing that has worked for Conservatives for quite a while: to claim Christian credentials on the basis of agreeing with the idea that individuals should be nice to one another; a privatised morality where the state is not allowed to encroach or extrapolate. In this version of gospel, I may give a homeless person money, a bed, a meal -whatever, but I should not look at the social and economic forces that might have brought about a situation where someone might find themselves in such a position. And I should not expect to address those forces through law, tax or education (for these are the forces that create Wealth).

Let's just remember, by way of context, that iIn Jesus' time, there was no prospect of government responding to need  such as that: the Roman state was set up to mine  wealth from the provinces and to reduce populations to slave or serf-like conditions so as to provide labour for the the better off and the only hope for the destitute was private charity.

I would argue, in a relatively democratic society where we recognise that there can be such a thing as systematic generation of inequalities (Roman society didn't quite manage to make that recognition), that the proper way to take forward Jesus' concern for the marginalised is to address the systematic causes and effects of unjust inequalities by collective action and use of collective resources. Besides, the record of 'wealth-extraction' systems such as the Roman State and neoliberal capitalism is lousy in respect of addressing compassionate priorities which are meant to be to the fore in 'Big Society' visions.

Remember, we ended up with things like public sewage systems, public roads etc because private enterprise can't do them properly (and in the only models where it can, private companies are fulfilling governmental contracts and can't apparently make a profit without state safeguards and injections of subsidy).

Philanthropy was tried and found wanting -take a look at Victorian Britain. It was found that to address need at the level required took more than charity, it took collective action by government committed to common-good. The Big Society should not be an alibi for trying to leave the common good up to the diminishing capabilities of the good-hearted. The truly Big Society would be bigger than private-enterprise part-time philanthropy; it would be big enough to start to address the scale of need and the systemic nature of it (which is actually also going to be the 'cheapest' way to do it in the end).

So the problem with DC's Big Society is that it is actually a way to avoid Jesus' priorities: remembering the poor, reintegrating the marginal, healing the sick in mind or body. This is because it is actually giving an alibi to making the lives of many vulnerable people miserable because they fall outside the capacity private-enterprise charity to pick up what the collective was just about able to do. Hoping that somehow an army of volunteers can be found among the overworked and a flood of money from the overmortgaged seems a recipe for disaster. Literally -because the costs of leaving the needs unaddressed or being addressed patronisingly by non-professionals are likely to be revolutionary or worse. To model our response on the best that could be managed within in the limits of an oligarchistic (even kleptocratic) empire when we have democratic government and a fuller understanding of things, is frankly a sleight of hand to preserve privilege.

This is a moment to remember that trickle-down economics has never really worked.

And, we are talking about the Jesus who said 'Woe to you who are rich now ...' and 'Blessed are the poor ...' aren't we?

The truly big society should help us to do things together that we can't do (so well) isolatedly and to do so in a way that helps promote a fair contribution from those most able to give it. It should be able to allow us to recognise that all, by virtue of being God's image and loved by God, have an equal right to develop their capacities, talents and abilities and to use them to support themselves and contribute to the common good which nourished and continues to support them. It should recognise that sometimes we must act to redistribute opportunity to prevent its oligopolisation by the privileged and that very often the carrier of opportunity is wealth.

So, yes, the big society is carrying forward God's work, but so is seeking to address the systemic evils which keep the poor poor and degrade the environment. Using the former to evade the latter is undermining God's work, I think, by making a narrower good a substitute for a wider good.