On Charlottesville and home again
The horror of Charlottesville for American friends was the visibility of things they had believed and hoped were confined to history. Is there anything similar in recent UK history? Unfortunately, yes. Do we have examples in recent times of people introducing explicit Nazi language and images into our political discourse? Yes. Katie Hopkins, a journalist who has written for many of our most popular press outlets, casually tweeted about the need for a ‘final solution’ recently—it was too much for one of her media employers (LBC), but she still writes for the British press. In a very similar vein, this week Trevor Kavanagh, the former political editor of our best-selling daily newspaper, wrote an article depicting ‘The Muslim Problem’. Kavanagh is a very experienced journalist, and the idea that he was not conscious of echoes of Nazi language of ‘The Jewish Problem’ when he chose his slogan seems merely incredible to me. It appears that, like Ms Hopkins, he depicted an aspect of our present multiculturalism using language that echoed Hitler. Again, one of our allegedly-mainstream political parties, UKIP, published a poster last year which apparently echoed German Nazi imagery. Nigel Farage, the then-leader, proudly unveiled the poster, and defended it in the face of predictable outrage. Farage remains something of a ‘media darling’, very regularly invited onto our mainstream broadcast media to express his views. Of course, it may be objected that these are relatively isolated incidences; I do not accept that, but even if they were, consider our most significant political decision for many decades, last year’s referendum on our membership of the European Union. From the start, on the ‘Leave’ side, there were three arguments on the table: an abstract notion of ‘sovereignty’; the amount of money the UK gave to the EU; and immigration. Whilst the second of these informed the, now infamous, bus slogan, the third was the meat of the campaign. But it didn’t work. Mass migration from Eastern Europe was indeed a reality of British life, and it was indeed uncontrollable, but pointing this out made no difference to the polls, which showed a comfortable ‘Remain’ lead about six weeks out. Then someone hit upon a new tactic: Turkey. Turkey was, and is, a candidate nation, desiring to join the EU. There was, and is, no serious expectation that it will join anytime soon—the problems run very deep. However, the imagined possibility of Turkish accession offered a new argument to the ‘Leave’ side: the uncontrolled hordes of Bulgarian and Polish immigrants might be joined by uncontrolled hordes of Turks—and they have brown skin and middle-eastern sounding names. It is a matter of record that, for the last 4-6 weeks of the campaign, this (entirely imaginary) threat of Turkish immigration was, essentially, the sole message of the ‘Leave’ campaign. Michael Gove gave an, astonishing, 90 minute TV interview, where he responded to every question the audience asked him with ‘Turkish immigration’; the infamous final leaflet of the campaign, delivered to every home in the UK, pressed this message, extraordinarily crudely. This focus on the (imaginary) possibility of mass Turkish immigration turned national opinion, shifting the polls by 5-10% The ‘Leave’ campaign chose to threaten us, however implausibly, with brown-skinned neighbours with middle-eastern sounding names, and this straightforwardly racist tactic changed the game. Let me parse this clearly: a genuine and real possibility of uncontrolled immigration by very poor communities from Eastern Europe did nothing to improve the ‘Leave’ vote; an entirely imaginary fantasy of immigration from Turkey was the decisive move in the campaign. Our most significant political decision for decades was determined by an imaginary fear of living close to people with brown skin and middle-eastern sounding names. This plays three ways: first, something like a million of us were convinced to vote ‘Leave’ because, although presently-actual uncontrolled immigration of poor white people from Poland or Bulgaria did not trouble us, we felt threatened by imaginary possible immigration from Turkey. If there is a way of narrating that decision that does not involve the category of ‘racism’, I can’t find it. Second, something like sixteen million of us either were entirely untroubled by a campaign that was explicitly racist, were ignorant enough of the debate to not realise what the campaign had become, or were sufficiently convinced that the goods of leaving the EU were so valuable that voting for an openly racist campaign was still the right choice. Third, the rest of us were either sufficiently uninterested to not get involved, or, at best, unwilling or unable to demonstrate convincingly just how racist the campaign had become. The aftermath of the vote was predictable: good friends of...
Read MoreOn Charlottesville and home
Today was the first day of the new school year here in Fife. Two of our daughters attend a school named ‘Madras College’, where our church congregation also happens to meet of a Sunday morning. It is a very ordinary state-funded Scottish high school which, like many thousands of British institutions, owes its odd name to an old connection with someone involved in the Empire. Most of its buildings in desperate need of replacement, although there is one fine quadrangle of great architectural merit and real note. I have forborne from commenting much in public on the—horrific—scenes enacted last weekend in Charlottesville, VA, scenes sparked by the intention to remove a monument to someone who was revered by his contemporaries, but has been judged more harshly by history. I have praised courageous friends—one in particular—who have taken a stand, and made the assumptions that every British person has made, that the rights and wrongs are obvious and clear, but I have not wanted to say this too loudly—because I have wondered what is as obvious and clear from far away about my life, my culture, my home, that I don’t see, and whether I would have the moral courage to confront it if I could see it. The fine quadrangle at the heart of our girls’ school, and the odd name, both owe their origins to the Revd Andrew Bell (1753-1832), who was born on the street that the school now stands on here in St Andrews. His admiring biography was written in three volumes by Charles and Robert Southey after his death. He was educated in town, went to the university here. Upon graduating, he accepted a post as tutor to the sons of Carter Braxton, a tobacco farmer in Virginia. Braxton owned, of course, many slaves—as a young man he owned a ship and had at least attempted to become involved in the slave trade. Out of his profits, he paid Bell a salary—some of it in shares in his tobacco enterprise. Bell grew moderately wealthy on the immoral profits of slavery. In 1781 Bell returned to Britain, fearing for his life in the War of Independence. He was ordained within the Church of England, served briefly an Episcopal congregation in Leith (near Edinburgh), but then in 1787 set sail for India, armed with a newly-minted honorary doctorate from my own university here in St Andrews. He landed in Chennai (which was then called Madras), and harvested several lucrative chaplaincy contracts with local British regiments. His great work in India, however, started two years later, when the East India Company opened its ‘Male Orphan Asylum’ at Egmore Redoubt, Madras, for ‘the orphaned, illegitimate, and abandoned sons of British officers’. Bell became Superintendent, and served with great distinction, devising a model of education that he named ‘the Madras system’, where older boys served as ‘monitors’ (or tutors) and instructed younger boys. He talked about educational advantages for the boys in public—and about savings on teachers’ salaries in private. He served the Asylum for seven or eight years before returning to Britain because his health was deteriorating. He was clearly loved by his boys, who were born into desperate situations, and who he helped greatly. That said, and although chaplain to the regiments of many of the boys’ fathers, he did not, it seems, ever query whether British soldiers should be routinely raping native women and leaving them destitute, or disowning the children born as a result of such assaults. He grew very rich in the Raj, so much so that when he sought an acquaintance’s help in securing a pension from the East India Company, the reply was tart: ‘[t]he very little [influence] I have, I would rather reserve to help the helpless, than in adding more rupees to the enormous heap you have brought home with you.’ (quotation from Southey & Southey, II.34). He obtained his pension, nonetheless, and so had both vast capital and comfortable income gained from the immoral profits of the Imperial occupation of India. He believed his real treasure, however, was the system of education he had developed, and set about recommending it to various poor and charitable schools. My university encouraged him, and awarded him a further honorary doctorate; his success may be gauged from the fact that his funeral was held in Westminster Abbey, where his grave is under the central aisle of the nave. In his will he left money to found a school using the Madras system in St Andrews. The bequest was handsome, and the Madras College began on the street where Bell had been born, in a fine quadrangle, which survives to...
Read MoreA conservative case against ‘conversion therapy’
I was on holiday when the Church of England General Synod met, and so I followed events with even less interest than I, as a Scottish Baptist, usually do. On my occasional scans of my social media feeds, however, I saw a certain amount of interest in a motion proposing that the Synod condemn ‘conversion therapy’, the practice of seeking to change the orientation of lesbian or gay people to make them straight. I was far enough away to have nothing interesting to say about the motion or the debate, but noticing it made me think once again what a deeply strange practice ‘conversion therapy’ in fact is. For the sake of the following argument, let us agree—briefly—to assume the best possible conditions: that there is no doubt that a traditional Christian account of sexual ethics is right, and that there are modes of intervention that are effective in changing a person’s sexual orientation (in reality I believe about 0.75 of these two things to be true). Even given these ideal conditions, the practice of conversion therapy would be a very odd one to engage in. The argument is very simple: to be gay/lesbian is to experience erotic desire for various people of one sex only: one’s own sex. To be straight is to experience erotic desire for various people of one sex only: not one’s own sex. Mt. 5:28 suggests strongly that such an experience of being straight is just sinful. It happens that there is no parallel condemnation in the NT of gay or lesbian desire, but I suppose most serious ethicists would construct one. Fairly simply, in Christian sexual ethics, to lust after someone to whom you are not married is sinful, and that judgement either does not depend on the sex of the object of your lust—or, just possibly, is intensified if your lust is heterosexual. So, to engage in ‘conversion therapy’ is to seek to supplant one set of sinful sexual desires—for people of the same sex—with another set of sinful sexual desires—for people of the opposite sex. Why would anyone want to work to exchange one set of sinful lusts for another, possibly worse, set of sinful lusts? And why would any responsible Christian ministry propose or promote such work? As far as I can see, this is the only interesting question concerning ‘conversion therapy’—not, ‘does it work?’ (who cares?); not ‘is it a good idea?’ (from any meaningfully Christian perspective, obviously, no), but why did anyone ever dream it up?—and why did others in the church not merely laugh it off? I can see only one plausible answer, though I would be very open to hearing others. I have argued in a few pieces before now that a peculiar pathology of contemporary Western society is an assumption that sexual activity is necessary to attain adequate humanity—a ‘healthy’, ‘adult’ existence is not possible for the virgin. (The source of this assumption is worthy of exploration—Freud must be the deep origin, but more has to be said.) I have also argued before now that this pathological—idolatrous—assumption is deeply embedded within our churches, perhaps especially within the more conservative Evangelical traditions. Offered a single senior pastor, congregations demur, fearing that s/he is not adequately adult; faced with an adult celibate, we strain a young adults group to make space for them, and then give up, implying by our programme construction that there should be no celibate adults beyond the age of 30. (Forget Jesus. Forget Paul. Forget the gospel.) Surrendering completely to this contemporary idolatry, that proper adult humans must be sexually active, we discover lesbian and gay people, who are sexually attracted only to people of the same sex. We might attempt to deny the existence of such people, but reality intrudes, and, if we are convinced that marriage can only be between man and woman, we therefore propose that it must be possible to change sexual orientation, and so we invent conversion therapy, and invest deeply in its plausibility. On this telling, the practice of conversion therapy is a surrender to idolatry: to the idea that healthy and adult humanity demands sexual activity. In the face of this idolatry Christian ethics can say one word only, the first word of all real Christian ethics: ‘Jesus’. The moment we say ‘Jesus’ we admit that true, fulfilled, adult, humanity is possible without sexual activity, and so the moment we say ‘Jesus’ we deny the need for conversion therapy. More, the moment we say ‘Jesus’ we acknowledge that, in the Kingdom, celibacy is the normal and natural way of being human; the ethical question is whether sexual activity, marriage, is ever...
Read MoreAmy Winehouse and breaking the Golden Rule
Maybe my mind is just less well ordered than most people’s, but for me some the moments of real intellectual breakthrough come when I find myself thinking something that surprises me, and so am forced to analyse that surprising thing to work out why I was thinking it. Whether the thing turns out to be right or wrong, or just complicated, I understand better my own instincts and assumptions as a result. One such happened last week, in an ETS panel session in Atlanta. One of the other panelists, David Gushee, closed an impressive impromptu peroration with an appeal to ‘the golden rule’ – ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you.’ I realised that I was thinking that this principle was wrong. Doubting the golden rule, of course, is one of those ethical positions that you are really not supposed to entertain. If there is a universal ethic, it is this. And Jesus says it, identifying it with the core teaching of the Mosaic law: ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets.’ (Mt 7:12) So I thought a bit about why I was doubting it, or at least David’s application of it. My analysis goes something like this: so stated, the ‘golden rule’ assumes a level of moral awareness that I am sure is not universal, and am not sure is at all common. If our instincts about what we would like others to do to us are bad instincts, the golden rule offers bad advice. More commonly, I suspect, our desires are extremely conflicted, and so the golden rule offers no meaningful guidance at all. I rarely watch movies on planes, but I had watched one on the way to Atlanta. It was the recent biopic about Amy Winehouse, which intersperses clips of her – astonishing – musical performances with the story of her life spiralling out of control, finally to her tragic death. The film portrays her essentially as a victim, thrown into impossible contexts by decisions made by her partner, her manager, or her father. The sympathetic characters were female friends from childhood, who tried to help her. In the middle of a drugs binge they would come and try to encourage her to get clean, whereas her partner would be encouraging her to try something even stronger. Who was doing the thing she wanted to be done to her? The answer is profoundly ambiguous: straightforwardly, she wanted to be high; no doubt there was a part of her that wanted to be clean. According to the portrayal in the film, what she actually needed – whether she ever wanted it or not – was to get out of the celebrity spotlight, because she was unable to cope with it and was using drugs to deal with that inability. ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you’ is not a straightforward piece of advice here… (This is, after all, the woman whose biggest hit was built around the lyric ‘They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no’…) Now, it would be possible to suggest that, because of her relative youth and her addiction issues, Amy Winehouse was considerably less rational than is normal for human beings; I suspect, however, that this is false. I reflect on my own pastoral experience, and supremely on my own life: there are questions I desperately don’t want people to ask me, whilst at the same time I know that it would do me good to face those same questions. What do I want them to do to me? I don’t know, so I don’t know what I should do to others, if I am following the golden rule. More, I remember moments of genuine intervention, such as when my fellow leaders at a previous church banned me from preaching for several months because they had decided I was neglecting family relationships too much in my desire to serve that fellowship. (We had been going through some tough times; I still don’t regret stepping up to do what I did, but in hindsight I accept that it was unsustainable, and I had reached, or gone someway past, the point where I needed to stop and pass the baton.) Did I want them to step into my life like that? No. Am I now grateful they did? Yes. Do I hope I would have the courage – and love – to do what they did to someone like me in future, despite her not wanting the...
Read More’Shadows and Broken Images’: thinking theologically about femaleness and maleness
I’ve been reading Megan DeFranza’s new book, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God (Eerdmans, 2015). In response, I want to argue that our best way of thinking through an adequately postmodern account of human sex-difference might come from reflecting on medieval commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences.
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