Baptist Times to close, apparently

ABP report that the Baptist Times is to cease publication from January here. At the time of writing, there is nothing about this on either the BT‘s own website, or on BUGB’s, but the report seems to quote the right people and when I queried it on Facebook Ian Bunce from Didcot assured me it is true. It’s not news that the BT has been losing money, and has survived only through financial support from BUGB; nor is it news that the print media are struggling, particularly daily and weekly newspapers, in the internet age. Most other smaller denominations in Britain (even the CoS) have gone the way of a glossy monthly publication. Monthlies, however, fulfill a different role: good at features; much less good at reporting news or at providing a forum for denominational debate. Of course, online news is instant and free, and online debate far more rapid and responsive. But in the face of such advantages, we should not forget the accompanying disadvantages. The day after the opening of the Leveson enquiry might not be the ideal time to say this, but journalists are professionals, trained to source and check stories; internet commentary – including this blog – is done by amateurs, who can easily get things wrong. (The – essentially false – ‘Word Alive split was over Steve Chalke’s orthodoxy’ story from a few years back is a case in point: running on the internet, it did real damage to real people, and to effective mission organisations.) Further, discussion in print fora is moderated by editors, which can introduce problems of partiality and the like, but is much more often a great boon. There are very few, if any, popular religious or news websites where it is worth reading anything ‘below the line’, and so anyone with any sense doesn’t. (Blogs generally do better, because of their semi-private nature, and because there is, generally, a degree of quiet editing. Yes, I do delete comments even here, albeit only a handful – see policy tab above.) The appearance of open debate online, therefore, is often an illusion, resembling less a reasoned public forum and more the incoherent shoutings of a mob that simply drown out any worthwhile contributions that happen to be made. Editors exist to preserve certain standards of quality in reporting and debate; where there is no editing (as generally is the case online) there are no standards. This is inevitably bad news. Finally, a print journal provides a focus; online debate is generally dispersed and fragmented. Those who hold to particular views gravitate to their own fora, and so discussion across party lines is much rarer. Factionalisation and polarisation are more likely in a debate that has no central context to draw it together. The BT  did this for BUGB, and so was a real, if quiet and partial, force for denominational unity. For these reasons, the loss of a newspaper like the BT is sad, even if it was inevitable. BUGB’s denominational life will be the poorer for...

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Education and religious commitment

The BUGB news sweep picks up another forthcoming piece of social scientific research (the report is from the Daily Mail, but as far as I can tell nonetheless fairly accurate), this one using data from the American General Social Survey. The headline is that there is a pronounced positive correlation between years in education and likelihood of attending religious services – more colloquially, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to go to church (or synagogue, or mosque – but given it is American data, church is the real point) – more precisely, each additional year of education makes an American 15% more likely to attend worship. This is valuable in that the narrative of ‘only ill-educated people are religious’ is still out there in the culture, and hard data to rebut it is useful. That said, it is not a surprising result, nor should we be too quick to claim that education makes people more likely to believe; there is no indication in the report as to whether the statistics have been normalised for other factors; if not, it may well be that religious observance and educational longevity are both related to another variable. (Amongst British students, to take a slightly parallel example, there is simply no question that evangelical Christianity is on average much stronger in elite universities than in others; I am fairly sure that the explanation for this is less ‘cleverer kids are more likely to be evangelicals’ than ‘middle class kids are more likely both to be evangelicals, and to be accepted by elite universities’.) The report goes on to make claims about the nature of the faith of educated Americans: educated people are more likely to read the Bible (again – is this normalised? ‘educated people are more likely to read’ is not news; do they turn to the Bible disproportionately?); less likely to agree that ‘the Bible is the literal word of God’; and less likely to agree that ‘only one religion is the true religion’. These latter results strike me as complex; the researcher, Philip Schwadel (U of Nebraska-Lincoln), narrated them in terms of more educated people being more ‘open-minded’ but not less ‘faithful’; I suspect that this is wrong. As any of us who have been involved in survey design and interpretation know, at the point where you are asking people to agree with simple statements about complex issues, you get into difficult areas of interpretation. For instance, a recent survey showed that British Evangelical church leaders were less likely to agree with the statement ‘abortion is always wrong’ than their church members; in discussing this, the people who did the survey made the point that this was probably an unfortunate artefact of the question, in particular the inclusion of the word ‘always’: anyone who has a measure of theological education these days will have been offered ‘abortion to save the life of the mother’ as a test-case in ethics (I’m not saying it’s a good one, but everyone uses it, including me…); with this background, the word ‘always’ in the question sounds like it is a test on where you stand on this, somewhat obscure, debate on the limits of ethics, not a test of your basic ethical position concerning abortion. Similarly, ‘the Bible is the literal word of God’ is a very complex statement: someone with a measure of theological knowledge will immediately recall debates over ‘is’ vs ‘contains’ in this context; the use of the word ‘literal’ is at least obscure, and probably actually misleading (if one holds to Calvin’s doctrine of accommodation, say, can one say that the Bible is the ‘literal word of God’? The answer is not immediately clear; Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture was hardly cautious). I reflect on what happens in my own mind when confronted with such a survey question: I first note that the question is complex enough not to admit of the yes/no answer required; then reflect on which response more adequately reflects my view; then reflect on what the question might be used as a proxy for (if I say yes, will someone assume that I am closed-minded/a fundamentalist/a six-day creationist/…?); then I probably tick the ‘don’t know’ box… It seems likely that there is a simple correlation between educational achievement and an unwillingness to indicate agreement with a broad-brush statement on a complex issue. In passing, this illustrates the difference between two types of data: church attendance and educational achievement are ‘hard’ data: people may lie (in the aftermath of the Thatcher government, political pollsters found they had to correct for ‘shy Tories,’ people who voted Conservative but would not...

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On not being in love with ‘Judas’

My friend Pete Philips has a typically thoughtful and worthwhile guest post on the Church Mouse Blog a little while back, looking at Lady Gaga’s recent single ‘Judas’. Pete lamented the lack of Christian engagement with this song (& they accompanying video), suggesting Lady Gaga is a significant cultural icon whose invocations of Christian themes should be missionally important to us both as guides to where the wider culture stands, and as points of engagement with the wider culture. Pete was perhaps right to lament the lack of discussion, but I wonder how much of the lack stemmed from what in academia we call a ‘null result’: having given time to investigating something, you sometimes discover that, actually, it wasn’t that interesting, and so probably don’t publish your investigations. I have to say that I don’t find the song that interesting, but then it is probably worth reflecting why. If you missed it (how?!) the video is worth watching: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagn8Wrmzuc] The production quality is supreme, the song an extraordinarily well-crafted piece of up-to-the-minute pop (although it doesn’t reach the heights of Gaga’s breakthrough single, ‘Poker Face’ (2008), and certainly not of her anthemic ‘Bad Romance’ (2009) which marked her out as a genuinely great pop performer). Religious images drip off the lyrics, the video, and indeed the CD sleeve (should anybody be so last century as to be still buying CDs…). Is the song about an engagement with religion, though? At one level, obviously not. Let me first consider it simply as a song (the modern pop song is a complex cultural artefact, that might be encountered via radio or MP3 (or even on CD by dinosaurs…) as a purely audio experience, is most likely to be encountered via video (You Tube; MP4; MTV & equivalents) as a recorded and repeatable AV experience; and will be encountered by some, in live concert, in a different way again. All need to be taken seriously for an adequate reading of the cultural text). Like all great pop songs, the lyrics are sufficiently ambiguous to admit multiple exercises in eisegesis: the song that seemed, when you were x-teen, to narrate your first love affair, was not written about that relationship, but was cleverly crafted to allow you to find in it an expression of those complex emotions for which teenagers cannot find words; ditto the songs about teenage rebellion and angst. So Gaga’s lyrics: for the one in the middle of a conflicted love triangle – him or him? (or indeed, ‘her or her?’,  or ‘him or her?’) – the contrast in the song between the idealistic desire for Jesus and the persistent love for Judas offers a narrative into which one might read one’s experience; equally, the lyrics do invite a more existential, or even moral, reading: ‘Jesus is my virtue, and Judas is the demon I cling to’ – if this line is taken as determinative, the lyrics express, not a love triangle, but the existential angst of one struggling with a desire to kick a cherished bad habit. Again, one might find a straightforwardly religious meaning – the struggle for faith in the (post)modern world. I suppose that none of these are ‘right’, in the sense of ‘authorial intent’; I suppose that Gaga writes deliberately invocative and imprecise lyrics – great pop lyricists do, and, anyway, it is the zeitgeist in our generation: here are some symbols; can you read something into them? The video seems to determine the song in a religious direction, with the disciples named explicitly in the colours of the biker gang, and a climatic dramatic moment in the gun pointed at Judas turning out to be a lipstick, painting his lips in readiness for the kiss of betrayal. There are scenes of footwashing, although Gaga (pictured, apparently, as Mary Magdalene) is washing the feet of Jesus and Judas only. The repeated aquatic imagery might be read as a (post?)ironic reference to baptism; water overwhelming Gaga but not changing her actions or nature in any respect. That said, the imagery is all fairly tired: mostly reminiscent of Madonna back in the 80s in its ironic/playful/blasphemous appropriation of Biblical themes; even the camp Jesus, crowned with safe and golden thorns as if dressed for the dancefloor of a gay club, seems boringly borrowed from Wallinger’s Ecce homo – far more powerful and shocking, because of its context. Gaga’s video’s, actually, have generally been triumphs of style over substance. ‘Bad Romance’ was beautifully produced, but seemed mostly to reference rather standard soft sado-masochistic themes, in unsubversive ways. At best, one might say (or hope) that the references were nicely playful, but the...

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The Manchester Passion

I have just discovered that a video of the whole of this is online. It was broadcast live Good Friday 2006, a modern-day passion play set amongst the streets of Manchester, and using music from the city’s club scene to convey the story. Even for a live outside broadcast, the sound was sometimes not great, and the decision to do some vox pops interviews was regrettable, but the whole remains still the single best piece of religious broadcasting I have seen – imaginative and thought-provoking. Odd bits of the setting are powerful (Jesus, arrested, is dressed in the orange jump-suit of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner) or funny (check out the kebab van owner at the last supper reading the Da Vinci Code!), but it is the surprising and powerful selection of music that makes it. Beginning in the Upper Room and at Gethsemene, Jesus sings to the disciples ‘Love will tear us apart’ (Joy Division) and James’s ‘Sit down’ (‘Those who fear the breath of sadness – sit down next to me; those who find they’re touched by madness – sit down next to me; those who find themselves ridiculous – sit down next to me – in love, in fear, in hate, in tears, in love, in fear, in hate, in tears – sit down…’) Judas (played by Tim Booth of James) throws his thirty pieces of silver into a busker’s pot as he sings ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now’ (The Smiths); the Virgin Mary (Primal Scream’s Denise Johnson) sings a series of linking songs – Oasis’s ‘Cast no shadow’ (‘Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say, Chained to all the places that he never wished to stay … As they took his soul, they stole his pride…’); M People’s ‘Search for the Hero’; Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’) expressing her feelings about her Son as He travels to His death. There are a couple of stunning duets – Jesus and Judas throw New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ back and forth: ‘And I still find it so hard, to say what I need to say, but I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me, just how I should feel today…Tell me how does it feel, when your heart grows cold…’ And Jesus and Pilate share, improbably but brilliantly, in Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’, singing at each other in unison lines like ‘I don’t think anybody feels the way I do about you now…Just maybe, you’re going to be the one who saves me…’ The effect is no doubt much more powerful if the Manchester lyrics are somewhere in the soundtrack of your childhood and adolescence, as they are for me, but even without, this was a powerful and thought-provoking translation of the gospel narrative into a contemporary setting. The end is astonishingly moving, even watching it again, knowing what’s coming (probably if you know the Stone Roses’ back catalogue better than I do you would have guessed in advance, but…) It’s an hour. It’s worth it:...

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Culture, guilt, and Lockerbie

Local news today is full of the debate over whether Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, should be freed on compassionate grounds. He is dying of cancer, and my understanding is that it would be normal practice in Britain to allow any prisoner who is terminally ill to die at home (indeed, another very high-profile convict, Ronnie Biggs, was freed on such grounds just last week). His crime, of course, affected families and the wider community in the USA as much as in Britain. The news reports I have heard suggest that the notion that he might be freed is being greeted with simple incredulity in the USA. The breadth of condemnation from across the Atlantic is striking: it is not confined to (families of) victims, or to social conservatives, but seems to be almost universal (Democratic senators have intervened publicly, and Hilary Clinton has been reported to have been involved). Is Britain – specifically in this case Scotland – just more liberal than the USA? Actually, probably it is, but I don’t think that this is the reason for the divide in this case. Rather, our understandings of what words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ mean are culturally-determined, and somewhat different. To us, dying in prison seems a cruel and unusual punishment, and so essentially unjust; it seems that the default assumption in the USA is that sentences should be served, and so that any relaxation is unjust. My own instincts are, unsurprisingly, fairly straightforwardly British. Is this right or wrong? I don’t know; being exposed to different cultural understandings at least allows me to ask the question, though, rather than simply assuming that what I have grown up with must be right. What is the theological point here? Simply this: words like ‘guilt’ and ‘justice’ are rather central to at least some accounts of the atonement (‘justice’ has wider theological application, of course, not least in theology proper and in discussions of providence). It is rather easy to use these words assuming that we all agree what they mean. We don’t, and if we are to understand each other’s attempts to speak adequately of the salvation of Christ, we need to realise that, and to be sensitive to...

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