Distinctly Welcoming

40 Years on: Moral, But No Compass?

For the past month or so on BBC Radio 4, there has been a three minute slot with snippets of recordings from "the Summer of 1968". It's tempting to believe that Radio 4 are keen to  celebrate my fortieth birthday. Instead, they're marking the anniversary of the Summer of Love, student riots, the full flowering of liberalism and a whole load of cool music from that year. What I've actually heard is incredibly dull: news pieces that were far from earth-shattering (rock star arrested in drugs seizure, music hall comedian dies, industrial action, midde-of-the-road film premieres, protests against the government etc etc). Apart from the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther-King and Robert Kennedy, the whole Summer of Love thing seems like a bit of indulgent nostalgia from a few middle-aged BBC executives. Accidentally tuning in to a Radio 2 programme listing the pop charts of June 1968 over the weekend, it seems even the idea that  the music was any good is misplaced  (have you tried listening to Englebert Humperdink?).

So what has changed? The new Church of England commissioned report, "Moral, But No Compass" suggests that society has lost its moral bearings due to a privatised vision of the person and increasing distance from the church. Increasingly, I am having a great deal of sympathy for this view, and wonder, as a friend said to me recently, that we have "Not got we wanted, but got what we asked for". The 60's revolution, and I date our current malaise of individualism back to then and not to New Labour, nor even Margaret Thatcher (though each hammered nails into the coffin of communal values), tipped us into the self-seeking that we see now. To paraphrase this same friend:

- we wanted sexual freedom, we got Nuts magazine, lapdancing clubs and untold family break-ups
- we wanted to break away from deference to authority, we got happy-slapping, knife crime and anarchic classrooms
- we wanted self-determination and the sanctity of the individual, we got a myriad of new neuroses and the objectification of the human body
- we wanted choice, and we got SUV's and a planet in meltdown

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound like some Daily Mail columnist, and I don't hark back to the days of patrician England, unquestioning deference and a different type of class system (we have a new one now based on celebrity and income!). But we do need to do some serious cultural critique, stand back and work out where we may have gone astray from the ideals that God calls us to.

It's not trendy, and I'm conscious that this sort of sentiment is not terribly "emerging church" either. But as a church, we need to work at questioning the cultural values we may have imbibed. I wonder, just to prod some discussion, whether the emerging church, in an effort to build "responsibility to other" has failed in "responsibility to action" because it has been overly dictated by society? .....Moral, but no compass?

Christian Dialogue with the Secular - Cardinal Cormac and the Professor

I was intrigued to hear Cardinal Cormac Murphy O"Connor's call for a Christian dialogue with the Secular (or Secularism or Atheism). There is a lot of confusion with these terms but I believe he is talking about a dialogue with those that would seek to take God-talk away from the public sphere (strictly speaking "secularism"). Hence, he's had a little dig at Richard Dawkins and his like (who was given the most woefully gentle treatment when interviewed this morning by that rottweiler John Humphreys on the radio!). What this sort of discussion demonstrates is that our context is not one of "faith versus the rest", still less about a purported vision of Christian Britain against the threat of political Islam. Across all quarters, amongst all communities, there are fundamental convictions about the nature of the good life that need to find expression. The challenge is to find language appropriate to what motivates and inspires our deepest concerns about life, community and the other such that the differences do not detract from the building of a shared whole.

Frequently, when lecturing about Islam, people will respond by saying something like, "We have an amazing amount in common, it seems to me that the real enemy is secular atheism". I have to reply, "no". The fact that we have so much in common in terms of the oneness of God and a recognition of many shared prophets (as we do with Judaism) demands that we ought to be better about the conversations, but we have our fundamental points of departure. Secularism, too, though teaches us truths consonant with the gospel. There are threats within the agenda of secularists seeking to remove God-talk from the public square....There are also threats within the agenda of a robust political Islam that totalises the non-Muslim. But there is much of God's grace within the freedoms and liberties of secularism or in the corporate responsibility to God within political Islam. We are not dealing with either/ors here, enemies or partners.

Can we learn from all quarters in being fully Christian and totally engaged, bringing our own challenges in turn? My Masters supervisor David Marshall makes the point that the Church arguably rediscovered its original mandate of social justice through its encounter with Marxism. I would add that, more latterly, the Church has rediscovered its original mandate to stewardship of creation through its encounter with the conservation movement. What might we learn and rediscover about our particular biblical calling as we engage in honest, vulnerable but confident ways with Muslims, Hindus, New Agers, Prof Richard Dawkins etc etc...It makes our bewildering multifaith milieu an exciting prospect rather than a frightening one when looked at this way, does it not?

Britain in 2008

I picked up the "Economic and Social Research Council" annual report, "Britain in 2008" yesterday (available in all good bookshops!). It's a vital overview of trends in British lifestyles and consumption, attitudes to conservation, religion and science, affording a picture of where we are now. The corresponding website is a helpful repository of statistics and articles here.

The stuff on religion is fascinating and attempts to unpack that majority of those who continue to designate themselves "Christian" in the census. Research conducted by the likes of Prof Woodhead at Lancaster University suggest that there is a large and growing constituency that they are now calling the "fuzzy faithful". This group go to church for high days and holidays, believe something but have relinquished core beliefs such as Jesus being the Son of God. As well as the well documented "spiritual seekers" they have another category known as "Sheilaists" after a young nurse who told a study of religion that although she believed in God, "I can't remember the last time I went to church", her position defined by herself as "Sheilaism. Just my own little voice."

The landscape is evidently hugely complex and belies any talk of absolute secularism. Nominal believers are in turn categorised as "natal nominalists" (born into the faith and assuming this is all that is necessary for such religious identity), "ethnic nominalists" (describing themselves as Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu etc in order to signal a difference from people of other faiths) and "aspirational nominalists" (who claim to be Christian in an established church because it is associated with respectability).

To muddy the waters even further, I see that Professor Richard Dawkins has "come out". In a full-blown admission of his skeleton in the cupboard, the prophet of uber-rationalism has trumpeted to the BBC that he enjoys singing Christmas carols!  Apparently, Richard Dawkins sees himself as a "cultural Christian". There we have it: he's obviously a "natal nominalist". So long as religious folk keep their religion to themselves (that means keeping it from the kids too.....does Richard Dawkins do nativity plays??), then that must be fine in his way of looking at the world.

This is all interesting stuff. Our context is perhaps not as bad as we think but neither is it as good as we might want to believe. The huge numbers of "fuzzy faithful" are at a staging post towards secular hegemony, having left religious hegemony. What should discipleship and mission look like for a 2008 Britain? Imagination, prayer and the willingness to take risks and make mistakes are commodities the church needs in abundance.

Richard Dawkins and the "A"- Word

This Monday's Guardian had a wonderfully funny article on Richard Dawkins' attempts to galvanise America's atheists: "Daniel in the lion's den!" My first feedback on the Distinctly Welcoming book included the comment that I had neglected to mention the faith of "secular humanism". It's a fair point. As theologian Walter Brueggemann says, "We are all created in the image of God. There is no more important theological investigation than to find out in whose image we are making ourselves". We tend to use the shorthand, "all faiths and none" and I guess, for the purposes of the book, it's helpful to focus in on the issues of historical world faiths that we are encountering. But the reality is, we all worship someone/somethings. Richard Dawkins seems to worship scientific rationalism with a religious fervour. I wonder  that, in some perverse way, Dawkins is a gift to the church in revealing the faith positions that underpin all our life decisions ("Praise God for Richard Dawkins!"). There remains the challenge of working out how the Christian faith is represented in the public sphere with humility and grace and in ways that broader society can understand.