QI Half Right

On the latest edition of QI (BBC2 - 8/16, the one with Sandi Toksvig, Clive Anderson, Henning Wehn and Alan Davies), Stephen Fry said that the Puritans did not escape persecution, but went to America to persecute.

Half right. Because the evidence of persecution (especially after the Civil War) is that they met in secret in houses, that they suffered the Five Mile Act that threw their meeting places outside towns, and had to wait for the King's Indulgences and then the Act of Toleration in 1689.

The Puritans wanted liberty for themselves. What is true is that they wanted a Puritan Commonwealth, a pure godly land where they could practice their ideas alone. Indeed, these first imported Americans could be called Religious Communists.

It is only later, as they had liberalised, that they began to see liberty as an ideal - for themselves and others.

He also claimed that Puritans were pictured in their Sunday best, in black, but otherwise wore clothes like the rest of the people. Only, however, if the clothes were sober, plus we know that the more moderate and parish minded Calvinists wore less severe clothing than the Independents and clear sectarians.

The Puritans were Bible only people and yet reasoned their Bibles, first in a harsh trinitarian way (and very opposed to Socinians, even to the point of wanting the death penalty) and then via many and various theories of interpretation the academies set up continued the liberalising through Arminianism and even into Socinianism later on.

They were merchants, saving money and investing, and rich people don't keep a severe religion down the generations. They later became the capitalists that wanted in on political life (the 1832 Reform Act) to overturn the feudal Church of England monopoly. We now see that at St. Pauls the Church of England has joined the capitalist establishment.

Radical Orthodoxy Exposed

Listening to the BBC interview, I really do think that Giles Fraser is over-generous to his colleagues. Of course everyone wants to respect the professionalism and position of colleagues. But what exactly is the conscience of the position on the other side?

I don't know, and it is not health and safety: but what worries is the position of the Church as an institution.

My summary book, Postmodernity, by Paul Lakeland (1995), Minneapolis: Fortress Press, has several mentions of what he calls Countermodernity, or what can be seen as the premodern in the postmodern space. This is the Radical Othodox position which, within its Christian Platonism, states that the Church is the Community of Peace (Lakeland, 1995, 70). All history should be read through Church history (properly understood, of course). Christianity is the "exemplary form of human community" (1995, 69, from Milbank (1991), Theology and Social Theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell) - and this trumps the social sciences' attempt to identify the same.

One can see in the need for Giles Fraser to resign, just what a dangerous position is created by conservative forms of postmodernism. The Church as institution comes first (or, in Protestant cases, the Bible) and it always comes first. It is (in this case) the nonfoundational metanarrative (1995, 69) of ethics.

But here we surely have the proof otherwise. The protesters have a social science reasoning against capitalism. It is demonstrably failing. Against this the Church is now preparing for violence against them. If this does not trash Radical Orthodoxy I don't know what does.

Update

There's a longer and freer flowing explanation in The Guardian online; interesting that Giles Fraser says in it that St Paul's and Wren doesn't do "the incarnation" in the sense that Giles Fraser can imagine Jesus born in a tent and St. Paul (himself) was a tent maker. So this implies a division in the Church, an architecturally identified one in which part of the Church isn't as "incarnate" as the rest. Meanwhile his resignation is sacrificial as there is no other job lined up (and not the Dean of Southwark as a cynical view might have - though perhaps he should apply rapidly). I don't agree with his view of incarnational nor the transfer of the birth narrative, but I can see it is a view held with consistency.

Integrity

So Giles Fraser has quit from St. Paul's. His view of the Church was of peace, of bias to the poor and the right to protest. The view of St. Paul's seems to be of removal, of being in with the capitalistic system and authorities that surround the building. removal is likely to show a level of violence, compulsion certainly. Thus it is a tourist and heritage site with a high price for entry. It's about 'posh' worship then. No one was fooled by the 'health and safety' reasons given for closing the church while the occupation has been taking place.

It is another example of the Church looking after its core institutional interest first and last. It's sad but this outcome was predictable. It is a black day in the history of S. Paul's. The rest is just idealism, and of a few individuals like Giles Fraser.

A few minutes after posting this, I added a rhyme on to Facebook:

As I was going by St Paul's
A protester grabbed me by the hand:
He said, "Inside, they miss the tourists they like to fleece,"
"So they are coming to grab us, using the police!"

Dawani's Residence

It's good that the head of the Orthodox Jews and the head of English Anglicans in the south are, well, pals, after the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks went along to the Lambeth Conference in 2008 and gave a little talk about Covenants in general. It was not an endorsment for the sort of Covenant the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has wanted, but for him it added depth to the notion of having a Covenant in general terms.

So now the Chief Rabbi has helped Rowan Williams get Anglican Bishop Suheil Dawani a residency permit in East Jerusalem.

Israel stole the land from the Palestinians after the 1967 war, unrecognised by others, whereas other land taken it continues to occupy and hasn't absorbed into Israel (although they built that horrid wall in Palestinian land: a bit like a householder putting up a boundary fence into the neighbour's garden). From Jerusalem, the bishop, whose diocese dates from 1841, reaches out to the West Bank (where he was born), Gaza, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Dawani lost his residency permit because the Israelis alleged that he helped sell Israeli land to Palestinians, and he denies it. One thinks so what if anyone did: selling land doesn't alter the State's jurisdiction does it? He says he didn't and he's going to be very sensitive to his position and location given the Israeli theft of land and occupations.

Well let's hope the fact that they have reached across to gain mutual help is one way peace can be achieved.

Context of the St. Pauls' Dilemma

I admit I have very little sympathy for St. Pauls, London, and its dilemma over the protesters outside. Anyone who wants to go into St. Pauls, other than during one of the services, has to pay a fat fee. It is increasingly the case in so many of these cathedrals.

When you go in these places there are then charges for photography, the ever present and over-priced shop, and some internal attractions demand extra entrance fees. These well staffed places tell you how much they cost to maintain themselves and this comes across as if they are without reserves and donors.

They want to be 'serving the gospel' (as they put it), meaning putting on services, but they are also part of the establishment. They don't critique capitalism anything like enough that they could, as they are part of the architecture and inheritance of feudalism and sit amongst the architecture of capitalism.

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s communism collapsed, except in China where they converted their authoritarianism into a state capitalist outfit that has, along with Western delusions, led to capitalism's imbalance and fundamental weakness all over the world.

Usually a developing nation takes on cheaper labour and the lower end technical manufacturing, and later catches up with the Western world. Japan did this, via a vertically integrated economy of corporations and lots of little workshops. It has been in a fifteen year slump. But what China has done is develop by state intervention and private dynamism (and back-hander corruption) and kept its exchange rate low; it has financed its expansion by lending to the West, and the money slushing around in the West had been expanded through its make believe gambling financial system. It all finally blew up.

As the protesters say, capitalism is crisis, because on the one hand the governments bailed out the banks and now the governments are going around bailing out one another, thinking that the banks are going to have to take some hit after all. It is a merry go round of incapability: only the Germans, it seems, have benefited from the euro because, of course, it is set lower than the mark would be if it was for Germany only. It benefits from the weaker economies, rather as the Chinese benefit from keeping its currency artificially low. Europe does not have the regional policy necessary to maintain a euro of unity, nor has Europe been prepared to allow whole areas to go into economic sluggishness while other parts do well - as has been the case in the United States. Europeans are not expected to travel to Germany to get work. Nevertheless, many governments in the euro did not keep to the rules, and in the fantasy of higher living standards than available they have themselves either gone bust or are near to going bust.

Christianity is, really, at its own decision point, though I suggest it has also undergone a similar crisis of its own. It doesn't have intellectual credibility (it explains nothing) and only a minority of people observe its rites and rituals, except on occasions - and fewer of those rites of passage are observed too. In places it has lost much ethical goodwill too, like in Ireland (child abuse) and Spain (child trafficking), though it still can from sources still generate an ethical argument.

I have never bought the idea that Christianity is a bias to the poor. Jesus of Nazareth preached reverse ethics from the assumptions of his day in his last days idealised vision, but he chose his twelve tribe leaders from among capable small business people - people who had boats, who maintained their own living, and people who were paid. They were not like sanyassins or close, not of the poor.

When Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, whole families including slaves were baptised at a time and traders became Christians as a mark of honesty and respectability - their mobility was how it carried through the Empire. Eventually its monotheism was an attraction to a centralised State. The earliest days showed a tension between being Roman and Greek and being underground. It was underground by necessity, not by choice.

And since Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy and the Protestant Churches were all allied with monarchs, princes and social systems. The Reformation took hold thanks to the political support that reduced down the reach of the Holy Roman Empire and Catholic empires. It is only after the United States had a different approach and Europe's working class was generally unchurched (except for the time of churches offering welfare, education and leisure provision) that the churches started losing the middle class as well.

Paternalism was a counterforce and some parish priests considered the poor, as well as the sheer desperation of Victorian inequality (rather like in the USA today), and denominations like the Unitarians were a sort of guilt-ridden middle class Church; but it is really only in its marginalisation that Christianity has started in parts to think about minorities and economic ones in particular. Its evangelical wing remains both individualist in salvation terms and generally (but not always) right wing.

So here we are as capitalism is in deep trouble. All the West has to somehow overcome the capitalist crisis while maintaining democracy. People are saying that they will not put up with the cuts, the loss of jobs and attacks on the poor. No one will grasp the necessity, even whilst protecting the savings of individuals, that countries have to default and banks have to go bust so that a lot of it can 'start again'. There needs to be the strengthened state to regulate these commanding heights of the economy and yet still a liberal state in terms of liberty and accessible democracy. At the moment we have governments behaving like monetarists when the new crisis equilibrium has curves like the Keynesians understood (governments should be spending and employing: quantitative easing of money does bugger all). We don't know what will happen in China when it fails to retain the growth that buys off genuine reform and change but part of the 'start again' is that China won't be able to maintain its artificial imbalance.

Giles Fraser might give his quick, liberationist, support the protesters comment, but in the end the Church has been part of the feudal State, part of the establishment, in with capitalist investments and part of its theology has always been to support these. No suprise then if its cathedrals contain entrance charges, shops, added attractions and are, increasingly, part of the tourist and heritage industry. In which case there are models for them, as in Fountains Abbey and Riveaulx Abbey (etc.).

When it's Going; When it's Gone

A website for non-believing clergy - still active, and who want an exit-strategy - has become public, although to be a member you would have to be screened.

It is a fact that any clergy person who has lost their beliefs and had left was, at one stage in the process, at a point of having lost their beliefs (or enough of them) and had not yet left.

Not quite behind the scenes are the well known 'New Atheists', but there is more to it than this.

There was a short study in 2010 by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on 'Preachers Who Are Not Believers' in the journal Evolutionary Psychology Volume 8(1). 2010 and it soon gets into those not quite non-believers who are actually happy with their condition and ministry. When discussing recruiting candidates, there were:

two others cited concerns about the term “non-believing.” Though neither of them believed in a supernatural god, both strongly self-identified as believers.

But what do they mean by this? Are they perhaps deceiving themselves? There is no way of answering, and this is no accident. The ambiguity about who is a believer and who a nonbeliever follows inexorably from the pluralism that has been assiduously fostered by many religious leaders for a century and more: God is many different things to different people, and since we can’t know if one of these conceptions is the right one, we should honor them all. This counsel of tolerance creates a gentle fog that shrouds the question of belief in God in so much indeterminacy that if asked whether they believed in God, many people could sincerely say that they don’t know what they are being asked.

This is not just agnosticism, the belief that one does not (or cannot) know whether God exists, but something prior: the belief that one cannot even know which question – if any – is being asked. Many people are utterly comfortable with this curious ignorance; it just doesn’t matter to them what the formulas mean that their churches encourage them to recite. Some churches are equally tolerant of the indeterminacy: as long as you “have faith” or are “one with Jesus” (whatever you think that means) your metaphysical convictions are your own business. But pastors can’t afford that luxury. Their role in life often requires them to articulate, from the pulpit and elsewhere, assertions about these very issues.

Pastors do afford this luxury, however; and that's the point. They can become very sophisticated at doing so, and I can think of these strategies for so doing.

• Biblical matters become history, only located in the past.
• Church tradition is revered but not projected into the present: liturgy is a museum of forms with an emphasis on art, music, theatre and ancient language.
• Detail of the biblical narrative examined as narrative.
• Focus on "questions" over any answers.
• Use of "stories" as a framework to matters others treat as revelation.
• Reinterpretation words like 'ultimate goodness' (but not if they give the game away).
• Avoidance of straightforward terms where simple explanation would give the game away.
• Formal terminology used but then little in support.
• Phraseology used asserting what one is supposed to do.

As for types of preacher and pastor who lose their beliefs: no one is immune. I suggest that the people who lose their beliefs fastest are the charismatics and evangelicals. The charismatics are full of praise, and then one day wonder what it is all about. It's like the gas has gone off bang. The evangelicals have the demand for strong beliefs that one day they cannot meet. Jonathan Edwards (no not him; the runner) lost his beliefs virtually overnight. It is the people who are or have managed themselves into forms of liberalism that go more slowly. They have, after all, managed this transition so far and have acquired strategies of presentation. Some do it in theology college. They create a space for their own losses. Eventually, though, a crunch point comes.

Again this is an institutional matter. In a community like the Unitarians, you can formally believe as you wish. If you are uncomfortable with the expressions of religion around you, then you might well leave - but then as a pastor you create the expressions and the question then is whether you meet the needs of some in the congregation that want more. Your creativity with words is thus pastoral and you should be able to be clear about your own interpretation. If that can't satisfy the congregants, then there is a problem. You should say to them, then, please use the words as you feel they mean, and they should not be demanding your agreement with their interpretation. It is not a community of one intended belief. Of course if that congregation as a whole is pretty much inclined towards a stronger interpretation, then the pastor ought to find a different pulpit. To be lying then is just dishonesty.

Which of course is the point. There is always the issue of honesty and dishonesty when a preacher in office uses strategies to avoid. Again, there can be pastoral reasons to stretch a point, but this cannot be permanent.

A religious humanist who puts out a 'sounds like' Christian message and who only presents this message is being dishonest. The preacher really would have to believe that this radical shift is Christianity today so as not to live in too much tension, but then when will they be clear about this to others who see it as the loss of the essentials?

The website referred to, however, is mainly concerned with people in a job as ministers, who face consequences from community, family and income should they declare their actual loss of belief and purpose. They know they have to go, it's just that it needs arranging.

There are, of course, those pastors who travel so lightly that they never really know when the zero point has come, or that it arrived and they are so dyed in the wool that they just keep going and keep going. They probably get to employing no strategies any more and just plod along as it is what they should do and do do and no one is any the wiser, including, eventually, the people who do it.

Boundaries of Belief

The issue arises about where are the boundaries of particularly Christian and post-Christian groups.

The issue arose certainly in my time in the Church of England. I remember a priest who said you can be unitarian in the Church of England but not a non-realist (effectively a denial of the reality of God). Of course there were people including ordained who had come to a non-realist position.

So the issue is not what you become, and how you might wriggle with the intepretations, but when it comes to seeking training or a new post, or indeed going for confirmation.

I suppose you can just about be unitarian in the Church of England if you are strong on God and on Jesus as a human exemplar, but why not then have Jesus as a human exemplar of what God would be like? After all, God may not be the all-loving being but simply acts as God will (the sort of unlimited Islamic model) for which your protection is either belief or exemplary behaviour.

I've always settled on the view that you should somehow be able to affirm resurrection, incarnation and God in the material. You don't need to affirm bodily resurrection, because the texts are ambiguous, but you ought to be able to say that the texts are on to something happening. I came to the view that the texts demonstrated something that was not happening, other than in the views of the early Churches based on the original Jewish expectation and the Pauline twist.

Old Catholicism as created in small groups in Britain is probably similar but with plenty of add-ons (e.g. home-grown Pagan) and stretched edges, a sort of liturgy with relaxation about interpretation. Liberal Catholicism, with its early history of diving into Theosophy and Krishnamurti, and its consideration of magic along with the supernatural, can be a combination of the liturgical orthodox and all manner of reinterpretations and additions. Some of the 'higher' manifestations of Liberal Catholicism seem to go back into the wider reaches of the first hundreds of years of Christianity and even incorporating the spiritual and Gnostic.

In the Unitarians as such there aren't any boundaries, supposedly, but actually there are in some chapels (by practice, expectation, whom they hire), and in any case you are going to have to be comfortable by the use of theistic language, however it is intepreted. It has to mean something at least, otherwise it will get very tedious. It is relatively easy for it not to be supernatural, and to have a human-level focus, but the language is bounded about a lot. It is quite clear that prophetic religious figures are all human and subject to the same limitations and mistakes as the rest of us (this being so obvious it hardly needs saying), though some older interpretations minimise the limitations and emphasise the prophetic achievement.

There are many groups where it is very easy to join in and very demanding to become a member. The charismatic types are like this: culturally familiar but signing on the dotted line demands quite a hurdle to jump and keep jumping (beliefs and expectations). I remember how apparently progressive and welcoming the Baha'i's were but then you discover that the main figures are regarded, in the texts too, as infallible and then you discover the limits of the inclusivity (try and be gay in the full sense, for example, or be a woman and have a place in the Universal House of Justice) and you discover things like the Baha'is affirming something like evolution but not the full science of evolution and indeed the method of science - because of what the prophetic figures at the time didn't understand and yet they are given the privileged treatment of infallibility.

It is amazing how, though, people become inculturated to the group and adopt its views. Things that they did not believe as individuals they take on once committed to the group. Nevertheless, people do go through groups; they do even come out of the most demanding of cults. In strongly believing groups, people entertain private doubts very privately, and then discuss with a few trusted people (often to find they are not to be trusted) and then at some point there is marginalisation and isolation, until the group magnet has faded and they leave.

The necessity to leave (moving house, changing jobs) is often a means by which people drop former beliefs that they were once so willing to express. Churches know this, which is why they are keen to get people hitched up to the right kind of church in the new location. Churches may seek out the people who have moved from another area into theirs, as information is passed along.

I think that for some Unitarians there is a fading away. They attend less often, and then even less often. They are missed by the congregation, but given space people fade away and eventually they've simply broken the connection. This also happens in the more anonymous Christian places of worship.

I sometimes think that we are observing a period of fundamental transition from the inside, that really there is a death of the churches taking place. We can stress their positive benefits for personal support and reflection, and community building, but other than for these large and entertaining media type churches the sub-culture of church life is being lost.

It is actually quite difficult to enter a 'mainstream' church and understand what is going on and why. The eucharistic ritual and its language will be strange to many - it is an acquired taste (wherever performed). I still think Unitarians are trapped into a model that is part of a past late Victorian sub-culture, yet I am less able to say how to break free. After all, meditation groups and the newer Eastern groups are themselves small in numbers. I'm quite convinced that many of the collective beliefs are reproduced by individuals in expression, but in all practical terms they don't operate (in ordinary life, as ordinary explanations for things).

The process of secularisation (which is a complex analysis) is one which shifts those Church boundaries. To keep people in, you have to be more liberal and perhaps members become more culturally attached; to attract people in you have to be part of the easily understood contemporary culture and that means distinctiveness comes in other ways, particularly in jumping through the hoops of belief.

Perhaps the thinking ought to go in different ways entirely: for example, the most likely to come to attend a more standard church are the early retired. What sort of fellowship or ministry does that group require that would be reflective for their lives and time ahead? It is not then about beliefs at all, even if these are so often operating as boundary markers.

So the institutional boundaries of belief are shifting, but in the end churches may have to stop and settle at what they have got, and are forced into being more sectarian in that sense. All groups are destined to be small, and even the big ones are only big in terms of the percentage of the actively religious.