ViaMedia

Category: Social Justice

  • Earth Accuses Earth: Responding to Cancel Culture

    by Jayne Manfredi, an ordinand at the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham and a contributor to BBC R4 Thought for the Day

    I think that God is calling me to be a peacemaker, which is really annoying because what I’ve wanted to do for most of my life is fight people. My younger self was not so much conflict averse, as conflict enthusiastic. I revelled in rage because I felt that life had dealt me some crummy hands and by God someone was going to pay for it. Now, as I take a breather and enjoy a sit down, a nice cup of tea and a biscuit in the middle years of my life, I see that God has worked a kind of miracle in me. I do hate it when God does that.

    It’s been coming on for a while. In my first year of ministerial training, I posted a silly photo of myself on Twitter, wearing a cassock and a stupid grin, with a caption from 1 Timothy 2:12:“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” The juxtaposition was an obvious joke to the people who had followed me for some time. Unfortunately, the tweet went viral and that was when my problems began.

    ‘THIS PERSON IS A DISGRACE,’ quote tweeted one Catholic priest. Other outraged people proceeded to bombard my mentions with further accusations, questioning everything from my personal morals to my suitability to be ordained, my poor theology and exegesis, my respect for God, the bible, the church, my husband and myself. Out of the avalanche of notifications, the odd poisonous phrase leapt out like shrapnel: ‘Woke Whore.’ ‘Stupid bitch.’ ‘Devil sucker.’ One man threatened to report me to my Archdeacon. I shouldn’t be allowed to continue training. The church leadership needed to discipline me.

    If their intention was to make me question my behaviour, then it backfired. Being piled-on in this manner rarely creates the environment necessary for the discomfort of self-reflection. I felt attacked so I behaved defensively, stubbornly entrenched in my own righteousness, complete with a newly acquired victim mentality that stridently declared, ‘Poor me. Why are the internet men being so mean?’ This allowed no room for personal accountability or growth or for taking a step back and looking at the situation dispassionately and with sagacity.

    Cancel culture is a contested phrase, which I’m defining here as the collective shaming of people who have committed a perceived offence, often for the reward of social credit. What started out as a valuable way for marginalised people to hold institutions and powerful individuals to account has mutated into a pernicious form of internet justice, online sabotage and mass shunning. It’s a blight that is not restricted to any one political leaning or community, and at its absolute worst, it manifests as large-scale, unrelenting bullying which can have devastating consequences. It is an abysmal way to treat people and as Christians, we should be taking no part in it.

    To add insult to injury, we are told that cancel culture is not a thing. It doesn’t exist. As someone who has been at the centre of several attempts to ‘cancel’ not only my online output, but my ministerial vocation, I can tell you that it absolutely does. The fact that the attempt was unsuccessful does not in any way negate the impact these incidences have had upon my mental health. The people who participated in the bullying or complained about me to my Bishop would probably frame it as merely holding me to account, or – that ubiquitous and obnoxious phrase – calling me out, when in reality, the goal was entirely punitive.

    I’ve been finding parallels with the story from John 8:1-20 concerning the adulterous woman and her accusers and contemplating it as a teaching about the politics of judgment, rather than the injustice of someone wrongly accused. Indeed, Jesus does not exonerate this woman; he doesn’t tell her that she’s blameless or even that she’s forgiven. This is a story about how we deal with sin when we are all sinners. When you understand that, you realise that this story isn’t about the woman at all; it was always about the people throwing stones.

    I fear we’ve become a church that is addicted to public condemnation. We delight in citing Jesus’ example of turning tables over in righteous fury as a justification for our own rage. We criticise anyone who doesn’t express the same level of outrage as us and dismiss their appeals to nuance and mercy by denouncing them as too privileged to care, or too centrist, or too complacent. Rage, when well-directed has its place, but regularly feeding off anger in an orgy of outrage is not what Jesus told us to do.

    I am wary of the cleansing seduction of giving in to my anger because my own outrage is an ocean that I dare not swim in; to just dip my toe from time to time feels spiritually draining. These are well traversed waters from my past and they are dangerous and unfathomably deep. To wallow in even the shallows is to risk drowning. I ration my outrage and take sips when I need to. I will never again use it to drown out the humanity of anyone else.

    Jesus talked far more about mercy than he ever did about rage, so if we’re going to turn tables over, we need to sometimes be willing to use them to shield those who are hated and despised, as well as the ones for whom there is no cost in loving. My faith is in a God who died but was resurrected and to follow Him is to believe that no one is beyond redemption. It’s to accept the inconvenient truth that even the most awful sinners are worth more in His sight than their worst moments. This is a God who shields sinners from stones, offers them a fresh start and empowers them to sin no more; not because they are threatened, shunned or shamed into it, but because they know they are loved.

    It’s offensive to me that God extends grace to people whom I find repugnant. It goes against every unwritten rule I’ve absorbed about fair play, and yet. If I want to receive that gift of grace myself, can I do no less than to extend it to everyone else? There’s something liberating about admitting that I am a sinner too, and we are all but creatures of the mud. Some scholars have pondered that when Jesus bends down in front of the crowd holding stones, what he writes in the sand is earth accuses earth. God is the ultimate judge. Not me. Not you. When the heady rush of condemnation takes hold, we cast ourselves as judge. Earth accuses earth. We miss the redemptive power of loving the hated, because we are far too busy looking for stones to throw.

     

  • MI5, Exclusion & The Church of England

    by the Revd Canon Dr Phil Groves, former Director of the Anglican Communion Office (2006 – 2016) and Associate Rector Wychert Vale Benefice 

    I don’t think like a normal person – my brain works differently. I am remined of this every day, not just in what I can do, but also because most people just can’t seem to see the world how I see it. I see solutions to problems they think are impossible, but often, because I can’t spell, they think the ideas I have must be stupid.

    I am dyslexic.

    Dyslexia, and Autism are forms of neurodiversity. Our brains function differently to most people. It is not better or worse, just different. I see some things clearly that you cannot. You see things clearly that I cannot.

    Dyslexic people are a hidden minority and just like every other minority we are victimised and dehumanised. If you think that is a bit strong – wake up.

    Just think about this. 14% of the UK population are UKME and everyone knows that it is a sign of injustice that they make up 25% of the prison population, a sign of systemic racism. Only 10% of the UK population is dyslexic but according to the best research between 30% to 40% of the prison population are dyslexic. Just take that in. Either dyslexics are wired to be criminals or something is very wrong in our society.

    Discrimination against neurodiverse people is subtle and complex, but it is very powerful. It can be very well meaning and it begins from when we go to school.

    Put yourself in the position of a parent of a child you suspect might be dyslexic and click on the NHS website entry on dyslexia. It will tell you that dyslexia is a ‘specific learning difficulty’. As a parent you will focus on the word difficulty and then ‘problem’ that occurs 4 times in the first section. Depressingly you will discover that your child will have a ‘life long problem’. Admittedly, there is the occasional mention of something positive, but what is heard is that dyslexics need support, special software, and help in the workplace.

    This reflects how our society understands dyslexia: it is a problem. We dyslexics hear that we are a problem and that our society would be better off without us.

    Dyslexia is a problem for children because our school system is built around the thinking process of the dominant group. Most dyslexics will tell you that for them school was a place of shame. Our inability to spell our names or neatly present our work was made worse by the fact that our verbal reasoning showed we were clever. The only reason for the mess we handed in on paper must be that we were lazy and our work was paraded to the class as the example of carelessness.

    School for dyslexics can just be too much. We are asked to pass exams designed for the majority society. School for some can be like conversion therapy for LGBTI+ people. We are made to feel ashamed for not being ‘normal’. Things that our teachers think should come easy to us are a constant fog, while concepts and problems seem so easy to solve, but even our teachers can’t understand the answers. We are rarely tested on our strengths. Creativity, empathy, and problem solving are difficult to test: spelling and rapid-fire numeracy are easy. If you are great at spelling, you cannot imagine the horror of being asked to swap papers with another child to mark only to be taunted by your failure in the playground.

    There is a different story. Made by Dyslexia believes ‘in the game-changing power of Dyslexic Thinking. After all, everything from the light bulb to the iPhone, the aeroplane to the motor car, was invented by a dyslexic mind. And our skills are vital in shaping the future too.’

    There they will discover that MI5 is specifically recruiting dyslexics and people on the autistic spectrum to build neurodiverse teams, because teams with diversity of thought are much stronger than teams where everyone thinks the same.

    MI5 lives out 1 Corinthians 12. Paul tells us that all are to be valued and everyone has a role to play in a healthy society. We don’t all need to be the same.

    And what about the Church of England?

    Since launching the Clergy Dyslexia Forum in the Diocese of Oxford we have discovered just how many clergy identify as dyslexic. We think it is at least 15% and it may be as many as 20% in our diocese, and in one of the four episcopal areas all the incoming curates are dyslexic. Having begun to speak of my dyslexia in sermons and elsewhere, I have discovered just how many of our congregations here in this benefice are dyslexic. They have come to me quietly and often never told anyone else: they are ashamed of their ‘problem’ and work hard to ‘overcome’ it. I believe that we are sitting in every pew in every church in the country.

    When I ask them about why they come to church – especially a church that places such an emphasis on writing – there is a common answer: Jesus loves us, even if the church does not. It is the same answer I have heard from Indigenous people in North America, LGBTI+ people across the world and women in misogynistic churches in male dominated societies. When we hear the gospel, we identify as the outcastes who Jesus embraces and we know we are loved.

    But what about in the leadership of the Church of England?

    The Church of England is facing up to the exclusion of UKME people in senior posts and at the same time working out what ‘Radical Inclusion’ means for LGBTI+ people. There are not enough, but there are UKME bishops and UKME people in other senior roles. There is one out partnered gay bishop, but there are also gay and lesbian archdeacons and cathedral deans. I have tried hard, but I can find only one openly dyslexic person in a senior role – the Bishop of London. We are absent unnoticed from the leadership of the Church of England.

    This is not about representation, our absence from power means that problem solving is limited to one way of thinking. The MI5 insight of the importance of diversity of thought is being ignored in the Church. More importantly, we are failing to be the church envisioned by Paul. We ought to worry when MI5 is more closely aligned to Pauline ecclesiology than the Church of England.

    How does it work?

    What I have discovered is that when I am open about my dyslexia the response is one of compassion. It is assumed I am asking for support and what software I require or how I can overcome my difficulties. I may be told that there are some amazing dyslexics out there, but I am never then asked how I can bring my skills to the table. I can hear the mental note being made – this person has a problem and needs helping, not this person has a gift that we need.

    When I talk to dyslexic clergy, I discover that when applying for jobs some have been encouraged not to be upfront and open about their dyslexia because they are told that it will potentially harm their application. Apart from being illegal and immoral, this plays into the sense of shame that is a very powerful part of the dyslexic experience.

    Again and again, it is this word shame that is raised by dyslexic clergy. We do not feel worthy of senior roles and we constantly fear being caught out as imposters. We need to listen to 1 Corinthians 12:

    Those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable we treat with special honour.

    God has put the body together, giving greater honour to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.

    The church needs to listen to this too. It is time to open the discussion on the inclusion of neurodiverse people in the church and society.

  • Drawing the Line?

    by the Rt Revd Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool and Chair of the Ozanne Foundation

    Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.[1]

    It’s not that long ago that the word “inclusive” used to irritate me. I saw it as a party slogan, rather like the use of “orthodox” or “godly” in other parts of our Church. It annoyed me, even as it nagged at me.

    This is because I hoped to rise above such divisive words. In particular, in my early days as a bishop I tried to inhabit a vacuum of opinion. I believed that this vacuum is the proper place for a bishop, the only place that a “symbol of unity” in the Church could possibly sit. Such a vacuum is certainly a good place to live if you want a quiet life: in space, no one can hear you scream.

    Well, over the years things changed for me. As with so many others in the long history of the Church, events and wounded people approached me and I came to know them, and they changed me. Now, as I approach my retirement, the place and voice of a disciple involves (to quote Dan Berrigan SJ as I so often do), “knowing where you stand, and standing there”.

    So I have done my best to say what I think about a whole range of things, including one or two which are contended in today’s church. I’ve tried to speak for, to make room for, the lives of people for whom there was no room in the past. Overall I’ve tried to set my compass by what the Roman Catholic Church has called the preferential option for the poor; what my predecessor David Sheppard called the bias to the poor.

    As I’ve done so there has been no shortage of people to tell me that by making this journey at all, I have fallen short of my discipleship in general and of my episcopal vocation in particular. I’m told that I have gone wrong in one or both of two ways: by being a heretic and/or by being a maverick.

    Those who think I’m a heretic usually write to me. They tend to be unrestrained in the use of their language. Many of them believe that my eternal destiny is at stake and that they need to help me with my salvation by setting me straight. From the tone of their letters they clearly believe that the job will best be done by shaming me into heaven, reminding me forcibly of my mistakes, inaccuracies, ignorances, underlining how offended they are by my words. I try always to reply to these letters and emails with thanks, but I have to say that none of them has yet succeeded in its aim. Shaming and anger are poor persuaders.

    Those who think I’m a maverick are usually more restrained in their style. They tend not to write but to speak privately, or to express themselves non-verbally, in the raising of an eyebrow of the rolling of an eye. They communicate more in sorrow than in anger. What a pity, brother, that from time to time you have so noisily flouted the agreed norms of polite Christian behaviour. How unfortunate that you seem to be questioning or resisting or pre-empting the necessarily slow deliberations of the Church. What a shame that you keep banging on about one or two issues, rather than spreading your indignations more carefully, seamlessly and evenly about the place. How sad that you’re so… well, untactful.

    For me, as for a number of my colleagues retired and serving in all orders of the Church, being seen as a maverick is unpleasant and unwelcome. Unwelcome, since our belief is that we live in the mainstream of discipleship and not on its margins. Making the option for the poor, being there for those on the edge of things, is the mainspring of our witness. But we ourselves do not wilfully seek to be on the edge of things. Still less do we want to be treated as a mildly tolerated presence on the edge, like pepper in a stew, piquant but mercifully optional.

    Anyway, as the year’s end approaches, and with around fifty days to go before my farewell service in Liverpool, I have been reflecting on this question: how have I, who used to be so annoyed by the word “inclusive”, come to be seen as an annoying maverick/heretic now?

    Perhaps it’s because I have entered in to a greater faithfulness to what I was taught about God and about his only-begotten Son. That at any rate is my hope and prayer.

    Here is a short passage from the Lutheran liturgical theologian, Gordon Lathrop. I read it years ago, and I quote it often:

    Draw a line that includes us and excludes many others, and Jesus Christ is always on the other side of the line. At least that is so if we are speaking of the biblical, historic Christ who eats with sinners and outsiders, who is made a curse and sin itself for us, who justifies the ungodly, and who is himself the hole in any system.[2]

    In the week of my forty-second Christmas as an ordained minister, I look again as a disciple to the paradox of the Incarnation. I look to the Infant of Days, to the scrap of humanity who couldn’t find a room yet who is fully God, who grew up to dine with sinners, to scandalise the religious, to die an unclean death outside the city. I look to him and I agree with Gordon Lathrop. Jesus is himself the hole in any human system of righteousness, and Divine righteousness is a gift given to those on both sides of any line. And I will live in this mystery with all the integrity I can muster.

    Another long-remembered thing. As a sixth-form student I read a book by Daniel Berrigan SJ, the US Catholic priest and peace protestor whose words I quoted above. The book was called “America is Hard to Find”. That book drew me into the peace movement, as a member of which I was honoured to have been arrested and held three or four times for standing or sitting in the wrong place, with Quakers and Catholics and Methodists and a few other Anglicans, acting as a heretic or a maverick over against the laws of England, when instruments of mass destruction were found on the streets, at Cruisewatch near Greenham Common, or at RAF Lakenheath, or in places where decisions were taken about the use of such weapons, such as 10 Downing Street (where in those days you could indeed stand or sit on the street outside). This has been a wellspring of my witness, and I remain glad that I stood there, although doing that too brought criticism to me.

    Perhaps all these criticisms are justified, perhaps one day I’ll grow up enough to understand them and to repudiate my life’s journey. Or perhaps not.

    In any case mine is far from being the unblemished journey of a saint or a prophet. It’s been full of twists and turns, mistakes and apologies, depressions and re-commitments. It has led me from a seat on the road outside 10 Downing Street to (briefly) a seat in the House of Lords, and many would say that sums up a road of contradiction and paradox and compromise and complicity.

    But as a result of that journey, I am more and more convinced that if we draw a line that includes us and excludes many others, then Jesus Christ is always on the other side of the line, among the people outside. I want to be there with Him. I have become unashamedly inclusive, for Christ’s sake.

    And on that road I hope to keep walking, through Christmas and through retirement and on into my own future, as part of the future of this broken and excluding world which needs Jesus so much.

    As I prepare to enter another chapter of my life and ministry, I commend the life of looking beyond lines to you all. I hope that you’ll walk on that road yourself, unafraid. God is with you. Have a blessed Christmas, and a happy and spirit-filled New Year!

    © Paul Bayes 2021

    [1] 1 Peter 3:14

    [2] Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology, pp. 64-5.

  • Spiritual Guides – The Key to Transformation?

    by the Very Revd Rogers Govender MBE, Dean of Manchester and Chair of the Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns 

    Every visitor attraction and Cathedral in this country has a number of guides to help people navigate the place. These are usually volunteers who know how to tell the story of the place because they have usually spent much time in the space over several years. They have grown to love the history, the artefacts, and the people who have animated the space over the years.

    We know much about the Girl Guide movement for girls aged 10 to 14. They are young people who want to go on adventures, create their own campaigns, learn leadership skills and meet new friends. This work of personal and social transformation begins at an early age. Very often the Girl Guide movement as well as Scouts train their members to become trail guides by going on hikes, mountain climbing, etc.

    The National Trust is another organisation that depends heavily on tour guides. Without their help and support the NS would struggle to open national treasures to millions of visitors around the country.

    As Christians we believe that God is our eternal guide. We follow Jesus the Guide who takes us on the train and trains us to become spiritual guides to others in their search for meaning and for God’s Kingdom. Psalm 73:24 reminds us ‘You guide me with your counsel and afterwards you will receive me with honour.’

    We are encouraged to have a spiritual guide to help us with our relationship with God and to help us in our discipleship and ministry. For some of us this is an alternative to therapy, enabling us to combine personal and psychological insights with spiritual teaching and truths. Spiritual Guides are essential for those of us in Christian ministry.

    A guide is able to speak from years of experience, with a practised sense of direction, self-discipline and an ability to lead others (Prophetic Dialogue, p 51). A seasoned guide will also be able to read the signs of impending storms or obstacles and help people stay the course avoiding potential danger. When distractions emerge, the guide will encourage people to keep moving so that they arrive at their destination safely.

    We are taught in the gospels that endurance in the spiritual journey is crucial for authentic discipleship, ‘The person who endures to the end will be saved’ (Mark 13:13). The ability to endure to the end is possible through our faith in Christ and the encouragement of our guides. Some may understand a mentor to be one’s guide. However, one may look at this, we all need someone to guide us through this earthly pilgrimage which usually begins in our early life with our parents, teachers and friends.

    We need spiritual guides to experience the good news of the gospel. We note the role of Philip as a guide to the Ethiopian eunuch, enabling him to share the good news of the gospel leading to his baptism.

    I have been reflecting on the importance of guides because we live in challenging times in church and society. There are so many issues of injustice, exclusion and exploitation that we face each day. We are called to a personal faith that cannot remain private – our faith calls us to engage with the needs of the wider church and society. Sometimes we may grow weary because we do not see any progress. As the current Chairperson of CMEAC (Committee for Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns) I have seen such slow progress on issues of racism in the Church of England. I am encouraged by the work of Lament to Action.

    In a secular society we can easily get tired of the apparent indifference to spiritual matters of faith and relationship with God. I was on a tram one evening in November this year and saw a man on the street holding a placard proclaiming that Jesus is Lord. A young lad sitting opposing me on the tram got rather angry and started banging on the window of the tram at the man on the street and began spouting expletives that were angry outbursts about God and the Church. It did leave me feeling a bit shattered and saddened.

    We sometimes face the temptation to give up the fight for justice and fairness. This is often the case with the issues of racism, human sexuality, gender equality, migration policy, etc. We wonder when might these issues be addressed in positive and just ways.

    However, I want to encourage us to look to Christ who is our Guide (John 16:13). We also need to look to those who guide and inspire us in our personal faith, discipleship and wider mission for Christ. We must endure and stay on message as we follow Jesus on The Way of the Cross to the experience of Resurrection. Let’s continue to ‘do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). Only in this way will be see God working in and through us as agents of God’s transforming mission in the world!

     

     

     

  • Is God Inhuman?

    by the Very Revd Dr David Ison, Dean of St Paul’s and Vice Chair of the Ozanne Foundation


    I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s book The Body. It’s a fascinating read about the wonders of the human body and how much of it – of us – is incredibly complex and still little understood. But in Chapter 11 he refers to things medical science learnt about the body through experiments carried out during the second world war by Nazis in concentration camps and by occupying Japanese forces in a huge experimental facility in China. He doesn’t dwell on them, but they were horrifying in their cruelty. Some experiments were supposedly to help soldiers wounded in battle, but others were to satisfy doctors’ curiosity by doing things unspeakably unethical just because they could. And although many Nazis were brought to justice for their cruelty, the director of the research centre in China was debriefed by the Americans to get his medical knowledge and then allowed to return to normal life, while the existence of the Japanese facility was hidden for forty years.

    The Uighurs and Rohingya. Political and religious terrorism. Black Lives Matter. Child poverty and homelessness. Violence and discrimination against women, LGBTI and disabled people. Cruelty continues, and those with power who do it will find ways to justify the unjustifiable. We even do it in the Church – not only with repeated safeguarding failures, but by being complicit with society at large in structural discrimination against black people and poor people and women and LGBTI people. The Church goes further now than society does in maintaining exemptions from discrimination against women and gay people, and we justify it in the name of what is acceptable to God – which makes the Church and its God appear inhuman to many.

    What is ‘humane’? What is ‘inhuman’? After all, it’s human beings who act ‘inhumanly’ some of the time. Being cruel and discriminatory is something which every single human being is capable of. That’s you and me both. Which of us is without sin and can say that we have never acted in a way intended to be hurtful? Who has never done something which another person experienced as cruel and unkind?

    A healthy human body is a dynamic balance of many different systems and needs, where too much or not enough salt or other nutrients can be fatal. Like our body, our humanity is a balancing act, full of difficult compromises to enable life to happen at all, more or less good or evil. Being human means we are capable of being, not either good or bad, but both good and bad, both humane and inhuman. And yet we define acting ‘with humanity’ as being solely good: as the Oxford Dictionary puts it, being human or humane is having ‘attributes or behaviour proper or befitting to a man.’

    Why do we do think that being good and kind is ‘proper’ and ‘befitting’ human behaviour, when experience is that human behaviour includes so much that we want to reject as ‘inhuman’? Discrimination, violence, misogyny, racism and slavery come from dehumanising those who are ‘different’, excluding them from being our fully human neighbour, treating them as ‘other’ or as evil or to be eradicated like germs from the social body, acting as we do so out of the evil that has not been eradicated in us. (See the useful reflections by John Root around racism and binary thinking).

    The view that ‘acting with humanity’ or being ‘humane’ describes only the morally good aspects of human behaviour is not derived from the reality of the world around us. It is in the person of Jesus Christ that Christians believe humanity in its fulness is fully realised: the human being without sin, the Son of God who shows us what is ‘proper’ and ‘befitting’ to a human being, without hatred or cruelty or exclusion, bringing us together into the love of God in our redeemed humanity.

    It is no coincidence that the goodness of humanity is defined by the one who takes on himself our sin for our salvation. Repenting of our sins, cruelties and lack of love, and inviting Christ to dwell in our hearts in love to transform us, frees us to acknowledge both past and present evil in us; it enables us to become more humane, by letting go of the inhumanity of believing that we are good and others are bad.

    The case of Jonathan Fletcher is yet a further example of how avowedly orthodox faith can inculcate an atmosphere of fear and repression in which our humanity in Christ is denied and abused, and God is modelled in ways which are more inhuman than humane.

    It’s crucial to Christian faith that God is the God we see in Jesus: that God is humane, human, abounding in steadfast love. God is not the inhuman deity who many have experienced through the Church, and of which we must repent. Any Church or Christian disciple making either God or other people become less rather than more human and humane needs to repent and change.

    My former colleague Canon Mark Oakley often asks: ‘What do people become in my presence?’ More human, or less? And we might add, ‘What do people become in the presence of the God I worship?’

    Through your church and through encounter with you, do people and their God become more or less human?

  • International Women’s Day – Choose to Challenge

    by the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester

    In 2019, on a visit to the Holy Land I visited the church in Magdala and found myself faced with an enormous and extraordinary modern painting by Daniel Cariola depicting larger-than-life sandaled feet which are those of Jesus Christ and those around him. There is also the hand of a woman stretched out so that it is just touching the hem of Jesus’ robes, and at the point of connection there is a vibrant, almost electric, circle of light. As I recall that picture now, it is not only deeply poignant as we live a time when close proximity and touch are things many people long for, but it also seems pertinent this week as we mark International Women’s Day (IWD) with the theme ‘Choose to Challenge’.

    We have had a bucketful of challenges over this past year and little of it has been of our choosing. Yet I am also aware that even when there is not a viral pandemic, for many people across our world there is continual and overwhelming challenge, not least for many girls and women. Not much of their challenge is chosen, good or life-giving – unlike the sort of challenge which is the focus of IWD.

    The hand in the Cariola painting is that of the woman who had been suffering for 12 years from a continuous flow of blood.  She knew much about isolation, trauma, and loss, not due to a viral pandemic but due to her gynaecological condition. I suspect her mental health was affected as well as her physical health.

    As the woman touches Jesus, he feels power go out of him and he voices a challenge, ‘who touched me?’. The question would have sounded absurd to Christ’s disciples given they were being jostled by a crowd, but it could also be heard as critical and disapproving. Yet I wonder if it was more about ‘choosing to challenge’ in order to make this woman visible, such that the ‘who’ in his question was inviting the woman to be revealed as someone with a unique identity and story. Here is a woman who has been hidden, rendered irrelevant and even stigmatised, and now she is about to be deeply noticed as a significant and loved individual.

    The gospel writers, as is so often the case where women are concerned, refer to her simply as a woman (unlike the men named by Mark and Luke in their chapters recounting this incident). We will never know if Jesus actually used her name in the moments of their encounter, but he does call her ‘daughter’, reflecting value and intimacy in relationship.

    It is this challenge to notice and recognise that the Church is called to join in with wherever people are hidden, stigmatised, labelled, or condemned as ‘other’, not only as we live a viral pandemic but as we emerge from it and shape the future we want to see.

    Yet there is another challenge in that circle of light, and it is that of the woman herself. Amid her desperation, isolation, and pain, she shows great courage in acknowledging her need and taking a decision to reach out.

    In my recent book ‘Encounters’ (which has Cariola’s painting on the cover), I reflect on this gospel story in the context of women in prison. It is not easy for those women to reach out for help, yet rehabilitation and restoration are not possible until that moment comes.  Indeed, it requires a woman’s story to be heard and her trauma to be recognised.

    This week as the Domestic Abuse Bill reaches Report Stage in the House of Lords many of our proposed amendments and challenges to the government are endeavouring to recognise the people who are powerless to challenge and remain hidden, most of whom are women, but not exclusively so.

    I am acutely aware that whenever one speaks out specifically for women and girls there is nearly always a backlash from people who want to critically point out that boys and men should not be left out. I agree. Yet, I also want to say that sometimes we need to shine a light more strongly in particular areas to change a pervasive culture which has been perpetuated down the centuries. And working for that kingdom-of-God-shaped shalom means sometimes unashamedly choosing to shine the spotlight on women in order to bring challenge so that their potential and equality can be recognised and fanned into flame.

    It is all part of the bigger picture in which we need to choose to challenge injustice, inequality, and discrimination, not least when it comes to disability, sexuality, background and colour.  At the same time,  we must never forget of course that the category ‘women and girls’ is of a different shape –  as all of those other listed categories of ‘difference’ include women, girls, men, and boys.

    As we mark IWD this year I hope that we might all be challenged about how we challenge to make visible those who are hidden in the crowd of our communities and further afield, and how we do so in a way which enables those unique individuals to recognise their own worth and needs such that they can dare to challenge the narrative they have of themselves.

    And today it is about women.

     

  • When You are Not Invited to the Table

    by Augustine Tanner-Ihm is an African-American activist, writer, speaker who recently trained for the Anglican ministry at Cranmer Hall, St. John’s College, Durham, and now a Doctoral Student in Leadership, Culture, and Practical Theology at Bakke Graduate University.  

    In many American Christian homes, families throughout the 50 states and territories traditionally leave an extra chair and plate at the dinner table. Strangely these extra knife, fork and spoon were rarely, if ever, used as this extra place at the table was designed for Jesus, himself. This is culturally designed to show honour while also being human-led by the privilege of having daily bread.

    This extra place at the table is to show welcome and hospitality to Jesus but also to whoever may show up. At the table, everyone is disarmed and equalized. This is probably why Jesus and the Christian biblical authors use this metaphor many times in the Greek Scriptures.

    What happens when you are invited to the table but there is no place for you there? You arrive with your best clothes and a bottle of wine and there is no one greeting you at the door. No one offering you a fresh cuppa. Or even saying your name. Many people would argue that you should be grateful that you even received an invitation at all. You feel rejected, despised, or worst forsaken.

    As A Black Queer Christian, this has been my experience at many tables. It is also the experience of many marginalised people who do not fit into the majority narrative. “Sorry, we are Closed” signs from the Church have been unintended and (at times intendedly) communicated to me and people like me. Therefore, I have tried to use the right knife and fork, so to speak. I have tried to rid myself of any hint of blackness. Change the way I think, speak, walk, and dress to be accepted. I tried to date women with utter failure. I went through reparative therapy in a charismatic Anglican church to be right with the church and respectfully, accepted fully by God. I prayed and prayed, and nothing happened. I wanted to be loved and accepted by God and the Church, I was willing to give up everything. After all, isn’t that what the gospel is calling us to do? To be accepted at the table I must rid myself of my blackness and my queerness, right? But to what? To Whiteness and straightness? Aren’t these just as broken as anything other human identities construct?

    This month we celebrate the lives of black folk that has made a significant influence in the US and around the world we celebrate LGBTQIA+ History Month. Two communities I am apart of and only recently I have been happy to be a part of. These two communities have historically been asked to eat the crumbs under the table in the cold winter’s night, while others eat at the banquet table. We celebrate communities that could not celebrate themselves. And even today many people find the idea of celebrating these communities divisive. When centuries of generational trauma continue it becomes difficult to align yourself with something or someone that is instilled that is immoral, disgusting and just wrong.

    This week I watched Russell T. Davies’ It is a Sin, which was a fictional drama about the Aids epidemic in the 1980s in London. This was eye-opening to many people especially younger queer people in the community. I watched as a character named Roscoe was rejected by the family he loved because of his sexuality and their faith tradition, who even wanted to send him away “back home” to Africa. I watched as Christians and the church used a virus that disproportionately affects gay men to preach hate and sometimes violence. It was difficult to watch how the church treated the same gender loving relationships, particularly as someone who desires to be ordained. I recently read an article from 1982 entitled: “I would shoot my mum if she had AIDS, says Vicar”. And another about “AIDS’s is the Wrath of God” from another Vicar. The last article I read was even worse: “GAS GAYS SAYS TORY: Answer to Aids”.

    I wasn’t born until 1990, therefore I have no lived experience from the 1980s of how the queer community was treated. However, I had two family members die of Aids and was scared to tell people because of the stigma of the virus. Therefore, I respect and honour so many older queer people who are still around and especially those who are still involved in the Church. This must have been extremely difficult to have as part of their lived experience, and indeed somewhat still part of their present, as it relates to their relationships and gender identity.

    Growing up in the American Midwest we played a game called, “Smear the Queer”.

    The game started when the object is thrown into the air. Players may either snatch the object out of the air or wait until it lands. If the object lands, the person closest to it MUST pick it up. Once a player is in possession of the object, they try not to get tackled. Once tackled, the object is thrown into the air (or at a particular person) and the game starts over again. Play usually ends when everyone is tired or when someone gets hurt. This game was played in my youth group and was a clear understanding that being queer was outside our welcome. The queer was a person that it was okay to hurt through voice or fist.

    While listening to stories of the Windrush people being rejected from church services and called savages by the very people that had the conviction of the imago dei . Many Black folks I know have nothing but disdain for the Church of England. Even some Black clergy believe it to be “Babylon” (the place where evil flourishes outside of God’s will) or worst believe its leadership are mere imperial masters dressed in cassocks with Union Flags underneath. This felt very true when my dear brother and partner in the Gospel of Jesus, Father Jarel Robinson -Brown was bullied by many people around the UK. There was a call for unity but as we know from the Hebrew scriptures there is not unity with injustice. The Anglican expression of Christianity, in which I love and devoted all of my 20’s to full-time unpaid work, let down many Black Anglicans that have entrusted them with their gifts, talents and lives. For, my White Anglicans and Episcopalians in our great Anglican Communion, you must remember Unity and reconciliation follow justice, not the other way around! And people of this Anglican Jesus movement, we must allow and accept the prophets of the church. Prophets are rarely ever loved and are often rejected. But we know through the Scriptures that prophets sent by God to speak to God’s people were there for righteousness not for their own glory. It is always a path of sacrifice over glory for any prophet: “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church”.

    The invitation to the table is a transformative one. Jesus invited you as you are but does not want you to stay that way. He desires you to become more holy through love and worship of him. That is what sanctification is all about. But that does not mean we ought to reject others. Rejection is receiving the crumbs under the table. Rejection is giving your son a rock instead of bread when he is hungry (Matt 7:9). Rejection is being invited to the table only to realise you are not invited but what the person wants you to be is invited. That is not what being a part of this Jesus Movement that Bishop Michael Curry of The Episcopal Church is speaking about. Being a part of the Jesus Movement is not staying silent because staying silence in oppression means you remain controlled, and not controlled by the spirit but the flesh. Dean Kelly Brown Douglas speaks of the church that is not yet there. This church that is aspirational.

    We are trying to be a church, but we are not there yet. This aspirational venture of trying to be church flows to its invitation of the other. The other is the one who is being crucified.  And we are a part of that daily crucifixion of the Queer and Black folk among us. Each day they come to serve but the church continues to crucify them asking “why you are not satisfied with the crumbs, you have been given?”

    The Church must be a people that walk with the crucified people of the earth- not act as the arbiters of injustices! The Church cannot be the one that crucifies the helpless but rather needs to be the one to wipe away the human tears of the world’s injustice, foreshadowing for humanity the eschaton. And as Christians, we should only be controlled by the Spirit of God, not man. This actively demonstrates that the invitation that God is asking for the Church to extend to all people is not based on their personhood but on them being sacred children of God.

    We must welcome people to the table and do as Jesus tells us in the gospel according to Luke – when welcoming people into the banquet, welcome everyone. Not just the people like you, but the marginalised people in society. Remember Jesus welcomed Judas to the table with open arms. He did not confront him with differences, but rather showed compassion and loved him. Just as we should.

    Welcome to the crucified amongst us!

  • A Rock Climbers Guide to Church, History and the Future

    by the Very Revd Nicholas Henshall, Dean of Chelmsford

    “Always going forward; never uprooted”.

    At a tense meeting between Margaret Thatcher and David Sheppard in the aftermath of the Toxteth Riots, the Prime Minister asked the Bishop what he had studied at university. “History” he replied. The Prime Minister’s response was straight forward: “what a luxury”. It is not a story you find in David Sheppard’s official biography, but he was my sponsoring Bishop and I “heard it from the horse’s mouth”. The Prime Minister’s reflects a growing sense disconnection with the past that has been digging up our cultural roots over the last 70 years.

    When I lived in Derby I came to realise that those who had demolished the Georgian brick terraces and then built a large dual carriageway straight through the centre of the city had really meant it. Concrete was the future – an ideology rooted in some extraordinary assumptions about our relation to the past and our understanding of human flourishing. To be fair, at the same time he ||TV programme Tomorrow’s World was telling us that we would all be wearing jump suits, travelling around in flying cars and going on holiday to the moon.

    Our disconnect with the past is well summed up in the famous Jackson version of Tolkien, “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost”. This is not mere nostalgia but a recognition of genuine rupture. We are heirs to the dislocations. Robert Taft, a great American liturgist and theologian, caught this in his powerful comment “those ignorant of history are victims of the latest cliché”. He was talking about patterns of worship, but it is a line worth pondering across church and wider society. Likewise, Goethe’s line that “the person who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth” could be the epitaph for our rootless, deracinated culture.

    In this way, set free from our moorings both as church and society, we can free-wheel and invent at will, casually unaware that in burying our history we are disabling the very mechanisms that open up the possibilities of the future.

    We find ourselves navigating several bogus approaches to tradition: a traditionalism that suggests that development stops at a certain point, and that a particular theologian such as Thomas Aquinas or Luther is somehow definitive for all time; or we rely on invented tradition to shore up our own view of reality; or like many artists, musicians and theologians in the post war period, simply decide to make a complete break with the past.

    By complete contrast, the great conductor / composer Gustav Mahler’s take on tradition may open up a fresh and helpful seam worth mining. He suggested that tradition is “not the veneration of the ashes but the tending of the living flame”. That sounds familiar from a New Testament perspective where every scribe trained for the kingdom brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old (13.52). Whether or not that is Matthew expressing his understanding of his own role and mission as an evangelist, it certainly informs ours.

    Presciently, well before the pandemic, the Taizé Community planned to focus 2020 around the line “Toujours en avant; jamais déraciné” (always going forward; never uprooted) – words from the Polish nun, Urszula Ledóchowska. That captures perfectly the dynamic of tradition that we ourselves need going forward. Certainly Covid-19 has not exactly been our Babylonian Exile, but it has confronted us with some similar questions about our future – as church and society. An Ezra-like retreat behind well defended walls is not an option as we reimagine our mission.

    This is precisely not an argument for nostalgia but for radical (in the true sense) boldness. The power of Vatican II (however imperfectly realised) was that it called people back to a dynamic, future facing re-engagement with roots, rather than to an idealised version of the past painted in the colours of contemporary anxiety. Much of what we trademark as pioneering innovation proceeds not from that dynamic re-engagement but from anxiety (about numbers, survival, parish share payments, etc).

    The Victorian Church saw huge growth in impact, engagement, and numbers. But in the face of Darwin, Marx and what was perceived as secularisation, they lost their nerve. The Church historian Owen Chadwick’s judgement is devastating: “they drew up the drawbridge and boiled the oil”. We still live with some of the legacies of that defensive redrawing of the boundaries and our withdrawal into chaplaincy models of pastoral care – the “manicured sheep” model, as Pope Francis calls it in his re-telling of the parable.

    Faithful improvisation is a metaphor that has been used both in ethics and liturgy to suggest how we might move forward – rooted in the deposit of faith, the “tradition” if you like, But tradition not as a static body of ideas or teachings but as something more limber that never stops unfolding; tradition as dynamic, constantly providing the resources to move forward, Tradition like the rock climber moving forward with three points of contact and one hand or foot searching for the next step.

    A future-facing church is not well served either by a slavish obedience to the past or the pretence that the past has no power, especially in the context of whatever re-emergence from the pandemic turns out to look like. I would suggest that Mrs Thatcher was wrong about history. History is no luxury but the dynamic engine of renewal.

  • “It’s a Sin…Not to Care and Listen”

    by the Rt Revd Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool and Chair of the Ozanne Foundation

    In 1982 I moved to west London to minister as a University chaplain there. I had been ordained for three years. The West London Chaplaincy was a wonderful, creative outfit; it had been set up a generation before by Ivor Smith-Cameron and had no place of its own, built around small groups meeting in halls, departments and community houses. There were about 60 of these groups each week. The work was very rewarding. Intellectually demanding certainly, but it was also lovely to minister alongside Christian students; men and women whose sense of identity, and Christian calling, grew as they learned from one another.

    It was at this time, as a young priest wanting to make sense of my life and of ministry, that I connected with the late, great Bill Kirkpatrick, who became my spiritual director. Fr Bill lived in a basement flat in Earl’s Court, from where he opened his heart to the community through “Reaching Out”, his ministry of presence and listening and love. He had converted a coal cellar, under the Inner Ring Road, into a chapel, with plain whitewashed walls and (for a place that shook whenever a lorry rolled over its roof) an extraordinary quietness and peace.

    Fr Bill Kirkpatrick

    Fr Bill was an intense presence. His listening released truth in the people he met. He wore a wooden holding cross around his neck. He made a great cup of tea. At the end of every session he would say “Thanks for sharing”, and I’d go and pray in that coal cellar and then walk up to Earl’s Court tube station feeling that I’d been heard and understood, and feeling that life was richer than I had known before.

    I was not the only one to receive wisdom from Bill, whose ministry was widespread and deeply respected. (For example Colin Coward has written movingly of his own connection with him[1]). But in the years I knew him, Bill’s ministry took on one focus in particular, because of where he was and who he was. For Bill was a gay partnered man living in Earl’s Court, and these were the years of what was then a mystery illness that devastated and further marginalised the gay community in London, as in so many other cities; the years of AIDS/HIV.

    And so, more and more, Bill’s life was spent accompanying people in their journey of illness and too often of death and bereavement. He brought a listening ear and the openness and love of Christ to people in fear and desperate need, people who saw all too little of that openness and love in communities of Christians that told them nothing more than that they were sinners, and passed by on the other side when they fell ill.

    I write this partly to give honour to Fr Bill, who died three years ago this month and whose radical mission and radical ministry deserves to be celebrated at any time. But I write it in particular now because those years have been dramatized and recaptured by Russell T Davies in his TV series “It’s a Sin”.[2]

    The series follows a group of young people, mostly gay men, as the adventure of their adult lives begins in the 80s. We are with them as they find themselves, and then find themselves under a terrible shadow. It’s truthful, honest, unsparing about the consequences of unknowing and unbridled promiscuity in a community that was still finding out how to live wisely in a world where love was not forbidden. It also remembers energy and laughter and joy and friendship and care and life, sustained even in the face of fear and illness and death.

    It is resonant. Gay friends of mine have been triggered by it this week, remembering people they loved and lost in those years, remembering their own experience of living in the shadows, still hearing the homophobic echoes in their lives today. “It’s a Sin” is a title with a lot of resonance –it references the Pet Shop Boys’ song of course, but wherever did Chris and Neil get the idea for such a title or for such a lyric?

    “When I look back upon my life
    it’s always with a sense of shame
    I’ve always been the one to blame…”

    Neil Tennant has said his song “was intended as a camp joke and it wasn’t something I consciously took very seriously.” But he went on: “Sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time…”[3]

    Well, yes, you do wonder. Thirty years later, poor little talkative Christianity continues to talk. The churches’ conversations on love and faith, which so many are still pleased to call “debates”, will continue for a good while yet. Human lives will continue to be pressed like flowers between the covers of one book or another.

    For myself, I love the body of Christ and I believe Jesus was serious when he asked his Father that we might all be one. So I will continue to do my best to take part in these conversations; I will do my best not to talk about people without them being there. I will do my best to advocate for love and marriage for all, in the persistent hope that Christ’s body may move forward together, may indeed be one, in love.

    But when from time to time all this talking gets too much and I tiptoe out of the room in search of the God of love, when I want to follow Jesus Christ onto the street, I’m going to remember Fr Bill Kirkpatrick – a partnered gay man with a ministry on the edge of the church to people on the edge of the world, a man who reached out.

    And I’ll remember a coal cellar under the London streets, and place of contemplation and silence as the cars roar overhead. And a priest with a ministry of “hearing through listening”, a ministry of unfailing presence, a ministry of encouragement for so many including me, most of all a ministry of listening to his people where his people were – listening in the hubbub of the Coleherne, listening on the street, listening on the ward, listening by the grave. And alongside all this a ministry of resourcing and writing[4] – about prayer, about AIDS, about death, and in everything he wrote, about life.

    Thanks for sharing, Bill. Remembering you I’ll remember that a self-absorbed, censorious and condemning Christianity need not have the last word – it will indeed never have the last word, because the last word is life beyond death.[5]

    Fr Bill Kirkpatrick

    [1]  http://www.unadulteratedlove.net/blog/2018/1/27/fr-bill-kirkpatrick-rip

    [2] https://www.channel4.com/4viewers/blog/its-a-sin

    [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/06/for-hard-core-petheads-the-tennant-interview-in-full/200905/

    [4] For example “The Creativity of Listening: Being There, Reaching Out”,“AIDS: Sharing the Pain”, and “Going Forth: a practical and spiritual approach to dying and death”

    [5] https://www.barnesandsons.co.uk/news/the-late-father-william-john-ashley-kirkpatrick-father-bill/

  • A Gospel of Love Trumps Hate in the White House

    by the Revd Professor Robert Gilbert, Biochemistry Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford and Anglican parish priest

    Does his faith help us to see why Joe Biden is the American President needed right now?

    Political debate, and public discussion in the media, have never seemed so angry and divided as in recent years. Both in the United States and the United Kingdom there is a growing realisation that we are disunited. In other countries too, such as Poland, Hungary and Brazil, a politics of extremes has flourished.

    One way in which the success of extreme political positions can be explained is as a response to the experiences of people “at the grass roots”. As a response to a profound sense of alienation and impotence, and of financial and social disadvantage, too. They feel that a radical, new direction is needed, and that they need to take back control.

    And for sure, many people are justified in feeling powerless, and alienated from the centre where the power is; and many people do live in poverty and are forgotten about, with no route that they can see of making a greater contribution to the common life of their community and country.

    But the anger and division voiced in politics and echoed by it in the media have not been simply a response to the voice of the people. I think the French-American literary anthropologist René Girard can help us understand something else that has been going on, and why Joe Biden might be the person well suited to help bring the hurt and fury to an end.

    In Girard’s view, within human social groups, communities and societies, competition for limited resources and opportunities, and resentment at (perceived) relative success of others and unmet desire, find a let out in the spontaneous creation of “victims”, or perhaps put more biblically, “scapegoats”. Onto the scapegoats get loaded everything which seems to be making the community or society all wrong with itself. The scapegoats are innocent, but the community that has fastened their problems to them really believes they are guilty. If they do not believe this, then the scapegoating mechanism will not work. When the scapegoat is driven out, or killed, no sense of relief will come.

    Girard then realised that the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus provide a total critique of this scapegoating process. Jesus seems to be the one who is driven out by his society, and whose death can bring people together: “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50). For Girard’s analysis, Jesus’s resurrection, the return of the scapegoat in forgiveness and love, reveals the reality of human violence and demonstrates the power of God to contain it, forgive it, and end it. In the words of the British theologian James Alison, following Girard, in this “God himself has given us the key to discover and inhabit with God the ordinary and good “secularity” of everything that is” (On Being Liked, DLT 2003, p60).

    The former American President, Donald Trump, fuelled his rise to power on the sowing of division. He cynically preyed on the anxieties and resentment, on the sense of alienation and impotence, of the people in order to maximise their anger and the blame they ascribe to others. In order to identify for them individuals and groups that can be held to account, and punished or driven from power, to make for a better and greater America.

    That this is so seems plain from the language of his 2016 campaign. That he continued to rule by creating and stoking a sense of division fuelled by the identification of scapegoats seems plain too. They include the residents of Muslim majority countries he banned from visiting the United States, the Mexicans he sought to exclude with a border wall, as well as his political opponents in a way which reached its inevitable violent conclusion on January 6th in the storming of the Capitol. The spate of executions which accompanied Mr Trump’s last days in office look, frankly, like a series of judicial sacrificial murders, offered to satisfy people on whose support he relies.

    Mr Trump’s strategy seems to have been to define “his people” – the people who are with him and support him – by the common objects of their hatred. There is every sign that the new President Joe Biden understands this very well and sees it for what it is. And there is every sign that it is his Christian faith which enables him to do that.

    Quoting Augustine in his Inaugural Address, President Biden showed that he plainly believes that a people need to be “a multitude defined by the common objects of their love”. He understands that the things that Mr Trump used as fuel to build anger and resentment are real and need solutions, but they are not new, and recognising that is an important step towards building back better beyond them. President Biden clearly named “the foes we face – anger, resentment and hatred,” to which he added some of their effects: “extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness, and hopelessness”. But he also understands that their solutions start with recognising the good, ordinary secularity, the natural worldliness, of everything that is. In other words, that we are in this together, and we are good.

    For Trump, a strategy of divide-and-rule was essential. For President Biden, this division must end. We can disagree, but “every disagreement does not have to be a cause for total war”. The new President’s Address makes clear that he sees growth in unity relying primarily on growth in equality – for a need for mutual recognition of equality between the politician and the people they serve, between the scientist or expert and the person they advise. A mutual recognition of goodness, frailty and value.

    Joe Biden’s Christian ordinariness is what is needed now. It’s needed in the United States, and I would suggest something like this is sorely needed here in the United Kingdom too.