Emerging Politics

This blog has been deliberately silent during the UK election campaign, and now the dust is starting to settle and we have a coalition government for the first time in living memory, it is fascinating to see the responses not only of the wider public but of those Christians who like to make pronouncements about such things.  Can ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ ever live and work together in harmony?  Many Christians seem to regard this as completely impossible – maybe because the very words themselves echo so closely the battle lines that have marred the churches for so long.  For at least the last hundred years – maybe more – ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ have been at each other’s throats about theology and church practice, and their strident disagreements have arguably contributed to the disillusion of many people with the church itself. 

We have often been asked which side of this theological debate we are on, but the reality is that we haven’t a clue – and what’s more, we don’t care.  The terminology itself is well past its sell-by date, and the notion that life can be so simple as to be categorized like this is naive in the extreme.  It might have worked fifty years ago, but no longer.  One of the characteristics of post-modernity is that everything is in flux, and the old certainties (and enmities) of the past no longer make sense.  The rise of the emerging church is only one manifestation of that, and is a key reason why some people dislike it so much, because it is (on the old paradigm) eclectic and illogical.  Viewed from this angle, the coalition of ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ in government looks like a version of the same thing – emerging government, perhaps?  Just like the emerging church, it will be loved and hated in equal measure.  Those who still prefer the old certainties and tribal identities will be especially cynical.  Which should mean that no emergent Christians will be among them, but you never know.  Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Narrow-minded faith in politics

With the election campaign now well under way in Britain, it has been interesting to see the responses and reactions of Christians.  Of course, there will always be those who peddle their narrow agendas and demand that the government acknowledge their own perspective on whatever they think a Christian society should look like.  But what has been more surprising is the way that otherwise open-minded, even liberal,  Christians are emerging as covert fundamentalists, only prepared to listen to (never mind take seriously) those politicians who they think they already approve of.  People who are quite happy to think outside the box on all sorts of issues to do with church and faith are taking up what can only be described as tribal (even feral) positions, not through discussions of the issues but just telling the rest of us which party leaders they will listen to and which ones are to be dismissed without any sort of hearing.  The country is in such a mess that it seems highly unlikely that any one individual of whatever political colour is going to have all the answers.  And of course from a Scottish perspective, there are more than just three parties of significance, which is especially relevant given that the fourth party is the current Scottish government!

Hating Haiti

While the rest of the world is waking up to the horrors of the earthquake in Haiti and sending resources to help those unfortunate people, televangelist Pat Robertson is expressing the view that it’s really all their own fault because their ancestors made a ‘pact with the devil’.  It really is amazing what contortions some people will go to so as to absolve themselves from any feeling of sympathy or responsibility to the suffering millions in today’s world.  New agers have often been castigated for explaining such things as a consequence of people ‘choosing their own karma’, and including tragedy in that as a way of working through bad influences from previous lives.  Now a so-called ‘Christian’ evangelist appears to be saying more or less the same thing – though he’s also on record as saying that the New Age is also a demonic conspiracy!  Apart from that, though, it makes you wonder how Christians like Robertson who, in another time and place, would lay so much emphasis on everybody being personally responsible for their own wrongdoings, can at the same time hold the view that today’s people are also to blame for something that allegedly happened 300 years ago.  And his interpretation of that history is by no means widely accepted anyway.  It’s all a far cry from Jesus, who when he encountered suffering people showed compassion for them and resolutely refused to even countenance silly questions about whether they or their ancestors might be responsible for their own suffering.  But then, Robertson is also a premillennial dispensationalist, so for him the teaching of Jesus will presumably be an irrelevance only suited to some hypothetical future millennial kingdom.

Oh Mrs Robinson

Until the last few days, virtually nobody in the UK – still less the rest of the world – had ever heard of Iris Robinson, wife of the first minister of the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland.  Today, the news is full of nothing else, and the reason is not hard to find.  In most circumstances, an older woman having an affair with a youth of nineteen would probably hardly merit a mention – just another example of how our relational preferences have changed.  A politician would perhaps make the headlines for a day (and she is a member of the Westminster parliament as well as of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and apparently of a local council as well), but the fuss would soon die down.  Except that in this case, it’s also overlaid with religion – and that makes it ever so interesting not only to the media but to the wider public.  Not only is Iris Robinson an ardent Protestant, and her lover a Roman Catholic (a surprising enough liaison in itself), but this is also the woman who, just a few weeks before she started the aforementioned affair, made a public denunciation of homosexual people and their lifestyle – something for which she was named ‘UK bigot of the year’ in 2008.

You can’t help feeling some sympathy for Mrs Robinson, whose strident religious beliefs and the conflict they created apparently led her to contemplate suicide when her double standards first came to light.  As one of those Christians who like to distinguish themselves from the rest of us by saying they are ‘Bible-believing’, she and her family will be well familiar with Jesus’ advice to the Pharisees not to throw stones at others if they themselves were less than perfect (John 8:7) – a truth which always comes back to haunt those who ignore it, as some commentators are now pointing out.  ’Bible-believing’ Christians are usually less than enamoured of movies like ‘The Graduate, but the message of its iconic song might just be what this family need to hear right now: ‘here’s to you Mrs  Robinson – Jesus loves you more than you will know’.

Christmas in Hong Kong

Spending a few days in Hong Kong, we could not have failed to notice all the signs wishing us ‘A Happy Christmas’, and the Christmas carols being played in hotels, streets, and tourist attractions – not to mention some serious Christmas trees.  It all makes a change from the endless wrangles back home about whether we should celebrate Christmas (this being too Christian for the UK), or some other sort of ‘winter festival’ (this being secular and therefore assumed to be religiously neutral).  Paradoxically, by comparison with Britain, HK is actually multicultural rather than just claiming to be – and seems to have no difficulty at all recognizing a Christian festival with Christian symbols and the recounting of traditional stories.  It generated some conversation between us as to whether it is easier to be Christian in a post-Christendom culture or in a globalized culture such as Hong Kong, and we concluded that on the basis of what we have seen the genuinely globalized is probably a more open and honest space in which to have faith conversations.  We certainly haven’t needed to apologize about being Christians – and yes, casual people in streets and shops have asked us that question.  Maybe instead of lecturing the rest of the world about freedom, our politicians should listen a bit more and see what they can learn about tolerance and all those other virtues they talk a lot about but seem to find hard to put into practice.

The wisdom of the elders

An interesting article in the Guardian caught our attention, partly because it was written by former US president Jimmy Carter, and partly because in it he draws attention to what he labels the abuse of women by religious bodies of many sorts, including the church he was once a member of (Southern Baptists), but left over this very issue.  The article itself is well worth a look: go here.   What is equally noteworthy is that it is also highlighting a group that Jimmy Carter is a member of – the Elders, a group of people like himself drawn from many different political and religious persuasions and brought together by Nelson Mandela to cast a critical eye on world affairs and offer the benefit of their considerable wisdom.  A rough estimate shows that between them all, they represent well in excess of a thousand years of experience!  For more on their reflections, see their website.  And don’t for a moment imagine that just because they’re old they are all reactionary traditionalists.  Quite the opposite: they could teach some far younger folk a lot about life, including faith and spirituality.