Is it because I is black?

Rachel Dolezal is a black American race activist who hit the news recently when it turned out she was white. She resigned from the NAACP earlier this week, but claims a 'self-identification with the black experience...that's how I was portraying myself...on a very real connected level.' The interview on the above link shows someone for whom personal experience trumps reality. Her choice to identify as black equates to being black.

(I'm reminded, oddly, of goal celebrations by mercenary footballers. The more kisses they bestow on the team badge after scoring, they less likely they are to stay at the club next season if a better offer comes along. They self-identify as Chelsea on a very real connected level. For this season.)

We've been here before, but not in a serious way. Ali G turns out to be a prophet, as well as a gangsta.  It's an instance of the wider syndrome of personal experience and emotion trumping truth and reality. There is a logic to it - consumer choice (or at least, what we're told is choice) is at the heart of liberal democratic capitalism. Choice has evolved from a virtue to a deity. The prevailing liberal wisdom is that if x is freely chosen by a person, then it is right, whether x is aborting a child, sleeping around, shopping, sexual identity, or when and how to end ones life (preferably on the NHS). The campaign to legalise euthanasia, which the BBC gave another nudge to on Question Time a couple of weeks back, is usually cast in the form of stories, all traumatic and difficult, to make the argument 'who are we to deny people who are suffering so much the choice they most desire?' It's hard to feel sympathy for a generalisation, and equally hard to deny it to an individual. Generalisations deal with principles and argument, individuals deal in choices and personal meaning.

And if we can choose all of these things, rather than have them 'given' by society, culture or religion, then why not race too?

But choice isn't a level playing field. Liberal culture finds it easier to defend the choice of a woman removing clothes for the sexual tittilation of men than a woman who wants to cover herself so as not to be seen as a sex object. Especially if the latter has, God forbid, religious reasons. A recent paper on euthanasia in Belgium notes a change in culture since the law was changed: Social and peer pressure makes it difficult for those who oppose euthanasia to uphold their position in the liberal culture that has been developing. 

Our school ran a session on internet safety a few months back. One phrase which stuck with me was 'for children to be children, parents must be parents'. In other words, its a parents responsibility to set boundaries, to keep their children safe, to say 'no' when 'no' needs to be said. Children who grow up having all desires granted become adults who believe that every personal choice is a sovereign act. To be human is to be limited. Testing those limits is part of being human, living as if they don't exist is simply delusional. This is not the Matrix.

and before you say so, I know this isn't a coherent argument, just some thoughts I wanted to have aloud and see what happened to them. If I choose to blog these words but they make no sense, then who are you to tell me I'm wrong? ;-) Where exactly do postmodern people go to adjudicate between competing truths and choices?

Bacon and Eggs

There was a story told (probably apocryphal) in seminary about how crusaders, as they were preparing for battle, would be baptized with their sword hand out of the water.  The soldiers would march through the water, with the water washing over thier heads, but their hands held high out of of the water.  They didn’t want to baptize the hand that would be used to kill their enemy.   Everything else had been consecrated and set apart for God, but their hand was their own, to do with as they please. (source)

I'm not sure where I first heard this one, but the image of holding things 'out of the water' is a powerful one. It's probably easier for other people to spot what's in your upraised hand, but we don't always welcome that kind of feedback. How fully immersed do we want to get?

I heard it put in another way in this book by Gavin Calver: When it comes to a cooked breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

Mike Pilavachi speaks of a young man he was dealing with, who split up with his long-term girlfriend because there might have been someone better out there. He makes the comment that whilst older people give a sharp intake of breath at this point, folk in their 20s and 30s often shrug and say 'fair enough'. In a commercial culture which is constantly offering 'upgrades' to the technology we have come to depend on, commitment to a particular make & model is actually a hindrance to getting the best. Consumerism erodes a sense that commitment is a virtue.

The crusaders story reminds us that we're not the first ones to struggle with the notion of 100% commitment. But how do we talk about a discipleship which costs everything in a culture of chickens?

Availability

What do we mean by 'reliable'? I forget the source now, it may have been one of Tim Chesters excellent  books on culture and mission, but one insight has really stuck with me. It's the difference between two sorts of availability.

People like me, with diaries, watches, appointments etc., work on chronologial availability: we agree to be in x place at y time, and we are. (Mind you, those who know me and work with me might observe that I'm frequently a few minutes late, but that's another issue). We book things into the diary, that's how we organise our availability.

Or there is emotional availability: the person who is always there when you need them, but don't expect them to agree to a cup of tea a fortnight on Monday. Availability is organised around need, relationships, family and the present moment; rather than schedule, priorities and ordered time.

To the latter, the former group might seem a bit distant, standoffish, over-busy. To the former, the latter might seem a bit chaotic, unreliable, high maintenance - needing to be reminded about meetings and appointments.

Chronological availability is more typical of middle class culture, but will come more naturally to people of a certain personality type (yes, Myers-Briggs again, I'm a 'J' - i.e. a natural planner/organiser/strategist), emotional availability is perhaps more typical of working class culture, (or the Myers-Briggs 'P', go-with-the-flow type)

All too often, people start a conversation with me with 'sorry, I know you're busy....', I wonder if that's to do with all of this, or the fact that I tend to whizz around at high speed a lot of the time. Perhaps that's the nature of this role, with over 200 church members, double that (at least) of community/'fringe' contacts, never mind friends and family. I'm aware of relationships which struggle because the two partners work with different types of availability, and the mindset of the other seems deliberately contrary, rather than just a different way of being available.

Jesus seemed to manage both, he was emotionally/spiritually available in the moment - the blind man at Jericho, the woman in the crowd - but also managed his time and his priorities ('let us go to the other villages, for I must preach there also').

A challenge in church leadership, and in discipleship generally, is how to blend the two. Being on time for a meeting is just as much about caring for and valuing people as being on the other end of the phone when they need you.

Disappearing up our own selfie

What with the woman who married herself, and Stephen Fry declaring that his drug use affected nobody but himself, the first week of October 2014 may mark the point at which our culture disappeared up its own selfie in pursuit of individualistic self-love.



I'm preaching in the morning on the 60 or so 'one another' sayings in the New Testament, and struggling with the limitations of the English language. So much of it is written to 'you' - which, reading the Bible on my own, in my own room, in my own time, in my own way, naturally must be the singular form. Not so. As the Texan Bible reveals, most of it is written to 'Y'all', the plural 'you', it is instructions to a community, to be read, understood and applied in community.

Maybe this is why we talk about rights so much, because we no longer think relationally. A right is something owed to an individual, and is regulated by law. We need them, but for normal personal relationships to be conducted on this basis shows that those relationships have broken down. To the early church, resorting to law to settle issues was a serious failure, because the gold standard was to sort things out in relationship.

Among church members now, most of our lives are lived apart from one another, so it's naturally to think individualistically when applying the Bible to our lives, in contrast with the communal spirit of Acts 2 (daily meeting together, eating, learning and sharing life). So both our culture, and the structure of our lives, make it hard to hear the Bible saying what it is really saying.

What happens when a selfie culture reads an ussie Bible?

Immortalised in Sand

That was the caption on this picture from this BBC story. Some idiots have vandalised a set of sand sculptures in Weymouth, including one of Andy Murray holding the Wimbledon trophy. Strangely, "Sculptures of ET, a smurf and the Gruffalo remained untouched."

And now the phrase is rolling round my head. Immortalised in sand. Sand which crumbles underneath you in a storm, sand which blows away on the wind (I watched Spiderman 3 last night, the powerful image of Spiderman saying 'I forgive you' to Sandman, who then, bit by bit, is released into a stream of sand and blows away). 

As Spiderman discovers, fame isn't all its cracked up to be, better to be loved than to be immortalised in sand, waiting for the next dousing of rain, or the next idiot to come and destroy you. What a blessing to be able to receive eternal life as a gift, one that nothing can erode.

The pursuit of happiness has overtaken everything else as the top value in the West. But is it the right sort? Interesting research here contrasting two types, 'hedonic' happiness, the 'immortalised in sand' stuff of fame and pleasure, and 'eudamonic' which comes from a 'deep sense of purpose and well being'. Turns out a sense of purpose and meaning is good for your health, licking the earth is bad for it. Tastes sandy too.

Persecution Would Be Easier

60 years from the coronation and anointing of the Queen, head of the Church of England, in a national church, our Christian head of state no longer 'rules' over a Christian country. The long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith - or is it the voice of George Carey? - finds itself fighting, and losing, a series of battles over lost moral beachheads.

Persecution would be easier. In those countries where the state has set itself against the church and the gospel, it's easier to know who your enemies are, and in some ways it's an easier task to identify a Christian worldview within that setting, because it's so clearly not the worldview of the state and prevailing culture. In post-Christian Britain, with bishops in Parliament and vicars acting as state registrars in weddings, things aren't so cut and dried. As society drifts into uncharted waters, it's harder to discern what cultural changes are a drift away from Christian moorings, and what changes merely expose of idolatry, the conflation of class or cultural norms with Christian faith. Sea of Faith is a case in point, a 'Christian' movement that married the modernist spirit of the 20th century just as everyone else left it behind for something less reductionist. 

Gillan Scott puts it well:
whether we are willing to admit it or not we are in the last throes of Christendom in our country.  The religious foundations of our society are in places being replaced by a notional belief in equality for all where religion is put on an equal footing with a whole range of other elements of our society’s make-up.  Christian belief no longer defines the law, but instead is increasingly subject to it.  The problem inevitably now comes in how ‘equality’ is interpreted and who makes the final decision on it.

The hardest work is ahead of us. Moral positions we used to take for granted have to be argued for, and there are some that will simply not make sense to folk outside the church. Jesus says of the Holy Spirit 'the world can neither see him nor know him' (John 14) - some of God's wisdom is simply not available on human channels. So, for example, if marriage is a divine 'given', a calling and structure built into creation by God, which (despite its evolutions) remains at heart the lifelong commitment of a man and a woman and the best context for raising children, there will be a point at which non-Christians simply don't get what we're saying. If marriage it's God's design for sexuality and family life, the fact that it is God's design will cut no ice with people who don't believe in God. It will not make sense.

There are two sorts of intellectual laziness which we're in danger of. The first is the uncritical absorption of cultural values into the Christian faith, which comes from a failure to think through our faith properly and be clear about our theology and foundations. The second is the uncritical rejection of cultural values, excused by biblical proof texts about 'the world', and failure to think clearly, critically and well about life in all its dimensions. The world desperately needs a robust Christian critique and worldview of wealth, economics, war, politics, leadership, poverty, disability, human rights, luxury, justice, power, sexuality and creation. The danger is that people only hear us talking about sex. Here's an exercise: visit Thinking Anglicans. Despite a wide range of topics covered by  Simon and the blogging, team, commenters only seem to want to discuss one thing. Discuss.

British culture is ever more rapidly peeling away from Christian foundations, values and institutions, often leaving the institutions (the most visible signs) long after their foundations have been eroded. As a child I used to dig trenches and holes all the way down the beach as the tide withdrew, to try to keep the water as far up the beach as I could, even though the water source had receded. I think we're right to still do a bit of that, even as the tide goes out. It simply makes sense: if God has made us, loves us, and knows what's best for us, then it's best for us whether we believe in him or not. 

If we can do that without sounding like whining reactionaries, then that would be great, but I'm sure the media and blogosphere can make even the most moderate voice sound like a phobic bigot by taking things out of context. Maybe we will get both the tone and content of our apologetics right, and still it won't get a fair hearing. That's the reality of living in a fallen world.

The FOMO epidemic

This is really helpful:

  FOMO – it sounds like an ominous superbug, doesn’t it? Like MRSA or SARS. Well, the chances are it’s a bug that you have. 

Research by marketing strategist Dan Herman, who claims to have identified and named the phenomenon, shows that around 70% of adults experience FOMO: The Fear of Missing Out.

Psychologist Arnie Kozak explains that ‘FOMO happens when we invalidate the experience we are having because we’re obsessed with the ones we’re not having’. Handled positively FOMO can motivate us to seize opportunities and be open to connections with new people. However, managed badly, FOMO cripples our ability to be fully present because we always have one eye elsewhere, on what could have been or might be instead.

FOMO can manifest itself in the small decisions of life (I should have said yes to that weekend away, they look like they’re having a great time) and larger life choices (I probably won’t stay with this company/church/partner long, I’ll keep my eye out for a better option). Whether it leads to anxious feelings of inferiority in which we feel depressed about our perceived social isolation, or a frantic, restless lifestyle that feels obliged to say ‘Yes’ to everything (even if we don’t really want to go), both are borne out of a desire to be all places at all times.

A symptom of living in a world in which we have increased choice, FOMO is made all the more acute by the use of social media...... 

read the rest here. 

I wonder how this affects out ability to worship, to engage with scripture, to engage with community? Can we fully worship God if we are not 'fully present'? Can you have a proper and deep conversation/relationship with someone whose mobile phone is always switched on? Can I meditate richly on scripture if part of me is wondering whether I should be doing something else?

Plan B 'Lost My Way'

Some lyrics from the latest Plan B single, from 'Ill Manors', currently top of the album charts.
god said let there be light created adam and eve
then he gave them eyes and told them both to both belive
something they’d actually physically see
and then the devil came along and planted a seed

and down started growing from the ground like trees
right up to the sky so profoundly seen
to be the only thing in this life that wasn’t a dream
made from stone still and iron beams
the council blocks to defining mean

and bullied the sky so that everybody can see
some birds are caged and will never be free
and gradually people began to change there beliefs
until god was nothing more than just a fictional being

the worship and money merged all colours and creed
into one true religion that was driven by greed
corporate machines trying to sell you shit you don’t need
on television and the ad breaks in between

until people only cared about material things
not lives with other fellow human beings
and i’m guilty of it to or so it seems

lost my way,
fell down a hole,
no-ones gonna come,
and save my soul,
lost my way,
no going back,
i’m stuck right here and that is that!

if you don’t believe if something then you’ll fall for anything
and if that happens then you’ve lost your way
if you don’t believe if something then you’ll fall for anything
and if that happens then you’ve lost your way

if you don’t believe if something then you’ll fall for anything
if you don’t believe if something then you’ll fall for anything
if you don’t believe if something then you’ll fall for anything
fall for anything, fall for anything

it's not the first song he's done with a strong spiritual content, but to be honest his is an entirely different world to the one I inhabit. And there's no point Christians jumping up and down going 'hey look chart topping rapper mentions God!' because I can't think of many churches in a position to engage with the culture and issues he represents.

Is Jesus at the Olympics or in the estates just down the road?

A Pastoral Grey Area

So, there's this bestselling book around, which over 1m people in the UK have bought, which means several hundred people in my neighbourhood, and possibly a few connected to my church as well.

As someone who likes to be vaguely aware of what's going on, I'd normally dig around a bit to find out more about the book, or even borrow a copy. After all, that's what I did with the Hunger Games trilogy a few months ago. If anyone wants my copy of Mockingjay.... (See Mark Meynell for some comment on this. That's a whole different dilemma: by buying the book, I was consuming entertainment based on young people killing each other, which itself was trying to make the point that entertainment based on young people killing each other was a bad thing. Confused yet?)

Anyway, I got as far as Wikipedia, and immediately hit a few snags. To find out anything about 50 Shades of Grey means getting into accounts of sexual activity which would make Caligula blush, and which as a husband and as a Christian, I would want to steer well clear of. There are some things I don't want in my head, and graphic descriptions of abusive sex are one of them. But not to find out anything about 50SOG would mean being unable to say very much about it.

Trouble is, the more mainstream pornography gets, the more urgent the need to work out how to respond to it as a Christian. At the overt end are books like this and the 'adult' channels dumped into your TV set by Freeview, at the covert end is sexualised fashion, pop culture, media, and 9 year old girls singing 'sexy and I know it' in the school playground.

There are a few Christian thinkers and writers addressing this, but not many. Ed Stetzer has highlighted a study on pornography, which finds:
■Pornography is addictive, and neuroscientists are beginning to map the biological substrate of this addiction.
■Users tend to become desensitized to the type of pornorgraphy they use, become bored with it, and then seek more perverse forms of pornography.
■Married men who are involved in pornography feel less satisfied with their conjugal relations and less emotionally attached to their wives. Wives notice and are upset by the difference.
■Pornography use is a pathway to infidelity and divorce, and is frequently a major factor in these family disasters.
■Among couples affected by one spouse's addiction, two-thirds experience a loss of interest in sexual intercourse.

So I'm struggling with how, as a church leader, to engage with this stuff in a way that will help my congregation, but without having to actually read/look at any of it. Any helpful thoughts?

8 ways to keep people out of church

Norman Ivison has a good post today on the culture of 'Generation Y' (people for whom U2 is dads music), and what aspects of church culture they would find off-putting. Reading through the list, I could imagine most Gen X-ers and baby boomers nodding their heads as well.

Norman has a fuller description of each one, but they are things like
 - don't be tempted to offer variety
 - preach and teach lots but don't encourage questioning or disagreement
 - take church very seriously and don't encourage fun
 - have complex structures, understood by only a few, which make decision making fiendishly complex and drawn out.
 - don't experiment.

Most of these are no brainers, and expose some of the cultural and institutional captivity of the church. But no single culture or era has it all correct - sometimes taking time over a decision is better than rushing it, valuing tradition may work better than trying to customise and personalise everything (because the universe doesn't revolve around me), and the two need to be in dialogue, rather than 1 replacing the other.

But I'm also culturally captive, and as someone for whom experimentation, dialogue, efficient structures and variety are 'normal', its easy to forget that for others these things are a bit scary. But probably not as many people as we imagine - outside of changes to music in worship, a lot of church leaders I know have faced far less opposition then they imagined they would when leading change.

Its enough to make you Scream

The £74m spent on Edvard Munch's the Scream could have helped 1.3m people in the East African famine. But it didn't, it was spent on a painting, and everybody clapped. I've yet to see anything in the news coverage or comment that's questioned  a value system which thinks this is ok. I don't think God is clapping.

Eventually, moth and rust will destroy this picture, and one can only hope this becomes a moment we look back on with shame.

Religious Atheism

Interesting take on atheism as a cultural/religous phenomenon in the New Scientist. Here's an extract from an interview with scientist and teacher Bernard Beckett, who writes fiction books based on scientific themes

....you chaired an event for Richard Dawkins and, as a result, shifted your views from atheism to agnosticism. Why the conversion?

The event sold out very quickly. The people were huge fans of Dawkins, and being amongst a group of card-carrying atheists was something I'd never experienced before.

I'd probably have called myself an atheist at the time. But normally, that means going your own way and creating your own response.

Instead, it felt more like being in church. Suddenly, there were a whole heap of people who seemed to be responding as one. To me, that reproduced some of the things I disliked about the church I was brought up in, because leaps are made from atheism to other beliefs that you are meant to have as well.

For instance, the belief that there is something negative about the influence of religion, which I don't necessarily think is true. It's a very complex sociological question that would take a lot of research, but suddenly, if you're one of us, you also have to be against religion.

At that point I feel uncomfortable. I also felt uncomfortable with the idea of wanting to convert people; to atheism in this case. It felt evangelical, and that's not my instinct at all.
There was an issue of New Scientist recently, where Marcelo Gleiser wrote about the search for the theory of everything. Gleiser believes that this is a bit of a hangover from religion.
For some people, like Dawkins, science is about beauty and meaning and truth. I'm really uncomfortable with that. I don't think science is about that at all.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting, it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

I can't see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but there's no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief. And that seems to me to me to be a more rigorous view and one I'm much more comfortable with.

This does strike a chord: just as there's a culture within church circles which contains lots of things which have nothing to do with Christianity, there also seems to be a culture around certain popularisers of atheism which goes a long way beyond science.

However, if you think that you're right and that someone who disagrees with you is wrong, then it seems a bit postmodern just to let everyone have their own point of view, and not get a bit 'evangelical'. I'm not a scientist, but if certain things are scientific facts then it's probably a good thing to teach/persuade other people of them. Ok we can be less sure about the existence or otherwise of God, but if you can only argue for a position if it's certain, how on earth do you discover whether or not it's certain in the first place...?

Being 'evangelical' about atheism logically follows from being an atheist: religion must look like a massive and self-indulgent waste of time, resources and effort, and people are much better being persuaded to do something more useful. The same impulse also follows from believing in God, though for different reasons!

But what Beckett hints at is that, as well as being a reasoned position, evangelical (or 'religious'?) atheism has also become a cultural boundary marker for a certain social/intellectual group. Heck, they've even got merchandise. The church, sadly, has reams of examples of what happens when you forget the difference between a cultural boundary marker, and a core belief. I'm even required by church law to wear some of them.

But maybe that's a feature of any ideology or intellectual movement: the beliefs have to take form within a culture, and be expressed, or else it's all purely theoretical. And once they do that, the outward form of the belief is often the first bit of it that outsiders encounter, and it becomes part of the package. Is 'evangelical' atheism bound to develop its own subculture?

Something to Believe In

Whilst I can still do so for free, here's a piece from the Times earlier this week. Maurice Saatchi calls for the new government to give us a Big Idea to believe in.

One by one, our most basic beliefs have turned into myths.

We used to believe in caring socialism, until it reminded us of the Russian station masters who sent out empty trains in the middle of the night to meet their state targets. We used to believe in capitalism, until we were introduced to the “free market” called banking, where five companies control 80 per cent of all transactions and two of them went bust. We used to believe in proud nationalism, until we recognised that the combination of globalisation, devolution, and immigration make it seem an uncomfortable anachronism. In Britain today, the great Hollywood law that “nobody knows anything” should be “nobody believes anything”.

You could add God to the list of faiths/big ideas no longer held or believed in by a significant number. This is postmodernism in all its glory. Or perhaps, postmodernism Part 2. In Part 1, there were still enough people who held to 'metanarratives', big explanations/stories of the events of history, big philosophies which explained everything, whether it was God, capital, The People, or Progress.

In Postmodernism Part 2, the Big Stories have gone. They're held as articles of faith by a diminishing remnant, but are no longer mainstream. Saatchi notes Camerons well-documented pragmatism, and lack of a single, overriding philosophy:

Our new leader has the intellect, the charisma and the courage for history to judge him “a great prime minister”. To deserve the title, he will have to ignore the Conservative press officer who replied to a query about his party’s philosophy: “If you want philosophy, read Descartes”, and the Conservative candidate who agreed: “We don’t want philosophy and fluff”.

Now it might be that the age of ideology was just that, an age which has been and gone. But there has always been a big story somewhere, whether it was the medieval Catholic worldview, the Enlightenment, the British Empire etc. Nowadays 'believe' is an advertising slogan for Guiness, or football, I forget which. It's something very short term, a brief exertion of will and wishful thinking, packaged as entertainment.

Saatchis prescription is to reread Marx, the Declaration of Independence, and the Sermon on the Mount: To read them afresh is to understand the power of belief. They are all cries against the injustice of the established order. Like our Prime Minister, these authors all wanted “power to the people!” Their aim was revolution. Their effect was revelation. Um, yeeeeeeesssss, as Jeremy Paxman might say. Not the most accurate summary of the Sermon on the Mount I've ever read, but it's still an intriguing choice. The USA still has a couple of Big Ideas on the go, one is its own self-belief as a global agent of righteousness, the other (connected) one is in God. Apart from blind faith in Fabio Capello, you'd be hard pushed to find any left in England.

So what happens post-postmodernism? Is part 3 that the world is recolonised by those who do believe in a Big Story (China, Islam)? Can we manage, as a society and as individuals, without a big picture of how the world fits together? If there is nothing to be sceptical of, would we have to create something? And how does belief in Jesus as the agent of God's kingdom, a big story which covers all of creation and all of history, work in this context?

And politically, how long can a party survive if it doesn't have a philosophy? If everything is pragmatism, then all politics comes down to personality - do I trust the pragmatic instincts of Polician C over Policitian L or Politician LD. If there's no philosophy guiding those instincts, then ultimately there's no other way of judging which is better or worse.

My Generation

Here's the line up of current and potential party leaders, at time of writing

David Cameron (born 1966)
Nick Clegg (born 1967)

Labour contenders
David Miliband (born 1965)
Ed Miliband (born 1969)
Ed Balls (born 1967)
John McDonnell (born 1951)
as yet undeclared Andy Burnham (born 1970) (Update: now declared)
Update: Diane Abbott (born 1953) has entered the fray in a welcome burst of diversity. Actually, not that diverse - she's Oxbridge too. What are the chances that Michael Portillo is one of the 10,000+ new Labour members and planning to stand as well?

With two exceptions, Generation X have well and truly taken over. The original writeup of Generation X was a bunch of nihilists, destined to live forever off the scraps their baby boomer parents had left them - McJobs, shopping, marketing, and the absence of any kind of big idea or cause to fight for. Sounds fine if you're 22 and trying to work off your student debt in the early 90's, not quite so clear if you're 43 and Prime Minister in 2010.

So if Generation X is supplanting the baby boomers, what is my generation like? Beyond a taste (not universally shared) for stadium rock, curry, irony and Have I Got News for You, is there anything else? I found this piece by Patrick Neate very interesting, an attempt to redefine Generation X based on the following characteristics:

- Magpie Tendencies, cherry picking from all sorts of sources, eclectic.

- Enterprising "Faced with new and difficult career circumstances but armed with new and difficult tools, we adapted"

- Instinctive Relativists: "We didn't believe in global communism, but that doesn't make us advocates of global capitalism. We may not believe in God or institutions but that's missing the point; because we don't believe in the absence of God or institutions either. We don't even believe in immutable knowledge. We prefer Wikipedia - a limitless, editable source that's as fallible as its contributors"

- Natural Pluralists - "it's simply not true that we don't believe in right and wrong; rather that we're often not sure what they are. We are governed by uncertainty and, admittedly, this is a dangerous position. But, in the contemporary world, it's still better than many. As a general principle, it must be worse to think you're right and be wrong (ask Tony "Boomer" Blair) than to admit that you're just not sure"

- Mod Cons (moderate conservatives)

- Comfort Junkies "Our Mod Con tendencies will never get in the way of our mod cons and our pluralism will never outgun our desire for comfort. It is the one thing about which we're never relative. And this scares even me."

he concludes (note - this was written a couple of years ago. It also reflects a thoroughly middle class flavour to Gen X, maybe cultural analysts are only bothered about people in their own social grade):
"As Generation X reaches middle age and inevitably takes charge, it's possible to envisage dithering direction guided only by the side its bread (wholemeal, stone ground, from the deli) is buttered (spreadable, Danish, unsalted). But it's also possible to imagine humane and pragmatic leadership that's adaptable to the new challenges it will undoubtedly confront. I would finally suggest that the way this particular cookie will crumble comes down less to the characteristics of the generation than the generation's recognition of the two prime characteristics of its era: unprecedented prosperity and (at least local) peace. We have been very, very lucky."

I recognise a lot of this, though some of it overlaps with Generation Y - todays 20-somethings are much more natural pluralists than the 40-somethings. But it's been a while since I heard/read a decent analysis of the post-boomer generation, and now they/we are in charge, perhaps it's time to find out a bit more. Anyone got any good thoughts/links?

DK (born 1969)

'A sickening misuse of the gift of life'

Outstanding piece in the Times today, about the hideousness of celebrity culture:

The centuries of prattle, of air time and screen time, the miles of column inches are a sickening misuse of the gift of life, of health and adequate nutrition, of freedom from oppression, of the access we now have to the world of knowledge and the arts. They are stolen from thought about, or discussion of, things that are truly important or worthwhile; fighting poverty, disease and the iniquities and injustice of the world; the profound joy afforded by literature and the arts; questions about the meaningful purpose of life.

The celebrity culture is a black hole sucking up light. It is not only a manifestation of the cretinisation or tabloidisation of our culture but further cretinises it.

Celebrity culture spreads like a stain. It engulfs even those whose fame is rooted in real achievement or real responsibility. As the empty are valued, so the valuable are emptied. They are treated as if they were as vacuous as pop idols. Scientists, artists and politicians become defined in the collective consciousness not by the serious, complex matters that they deal with or by their real achievements but, increasingly, by their sex lives, their personal traumas, their peccadillos.

Never mind the general theory of relativity and those field equations that are one of the greatest monuments of the human intellect. What the punter wants to know is whether Einstein s****ed his dog. (my emphasis)

Comedian Stewart Lee, critiquing celebrity 'books', made the point that someone who read them would end the books more stupid than when they started. Marcus Brigstocke 'alleged' on Sunday night that some atheists are atheists because they can't hold the concept 'God' in their head without their eyes glazing over. Maybe the Stupid Society is more of a problem than the Broken Society, or perhaps it's just a symptom of it. If our capacity to think and reason is broken, traded in for a pole dancer and the latest rock star implosion, then that's a serious problem.

There's probably a good book out there comparing the decline of the Roman empire with postmodern Britain, but I'm not sure I'm ready to get that depressed.

Robbie Williams turns Theologian? 'Bodies'

Channel hopping the other day, I stumbled across this



God gave me the sunshine,
Then showed me my lifeline
I was told it was all mine,
Then I got laid on a ley line
What a day, what a day,
And your Jesus really died for me
Then Jesus really tried for me

UK and entropy,
I feel like its ******* me
Wanna feed off the energy,
Love living like a deity
What a day, one day,
And your Jesus really died for me
I guess Jesus really tried for me

Bodies in the Bodhi tree,
Bodies making chemistry
Bodies on my family,
Bodies in the way of me
Bodies in the cemetery,
And that’s the way it’s gonna be

All we’ve ever wanted
Is to look good naked
Hope that someone can take it
God save me rejection
From my reflection,
I want perfection

Praying for the rapture,
‘Cause it’s stranger getting stranger
And everything’s contagious
It’s the modern middle ages
All day every day
And if Jesus really died for me
Then Jesus really tried for me

Jesus didn’t die for you, what do you want?
(I want perfection)
Jesus didn’t die for you, what are you on?
Oh Lord
(Jesus didn't die for you) Ohh
(Jesus didn't die for you)
(Jesus didn't die for you) Ohh

What is that all about? Yet another pop star 'doing God', or not? Gregorian chant backing creates a deliberately 'religious' feel to the song. Is this a prayer, or a dig at deluded Christians ('what are you on?'). Maybe it shows what happens when you've watched a bit too much of the God channel.

Wannabepriest has some good reflections, to which I'd add the following:
- The chorus intrigues me. Looking good naked is lifted straight from Gok Wan, but further back it's from Genesis 2. All we've ever wanted is to be naked without shame, to look at our reflection without rejection. I don't know if Williams is making the connection, but if he isn't, maybe that's interesting in itself: picking up on our obsession with bodies and perfection as an expression of the primordial dis-ease with self brought on by sin.

- Perhaps the confusion is just honest. When crowds of thousands at Williams gigs sing 'God save me rejection' in one breath and 'Jesus didn't die for you' in the next, perhaps that's just a thermometer to the brow of the times. We all want God to be there (apart from folk who don't want him to be there!) but we don't want to feel indebted, or personally got at. If Jesus really died for me, then I owe him.

- Some interesting stuff about death and entropy, the kind of thing a man in his 'modern middle age' might start thinking about. The final resting place of the body is the cemetary. This is standard mid life crisis stuff: awareness of mortality, trying to hold onto sexual potency, but when you look in the mirror that body isn't what it once was. What you need isn't sex, but love. Someone who can look at you, naked, and 'take it'.

Quit First, Ask Questions Later

Update: well I never, Alan Wilson has written a piece entitled 'Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix' for the Grauniad (Ht Thinking Anglicans). This may look like a co-ordinated Anglican message, but trust me, it isn't.


Hazel Blears has been doing some thinking since last week. She now wishes she’d done the thinking before her triple-whammy of the Observer article, the resignation and the brooch, but the horse - or possibly the chipmunk - has bolted.

Withoutapauseoranyspacesit’sveryhardtomakesenseofthings. High-speed, 24-hour culture has plenty of adrenaline, but not enough......................space. (Aside - tried to just have a long space in that gap but nether Blogger nor Wordpress would let me. Even our blog software can’t stand space) We shoot first and ask questions later, but corpses don’t give great answers - something Blears is discovering as she fights to salvage her political career.

Here’s the dilemma: if we don’t get instant answers to problems and issues then that’s ‘dithering’. But often the best answers come after a bit of time to think, consult and plan. Gordon Browns notorious Youtube video was a classic example of feeling a need to DO SOMETHING, and botching it. Brown is a naturally long-term man trapped in a short-term system, and finding it doesn’t suit him.

We can’t have it both ways. We naturally expect everything ‘now’, but if we want swift, decisive action from the government, church, banks, etc., then it’s less likely (unless the need is screamingly urgent), that they’ll get it right.

The quality of our politics, leadership, and national life requires that government and agencies be given time to think things through. This fights against our culture of the instant. Any government which gives the people what they want won’t be giving us what we need.

Repenting at leisure is all very well, but it’s better not to sin in the first place. 24-7 culture struggles to find the time to make quality choices. The ancient tradition of Sabbath - rest for yourself and for your workers - built in time every week to take stock and step back. A culture without this has lost its Pause button, and that’s not good.

this is a cross post from Touching Base, a weekly column at the Wardman Wire.

Todays Little Choices

It's been quite a week for democracy and people power.

Barack Obama's first inaguration was the media event of the week, with everyone from 5Live to the Daily Mail queuing up to kiss the ring. Obama recognised in his speech that leading the USA also involves leading the world. Even though the rest of us have no say in it, the choice of President made by the USA will affect our politics, economy and society.

And how many in the US actually made that choice? Obama won with 52.9% of the popular vote, which with a high turnout translated into 1 in 3 of the total adult population. His early decisions - on Guantanamo and international funding for abortion - affect people who had no say in that election. It's a reminder that when we vote we vote on behalf of others, not just ourselves.

They get a President, We get a Presenter
Back in the Messiah-free UK Jonathan Ross has returned, after his 3 month suspension. Many have put the BBC's response down to a campaign against Ross which resulted in nearly 40,000 complaints being sent to the BBC. I wonder if any of those against that campaign were involved in this one, which helped torpedo government moves to keep MP's expenses secret. With hundreds of people using the internet to raise the issue with MP's, there was a sudden change in the Westminster wind, and a Tory-Labour deal came rapidly unstitched. Was this what Hazel Blears had in mind when she explored how the internet could enhance democracy?

Less succesful were the 300+ complaints against the Agnostibus - the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the slogan "There is Probably No God, now stop worrying and enjoy life" didn't breach the advertising code, being "an expression of the advertisers opinion" and that "the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation." Would they have got a different result with 40,000 protesters? Or do some things stay true no matter what public opinion thinks? The weird thing is the ASA have ruled that atheism, and the claim that belief in God causes you to worry and stop enjoying life, can't be substantiated. So who won?

Meanwhile, though total figures don't seem to be public yet, I imagine that Ulkrika Johnsson's vote on Celebrity Big Brother knocks all of the above (except Obama) into a very small cocked hat. It would be dispiriting to think too much about it, but far more of us will take the time to vote on a reality TV show (or complain if John Sargeant is booted off), than to lobby our MP over a matter of justice and truth. This leaves the democratic process in the hands of the few, not the many - it is only those who are committed who can locate and pull the levers of power.

A funny thing has happened to choice. 100 years ago, women were fighting for the right to vote, to choose their political leaders. In an age when few economic or social choices were available, the right to exercise power through the ballot box was a unique opportunity to influence things. Since then there has been a massive change, as the power to choose has extended from politics, to economics, family structure, personal identity, gender roles and religious preferences. Choice is now a fundamental right for 3 years olds - chatting to a teacher at our local pre-school yesterday, they have to offer every activity as a 'choice' to the children, despite having dozens of 'learning outcomes' to deliver.

McChoices
Weve got used to exercising many of these choices through consumption: what we buy, wear and do is part of our identity. At the same time, the Big Brother effect has created a parody of choice. Douglas Coupland once defined marketing as the art of feeding people's waste back to them in such a way that they don't realise it's not real food. The mobile phone and TV production companies one day woke up and realised that they could sell 'choice' back to us in a form which made them money.

And the more Gordon Brown tells us that the credit crunch is the result of global factors beyond his control, rather than our economy's quiet divorce from Prudence, the more text voting looks like a fun diversion and lobbying Parliament a waste of time. Even some prominent bloggers have taken to trying to stitch up public votes. Or was it campaigning?

So now to my choice: in my inbox is a newsletter from No2ID, warning of a key Commons vote next week on data protection, and an amusing circular email from a friend. Which one I choose to read might affect the country I end up living in. It should be a no-brainer, but......

this is a cross post from Touching Base, a regular column hosted by the Wardman Wire.

Tom Wright: Christmas sermon extract

The NT Wright page (maintained by a fan, I think) has served up some great background reading for Christmas sermons. In amongst it all, is this searing passage, preached 2 years ago:

Because it really is dark out there, and alas sometimes in here too. The great revolution of thought which happened in Europe over three centuries ago, associated with Descartes in particular, was the attempt to grasp truth as it were from scratch: by doubting everything, we would see what we could be sure of and build out from there.

We would know the facts, and the facts would set us free – free from God, free from any responsibility except to our own self-interest. There’s a straight line from Descartes to Dawkins: we can doubt God, but we can’t doubt the facts, the empirical evidence.

And the results of that arrogant attempt to possess truth are all around us, etched in the horrors of the twentieth century and now already the multiple follies of the twenty-first, as we in the West blunder blindly on, believing firmly that because we know the facts and have the technology we can do what we like with other people’s countries, other people’s stem cells, other people’s crops, other people’s money, other people’s lives.

And meanwhile the worm in the apple has hollowed it out more or less completely: the ‘truth’ which we thought we knew has been eaten away not just in theology and philosophy but in its heartland of physics, by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and in its deeper heartland of the human being, where Descartes began.

We have become a society paranoid about truth: so we make each other fill in more and more forms, and set up more cameras to spy on each other, to check up on one another because we want the truth, we want an audit trail, we want more and more Enquiries and Judicial Reviews and Investigations, but we can’t get at truth because Descartes’ experiment has itself made it impossible, has generated a world of suspicion and smear and spin.

and it's not just society...

But if the world has tried to have truth without grace, the church has often been tempted towards grace without truth – as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, ‘cheap grace’.

God has become a benevolent old softie, ready to tolerate everything, to include everyone, to throw away all those unpleasant old moral standards and say it’s all right, do your own thing, if it feels good it must be OK.

And once again the results are all around – both in the anti-moralism of the arch-liberals and the anti-authoritarianism of today’s new conservatives, who don’t realise that they are simply producing an ecclesiological parody of the do-it-yourself morality they so detest.

37,000 back to church

...according to Back to Church Sunday, based on data from 1/5 of the 3,000 churches taking part. Report here, BTCS website here. Ht Dave W's church times blog. That's quite a number, and it'll be interesting to see if the quality of welcome, fellowship etc. is such that they stay, or realise that they'd been staying away for good reason!!

Based on research by Richter & Francis, Mission Shaped Church estimated that 35-40% of UK residents have some kind of church backgrounds (though that number is shrinking), but no longer come to church. These are folk who come to Christmas services, know some of the songs and the Bible, and could come to church without it all feeling completely alien.

MSC argued that half of these might be open to returning. However, TEAR fund came up with a much lower figure in its research last year. Instead of there being 20% of 'open de-churched' (to use the jargon) it reckoned there was only 5%. Still, that's over 2m people that back to church Sunday can work for, and it's clearly helped many of them. Here's the Tear Fund chart

Speaking to a local youth team yesterday, we used a simpler version the above graphic and asked them to mark on it where they did most of their mission work. It was encouraging to see a lot of splodges on the left hand side of the chart. Most Christian outreach, such as BTCS, Alpha, etc., is of the 'come to us' variety which mainly connects with the fringe/occasional/open de-churched segment, which is a small and shrinking chunk of the whole.

I'm looking forward to the day when we get a 3-D version of the chart which shows people's attitude to spirituality, faith and prayer. Lots of people who don't go to church pray regularly, and defining things in terms of their contact with the church can give the false impression that God is only at work within the church. When we actually talk and listen to people, we often discover that He's been there way ahead of us, and that what people have rejected is not God, but the church and the cultural trappings which grow like brambles around the gospel, or the hurtful mistakes of Christians which have practiced the opposite of what was preached.