A hopeful "In View of Experience" blog - not necessarily Anglican - but hopefully helpful!
How do we react to the US election? A result which some celebrate and others mourn?
How do we react when many people, including those in the mainstream media, find the result hard to countenance because it goes against what they consider to be 'good'?
"That half this country could willingly restore Donald Trump to a position of power is a sickening thought." Jonathan Chait, Political Columnist
"We have to break the world in order to fix it again" Anthony Scaramucci, Rest is Politics
"I think we may have over-estimated the goodness of people." Duncan Jones, Director of Moon
"We have to believe that the world can get back to a better trajectory - but tonight is a very, very devastating body blow." Rory Stewart, Rest is Politics
How do we react when those who lost, may not have rioted but, immediately seek to find someone to blame or suggest those who voted differently should unfollow them?
Not that the UK is not going down the same path; rioting about immigration led to sentences that were met with enragement. The cancellation of Winter Fuel Payments has been received as a deep betrayal of the electorate.
What is the alternative to simply hanging our heads in despair as public life deteriorates or embracing a side with all its imprecations and implications?
Is there a better way through events that would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago? Even the possibility of learning something good?
Here is a suggestion for how the Christian might prophetically interpret the world to itself, it draws almost exclusively on the sixth episode of Justin Brierley’s “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God” podcast series, which is called “The Meaning Crisis: Why we’re all religious deep down”.
On the podcast is Jo Frost, the Director of Communications and Engagement for the Evangelical Alliance and co-director their “Being Human” project. She says that as a society we need to rethink dumping so casually the shared narratives of the past,
“Man is a teller of tales. We tell our lives as if they are story and we live our lives as if we are in one. We cannot encounter the world that we’re in except in narrative. There are pinnacle moments, there are turning points, main character energy. We are storied creatures, and I think when the challenges we’ve encountered just in our lives, on our streets, through Covid and everything else that has happened with us, that peoples’ stories have got smaller. The smaller the story, the less capable it is of holding the weight of a whole human life, because to be human is to be made in the image of God, it’s to have purpose and meaning and dignity and value and connectivity and all of these amazing things.
“If our stories are too small that's where we see the cracks and the fragmentation and the anxiety and all of these things bubble-up. So, I think the stories that we tell of ourselves and the stories that we inhabit are incredibly powerful and I think we've encountered time and time again that the fragility of our cultural stories are having profound impacts on who we are and how we relate to each other.”
Bishop Graham Tomlin has written a book on these things (Why Being Yourself is a Bad Idea - SPCK). To Justin Brierley he commented on how having those stories that are “too small” specifically affects our political landscape,
“I do think the loss of the Christian story is part of why we’ve become more polarised. In the world where there was a general sense that there was a God, and that there was an order that he’d given within the world, and we all fitted in with that order. We all had our different political opinions and approaches, but they were sort of held within a broader structure. My political opinions were penultimate not ultimate, now we’ve stripped away that sense of there being a broader story- a God who oversees everything and to whom everything returns eventually. My political opinions become ultimate, not penultimate, therefore they become the only thing that matters, therefore if you have a different political opinion, you are my enemy rather than someone held within the love of God.”
Jo Frost says that there is a way through,
“…we need to have confidence that actually there is a bigger story and there is a better story that we are invited to participate in. And it is rich and it's deep and it's complex and it's nuanced and actually we need that full story to make sense of our lives and if we can find ourselves in it and we can start to glimpse what it means to be truly human.”
When people ask what I think of the US Election my answer is going to be - that’s why I go to church.
I want my community to know that I go to church to join with others in inhabiting C.S. Lewiss, “true myth”,
“Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”
I want my community to know that it is the True Myth that I regard as sacrosanct not my 'Identity' or 'me being my authentic self.' I want them to know that we all need a story to live by and loss of that costs us dear. I want them to know that I’d love them to come to my church to have look inside the story of Christianity.
On “The Surprising Rebirth”, historian Professor Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker says that there is a reason for the political climate becoming so poisonous in just a generation - it is because of how we have treated that generation. Namely,
“… we no longer as a culture in the West invite our children into a heritage, into a story. It's basically all about the story that you invent for yourself. I hazard that this is yes in no small part behind the kind of massive mental health epidemic we have where young people, of course they're anxious they they're basically cast loose in the world and basically being told to go and invent themselves”.
That makes our individual investment in the world we create and our expectations of those we weave into it, simply massive.
When Kamala Harris made her concession speech, she specifically addressed the young people, telling them,
"On the campaign, I would often say when we fight, we win. But here's the thing, here's the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win. That doesn't mean we won't win. The important thing is don't ever give up. Don't ever give up. Don't ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power. And don't you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before."
Such words become an unbearable burden when an individual believes their individual story requires them to use their power to take on an impossible task which they can never lay down.
I want my community to know that the True Myth offers a better story. A story where winning isn't about my power overcoming another and that while many, many things might be impossible for me, there is one for whom all things are possible.
That's why I go to church.
With thanks to J Dean from Unsplash for the image
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