Hallelujah!

Well we now know the Christmas number one, and unsurprisingly, it features the winner of the TV show 'X Factor'. What is slightly more surprising is the choice of song. In Alexandra Burke's cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', we have the first Christmas hit to feature biblically themed lyrics since Boney M's camp rendition of 'Mary's Boy Child' in 1978. After 30 years, it seems that even the ultra-conservative producers of a mainstream pop show feel that religeous themes are no longer a taboo subject.

In our increasingly biblically illiterate society, columnists are falling over themselves to explain how the tale of a broken love affair is told through the metaphor of David and Bathsheba, spiced up with a slightly fetishist twist on Samson and Delilah. Does this herald a return to the Bible as one of our key cultural influences? It certainly shows that a quest for spirituality and meaning is back on the mainstream agenda.

Although Hallelujah is unashamed of looking to the Bible for answers, it seems to come with little hope of actually finding them. The keynote here is ambiguity: although the passion is genuine, the hallelujahs are 'cold and broken'. But it's a start.

Jesus was unafraid of ambiguity, and for much of it's history the church has been willing to live with it too. Maybe Alexandra Burke is the standard bearer for a new era of cultural engagement with Christ; not as a trite 'answer' but as the best place to come with our deepest and most urgent questions. Hallelujah to that!

Happy winterval

You hear about it, but you never think it will happen to you. Last week our little Essex town was splashed across the pages of the national press after a local primary school were banned from singing at the town festival because their programme of Christmas carols was deemed too religeous for the 'theme' of the event.

On the one hand, I do feel a bit sorry for the festival committee. They work hard for months trying to put together an event which genuinely does bring the community together for one night each year. Now one member makes a bad decision and they find themselves in the middle of a storm of criticism.

But the more I think about this, I'm glad that it has provoked such a strong reaction. Our forefathers fought and died for the right to freely express their faith in this country. Exactly how did we manage to get from a moderately sane society to one in which a well meaning local volunteer could somehow perceive that banning schoolchildren from singing carols was 'the right thing to do'? And even more worrying, how could a school head teacher (who you would expect to be at least a bit more politically and media savvy) simply roll over and accept it? If anyone along the chain had spoken up, they could have stopped this cruel, inexplicable, divisive, anti-inclusive action right there. But no-one did.

20 years ago society as a whole recognised that racism was wrong, but a lot of it still happened because people 'didn't know any better'. Our thresholds of acceptance are much lower today. We need to be equally intolerant of the creeping religeous persecution which has emerged under the cover of 'political correctness'. Hopefully in Corringham at least, next time someone suggests that it is OK to ban Christianity from public expression, there will be someone there to blow the whistle.

The hair of the dog

So now we know the solution to the borrowing crisis, and it is... more borrowing. Yesterday the government announced that it would cut taxes and spend more public money in an attempt to kick start Britain's stalled economy. This will be funded by a massive increase in public debt, to be paid back in all probability after the next general election. Given that easy borrowing was one of the main causes of our current economic woes, this sounds suspiciously like offering a double whisky as a hangover cure.

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the mismatch between indivdual and collective wisdom. It's wise for individual banks to hoard cash and rebuild their reserves, but collectively this makes the credit crisis even deeper. It's sensible for companies to prepare for recession by cutting costs (and that often means jobs), but the collective result is to deepen the very recession they are trying to guard against. It's probably unavoidable for governments to offer a 'fiscal stimulus' (ie throw lots of public money at the problem), but this reinforces the addiction to consumerism that has led us here in the first place.

It is clear that doing nothing is not an option, and that whetever we do there is going to be pain (which means real people suffering in real ways). This offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make the transition to a saner, more sustainable, less de-humanised approach to creating and stewarding wealth. Which makes it all the more sad that our leaders seem dead set on finding a way back to 'the way things were before'.

One of yesterday's papers called this the 'spend now, pray later' budget. It is a shame that none of those responsible have the vision or courage to reverse that order.

Vanilla faith

I got another email from the Tony Blair Faith Foundation today. And every time they send me something, it gets scarier and scarier.

Blair's initial vision for the foundation (as set out in his Westminster Cathedral speech in April) was to promote the relevance of faith in the modern world, to educate about the role of faith, and to encourage faiths to work together towards achieving the Millenium Development Goals. So far, so good. He was also keen to stress that "The Foundation will expressly not be about chucking faith into a doctrinal melting pot. It is not about losing our own distinctive faith." Trouble is, he seems to have had problems communicating this vision to the staff he has recruited to take it forwards.

Today's email ends with the following quote: 'faith is the belief that human kindness is at the core of our souls. Therefore, it doesn't matter what faith you believe in. What matters is that we all have the ability to use our faiths as a positive catalyst for peace and goodwill in our increasingly interdependent world.' I guess this is superficially inspiring (in the same manner as a Whitney Houston song). But none of the world's great faiths actually believe this kind of vacuous fluff.

Whatever it was that motivated Jesus to go to the cross, it wasn't a vague concept of human kindness or a conviction that it doesn't matter what you believe in. Deploying the redemptive power of faith to targets as challenging as the Millenium Development Goals means recognising and respecting the power and passion of people's beliefs for what they are, not trying to redefine them into some kind of post-religious niceness.

Right now the Tony Blair Faith Foundation aren't promoting the relevance of faith. They are effectively trying to start a new one, and recruit a generation of young people to join it. And that scares me.

Marks out of ten

I walked into Millbank Tower for the the Theos annual lecture this week with high hopes. It's not every day that you get to hear the Director-General of the BBC address the subject of 'faith, morality, and the media'.

It's amazing how disappointed you can be in less than two hours. Not with the event itself, but with Mark Thompson's sterile treatment of the subject. The DG spoke like a guilty man with a good lawyer: defensive, unadventurous, and sticking strictly to his script. The only consolation he must have taken from the night was that it was a lecture not a debate; any half decent opponent would have had a field day.

It appears that the head of our most influential media institution refuses to even contemplate the idea that the contents of our airwaves could have any effect on the moral character of our society. His formula for making editorial judgements was 'the benefits of a programme weighed against the potential offense'. This again abdicates any form of cultural leadership; the only moral failing the BBC now officially recognises is a failure to get away with it. It is also an open invitation to a culture of offense-taking, as it is clear that our national broadcaster chooses to be swayed by brute force of opposition rather than quality of argument.

The overall effect was like watching a man realising in front of a live audience that the words coming out of his mouth were just inherited dogma and actually made no sense. Admittedly it's a tricky subject to wrestle with, but the Director General is paid over three quarters of a million pounds a year to do exactly that.

In best BBC fashion, I am obliged to try and find at least one positive thing to say. As he staggered across the finish line, Mark Thompson observed that "whatever else it is, religion is about story-telling – about stories which are so compelling that they can change the lives of the hearers for ever. There has never been a better moment in history for story-telling". Amen to that.

Time to leave the closet?

This morning I was at a politics and government prayer breakfast put on by the guys at Holy Trinity Brompton. As always, the atmosphere was great and the sense that Christians in political life can share genuine fellowship and unity despite party differences was tangible.

Because it was an off-the-record event, I won't reveal the names of any of the attorney generals, financial secretaries to the treasury, or shadow home secretaries present. However, it did make me realise that Christian faith in public life is not quite such a rare commodity as some would have us believe. Maybe it is Tony Blair's fear that anyone making a public declaration of their beliefs would be branded a 'nutter' that is causing people not just in politics but in sport, media, and the arts to be somewhat backwards about coming forwards.

But it did give me an idea. Maybe we should start an 'outing' website, on which we could publish sordid details of public figures' dalliances as churchwardens, gospel choir singers, or former student Christian Union committee members. Perhaps it would help people to realise that in our tolerant 21st century society it is OK to come 'out of the closet' and admit that you are.. well... yes... a follower of Jesus. Any nominations to the usual address.

Lock, stocks, and 2 smoking Bishops

In an apparently co-ordinated assualt a fortnight ago, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York both waded into the fray surrounding the credit crisis. Dr Williams (in typically measured tone) called us to "recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality", while Dr Sentamu (in characteristically less-than-measured tone) called those responsible "bank robbers and asset strippers" and observed that "One of the ironies about this financial crisis is that it makes action on poverty look utterly achievable".

They have a point. There is a current trend for comparing the money required to tackle global poverty to our spending on luxuries (America's annual expenditure on golf or Europe's on ice cream are two that spring to mind). But whether or not you are willing to forego your 4 iron or 99 flake, the sum is clearly dwarfed by what has been pumped into the banking system over the last few days.

This morning's Metro (London's normally celebrity obsessed free commuter rag) ran with a headline 'Bank Aid', and pointed out that the latest finanicial bail-out is alredy costing 30 times the amount raised by the global band aid / live aid initiative. Not bad for a paper who's other lead story involved Madonna's footwear. I blame the bishops, and a good thing too...

Is it believable that I believe what I believe?

Jamie Whyte's column in the Times on Tuesday was one to make any Christian sit up and think. Buried amongst the narrow minded vitriol and unimaginative sideswipes at Christian politicians was this remarkable prophetic gem:

"Suppose you believed that Heaven exists and that only some of us will qualify to live in it for ever, as the vast majority of Christians claim to. How would this affect your behaviour? It would depend on what you thought were the admission criteria for Heaven. But whatever you took these virtues to be, they would utterly dominate your life. When everlasting bliss is on offer, nothing else matters at all. People who believed in Heaven would surely act quite unlike those who do not. Yet the expected behavioural difference is not to be observed. The vast majority of Christians display a remarkably blasé attitude toward their approaching day of judgment, leading lives almost indistinguishable from those of us open non-believers. Put simply, they fail the behavioural test for belief."

I could imagine Jesus saying the same thing (although he would have used shorter words). Though Whyte misses the rather important point that Christians don't believe eternal life can be 'earned' through behaviour, the rest of his observation is spot on.

The great shame is that Jamie Whyte has cleary never met an actual follower of Jesus close up. Having just got back from the 24-7 Prayer movement's annual gathering, I humbly suggest that it would have been a good place to start looking. And of course, if you feel that these guys are having a bit too much fun in the midst of personal sacrifice, a brief trip to the jails of China or North Korea should settle the point once and for all.

But I'm still going to use his article when I preach in church this Sunday.

Counter Ideology

Did you know that the British Government has a ‘Counter Ideology Team’? Until last week neither did I, until I spent a fascinating half day working with them as part of my ‘professional’ job as a consultant advising the Foreign Office on change management.

The Counter Ideology Team’s objective is to “challenge the violent extremist narrative and support the voice of the majority”. Their focus is on British Muslims, and they fund a variety of initiatives to ensure that moderate voices get heard and militants become marginalised.

The very existence of this team raises a whole load of fascinating questions about the likelihood of their success and the implications of their methods. I was still thinking about this when I came across a brilliant quote in Brian McLaren’s thought provoking book on faith and politics “Everything Must Change: Jesus, global crises, and a revolution of hope.” Get this:

“When groups of seemingly disparate people defect and band together in the way of Jesus, they form what we might call unterror cells. They secretly plot detonations of hope. They quietly conspire to set off explosions of spontaneous kindness. They plan gentle coup d’états to replace regimes of domination and oppression with movements of empowerment and service. In a complete overthrow of violent terrorism, they fly airplanes of generosity into towers of need and plant improvised encouragement devices by roadsides in neighbourhoods everywhere, seeking God’s kingdom and God’s equity.”

The answer to radical evil is not moderate anything, but radical good. I dream of a movement whose passionate commitment to the cause of Christ leads them acts of kindness more extreme and audacious than anything the kingdom of darkness can muster. And when the Counter Ideology Team come after me and accuse me of ‘radicalising young people’, I want the charges to stick.

Reportage

It's been a good year for... reports on the role of Christianity in public life. We have endured a long period in which much of what was coming out either seemed to be divorced from the 'real world' or so heavily rooted in it that it was incapable of understanding what faith was really all about. In the last 12 months there have been a number of challenging contributions which at last seem to be hitting the spot.

The Theos think tank launched themselves with 'Doing God', whose title was inspired by Alistair Cameron's infamous 'we don't do God' statement that defined the Blair era. Nick Spencer does a thorough job of clearing up a lot of the misconceptions that plague our understanding of Christian involvement in the public square (on both sides of the debate). The new sequel 'Neither Private nor Privileged' builds on this foundation by offering a vision of exactly what form this engagement ought to take. The conclusion is ambiguous but important: the church must remain faithful to her vision and calling, regardless of the political climate. Where she can succeed in demonstrating and convincing people that this vision embodies the 'public good', there will be significant opportunities to participate in the mechanisms of society.

Closer to the political sharp end, a committee of Christian MPs recently published 'Faith in the Future'. Their aim was to look at what contribution Christians can make in creating a better future for our children. Being a cross party group they fought shy of detailed policy proposals, but do offer a framework against which policies advanced by any of their parties ought to be judged. The report may have lacked the spice of controversy, but I suspect that it will prove a valuable compass for the longer term.

Avoiding controversy was clearly not a priority for the authors of 'Moral but No Compass', a hard hitting study into the relationship between Government and the church (primarily the Church of England). Their conclusions pull no punches: the Government is accused of under recognising the contribution the church makes, of distorting the figures to make this contribution less visible, of deliberately favouring minority religions over mainstream Christianity, and of creating a culture of institutional atheism which discriminates against Christian proposals in the delivery of public services. Their research is thorough, and left Communities minister Hazel Blears furiously denying while appearing very much in denial on the whole issue.

Between the four there is an emerging sense of an objective, a strategy, some tactics, and plenty of ammunition. Uneasy metaphors for followers of the 'Prince of Peace'. It will be intriguing to see how they are put into practise.

No such thing as a free lunch

May 27th: a small group of us had lunch with legendary American Christian political activist Jim Wallis. Whether you entirely agree with Jim's politics (or his theology), it is hard to deny that he is one of the most enduring and effective voices on the U.S. scene right now.

I wrote an article summarising our conversations for the the 24-7 UK website. You can read it here, but it ends as follows:

"24-7 started by praying for the lost; we soon found ourselves propelled onto the streets of Ibiza and Macedonia and Manchester. We started praying for the poor; we felt compelled to go to addicts in Vancouver and prostitutes in Boystown. Now we are feeling a growing sense of urgency to pray for parliament and government. It doesn’t take a grade 1 prophet to work out what happens next. Our vision is ‘to transform the world through movements and communities of Christ centred, mission minded prayer’. We know that politics on its own is not the key to transforming the world, but it looks like it’s definitely going to be a part of the mix."

The ravings of Sindy

The Independent on Sunday (aka the 'Sindy') cused quite a stir yesterday by running a front page article on the 'Evangelical conspiracy' to influence parliament.

It turns out that their gripe is with CARE, the Christian campaigning group who (amongst other things) have about a dozen young people working as interns in MP's offices in and around Westminster.

I know a number of the CARE interns, who must have been surprised (to say the least) to find their names splashed across the front page of a national newspaper yesterday. On the face of it, it is difficult to work out why they have been singled out for such harsh treatment. There are well over a thousand interns working in and around Westminster. Labour MPs frequently have staff members provided by trade unions, Conservatives get their assistants funded by private industry, campaign groups provide researchers, and so on. This is simply how the system works; MPs get resources to represent effectively on their issues of interest, and groups get a chance to participate in the democratic process and ensure their views are heard in the debate. Far from roaming the corridors of power seeking to manipulate unsuspecting MPs (even if such a thing existed), most interns work hard on the mundane aspects of an MP's role: administration, correspondence, and trying to assist ordinary constituents like you and I.

The only question of any substance in the Sindy's rant is that of charitable status. The Charities Commission are already looking at this as part of their review of religeous charities and public benefit. It would be deeply concerning if they concluded that engaging via democratic institutions is no longer deemed to be 'in the public interest'. This is the exactly the kind of social exclusion that extremists of all shades thrive on. However, the impact on CARE would be negligible. The £70K they spend on the intern programme is less than 4% of their budget, and moving it into the 'non-charitable activities' category would be a purely technical adjustment with no real-world effect.

The only explanation for why such a non-issue could make it to the front page of a national newspaper is that the secularist lobby are getting nervous. It is already clear that, far from being a spent force, religeous thinking will be one of the key influences shaping global politics in the 21st century. Despite the best efforts of militant atheist Evan Harris MP to nobble the committee stage, Gordon Brown has already had to make unprecedented concessions in allowing a free vote on the morally controversial Human Fertilisation & Embryology bill.

As Mahatma Ghandi said: 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'. For those of us who are used to having our faith ignored or laughed at, the Sindy have just declared that stage 3 is about to begin. It's going to be a rough and uncomfortable ride, but we can at least take comfort that there is only one more stage to go.

Moses and the credit crunch

14th March 08: today I got a 'phone call from my bank asking if I could lend them some money. They didn't quite put it that way, of course. The actual offer was 'would you like to pay less interest each month?', which it turned out would require me to agree a new, lower borrowing limit on our (partly paid off) flexible mortgage. Evidence (if any more were needed) that the banks are feeling the chill winds of a global credit crisis, and are resorting to ingenious ways to escape from their existing lending commitments in order to release precious cash for use elsewhere.

Moses (circa 1500BC) affirmed that to 'lend to many and borrow from none' would be a sign of God's blessing on a nation. The opposite (becoming an indebted borrower with nothing to lend to others) was bluntly described as a curse. In modern Britain, we seemed to believe that we had managed to reverse this biblical wisdom, with unrestrained consumer spending regarded as a sign of economic health. The resultant 'have whatever you want and have it now' culture has led us to run up an incomprehensible trillion pounds of household debt. Now I am forced to watch people I care about starting to suffer the consequences of their ill-advised spending sprees. Whether you blame cynical commercial organisations or complicitly naive individuals, the result is going to be real hardship for some and financial stress for many.

I declined the bank's kind offer to halve my credit facility in return for saving me a couple of quid a month. This doesn't mean that we are 'safe' as a family; in our interconnected global economy, when one group suffers the pain gets widely distributed. Our best protection is probably to return to some of the oldest economic principles of all. No one individual can solve our economic woes on their own, but with courageous and visionary leadership it is still possible that we can all do so by acting together.

Psychotically Godly Bad-Ass Dude

Feb 08: In the space of a week, I just got paid what I am taking to be a pair of back-handed compliments.

First off, and to the great amusement of our church, Pete Greig described us as a 'psychotically godly family'. While psychosis is not normally regarded as a good thing, there is a one definition which runs along the line of 'perceiving reality in different ways and acting accordingly'. And on that definition, I guess that we are probably guilty as diagnosed.

Then on the Thursday, Lise and I were doing our weekly evening shift on the bar'n'bus, a mobile youth centre run by local Christian volunteers. One of the things that the kids struggle to get their heads around is that we all give up our evenings without being paid, just so that they can have somewhere safe to hang out. On explaining (again) that we do it because Jesus cares about them and therefore so do we, one teenage girl came back with the direct challenge: "so are you a Christian then?" I confirmed that I was. "You don't look like a Christian", she retorted. "You look like some kind of bad-ass dude" (I guess it must have been the leather jacket). Unlike Pete, she then expressed concern that this observation might have offended me, to which I was able to reassure her that it was possibly the nicest thing anyone had said to me all week.

On the bus team we are priviliged to have several kind, gentle, deeply spiritual older ladies. They represent beautifully one aspect of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. But wilder examples like the Celtic Church, the early apostles, and the 18th century missionaries prove that this is not the only aspect. And in the challenging, exposing, often confrontational world of political life, maybe what we need right now is band of psychotically godly bad-ass dudes...

The ayatollah of Canterbury?

Furious controversy this week after Dr Rowan Williams, the head of the Church of England, was apparently quoted as supporting the idea of introducing elements of Islamic Sharia law into the British legal system.

Despite sharing a taste in beards with the spiritual leaders of revolutionary Iran, it appears on closer examination that the Archbishop was not advocating hand chopping as an alternative to community service for first offences of shoplifting. His gripe is with the one-size-fits-all secular legislation that has increasingly started encroaching into areas that used to be regarded as matters of conscience (often religious conscience).

He has watched with alarm as respected Christian adoption agencies have been threatened with closure if they do not comply with new regulations requiring them to place children with gay couples. A similar issue is brewing over the human fertilisation and embryology bill currently passing through parliament.

Dr Williams' solution seems to be a more flexible legislative approach which makes space for religious belief through providing opt-outs and statutory alternatives. And if he is going to advocate this for Christians, he senses that he would also have to support it for Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and everyone else.

This week's reaction must surely show that his approach, whatever its merits, is dead in the water. The British commitment to 'one law for all' goes back to Magna Carta. And thus yet another nail is driven into the coffin of the sacred-secular divide.

The message is clear. If Christians are going to be free to live according to their conscience in modern Britain, they will need to strive vigorously to ensure that the laws of this country continue to reflect broadly Christian values. This can hardly be a bad thing: Moses first made the point that righteous laws are a blessing to any nation. But it seems that the alternative is not just social sub-optimisation but creeping religious persecution.

Putting faith in diversity

Tuesday 15th January: Today I went along to a Foreign & Commonwealth Office consultation on 'age and belief as aspects of diversity'. I normally try to give the diversity fundamentalists a wide berth, but given the subject matter it seemed prudent to get involved at an early stage, to help avoid any strange ideas on religious belief finding their way into official policy.

The hour-long discussion was mostly uncontroversial; good points about the need to avoid fostering a 'victim culture' and the potential for conflict between the agendas of different special-interest groups. However, the biggest stir seemed to be caused by a comment that I made near the end.

I suggested that, rather than trying to identify more and more strands of diversity requiring special treatment (adding age and belief to their existing programmes on race, gender, and sexuality will bring the FCO's total to 5), we should instead agree some core principles and apply them equally to everyone. Thus, discrimination in pay or promotion on grounds unrelated to doing the job is unacceptable whether the individual is black, gay, female, octogenarian, zoroastrian, or has any other salient trait that might be considered a factor.

I admit that I didn't come up with this on the spur of the moment. I have been reflecting on how to balance personal freedom and the protection of individuals since the notorious Big Brother racist bullying incident brought it into the public spotlight. I believe that what Jade Goody was guilty of was foul mouthed, mean spirited bullying. It was wrong when directed at Shilpa Shetty (using some of the language of racial stereotypes in the process), it would have been equally wrong directed at any other human being, and it was wrong of Channel 4 to package and distribute it as entertainment. We teach children that bullying has no place in our schools, and we should be similarly intolerant of it in adult life.

This seemed to strike a chord with the FCOs consultation group. The fact is that very few of us still believe that our social ills can be addressed through divisive political correctness. A return to a values-based agenda (which leans heavily on biblical and Christian ideas about the value and dignity of every individual) is long overdue.

...and a blasphemous new year

The BBC have had a strange Christmas season this year.

They began advent by narrowly avoiding prosecution for blasphemy, following a case brought by Christian Voice over their 2005 screening of 'Jerry Springer: The Opera'. Having made a heroic stand for freedom of artistic expression in the courts, they then immediately threw it out of the window by voluntarily choosing to censor out the word 'faggot' from the popular Christmas hit 'Fairytale of New York'. The late Kirsty MacColl's acerbic lyrics were only saved by a public outcry and subsequent climbdown by the bosses of Radio 1 (the fact that Radio 2 had continued to play the song in full couldn't have helped much either).

All this merely goes to demonstrate what most of us already knew. Blasphemy laws (or their modern descendants, political correctness regulations) have never had much to do with protecting God from insult. They do however have everything to do with guarding the sensibilities of the current ruling elite. Whether 17th century ecclesiarchs or 21st century liberal authoritarians, the message is clear: you challenge the official view of the world at your peril.

In light of all this, I was intrigued to see what noted atheist Russell Davies would serve up for the eagerly awaited Doctor Who Christmas Special. Certainly the visually lavish offering was short on peace and goodwill (killer angels very much in evidence), and we were denied the satisfaction of moral justice (the bad guys didn't win, but most of the good guys didn't make it either). Lines like "She's just atoms, doctor... an echo of the ghost of consciousness" and "if you could decide who lives and who dies, that would make you a monster" are familar atheist mantras. Yet in spite of this, Davies portrays a world in which good and evil are very real and actions have clear moral consequences. And as the character Astrid chooses to sacrifice her own life in order that humanity might live, we are presented with a parable of redemption that is about as biblically rooted as they come.

Kylie Minogue as a 'type' of Christ?? To quote my girls' other TV favourite of this Christmas, The Railway Children, "Very beautiful and wonderful things do happen, don't they? And we live most of our lives in the hope of them."