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."