Brexit and Revival

2016 (From my diary)

‘Some Christian writers are suggesting that the vote for Brexit has resulted in the start of a revival. I somehow doubt it. Believers are divided on which way to vote but the general consensus from those who say they know how God feels over news events, is that Jehovah wants Brexit to happen for some reason. I am undecided.’

 

2017

In 2016 the UK gave its notorious vote for Brexit. It was a strange time and it was not a time when religion kept out of politics. Believers were divided on it. But for some it seemed as if God would only be pleased if we left the EU. Donald Trump earned similar favour with a certain kind of believer. There seemed to be such a deep-seated sense of alienation in society against both the media and the establishment. So, Brexit and Trump seemed to offer some kind of hope to many. Farage was having the time of his life yet again.

The idea was that Brexit would disentangle Britain from a corrupt EU and possibly, eventually, a one world government. But for many it was more about the free movement of others into the UK. Was that discrimination and prejudice or was it about nationalism? Or both?

Many US believers felt that Trump would speak up for believers and for Christian issues, including the issue of termination. But there was no unity in Christian circles on these things. Donald Trump polarised people, there were few on the fence. Even in Britain he had many supporters and opponents.

Brexit, according to some of those commentators, was supposed to result in revival. The LORD would be pleased and this was supposed to create an atmosphere for revival and open up the floodgates of Heaven. But by the start of 2017 all it seemed to have done was create an atmosphere for jingoism. Voices which had never been heard (or tolerated) began to be heard. There were strange winds of change, but that change was not a revival, it was a strange kind of limbo, a vacuum in which the loudest and proudest would have their agendas pushed to the forefront of the consciousness of society. Most of the noise came from the shallow end of the pool. The meek did not push to the front of the queue and were drowned out by the shouts in the confusion in Britain at the time.

 

An incident I witnessed in a town in the Midlands in February 2017 seemed to sum up the whole thing. In the town centre, next to the market place, a street preacher began to preach in the jaded old morning. He said, “Repent. God is loving, God is good. Surrender to Christ. It doesn’t matter what you have done, he will forgive you. These are the end times.”

And he repeated this message to the people on a kind of loop, sometimes changing the order of the sentences. I listened for a while, as was my habit at the time. Then I saw one of the market traders conferring with a security guard who seemed to be linked to the market stalls (it was market day). And the guard, a tall, well-built man with a wispy beard, went across to speak with the preacher (a much more vulnerable looking man). I filmed the incident on my phone, expecting trouble. After a few minutes the man was moved on. The market stall holder had given the security guy his orders and he had succeeded in moving on the preacher, even though he was doing nothing wrong and had not even been using anything apart from his voice. His voice was most likely drowned out by the market stall holder who felt that he was bad for business.

The security guard walked across to me aggressively, smiled as if he had done some deed I should be pleased with (or else the smile said something more sinister) and then suddenly swerved off centimetres from me. I followed the street preacher briefly and he walked out of town, preaching as he went. To him, of course, it was the end times, and such things were to be expected.

The reason this story summed up the times was because the incident was happening on a much larger scale in society – and not just to street preachers.

Traders of all kinds felt that Christianity was not good for business. And their voices were the ones that were heard. And maybe, for some businesses they were right. In the town market there was a resident fortune teller – she, a grey-haired lady who claimed to be the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter had been there for years. She actually seemed quite nice, had a right to be there and I considered going to her if things got really bad, although these days I rarely even read my horoscope. What would a revival mean for new age traders? Other market stalls sold drug paraphernalia, poppers and the usual. But even the more legitimate market traders seemed to fear that the preachers were bad for business. Bad for mobile phone cases. Bad for fabrics. Bad for all kinds of things. It was not as if many people stopped to listen anyway. And that, essentially was the trouble. As the idol makers in the book of Acts in the Bible objected to Paul’s preaching, knowing that his message would result in a loss of their jobs and trade, so the modern-day preachers (even when they preached outside the traditional marketplace) seemed to be a threat to the jobs of many. To those who manufactured arms. To the payday lenders and those who dealt in drugs. These voices seemed to prevail at that time. For the sake, of course, of freedom of choice. And on a macro level, those who criticised or who preached a message which reduced their trade, would be thrown out by the security guards. Guards who would smile as they intimidated and moved on the voices and witnesses in broad daylight.

In the false dawn of Brexit.