The US

Written on 15th September 2016. America. Virginia. Christian college - Regent campus.

Donald Trump is against Hilary Clinton to get into the White House, but sexism is still alive and kicking. I suppose the thing which has really interested me is the way that faith issues are talked about so openly in all the US media. It seems healthier than the UK in that respect.

I am sitting on a kind of picnic table on the Regent College campus where a friend works in the School of Divinity here. I have been lucky enough to have a holiday in America. It is a Christian college founded by Pat Robertson who lives in a huge house nearby. His house is protected by the police 24/7 as he has received death threats recently. He has employed his family to work at the TV station here - CBN, one of the largest Christian TV news stations in the world. In some ways it is like old Constantinople, and may be the closest I have been where a Christian community is in the majority, apart from Christian festivals and churches. As such, I am interested to see how the place feels and whether it really is the utopia I have imagined a revival might be.

I have been told that I have romanticised what a revival is. Usually, a person will romanticise the past but it looks as if I am perceived to romanticise the future. Not a comfortable place for someone with a pessimistic bias. If a revival is an abundance of Christians, then you could say that this Bible belt area is in a kind of revival. But do the believers also need to change their ways?

I asked my friend if things were better here. He thought that there were a whole new set of problems and that poverty and unemployment, drug use and alcoholism were still major issues. As if to bring this message home I was taken to a kind of faith-based soup kitchen. There was a service before the meal and I was asked to give a brief talk about my life story. I wanted to keep it short, aware that the congregation were hungry and had come for the clothes and food. As I spoke, I wondered why people were wandering around, talking and why there was some disruption at the back of the hall. It turned out that the microphone wasn't working and they had missed most of the life story. The story of my life. When the microphone began to work and I realised what had happened, I managed to say a few words about Christ helping me to be drug-free. I said that Jesus can make people's lives better and that when suffering we need gentleness and love. My nerves betrayed me and I had clutched the microphone like it was a cliff-top. It was the usual anti-victorious-Christian scene I am so good at. They clapped politely. Afterwards, the preacher went on too long and the people were hungry. I remembered Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London where he was so scathing of the do-gooders who made people listen to long sermons in exchange for food and accommodation.

I helped to hand out bread and vegetables tied together in heavy plastic bags, aware of the humiliation of being a black person accepting help from a relatively privileged white guy. The stained polystyrene roof sparkled with a kind of ironic glamour, like the glamour of the pound stores at Christmas time in the UK. One female volunteer at the soup kitchen said that there were miracles among the poor. But she was hunched and in need of healing herself. It was a rumour. A man named Ali, a thin black man with a face that suggested a life story better than mine, came for food.

"What is it like to live here?" I asked.

"There isn't that much racial tension or violence," he replied, before asking what the Queen was like.

But I only saw the poverty and contrast between rich and poor in this place. And as I write, on the Christian campus which charges students large sums for education, between Pat Robertson's huge house, TV station and college campus where he employed his family in what seemed like more of a business than a ministry. Perhaps it was a simplistic view - that the glamorous chandeliers and mansion-like staircases at the college were necessary to gain students, to get customers, to make money. That the nepotism was fair and right and good. I dont think nepotism is always wrong or a sin, but it can be if there is a more qualified candidate. It is so widespread in the world and the Church anyway. It was a simplistic view of a far more complicated reality, and yet I wondered why that view was always refuted. And seeing the contrast between rich and poor I concluded that yes, I really had romanticised revival. It was not what I wanted to believe. There were huge problems here.

"Why are Christians so weird?" asked a student at the college coffee store. And if I had dug deeper, if I had really, really dug deep, would I have found what I was looking for? 'Seek and you shall find' being a spiritual law. But I hadn't wanted to find a community which had so many problems. I had wanted to find, been seeking for, a utopia. And now I had to face facts. Revival is not utopia. There would still be great problems. And every ideal feels like that, like some kind of compromise or a lowering of hope. And that is hard. And once again the question:

'But would it make things better?'