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.

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?'

A Buddhist Perspective

2015

Of course, there were other faiths which I didn’t encounter so much. I could spend 25 more years finding the views of so many other faiths. From animists to Mormons, I would be spending my life asking for new perspectives. It was confusing enough as it was. For example: ‘What is the view of those who are male family members of those who have spontaneously combusted before the age of 50?’ – a trite question like that illustrated the plethora and range of perspectives out there. Literally, every human being has an opinion on it – even if that opinion is ‘I don’t really think about it much.’

But there are other faiths which have significant memberships and which needed to be covered…

I asked a Buddhist what he thought about the subject… he was a convert and highly intelligent, particularly skilled in his knowledge of history.

James

“We don’t need a Christian revival... although you might. We need to work out where our future lies now that we are no longer the world’s pre-eminent power, and create a new social compact to replace the old one that broke down irretrievably in the 1960’s. The days of deference to the old class-based structure have gone, and with it came a challenge to all established authority such as the Church and crown. 

The task for all post-Christian nations is to work out a civil morality to replace a Christian one that most of the population no longer believe in. That is already happening, and Christian thinking will be a major part of it because it’s what we know. However, if the churches try to impose it then Christianity will be marginalised just as the old religions of Britain were when Christianity arrived on these shores.”

Do we need a revival? Or is it just a preference? There is a sense in which it is not absolutely necessary for some... but it is absolutely necessary for others. In some ways it can even be a life and death issue. There would still be bad news and awful things happening, but as very few of us have lived through a revival, it is hard to do more than speculate at this point. Perhaps a better question is 'Would it make things better for most of the people, or would it be better never to happen?'

But even those who are set against it might find some interest in the lively debates which would occur. At the moment, many of those debates (often online), tend to be grim, graceless flame-wars. Perhaps a revival would temper those wars and make them a little more enjoyable. Life, after all, would be hideous if it were not tempered by love.

Next week I will be changing the style of this blog and moving on to some wider unexplored issues.

The Economists' Perspective

 

2014

 

This is going to be a dry entry. Basically, we are talking money and law. Please feel free to stop now if you are not interested… I'm not going to be talking about World War III and weapons of mass destruction here...

I'm not sure how we can make something which is so intrinsically interesting, so boring, but somehow we manage it. For those who still remain, thank you. As far as I could see, I was the only one writing about the economic and social impact of a modern-day revival. I was also in the minority among revivalists in being a liberal Christian. Think about it – if there was to be a modern revival, there would be an impact on society, a knock-on effect on laws (even if the new Christians were simply petitioning and lobbying). There would also be an influence on the economy because the revival would probably be coming from a grass-roots level. The more people who became Christians, the more people would support charities. The fewer people would be involved in things like drugs. And what would be the influence on the alcohol and nicotine trade? Historically, people drink less during a revival. Christians still drink, but there is a knock-on effect on these trades.

It's a minefield. People feared what should happen, if they ever thought about it. They assumed it would be a little like the US where abortion was eventually discouraged. Would the pro-lifers here also gain support? Probably. But what about the pro-choice Christians? I will write about the LGBT+ community later on this blog.

In October 2014 I went to see Robert Peston speak on economics at the Cheltenham Literature festival. I found the lecture boring, full of significant, yet dry graphs showing how precarious the economy was after the collapse of 2008. Strangely, the only thing that really struck me were the words of the man who introduced Robert Peston. The compere said: “It’s Sunday morning and the local churches want to know where everyone is.” The hall was full of around 500 people. There were probably a lot more people at churches but there were also a lot of people shopping or simply in their homes. Why did people seem to be everywhere but in churches (or reading my blog)?

And that was the problem among economists. There was speculation of all kinds of financial situations. Recessions. Boom and bust. Various countries economies growing. The cost-of-living crisis.

But no-one really took account of the black swan theory. A black swan among economists is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation. It does not come up on financial forecasts for a company or a country, because no-one expects to see it. Just like a black swan. But black swans exist, though they are rare. In hindsight, people often say they were obvious all the time.

In this case, the black swan was a Christian revival. People simply didn’t expect it.

 

The economy is complex and influenced by all kinds of factors, property, unemployment, tax, etc, etc, etc. I’m not financially illiterate but I was bored senseless by most of it. Presumably a revival would be good for the economy too as God blessed the nation? You would think so. But in the cost-of-living crisis which began proper in 2022, hot on the heals of a pandemic, almost everybody was having to cut back on luxuries. And once again, it was the poor who lost out the most. How were they supposed to weather the storm? Revival is good news for the poor, to put it simply, because people help each other more during one and have more concern for them. It’s not necessarily that people work harder and that there is a knock-on effect on the economy. Some people can’t do that. It is because there is more compassion within society and people help each other out. There is much historical evidence for this. And as a result, though shares may not rise and the country may still be in debt, individuals get help with their personal debts and their personal affairs. Sometimes the church helps, through organisations such as Christians Against Poverty. Or food banks. And then the emergency measures become measures to tackle the root causes of the problems – some of which stem from a lack of meaning among the general population. When meaning is found, even if that meaning is simply the compensation of eternal life and a better life this side of eternity, people start to feel more motivated in whatever they choose to do?

As I say, a dry post. It’s only money.

 

 

 

A Jewish Perspective

October 2010 University of Birmingham

 

I went to see the late Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks for his talk on the role of faith in modern day Britain, in an event organised by the Jewish Society (JSoc).

He stated that he saw faith as a force for good in society. As he entered the room everybody stood up out of respect... except for the Jewish lady sitting next to me. Quite impressed by her rebelliousness I sat back down and said how standing to show respect was such an outdated tradition. She informed me that she was disabled.

The chief rabbi saw secularism as the enemy and wanted all faiths to unite against this force. He spoke with an assured authority and the lecture hall was entranced by him. And it became clear that revival was a term understood by all faiths, not just Christianity. There could just as well be a revival of Judaism, a revival which seems to be prophesied in the Bible. 

Palestinian and Jewish tensions continue, especially at the moment, and those on the political left and the pollical right will select their camp into which to support (most right-wingers supporting Israel, most left-leaners supporting Palestinians. Moderate voices just hoping that the whole situation can be resolved peacefully.) It's a bit of a minefield.

Living in the Midlands, my exposure to Jewish people was significantly low for my childhood and most of my adulthood. I simply knew so few Jewish people. I was friends with a handful of Messianic Christians (who, in their own community, lost a lot of things by becoming believers in Jesus, facing discrimination even in Israel if they went there).

But of course, the Christian faith and the Bible are very much concerned with Jewish people. I maintained that a Jewish person was my best friend, after all. My faithful invisible friend.

Significantly, apart from the first revival in Israel of Christian believers among the Jewish people through the disciples, there had not really been a historic revival of Christianity in Israel. The consensus among Christians was that it would come, but not until the last of the last days. Meanwhile, Israel itself was prophesied to thrive again and perhaps we have seen the beginnings of this since it was re-established. But, in a way, they are still in survival mode and peace does not always come out of Israel. Furthermore, we have a very dubious belief set within Christianity that whoever blesses Israel will be blessed and whoever curses Israel will be cursed. Is it all really that simple? As I say, it's a minefield.

The issue is so complex and problematic that it is hard to write about and bring anything new to the table. All I would say is this – if a Christian revival is good for any gentile country, then why would it not be good for Israel too?

It seemed safer to boycott the thought…

The Chief Rabbi finished his talk about faiths uniting against secularism. I had taken notes and the lady next to me gave me a look as if to say... 'You ignorant gentile arse'.

Sometimes I fear I will never get my Righteous Among the Nations medal...