Categories: uncategorized
Date: 02 April 2009 07:20:43
This week we have, again, seen how a country which has been seen as losing its religious identity has used/ subverted religious symbols and slogans in order to make political points. Picture 7 in this montage from the BBC coverage of G20 protests is one example; the BNP advert is another. Jonathan Bartley has produced this insightful piece for Ekklesia on the topic of the latter.
The body of literature which looks at secularisation in this country and in the US is broad and often contradictory. Amongst the more readable, and less polarised are Callum Brown's Death of Christian Britain, (which has recently come out in second edition) and Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates by Grace Davie. Both of these books talk of the way that even if traditional religion and practice decline (or even die) a shadow remains within the collective memory.
This shadow is what Bartley is talking about the church having played on and what the activists are taking and using. It is a difficult thing, which relates to collective memories and identity formation, and as we have seen cannot be controlled by religion or religious groups. This is the same shadow that makes The Life of Brian so funny to many but equally so offensive to some.
The question I believe the church is increasingly facing, but failing to adequately address is how to engage with this shadow. On one level it is a shadow that anybody trying to share the gospel will want to exploit..... it gives us our connection with a post-Christian society. However, it is a shadow Christians want to use in some kind of "pure form" which rejects (or simply fails to recognise) the fluid nature of this shadow. It is not a solid thing we can simply add to our toolbox of late/modern ministry tool box of metaphor and image. This is a fluid shadow, a shape shifter, which changes according to purpose and according to time and space. If we try to ignore it's use by others.... believing this will starve the oxygen of publicity we are playing a dangerous game. The shadow needs to be taken back and it's shape remoulded again to challenge the uses we find so offensive.
We need to wrestle with this shadow, not simply try to lock it away until we wish to reuse it. Being a shape shifter it will take a liquid form and simply slip under the door of where-ever we try to lock it up. We have to realise it is an independent being, of which "the church" doesn't have ownership.
As for what Jesus would actually do this is something I am really beginning to struggle with. I don't think it is simply nothing, as some have suggested according to the article. The answer that keeps coming back to me, and was reinforced during a Lent bible study where we looked at the story of Zacceus yesterday, was Jesus would probably sit down for a meal with Nick Griffin and co. He would love them, see the image of God within them, despite their sin and horribleness. He would pursuade them to change their lives through showing the alternative to them, in a loving way which involved befriending them. Practically I don't know how we can do that and it is certainly something I am not sure I could / would feel safe doing and am not about to engage in. Yet this is the type of thing discipleship means...