Nick Spencer pays tribute to the hugely influential psychologist Daniel Kahneman who died recently, and shows how his ideas about human nature were both pioneeringly new and rather old. 27/03/2024

1. Sinful Adam

“If we admit the fall of our first Parents”, wrote pioneer chemist Robert Boyle in 1675 [Reason and Religion], we will not be surprised to discover that “our Passions and Interests, and oftentimes our Vices pervert our Intellects.” “Our understandings”, he continued, “are universally biased, and impos’d upon by our Wills and Affections.”

This was a familiar lament in the seventeenth century. Christian theology had hardly neglected the story of “our first parents” – Adam, Eve, the Fall, their exile from Eden, and the ensuing world of labour, pain, and sin – but Protestant Christians of the early modern period rediscovered it with a vengeance. And they drew out a powerful new cognitive dimension to the story.

Before the Fall, they argued, Adam’s knowledge had been encyclopaedic, his reason had been perfect, his senses preternaturally acute. The same, many claimed, applied to Eve, who, at least according to Martin Luther, “had these mental gifts in the same degree as Adam.”

Then everything changed. Turned away from God, the fallen human mind was no longer disposed to admit “the light of Truth”, Boyle explained. Instead, it now receives “an infusion, as it were, of adventitious Colours (that disguise the light) from the Will and Affections.” Our “judgement” was distorted, our “notions” bent according to our “senses… [our] inclinations… [and our] interests.”

Christian apologists today sometimes claim that belief in the literal truth of Genesis is a purely modern phenomenon, the legacy of modernity and its fractious child fundamentalism. Before the late nineteenth century, they maintain, no–one thought the story of Adam and Eve was literally true. This is categorically wrong. Were you to be transported back to the seventeenth century to ask your average pew–sitter whether they thought Adam had been real, you would have received an unequivocal yes, as well as some very perplexed looks. “Most people,” wrote poet William Dawes as late as 1731, “own it not six thousand year, since first this beauteous fabric did appear.”

But you would also have been told, or you would soon have picked up, that the literal truth of Adam’s existence was the least interesting thing about him. Adam’s story belonged not just to Adam. It belonged to everyone. Indeed, it was the story of everyone. Adam was humanity as it should have been, humanity as it failed to be, humanity as it now tragically remained. To talk about Adam (and Eve) was to talk about the human condition, morality, mind, body, and all.

And in the early modern period, if you were a Protestant (Catholic thought was much more sanguine about the effect of the Fall on reason), to talk about Adam was to embrace an anthropology that was painfully conscious of the fragility, fallibility, and multiple failures of the human mind. Prior to the Fall, John Calvin had written in his commentary on Genesis, “Adam was endued with a right judgment [and] had affections in harmony with reason.” After it, the “mind was smitten with blindness, and infected with innumerable errors.” Passion now triumphed over reason; the senses (themselves damaged) over rationality; the distorted will over knowledge of the truth.

It was not that humanity altogether lacked reason, although some theologians, convinced of total human depravity, claimed they did. Reason still survived, but it was impaired, vulnerable to pride, “exist[ing] subjectively within us”, “weakened, darkened and tainted by the Fall”. Different passions, different selves, fallen and saved, impassioned and reasonable, warred within us.

The whole thing, according to historian Peter Harrison, served as a huge spur to the scientific revolution. Science, or experimental natural philosophy as it was then known, was a way of restoring to humanity Adam’s proper mastery of nature by restoring his judgement, reason, will, and knowledge. In time, it was hoped, humans would once again become fully rational.

2. Introducing Daniel Kahneman and Thinking, Fast and Slow

In 1969, Daniel Kahneman met Amos Tversky. Kahneman had survived the Nazi occupation of France, emigrated to British Palestine, and then worked as a psychologist for the Israeli Defence Force. He was transparently brilliant and went on to hold academic positions in Jerusalem, Cambridge, and Harvard. Tversky was, if anything, more remarkable. He had also worked for the IDF, as a paratrooper as well as a psychologist, and was now employed by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when the two met.

The two set out, in Kahneman’s words “to understand how humans actually make risky choices, without assuming anything about their rationality” and over the next few years were to publish a number of academic papers, in particular ‘Prospect Theory: an analysis of decision under risk’, and ‘Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’, which would revolutionise their discipline, each earning over 20,000 citations.

Tversky died in 1996 but Kahneman would go on to win the Nobel prize six years later (he references Amos nearly a hundred times in his Nobel biography) and publish Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011. The book sold a million copies in first year, a number and speed comparable only to Fifty Shades of Grey[1], and it would go on to sell ten times that over the next decade.[2]

3. Utility Theory

The key moment in their relationship came early when Tversky gave Kahneman an essay by the Swiss economist Bruno Frey on Utility Theory. Utility Theory is the idea that human preferences are consistent and rational, and reliably based on the value, or utility, that people assign to different possible outcomes. It contends that people exercise this calculus consistently as a way of maximising their “utility” when making uncertain choices.

The theory is grounded in the idea that human beings are ruled by rational self–interest. Rationality here is not the expansive virtue familiar from common usage but refers, more modestly, to whether someone’s choices are internally consistent and coherent. If you prefer A to B and B to C, rationality dictates that you must prefer A to C.

Similarly, self–interest does not mean selfish in the popular sense of the word (although the two terms are often used interchangeably) so much as being governed by the desire to maximise utility as the individual understands it. “The agent of economic theory,” Frey’s opening sentence proclaimed, “is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change”.

Utility Theory was fundamental to the economic and social sciences at the time, and had far–reaching implications that rippled through state and market. If this was indeed who humans were, how they thought and why they chose what they did, it followed that it was the basis on which government should or, more precisely, should not interfere in their lives. “Faith in human rationality is closely linked to an ideology in which it is unnecessary and even immoral to protect people against their choices.” Individuals are rational and consistent. They are best positioned to know not only what they value but also what price they are prepared to pay, or risk they are prepared to take, to get it. People know best for themselves. We should leave them alone. It is the underlying logic of libertarianism and of its less bullish but more popular cousin, liberalism.

In the early 1970s, Kahneman was blessed by ignorance. “I did not know enough about utility theory to be blinded by respect for it,” he wrote. The problem, as he saw it, was that the theory did not square with the understanding of humans acquired through his experience, personal and professional, in war–time France, newly–founded Israel or 1960s America. He and Tversky discussed the paper and the issues it threw up. “My career would be defined by that conversation,” he said.

4. Two systems of thinking

Thinking, Fast and Slow opens with Kahneman describing two different “systems” of thinking. One is automatic, impressionistic, instinctive, lazy. It neglects ambiguity and dismisses doubt. It thinks that “what you see is all there is [WYSIATI]” and sees the world as tidier, simpler, more predictable, and more coherent than it really is. System 2, by contrast, is hesitant, sceptical, effortful, reflective. It stops us from turning foolish thoughts and inappropriate impulses into embarrassing mistakes. It is who we like to think we are.

Put in this way, there seems to be more than a passing resemblance to Iain McGilchrist’s understanding of left and right hemispheric approaches to thinking. At times in Kahneman’s book, the resonance feels obvious. The two systems work, he writes, “if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind.” They don’t do different things, in much the same way as McGilchrist is at pains to emphasise the left and right hemispheres don’t do different things; rather they do the same things but in different ways, each with its own “individual personalities, abilities, and limitations.”

Tempting as it is to make, however, the association it probably incidental; perhaps (ironically) an instinctive System 1–type of association, rather than a more reflective System–2 reaction. McGilchrist’s then recently published book, The Master and his Emissary, is absent from Thinking, Fast and Slow, as is his general hemispheric approach, and his follow up work, The Matter with Things is more positive about human judgment and intuition than is Kahneman is Thinking, Fast and Slow or his co–authored follow up book Noise. According to McGilchrist, Kahneman’s system 1 and system 2 “cuts the cake ‘horizontally’ (top brain versus bottom brain)” rather than by hemisphere, and although it detects similar patterns of human response, to do with speed and confidence verses caution and deliberation, it does not do so in the same way, or with the same conclusions, as McGilchrist does.

In any case, the two–systems approach to the way we think is not the most interesting or startling observation in Kahneman’s book. After all, is anyone really surprised to learn that humans can be both instinctive and reflective, or that we are not natural statisticians but that we usually can, with hard work, grasp basic statistical thinking? More penetrating, and more fateful is the ensuing analysis of our general cognitive fallibility that Kahneman builds on his two systems.

5. The way we really think:

The theory that human beings are self–interested, rational agents does not imagine that we are mean–spirited or naturally gifted calculators. Rather, it is simply that we are reliably capable of identifying options that generate the best utility for ourselves, according to our values, and calculating accurately what we are prepared to do to achieve them. We know what we want. We are able to judge accurately. We are consistent in our decisions.

The work that Kahneman and Tversky did suggests otherwise. In our everyday life, it transpires, our judgement is plagued with misleading heuristics, biases, fallacies, blindness, and overconfidence. Our “intuitive expectations are governed by a consistent misperception of the world”, one that we are disinclined to recognise let alone correct.

Our minds are a nest of misleading “heuristics”. A heuristic is a kind of cognitive short cut or rule of thumb, a “simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.” Because thinking (slow) is hard work, we adopt a lot of heuristics, to get us close to the answer. The problem is that often they don’t get very close at all.

We commonly make decisions on the basis whether we like or dislike something (or someone) – the so–called ‘affect heuristic’ – rather than doing the hard work of assessing it (or them) according to their relevant merits. We form judgements according to stereotypical impressions – the ‘representativeness heuristic’ – rather than considering the information relevant to the specific case. We estimate the relative importance of something from the ease by which we recall it – the ‘availability heuristic’. Worse, when a media report provokes a public reaction which provokes more media coverage, we get an ‘availability cascade’, which further distorts out judgement. It’s why we are so prone to overestimate the actual risk of terrorism as opposed to, say, road accidents. Time and again, when faced with a difficult question, we substitute an easier one, which fails to tell us what we need to know, without noting the substitution.

Our thinking is also riddled with biases. We are painfully prone to searching for evidence that confirms our existing beliefs – so–called ‘confirmation bias’ – rather than seeking data that might challenge of overturn those beliefs (which is why science is both so unnatural, and also so vulnerable to the actual practice of scientists). We tend to revise the history of our beliefs in light of what actually happened – the so–called ‘hindsight bias’ – rather than struggle with painful but productive cognitive dissonance of having our beliefs overturned. We are habitually overconfident about our judgements and decisions – the so–called ‘optimistic bias’, perhaps “the most significant of all cognitive biases” – a bias that is advantageous in as far as it enables resilience, but which can also be very costly, not least financially. We are, of course, largely unaware of our biases.

Our thinking is also fallacious. We repeatedly commit the so–called ‘planning fallacy’, in which our plans are far too close to the unrealistic best–case scenario. We repeatedly commit the so–called ‘conjunction fallacy’, in which we wrongly judge the conjunction between two events to be more probable than either of one separately (e.g. in the now–famous example, Linda is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller)[3]. We are persistently blind to the sheer impact of randomness or chance in events, preferring instead to find a meaningful, causal narrative in things that lack them, sometimes in order to laud our own agency, sometimes as a means of reassuring ourselves that the world makes sense.

We have a tendency to overvalue significantly first impressions, whether good or bad – the so–called ‘halo effect’. We are constantly misled by our intuitions. “Associative memory generates subjectively compelling intuitions that are false.” We have an unwarranted but powerful bias towards believing that small samples accurately resemble the population from which they are drawn. We are unduly influenced by our current state of mind whenever we evaluate our happiness. Our opinions change “without apparent reason”, even for matters of careful, considered judgement by professional experts”. We are inclined to rate something according to the final sensation it leaves us with rather than its duration – the so–called ‘peak–end rule’ – elevating the memory of an experience over the experience itself (which is presumably why so many people spend so much time filming what they are doing on holiday or at a concert rather than doing it).

We are highly vulnerable to priming. Experiments that prime people with idea of money see them behaving in a more independent, more individualistic, more selfish way than usual. Experiments that prime them with the thought of death makes them more sympathetic to authoritarian ideas.

We are highly vulnerable to framing. Tastes are not fixed but vary according to a reference point. Our judgements of an event can be fundamentally reshaped by the perspective in which it is placed. Our judgements are highly vulnerable to our moods, to feelings of stress or fatigue; for example, doctors are more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day than at its start. Our thoughts and our behaviour are highly influenced by the environment of the moment.

We are, in short, a mess. Our thinking is “inconsistent and unpredictable”. Logical consistency “a hopeless mirage”. We underestimate role of chance in success. We overestimate how much we know about the world. We place far too much faith in our intuitions. We have neither “the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences”. “Laziness is built deep into our nature”. Perhaps most painfully, “you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.” Not only do we not know the world as we think we do. We do not even know ourselves.

6. Embodied Thought

There rests the case for the prosecution against ‘rational economic man’. It is strong, and leaves us with the picture of the human that is as unflattering as it is (or should be) familiar. It certainly would have been familiar to Robert Boyle, and his Protestant contemporaries, for it reveals an Adam (and Eve) who possess a powerful intellect, but one that is “coloured”, “pervert[ed]”, “infused”, “afflicted”, “biased”, “bent”, “smitten”, “infected”, “weakened”, “darkened”, “tainted”, and “impos’d upon” by “passion”, “will”, “affection”, “errors”, “inclination”, “interests”, and “senses”.

Nor is this the only way in which Kahneman’s human resembles the Protestant ‘Adam’. For the other element on which Kahneman touches in Thinking, Fast and Slow, drawing on the work he did before he met Tversky, was how bodily human thinking is. Kahneman’s early work focused on visual perception and attention, and he is at pains to emphasise in the book how cognition is embodied.

The body offers a picture of the mind. The size of the pupil of one’s eye, for example, is an index of the level of mental energy used. “Merely thinking about stabbing a coworker in the back [!] leaves people more inclined to buy soap [and] disinfectant” – the so–called Lady Macbeth effect. The eye and body offer a window on to the mind, but they do more than that. They shape the way we think. Small and apparently unnoticed stimuli on our body from our immediate, physical environment have a perceptible influence on our thoughts and actions, and predictably more substantial ones have a bigger impact. All of this further undermines the rational self–image we prize, of our minds working well, unimpeded by irrelevant, extraneous physical prompts. Kahneman writes that the body is “involved in computation” but this seems to underplay it. As he says early on, “You think with your body, not only your brain”.

We sometimes imagine that this is a quintessentially modern approach, made possible only once Darwin had demonstrated that humans are evolved as any other animal. That which we like to think makes us uniquely human (and dignified) – our rational thought, the profundity of our emotions, etc. – is not only comparable to that in animals, but fundamentally animalistic. Our intellect, our love, our happiness, our anger are biological rather than spiritual, in the way that was commonly believed when Darwin was a young medical student in the early nineteenth century. Before the Darwinian turn in our anthropology, our minds, like our souls, were detached from our bodies as that titan of seventeenth century thought, Descartes, argued.

If so, we might want to return to hear more voices from the early modern period. Take, for example, the poet and preacher, John Donne, from a couple of generations before Boyle. “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,” Donne wrote in his poem ‘The Ecstasie’, “But yet the body is his book,”. “One might almost say, her body thought,” he said of Elizabeth Drury in his ‘Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary’.

This was not simply poetic licence. “Doth the mind so follow the temper of the body, that because those complexions are aptest to change, the mind is therefore so too?” Donne pondered in one of his early Paradoxes and Problems. “Our mind is heavy in our bodies afflictions, and rejoyceth in the bodies pleasures”, he wrote in another. “The body makes the mind”, he wrote in a third. Reading Donne’s sermons, John Carey wrote, “we are repeatedly conscious of this need to anchor abstract truths in the human anatomy.”[4]

Donne is arguably sui generis, one of the most generative, paradoxical, and provocative thinkers of his time. He was certainly unusually interested in the body. But neither his interest nor his ideas were unique. He read a lot of contemporary medical literature and integrating its ideas into his verse with vigour. And he adopted the idea for “importing anatomical density into spiritual contexts” from the Church Fathers, from one of whom he also borrowed to reconcile his heterodox idea that the soul itself was being dependent on the body.[5] In other words he was, to a discernible degree, of his age, “emerg[ing] from within a physiology that imagined souls and bodies as far more closely connected than we post–Cartesians tend to allow.”[6]

Just as Kahneman (and Tversky’s) idea that there is “an inconsistency… built into the design of our minds” would not have been out place in a seventeenth century, so his conviction that “you think with your body” would have also been familiar. Kahneman’s work, like that of any good revolution, brings us back roughly to where we once were.

7. The problems with Thinking, Fast and Slow

Kahneman’s work has been criticized. Thinking, Fast and Slow was published just before people began to talk about the ‘replication crisis’, in which the inability to reproduce the results of many psychological experiments cast a shadow over their reliability. Subsequent analysis showed that a number of the studies on which Kahneman had drawn, particularly those about the effects of priming on decision making, were not as trustworthy as he thought.

He became aware of this problem and, a year after the book was published, wrote an open letter to colleagues working on priming studies, saying that “your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research”, and warning that he saw “a train wreck looming.”[7] In response to criticism of his own work, he acknowledged that “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies.”[8] A subsequent analysis of the integrity of the studies on which he relied showed that the problem extended beyond priming studies. Readers of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the authors of the analysis concluded, should take the book “as a subjective account by an eminent psychologist, rather than an objective summary of scientific evidence.”[9]

Kahneman had not been aware of the fallibility of these studies, and so could hardly be blamed for his use of them. More culpably, he was not altogether above his own “framing” tricks. Iain McGilchrist, perplexed by the critique of expert intuition he read about in Thinking, Fast and Slow, followed up the studies on which Kahneman was relying at this point.[10] He found that they were not as straightforwardly supportive Kahneman claimed[11] including, sometimes, in the way the results were presented. For example, whereas one original paper, evaluating the reliability of internal corporate audits, concluded that the judgment stability averaged .79, meaning that auditors were about 80% stable in their judgments,[12] Kahneman had re–framed the finding as they “contradict[ed] themselves 20% of the time.” It was the same statistic but reframed to give a rather different impression, and arguably to lend support to a narrative that it actually undermined.

A third criticism is linked to this point about framing. Thinking, Fast and Slow is acute in the way it fingers the effect of framing on our decisions, however (un)reliable the studies on which it rests are. In reality, framing is a very familiar observation to anyone who has lived within a consumerist culture. We naturally prefer a cash discount to a credit surcharge. Kahneman is good at explaining why. But in explaining how framing can distort our views, he sometimes seemsto slip into the belief that there is a naked, unmediated, unframed reality out there from which our judgements are being distorted.[13]

This might indeed be the case in certain ‘factual’ situations. Kahneman mentions one study that showed how people who saw information about ‘a disease that kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000’ considered it to be more dangerous that those who were told about ‘a disease that kills 24.14% of the population’. The high, raw numbers wrongly framed the first as a greater threat than the lower–sounding percentages of the second. But calculations like this are less common that we might think, and humans normally live and move and have their being in webs of communication rather than in any undiluted reality, whatever that may be.

“Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself”, Kahneman writes in his chapter on framing. “Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance.” But such statements only make sense if there is such a thing as “reality itself” to which we have access, such a thing as “substance” that is unmediated by description. Most of the time, there is not, and what we encounter, from the most obviously contested ethical or political affairs (‘terrorist’ vs ‘freedom fighter’) all the way down the basic physical reality that sounds us, we encounter only though morally, aesthetically, and existentially loaded “description”. As ever, The Simpsons nail it. Defending the difference between the name and the reality, Lisa quotes Shakespeare: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” “Not if you called ‘em ‘stench blossoms’”, Bart responds. “Or ‘crap weeds’”, Homer adds.[14]

Perhaps the most consistent criticism of Kahneman’s work, however, is that it puts forward too negative view of human nature. The pessimistic wood is hard to miss from among the trees of fallacies, biases, misleading heuristics, deceptive associations, vulnerability to priming and framing, and the like. Humans are ludicrously hubristic. “Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous.” We are self–defensive, “more motivated to avoid bad self–definitions than to pursue good ones.” We are dangerously bad at calculating risk, overweighing unlikely events, obsessing about what – statistically speaking – we shouldn’t. We exaggerate our ability to forecast the future. We are self–deceptive, constantly fooling ourselves “by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true,” as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whom Kahneman quotes approvingly, says. The overall verdict is not a happy one. “Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favourable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.”

In response to the criticism, however, Kahneman insists that his view of human nature is not as unrelentingly or unfairly negative as all that. Albeit he admits he is “generally not optimistic about the potential for personal control of biases,” he also insists that we are not completely at the mercy of priming, that intuition is not always misguided, and that System 1 thinking is the basis of what we do right as well as what we do wrong. “I often cringe”, he says at the end of the book, “when my work with Amos is credited with demonstrating that human choices are irrational – with all the overtones that has of impulsivity, emotionality, stubborn resistance to reasonable arguments etc – when in fact our research only showed that Humans are not well described by the rational–agent model.”

And that surely is the point. The wonder is that we should ever have found ourselves in a position in which we are perplexed or upset by this picture of embodied human mental fallibility. Kahneman’s picture of how humans actually do think should be recognisable to anyone who has paid serious attention to their own thought processes or, in as far as they are accessible, to those of people around us.

Humans are pattern seekers. We think associatively, causally, narratively, metaphorically. We believe in a coherent world, in which regularities are not simply the result of accident but reflect a deep underlying causality or intention. We are inclined to find a coherent causal story that links and explains the details and fragments of reality we stumble over. We draw connections often where none exists, and we find reasons for things when chance is a better explanation.

We are deeply sensitive to issues of fairness, not in the sense that we are good – “experiments have shown that strangers who observe unfair behaviour often join in the punishment” – but in the sense that the perceived un/fairness of a situation is intrinsic to our assessment of it. (Can anyone who has ever spent any time in the company of a small child be surprised by this?) Accordingly, we are highly sensitive to questions of prestige and respect – “except for the very poor, for whom income coincides with survival, the main motives of money–seeking are not necessarily economic” – and so also highly vulnerable to and influenced by emotions like esteem, regret, or blame. (Can anyone who has ever spent any time in the company of a small child…)

If anything, all this is too self–evidently true, and, to be honest, Thinking, Fast and Slow has more than its fair share of ‘no shit, Sherlock’ observations. “As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy decreases.” “Self–control requires attention and effort.” “Awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages.” “Risk takers underestimate the odds they face.” “Happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”

Whether or not this is a fair criticism, Kahneman himself admits in the book that “Amos and I often joked that we were engaged in studying a subject about which our grandmothers knew a great deal.” Indeed so. You do not have to be a Jewish grandma or a psychological sceptic to scratch your head in wonder at the incredulity provoked by Kahneman’s picture of human nature.

8. The return of “miswanting”

That incredulity derives surely from the extraordinary hold that the rational–agent model has had on us, flattering our pride and underpinning our whole liberal enterprise. Our forebears, even recent ones, would have found it hard to understand why anyone should be incredulous about the idea that humans need external factors – community, institutions, traditions, ideologies – to orient us, instruct us, and to correct our own decisions; that sometimes – wait for it – we are not the best judges of our own good.

Everything liberalism has achieved, from fighting off the atavistic oppressions of a traditionalist past to combating the crushing expectations of a utopian future is grounded on the idea that we, here, now, are the ones who know best what is best for us. Because if we don’t, who does? The idea put forward towards the end of Kahneman’s book, that “we cannot fully trust our preferences to reflect our interests, even if they are based on personal experience” is nothing short of liberal heresy.

So it is as a modern heresy that Kahneman’s book works, dissolving the idea not only that we are rational, consistent individuals but even that we are individuals, i.e. single and indivisible, at all. “The moment–to–moment variability in the efficacy of the brain is not just driven by external influences… it is a characteristic of the way our brain functions.” We are warring selves. “You are not the same person at all times”. The experiencing self is different from the remembering self. We are Legion, very often, quoting the title of a book by the psychologist Timothy Wilson, “strangers to ourselves”.

The consequences of all this are momentous. Kahneman’s work is famed for many reasons. One is how it thoroughly undermines the trust we place in experts, or at least most of them. Fund managers, political pundits, and economic forecasters commonly “produce poorer predictions than dart–throwing monkeys”. One is reminded of the Queen’s deadpan question when visiting the London School of Economics after the Crash “Why did no–one see this coming?” CEOs, statisticians, and job interviewers are not vastly better, and even medics, to whom we entrust so much, do not fare that well.[15]

A second is his proposed solution to this. Part of the answer to this is simply to develop better procedures and techniques for making decisions, many of which have a “my grandmother would have said…” flavour to them: obtain outside perspectives, aggregate viewpoints, avoid fixating on short term outcomes, ensure decisions are not made under physical stress or burden, etc. Part of the answer orients him towards the use of algorithms to replace human judgement.[16] And part of the answer became evident in the whole new field of “libertarian paternalism”, “choice architecture”, and Nudge theory that his work catalysed.[17]

However, I want to end this essay not by looking not at how the disruption and solutions inherent in Thinking, Fast and Slow but by looking again at its conception of human nature and by going back to where we started. The realisation that humans are not rational agents, consistent and coherent (and selfish) in our choices has led to the coining of a new word.

“Miswanting” seems to have entered usage around the turn of the century. Kahneman dates it to a chapter written by Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, entitled “Miswanting: Some Problems in Effective Forecasting”, in a book about Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition. The word is used “to describe bad choices that arise from errors of affective forecasting” but has spread to mean what is already implicit in that definition, namely people desiring things that will not ultimately actually make them happy or satisfied.

It’s a clever, recognisable, and eminently useful term, although one that, properly speaking, should have no place in a truly liberal society. To tell someone they miswant something is to say to them that, at this particular moment I know better than you do what you really want. And in a culture where the individual’s will is sovereign, that is hard to justify.

But in reality, we all recognise the truth of miswanting things, both for ourselves and for those whom we know and love. And so term makes intuitive sense, just as it would have done in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it would be hard to find a better term to describe exactly what transpired in Eden. Adam and Eve miswanted the apple. Their forecasting was badly misguided. They were focusing on short–term goals. They chose an immediate return over long term security.

The word is so perfect, it is hard to believe that it wasn’t used at the time. Alas, it appears not to have been. Joseph Hall, the bishop of Norwich, did use the term “miswonting” in 1606, but it is a homophone rather than a synonym, meaning “lack of use” rather than wrong desire.[18]

But, if English lacked the term miswanting, it did have alternatives. The word “misyearning”, meaning wrong desire, entered the language in about 1480. “Miswill”, meaning the same thing, was being used in 1496. Arthur Golding used the word “miswishing” in a translation of the reformer John Calvin in 1571. “Misintention” was coined in 1626, and “misinclination” twenty–five years later. Early modern English men and women had a whole lexicon to describe the phenomenon of the embodied and fallible human mind desiring and choosing that which was wrong for the embodied and fallible human being. It was a lexicon that subsequently fell out of use but one that, it seems, we may now be feel the need to resurrect. Perhaps we are finally throwing off the absurdities of the rational self–image which we preeningly awarded ourselves decades, indeed centuries ago, and are returning to a more earthy, realistic and, dare one say it, theological conception of the human. If we are, we have Daniel Kahneman to thank.

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On the occasion of Orthodox Christmas according to the Julian calendar, George Lapshynov writes an introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy and to the Russian Orthodox Church in particular. 08/01/2024

The West is in dire need of better education on Eastern Christianity, and especially on the Russian Orthodox Church, which has received an unusual amount of attention in the last few years following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Patriarch Kirill’s close support for Vladimir Putin’s military ambitions. So argues Katherine Kelaidis in her book Holy Russia? Holy War?, which Theos recently reviewed.

As Russian Orthodoxy is rarely presented other than through the sometimes helpful, though ultimately limited lens of politics, this article will seek to nuance the picture by delving into the lived experience of Orthodox Christianity, and by debunking some of the more widespread myths.

Introduction to Eastern Christianity

To understand the complex organism that is Eastern Orthodoxy, any Western reader should start by acknowledging that the very name “Eastern Orthodoxy” is misleading.

Officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church – in other words, the Right–believing Universal Church – it is to all intents and purposes the Church established in Constantinople in 325 AD. This article will continue referring to Orthodox Catholic Christians as “Eastern” for ease of comprehension in a Western context, but its members refer to themselves simply as Christians, or right–believing (i.e., Orthodox) Christians. And from its own perspective, there is nothing “eastern” about it.

The same can be said about the (Eastern) Roman Empire – the history of which is inexorably linked to Orthodoxy. “Byzantium” is from the Orthodox perspective a Western neologism; the ancient city of Byzantion ceased to be in 330 AD when Emperor Constantine re–founded it as New Rome, later Constantinople. The entity known in the West as the Eastern Roman Empire was for them simply the Roman Empire. Its habitants were Romaioi – Romans. And until WWII, five centuries after the Fall of Constantinople of 1452, those who we now call Greeks could still be found to refer to themselves as such.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is not administratively a single, coherent body; it is a fellowship of autonomous and autocephalous (i.e., self–headed) churches who are in communion with each other and follow the same faith and practices, as defined by the first seven ecumenical councils.

Its organisation is not rational and streamlined: it is the result of seventeen centuries of slow evolution, though strong immutable theological principles underpin its structure. Its canon law is uncodified – neither unified nor harmonised. And the Church is organised around a territorial principle: each autocephalous church is sovereign within its own territory, according to the Apostolic Canons, and foremost importance is given to local legislation and governance.

The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, whose episcopal see is in modern–day Istanbul, is its honorary primate, the “first among equals.” As the bishop associated with the former capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, he remains as a symbol of church unity and cooperation and has the power to call a pan–Orthodox conference, a Synod of the entire Eastern Orthodox Church. This symbolic primacy however does not reflect actual influence, and there are no hierarchical relations between the Orthodox Churches.

Although the Ecumenical Patriarchate is senior in the order of precedence of the Orthodox Church, it is today only a shadow of its past self and is responsible for but a small minority in terms of the number of believers. The Slavic nations and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe account for three quarters of the approximate 220 million Orthodox believers worldwide. The remaining quarter consists of Georgia, the Middle East, and Central Asia, as well as Greece, Cyprus, and the other world countries where Eastern Orthodox immigrant communities or converts exist.

Though not senior in age or status, the Russian Orthodox Church is the largest. Because of its sheer size, it has great political weight, and often acts internationally as the voice of Orthodoxy.

The Russian Orthodox Church

Initially under Constantinople, the Russian Orthodox Church unilaterally declared its independence from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1448. Constantinople, surrounded by the Ottomans and desperate for help, had recognised the universal and supreme jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, then Pope Eugene IV, over the whole Church at the Council of Florence in exchange for military aid. The Russian hierarchy unreservedly rejected the act of union with Rome and became de facto autocephalous. As the military aid provided by the West proved insufficient, Constantinople fell, as did its alliance with the See of Rome, but the Russian bishops remained autonomous.

With the disappearance of the Roman Imperial state on which Orthodoxy relied, and the Ecumenical Patriarch’s submission first to Rome and then to the Ottoman occupier, the Grand Prince of Moscow was the only remaining free–standing Orthodox ruler. By the 1470s, Ivan III started to view himself as the sole guardian of Orthodoxy. And it is his grandson Ivan IV, called the Terrible, who began using the title of Tsar, meaning Caesar – emperor and autocrat. The Roman Empire was no more, and so with Ivan III’s marriage to Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of the last Roman Emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, Moscow would claim the title of Third Rome, the only credible and Orthodox successor to Constantinople–New Rome.

The other Churches officially recognised the autocephaly of the Russian Orthodox Church during the period 1589–1593. The Metropolitan of Moscow and All Rus’ became a Patriarch, fifth in the order of precedence and honour of autocephalous Orthodox Churches, first among the Slav Churches, and listed immediately after the historical Greek Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church as its own entity was born out of a categorical rejection of union with the West. And as the newly autocephalous Russian Church, now with Patriarchal rank, it remained the most senior Orthodox Church outside of Ottoman control until the mid–19th century.

However, that is not to say that it had complete freedom or was free from persecution. From 1700, as part of the government reforms of Peter the Great (who sought to modernise and westernise the Muscovite Tsardom), the patriarchal throne was first left vacant and then replaced in 1721 by a mixed clerical and lay committee directly under the authority of the emperor, effectively making the Russian church a department of the state. It lost its autonomy from temporal power and the emperor’s reforms forced it into political isolation. This situation lasted until 1917, when the Patriarchy was restored, only to be systematically suppressed by the new Soviet regime from the following year. The systematic murder of clergy and plundering of churches only ceased when the Communist Party found it could use the Church for its own political ends in the 1940s, but not before over 100,000 clergy and laity were martyred and persecuted in the first 20 years following the October Revolution. [i]

Orthodox Spirituality

Orthodoxy is usually presented as either specialising in “mysticism” and “spirituality,” an exotic though backward expression of the East, or alternatively as the “liturgical” and “sacramental” Church par excellence. [ii] These visions of Orthodoxy, however, are orientalising and foreign to Orthodox self–perception.

Orthodox Christians see themselves simply as committed to the immutable Truth and traditions of the first seven ecumenical Councils and the creeds of the traditional faith of Christians. [iii] Likewise, the Orthodox tradition views theology as rooted first and foremost in experience of the Divine, which is why its greatest theologians were rarely academically trained. It’s apparent focus on spirituality or mysticism is therefore not the result of a quest for some exotic experience; it is the reality of the simple life of a believer, borne out of its focus on relationship with and experience of the Divine.

Eastern Christianity rejects comprehensive philosophy – like scholasticism – or the reduction of Christianity to a particular doctrine – like the doctrine of justification by faith. It also rejects the Western dichotomy between Word and sacrament, which it views as false. It regards any human construction, be it intellectual, like a systematic theology, or material, like a streamlined Church administration, as a narrowing down of the faith.

Similarly, neither the Scriptures nor the Church Fathers and their Councils, being human creations, are considered infallible, though they are divinely inspired. The Holy Bible is not primarily considered a source of reliable information about religious matters, and there is no consensus across the Orthodox world on how to interpret it. Rather, the Bible, together with the writings of the Fathers, the history of the Church and its Councils, and the lives of the saints, bear witness to Christ and are ways of encountering Him.

Instead of delineating the Truth intellectually, Eastern Christianity cares about the genuine encounter with the Person of Christ and focuses on prayer and worship. Faith, it believes, cannot be the fruit of intellectual search, nor a reasonable solution to the frustrations and anxieties of life. [ii] In the words of Fr Pavel Florensky, Russian priest and polymath of the early 20th century, “the life of the Church is assimilated and known only through life – not in the abstract, not in a rational way… Orthodoxy is shown, not proved.” [iv]

Its theology therefore begins by standing before God in a mysterious togetherness, caught up in the presence of God. And mysterious it is because our understanding will never be exhaustive.

This focus on lived experience rather than rationalisation finds expression in the hierarchy of the Church, as all bishops are chosen from among the monastic clergy (those who are both priest and monk). It is also expressed in what from the Western perspective might look like chaos in theology and structure, but which the Orthodox view as organicity: instead of seeking standardisation and ironing out differences, disagreements, and clashes, the Orthodox look for “a rich harmony, not a thin unison.” [iii]

This idea of organic or spontaneous order bears the name sobornost’, a Slavonic translation of the Greek katholikos, which expresses both catholicity and conciliarity. Sobornost’ describes the Orthodox understanding of the Church – a free and level association of believers, coming together in unity – as well as of the fundamental nature of human community. In sobornost’ is also expressed the view that no one is saved alone, but in the Church and in unity with all her members. It views this “holy union” of all the believers, living and departed, the angels, apostles, and martyrs as the “true life of the Church.” [v]

It is in this light that Orthodox theology insists on the doctrine of deification, theosis. For Eastern Christians, man is made in the image of God (Gen.1:26–27), but this image is broken since the Fall. Deification therefore entails the recovery of the fullness of the image through Christ, and the restauration of our true humanity through a process which involves real and complete change within ourselves. As we, by the grace of God, further empty ourselves of ourselves, Christ transforms us ever deeper, and God shares through us ever more of His love with the world. [vi]

Though Orthodox Christians look forward to “the life of the age to come” (Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed), they also believe that through deification, man has already a foot in the Kingdom of God. And looking up to the lives of the saints, whom we are called to imitate, we can already glimpse at ta eschata, the “last things.”

* * * 

Myth 1: There is no one Orthodox Church.

The Orthodox Church is divided internally along territorial lines, and each recognised Church is sovereign within its borders. This territorial partition corresponds naturally to cultural and national–ethnic differences.

When considering Orthodoxy exclusively through a political lens, only its legal–administrative outlines are visible; it resembles a random collection of independent units, each with its own structures, problems and histories, and the tensions between them stand out saliently.

Take the UK for instance: in it overlap the jurisdictions of the Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ecumenical (Greek, and Ukrainian), Antiochian, and Russian (Moscow Patriarchate, and the two autonomous Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, and Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) Orthodox Churches, each with their own structures, clergy, and faithful.

Where in its native lands Orthodox Churches are responsible for neatly delineated countries or regions, the situation abroad is much more complicated and messier indeed. As the national Churches expanded westward not to convert but to meet the spiritual needs of immigrants, they grew haphazardly and irrationally – one priest and one community at a time. Western observers are therefore not entirely to blame for this misapprehension; the ubiquitousness of ethnic divisions is indeed a feature of 20th century Eastern Christianity.

However, behind structural–political divisions hides a deep sense of spiritual unity. Lift the superficial blanket of division in any UK city with Orthodox Christian communities and you will immediately notice that Romanians attend Serbian churches, Russians frequent Antiochian churches, and Greek churches might hold occasional Slavonic–language services. In addition, despite national distinctions, Orthodox Christian communities come together at events such as youth group meetings, social picnics, pilgrimages, and Great Feasts. 

Of course, most Orthodox Christians prefer their own national church over any other. Aside from offering spiritual nourishment, Orthodox churches, at home but especially abroad, also function as ethno–cultural community hubs. Yet crucially, every Orthodox Christian is welcome and at home in any Orthodox Church, regardless of the language of the service or the brand of incense used.

To think of the Russian Orthodox Church, or indeed of any other Orthodox Church, as an isolated and discrete body is therefore to miss the point: it is an expression of wider Orthodoxy. On its own, its very doctrines and theology falls apart. Go to a Russian parish in Oxford or London, and you will find Ukrainians, Moldovans, Serbs, and English converts in attendance. They are not there because the church is Russian – they are there because it is Orthodox.

The administrative division of Eastern Christianity into national Churches does correspond to a certain reality and is a feature that should not entirely be dismissed. However, it is also a severely limiting perspective, a small aspect of a multi–faceted picture.

Myth 2: The Orthodox Church is torn by politics.

The tensions between Constantinople and Moscow are a particular focus of attention, and external analysts and commentators are keen to frame the entire internal Orthodox debate in the binary terms of a rift between the two. The temptation is all the stronger because the Istanbul–based Ecumenical Patriarchate promotes a certain adherence to Western liberalism while the Russian Church stands for a more vocal opposition to “the West” in the broadest sense.

The relationship between Constantinople and Moscow has been complicated for centuries, it is true. In the last years especially, both have been overstepping their boundaries, flexing their muscles, and leading increasingly petty attack campaigns on each other. Yet, to reduce Orthodoxy to a battlefield between these two competing camps is misleading on several accounts.

First, it forgets about the many other Orthodox Churches which are not aligned with either side, avoid activism for either cause, and continue the Church’s ancient tradition of opposition to politics. Second, it treats the national Churches as “black boxes”, ignoring the fact that the political views of the members are rarely well represented by the leadership, as was the case when the Orthodox Cypriot faithful preferred an anti–Western archbishop, but the Synod elected a pro–Western and pro–European candidate instead. Last, it reduces the intra–Orthodox debate to one vis–à–vis the West, which is a biased, naval–gazing lens to deploy when studying Orthodox relations from a Western perspective.

It is a fact that Eastern Christianity is struggling with its relationship to an ever–expanding West. Should it be embraced? Opposed actively? Evaded passively? A straightforward solution is elusive.

But the problem of the West, unlike what most commentators believe, is not all–consuming. The Orthodox Church has survived the fall of Constantinople, it has sat out the Ottoman Empire, and has sat out decades of Communism in the Soviet Union and the Balkans. Although the jury is still out, I believe for better or for worse that it is leaning towards its time–tested strategy of sitting this out also until, as all empires and ideologies do, Western liberalism collapses. Time is on its side.

The political approach further misses the point because neither the Orthodox Church as a whole, nor any of its constituent parts is political. Unlike its Western sister, the Roman Catholic Church, it has never been a state. It has never been its role to decide who is or is not the rightful heir to a throne. Unlike its cousin the Church of England, it has never sat in parliament. It has, quite the opposite, always relied on delegating its politics to the state, whose patronage assured its defence and the protection of its integrity. And this even when living in hostile and non–Christian lands.

This apolitical quality runs deep through Eastern Christianity and is articulated in the Orthodox theological concept of symphonia. Dating back to Emperor Justinian’s 6th century legal code, it divides labour between the state and church, such that the state deals with the imperium, the worldly things, but does not let it interfere with the sacerdotium, the field of spiritual things, while the Church acts as the ‘conscience’ of the state. Today, in a secular world, the principle of symphonia amounts to a principle of “mutual non–interference.” [i]

Indeed, for all the disagreements and power struggles that exist among the leaders of the Church, and for all that politics are a part of its everyday reality, the political does not penetrate its every level. In its uninterrupted daily cycle of prayers, politics scrupulously perform no role whatsoever.

The duty of all Orthodox clergy, whichever the country, is to pray for all of humanity, including and especially those they consider to be in the wrong, so that they may fulfil the commandment to love even their enemies (Matthew 5:43–48). Priests must hold everyone in their heart as they stand before the altar and desire the salvation of all. To limit an analysis of Eastern Christianity to the political would be to ignore a central quality that has enabled it to survive through centuries of political turmoil, warfare, and oppression.

Myth 3: The Russian Church is but a mouthpiece of the Kremlin.

Of all the interest in Eastern Christianity in the last few years, most has been directed towards the symbiotic relationship between the Russian Church and Putin’s government.

Ben Ryan, in his essay for Theos, rightly noted that “Putin has allowed the Church to return to prominence and supported it in a way unheard of since the Revolution. The Church has, in turn, provided some of the intellectual and cultural backing for Putin’s Statist vision for Russia and the wider Russian sphere of influence.”

It is undoubtable that the Russian Orthodox Church has benefitted materially from its association with Putin’s Kremlin – especially in the early 2000s, when it was still recovering from 70 years of Soviet oppression. Putin’s administration helped the Church secure funding, recover previously nationalised property, and obtain legal protection and status.

This begs the question: what does the Church have to do for the Kremlin in return?

“It would be simple to conclude that, in bringing back faith–based politics,” Elle Hardy recently pointed out, “Putin is dictating his people’s values. But the truth is not so straightforward. Because, as in the chaotic years after the end of the Cold War, Russians do seem to be turning to God of their own volition.” Yet the return to faith of a portion of the population, even on their own, is not devoid of political baggage altogether.

As one of the few surviving repositories of pre–Soviet Russian identity, the Church connects the Russian people with their pre–communist past. In comparison, the modern Russian state, which is the product of the mass corruption of the 1990s, has little to offer in terms of values and national narratives. It has no history to draw on, no symbolism of its own (all state symbols are either recycled from the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire) and relies so increasingly on the seniority and moral leadership that Orthodoxy offers.

Polls clearly show Russians are losing faith in the state, yet the Russian Church, acting as a cultural symbol and providing a point of reference for collective identification and expression beyond the political, does not seem affected by this loss of trust. Unlike what many Western depictions suggest, and notwithstanding existing ties to politics, Russians perceive the Russian Orthodox Church to be distinct from the Kremlin. And this is a crucial point.

Why, then, does the Church continue to serve the interests of the Russian state, as the war in Ukraine has shown?

The Russian Church is guilty of acting in the interests of the Russian state. Its spiritual head, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’, has not only failed “to condemn Russia’s military aggression,” in the words of Metropolitan Kliment, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s Synodal Department for Information and Education, “but he also failed to find words for the suffering of the Ukrainian people”. More than failing to condemn the war, Kirill has justified the war by blessing anyone “moved by a sense of duty” to fight the war in Ukraine, stating that anyone who would die in the performance of this duty would see their sins washed away. And he is not alone in the Church in offering support to the Kremlin in such a fashion.

To understand why these senior figures have acted the way they did, it is necessary to look at the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church again. For indeed if we can guess how Kirill benefits personally from patronising the Kremlin, this is not the case for the average parish priest.

Just as in the wider organisation of the Orthodox Church, Moscow is not subordinate to Constantinople, so it is for the Russian Orthodox Church at the national level. Although Kirill is Patriarch and he is the ceremonial head of the Church, he is sacramentally only a bishop and is neither higher nor greater than, nor does he rule over, any of the other 270+ bishops of the Church.

To treat the Russian Orthodox Church therefore as a single, homogenous, and monolithic entity is to obscure its internal organisational and hierarchical complexity. When Patriarch Kirill speaks, though he may speak with the authority that the seniority of his office affords him, it is he who speaks and not the Russian Church. And he certainly doesn’t speak for Christ. His outspoken alignment with the Kremlin, though it casts a dark shadow over the whole of Russian Orthodoxy, is not a policy of the Church.

The Russian Church, its clergy, and the people, far from the politics, and far from benefitting in any meaningful way from the upper hierarchy’s symbiotic relationship with and loyalty to the Russian state, persevere silently in their good works and prayers for peace in the world.

More than that, many clergy actively oppose the Church hierarchy’s involvement in politics through peaceful disobedience, a right which is protected by the Russian Church’s social doctrine, the Basics of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (III, §5). Even some very senior figures of the Church such as Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), former chairman of the Department for External Church Relations, have refused to endorse the Kremlin’s war with Ukraine.

In March 2022, 293 clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church, including a representative of the Patriarch, openly demanded the immediate cessation of the fratricidal war in Ukraine and issued a warning to the Russian state, threatening it with the curse of Cain (Gen. 4:10–12). Some bishops have publicly allowed their priests to stop commemorating the Patriarch during the Divine Liturgy. Monasteries and parishes of the Russian Church in Germany have offered housing to Ukrainian refugees. And churches in the UK directly under the jurisdiction of Moscow, horrified by the war, openly welcome and support Ukrainian refugees by the dozen, offering regular prayers for peace. Even within Russia itself, the administration of the Russian Church has deployed schemes all over the country to support, house and feed the millions of Ukrainian refugees who crossed the border to the east rather than to the west.

Indeed, despite appearances, in the words of Hoppe–Kondrikova et al., “the Russian Orthodox Church is not a state church, does not want to be a state church, and cannot be a state church.”[i] To treat it as such is to turn a blind eye to the Russian Orthodox Church’s centuries of struggle with and subordination to successive tsarist and Soviet regimes, from which yoke it only freed itself in the 1990s and at a very steep price – a freedom it is not ready to give up.

Oversimplifying the relationship of the Church with the state is also to undeservedly erase the good that thousands of Russian Orthodox clergy do both for their local communities, through pastoral and material help and often at their own expense, and for the world more widely, by praying for all humankind and regularly defying Russian state policy.

It is easy to simply reject Russian Orthodoxy as Putin’s propagandistic means to political ends. It is much harder, yet so much closer to the truth, to look at the lives of the millions of Russian Orthodox believers and thousands of clergy in Russia and abroad who go to church not for politics but to grow in love for their neighbour and find peace. 

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George Lapshynov analyses the state of volunteering in the UK and the changing trends from before, during and after COVID. 15/08/2023

The 21st century is now in its third decade, and the voluntary sector in the UK has been in a poor shape for most of it. While the pandemic and subsequent recession were particularly damaging, they are by no means the only challenges the sector has faced in recent times. 

The faith sector is also heavily invested in this issue. In 2016, NPC found that more than one in four charities in Great Britain are faith–based – a proportion that is growing – and that nearly two–thirds of these are Christian. Many of these are either entirely volunteer–led or rely very greatly on volunteers. 

This descriptive article will provide an overview of the situation before 2020, how it evolved during the pandemic, and paint a rather worrying picture of what it looks like now. 

Before the pandemic 

Even before the pandemic hit the voluntary sector, charities were struggling on more than one front. 

The recovery from the financial crisis of 2008 took almost a decade, during which there was a decline in the number of organisations and in their income. (It was not until 2015 that both income and investment values returned to pre–crash levels).[i] 

The lack of diversity and homogeneity also plagued, and still plagues, the sector. There were more charities, both in number and diversity, in more affluent areas than in more deprived ones. People aged 65–74 were twice as likely to volunteer as those aged 25–34. Four out of five charities had a workforce that was not representative of the population they serve, particularly in terms of ethnicity. In other words, those who have the most to gain from volunteering were the least likely to participate, and those who need the services provided by charities the most were the least likely to benefit from them. 

Additionally, the age gap in particular resulted in the sector being unprepared for the pandemic, as the older people on whom many charities depended were especially vulnerable to Covid and unable to volunteer. The sudden loss of this key demographic affected faith groups particularly, and the vulnerable groups that depend on their support. 

UK government policy became increasingly reliant on the voluntary sector. In pursuit of their explicit desire to reduce further and further the size of the state, successive Conservative UK governments left a gap in services that had previously been the sole responsibility of the state, and charities and volunteers were increasingly used as a resource to fill this gap, providing public services in place of the state.[ii] And while governments have cast this increased burden on volunteers and charities in a very positive light, with a narrative of increased social engagement and civic empowerment, the reality is that the charity sector has had to bear the heavy costs of over a decade of austerity. 

It is little wonder, then, that government initiatives such as David Cameron’s Big Society (2010–2015) or the National Citizen Service, which sought to significantly increase the number of active volunteers in the UK, have failed to do so. Instead, national levels of volunteering fell markedly between 2013 and 2020, though formal volunteering in particular took a hard hit. 

(Formal volunteering is defined by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) as volunteering organised within an organisational context, such as by charities, and voluntary and public sector organisations. It is contrasted with informal volunteering which is carried out outside of an organisational context and can include activities such as tidying a local park or driving a neighbour to a hospital appointment.) 

To make matters worse, by early 2020 growth in activity had already significantly outstripped growth in income on average, meaning that the sector would have entered a period of financial instability regardless of the impact of the pandemic. 

Thus, Covid and the ensuing recession have only exacerbated these problems by increasing the demand for services while reducing income and relying on a dwindling number of volunteers. 

Pandemic: First phase – March 2020 to October 2020. 

The conventional wisdom holds that volunteering during the pandemic was a very positive phenomenon that brought the nation together, uniting all ages, genders and races in the face of the “great leveller” that was the coronavirus. And certainly, some of this is true. 

“Neighbourhood” volunteering – a form of informal volunteering – lent itself easily to social distancing and taking necessary precautions. It was social, not very dangerous, and required little commitment. It involved providing local support, such as by shopping, getting medication for quarantined or vulnerable people, or simply cooking meals for those who could not do so themselves. Unlike formal volunteering, it was also more mutually beneficial as it helped facilitate bonding between neighbours and combatting loneliness. It provided a sense of solidarity in a crisis situation, and helped create a shared common goal.[iii] 

The increase in informal volunteering was especially significant in the first weeks of the pandemic, through “hyper–local” informal assistance and support networks. One month into the pandemic, an estimated three million Britons were involved in informal mutual aid groups, and 750,000 signed up to assist the NHS in various tasks – though a much smaller number actually received assignments.[iv] Given pre–pandemic trends, this appeared to be a genuine volunteering revolution. 

More new people than ever got involved. The advent of remote volunteering ushered in by social distancing benefited notably disabled people and furloughed employees. It also benefited people with mental and physical health conditions more generally, who before the pandemic were according to most studies unlikely to volunteer. And the average age of volunteers also dropped during the first months when a new cohort of younger volunteers, likely on furlough, joined the pool.[v] 

Yet, the tremendous volunteer efforts of the first months of the pandemic, though worthy of celebration, were not sustained. 

The “spirit of mutualism” that fuelled neighbourhood volunteering in the first lockdown period did not prove to be a suitable principle for long–term organisation. The informality of the self–organised neighbourhood groups often led to undemocratic dynamics that antagonised volunteers and made larger projects difficult to coordinate. And the structures and safeguards needed to successfully retain volunteers – such as clear boundaries, clear task descriptions, social rewards, and the nurturing of relationships in the longer term – were mostly lacking.[vi] The ability of churches to coordinate informal volunteer groups and to circumvent some of these larger pitfalls should in this context not be underestimated. They offer grassroots and implicit convening power as a community resource and, had the pandemic not forced their closure, could have helped sustain the activity of self–organised volunteers.[vii] 

The mass mobilisation of British society for response–volunteering was merely consistent with the findings of previous studies on volunteer efforts in response to disasters.[viii] In fact, the nation–wide enthusiasm for “hyper–local” informal volunteering fizzled out quickly as the first wave of the pandemic passed in late summer 2020. And while some charities attempted to restart their essential and life–saving activities when restrictions eased, they struggled to bring back their volunteers.[ix] 

Indeed, the literature on the impact of the pandemic on volunteering, focusing on the superficial success of informal volunteering at the local level, often overlooks the many difficulties charitable organisations – or indeed faith organisations – faced at the time. As well as having to reduce their services and ask their volunteers to step back from their roles because of the restrictions imposed by the lockdown, the mainstream charity sector suffered from reduced income and reduced levels of volunteering all while facing increased demand for their services. 

Charities had to simultaneously digitise their services, furlough their staff, and move en masse to remote working – if at all possible, depending on the nature of the services provided – which has had a major impact on their ability to respond more effectively to the pandemic.[x]  

While the sector needed more volunteers to meet the demand for support, more than a third of charities saw their volunteer numbers fall between March 2020 and April 2021.[xi] In a survey of 2000 charities, the Charity Commission found that almost all (91%) participants in England and Wales experienced some negative impact from Covid–19. The most commonly affected areas were service delivery, finance and staffing, with the majority experiencing frustration and uncertainty. 

As efforts in the first months of the pandemic were mainly focused on the delivery of food and medicines and on combating social isolation, specialised forms of volunteering with homeless people, refugees and people without recourse to public funds attracted only a minority of volunteers. And unlike informal volunteering, where many people new to volunteering participated in crisis response, previous volunteering experience remained by far the best predictor of volunteering during the pandemic in formal contexts.[xii] 

Government guidance on how to safely involve, engage and support volunteers during Covid–19 was published in November 2020, but only just as the second lockdown began. In fact, the Respond, Recover, Reset: The Voluntary Sector and Covid–19 research project, led by Nottingham Trent University (NTU), the NCVO and Sheffield Hallam University, found that charities would not report an overall increase in volunteer numbers again until summer 2021, a few months after the third lockdown had eased.[xiii] 

Pandemic: Second phase – November 2020 to June 2021 

The early second phase was characterised by two particular phenomena: the rollout of the vaccine starting December 2020, and the subsequent mass mobilisation of volunteers to support the national vaccination programme from the beginning of the year 2021. Where possible under the new government guidance for volunteering, some voluntary organisations resumed limited or regulated face–to–face activities, while a portion of charities had to continue pausing their volunteering until spring 2021. 

Unlike during the first lockdown period, neighbourhood volunteering did not pick up again on a massive scale. And while the widespread desire to volunteer had not vanished completely, it was certainly less prominent. When in January 2021, the UK Government announced its Covid–19 vaccine delivery plan, only 200,000 people offered to volunteer; a notable decrease from the 750,000 that did so a year earlier. 

In line with the easing of restrictions and the falling number of Covid deaths and cases, the number of charitable organisations reporting an increase in numbers of volunteers started to exceed those reporting a decrease in April 2021. 

Yet, the image for charities remains troubled. Despite the two most acute phases of the entire pandemic being over by April 2021, the charitable sector did not get fully back on its feet. Though organisations indicated an increase in services offered and an overall increase in numbers of volunteers, the sector continued to struggle financially. 

Late–pandemic period – July 2021 onwards 

The “late–pandemic” period comprises the arrival of the Delta variant in the UK in early summer 2021, the subsequent Omicron variant wave, and extends to this day as we live in a late–/post–pandemic world. 

While parts of the country were under different levels of restrictions depending on local infection rates under the “tier system,” the charity and faith sectors have continued to suffer. 

According to the latest Community Life Survey 2021/22, participation rates in formal volunteering in 2022 were the lowest recorded since data collection started. Compared to 2019/20, 4 million fewer individuals volunteered at least monthly and 6 million fewer individuals volunteering at least annually in 2021/22. 

The these trends in volunteering cannot however be attributed solely to the impact of the pandemic and its successive lockdowns and restrictions. Rather, these are signs of a deeper societal shift. 

Indeed, the number of formal volunteers continued to decline until 2022 compared to the first year of the pandemic, even though restrictions were less severe or non–existent. Similarly to how financial insecurity and economic hardship could not fully explain the decline in volunteering which lasted until well after the 2008 recession, so too the pandemic on its own is unable to fully explain the decline in formal and informal volunteering. Rather, this trend appears to fit within a wider “social recession” and unravelling of civic organisational infrastructure and community engagement at work in the UK.[xiv] 

The Community Life Survey further identified three main barriers to volunteering: work commitments (49%), other hobbies (31%) and the need to look after children (23%). The fact that nearly one in two of the 10,000 respondents to the survey said they were unable to volunteer because of workload is a real concern for the nation’s work–life balance, especially as the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Although paid work has always been to some extent a barrier to volunteering, with the cost of living crisis, individuals may have to work longer hours or take on additional jobs to pay their bills, meaning they will have even less free time to volunteer. This statistic is all the more noteworthy as the success of the furlough scheme and the volunteering that went with it have clearly shown that, given more free time, there is no lack of willingness to volunteer among the working population. 

If volunteering is indeed the lifeblood of the charity sector, then the dwindling supply of volunteers is certainly a very worrying indicator of its poor health. 

Furthermore, in 2022 rates of monthly formal volunteering were over twice as high in affluent areas as in the most deprived areas, an increase compared to 2019. That the decline in volunteering is more pronounced in socially and economically deprived communities is a sign of the further depriving of those who are already disadvantaged, and the widening of the gap that separates affluent and deprived communities. 

While the pandemic may have contributed to the UK’s deepening social recession, it cannot fully explain this trend. Rather, the pressures it has placed on British society have merely highlighted the existing fractures along socio–economic and cultural lines, and perhaps hastened their widening into chasms. 

Post–pandemic reality: the current state of play

The above evidence strongly suggests that there is a pre–pandemic world and a post–pandemic world in the charity sector, particularly in terms of formal volunteering. However, it would be a mistake to attribute all of the sector’s current problems to Covid–19. 

Even before the pandemic hit in the winter of 2020, the sector was under strain. On the one hand, unsound government policies were driving up demand for services, while on the other, austerity rhetoric was calling for cuts in the public funding on which the charitable sector relies. Neither an increase in income nor an increase in the number of volunteers had kept pace with the growth in demand. And despite national efforts to encourage more people to volunteer, the overall number of formal volunteers had fallen in the decade before the pandemic. 

Then came Covid–19 and the subsequent cost of living crisis. 

Despite the seemingly upbeat picture of a united Britain in the face of unprecedented duress, the reality is more sobering. 

It is true that nearly a million people offered to volunteer through the NHS scheme to help in their neighbourhoods, and thousands of local mutual aid groups were formed within days of the first lockdown. The pandemic even seemed to bring out the unlikely to volunteer: younger people, men and people with disabilities, who are usually under–represented in the voluntary sector. The pandemic also seemed to bring people closer together: the sense of community, of belonging, of being “in this together” and the spirit of mutual aid are repeatedly highlighted as features of the first wave of the pandemic. 

Yet the spirit of mutual aid proved to be sort–lived, and the organised charity sector suffered tremendously. 

While they were the first port of call for the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, charities were also crippled by sanitary restrictions, the inability to hold their usual fundraising events, the need to digitise wherever possible, to furlough staff and to find alternative work for their volunteers working in the field. At the height of the pandemic, when homeless people, refugees and other vulnerable groups were most in need of support, charities overwhelmingly reported a loss of volunteers and funding. 

Even when the restrictions were lifted between the various waves of Covid–19 outbreaks, charities struggled to meet the demand for their services. Many long–term volunteers and supporters were unable to return to volunteering because of health concerns, and many who had lost the habit of volunteering simply decided not to return. 

In addition, early, rather positive analyses of the state of volunteering in the UK during the pandemic failed to capture the long–term “social scarring” that British society would suffer from the pandemic. Although we are now firmly established in a “new post–pandemic normal,” the shadow of Covid–19 still looms large over society. 

The aftermath of the pandemic is even bleaker, because it is much more enduring. In addition to all the pressures the charity sector faced before 2020, all of which remain today, it now has to operate with fewer staff and volunteers, face an ongoing battle with digitalisation, and deal with a difficult post–Covid financial situation. Levels of formal volunteering in the UK are at an all–time low – lower even than during the 2008 recession – public trust in the charitable sector has also fallen, and the gap between more deprived and more privileged areas of the country appears to be widening. 

The ongoing cost of living crisis is just the bitter icing on top of the cake. With inflation and energy costs both draining the sector’s already dwindling resources and impacting on public donations, charities face an almost impossible balancing act, as a recent report by Pro Bono Economics and NTU points out. Not only is the sector itself affected, constantly scrambling for funds to keep the lights on, but it also faces increased demand that it cannot meet. The cost of living crisis, as incisively noted by my colleague, is threatening its own last line of defence.[xv] 

Like an exhausted and bleeding Atlas, the charity sector carries on its weary shoulders the responsibility for many essential public services and for caring for society’s most vulnerable. And if we do not act soon to heal its wounds, then doubtlessly the heavens will come crashing down.

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Anna Wheeler looks at the art of puppetry and the insight it gives to mortality and the human experience. 17/07/2023

Love’s such an old–fashioned word and love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night, and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves…this is our last dance…this is ourselves. 

The haunting words at the end of Under Pressure by Queen ft. David Bowie. In the official video, there are plenty of deathly and ghostly or puppet–like images. The power of the song hit me when I watched the film Aftersun as the main character contemplates his own death as he dances to the song. Both the official video and scene from Aftersun show humans or ‘living images’ (not all the images in the Queen video are of people in motion) in the extremes of emotion – a difficult watch you may say. These moments of emotion are heightened and not ones we may experience every day, so may feel difficult and other. 

A marginalised genre to show marginalised emotions 

But why difficult?  Is it because we are not used to such otherness or are discomforted by it?  These are painful emotions and ones which we perhaps hope are indeed ‘other’ to most of our daily life. The ‘people on the edge of the night’ are, for me, the people on the edge of life as we know it.  They could be people on the margins of what we call ‘real’ life but could also be anything that has had a life and which appears to be real, that is about to die. 

Where am I going with this you ask.  I’ve been interested in puppetry for as long as I can remember for these very reasons – puppets represent the margin of reality with fantasy – merging it in our hearts and minds, and puppets live and die on stage in front of us.  The genre of this art form is one of strangeness and ‘other’ to what we are used to, but then many of us regard talking about death as strange.  Hence, we should not be surprised when an art form regarded as a little different, is very good at representing death which, to our peril, we have separated from living. 

The struggle to live and the religious impulse in puppetry 

Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of Handspring, the Puppet company behind War Horse, believe that puppetry has something particular to offer a contemporary audience. It has been much discussed how an inanimate object can make us emotional.  It is because the puppet is a lifeless object looking to live – as we are in many ways.  A puppet’s struggles are essentially the same as ours – they are dependent on the relationship with at least one human to give them life and direction.  A puppet’s existence is relational and watching a puppet on stage, on its own, with only its puppeteer, is deeply moving and personal.  Kohler and Jones also talk about a religious impulse residing in puppetry; theatre can have this for some people, but puppetry, they say, has this in disguise.  Puppeteer Mervyn Millar talks about the humble puppet being life, where there is no life.  An audience, with the assistance of the puppeteer, will imagine a living person – in a wooden doll (or horse).  This is a profound act because when we imagine a person, we imagine their inner thoughts, and we connect.  We have a natural instinct to look for ‘signs of life’ – for instance – might a floppy teddy move?  Adults’ love of the Toy Story films is testament to this. 

It strikes me that puppetry is a search for language, perhaps at times unspoken, about the mystery and difficulty of being human in life and death.  If you watch a puppet in action, it may heighten your senses.  By a puppet sharing its life and story with us, it seems to understand those watching it – our own reality is enlarged in the otherness of the other.  I see this in the work of Blind Summit  who operate puppet Moses in The Table. The puppeteers who work him, live through him – it’s their reality that makes him real.  And yet when I watch him, I understand what he is feeling – who is more real, him or me?!  He becomes an embodiment of them, and their experiences become his and by that, Moses makes us laugh because we can see all our frailty and craziness in him.  I laugh not at him but with him, and at myself.  You may note here that I refer to ‘him’, when ‘he’ is in fact made of a pillow and cardboard… 

To take the notion of the puppeteer’s reality making the puppet real, a little further: the act of breathing life into a puppet to bring it into existence echoes the Judaeo–Christian creation story. The very act of breath gave life to humanity, and the giving up of breath by Christ on the cross was the breath that brought us into relationship with God.  In puppetry, we’re asked to put our belief in contradiction – this thing, which is not alive, yet alive when the human spirit inspires it.  Some may find this a step too far – a complete leap of faith – but think where else we see this in the Christian story: Golgotha.  How do you stake your life on a broken seemingly lifeless person hanging on a cross? Yet it is that same man who holds a hidden but unbreakable strength needed for life in all its fullness. Puppeteer Basil Twist reminds us that puppetry has sacred roots. It deals with the frontier between life and death.  It can be profound, spooky, and uncomfortable – and it is perfectly acceptable to have these feelings – a puppet teaches us that we live alongside death; it isn’t something that’s tagged onto the end of life.* 

Love and death 

The lines I quoted at the start of this article about love bring me onto Famous Puppet Death Scenes by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop.  A puppet will always live and die before our eyes because a stage show must always start and end – and in that puppet’s death, we may sense our own impending mortality. ‘Most of us prance blindly through our daily duties, seldom giving a glancing thought to our impending mortalities. No wonder: if we could truly grasp the bewildering certainty of death, we would be overwhelmed by it… I do not wish to die! I love to be alive!’ The company talks about how it combines this fear and love to bring out the power of their death scenes – this may seem absurd, grotesque, and distasteful yet when we love and live absolutely fully, as a puppet does, the immediacy and event of death is even more bold.  A puppet can’t half love, just like it can’t half die.  Neither can we.   

If there is one quality that hits me when I watch a puppet, it’s vulnerability – Old Trout remark ‘…there is an even bigger question that we should be asking ourselves: what is it about us all, as a species, that we are so deeply addicted to attributing consciousness to inanimate objects?  Puppets, dolls, action figures, sure – but if you think about it, flickering pixels as well.  Could it be that empathy is so crazily important for our survival that our brains have evolved to care about anything that resembles another human being?  Maybe the part of us that believes a block of wood has feelings is actually the best part of us…the part that will save us all.’ 

Empathy with and from inanimate objects 

If we do have the capacity to care for anything that resembles another human, Director Spike Lee is onto something in the film BlacKkKlansman when Ron (played by John David Washington) is piercingly moved as he engages with and touches the shooting targets – the static cut–outs of human beings that the KKK have been practising on (warning: link contains very offensive language).  These inanimate targets provoke a reaction in him and in the viewer which brings home what is happening. The shooting targets ‘live’ and the knowledge and memory of those persecuted is present in the eyes of Ron. It doesn’t matter that these are not ‘alive’ – they represent those who have been murdered and those who will be.  He is at one with them – they may as well be real because he treats them with a reverence and respect as if they are his friends (they are) and what they remind us of is utterly real and urgent.  He looks at them as if to say, ‘I’m with you; I will fight for you’.  The power of the scene is that you do not see what the KKK have been shooting at until the men have fled.  Then you see the targets with bullet holes.  The brutal violence and hatred within America at that time is shown in seconds through these abused, defaced inanimate objects.  To care about the ‘un’real objects is the only hope we have when the ‘real’ humans have sunk to such depravity.  We must then say to the shooting targets ‘we are with you; we will fight with you’ in order to save ourselves.  It is their essence and spirit that we resonate with. 

Reassessing realness 

Puppetry and the world of inanimate objects is an art form that can be a calling back to the self – to the fundamentals of being human – birth, life, suffering and death – and the emotion within the circle of life.  Puppetry is rough, unfinished and unpredictable – as we are ourselves.  There is the sense that puppetry is of the world but not fully in it – always wondering about its place but with an accepted awareness that its time is limited and that it will die.  It has been known; made to exist by another.  We are all known in ways deeper than we can articulate; we exist in relation to others and the Christian concept of free will affords us the ability to live without being operated by a puppeteer. But what I see in a puppet is a bravery within fragility about both life and death.     

The 2023 film Pinocchio directed by Guillermo del Toro reflects all the themes above, in both form and content, and has itself been seen as an allegory of Christ’s life.  Whether or not you take this from the film, the subjects of the film include forgiveness, grief, and acceptance – grief for mistakes made but acceptance for who we are, and that how we see ourselves and others often limits our concept of realness and worth. 

If we approach life with more of a sense of mystery and openness, as a puppet does, maybe death would then become more approachable because we would already be in that place of openness.  A puppet touches the place of enchantment, awe and wonder for the entirety of its life – including its death, where we don’t stop believing in its life.  If we see love as more daring, to use the opening lines, and to apply to life what Basil Twist applies to puppetry – more animation and less manipulation of life, we could hope to feel less trapped by mortality and more loving to situations and people who we view as other.  

*My Neighbour Totoro with the enchanting puppetry of Basil Twist, cited above, returns to The Barbican Centre London in November 2023 – March 2024.

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In light of this weekend’s coronation of King Charles III, George Lapshynov unpacks the religious symbolism found within the service. 03/05/2023

“The Queen is dead, long live The King!” As in death, so in life, the reigns of British monarchs – and the monarchy as a whole – are deeply steeped in religious Christian symbolism. 

Indeed, Her late Majesty The Queen’s memorial and funeral events last year were, for twenty–first century Britain and as far as public events go, marked with an unprecedented amount of Christian language, Scripture and symbolism.[i] And the Coronation of her son will be no less so. 

Unlike some contemporary European monarchies, such as Belgium, where the king constitutionally takes the throne after swearing a solemn oath before the united Chambers of Parliament – a strictly secular affair – the crowning of English and then British monarchs since at least King Edgar in 973 AD has always taken place in the context of a Eucharist. Although British monarchs swear the constitutional Coronation Oath before the beginning of the church service proper, the oath is administered not by the Speaker of the House, but by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Likewise, the anointing, investment with the symbols of power, crowning and enthronement all occur in the course of a Communion service.[ii] 

Norwegian monarchs still have a religious rite of royal consecration – a rite of blessing for their reign. Some other European monarchs attend some form of religious service after taking office. But the UK is the only monarchy in Europe that retains a religious coronation in the strict sense of the word, where the monarch is actually invested with a crown and symbols of power. 

Moreover, both Elizabeth II and Charles III, but Charles particularly, have been outspoken advocates of the monarch’s role not only as Fidei Defensor, Defender of the – established, i.e., Anglican – Faith, but as a ‘defender of faiths’ more widely, a vision that this Coronation will embrace more than any other in British history.[iii] The preamble to the Oath, a novelty compared to 1953, has the Archbishop reassure the king that his commitment by law to maintain the settlement of the Anglican church need not clash with his vision of a confessionally diverse Britain. If anything, the preamble goes, “foster[ing] an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely… is the true profession of the Gospel”.[iv] 

What then can we expect from the service? Coronations are not an everyday affair, and Britain has changed much since the last one – including only 12% of the population identifying as Anglican according to the 2019 British Social Attitudes survey, as the religious landscape diversifies.[v] Understandably, many people may not “understand the liturgy or what is going on in the ceremony”, as Catherine Pepinster wrote in a recent piece for Theos. With this in mind, we have put together a helpful guide to 10 moments of religious significance to watch out for: 

The Location 

Westminster Abbey has been the theatre of 39 coronations. Since William the Conqueror chose to be crowned in the Abbey on Christmas Day 1066 – choosing it because of its association with the Saxon king St Edward the Confessor – all subsequent coronations of British monarchs have taken place in the Collegiate church. Its hallowed vaults and chapels have seen the burials of saints, royalty and national heroes. Indeed, the Abbey undoubtably remains to this day a centre of great religious and national significance in the United Kingdom. 

The Processional Cross 

The procession into Westminster Abbey will be led by the recently finished and blessed Cross of Wales, a gift of the King to the Church in Wales. The Cross is itself a symbol of cooperation between the Anglican and Catholic Churches as it features two shards of wood said to be from the True Cross (the cross upon which Jesus was said to have been crucified), presented to the king by Pope Francis.

The Procession of Faith Leaders 

For the first time in British history, four members of the House of Lords from non–Christian major faiths – Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Judaism – will participate in the ceremony by processing to King Edward’s Chair in the Abbey with key pieces of regalia. The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland will reprise his role presenting the Bible to the monarch before the Oath. Members of the clergy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church, Free Churches, and Churches Together in England will bless the newly crowned king. And leaders from other faiths will form a Procession at the opening of the service and be given a place of honour in the proceedings, while not taking actively part in them.

The Anointing 

Since biblical times, kings, queens, prophets and priests have always been anointed. The oil, called chrism – which has given us ‘Christ’, meaning the Anointed One – and coming from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, was blessed for the upcoming coronation by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, and the Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum. Through the act of anointing, the monarch is said to be ‘consecrated’, i.e., belonging to the realm of the sacred, set apart for the service of God in a specific capacity. It is considered the holiest rite of the coronation ceremony, and is the only part that will not be filmed. Where the late Queen used a canopy to give her ‘figurative privacy’ from the cameras during this part of the service, Charles wanted actual seclusion for this part of the ritual and commissioned a specially–made decorated screen that will enclose him on three sides. 

The Sword of State 

Although primordially a symbol of kingship, the Sword is blessed by the Archbishop as is all the other regalia. With it, the monarch is entreated to “do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans”. It represents the power of the monarch to use the might of the state against its enemies, but is also a symbol of justice – a means for the monarch to fulfil their duty as bringer of justice and preserver of peace. 

The Robe and Stole Royal 

These are liturgical vestments that represent priestly authority. By virtue of the monarch’s consecration during the Anointing, he or she is in fact ordained to the very specific ministry of kingship. The Imperial Robes, and the Stole in particular, thus represent the sacred and spiritual nature of kingship and the indissoluble link between earthly rule – serving and protecting the people, delivering justice – and divine command. As God is King, so is the monarch God’s servant.  

The Orb with the Cross 

Laden with particularly strong Christian symbolism, the ‘Orb set under the Cross’ represents Christ’s dominion over the world, in particular through a Christian earthly ruler. In use since antiquity, the globus cruciger is an unmistakable reminder to the world that the monarch holding it is Christian, and that “the whole world is subject to the Power and Empire of Christ.” It has also a strong evangelistic connotation, as it calls (or certainly historically called) the monarch to spread his or her own temporal realm as a means of spreading Christianity. 

Annulus 

Featuring at Western coronations since at least the Middle Ages, the meaning of the King’s Ring might be less self–evident. A symbol of kingly dignity, the Annulus is like a signet ring, bearing not the personal arms of the monarch, but the symbolic seal of faith. Reminiscent of the ecclesiastical ring of Catholic bishops, it is also another symbol of the priesthood, as well as of marriage. As if wed to the nation, the monarch enters into a covenant with his or her people and promises to serve the realm faithfully, with love and care. 

Sceptrum et Baculum 

The Sceptre with the Cross and the Rod with the Dove are respectively the tokens of the monarch’s temporal power as Head of State and of his or her spiritual role. Both find their roots in the shepherd’s staff, through the episcopal crozier, as symbols of care. Heavy with biblical symbolism, they represent the monarch as a Good Shepherd. The Sceptre is surmounted by a small globus cruciger, pointing again to the inextricably spiritual nature of temporal rule. The Rod is surmounted by a dove, representing the Holy Spirit. Together, they balance each other out, so that the monarch’s rightful use of power might be inspired and tempered by God’s mercy and equity. 

The Crowning 

And last, though certainly not least, while holding the Sceptre and Rod, the monarch is finally crowned with the Crown of St Edward. With temporal power in one hand and spiritual and pastoral responsibility in the other, the monarch can now assume the full responsibilities of kingship. The ultimate symbol of royal authority, the crown is also no less charged with religious symbolism. The ‘crown of the faithful’, ‘the crown of glory and righteousness’, the ‘crown of thorns’, or the ‘crown of immortality’ it mirrors – as does so much of the regalia – the divine Kingship of Christ, and by extension the divinely sanctioned nature of temporal kingship in the name of Christ. It invites the monarch to foster in his or her reign all the virtues and qualities of Christ.

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Much more could be said about the rest of the coronation ceremony, which does not end with the crowning proper. The clergy and the people swear allegiance to the monarch, old and new commissioned pieces of sacred music are sung… More importantly, the newly crowned monarch’s first acts will be to pray, confess their sins and receive Communion, thus placing the entire rest of their reign under the sign of their lived faith. 

The nature and responsibilities of kingship take on the form of Christian ministry throughout the ceremony: consecration, priesthood, pastoral care, divine inspiration, evangelistic calling, Christic emulation. 

Beyond the sacred Christian character of the entire coronation rite, Charles also clearly signals his aspiration to an ecumenical role as a link between peoples of all faiths within his realms and territories. Leaders of other Christian denominations and of other non–Christian faiths will take part for the first time, hymns will be sung in Latin – a first since the seventeenth century – and our practicing Hindu Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, will read the Epistle. 

Symbolism is, of course, open to many interpretations. Where some see in the sword a symbol of justice, others will only see oppression. Where some see superfluous golden trinkets and a waste of money, others still might see an earnest attempt at capturing in matter, albeit imperfectly, a glimpse of the glory of God. 

As the nation prepares to re–engage with its renewed and reinterpreted thousand–year–old traditions in less than a week, we hope this short article will give you the means to decrypt and better enjoy the event. 

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Catherine Pepinster on King Charles’ coronation and its significance on the Church of England’s position as the established church. 27/04/2023

May 6, Coronation Day, will put the monarchy in the spotlight. But it won’t be just the King and Queen Camilla, who will be centre–stage. It will also focus attention on the Church of England.

For generations, the Church of England’s role as the Established Church was uncontested; it was just part of the constitutional furniture. The Church, founded by Henry VIII, after he broke away from the Roman Catholic Church over his desire for a divorce, has, since the 16th century, been the national Church. It has a duty to look after every soul in the land, the right to have bishops in the House of Lords, and to crown the monarch. It was in many ways an expression of Englishness. Long before the cross of St George was flown by patriotic football fans – look at film of the 1966 World Cup and you’ll see Union Flags waved by the crowd – it was the towers of Anglican churches that could be relied upon to fly the English flag.

But in a nation that is both so much more religiously diverse yet also increasingly secular and one where the rights of an Established Church are more openly contested, not least its right to have 26 seats in the House of Lords, its key role in crowning the King on 6 May is up for debate. And in a Kingdom that is not so united as it was in 1953, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland asserting themselves powerfully since devolution, the role of the Church of England alone in crowning the King seems an anachronism.

There is of course no chance that the Church of England will willingly give up its role as the Established Church. Indeed, its role will be affirmed by the King when he swears during his coronation to not only maintain the Protestant Reformed Religion but also uphold the settlement of the Church of England. In that sense, the Coronation is a mutual endorsement of Church and Crown – an endorsement also expressed through the monarch being the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

But its place at the heart of the nation is not set in stone and thanks to the late Queen Elizabeth II, it has found a new raison d’etre. In 2012 at the start of her Diamond Jubilee, she gave a highly significant speech at Lambeth Palace to faith leaders. With the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, standing alongside her, she said:

“Here at Lambeth Palace we should remind ourselves of the significant position of the Church of England in our nation’s life. The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under–appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.

“It certainly provides an identity and spiritual dimension for its own many adherents. But also, gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely. Woven into the fabric of this country, the Church has helped to build a better society – more and more in active co–operation for the common good with those of other faiths.”

At the time, the press failed to realise quite how important a moment this was – or perhaps the world was ready for such a shift in what the Church of England was about, so there was little fuss. It was certainly a much more muted response than the one that greeted the then Prince of Wales saying, in 1994, that he would like to be known as Defender of Faith, rather than Defender of the Faith when he came to the throne. He argued that in a nation that had so many Christian denominations as well as other faiths, he had a responsibility to them as well.

Faith leaders, though, did notice what the Queen said in 2012, and embraced it. It is noticeable that many faith leaders outside the Church of England are among the greatest supporters of its seats in the House of Lords, seeing them as ensuring faith has a voice in the public square.

The King, who was proclaimed Defender of the Faith – the traditional title – when he acceded to the throne and is also, like monarchs before him, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, emphasised just after his accession that he has a role to play when it comes to other faiths. He told leaders of Christian denominations and other faiths at a special faith reception in Buckingham Palace a week after he became King, that he had a duty to protect faith, while also being “a committed Anglican Christian” who would “at my Coronation take an oath relating to the Settlement of the Church of England”.

So this enthusiasm for diversity and the Church of England’s responsibility for it, will be evident at the Coronation. The Coronation Order of Service has yet to be published but I am reliably informed that it will be noticeably ecumenical. In 1953 the only nod to other Christian denominations was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland presenting Elizabeth II with the Bible on which she swore her oaths. Expect far more involvement of other Christian representatives this time.

Finding a role for other faiths is trickier. Church of England canon law precludes their prayers being said within one of its churches. On occasion it has happened but it usually leads to a rap over clerical knuckles, as happened a few weeks ago at Manchester Cathedral when it allowed a Muslim call to prayer from the nave, and then had to apologise. But a procession of leaders of other faiths is entirely possible, as happened at the late Queen’s funeral in September.

The Coronation’s organisers have also found an ingenious solution to further involving other faiths by having four peers, representing the Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish faiths, to carry in the procession special items to be used in the Coronation. Whether we will see any other involvement, such as a group of faith leaders offering the newly crowned King greetings, rather than prayers, and possibly gifts, symbolising their faiths, is not yet clear.

At his Buckingham Palace reception for faith leaders, the King also gave a nod to non–believers, when he said: “I hold myself bound to respect those who follow other spiritual paths, as well as those who seek to live their lives in accordance with secular ideals.”

It was a tactful comment but those with secular ideals are possibly more of a problem for the Church of England than the King. Whether Roman Catholics or Muslims, people of faith might not share the Church of England’s devotion to the Thirty Nine Articles but their understanding of divinity makes common sympathy possible. But as those with no beliefs grow – and the 2021 Census revealed that in England and Wales there was an increase of 8.5 million non–believers taking those with no faith to 22 million or a third of the population, common sympathy – or lack of it ­ becomes an issue. Once, many people who had little belief would have turned to the Church of England for hatching, matching and dispatching. But now they opt for naming ceremonies, weddings in country hotels, and humanist funerals. That nominal connection with the Established Church is broken.

And yet it isn’t entirely. Churches – and they are often Anglican ones – are at the heart of communities still. The National Churches Trust’s House of Good report, published in 2020 and updated in 2021, highlighted how important churches are, from hosting food banks, to running groups for the elderly and families with children, to offering pastoral care of all kinds. They offer not just bricks and mortar but welfare and wellbeing – even to the non–believer. There is nothing like them, as can be seen in times of crisis, such as when someone is murdered and people flock to their local church for prayer, to light a candle or just have a quiet space in which to reflect.

So there is sympathy left for our Established Church and a place for it in our lives. Perhaps the most difficult issue when it comes to the Coronation is that so many people today lack religious grammar: they won’t understand the liturgy or what is going on in the ceremony. The Church of England has produced a book of prayers for the Coronation – but that’s a conversation between friends, as it were. Which non–believer is going to purchase a book of prayers? The effort put in to communicating what the Coronation is about to those who may well be mystified is not apparent, which is a shame, because the Coronation, with a little effort and imagination, could be an opportunity to communicate what faith is all about. You’d have thought this moment would have been seen by the Church of England as a mission to explain. But that baton seems to have been passed to the media – to broadcasters and press and online journalists. Perhaps we should be flattered by the Church of England’s trust. But if I were an Anglican bishop, I’d have tried a little more direct communication with the public too.

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Four months since A Torn Safety Net, Hannah Rich looks at food insecurity and its impact on charities across the UK. 16/03/2023

If toilet rolls were the sought–after item this time three years ago, in the panicked early days of the pandemic, tomatoes are this year’s hot ticket. As early as last December, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warned that the UK was “sleepwalking” into a food supply crisis, due to the combined cost of what it called the three Fs: fuel, feed and fertiliser, all of what have risen significantly in price. The failure to heed the warning is now making itself apparent, with supermarket shelves becoming barer and shortages of fresh produce starting to have an impact on British shopping lists.  

There is a reason that the idea of ‘food insecurity’ as opposed to ‘food poverty’ has crept into economic commentary. It is affecting a greater swathe of the population than before, for one. In some cases, even a steady income is no guarantee of being able to buy everything on your grocery list. But while it is beginning to bite for those previously immune to economic challenges, the trickledown impact is biting even harder for those already struggling to make ends meet. It is compounding the need already seen at food banks and pantries.  

“Things like potatoes, we’ve struggled to get hold of. Normally, we’re inundated with fresh fruit and vegetables. We’ve had to buy it in this year or else we’ve just not had it,” says Lily Axworthy, chief executive officer of Greater Together Manchester, which oversees a city–wide network of community projects including emergency food provision. “That’s really sad when our premise has always been that we’ll give unlimited fresh fruit and veg to anyone and everyone who needs it.”  

The problem begins even before carrots and potatoes have hit the shelves of supermarkets or food banks, let alone a roasting tin. The cost of producing vegetables is at an all–time high. The volatility of natural gas prices, due to the war in Ukraine, has pushed the price of fertiliser up by 139% in a year, with reverberations throughout the agricultural sector and food chain.  

A combination of rising energy costs, narrower margins and a shortage of labour means that British farmers are planting fewer potatoes or, in some cases, giving up on potatoes altogether. It costs more to grow and harvest vegetables than it does to produce wheat, and farmers are adapting accordingly. Global food systems researchers based at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that the UK simply not growing or importing enough fruit or vegetables for the whole population to enjoy the recommended five portions a day. They concluded that we would need to produce 9% more homegrown fruit and vegetables, or import it, in order to adequately meet the country’s requirements; almost half of our vegetables come from imported varieties because of changing consumer trends and cheaper overseas agriculture in recent years.  

Even when fresh items are available at food banks and pantries, the cost of cooking them means visitors are more reluctant to accept them. 

“Once upon a time, big joints of meat were the golden item, but now people are hesitant to take them because they don’t want to have to cook them,” says Axworthy, reflecting on the changing demands of people coming to a ‘social supermarket’ in one of the most deprived wards in Manchester. Even items like whole chickens donated and offered free of charge are not without cost. It is increasingly common, she says, for churches and local charities to cook meat items before distributing them, or even carve them up into separate portions for freezing. “We normally give out turkeys at Christmas, especially for some of the bigger families… This year we asked people if they’d like us to cook them first, because that’s four or five hours of having the oven on and that’s not nothing. All anyone talks about when they’re sitting around in our projects is gas and electric.” 

It is a double whammy; those in food insecurity are also more affected by rising energy costs. Food Foundation data found that in addition to changing their eating habits, households which reported food insecurity were significantly more likely to also say they were deliberately cutting down on using appliances for cooking, eating meals cold, washing dishes in cold water or turning off the fridge.  

Church and community groups have historically been good at finding sustainable and creative ways to resource their emergency food provision, but even the most resourceful projects are being hit by the wave of shortages. The cost of living crisis is changing not only how many people rely on these projects, but also what they can expect from them.  

As Gordon Brown and Rowan Williams wrote in their foreword to our recent Theos report A Torn Safety Net, “compassion is not running out, but cash is”.  

If there is less on the shelves in the first place, then naturally there is less left at the end of the day, too, revealing the strange contradiction of quite how much we have come to rely on food waste as the panacea to food poverty. It makes sense that at a time when all our budgets are tightening, supermarkets also have a close eye on their margins. Some have done so by actively trying to reduce their waste by putting out less stock. The empty shelves are partly down to supply chain problems, related to Covid or Brexit depending on who you ask, but in many cases also a function of deliberate and careful stock management. Saving energy by running one less fridge or freezer is an attractive offer to store managers looking to reduce outgoings, for example. 

Economists call this the ‘bull whip effect’. Small fluctuations in demand at the customer level can reverberate and translate into progressively larger fluctuations and greater variability further along the supply chain. (Just imagine the way that a small flick of the wrist at one end of a skipping rope can ripple and send the other end of the rope flying high into the air.) Customers individually buying less translates into big decisions on behalf of big corporations, leading to bigger changes in their ordering strategies with knock–on effects for suppliers and the wider food ecosystem. 

For example, Tesco found that as many as 69% of its shoppers were looking for ‘yellow sticker’ reduced items, and responded by actively revamping the bargain section of some of its stores to make it more attractive, streamlined and less of a free–for–all. This is good news for bargain hunters at the supermarket, but bad news for waste food projects who rely on there being leftovers. There are further unintended consequences from the well–meaning initiative of getting rid of sell–by dates on many products too; there no longer comes a deadline when they cannot be sold and therefore become eligible for reduction or redistribution. 

It is a cruel irony that food waste redemption projects, which in many cases started life as niche environmental concerns rather than explicitly anti–poverty initiatives, are now a mainstay of the charity and community sector. There being less waste food should be a good thing, but it is a change that has come at the least opportune time. Church and community groups report a less reliable supply of surplus donations direct from supermarkets.  

“We’ve typically been getting leftover stuff from two Tesco’s, a Co–op, a KFC and a Sainsbury’s, and that kept us ticking over when donations have gone down, but the amounts coming from that are beginning to reduce now too,” one food bank manager told me recently. Another reported that what used to amount to a lorry load a day of surplus food given to food banks and pantries in their town had dwindled to one a week.  

It’s a problem of distribution, not of supply, according to Ali Gourley from FareShare, which redistributes surplus food from the industry throughout a network of charities across the UK. In 2020/21, FareShare helped 10,542 charities and community groups, with over 1.1m people provided food supplied by the network. 

“We’re not able to meet the need. We’ve never been able to meet the need… ironically there is actually way more surplus food than we can redistribute. We don’t have enough money or resources to get to it,” says Gourley. At the height of the pandemic, government funding enabled FareShare to scale up its operations, but that funding has since stopped despite the fact that 90% of community groups within the network, including a large number of churches and faith–based charities, say they’ve seen an uptick in demand in the last year. In a survey conducted in autumn 2022, the majority of groups said they’d have to cut back activities without FareShare’s input, with 22% saying they’d have to stop altogether.  

This is a vicious circle because of course, at the point that food pantries and food banks are having to actively purchase more produce rather than relying on donations, costs are rising across the board. The Trussell Trust, the country’s largest network of food banks, reported having had to spend twice as much money as usual on buying food for its emergency parcels this winter. 

“I imagine charities are having to buy food from sources other than us [to meet the increase in demand],” says Gourley. “That’s far more expensive for them to do. That means they’re spending less money on frontline services like debt advice or whatever the charity does. It means that they’re probably having to be more creative with what food they get. It means that food parcels going to people won’t be as good or as quality as they would have been otherwise.” 

Locally, redistribution of surplus food is often reliant on ad hoc networks of volunteers and community groups to collect it from supermarkets. “There is an obvious increase in demand for food, but trying to find a way to get it to people is hard when volunteers are stretched,” one supermarket employee told me. It is “heart–breaking”, she says, to have to throw out “perfectly good” dairy, meat and fish produce when local volunteers aren’t able to collect it from the store by the 8pm deadline. “All it would take is someone with a car and a fridge, but even that is a lot to ask when petrol and electric are through the roof.” 

Nick Waterfield, who runs a community food hub based out of a Methodist church in Sheffield, says that over the last year, he’s observed a change in the demographic of those coming to the project, as well as an impact on how their needs can be met. During the pandemic, they moved from a food bank model to a food hub model and did away with the referral system. On average, the hub feeds around thirty households a week, each of whom pay a £1 contribution in return for a selection of staple food items and fresh produce. The bulk of the goods come from FareShare.  

This costs the church a small subscription each week, which is covered by the contributions of guests, at the same time allowing them to feel they have bought their groceries rather than receiving a handout – something Nick says was important in redesigning their model. He has seen the selection of items coming from supermarket surplus change markedly:  

“I don’t think we’ve seen a decrease in quantity. We still get the same number of trays coming off the FareShare van, but the quality and variety is noticeably worse. We get more treat items now, more cakes and biscuits, and fewer staples. We were getting tins of ham and hot dog sausages, but it’s been months since I saw a tin of meat come in.” 

“That’s the difficulty. It’s stuff that’s harder to shift. Not all of it is of any use on our shelves. This week, for example, we got a boxload of seaweed thins. They’re an acquired taste. I even ate them myself in front of people to try and persuade them to take them, but they’re hard to shift and anyway, they won’t exactly fill anyone up.” 

Increasingly, it is older people and working individuals who come to the food hub, as a way of stretching budgets rather than feeding a whole family. The fluctuating variety of produce on offer means you couldn’t rely on getting a full recipe’s worth of items. Short of reducing the number of items each customer gets, there isn’t a way to make stock go further.  

According to Waterfield, families and larger households often turn to food banks rather than projects like the food hub model, because they have a more regular stock list, rather than depending quite literally on what comes off the back of the lorry, and can also often give out more items. He cites the example of a woman who was recently overjoyed to find a birthday cake within her one pound selection at the hub. It isn’t exactly the difference between eating and not eating, nor is it an essential, but rather it represents the ability to make limited finances stretch further and cover ‘treat’ items for which people wouldn’t be able to budget.  

“We’d like to see the government fund us to redistribute surplus food,” says Gourley. “At FareShare, we’ve got a scheme where we go to farms and help redistribute surplus by covering the cost of picking or packing it. That would help increase the amount of food we can redistribute to the sector. It wouldn’t do anything on the demand side. The sector would still be flooded with people, but it would go some way to doing more to help.” 

Back at the Methodist church in Sheffield, Waterfield agrees. “It would be good if we didn’t have to do this, but given we do and this government thinks of us as part of the welfare system, the question is how can we ensure it’s not as random? It can’t just rely on what doesn’t sell, because maybe what doesn’t sell isn’t going to sell anywhere, including at a food hub.” 

Perhaps after years of ‘permacrisis’, the limits of local ingenuity and creativity are being reached; there are solutions, but they are increasingly structural. In yesterday’s Budget, the chancellor announced a £100m package of support for charities. Details of its distribution remain to be fleshed out, but it is a welcome recognition by the government of the fragility of parts of the charity sector and the ways the safety net is torn. But there are also ways that policy and investment in sectors like agriculture could be shaped in ways that would also benefit the charity sector, albeit indirectly – as we have seen acutely in the case of food waste and surplus. 

Faith groups and local charities are valiantly meeting the needs of their communities, against the backdrop of growing demand and the rising cost of living, but there is a limit to how sustainable a system that relies on there being surplus elsewhere can be. Compassion is not running out, that much is true, but cash is and so too are the leftovers. 

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Dr Kathryn Wright, Chief Executive of the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, examines how RE is taught in light of the recent Census results. 23/12/2022

As Christmas approaches, I am reminded of the times when our two young boys would ask those challenging questions. How does Santa deliver presents to the whole world? Was Jesus really born in a stable? Now, more recently as they enter adulthood, the questions have got harder. Is the biblical narrative true? If there is a God, why would he choose to become a human being? I wonder how many parents and carers will have conversations like this over the festive season. The findings of a recent survey suggest that a significant number will.

Earlier this Autumn, ahead of the census results, Culham St Gabriel’s Trust commissioned a nationally representative survey of 2000 UK adults to find out parents’ views on a range of matters related to religion and worldview literacy. It found that close to four in five discussed beliefs that affect people’s behaviour and decision–making with their child. In addition, seven in ten discuss beliefs and practices of people with religious and non–religious worldviews, beliefs concerning what happens when we die and the origins of the universe. Discussing the big questions in life through the lens of different worldviews seems to be commonplace in UK homes.

Whilst the recent census data indicates an increase in those who do not identify with a particular religious worldview, particularly Christianity, what our findings show is that only a small minority (less than 10%) never talk about questions of meaning and purpose at home. To me, this suggests that many households are still interested in the fundamental questions that underpin both religious and non–religious worldviews.

For children, what was the main source of information concerning these questions? Rather than friends, family and the internet, the survey found it was their teachers at school. Seven in ten said their child mainly accesses information about religious and non–religious worldviews at school. It is therefore not surprising that two in three parents thought religious education (RE) was an important part of the school curriculum. In the survey’s open ended questions, parents value the subject because it encourages acceptance of different cultures, religions and worldviews as well as building respect and understanding.

Parents also thought that educating children about the deeply rooted history of different religious and non–religious worldviews would help them understand how they have shaped our society today. Lastly, parents thought learning about values and ethics contributed to their own child’s future behaviour and sense of empathy for others.

Although some parents questioned the value of the subject, particularly in terms of its earning potential or because they did not see any importance in religion, the overwhelming response was positive. The recent census data, and indeed the accompanying research done by Theos on ‘Nones’ suggests that we now live in a multi–religious society and multi–secular society where worldviews are made up of both religious and non–religious ideas. The majority of parents in our survey recognise this and have subsequently identified the need for high quality RE in schools to help children navigate this complex nature of modern belief and practice.

In the second part of the survey, we asked parents what they thought of the Religion and Worldviews approach to RE. This new way of thinking about the subject reflects the recommendations in the Commission on RE (2018) report and is being developed in some English schools. This new approach, as illustrated by the 2021 Theos animation Nobody Stands Nowhere, has its key premise in the notion that everybody has a worldview – a way of experiencing and understanding the world in response to ‘the big questions in life’. This approach aims to enable all pupils to become open–minded, critical participants of public discourse about religion and worldviews.

It was encouraging that parents were mostly supportive of this new approach, with an average of seven in ten parents agreeing with its core principles, including:

● 73% of UK parents said it is important to learn about the similarities and differences between beliefs and lived experience of different worldview traditions
● 72% of UK parents said that RE lessons should include teaching that worldviews are complex and may comprise both religious and non–religious beliefs
● 70% of UK parents said RE lessons should teach about the social and historical context of different religious and non–religious worldviews

In his recent Theos article, Census 2021: And the winner is… Nick Spencer asserts that it is teachers of RE who are the ‘winners’ of the recent census findings. Based on these parents’ responses to a religion and worldviews curriculum, he may well be right. This approach to the subject provides a fresh vision for the subject that has been developed in response to the long term changes in the nature of belief in society. 

However, the subject is significantly underfunded by the Government, and there is a danger that some pupils are not getting their full entitlement. Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, alongside the RE Policy Unit*, is calling for a National Plan which would include a sustained programme of investment in teacher education and ongoing professional development aimed at bringing this new approach to RE into every classroom in the country.

So if a child asks you a thought provoking question during this festive season, you can be assured you are not alone. Why not ask children and young people what they are learning about in RE at school? After all, this is the place where children are exploring how to navigate our increasingly diverse religious and non–religious society. Perhaps they can teach us something too.

Dr Kathryn Wright
Chief Executive, Culham St Gabriel’s Trust

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Tom Holland, delivers the 2022 Theos Annual Lecture on ‘Humanism: a Christian heresy’. 23/11/2022

Humanism: a Christian Heresy

[Full text of the Theos Annual lecture 2022, delivered by TH at Conway Hall on Wednesday 23 November]

“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” 

This observation on the pretensions of humanity – cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality – was made in the 1940s, midway between our own time and the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin did not, in his foundational work on evolution, focus on Homo sapiens. Only with the publication twelve years later, in 1871, of The Descent of Man, did he explicitly set himself to answer the question of “whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre–existing form”. Nevertheless, the implications of his theory for any notion that humanity might claim a special status for itself had been evident enough all along for those with eyes to see. Bishops might mock, and demand to know whether Darwin’s followers were descended from gorillas on the father’s side or the mother’s side, but humans ranked, in the final reckoning, as organisms just like any other. They were nothing special. For them to imagine otherwise, to regard themselves as somehow superior to the rest of creation, was a conceit so unwarrantable as to verge on the ludicrous.  

Darwin was not, of course, the first to have undermined the notion that humans might stand at the centre of the universe. In 1638, the young John Milton – on a tour of Italy – had visited Florence. “There it was,” he later wrote, “that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought.” It was not the sun that revolved around the earth, so Galileo had taught, but the earth that revolved around the sun. Time came to prove his hypothesis right. The sun, however, did not long maintain its privileged position in the map of the cosmos. Today, we know that it is an undistinctive star in an undistinctive corner of an undistinctive galaxy in a universe so stupefyingly vast that it can hurt the brain even to try and comprehend its size. Set against the icy immensities of space, what is humanity, then, but the merest speck of a speck of dust? What scope is left us as a species to claim any dignity at all? “In science,” as the astronomer Seth Shostak has put it, “if you think you’re special, you probably aren’t.” 

Strikingly, however, in an age that has seen the theory of evolution almost universally accepted in Britain, and the limits of our knowledge of the universe pushed to ever more incredible extremes, there seems to have been no diminution in the value that we, as a culture, ascribe to human life. Quite the contrary. That we are all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights, simply by virtue of being human, and of a dignity that embraces our entire species, without exception, are doctrines so widely accepted in contemporary Britain that many of us barely recognise them as doctrines at all. It is a measure of just how radically these beliefs privilege human beings that they have increasingly come to be described, over the course of the past century, as ‘humanist’. The term is a vague one; and the fuzziness of the definition has encouraged – as no doubt it was bound to – various attempts to endow it with a greater precision. In 2002, the World Humanist Congress, meeting in the Netherlands – where fifty years previously the very first such congress had been convened – issued what its delegates presented as “the official defining statement of World Humanism”. The Amsterdam Declaration proclaimed “the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others.” Religions – dismissed as ‘dogmatic’ – were condemned by the World Humanist Congress for their ambition “to impose their world–view on all of humanity”. Science and its methods, by contrast, were highly praised. Not for humanists any Bronze Age mumbo–jumbo. Ethics were to be derived, not from sky fairies, but “through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision.” This it was – so the Amsterdam Declaration piously affirmed – that would lead all those capable of emancipating themselves from the malign hold of superstition and priestcraft to true enlightenment: a reverence for human rights and for the entire human species.  

To acept the truth of all these various propositions – one might almost call them dogmas – requires, of course, less the exercise of reason than a leap of faith. That science sustains a belief in human rights is hardly an obvious proposition. Implausible too is the conviction of those who issued the Amsterdam Declaration that their own values, their own ethics, their own assumptions are so self–evident, so inevitably where “a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision” is bound to lead, that they rank, in effect, as universal. International the Humanists may claim to be; but in truth they are preponderantly Western. The delegates who met in Amsterdam for the first World Humanist Congress came from the Netherlands, the United States, Britain and Austria; only one of the eighteen subsequent congresses have been held outside Europe, North America or Australasia; the venue for the twentieth congress, to be staged next year, is Copenhagen. The headquarters of Humanists International is here in London. Its understanding of ‘universal’ is, then, it might be thought, a somewhat culturally contingent one. Indeed, it might legitimately be defined, not as universal at all, but as ‘originating in Western Europe’. 

Humanists, unsurprisingly, tend to reject this characterisation. They prefer to see themselves as the heirs of traditions of intellectual enquiry that embrace the globe, and reach back millennia. The spirit of free enquiry, blazing into life in various civilisations and in various periods, is cast as a kind of Pentecostal fire, one that has brought enlightenment to sages and philosophers throughout the entire span of history. In ancient India, in Confucian China, in classical Greece, writings have been identified by humanists that appear to prefigure the very things that they themselves believe. Humanism is thereby able to cast itself, not as a school of thought bred of the modern West, but as an iteration of teachings as ancient as civilisation itself. Just as Hindus, or Buddhists, or Confucians can glory in the antiquity of their sacred texts, so too, it turns out, can humanists. 

Yet the risk of this approach is not merely that it results in cherry–picking, but that it can obscure the very alien quality of those texts which are being cherry–picked. Take, for instance, ancient Greece: a civilisation for which humanists have long had a particular fondness. The more we know about the philosophers whom the Greeks described as atheoi, the less like contemporary sceptics they come to seem. Thus Epicurus – for all that he featured in a list of famous atheists drawn up by the philosopher Sextus Empiricus – not only believed in gods but was an initiate of the local mysteries. Indeed, he went so far as to demand sacrifices from his followers “for the care of my holy body”. His materialist convictions were not, as his contemporary admirers are prone to imagining, bred of a scientific cast of mind, but of the precise opposite: a conviction that they would help him to attain inner peace. The only value of research into the natural world, so Epicurus believed, was to enable the philosopher, by properly appreciating the pointlessness of superstition, to attain the state of tranquillity that was, so he taught his disciples, the ultimate goal of life. The closest modern parallel is less Richard Dawkins than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. 

To draw on a fittingly Darwinian analogy, ancient atheists and modern humanists resemble one another in the way pterosaurs resemble bats: as examples of similar features developing in unrelated species. As in the natural world, so in the dimension of human thought: convergent evolution has been a recurrent phenomenon. That isolated prefigurings of humanist beliefs are to be found scattered in ancient texts does not in itself demonstrate an evolutionary relationship between them. Humanism exists less as a tick–list of principles than as an entire matrix of assumptions. Two in particular appear fundamental: that every man and woman possesses an inherent worth; and that superstition is the foe of human flourishing. The relationship between these two propositions was taken so for granted by the authors of the Amsterdam Declaration that nowhere did they bother to argue for it: a telling demonstration of just how unthinkingly they took it as read. That humans – no matter their sex, their place of origin, their class – are all of equal value; and that those who walk in darkness must be brought into light: just how common in antiquity was the fusion of those two particular principles? Not common at all, I would say. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it was pretty much a one–off.  

There is no single text, perhaps, that is more consistently the object of humanist contempt than the book of Genesis. The creation of the cosmos in six days; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah’s flood: here are stories that have long served free–thinkers as prime exhibits in their contention that religion is merely a farrago of childish nonsense. This is why, in round–ups of the ancient texts that humanists are prepared to acknowledge as influences on their own beliefs, Genesis can pretty much be guaranteed not to feature. Yet humanists no less than Jews or Christians are indelibly stamped by its influence. Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that, if there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species, it is to be found in the opening chapter of the Bible. Gods in antiquity were not in the habit of endowing humanity with an inherent dignity. Quite the opposite. “I will make man, who shall inhabit the world, that the service of the gods may be established, and their shrines built.” So spoke the god Marduk, who according to the Babylonians had fashioned the heavens and the earth from the twin halves of a dragon’s corpse, and who ruled as their king. Rather than condemn his fellow deities to perpetual toil, he had created humanity out of a sticky compound of dust and blood to serve them as their slaves. Here was an understanding of man’s purpose, bleak and despairing, that it would have been very easy for the exiles brought to the banks of the Euphrates from sacked Jerusalem to accept: for it would certainly have corresponded to a sense of their puniness before the immensity of Babylon the Great. But the exiles from Judah did not accept it. Rather than fall to the worship of Marduk, they clung instead, like drowning men clutching after wreckage, to the conviction that it was their own god who had brought humanity into being. Man and woman, in the various stories told by the exiles, were endowed with a uniquely privileged status. They alone had been shaped in God’s image; they alone had been granted mastery over every living creature; they alone, after five days of divine labour, which had seen heaven itself, and earth, and everything within heaven and earth brought into being, had been created on the sixth day. Humans were possessed of an especial dignity because they shared in the dignity of the one true God. 

The corollary of this was, of course, very clear: that the cult of Marduk ranked as the merest superstition. So too did the pantheons worshipped by other peoples: the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians. Male gods and female gods; warrior gods and craftsmen gods; storm gods and fertility gods: they were all of them, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “less than nothing.” There were no spirits lurking in springs, or in groves, or on the tops of mountains, that required mollification. The temples built by the Babylonians, so steepling that they seemed to brush the sky, merited neither awe nor admiration, but scorn. Their statues were stock and stone. “All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit; their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame. Who fashions a god or casts an image, that is profitable for nothing? Behold, all his fellows shall be put to shame, and the craftsmen are but men; let them all assemble, let them stand forth, they shall be terrified, they shall be put to shame together.” 

The book of Genesis, the prophecies of Isaiah: these texts, anthologised alongside numerous others, and called by Christian the Bible, were fated to have an utterly saturating influence upon what the great Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin has termed “the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world.” In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with Christianity. Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions which served to define them; but in Europe, in the lands which acknowledged the primacy of the Pope, there was only the odd community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Church. Just as humanists do today, it cast its values and ideals as universal – ‘catholic’. There was barely a rhythm of life that it did not define. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones. Even when, in the sixteenth century, Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith was universal, and destined to embrace the entire world, remained. It inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers; in their conquest of those that they were able to seize, and reconsecrate as a Promised Land; in their attempt to convert the inhabitants of those that they were not. Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical re–alignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as most of us in the West had assumed them to be, the need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are and not to confuse them with ‘human nature’ is, perhaps, more pressing than it has ever been. To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries – and in many cases millennia – has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for atheists than it is for believers. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. We are all of us – Catholics, Protestants, Catholic atheists, Protestant atheists – goldfish swimming in Christian waters. To identify the precursors of humanism with Indian philosophers and Confucian sages, while never once mentioning the heritage of Christianity, is akin to describing the forebears of birds as crocodiles or snakes, while never once thinking to mention dinosaurs.  

So it is, for instance, that the Amsterdam Declaration can airily dismiss the dogmas of religion, even as it simultaneously takes for granted the existence of “universal legal human rights”. Yet to believe in the existence of human rights requires no less of a leap of faith than does a belief in, say, angels, or the Trinity. The origins of the concept lie not in “the application of the methods of science” so prized by the Amsterdam Declaration but in medieval theology. When, in the 12th century, Christian scholars sought to fashion a properly Christian legal system, they naturally turned to the Bible for guidance. There, both in Genesis and in the New Testament, they could read that all men and women were endowed with an inherent dignity. All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Yet how – that being so – were Christians to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that “the use of all things should be common to all”? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in the Latin West. The solution, arrived at by 1200, was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to those learned in the Church’s canons, iure naturali –  ‘in accordance with natural law’. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. Instead, he was merely taking what was properly owed him. It was the wealthy miser, not the starving thief, who was the object of divine disapproval. Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers decreed, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered something novel: a legal obligation. That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, however, was a matching principal: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by lawyers in medieval Christendom – their ius: their ‘right’.   

Yet this doctrine – despite its origins in Christian jurisprudence – was one that would come, in time, to slip the moorings of doctrinal Christianity. Indeed, first in the American Revolution, and then in the French, the claim would be made that human rights owned nothing at all to the distinctive history of Latin Christendom. They were instead eternal and universal. To radicals in the French Revolution – who tended to live and breathe anti–clericalism – the notion that anything of value might have sprung from the mulch of medieval superstition was a possibility too grotesque even to contemplate. “The Declaration of Rights,” they proclaimed, “is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.” A momentous discovery had been made: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, would prove itself brilliantly adept at exploiting this realisation. Repeatedly, Christian concepts were re–packaged for non–Christian audiences. Today, as in the eighteenth century, a doctrine such as that of human rights is far likelier to be signed up to if its orgins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe is kept scrupulously concealed. The emphasis placed by United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction – just as it was a precondition for the humanist promotion of human rights as a concept entirely distinct from the dogmas of religion.   

Yet this in turn veiled a further irony: for what was the contempt displayed by the iconoclasts of the French Revolution for Christianity if not itself a tribute paid to the inescapable influence on the West of Christian paradigms? “The old has gone, the new has come!” So Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, had proclaimed. The tone of radicalism, the sense that an entire order had been judged and found wanting, could not help but seem shocking to his contemporaries. Change, in the opinion of the Romans, was by definition sinister. The phrase res novae – ‘new things’ – served them as a synonym for everything in society that was most menacing, pernicious, malign. Consciously to banish the past, to overturn custom: here was a fearsome project, one so monstrous as barely to seem explicable to the peoples of the Roman world. Nothing better exemplified the revolutionary quality of Christianity than its glorification of revolution. Fissile within its scriptures and rituals, the portrayal of change as a force for good opened up to humanity a novel understanding of what the future might represent: the road to a brighter future. Just as Isaiah had condemned the gods of the Egyptians and the Babylonians as mere idols, fit to be toppled into the mire, so had Christians in the early Middle Ages equated progress with the banishment of superstition. Trees sacred to pagan gods were exultantly felled by missionaries, and churches planted where blood–stained altars had originally stood. Then, during the Reformation, the same sense of devout hostility towards idolatry came to be turned against the Roman church; and during the French Revolution against the entire massy structure of Christianity itself. Just as the reverence felt by enthusiasts for the Enlightenment for the doctrine of human rights would have been unthinkable without medieval canon law, so did the hostility of the Jacobins towards institutional religion palpably stand in a line of descent that reached back in time to Luther, to Boniface, to Isaiah. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.” 

Humanists, when they celebrate the liberation from dogma and superstition that it is to be gained, in their opinion, from “the application of the methods of science,” are bearing witness to the enduring hold on Western civilisation, not of Greek philosophy, still less of the teachings of Indian and Chinese sages, but of Biblical prophecy. It was certainly no accident that many of Darwin’s most enthusiastic defenders should have borne the unmistakeable stamp of radical Protestantism. “Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies.” So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, an anatomist and biologist whose genius for savaging bishops led to him being described as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. That it was his duty to bring light to the world, and that the more the fog of superstition was banished, so the more apparent would become the contours of truth, was his devoutest conviction. Huxley’s sense of himself as a member of an elect had – as contemporaries were quick to note – a familiarly radical quality. “He has the moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute confidence in his own convictions, the desire and determination to impress them upon all mankind, which are the essential marks of the Puritan character.” These qualities, however, were not all that Huxley owed to the Reformation. His conviction that medieval Christendom had been nothing but bigotry and backwardness, a hellish landscape stalked by fanatical inquisitors, was one that ultimately descended, not from Voltaire, but from Luther. Agnostics – a term coined by Huxley – have always tended to display, in their attitudes towards Christianity, a marked susceptibility towards Protestant propaganda. The conviction of Milton that Galileo’s fate illustrated the fundamentally pernicious character of popery and priestcraft has had many heirs. That “the Franciscan and Dominican licencers” were fanatics too benighted by superstition to permit the study of the heavens is a myth clung to no less devotedly by humanists today than it was by Puritans back in the time of the Thirty Years War. It is in that sense that Huxley, when he exulted in the prospect of “a new Reformation,” was speaking more truly than he knew. Humanism is not an emancipation from Christianity. It does not offer redemption from the great cycle of revolutions and reformations that for two thousand years now has marked the course of Christian history. It is merely another illustration of the great paradox of our age: that Christianity has no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish.   

That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that values should be translated, as Sam Harris has argued, “into facts that can be scientifically understood”: these are not, nor ever have been, self–evident truths. It is hardly surprising, of course, in a society that has increasingly abandoned the institutional practise of Christianity, yet still clings to its assumptions, its values, its myths, that we should shrink from staring the implications of our current predicament fully in the face. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” Such was the warning given almost a century and a half ago by Friedrich Nietzsche: the most radical because the most unsparingly honest of modern atheists. No one – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. Socialists, democrats, liberals: all were equally deluded. Humanism, despised by Nietzsche as an ideology to which the English were peculiarly prone, was dismissed by him as palpable idiocy. “When the English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English,” Nietzsche concluded witheringly, “morality is not yet a problem.” It was not from reason that the doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith which humanists believed themselves – in their conceit – to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead – but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. For centuries, perhaps, it would linger. Christianity had reigned for two millennia. It could not easily be banished. Its myths would long endure. And yet they were no less myths, for all that, because they now wore the show of the secular. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour”: these were Christian through and through. 

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most revolutionary about the Christian faith. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill–constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Its ideals of compassion and equality before God were bred, not of love, but of hatred: a hatred of the deepest and most sublime order, one which had transformed the very character of morality, a hatred the like of which had never before been seen on earth. Nietzsche, when he lamented what Christians had done to classical civilisation, did not mourn it as a precursor to humanism. He admired the Greeks, not despite, but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. The radicalism of Nietzsche’s atheism lay in his recognition that morals and values were no less dependent for their viability upon faith than was faith in a god. This dark insight it was that enabled him to value the ancients for the pleasure they had taken in inflicting suffering; for knowing that punishment might be festive; for demonstrating that, “in the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty, before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.” 

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history, had warned what confusions were bound to follow from the death of God. Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated. “After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection, with new questions.” Half a century after Nietzsche wrote this, and almost two decades after the outbreak of the Great War, the Nazis came to power in Germany. Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly proclaimed how Christian his movement was, had come increasingly to share in Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity. Its morality, its concern for the weak, the Führer viewed as cowardly and shameful. Christian teachings had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mental patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. The churches had had their day. The new order, if it were to endure for a millennium, would require a new order of man. It would require Übermenschen. This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong – as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated – had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.  

“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” These words – with which I opened my talk – were spoken by Heinrich Himmler. Here, in his conviction that Homo sapiens had no claim to a special status, and that it was unwarrantable conceit for humans to imagine themselves somehow superior to the rest of creation, was all the sanction he needed for genocide. He, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity. Perhaps it is this that lies behind our readiness to accuse those with whom we disagree of being fascists, or Nazis, or Hitler: the dread of what might happen should such words cease to be taken as insults. Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption. It is not truth that science offers moralists, but a mirror. Racists identify it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism – “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others” – finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The well–spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence–based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.

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As St Bernadette’s relics begin a two–month tour across Britain, Marianne Rozario explains the Catholic Church’s teaching on saints 07/09/2022

This week marks the beginning of a two–month tour of the relics of Saint Bernadette which are journeying on pilgrimage to fifty Roman Catholic Churches throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. But who are saints? What is a relic? And why does the Catholic Church hold them in such high regard? This explainer summarises Catholic teaching on these questions.  

Who is a saint? 

The word ‘saint’ is derived from the Latin word sanctus meaning ‘holy’, understood as set apart from the world. In general, it refers to all Christians who strive for a life of holiness. In the Catholic Church, a canonised saint is a human who after their death is officially recognised as having ‘practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace’[1] 

What is involved in the process of canonisation? 

Canonisation has a long tradition in the Catholic Church. In the first five centuries of Christian history, there was no formal process, and the recognising of saints was based on public acclaim. From the sixth to the twelfth century, the agreement of the local bishop was required before someone could be canonised. From the twelfth century, the bishop would furthermore collect eyewitness testimonies of those that knew the person and witnessed claimed miracles. If satisfied, that bishop could then seek the approval to the pope. 

Nowadays, there are several stages to a formal process. Firstly, the title ‘Servant of God’ is given to a person whose life is being investigated for official recognition for sainthood in the Catholic Church, usually five years after their death. Secondly, the person is given the title of ‘Venerable’, formally recognised by the pope as having lived a virtuous life. Thirdly, to be beatified – recognised as ‘Blessed’ – one miracle acquired through the candidate’s intercession is needed, while those killed for their faith are given the title ‘Blessed’ with no miracle required. Finally, to be officially recognised as a saint, a second miracle after beatification is required. A commission made up of theologians and scientists must verify these miracles.

Where does the Bible support the understanding of saints?  

Catholics believe that support for the devotion to saints can be found in Hebrews 12:22–24 which encourages Christians to approach saints in heaven alongside the angels, God the judge, and Jesus the mediator. It speaks of ‘the assembly and church of the firstborn who have been enrolled in heaven’ and ‘spirits of righteous ones who have been made perfect’. Similarly, in Revelation 8:3–4, an image is depicted of the smoke of incense going up to heaven with the prayers of the saints from the hand of an angel before God; an image of how the intercession of saints work.[2] 

What does saints as intercessors and models of virtue mean?  

The Catholic Church believes that through the process of canonisation, saints are given by God to be ‘models and intercessors’ to the Church on Earth.[3] As intercessors, saints mediate the spiritual and temporal realms.[4] They are able to communicate with ordinary worshippers and take their requests into the spiritual realm. 

Saints are also models of holiness and virtue for those on Earth to imitate. They have been described as ‘those men and women who have gone before us, marked by the sign of faith, and have been recognised as martyrs or people of heroic virtue’.[5] The Catholic Church sees ‘virtue’ as ‘a habitual and firm disposition to do the good’.[6] Virtues are not just attributes or characteristics of a person. Rather, in Catholicism, ‘the goal of a virtuous life is to become like God’[7] or as Ephesians 5:1 puts it ‘Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children’.  

What is a relic? 

A relic is ‘a part of the physical remains of a saint after their death, or an object which has been in contact with their body’. In honouring or venerating relics, Catholics seek to remember that they are not simply human bones but ‘bones that belonged to individuals touched by the transcendent power of God’.[8]  

The veneration of relics is a practice dating back to the early years of Christianity.[9] Early examples include the veneration of Saint Polycarp. The early Church Fathers were united in their approval of relics, but were careful to note that the veneration of relics is not equal to worship which is only owed to God, but instead a lesser form of honouring. The Catholic Church continues to affirm this position.  

Non–Christian cultures and religions also practice some kinds of relic veneration – for example, Athenians venerated the remains of Oedipus and Theseus, and the relics of the Prophet Mohammed are kept in a special wing of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul despite contemporary Islam not sanctioning the veneration of relics today. Still today, Buddhists venerate the remains of Buddha – ten original sets of relics from the Buddha’s remains were redistributed into 84,000 stupas – and Hindus consider the footprints, or padukas, of great teachers to be sacred.  

Example: Saint Bernadette 

Bernadette Soubirous was born in 1844 to a poor family in France. At the age of fourteen she is believed to have seen the Virgin Mary eighteen times between February and July 1858 in a cave on the outskirts of Lourdes. This series of Apparitions – apparitions understood as a heavenly being making themselves known in a personal revelation to those on earth – were authenticated in 1866 by the Bishop of Tarbes. Bernadette lived out her religious vocation with the community of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers until her death at the age of 35, and was canonised a saint in 1933.  

Saint Bernadette’s visions led to the founding of the shrine of Lourdes which inspires generations of people to journey on pilgrimage there each year. Estimates suggest that around 5 million pilgrims visit Lourdes each year, with about 200 million pilgrims having visited since 1860. The Marian shrine – of or relating to Mary the mother of Jesus – is a popular pilgrimage destination for those with special devotions to Our Lady and those seeking miraculous healings.  Tradition holds that the shrine has a spring of water with miraculous healing properties. The 70th officially recognised miraculous healing was announced in 2018, however there are over 7,000 accounts of miraculous recoveries attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.[10] 

The tour of Saint Bernadette’s relics to England, Scotland and Wales over the next two months will be, firstly, an opportunity for the Catholic community in the United Kingdom, especially those not physically able to go to Lourdes, to pray in front of the relics asking for the intercession of Saint Bernadette. Lourdes is seen by many as a place of healing – spiritual, emotional, psychological and physical – and those that visit the relics of Saint Bernadette and ask for her intercession will be hoping that those gifts will be extended to them. 

Secondly, the tour of her relics serves as an opportunity for the faithful to grow in virtue through the witness of Saint Bernadette’s life. In particular, Catholics hold that Saint Bernadette demonstrated the virtue of obedience throughout her life – obedience to Mary by following her requests to return to visit her and building a chapel on the site of the visions, and obedience to God in the face of those not believing her visions.  

Through the tour of her relics, there will inevitably be an increased awareness of St Bernadette’s life, the way that she models the virtue of obedience for living Catholics, and the significance of saints in the spirituality of many Christians globally. For the Catholic Church here in Britain, this unique opportunity is a blessing that I hope can refresh, renew and reignite faith – and perhaps foster a curiosity in those with little understanding of saints and relics.

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Muslim groups made an unlikely appearance in the briefing war among the candidates. Simon Perfect examines the problems in government–Muslim relations. 20/07/2022

In the brutal pace of the Tory leadership race, most of the focus has been on the economy (who’s a real fiscal Conservative); trans issues (who’s more ‘anti–woke’); and Boris (how much distance to put from him). With all that to chew on, religion hasn’t had much of a look in – until a couple of days ago.

As part of an apparent effort to discredit (former) candidate Penny Mordaunt, the Daily Mail’s cover story on Monday 18th criticized her for her engagement last year with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the largest umbrella organisation of mosques and Muslim groups in the country. In February 2021, then Paymaster General Mordaunt tweeted congratulations to Zara Mohammed, the first woman to be elected secretary general to the MCB, and at age 29 one of the youngest leaders of a national–level religion or belief group. Mohammed’s election, on a platform of empowering Muslim women and young people, was generally warmly received by religious and political figures. But Mordaunt’s tweet, and her subsequent meeting with the new Secretary General, was criticized by government insiders at the time for breaking the Conservatives’ long–standing policy of non–engagement with the MCB. A year and a half later, that engagement was again being raised by her opponents (seemingly apropos of nothing) as evidence of her “dodgy judgment”.

I’m not particularly interested in defending or criticising Mordaunt. My interest is in what this says about the place of Islamic civil society organisations and public figures in our politics.

The background to this controversy goes back over a decade. Founded in 1997 to be a cross–community voice for Muslim issues, the MCB now has around 500 fee–paying members (mosques, schools, charities) that it seeks to represent; and its main activities today include advocating for Muslim concerns and capacity–building and training programmes among its members. Its establishment was broadly welcomed by New Labour, but by 2009 relations had soured. That year, New Labour broke off cooperation following accusations linking MCB to extremism, and the MCB’s criticism of Labour’s foreign policy. The deputy director of MCB at the time, Dr Daud Abdullah, had signed (in a personal capacity) the Istanbul Declaration – a deeply controversial document supporting Hamas’ “jihad” in the recent Gaza war, and calling on Muslims to oppose both Israel and the “sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters”. (Gordon Brown had offered to send the Royal Navy to help stop arms smuggling into Gaza). In signing the declaration, Abdullah was accused by the government of calling for global attacks on Jews and violent retaliation against British forces – accusations he denied.

The upshot was that Labour broke off relations with the MCB. But the suspension didn’t last long – contact between MCB leaders and government ministers resumed soon after, continuing sporadically under the Coalition government. It was from 2015 and the election of the Conservative government that formal engagement significantly declined. The MCB has described this as a “quasi–boycott”,[1] and that approach was advocated by a Mordaunt opponent in the Daily Mail article, speaking of a “government ban on the MCB” that she had seemingly violated.

So why does this matter? Firstly, it’s distasteful that some MPs and their advisors see fit to feed the tabloids old controversies about Muslim organisations and public figures, without context, as a way of scoring political points. Here Muslim groups are being used in an instrumentalized way, without their concerns or interests being listened to.

Secondly, we can see that the ‘extremism’ accusation is both very sticky (hard to shake off once applied), contagious (you can be accused of it by association with others), and easily manipulated. In this intervention Mordaunt’s opponents, and the Daily Mail, sought to imply that the current MCB is sympathetic to extremism, based on the decisions of its leaders in the 2000s. But regardless of the legitimacy of the original accusations, as Zara Mohammed herself pointed out she was a teenager when the initial breakdown in relations occurred. Its office–holders and national council are now much more diverse in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and denomination;[2] and it plays an important role in raising Muslim concerns nationally, training Muslim women in mosque leadership, and encouraging good relations between mosques and their local communities through its ‘Visit My Mosque’ initiative. The evidence of extremism is thin. Of course the MCB has been vocal in criticizing government policies (and Islamophobia within the Conservative party), but so have other national–level religion or belief groups. It’s no reason to avoid dialogue with an organisation that has lots to offer in terms of social cohesion.

Thirdly, this story reminds us that when it comes to Muslims in particular, the current government is very reluctant to engage with groups that challenge parts of its agenda, or its interpretation of ‘good citizenship’. The government will always have to make judicious decisions about which groups to engage with and which not to, and clearly some will always be beyond the pale; but it appears the range of acceptability for Islamic groups is very narrow. Individual politicians of Muslim heritage like Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid can make it to the top of the Conservative party, but as sociologist of British Islam Dr Stephen Jones notes, “virtually no Muslim organisation has a formal relationship with central government” now.[3]

The few relationships were thinned even further in June, when the government dropped its independent advisor on Islamophobia, Imam Qari Asim MBE – after Asim made a Facebook post condemning the controversial film The Lady of Heaven, which many Muslims have deemed offensive and dangerous for Sunni–Shi’a harmony.[4] In its dismissal letter to him (which he claims was posted online before he received it), the government argued that by “involvement in a campaign to limit free expression”, he was undermining our “democratic values and freedoms”. Now many would disagree with Asim on this issue; personally I don’t support the censorship of artistic products, though I recognise many Muslims’ strength of feeling and respect their right to protest peacefully. The vile anti–Shi’a hate speech at some of the protests must also be condemned (as Asim clearly did, despite the government suggesting otherwise).[5]

But the government’s decision on Asim is troubling. Little progress has been made on establishing a workable definition of Islamophobia since Asim was appointed in 2019, which he claims is due to lack of interest from ministers. Moreover, how ‘free’ should speech be in different contexts is hotly contested; generally we don’t imply that someone who wants certain restrictions on expressions they find offensive (which would include a large proportion of the population) is a bad citizen, extreme or un–British. Even if I vigorously disagree with them, all Britons have a right to peacefully contest the current parameters of free speech, and they should not be deemed bad citizens when they do so (indeed, full citizenship means being able to contest such parameters). It’s concerning that Muslims seem to face an extra test of legitimacy that doesn’t apply to others – that they should drop concerns about free speech or social conservatism to be seen as good citizens. And it’s concerning that the government is unwilling to work with Muslims like Asim or the MCB when they don’t align exactly with its views.

Ultimately, the change of prime minister offers a chance for the government to move on from Boris Johnson’s strained relationship with British Muslims. If the new PM is serious about building dialogue with these communities, it would be a good idea to move forward on finding a workable definition of ‘Islamophobia’ – one which captures verbal abuse against Muslims as people, but protects free speech on Islam itself.[6] Taking meaningful action on Islamophobia within the Conservative Party would be a priority, as would engaging more with Muslim civil society groups of goodwill, even if those groups are critical of particular policies.

Such an approach would go a long way to rebuild Muslim trust in the government, and prove that it is moving on from its own “dodgy judgment”.

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Hannah Rich shares early insights from current Theos research on faith and economic insecurity. 17/05/2022

Over the past six months, the ‘cost of living’ has gone from a technical phrase used by economists, to something we hear multiple times a day in the context of an acute crisis. Consumer price inflation has continued to rise to its highest level in almost 30 years. Energy bills have rocketed, due in part to the war in Ukraine and associated instability. A survey by the Food Foundation found that in April, one in seven adults in the UK had skipped meals or routinely gone without food, a figure that has risen by 57% since January. The Bank of England recently issued a warning that the UK economy will shrink this year, with interest rates being raised for a fourth consecutive time. All this augurs a likely recession in the coming months.  

It feels like another strand of our economic security net has frayed. If the economy is a game of Kerplunk, then yet another one of the sticks precariously holding up our collective marbles has been pulled out. But the current cost of living crisis and its consequences are far from child’s play.  

It is, therefore, an auspicious time to be conducting a research project on the impact of insecurity on faith, community and volunteering. Since the beginning of the year, my Theos colleague Simon Perfect and I have been researching how precarity affects the way in which people engage with faith communities and build spiritual capital. We set out to explore the ways faith communities address precarious or insecure material circumstances and what it means for congregational life.  

What does it look like, for example, to hold community together when the majority of people in a congregation are on zero–hours contracts or in shift work and their time isn’t fully their own? And how do faith leaders meet the spiritual needs of displaced migrants and asylum seekers, who might only be living in a particular area for a brief period of time until the Home Office relocates them? If someone’s economic life is precarious, does that mean their spiritual life also is – or do faith communities act as anchoring points of stability when little else can? 

These were, and to some extent still are, the guiding questions of our work. But they are also the basis of a project conceived before the cost of living had reached the point of crisis. As we have gone on, the notion of economic insecurity has ballooned and become far more wide–reaching than we might have imagined a year ago. Keeping track of the many forms this takes, from employment, to health, income to housing, has proved difficult.  

It was an evolving conversation already, with definitions and measurements themselves fittingly insecure. Guy Standing’s seminal book The Precariat, which coined or at least popularised the term, was published in 2011, when the surface of the gig economy had barely been scratched, before either Uber or Deliveroo were even operating in the UK. The labour market dynamics that contribute to precarity and insecurity have only deepened since. The number of workers on zero–hours contracts in the UK increased fivefold from 190,000 in 2011 to 990,000 in 2020.  

When the cost of living crisis began, the pandemic had already revealed the many layers of precarity within the economy, and their public health consequences. Those with an income of less than £20,000, or with less than £100 savings, were three times less likely to say they could successfully self–isolate if required to. Nearly a third of care workers said that they would struggle to take time off in the event of illness, due to financial insecurity. But in almost every facet of society, from housing to employment, things feel less secure than they did even a matter of months ago.  

Where we planned to explore the consequences of precarious living circumstances for people’s spirituality and ability to commit to faith communities, conversations have quickly turned to how acute material insecurity is being felt by congregation members and church leaders alike. More than thirty interviews with members of faith communities and charity workers across the country so far have mapped the spiralling insecurity affecting the whole country. For some, the chance to reflect theologically on this is inextricable from the practical reality in front of them.  

As Jon Miles, senior development worker for Transforming Communities Together, a faith–based charity in the West Midlands put it when we spoke back in February, “the sense is that as a country, although we’re being told lots of feel–good stories, the reality on the ground is that the whole thing feels quite uncertain. You’ve got that going on within communities. It has the potential to change the narrative slightly around attitudes to money and the poor, because a lot more people are feeling uncertain, not least when you have the contrast with extreme displays of wealth as well.” 

Those households and individuals who still feel economically secure are by far the minority. The ‘precariat’ may still exist as a group as the extreme margin of the economy, but to identify those at risk of joining it is trickier, when there is barely a community in the community unaffected by ballooning economic insecurity. According to Miles, “the resilience that people might have had to deal with economic challenges, challenges around personal finances, housing situation and employment, and their broader support structures and social resilience to those have also been eaten away. Stuff they might have coped with fine or better under ‘normal’ circumstances, they can’t now.”  

The changing shape of employment and the economy has brought a whole swathe of people who have never had to grapple with financial difficulties before into the mix. The group of people a couple of pay cheques away from losing their homes is ever larger as energy bills have risen, but the number of compounding factors makes it harder to model or identify who is deemed economically precarious. If your weekly shop was already held together by supermarket yellow stickers at the start of the year, there is little room for manoeuvre as things get tighter. People who were already experts in managing limited finances – who had perfected their skills of Kerplunk, if you like – are now finding that that is no longer enough. Even Martin Lewis, the doyen of money saving and clever personal finances, recently admitted he was “virtually out of tools to help people”.  

Research by the RSA defines economic security as “the degree of confidence that a person can have in maintaining a decent quality of life, now and in the future, given their economic and financial circumstances,” and the ‘future’ aspect of this is critical too. Even if you are comfortable enough to have absorbed the recent increase in energy prices into your household budget, that is still no guarantee you will be able to do so when they rise again in the autumn. A debt advice worker told us how their first port of call in supporting people used to be to help them find the best possible energy deal to reduce their outgoings, but that that is now “an absolute joke”. 

In this regard, economic insecurity is qualitatively distinct from poverty or deprivation, as one community activist in a town in the North West of England articulated. Her community is classed among the most deprived in the country, and ranks poorly for community wellbeing, and yet this does not automatically equate to being the most insecure. The two largest employers in the town are anchor institutions offering low–paid but stable employment. The social housing stock is still run by the council and is plentiful. Life feels tough there, she said, but until recently has not necessarily felt insecure, because it is a common experience: “I lived in London for years and housing insecurity was a massive thing and so directly related to the experience of poverty there in a way that just isn’t the case here…. It’s interesting because I’ve always thought of poverty as related to precariousness, and yet there’s almost something quite secure about generational poverty.” 

The practical consequences of all this for faith communities is perhaps best illustrated in the smallest of details and anecdotes. One church minister in inner city Glasgow described how the number of pastoral home visits he is asked to make has dwindled recently. Even accounting for social distancing and post–pandemic nervousness, he sensed this wasn’t normal. ‘Talking to people,’ he said, ‘it has emerged that maybe they can’t afford the heating and they don’t want other people in the church community to know that. So instead I’ll say, ‘let’s go for a cup of tea in the Morrisons’ cafe’ or ‘let’s have a coffee in the church’. This is in the context of a community and congregation in which foodbanks have become a normal part of life to the point where local supermarkets even operate them.  

Opening church halls and community centres as warm spaces for those struggling to heat their homes is a welcome stopgap, but it relies on the church being able to pay its own gas and electric bills – and as we are observing in our research, this is no longer a given.  

The crisis is biting not only at an individual or household level; the whole charity sector is feeling the effects of growing economic instability. According to sector leaders, a third of charities fear they will struggle to survive as a result of the crisis. 60% of those surveyed by the Charities Aid Foundation say they are worried that people will have less money to donate to charity, and 70% are concerned about a rising demand from service users. Squeezed personal finances and rising organisational overheads at a time when funders are also tightening their purse strings all makes for a perfect storm for charities and community groups.  

The co–ordinator of one project – a soup kitchen providing meals to people in Wolverhampton city centre – spoke about the growing challenge of finding affordable premises to operate from, having had to leave two different venues in the course of the pandemic. The project was initially based in the building of a church which subsequently shut, then was helped by a local café which has recently closed down too: “It’s that thing that if you’re homeless, you can’t get a bank account, but if you can’t get a job, you can’t get a home. It’s the same for us as a project, really. I haven’t got premises so when I ask for funding, I can’t give people a registered address, which makes it difficult.” 

Back in spring 2020, few factored into their funding calculations quite how long the Covid–19 pandemic would last, nor could have foreseen the global and national events that have led to the current cost of living crisis. As a result, some funders over–committed in the early days of the pandemic and now have restricted resources left for the recovery phase. The same is true of volunteer capacity. The glut of mutual aid groups and community support that proliferated at the beginning of the pandemic is not easily sustainable through back–to–back crises. As many stalwart volunteers were forced into retirement by the need to shield, people on furlough or temporarily out of work picked up the pieces, and we are only now beginning to see the lay of land post–lockdown.  

“The whole world is in a terrible state o’ chassis,” my grandad was fond of saying, quoting the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey in the final line of his 1924 work Juno and the Paycock. The line is uttered by Jack Boyle, having lost his final sixpence at the end of a sorry saga of financial struggle and family breakdown. Grandad used to employ it melodramatically for everything from there being no milk in the fridge to the genuinely chaotic state of world of affairs. But reading current economic forecasts and hearing stories of how the crisis is affecting communities put me in mind of this; more than ever, it does seem that all of us – ‘the whole world’ – are in a state of economic chaos or instability. But for now, at least, faith communities and charities are a steady ship in that storm. 

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In light of recent events around Ukraine, we are re–sharing this extract from The Mighty and the Almighty (2017) in which Ben Ryan considers Putin’s unusual symbiotic relationship with the Orthodox Church. 16/02/2022

Biography

Few major world leaders have been able to cultivate quite as enigmatic or obscure a public persona as Vladimir Putin. Beyond a series of basic facts, any detail on Putin’s life, opinions and even career specifics is subject to a significant degree of deliberate obscurity, mythologizing, and heavily partisan interpretation. Biographies rely heavily on interviews with enemies or close allies, and officially sanctioned and carefully released information.[i] Putin’s own pronouncements are very deliberate; there seems to be a consensus that he rarely uses words without a careful consideration of the effect he is creating. The closest thing to a Putin autobiography, First Person[ii] (Ot Pervogo Litsa) typifies this. It is not an autobiography but a selection of carefully prepared interviews on particular topics with a trusted selection of Russian journalists.

It is a persona that perhaps deliberately fascinates and terrifies a Western audience, a picture alien to anything that anyone in the West would want to portray. Putin cultivates the image of a hard man. Much is made of his childhood scrapping in his block with the local gangs, getting into martial arts (a hobby he still maintains), the KGB man, and latterly the strong man who is prepared to stand up to those who would weaken Russia, whether internal (the oligarchs, Chechens) or external (NATO).

For all that, certain details of his life are clear. He was born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) in October 1952 to Vladimir and Maria. His father was a Soviet patriot who had been severely wounded in the siege of Leningrad, his mother also having lived through the whole siege. The story Putin has told is that soon after his birth he was baptised as a baby, his mother apparently being a committed Christian, which, if true, although not unheard of, would nonetheless have been rather bold at a time when religion was banned.

Rated as a good but not outstanding student, Putin’s great love as a teenager was martial arts, particularly Judo and Sambo. He was apparently a real talent, winning trophies and training relentlessly. He went to university to study law and developed a desire to join the KGB. He accomplished that aim after graduating at a time when future Premier Yuri Andropov was the head of the KGB, a man whom Putin by all accounts still holds in high regard. Despite the conspiracy theorists, Putin appears not to have been an especially prominent agent. He spent some years working in Moscow before he was sent to East Germany to work in counter–intelligence in Dresden, his only experience outside Russia. In his own words, he worked in political intelligence, collecting intelligence on parties and politicians. He denies the more exotic stories, such as that he obtained documentation on the design of Eurofighters or that he ran Hans Modrow, a prominent East German politician.[iii]  He met his future wife Lyudmila (an air hostess) in 1980 and married her in 1982 or 1983.[iv]

Putin and his family saw the end of communism first–hand in Germany, but witnessed the effects of perestroika and glasnost at home only from a distance. His sense of abandonment as the Soviet system failed to support his office as the Berlin Wall came down was said to be acute. The great sell–off of state assets under the early years of the Yeltsin administration completed the effect – and perhaps goes some way to explaining the obsession with re–creating a strong Russia and Russian zone of influence.

Putin returned to Russia and after finishing a law degree came to work for Anatoly Sobchak in St Petersburg – a man who would go on to become a key patron and ally.[v] Some believe he was assigned the role by the KGB to keep an eye on the dangerous Sobchak.[vi] Others report that though Putin retained his KGB reserve role, he was not assigned to watch Sobchak but was recommended by an ally and performed no intelligence role.[vii] Whatever the truth, there is little doubt Putin soon proved a valuable asset to Sobchak and went through a series of increasingly significant roles through the early 1990s, gaining a reputation as a fixer without ever really proving himself in any election.[viii]

If how Putin came to work for Sobchak is somewhat shrouded in mystery, how he become part of Boris Yeltsin’s[ix] inner circle and eventual successor is even more curious. In 1996, after Sobchak had lost power in St Petersburg, Putin left for Moscow and got his break in the central government via another ally, Pavel Borodin. Even Putin in talking about Borodin finding him an appointment in Moscow claims “I don’t know why”.[x] From there he rapidly went through a number of increasingly prominent positions in the infamously volatile Yeltsin presidency, including serving as head of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) and as Prime Minister. So it was that with Yeltsin’s health failing Putin was named as the preferred successor.

Having become President, Putin has successfully held the position since 2000 with only a four–year interlude from 2008–12 when his ally Medvedev[xi] held the reins until Putin was eligible again (Putin served that time as prime minister). In his time as president, Putin has had some notable successes. For all that opinion polls (and indeed some election polls) have had their authenticity questioned,[xii] there seems little doubt that Putin has a significant support base and remarkably high level of popularity for a man who has been in office as long as he has. His economic record, at least until the last few years, has been remarkably successful, helped of course by Russia’s enormous mineral wealth.

The political power of the oligarchs has been largely curtailed. Among the group that successfully managed to strip away huge portions of previously state–owned industry for a fraction of their real value, several have been effectively exiled, imprisoned or forced to sell up large parts of their gains back to the state or else to other oligarchs better in favour with Putin. If Russian business continues to be dominated by a small sect of oligarchs, they at least have learnt the hard way to keep themselves out of the political sphere.

In foreign policy terms, Russia’s increased confidence was obvious long before the recent Ukraine crisis. Whether it was military action in Georgia or the critical role played by Putin in the 2013 dispute over the possibility of international action in Syria, Russia has been prepared to play an increasingly prominent role in recent years. The decision to annex Crimea is only the latest in a string of efforts to shore up the Russian sphere of influence and stand up to the perceived encroaching of NATO and the EU.

Putin inspires a great deal of fear in the West.[xiii] The combination of aggressive nationalism, increased military confidence and domestic repression and human rights questions and, of course, the continued nuclear capacity is a dangerous cocktail. That notwithstanding, Putin has been a remarkably successful president and today sits as one of the most powerful world leaders.

Putin’s faith and politics

Personal Faith

Putin has been keen to present himself as a man of serious personal faith. This is a trend that has seemed to become more pronounced throughout his time in office. Cynics suggest that the increasingly confident assertion of faith is part of a broader trend of seeking a nationalist agenda as economic performance declined. However, even relatively early in his presidency Putin had spoken at times about his faith and had already formed an apparently close bond with certain members of the clergy in the early 2000s, when his popularity was at its peak.

In early meetings with then US President George Bush, Putin certainly made much of his personal faith, showing off the small aluminium cross that he wore round his neck and making much of his Christian commitment. Bush was by all accounts certainly impressed – relating the account of the meeting in his book Decision Points.[xiv] Bush, of course, was famous for his own evangelical faith and it is entirely possible that Putin emphasised this precisely to win a friend in the US president. However, the story of this little baptismal cross is one which Putin has highlighted on several occasions and figures prominently in a passage from the biography written by Hutchins and Korobko.[xv]

The story goes that this baptismal cross was given to Putin by his Christian mother when she had him secretly baptised in the early 1950s and it has apparently been an object of great sentimental value to him ever since. Putin did not wear it while he was an active KGB officer, but he reports that “in 1993 when I worked on the Leningrad City Council, I went to Israel as part of an official delegation. Mama gave me my baptismal cross to get it blessed at the Lord’s Tomb. I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”[xvi]

The story takes on a mythical element to it, however, in an account of a fire at the Putin family dacha.[xvii] According to the story, the property burned down in the mid–90s, destroying many of the family’s key possessions including a good portion of their money. However, the cross survived the fire and was presented back to Putin by one of the firemen.  If the account seems extraordinary it is nonetheless one which has been repeated often. It bears, in fact, a close resemblance to an ancient Russian religious myth in which an icon of St Nicholas was said to be impervious to flame.[xviii] Whether or not that connotation is deliberate and the tale of Putin’s cross is a mythical construct, it is striking that this story is one that forms part of the official narrative on Putin’s faith. Putin certainly wishes to portray a strong personal faith that is exemplified in these stories.

There is some reason to believe that this goes beyond cynical self–image. For many years Putin has certainly had a close relationship with Archimandrite Tikhon, the Father Superior of Sretensky monastery. So close, in fact, is this relationship that there are those who would paint Tikhon as an éminence grise. Certainly Tikhon, a former film student, with a reputation as a spiritual healer seems to have served for some years as confessor to Putin. One biographer speculates that Tikhon probably knows more about Putin’s life than anyone else.[xix] He is also a priest with some rather remarkable political views, having publicly criticised democracy as a force that weakens a country and its spiritual basis, spoken out in favour of censorship as a necessary instrument and worked as a well–known public media figure. He has certainly seemed to profit from the relationship with Putin and other prominent political figures securing a string of new offices and promotions in recent years. However, he himself has always been keen to be clear that Putin is very much his own man, and certainly for all the closeness in their relationship Putin has stopped short (at least so far) of fully endorsing Tikhon’s model of Church–state relations. They did, however, work closely together in 2007 in the process of re–unifying the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, and speculation over the extent of their influence on one another has continued for years.[xx]

Tikhon has reported in the past that Putin prays daily in a small chapel next to the presidential office. Putin’s mother and ex–wife were both certainly religious and the claim that Putin prays regularly is not implausible. As an overall picture of Putin’s personal faith then, while recognising the usual problems when it comes to unpicking truth from myth and managed public image, we can at the very least see that Putin wants to portray an image as a man with a committed personal faith.

Politics and Faith in the service of the State

The debate about the relationship between the Orthodox Church and political power is nothing new. Indeed, it goes all the way back beyond the Great Schism in 1054 and even to the working out of Christianity’s relationship with power with Constantine, the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire. The Russian state, and its predecessors in the Tsarist Empire, Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Kiev, adopted a trajectory of religion and power that did not follow that of Catholic or Protestant Europe. The Church, even more than established churches of Western Europe, was fully part of the structure of the government. It was in part this intimate relationship with the ruling system of the State that prevented the Orthodox Church in Russia (as opposed to other European churches) from acting as a critical or independent voice, and which explained in part the Bolshevik revolution.

Under Communism, the Church was a threat to the state as a body closely associated with power structures, a rival ideology and capable of inspiring the affection and support of a large proportion of the Russian population. Putin, however, is on record as seeing that attitude as a mistake on the part of the USSR. The Church, for Putin, has a significant and powerful value in forging a strong Russian state. Under Putin, the Church and nationalism are increasingly closely united. The Church serves a powerful role in supporting Putin’s true political ideology – his identity as a gosudarstvennik[xxi]or ‘Statist’. The “Russian Idea” as described by Putin in his so–called ‘Millennium Message’, delivered in 1999 and still seen as the core of his political model, includes patriotism, collectivism, solidarity and derzhavnost (destiny to be a great power). Religion, even were Putin not religious himself, has a very clear and obvious instrumental value in meeting those goals.

This instrumental use of the Church has been seen on a number of occasions both internally and, increasingly, externally. Internally, Putin has done much to encourage and support the growth of the Church and to restrain the proselytising activities of other religious bodies (Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostal groups have found it very difficult to be registered as an official belief group in Russia, and  are portrayed as a security threat to the Russian state[xxii]). Under Putin’s watch, icons and church bells that were sold or smuggled out of Russia under Communism have been restored,[xxiii] churches have been built or rebuilt (and particularly the vast Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow[xxiv]) with oligarchs and local businesses strongly encouraged (even allegedly coerced[xxv]) into funding the work. 

It can also be seen in education, where Orthodox culture is now part of the school curriculum and even, increasingly, in direct control of popular media. Putin’s government is heavily suspected of fixing the results of the 2008 poll for the “greatest Russian” in favour of Alexander Nevsky, a warrior who resisted foreign invaders as Prince of Novgorod, Grand Prince of Kiev and Grand Prince of Vladimir and was later proclaimed an Orthodox saint. Independent polls revealed that this result was probably fraudulent. That, of course, in some ways makes the result more interesting as an example of whom the Russian government want people to value – a figure of both nationalist pride and religious prestige.

Externally, this instrumental relationship has been gaining in importance too. Putin played a role in the reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, in the process creating an effective foreign policy tool.[xxvi] As Putin has looked to reinforce a sense of ethnic and linguistic Russian–ness even beyond the Federation borders, the Church has been a valuable part of that process. A quotation from the Patriarch Kirill[xxvii] is illustrative of this point:

“The Patriarch is the custodian of the internal unity of the Church and, together with his brothers in the episcopate, guardian of the purity of the faith… The Patriarch is the defender of the canonical borders of the church. This ministry takes on special significance in that situation that arose after the formation of independent states on the territory of ‘historic Russia’. While respecting their sovereignty and caring for their well–being, the Patriarch is called, at the same time, to be concerned with the maintaining and strengthening of spiritual ties between people living in these countries for the sake of preserving the system of values which the one Orthodox civilization of Holy Russia reveals to the world.”

Certainly, this sense of the “canonical borders” that exceed the current Federation borders has been employed rhetorically on several occasions – particularly in relation to Russian operations in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. Explicit note was made of the special status of Crimea in the history of Russian Orthodoxy – as the site where the Grand Prince Vladimir adopted Orthodoxy and was baptised. Putin noted, “his spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus”. This narrative of unifying the Russian peoples defined by language and religion has been a growing trend in which the Moscow Patriarch and President mutually reinforce one another. The Church has become mobilised as part of the defence of this policy and the State more broadly – creating a concept of ‘Spiritual Security’. In official Church documents, spiritual security is now the official missional activity of the Orthodox Church in Russia, propping up a bold ideological vision for the role of the Church in society and politics.[xxviii]

With that, of course, comes a sense that other religious groups undermine the security of the state. How to manage the other faiths in Russia has become a new political problem. Under Communism, all religions were equally illegal; under Putin, a more difficult relationship has had to be worked out. Russia’s Muslim population is considerable, if difficult to calculate accurately, with numbers ranging in different surveys anywhere between 5 and 10 per cent of the overall population.[xxix] That population, of course, is especially prevalent in the southern part of the country and in Chechnya.

Chechens present a particular problem as a secessionist nationalist group with strong ties to Islamic extremist groups including Al–Qaeda and the Islamic State. Similar conflicts now exist across Russia’s North Caucasus regions. A Caucasus Emirate was established in 2007, though its leaders have mostly now transferred their allegiance to the Islamic State.[xxx] Putin’s response (and indeed his predecessor Boris Yeltsin’s) to these threats has been with strong military action. There have been two Chechen wars, one, under Yeltsin, from 1994 to 1996 and one, under Putin, in 1999–2000. In both cases the Russian military was able to reassert control only after heavy fighting and the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians. In 2000, Putin declared that his “historical mission… consisted of resolving the situation in the Northern Caucasus.”[xxxi] This is quite an ambition, and one that would seem only to have got harder since then, and might provide a particularly difficult test for Putin’s instrumental use of the Church.

Conclusion

Overall, the Orthodox Church and Putin have a rather unusual symbiotic relationship. Putin has allowed the Church to return to prominence and supported it in a way unheard of since the Revolution. The Church has, in turn, provided some of the intellectual and cultural backing for Putin’s Statist vision for Russia and the wider Russian sphere of influence.

There is an open question which is seemingly impossible to answer which is to what extent Putin was inspired by the resources provided by Orthodoxy in his model, or whether his statist model simply uses the resources provided where it can find them. Certainly Putin has seemed to use the Church more and more in an instrumental way to support his actions at home and abroad – however, it is notable that he has chosen to do so. No other Russian leader since the Tsars has felt the need or desire to do so. Even Yeltsin, who also professed a nominal Christianity and a desire to rewrite some of the weaknesses of the disintegrating USSR, made little effort to involve the Church in that. Nor, to any great extent, have many of Putin’s political rivals. This is very much a Putin concern – and with that in mind it is too simplistic to assume that all this faith material is only instrumental. There seems to be some legitimate sense of interaction between Orthodox thought, faith and Putin’s politics and political model.

Certainly some of Putin’s opponents seem to see things that way. When Pussy Riot, the feminist punk anarchist group, staged one of their performances in protest against Putin, the government and the establishment, it is notable that the site for their provocative gesture was inside a Moscow Cathedral. It is difficult to think of another secular European leader for whom the most symbolic attack would be in a cathedral – and that if nothing else is a notable example of the close symbiotic relationship between the president, his politics and his faith.

The Mighty and the Almighty can be purchased here

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Simon Perfect reviews a major new book that charts ongoing, gradual transformation within the British Muslim communities. 12/11/2021

In February 2021, Glaswegian Zara Mohammed became the first woman to be elected Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the largest umbrella organisation of mosques and Muslim groups in the country.[1] At 29, she is also one of the youngest people to lead a national–level religion or belief group. With an agenda of empowering Muslim women and young people, tackling Islamophobia and encouraging greater Muslim participation in public life, her appointment was welcomed across the religious and political spectra and hailed as “a landmark moment” for British Islam.

But there was an odd response from the Conservative government. Penny Mordaunt, then Paymaster General, tweeted congratulations to Mohammed – before being criticized by government insiders for breaking the government’s long–standing policy of not engaging with the MCB. New Labour first stopped cooperation with it in 2009, following accusations of links to extremism and the MCB’s criticism of Labour’s foreign and counter–terrorism policy. Sporadic contact with departments and ministers resumed in 2010, but under the Conservatives there has been no formal ministerial engagement – something the MCB describes as a “quasi–boycott approach”.[2]

What’s the context behind this? And more widely, was Mohammed’s appointment mere window–dressing in one organisation, or did it reflect more substantive change going on among Muslim civil society?

Thankfully, to help us answer this we can now turn to an excellent new book by Dr Stephen H. Jones, a sociologist and lecturer at the University of Birmingham. Islam and the Liberal State: National Identity and the Future of Muslim Britain (2021) summarises in one place the latest research about British Islam, and makes use of Jones’ own access to Muslim organisations secured through his work, including his time as General Secretary of the Muslims in Britain Research Network in 2017–20. It is essential reading for anyone wanting an up–to–date ‘state of the nation’ look at the British Muslim communities.

Jones’ stated intention is to show that, contrary to popular assumptions, liberalism and Islam can be compatible. Through a detailed examination of the experiences of British Muslims in three contexts – Islamic education, Islamic law, and Muslim organisations’ relations with the state – he seeks to show that media and political talk about the need to build a ‘British’ Islam that is at home in the liberal state is well behind the times. In fact, over the last few decades, Islam in Britain has already shifted away from isolation to participation; it has “reorientated itself, reshaping around British public and institutional norms”.[3] Distinctly British forms of Islam that are actively engaged with wider society are already here, and are mainstream. But this development, he argues, has been consistently ignored by commentators, who prefer to insist simplistically that Muslims are failing to integrate, without clarifying what they actually mean by it.

This argument is particularly important following the terrible suspected jihadist murder of David Amess MP, and in the wider context of the ongoing inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing. It cannot be repeated often enough that the vast majority of British Muslims abhor both the violence and the extreme views behind them.

Isolationist Islamic education?

Jones’ argument is primarily about shifts in institutional ethos. In the educational sector, for example, there is a common narrative that Islamic educational institutions are isolationist and failing to equip young Muslims (and future Islamic leaders) with the skills they need to succeed in modern Britain –leaving them alienated and vulnerable to extremists. This account has been a major driver of government educational policy for the last two decades and remains popular.

But how true is it today? Jones shows that while isolationism is still the case in some institutions, in others a gradual but significant process of reform is ongoing. His focus is primarily on Islamic higher learning, including seminaries for teenagers to young adults (known as dar al–ulums, hawzas or jamias depending on denomination), rather than on madrasa education for children. He highlights important examples of Islamic seminaries and colleges which have built bridges with secular universities and are offering modules on more wide–ranging religious and social science topics to complement their traditional curriculum.

Crucially, there are also signs of change among the Deobandi dar al–ulums. The Deobandis are one of the most significant Muslim groups in Britain, running a majority of mosques and educational establishments. Traditionally they have encouraged students (mostly males) to pursue a conservative scholastic piety and to limit interactions with wider society. As such their seminaries have sometimes been accused of being on a conveyor belt leading Muslims towards extremism. But drawing a simplistic link between religious conservatism and violence is too problematic. According to Jones, no graduate of a British Deobandi dar al–ulum has been convicted of involvement in terrorism, and most British jihadists are relatively religiously uninformed and outside of such institutions.

Moreover, research in the last few years suggests that while some Deobandi seminaries remain insular, others are becoming more outward–looking, actively seeking partnership with mainstream universities and encouraging engagement with civil society. Teaching methods, standards and assessment processes are also being reformed in response to student demand for courses with greater employment potential. And strikingly, a study of the burgeoning Muslim chaplaincy sector in 2013 found that about half of the two hundred Muslim chaplains in the UK were from Deobandi backgrounds; their traditional education did not preclude them from embracing an outward–facing, pastoral role with considerable interfaith activity.[4]

This change is slow and challenges persist. In particular, many of these educational institutions struggle to secure external accreditation for their courses from secular universities, meaning graduates with years of scholarly training struggle to get their qualifications recognised in the workplace. And there is still a significant gender gap in Islamic education, with most secondary–level educational institutions being for boys only (though most higher–level centres are mixed). Many of these learning centres remain traditional and socially conservative. But it is clear that the Islamic educational scene in Britain is moving on from its earlier inward–looking and oppositional position.

Extremist civil society?

This picture, of gradual change from hostility to critical engagement, is also a pattern among other Muslim organisations. In Chapter 5 Jones provides a detailed account of the shifting relations between Muslim civil society organisations and the state. These relations have often been fraught, shaped as they are by the swings in counter–terrorism policy after 9/11 – from New Labour’s attempts to promote more ‘moderate’ Muslim groups, to the Coalition and Conservative governments’ refusal to engage with groups deemed insufficiently vocal in their opposition to extremism. Many Muslim activist groups have found themselves blacklisted, accused of being fronts for Islamist extremists and terrorist–sympathisers.

In Jones’ view, many of these accusations are increasingly flimsy, particularly when made against the more mainstream organisations today, such as the MCB. The problem is that some of these organisations have roots in Islamist groups that emerged in Britain from the 1960s onwards (with links to such transnational Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat–i–Islami). Many of the original activist leaders held Islamist ideals, and some have undoubtedly made illiberal or offensive remarks. But, as Jones argues, focusing on the origins of a group (or on the past remarks of individuals) often masks real change going on among them. “[M]any of the members of these networks have shifted views as they have grown older, with some disavowing their former selves”,[5] and he provides several convincing examples of this. In a number of cases, organisations and leaders that were once antagonistic or wary of wider society have gradually turned towards engagement (including with the state and police) in order to address urgent challenges facing Muslims from poverty to Islamophobia.

These developments, Jones argues, make the government’s attitudes to particular Muslim organisations increasingly outdated – especially its refusal to engage with the MCB. Today its leadership and ethos is a far cry from its form in the early 2000s, when it was dominated by foreign–born male elders with most affiliate mosques aligned with Deobandi and reformist Islamist traditions. Its office–holders and national council are now more diverse in terms of gender, age, ethnicity and denominational background.[6] And it is undoubtedly a major force for transformation in the Muslim community: it is playing an important role in training women in mosque leadership, driving social action, and in encouraging hundreds of mosques to engage with their local communities through its annual ‘Visit My Mosque Day’. Undoubtedly the MCB has put up Conservative backs by its claim the party has inadequately tackled Islamophobia within its ranks (a claim confirmed by an independent report earlier this year),[7] and by its criticism of Boris Johnson himself for his ‘burqa’ comments in 2018. But continuing to hold the new MCB leadership at a distance on the basis of its history looks increasingly bizarre and unsustainable. Other umbrella religion or belief organisations criticize the government on various grounds but are not so shunned.

In these ways, Jones successfully shows that the narrative that British Muslims have failed to integrate is at best too simplistic, and at worst, deliberately divisive. The persistent social conservatism of many Muslim individuals and organisations should not mask the fact that, by and large, these communities see themselves as part of British society and want to contribute to it positively.

Crucially, Jones argues, this gradual reorientation has been driven both by Muslim communities themselves and by external action from the state. This point challenges both the claim that Muslims themselves do not want to integrate, and the claim that all state intervention in the Muslim communities has been negative. Jones is critical (in my view rightly) of many illiberal government policies regarding Muslims, including much counter–terrorism policy which has contributed to making Muslims a suspect community. But he is also right to resist a black and white condemnation of all state action – noting for example the positive outcomes of government initiatives to build greater training opportunities for Muslim leaders, and the promotion of Islamic Studies in secular universities. The downside, as he notes at the start of the book, is that such initiatives to alleviate Muslim socioeconomic troubles are ultimately valued by government as a means to thwart extremism, rather than as important ends in themselves.

British Islam as a source of democratic renewal?

Jones’ book is not just about how we think about British Muslims; it’s also about how we think about liberalism. Right at the start of the book, he makes the startling claim that “if done right, the incorporation of Muslim minorities might facilitate democratic renewal.”[8] By this, he means that seeing the reality of British Islam today could help us see the limits of our current system, and more positively, opportunities for its revival.

His point is about public reasoning, and the kind of language and ideas that are considered valid in political debate in liberalism. Religious public reasoning is routinely rejected by secular critics as having no right to space in “public deliberations”, but Jones sees Islamic–based reasoning as particularly “unfairly excluded”. “In theory, Muslims in Britain are as welcome as anyone else to try and effect change on the basis of what they believe, but as soon as it becomes apparent that Islam is being used as a resource to motivate change conversations are rapidly closed down”.[9] There is an implicit pressure on Muslims (as on other religious believers) to translate their political arguments into (supposedly neutral) secular language. An example is a recent briefing paper from the Centre for Muslim Policy Research, a new British Muslim think tank, which takes an entirely secular tone in its discussion of assisted dying; the authors presumably made the (reasonable) assumption that references to Islam would weaken their appeal.

Jones sees this pressure on Muslims is a litmus test for the wider pressure on religious activists more widely. He argues that a liberalism which insists religious reasoning has no serious place in public or political debate is exclusionary – since, unlike the non–religious, religious citizens face the asymmetric burden of translation and are discouraged from making arguments in their own terms. He also argues such liberalism is impoverished. By setting limits on the kind of language that is socially acceptable in public debate, it hinders the introduction of new ideas, stultifying its capacity for revitalisation. As Jonathan Chaplin argues in an essay for Theos:

“In a political culture characterised by clashing religious and secular world views, democratic debate will be stifled and left impoverished if we discourage the articulation of the deeper convictions leading people to take the conflicting policy stances they do. By contrast, the confident assertion of rival justifying reasons, religious and secular, leaves the door open to innovative, critical, indeed radical interventions that can challenge the tendency for liberal democracy to slide into conformism, complacency, even oppression.”[10]

Making more space in our political culture for lawful religious reasoning (for example, in parliamentary debate) would not at all mean those arguments need to be accepted by others. It would mean, however, that they are given air time, and that political debate would reflect more closely the diversity of moral lenses that people use in this country when thinking about key issues. In the case of Muslims, it would also mean that they feel able to participate on equal footing with non–religious citizens – as people who can contest the rules of the game, in their own terms, as well as play it.

***

In these ways, Jones’ book highlights the limitations of our current form of liberalism. But ultimately, despite the many challenges facing the British Muslim community, Jones’ book is surprisingly optimistic – both about the future of British Islam, and the future of liberalism itself. If, as he claims, the “narrative about Muslims’ lack of integration does not have purchase”, then neither does “the associated claim about the inadequacy of liberal politics to meet the challenge of increasing cultural, moral and religious diversity”.[11] In other words, acknowledging the reality of Muslim Britain – of gradual integration and increasing engagement – could actually renew confidence in what our own political system has achieved, and what it could achieve with greater imagination.

Islam in the Liberal State: National Identity and the Future of Muslim Britain (2021) by Stephen Jones is published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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Pete Whitehead looks at the impact that some strands of New Atheism had on the internet, and how they shaped our discourse today. 16/09/21.

 Like it or not, our online lives are increasingly inseparable from our physical ones. (A quick aside to prove my point: name three people you’ve spent more time with in person over the past month than you have staring at social media.) Think about how we talk about the internet; the colloquialisms that have sprung up around it, and it’s a deeply physical language. The internet morphs us – it ‘rots our minds’, it ‘breaks your brain‘, it gives you ‘brain worms’. [1]  ‘Getting mad online’  probably does more to raise modern heart rates than gyms do.  

 Tech writer and essayist Roisin Kiberd, in The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through The Internet, likens the effect of the internet to horror director David Croenberg’s Videodrome, where ‘people are altered by the media they consume…the screen is so addictive, so hypnotic, that they return to it again and again, until it distorts their thoughts and threatens their humanity’. [2] We are, she argues, like Cronenberg’s creatures; the ‘new flesh’ of screen addicts, shaped by the content we consume. As the internet becomes a place of low context, high anger, and constant stimulation, giving us – as comedian Bo Burnham puts it – ‘a little bit of everything, all of the time’ – explaining how we got here seems almost impossible to chronicle.  

Internet trends have come and gone like waves on a beach; each one leaving its mark, changing the landscape just a little bit. However, some waves are bigger than others, and some internet trends changed the landscape indelibly. One of these is New Atheism, which reached its zenith around the same time as the advent of the first social media platforms.  

Of course, atheism is not exactly a new tradition. But ‘New Atheism’, a term coined in 2006 by Gary Wolf, came around at the same time as profound changes in our online infrastructure. It shaped the internet, was shaped by the internet, and went on to shape some of our modern world. [3] Online atheism is an interesting phenomenon in this regard; it spans a particularly turbulent time in the evolution of the internet, as it morphed from the internet of the late 90s/noughties: blogs, forums, chatrooms – and hundreds of them – to the more closed, regulated space we are in now. Knowing this, it’s possible to identify ways in which New Atheism served as the canary in the coalmine for the elements of internet (and contemporary) culture we are now grappling so profoundly with: the way platforms shape discourse, oppositional politics, and political identification.  

 I: Letter to an Atheist Nation  

 First, it’s worth an overview of the terrain. In the noughties, it’s fair to say that atheism was at a high point as a movement. Regardless of what you think about the impact of New Atheism on our culture for better or worse since, the noughties saw the rise of New Atheist figures, public support for atheism, and the publication of The End of Faith, The God Delusion, Letter to a Christian Nation, and god is Not Great, or Why Religion Poisons Everything (The lower case on ‘God’ on certain editions is deliberate, and presumably felt achingly daring.) 

I know, because I read all of them, and spent the majority of my high school debating career more or less doing a schoolboy’s impression of Christopher Hitchens. I was an onlooker to the tail–end of the ‘atheist internet’ – YouTube channels, Reddit’s atheism board r/atheism (which at one point was more popular than topics such as ‘news’ or ‘sex’), and so on. In the present day, many involved with atheism at that time are now renouncing it as having connections to the alt–right. Sam Harris is interviewing Charles Murray, of beloved text for racists The Bell Curve fame, and furious that Vox editor Ezra Klein would challenge him on this decision. Formerly atheist YouTube channels are being identified as alt–right gateways by think–tanks, and I look back on them to see that they’ve taken quite a turn since I was 14 or so.  

 So, how did a movement that once was one of the most popular on the internet morph into something else entirely?  

One of the key events in this shift was undoubtably offline: 2011’s ‘Elevatorgate’ – in short; a woman was sexually harassed in an elevator during a Skeptic conference, and blogged about it, arguing that the community should do better. She then faced haranguing from fellow skeptics and atheists.  

The response to a victim of harassment within the atheist community included Richard Dawkins writing a now–infamous letter entitled ‘Dear Muslima’, which makes the argument that as long as some women had it worse under Islamic theocratic regimes, then Western feminists really ought to shut up. [4] This felt like a dividing line: it reflected the way in which Islam had become the yardstick by which all evil was measured, adding to the sense there was a growing anti–Islam movement–within–a–movement fomenting within New Atheism. (Dawkins wrote ‘Dear Muslima’, Hitchens argued that the US should declare war on Iran, nuclear weapons or not, and Harris argued that Islam was the ‘motherload of bad ideas’, that torture was ethical, and that Muslims should be profiled at airports.) It also highlighted the male–centric nature of the movement – it was, after all, the Four Horsemen. No women ever rose to the prominence of Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, or Dennett.  

But this shift was also shaped by the wider context of the internet. The new powers of connectivity that had allowed New Atheism to flourish and spread had also made it a movement heavily based on the internet. As online life started to change, so did New Atheism. 

 II: The Rationality Delusion 

There’s an episode of the sitcom Parks and Recreation where Chris Traeger asks Leslie Knope why the local cult call themselves ‘The Reasonabilists’. Her response: ‘Well, they figure if people criticize them, it’ll seem like they’re attacking something very reasonable.’ 

On YouTube in particular, the New Atheist online movement had seemingly discovered its own original sin – ‘irrationality’. This was the reason people voted Bush, supported Roe v Wade repeal, believed in the second amendment, wanted to abolish the teaching of evolution in schools, discriminated against the LGBT+ community. In short, it was why people did almost anything you didn’t like. It was because you were rational and they were deeply irrational. How could you get anything done when people were so keen to listen to their stupid sky fairy?  

Logical. Rational. Reasonable. These things stopped referring to ways of viewing the world, or systems of analysing data, and instead – in the endless market of the internet – just became another micro–identity. Rationality began to refer to something you are, not something you did.  

Initially, the New Atheism seemed to be borne of progressivism. It’s fair to say that much of early noughties atheism came as a reaction to the Bush–era politics of God and Guns. Bush’s White House was a figure of global opprobrium, and the reaction was not merely located to America. The narrative that emerged, especially amongst the broadly liberal atheist movement, was not one about policy or outcomes as much as it was about intellect – or perceived intellect. It didn’t matter per se what Bush did about Iraq or Katrina or inequality. What mattered was that he was stupid, and Christian, and the people he hired were stupid, and Christian. Meanwhile, the atheist side – in the words of the great twentieth century philosophers Dexy’s Midnight Runners – were far too young and clever. 

However, roughly 75% of the US is religious to some degree, and it’s the same for the population of the EU. Worldwide it’s about 80%. The exact numbers here are far less important than the simple fact that the vast majority of the world is religious. White men in the global West don’t need much to convince them that they are supremely rational, and the emerging ‘Clash of Civilisations’ narrative post–9/11 meant that a movement led by, and predominantly made up of, white men from the global West was likely to have pretty bad views when it came to the rationality of others.  

It’s easy for men, who grow up with the stereotype that we have ‘rational intelligence’ compared to the ‘emotional intelligence’ of women, to crow about how our opinions are based on ‘facts and logic’ while everyone else is irrational. (Indeed, the late Catholic journalist Dawn Foster spoke about this smug affect being something that put her off New Atheism on The Sacred – ‘It was the very masculine and combative element of it… there was no room for empathy in New Atheism’.)  

From here, it’s easier to see how elements of the New Atheist movement would later mesh with the alt–right. There was a top–down element; Phil Torres details in Salon how many of the most prominent figures in the movement would take a rightward shift, in what he describes as a ‘story of intellectual grift and abject surrender’. (The Islamophobia of Harris and Hitchens, and some of Dawkins’ recent social media posts provide further ballast to this argument.) [5] Regardless, if your baseline assumption is that a huge chunk of society is irrational, it’s not hard to see how you start trying to ‘save society from itself’. The pipeline becomes far clearer from this point – if you start with ‘everyone but us is irrational and it’s killing western civilisation’, and you consider both religion and cultural liberalism (‘Social Justice Warriors’) as irrational, it’s just not that far before you get to (as Trumpist political operative Jeff Giesa would put it) ‘Trumpism [is] the only practical and moral path to save Western civilisation from itself’. [6]  

 III: Breaking the Spell: Tribes as an Internet Phenomenon 

 Having established ‘irrationality’ as the enemy – wherever it was found – online atheism set about breaking the taboos that irrationality had set up.  

 The author Will Davies argues that New Atheism marked out its first principles as such:  

They were defending evolutionary science and secular values, but as much as anything they were asserting their right to attack the beliefs of others, regardless of how cherished those might be. [7] 

To be an Online Atheist relied on constantly finding a new theist to offend. Put another way: If an atheist shouts ‘there is no God’ in a forest, and no believer is around to hear it, did they even shout it at all?  

This ‘tradition’ led to oppositionalism becoming an identity marker online. Every free speech warrior that has come since has subscribed to the great karmic balancing act of New Atheism – for my speech to be truly free, it must be upsetting someone. Indeed, as Davies puts it, ‘Far from being an obstacle to free speech… “snowflakes” (who are all too willing to take offence) are actually one of its component parts.’ 

As the architecture of the internet shifted, it became easier to find people to offend. The internet is built around a model of advertising that herds us into smaller and smaller encampments, all the better to lob data–driven ads at us. Internet culture, perhaps unsurprisingly, mirrors the base economic reality of the internet. However, with the transition away from internet 1.0, small encampments are starting to be our undoing. Small tribes work on small blogs. Make everyone use the same few platforms, however, and context collapse will suffocate any chance of decent discourse.  

As Marie le Conte points out for IPPR, the internet’s fundamental shift means that ‘everything we post, can, in theory, be seen by more or less anyone’. This is a profoundly unnatural thing. We modulate what we say – and how we say it – almost all the time; even when we’re saying the same thing. For a second, imagine you’re in the pub, with your friends, taking about something political you all agree on, and care about passionately. Think about how you might talk. Now imagine you’re trying to get someone who hasn’t really heard about that issue before to agree with you. Your ‘script’ probably looks a lot different. Context collapse gets rid of this mediation. Want to believe that feminism is solely about the murder of every single living man? Head to tumblr, type in #killallmen, and bingo – thousands of posts, by aggrieved young women, which are aimed at each other, and never meant to be read by you, will reassure you that you were right all along.  

IV: online Is Not Great, or Why The Internet Poisons Everything 

 One of the platforms that we’re all herded onto now is YouTube, which has a particularly interesting role to play in our current discourse. To many, YouTube is often characterised as ‘cat videos’, and maybe at its inception years ago that was the case. Now, though, it’s a huge player in entertainment – already the world’s second most–visited site, and the world’s second biggest search engine. [8] People are becoming overnight millionaires from the platform, and ask any teenager who their favourite YouTuber is and you’ll almost certainly get an answer. Only by understanding the history of YouTube can we really understand the platform’s relationship to our contemporary discourse, and what became of the New Atheists. 

In the beginning, YouTube rewarded hits. So, for instance, if your cat does something funny and you get it on tape and 15 million people watch it, your channel does well. However, there’s a problem. I might click on the cat video, watch it, maybe send it to a colleague, and then click back onto my emails. That’s no good for keeping me watching adverts, which is how YouTube makes money.  

 To solve this, they switched the focus of their algorithm. YouTube began to reward watch time. If I put out an hour long video and 10,000 viewers watch it for 45 minutes, I am rewarded more than someone who puts out a 10 second cat video that’s seen 100,000 times. Rob Larson, professor of economics and author of Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley sums it up thus: ‘[Google] Search was designed to move users on to their web destinations quickly, with the goal of the “long click”, where a user does not return to try other results. But with YouTube, Google has a stake in keeping viewers on the platform to view more videos and more ads – prioritizing since 2012 the site’s ‘stickiness’. 

This led to a change in content – for a short time, content about the popular video game Minecraft became almost ubiquitous, because the interactive and free–spirited nature of the game lent itself well to longer videos. This change, however, led to increased monetisation of people who would riff for, let’s say, 30 minutes about a topic. If you could get a large audience to listen to you for a long video, then you would do well. So yes, Minecraft videos became popular. But if you weren’t a gamer, then you could produce discussion content, and this very often meant atheist content.  

These two trends combined. A YouTube phenomenon popped up, with titles like ‘Theist gets DESTROYED by LOGIC’, delivered by science types who ‘debated’ with creationists for views. This formulation – expressed algebraically as ‘[figure X] + [violent verb] + [noun related to intelligence]’  – tended to equal ‘views and ad revenue’. These were red meat to the internet atheist crowd, who revelled in seeing their heroes take apart ‘silly creationists’. We all love to see our opinions validated, and these videos became popular, with an online ecosystem springing up around them on other sites. 

 It’s entirely probable that people really wanted to listen to this stuff. But the platform gave them a nudge. One of the key ways that YouTube promotes ‘stickiness’ is deciding to ‘promote more extreme views in its “Recommended” or “Up Next” algorithm… The Wall Street Journal conducted an extensive investigation of the platform’s algorithm by hiring a former YouTube recommendations engineer to study the site, finding that it reliably promotes clips that draw strong traffic and keeps users clicking on more videos. When it comes to news related subjects, these results tend to be those with more extreme views, especially conspiracy theories from the political right.’ [9] In other words, the more outrageous you could be, the more likely you were to have people funnelled to your channel, given that more than 70% of YouTube traffic is driven by recommendations. [10]

 Indeed, Guillaume Chaslot, another former engineer at YouTube, now runs a site that tracks how YouTube decides how and what we watch. In one report, it found the number one verb to get your video in the ‘recommended’ section – meaning it shows up to users – was “dismantles”. Indeed, ‘Although milder terms such as “educates” and “debunks” also score highly, confrontational words like ”obliterates”, “shreds”, “owns”, “insults” and “destroys” make up a substantial portion of the list.’ [11] Chaslot argues that turbulence and confrontation “makes people more upset on social media, more engaged, spending more time… so the algorithms are going to try and reproduce this division,” he says. “The algorithms are putting oil on the fire.” [12]  

 This initially began to filter through the US right; Ben Shapiro now gets more clicks on his platform – the hard–right Daily Wire – than the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or The Atlantic magazine. [13] Much of his SEO skill comes from cutting his teeth in the world of YouTube – type in ‘Ben Shapiro’ and the recommendation will, almost certainly, point you towards him ‘destroying’ someone: a la Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Transgenderism And Pro–Abortion Arguments, and Shapiro DESTROYS Feminist Who Says Originalist Judges Are Sexist. Now, we have Boris Johnson SCHOOLS Jeremy Corbyn being released by the Conservative Party’s official YouTube channel. [14] The left is not immune to this; only this week, PoliticsJOE (often perceived as a centre–left outlet) released a video entitled ‘Kier Starmer eviscerates Boris Johnson‘. [15] A trend that began with the New Atheist internet movement has been reincarnated by the chthonic power of algorithms – and what began as a misguided view of debate as an inherent good has misenchanted it, and destroyed it in the process.  

V: The End of (Good) Faith 

 You’ve probably heard before that we can’t have more than 150 friends, so we’re just neurologically unequipped to handle social media. [16] I don’t know if that’s true or not – but I do know that it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what the internet does anymore.  

 Much is made of the internet’s ability to put you in touch with people who think the same thing, or at least are interested in the same kind of thing as you, via filter bubbles and echo chambers. Far less is made of the negative polarisation the internet enables, which is arguably more psychically damaging (and indeed, more economically rewarding). Now, the internet puts you in touch with everyone you hate, all of the time. You can find the most antithetical view to your own, at any point, and get angry about it. Echo chambers aren’t just bad because you hear the same thing over and over again; they’re bad because they’re full of people furious at the same stuff.  

 If you’re making money from videos in which you ‘destroy’ your irrational opponent with ‘facts and logic’, you will need people to destroy. [17]  The problem was that they had already identified ‘irrationality’ as the root cause of all evil.  And indeed, the same YouTube culture that had thrived previously by debating Christians would go on to take up the cause of fighting ‘political correctness’, on the grounds that it was simply a new, liberal form of irrationality. The macho, combative culture was still there, but with a new enemy – the ‘SJW’, or now ‘the Woke’. It was this adherence to the culture and affect of New Atheism that allowed many of them to ally with traditionalists and reactionaries, on the basis that the enemy of their enemy is their friend.

 The legacy of New Atheism can be seen in the various ‘Is ‘Wokeness’ a religion?’ articles churned out, usually by outlets who have already decided that the answer is ‘Yes, and that’s naturally a bad thing.’  This overwhelmingly white and male movement had decided that anything it didn’t agree with was ‘irrational’ – and so the video titles stayed much the same, only this time replacing ‘Christian’, or ‘Theist’ with ‘Leftist’, or ‘Feminist’.

Indeed, Jordan Peterson identified this strategy when, in an interview, he said that he had “figured out how to monetize social justice warriors.” [18] In another video, he makes a similar claim, saying that his audiences “came for the scandal and stayed for the content.” [19] In other words, people were now actively seeking out content they actively disagreed with. Even if you weren’t looking for it personally, you were heading to content creators that would do it for you. Anger and resentment has driven our politics for some time, but internet culture allowed it to become part of your very identity. 

 Context collapse meant everyone had access to everything. Turning back to Davies, he argues that:  

News doesn’t need to be “fake”, it just needs to be strategically extracted from the vast archive of digital content, and presented to the public as the frightening new norm. The British press are masters of this, establishing a new role for newspapers in tracking down online behaviour that will nourish their readers’ prejudices. [20] 

 YouTube and other platforms meant there were whole audiences devoted to watching people they didn’t like get ‘destroyed’. This, and the embrace of ‘irrationality’ as the new original sin, combined to create a culture where hundreds of young men who’d started watching for anti–creationist content were instead getting recommended hundreds of hours of anti–feminist, anti–‘social justice warrior’, anti–‘snowflake’ content.  

 I disagree with Davies that this is a particularly British phenomenon. Everywhere you turn, legacy media has turned to Twitter to try and stay current in a hyper–fast world, and ‘posts’ are now news. The reasons the press are so good at this is twofold: that form of content is cheap, easy, and gets readership with little outlay. The other is that, like everyone else, the people working there have been shaped by the culture of the internet, which in turn, has been shaped by the New Atheism. The Press, Politics, the Prime Minister – all are merely appendages of the New Flesh that New Atheism helped herald. 

 It’s hard to see how we claw back civility from here. Big Tech (Alphabet, Facebook, and Twitter) have a combined revenue greater than 146 of 213 countries. If, as Andrey Mir suggests, the correct question isn’t ‘how do we get rid of polarisation’ but rather ‘how are we going to live with it?’ then understanding every single part of where it came from will be increasingly crucial. [21]  

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Simon Perfect explains a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice about the lawfulness of hijab bans and neutrality policies in European Union workplaces. 04/08/2021

Say you run a café in a sleepy European village. One day, your Muslim employee tells you she wants to wear the hijab to work. Suddenly, the sleepy village wakes up in an angry mood. Your regulars complain that they do not want to be served by someone wearing (what they see as) a sign of oppression. News spreads, people start to ‘cancel’ your café; your income falls. What do you do?

A)      Insist on your employee’s right to wear the hijab, and face financial distress.

B)      Ban staff from wearing the hijab, and tell your employee she must stop wearing it or be sacked.

C)      Ban staff from wearing any religious symbol or religious clothing in order to present a neutral image. If your employee refuses to comply, sack her.

D)      Offer to move her to the kitchen away from customers, where she can still wear the veil. Again, non–compliance leads to dismissal.

This is the kind of scenario that a recent ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Union’s highest court, sought to address. Last month Muslims around the world celebrated Eid al–Adha, the festival commemorating the devotion to God of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham). But for many Muslims in the EU, celebrations will have been marred by the headlines that the “Hijab can be banned at work”, following the Court’s decision.

But has the Court really just said our fictitious café owner could ban the hijab?

The ruling (which, it should be made clear, won’t affect the UK) responded to two cases in Germany.[1] Both involved Muslim women who were dismissed for refusing to observe new company prohibitions on religious symbols (in one case, the ban was on any visible signs of political, religious or philosophical beliefs; in the other, the ban was specifically on “conspicuous, large–sized” signs of such beliefs). In each case, the German courts sought the opinion of the ECJ in how to handle them. The cases are about the rights of employers to conduct a business freely (Article 16 under the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights) versus the rights of employees to manifest their religion or belief (Article 10).

Rather than breaking new ground, as implied by the media response, the ECJ’s ruling largely reiterates one it made in 2017.[2] In the 2017 cases (which also involved Muslim women disciplined by their employers for wearing headscarves), the ECJ held that bans on specific religious symbols like the hijab (option B in our scenario) are unlawful as they amount to direct discrimination, where one group (in this case, Muslims) is treated less favourably than others. This was a partial step forward for religious freedom, making it harder for employers to directly discriminate against specific religious groups.

However, the ECJ also said it could be lawful for our café owner to pursue option C: a ban on all visible signs of religious, philosophical or political beliefs. The Court acknowledged such a policy could amount to indirect discrimination – where a policy applies to everybody, ostensibly treating them the same, but in practice causes “particular inconvenience” to some people more than others.[3] But indirect discrimination could be lawful if it is an “appropriate” and “necessary” means of achieving a “legitimate aim”. In the latest ruling, the ECJ has clarified that a “genuine need” to prevent “social conflicts”, or to offer a “neutral image” to customers, could be a legitimate aim for a ban, if the employer can demonstrate they would face adverse consequences without it.[4]

Not all bans are made equal, however, and in the latest ruling, the Court says that a neutrality policy could only be lawful if it is applied consistently and systematically to all signs of religious, philosophical or political beliefs, regardless of how big or small those signs are. Only banning prominent or large ones would treat one religious group (particularly Muslims) worse than others, amounting to unlawful direct discrimination. This will make it harder for employers to introduce a hijab ban on the sly, by prohibiting large symbols only. In addition, the ECJ’s rulings suggest that a neutrality policy restricted only to customer–facing employees could be more permissible than a universal policy on all staff.

Beyond these guidelines, though, the ECJ has given wide freedom to national courts on how they decide these religion or belief cases. EU member states have a “margin of discretion”, meaning a level of flexibility in how they apply EU law to suit their national context.[5] (Similarly, the European Court of Human Rights grants states a “margin of appreciation”; it has cited the doctrine when upholding, for example, the decision of French courts which had prioritised the French principle of strong secularism over a public sector worker’s religious freedom when she was dismissed for wearing the hijab).[6] In the 2017 ECJ cases and again in the latest case, the ECJ has put strong emphasis on this principle – largely leaving it up to national courts to decide whether or not a particular workplace policy is directly or indirectly discriminatory, and if the latter, whether it is justified. In the latest ruling, the Court says that if there are national laws that give stronger protections to individual religious freedom in the workplace, then the national courts can take these into account in their judgements.[7] This is a welcome clarification, meaning that the ECJ’s rulings set a minimum baseline of protection to religious freedom that states can add to.

Taken together, the 2017 rulings and the recent rulings ensure that EU employers can’t introduce an explicit, and humiliating, rule specifically preventing their Muslim women from wearing the hijab. In this sense, the rulings are actually a partial step forward for religious freedom from pre–2017, restricting the likelihood of direct discrimination against particular groups. And the latest ruling has further tightened the conditions for a neutrality policy, by emphasising that employers would have to demonstrate their “genuine need” for it. But a partial step forward does not mean decisive protection for religious freedom. By reiterating the lawfulness of neutrality policies, the Court has confirmed the interests of employers can indeed trump individual religious freedom under certain conditions.

Secularity does not equal neutrality

What should we make of all this? Some commentators see the rulings as pragmatic and the best that could be done in a difficult situation. Law professor Ronan McCrea notes that across Europe there are very different expectations about religious expression in public; for the Court to impose one particular approach on member states would be both “immodest in the extreme” and an unwise aggravation of Eurosceptics. 

But pragmatism aside, the rulings perpetuate, rather than redress, inequality between religious minorities and the secular (or culturally Christian) majority. Even if applied consistently to all signs of religious or political belief, a neutrality policy would still make life very difficult for many religious people, forcing them to choose between their job and their deepest convictions. This would particularly affect Muslims, especially Muslim women, who already face multiple obstacles in the workplace on account of their religion, gender, and often ethnicity. But it would also negatively affect anyone who believes they need to wear visible religious symbols at all times – Christians with crucifixes, Jews with kippahs, Sikhs with turbans and kirpans. Neutrality policies avoid the humiliating targeting of specific religious groups, which is crucial, but they also increase the range of religious people potentially affected detrimentally.

Conversely, a neutrality policy would have little to no negative impact on non–religious employees. Being told you can’t wear a t–shirt with a political slogan will (in most cases) cause no way near the amount of pain that being told you can’t wear something you believe is necessary for you to gain salvation. Neutrality policies present secularity as the neutral option, but adopting secular dress and hiding religious symbols is not a common denominator that everyone feels able to access on equal terms. Secularity does not equal neutrality.[8]

Beyond this, the rulings create as many questions as answers. The ECJ has said that a ban on all symbols could be justified if the employer can demonstrate a genuine need to offer a neutral image to customers. But what would count as a genuine need, and how would an employer demonstrate this? Would it take the threat of a full–scale boycott of our fictitious café to justify introducing a ban on symbols, or could employers get away with saying they are worried about losing just a handful of customers? Wanting to present a secular image assumes that people manifesting their religion visibly are imposing their beliefs on others, or are unable to offer an impartial service – but that is hardly the case. The Court could have said that indirect discrimination against religion or belief can only be justified in narrow circumstances; instead, those circumstances are left quite wide.[9]

Moreover, while the ECJ has made clear that a particular religious symbol like the hijab can’t be banned just because customers ask for it directly, it has also confirmed that employers can justify a general neutrality policy based on the (assumed) preferences of customers. This still leaves the door open for employers to introduce a ban on all symbols based on the assumption their customers are Islamophobic. Islamophobia would still lead to Muslim women being forced to unveil, or forced into accepting substitute, non–customer facing roles irrelevant to their qualifications (since the court suggests such an arrangement could be a legitimate alternative). But hiding your religious minorities in a back room is hardly good for equality and integration.

These legal cases also show that it remains easier to discriminate on grounds of religion or belief than other protected characteristics. It would undoubtedly be unlawful for employers to remove people from customer–facing roles because their customers don’t want to be served by someone who is black, or disabled, or a woman – but it could be possible to do that to a religious person who refuses to comply with a neutrality policy. The difference arises from the common assumption that beliefs (religious or others) are choices, and thus are less deserving of legal protection than characteristics that cannot be chosen, such as race. In reality, of course, they often involve both choice and lack of choice; we don’t have full control over what we believe. It is this chosen–unchosen quality to religion or belief that makes it so hard to handle in law.

Ultimately, the ECJ’s recent and 2017 decisions are still a step forward from the pre–2017 situation; the most explicitly prejudiced attempts to ban religious symbols in the workplace have been declared unlawful. But that may be of little comfort to those people who deeply believe that wearing particular clothing or symbols is required to adhere to their religion, and who are forced by neutrality policies to choose between their job and their faith. With Islamophobia on the rise across Europe and globally, more and more employers will face dilemmas like our café owner; after this ruling, many will feel free to choose business interests over religious freedom.

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To read Simon’s other writing for Theos, click here.