by Martyn Percy

First in a series of four reflections

I have written about respair before, and it is a term that is ripe for revival. As a noun, respair means “the return of hope after a period of despair”. As a verb, respair means “to have hope again”. Although both forms are rare and obsolete, they seem ripe for reviving.

Most readers will be more familiar with the term despair – the verb, noun and experience.  I despair of my football team.  I despair of the government. “I despair, therefore I still am, just about…I think…?” (with apologies to Descartes). Despair is, oddly the place we end up in when there is nowhere else to go. The heart already broken into a million pieces cannot be broken into more. We are one step away from returning to our form as dust.

Yet despair is a place, and strange though this may sound, it is a temporary state and place for most of us, whilst we are gradually repaired.  It is a time for some self-compassion, and that requires honesty and realism.  The things that have brought us to this place may still be in place. But we cannot escape from despair by trying to make ourselves happy.  The repair that can come out of despair must face the darkness that has surrounded us. Until we know this – and by that, I mean understanding and accepting – we will struggle. We will tell ourselves that if we can avoid despair there may be hope. On the contrary, the despair has to be unpacked and owned before it can be left.

In an age when feelings have been elevated to a level of existential status, we need to ask if we are still able to educate one another, or only able to score points off each other from the comfort of our swivel-chairs.

The Church of England has retreated – ever-so-slowly – into its own echo chamber. It was once a support-based institution, but has collapsed into a members-only organisation. Local clergy and chaplains heroically resist this trend, and do what they can to continue serving their constituencies and communities, despite the demand to focus on membership drives.  Here, the leadership of the Church of England has been seduced by faddish managerialism and brand-strategizing. 

With a sharp decline in affiliation (of any kind) to the Church of England, and a rising tide of cultural disenchantment with its leaders, a serious crisis is emerging.  In recent decades, the Church of England has invested significant time, energy and money in branding, marketing, mission and re-organisation.  Every initiative has resulted in greater public distancing from the Church of England, and a steeper decline in attendance. 

The Church of England leadership now functions like some unaccountable executive in a political party (communist, pre-Berlin wall) that cannot step outside its own bubble. Speeches at conferences get longer, the agenda less relevant, and the procedural motions riddled with minor points of minutiae.  Party loyalists are rewarded, and dissenters quickly distanced. Or, if they persist, denounced and denigrated.  There is a whiff of dictatorship in the wind.

Culturally, we have reached a moment when even in the churches, dissent and disagreement are treated as disloyalty.  Asam Ahmad writes in the magazine Briarpatch (March 2^nd 2015) that:

In the context of call-out culture, it is easy to forget that the individual we are calling out is a human being, and that different human beings in different social locations will be receptive to different strategies for learning and growing. For instance, most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories.

Asam Ahmad added to these reflections in a follow up article for Briarpatch (August 29, 2017) he notes:

“…But sometimes the only way we can address harmful behaviours is by publicly naming them, in particular when there is a power imbalance between the people involved and speaking privately cannot rectify the situation….”.

He then concludes:

“It is important to note here that there is often a knee-jerk reaction to name many instances of conflict as abuse: the word “abuse” can end up referencing a range of harm, from sexual and physical violence to gaslighting and even straightforward meanness.

But at the same time, we must listen to survivors of sexual and/or physical violence, particularly when they tell us they have not been able to receive accountability through private interactions alone. Survivors publicly naming their abuser are often met with a refusal to listen to their stories, and with tone policing, gaslighting, and/or generally being dismissed. This, despite the fact that survivors going public often do so at an incredible personal cost, and often after years of having tried to privately rectify the situation.

When we insist that all of these conversations must remain in the private sphere, we are insisting that accountability is always a private matter. The history of our movements very clearly shows the opposite is often the case. People continue to take the side of those with more power, more privilege, and more capacity, and often these people are never held accountable for the harm they have caused. This is precisely why call-outs [sometimes] need to happen.”

General Synod is in an occasional long-distance commuting relationship with reality.  The public no longer trust a body that is not credible or relevant to their daily lives. Operating inside a culture of privilege and patrimony, and even unaccountable to loyal members, will not win new converts to the cause.

Aspects of the Church of England still constitute an important of our collective national treasure.  At local levels, parish ministry and chaplaincy continue to be cherished and valued, making appreciable differences to community and civic life. Yet that is translating less and less into church attendance.  The more the central governance of the church tries to invent new initiatives to address its own numerical anxieties and other neuroses, the more the public back away.

Yet the leadership of the Church lives in denial. And General Synod is an echo chamber for convincing the leadership that there is progress, when in fact the external evidence all points to disrepair and decline.  If we were to conduct a cultural weather forecast for the future of the Church of England, the climate change will – Canute-like – swamp it within the next fifty years.  Already drowning in irrelevance, it can neither resist rising cultural tide-changes.

What is needed here is serious collective self-criticism. I doubt however, that General Synod, the Archbishops or the Archbishops’ Council can manage that. Fear of loss (face, support and control) means the grip only gets tighter, and the politics and practices meaner. Asam Ahmad (02-03-15) in Briarpatch notes:

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent (even in) how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time. And what happens when someone has mastered proficiency in languages of accountability and then learned to justify all of their actions by falling back on that language? How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour? We don’t have a word to describe this kind of perverse exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in progressive circles.

Though we still lack a word for this, I could hardly put it better myself.