One of the classic examples of preaching that has come down to us, is the terrifying 1741 sermon of Jonathan Edwards in America. He spoke in a sermon entitled ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’. ‘The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber. The pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them.’ Since Edwards’ time, many preachers have used similar techniques of rhetoric to quite literally terrify their congregants into a state of compliance and passivity.

The use of fear as a means of control within the church is a well-known tactic. Alongside terrifying the individual by the threat of eternal punishment, is also a teaching that sees the hand of God at work in natural disasters. To use an example from the States again, the airwaves and the internet were full of Christian Right pundits believing that they could discern God’s hand at work in Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans in 2006. An anti-abortion activist, Steve Lefermine, declared: ‘In my belief, God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion.’ Pat Robertson famously saw the hand of God in the events of 9/11 as a punishment for homosexuality, abortion and feminism. Extremist Muslims also claimed to be able to see God at work killing Americans through Hurricane Katrina. ‘The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah’ declared Kuwaiti official, one Muhammad Mlaifi. Yet another Christian commentator, Michael Marcavage, declared that God had decided to wipe out New Orleans because of homosexuality.

I have no doubt that I could extract from other sources numerous other examples of preaching that declares God to be in total control of the unexpected disasters which are sent to respond to the sins of humankind, especially the ones that the preacher particularly disapproves of. There are various reactions to such statements that can be made. One is to see an absurdity in these claims and find them almost funny. They are, however, removed far from humour by the fact that some individuals who hear these interpretations presumably believe them to be true. That makes all such statements sinister and conducive to an alarming frightening understanding of the nature of God. Such a theology of fear needs to be confronted and named for what it is, a doctrine whose purpose is designed to threaten terror and keep control over others.

When a preacher uses terror tactics in his messages, two particular things are happening. His target is likely to be people not actually present in the building, people who are identified as enemies of faith, apostates, sinners and those who do not conform to the preacher’s ideals. So, in the first place, terror sermons are about shoring up boundaries with the outside world, helping those inside to feel safe and warning them from straying from the narrow path set by the church. In short the preacher wants to re-emphasise the boundary between us and them. In the second place the preacher is also creating a miasma of fear among his own people. Not only are they forbidden to look too much at the world outside, for fear of having their purity compromised, but they are also exhorted to cling tightly to the leadership of their pastor. He is the one who can protect them from the threat of disasters in this life and the possibility of everlasting damnation in the one to come. The God, who has designed everlasting torments for the wicked, is also behind the arbitrary events of history. His spokesman and representative in the church is the preacher and leader. His task is to declare the Word and Will of God to those in his charge. But as we can see, an important tool in maintaining his control and power is sometimes this weapon of fear.

Many people in the UK may well have never experienced the tools of fear-mongering used in their churches. It is true that all my examples comes from the States where the control of congregations through the weapon of fear is perhaps a more common feature of church life. But I would suggest that fear is used in churches quite frequently, even it is less obvious in this country. A place where there is constant reference to a God who punishes individuals horribly or who sends disasters to repay back-sliders is a setting which will always frighten people. The use of fear tactics, implied or actually uttered, will always be threat to people’s peace of mind and day to day equilibrium.

In speaking about ‘selling fear’ I am referring once again to a style of church life that, at best, is uncomfortable and, at worst, cruel and abusive. Even though in this country when it occurs, it normally remains at the uncomfortable end of the spectrum, I would challenge everyone to become sensitive to what I called the ‘miasma of fear’ that clouds the life of many churches in every part of the world. Most of the responsibility for lifting this cloud rests on the leaders. They should be challenged every time they use, directly or indirectly, fear tactics in their conduct of church life. One of the key biblical passages which can guide in this is the one that says. ‘There is no room for fear in love. Perfect love casts out fear’. To sow fear in any form within a congregation is a direct denial of the commandment to love. Is there any greater way that a church leader could fail in his or her responsibility to love and care for the sheep?

I am sure that somewhere among my posts are some observations on the need of every human being to belong to a human group. This theme has recently become of greater interest to me as I delve into the realm of social psychology and social rejection. My focus today is to suggest quite simply that some churches and abusive groups have exploited this need to belong in their followers. Having offered individuals a home to satisfy their belonging needs, particularly when they are young, the cultic group then is able to hold on to them for a considerable period through continuing to exploit these same belonging needs. The ability to move on from, or leave, the group when the individual perhaps starts to encounter abusive and exploitative behaviour from the leaders, is achieved only with great difficulty. It is because this member has become so thoroughly entwined with the group through the need to belong that separation is achieved only at the expense of knowing real trauma and distress.

The need to belong, as the social psychological textbooks tell us, goes back to the time in human evolution when survival depended on the ability of groups to gather food and defend themselves from rival bands who might be competing for the same food supplies. From a psychological point of view the human infant has to make secure bonds with a caring adult in order to physically survive. We call this bond ‘attachment’ and many books have been written to describe how this process works and how failures to obtain attachments can result in severe dysfunction in the emergence of the adult. The psychologist Winnicott beautifully sums up this idea of attachment when he said something to the effect that there is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby in close emotional and physical proximity to the caring adult, usually the mother.

Many young people grow up with unfinished business with the family. No parent ever get things totally right in offering exactly the right amount of care that is needed by their off-spring. Some parents give too much and some too little in the way of parental care. Most children, thankfully, have sufficient ‘good-enough’ care for them to be able to move to adulthood without serious problems. But even if parents are near perfect in rearing their children, few young people do not experience pangs of worry and concern as to whether they can indeed go it alone in the journey towards maturity. The picture that comes to mind is the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. For a few moments the butterfly, even though perfectly formed, has to dry itself in the sun so that its wings will function properly. So the young person may have several months of uncertainty as to whether he is a child or an adult. That time is one of uncertainty and vulnerability.

Every young person has to pass through the transition from being dependent on parental figures and peer groups to the independence of adulthood. This period of ‘wobble’ may happen at any time between the ages of 16 and 25. It is a bit like a car changing gear. It may be a smooth transition or we may hear the gears grinding horribly as they struggle to go at the new speed. But the need to affiliate or bond is strong and powerful right through the process. The object of dependency is constantly changing. In younger teenagers the need to belong is focussed on membership of gangs or strong peer groups. Many churches are important places for young people to gather in what is hopefully a healthy environment while they are exploring the loosening of parental and home ties on the way to a new adult identity. The cultic or high-demand church that appeals to the almost adult of 18+, is however working in a different way. They use the need to bond or belong as a way of drawing the young person deep into the group. This is done so that the individual will want to give away their financial and emotional soul for this reassurance of ‘belonging’ and being on a journey to salvation beyond the grave. The ‘conversion’ process, however it is done, will hook deeply into the psyche of the individual so that he/she feels an overwhelming sense of safety in the new package of belief and belonging that is being offered. The depth of conversion, is, in my thinking, proportionate to the degree of vulnerability being experienced by the young person as they are moving from one stage of their lives, that of dependence, to independence. The cultic institution, however, in practice stops that process from being completed. The young person swaps one sort of dependency, parents, peer groups etc., for another, that of depending on the cultic group and its leaders.

The model I am offering for the vulnerability of young people entering extreme churches or cultic groups, also explains why many find it so hard to leave. As long as they are in the group, their belonging needs are being satisfied in much the same way that a child ‘belongs’ to his or her parents. It is when they leave through expulsion or unhappiness that they discover that the growing up process, the movement to independence, has never been completed. They cannot, to use the butterfly analogy, fly on their own. The task of supporting such people who have recently left high demand groups and churches is hard precisely because the task of growing up has been left incomplete or short-circuited. The group has taken away something extremely precious from the former member. It has deprived that member of the context and setting in which to grow up and mature. By latching on to the common human need to belong, it has betrayed that member, for the time being, of the chance to escape the dependencies of youth for all the possibilities of mature adult living and awareness.

While writing the piece on shunning for this blog, I experienced a degree of passion that made me realise that this area of suffering by ex-members of abusive churches needed more investigation. I started to do a word search in Amazon books to see what had been written on the subject. As might be expected I was directed to some novels describing the Amish experience where they have a special word ‘meidung’ to denote it. As shunning in a religious context is much wider than the Amish, I looked at other synonyms for the word. What came up was the word ‘ostracism’. This did produce a number of books but it appears, as far as I can determine, that no one has written a study on either shunning or ostracism in churches or cults. It is also intriguing to note that a new body of literature on the subject of ostracism has emerged over the past twenty years to look at the subject from a social psychological point of view. A book that I have ordered, looks at this same area of study but it uses the expression ‘social exclusion’ in its title. We tend to think of social exclusion as being the fate of people who through poverty, age or illness fall outside the usual networks of social support and thus become isolated. The book, however, seems to treat ‘social exclusion’ as a synonym for shunning and ostracism, i.e. a deliberate act on the part of groups or individuals towards others. The chapter headings in the book do not indicate that any of the scholars who are looking at the problem have considered the church as an area worth studying. So this may be a topic that I can give some further attention particular in my presentations to people interested the problem of cultic matters.

The book that I am now reading on ostracism has given me (and you the reader) a simple model from which to work. It suggests that ostracism, although operating at different levels of severity is a method through which to exclude and control individuals or groups of people. Most typically ostracism involves ignoring others, giving them the silent treatment and pretending that they do not exist. The most effective (and most cruel) forms of ostracism take place actually in their presence. Silence, not speaking, avoiding eye contact and speaking over them are all ways through which an individual can be made to feel utterly scorned. The book makes clear that the individual receiving this treatment, the target, is deeply wounded by this behaviour. It is far worse to be ignored than to be hit in the face because the human need to have their existence acknowledged is at least present when someone chooses to punch you.

I want now to list the four areas of human well-being that are undermined by ostracism according the book I am reading. There are, according to Kipling Williams, an Australian social psychologist, four areas of need that are important to every individual and each of these come under threat through being ostracised. They are respectively the need to belong, the need to have self-esteem, the need to have control over your life and the ability to make sense of life, to have a meaningful existence. Each of these human needs is undermined by the experience of being the object of ostracism. The picture that comes to my mind as I record these four human needs is that of a tent. The human individual, in order to function properly, has to have four guy ropes tethered to the ground for the tent to stand up properly. The ropes are connected to four tent pegs and these are symbols for these four fundamental areas of need. Ostracism effectively is an attempt by others to pull up the tent pegs, so that the tent collapses. In other word the ostraciser is effectively trying to make our fundamental sense of who we are collapse by this cruel and barbaric treatment.

I refrain, for reasons of space, from giving examples of ostracising behaviour because I am sure my readers have encountered it somewhere, whether in church or in another institution. But I want to mention the fact that being the giver of ostracism is also a fairly unhealthy experience for the individual. It may not become quite as bad as being ostracised but it is certainly harmful to well-being in a variety of ways. It hardly enhances a happiness or a sense of belonging if your leader instructs you to cut dead or ignore people that were until very recently your friends and part of the group. To put it mildly, shunning or ostracism is very bad news for both the target and the perpetrator. That it should ever be practiced in a religious organisation, let alone a Christian one, defies comprehension.

I concluded my review of shunning by asking whether anyone should every join an organisation which practised such horrible barbaric behaviour. I need hardly give an answer to this question but asking it helps to enable us to see how corrupted and evil certain Christian organisations have become. I certainly want to continue to study this question because, as I said before, it lies right at the heart of abusive Christian behaviour.

If you find your way to this blog post, you might want to watch the lecture I gave at the International Cultic studies Association in Stockholm in June 2015. Type in Stephen Parsons 2015 on the youtube search.

My wife and I have recently returned from a few days away in Scotland. Our time away included a brief day trip to the islands of Orkney. I do not propose to inflict on my readers a geography lesson but rather reflect on the way that islands have a deep attraction for many people at quite a profound level. The island represents a place that is away from it all, a place of escape, a place of peace. How many people nurture the fantasy that, if they won the lottery, the thing that they would buy would be an island so that they could live out that fantasy of escape and retreat?

The urge to escape and find a place of peace and rest is something that is found in all religions. Many of us can hear the music of Mendelssohn and the words from Psalm 55 sung by a boy treble, ‘O for the wings of a dove, far away would I roam…’ Church appears to offer such a sanctuary and we could say that part of the attraction of church is that it remains a place that is unchanging in a changing world. To attend church is to retreat, to some extent, to somewhere safe.

To return to our picture of islands as the place of refuge from a world that makes many demands on us, the salient feature of the island is the fact that it surrounded by water. This surrounding water makes it difficult for anyone to land on our island. The owner of the island will make sure that he or she restricts the access so that it would be very unlikely that anyone would called unexpectedly. Thus the home that is built on the island would be a place of peace but also one of isolation. The very security of the boundaries would shut out the wider world. Just as the world outside finds it difficult to land on the island, so those on the island have to make some effort to maintain contact with those on the mainland.

I imagine that my reader may have already guessed that I am seeing the island to be like a cult-type church that has closed itself from contact with the wider world. The world outside this ‘island’ church is variously seen as apostate, heretical or generally hostile. The surrounding barrier of water is needed to protect those within from contamination and wrong ideas. The higher the barriers, the greater the expanse of water around our island, the more those on the island are thought to be kept safe. Their safety is however only possible at the expense of a loss of contact with all that lives beyond the island. The longer they remain in this ‘island’ church community, the more difficult they find it return to their old lives on the mainland. Let us suppose that the people in the ‘island’ church have had to learn to speak a new language to enter this community. How difficult it will be to return to speaking the language of the people they left behind years or decades before.

The rich owner of a small island paradise may revel in the isolation that his territory brings him. But there are few individuals who are able to stay for long periods of time without becoming imprisoned by this isolation from other human beings. The tight barriers are liable to become prison walls very quickly. In the same way the church with tight boundaries can quickly become a prison. The special ‘island’ language, the jargon that Christians often indulge in, is barely understood outside their circles. ‘Island’ churches are wonderful places to join but very hard to leave. The sense of disconnection from the mainland of ordinary human living is attractive but ultimately detrimental to our emotional and spiritual health.

Chris is often reminding us of the marginalised people in society and how such people feel little for a church that ignores them and their plight. If this complaint is a valid one against mainstream congregations who support food-banks and give generously to good causes, how much more valid is it against those churches that revel in their ‘island’ status and their success in keeping their members ‘pure’ from the contamination of the world. The ‘island’ cultic church has become doubly disconnected from people with real spiritual and social needs. It is so concerned with the issue of ‘saving’ individuals from what it sees as a wicked and corrupt world that it feels no responsibility of any kind towards those left behind. A few years ago I read some of the literature connected with beliefs about the Apocalypse among conservative Christians in America. It appeared that those who believed that they would be raptured, taken up into the air with Christ had absolutely no compassion towards the 98% of the human population who would not be saved but would by contrast meet a horrible and fiery end. There is something deeply pathological about such beliefs. There is a whole series of fictional books written by one Tim LaHaye, the Left Behind novels, to feed these bizarre and unwholesome notions.

The fantasy of living on an island whether literally, or metaphorically through your church, would make living the Christian life far from easy to achieve. Jesus spoke of his followers being those who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick and visit the prisoners. I have had little experience of the last of these, but in my brief time as a part-time army padre, I always made it my business to call regularly on those locked up in the army barracks cells in Dreghorn, Edinburgh. My reflections on the stories the confined soldiers used to tell can be recalled on another day. But however we understand our response to these words of Jesus at the end of Matthew’s gospel, it is clear that it will involve, not our separation from the wider world, but our readiness to get our hands dirty at times, to go to places that we would rather not go. Whatever it involves, it does mean that we are not called to live on islands, however attractive they may be, but on the mainland where the rest of humanity lives.

One of the ways in which religious and political groups keep control over their members is by erecting high barriers that distinguish the ‘in’ crowd from those outside. These barriers are not, of course, physical barriers but they act in just as an effective way. They show those inside an organisation, as well as those outside, where the boundaries lie. In extreme groups, the person inside will think little about those who are not part of the group because they are conditioned to look only inside for their social support, emotional needs and source of teaching and guidance. The people outside are in some sense ‘infidels’ or heathen. Either way they are not worthy of any attention or support.

Such boundaries are of course to be regretted when they undermine cohesion within a society. Multiculturalism, as we have suggested recently, does little to challenge what are effectively ghettos. But a greater evil can be seen when individuals are pushed out, for whatever reason, from the tightly knitted security of a religious group. In the process called ‘shunning’, an individual is expelled by all those who had, till then, been the source of social and emotional support. This is a cruel and barbaric practice and not infrequently leads to depression or even suicide. The more an individual had obtained his identity from being part of the group, the greater the sense of total desolation when he is cast out. Shunning, either as an implied threat to all members of a group or as an actual punishment, is something that a blog like this should name as utterly contemptible. It certainly should be outlawed in any group which identifies with Jesus, the man who did so much to welcome the ostracised and the shunned in Jewish society.

In my reflecting on the implications of shunning I have begun to see that it is much worse than an act of hate. When we hate someone, we are consumed by an intense dislike. However much we may dislike the individual we still recognise that he exists and will continue to exist. Shunning takes hatred to a different level. Within the act of shunning there is an implied pretending that he/she has somehow ceased to exist. The person concerned has become such a threat to the organisation, that we have to treat him as a non-person so that the equilibrium of the organisation be not disturbed. If he could be made to disappear, then that would be the best solution. The person who makes the decision to shun someone is probably not fussy as to how they should be made to disappear, even if actual murder is, inconveniently, not a practical option as far as the law of the land is concerned.

I hope that I am not exaggerating when I suggest that the act of shunning is form of psychological murder, the desire that someone should cease to exist. All feelings, all sympathy and the memory of former communication with them is to be withdrawn. This total turning the back on another human being is shocking and reprehensible. My studies on cultic-like churches have brought me face to face with the victims of shunning and the effect on them is far more torrid than if they had just incurred the hatred of an individual. In primitive cultures we see the effect of being hexed by the local witch-doctor. When someone actually dies after such a hexing curse, we speculate that the practitioner had somehow managed to destroy the invisible bonds that link an individual into their community, thus rendering them defenceless and their ‘soul’ totally vulnerable. Shunning is the equivalent in the West of being ‘hexed’, even if our Western culture and upbringing affords us a greater level of psychic defence than is found in primitive societies. We are of course dealing with approximations of what seems to be happening in these actions, but I hope my reader can at least follow my line of argument.

I have mentioned the experience of being shunned by individuals at Trinity Church, Brentwood. I am sure my readers have other experiences of this horror to add to this discussion. The crossing over the road to avoid speaking to someone, forbidding your children speaking to their children; all these are far more cruel than insulting them to their face. To tell someone by your actions that you would prefer it if they disappeared off the face of the earth is a pretty terrible thing. And yet this is the daily experience of tens of thousands of ex-members of religious groups of all kinds across the world. The group, in order to protect its purity, has to deny a voice, or even existence, to those who criticise it, or worse still decide to abandon its version of truth.

As a final comment, I would want to say to anyone who belongs to or considers joining a religious group, whether Christian or otherwise, how does the leadership deal with those who leave? Do they practice shunning? Do you really think that your spiritual welfare is going to be furthered if you get caught up with having to, along with everyone else, shun ex-members? Do you really want to be a person who practises ‘spiritual murder’? There is no other way to describe such a horrific denial of Jesus’ command to love our enemies. There is also no better way to destroy our integrity as human beings than by forcing us to become part of a baying mob who wants to psychologically murder or destroy someone for the ‘crime’ of having left our group.

If you find your way to this page, you might wish to watch my Youtube of my lecture given in Stockholm for the International Cultic Studies Association in June 2015. Type Stephen Parsons 2015 in youtube search

The idea of creativity is one that has fascinated me for many years. It suggests that it is possible for an individual to make some something that is entirely new – something that has never existed before. Creativity may apply to musicians, artists or ordinary human beings. We recognise that an individual is a creator, when, out of the material of paint, clay, music or words , something comes forth, which is an object of wonder, something that has never been seen or even imagined before.
Before my reader gets the idea that creativity only belongs to the gifted and the talented part of the population, I should mention that all of us can be part of this process. Every time a relationship or friendship between two people is formed, there is the potential for it to become something beautiful and expressive of our creativity. The particular involvement in creativity that most of us enjoy is the joy of parenthood. Creativity is involved in the act of becoming parents and also the long demand made on our skills of nurture. There is nothing automatic about being a parent but the successful outcome to the process of rearing a child is a source of true pride, every bit as important at the completed statue or piece of music.

The thing that links every product of human creativity is the fact of its newness. What we have created has never existed before. But we had to cooperate with the act for it to happen. There was nothing inevitable about the act of creation. It demanded of us effort and hard work. We also recognise that it is an act where we express our freedom. We sense that if we had been under any external pressure, the desire to create would in some way have been suppressed. We contrast our acts of creativity with the other parts of our lives where we have to do things, either because other people require us to do them or because they form part of the need to make a living. The fortunate few in society are those who have occupations which allow them to express their creativity and earn a living at the same time. The rest of us have to express our creativity in our free time, in our family life or through our interests and hobbies.

This reflection on creativity brings me back to a verse in the Book of Revelation where the risen Christ states: ‘behold I make all things new’. This verse opens up a variety of potential meanings to the reader. Is he talking about the transformation of the present or is he referring to a change in what is going to happen in the future? As far as I am concerned, the lack of precision in any interpretation of this saying allows it to be one of the most exciting sayings in the entire New Testament. It suggests that Jesus is alongside all of us who are busy uncovering the creativity in our lives whether through art, music or relationships. He is involved with us in the constant newness of the process we call creativity. He not only sees it but encourages it in us. At the same time he is, we believe, involved in the work of newness and transformation of the lives of those who come close to him. We sense that a lifelong attachment to Christ brings us into a deeply creative relationship which is itself a gateway to constant newness, both in terms of what we experience and what we understand.

I have already hinted at a reason why this reflection on creativity links into a blog on Christian abuse. Coercion, compulsion and control are all things that destroy creativity in the same way that they have already destroyed the possibility of experiencing freedom. The loss of freedom is not just about institutions of slavery and the like, it can also be found in any situation where the possibility of newness and the unexpected is denied. There are of course many manifestations of Christianity where the new or the unexpected is seen to be subversive, because such things cannot be controlled. Even the suggestion that is a single interpretation of a passage of scripture removes the possibility of any creativity or freshness of approach. In Britain and the States there is a form of education for children known as ACE (Accelerated Christian education). This style of teaching enables unqualified parents to take their children through a conservative curriculum which requires the child to learn entirely through box-ticking. There is no possibility of having answers that have involved the child in developing the gifts of imagination or lateral thinking. Behind this method proposed by ACE is an entire philosophy that presupposes that the answers are always given. There is never any room for doubt, ambiguity or paradox. Newness is kept out the process of learning. In that world view, devoid of newness and creativity, I see a place which is sterile, lifeless and utterly without any excitement. It is a world that is completely without any attraction and I do not believe that Jesus wants us to go there. By contrast he is inviting us to travel with him to a world where all things are new, everything is in the process of being revealed. These are the things that, as the collect, puts it, pass our understanding.

O God who has prepared for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding; pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire.

The rights now afforded to women by the church and the wider society would have been unthinkable only a century ago. We, in the Anglican church in the UK, are celebrating the recent vote to allow women to be bishops but we forget how much the church used to stand at the forefront of opposing even the very idea of women having rights or status in a male dominated world. If we deplore the attitude of some Muslims towards their women folk, we must not forget that in the 19th and early 20th century, the rights of women were virtually non-existent in Christian Europe and America.

In America, the National Woman Suffrage Association Convention was founded in 1885. One of the chief weapons used against this movement was, according to an early speaker Elizabeth Stanton, religion. She declared how the ‘Bible was hurled at us from every side’. In the next generation, in 1921, the power of religion was used to shut down Margaret Sanger’s public meeting in New York on birth control. The Equal Rights Amendment in the States was finally passed only in 1972. It had been presented to Congress for the first time in 1923 but had been bitterly opposed by congregations from Catholic, Mormon and Protestant groups. The Suffrage, the right to vote by women, was also long contested. The opposition to these ideas was in part sustained by the endless repetition of the familiar Pauline texts which appear to demand the silence and subjugation of women.

Two pioneers of the 19th century against the institution of slavery in America were two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke. Although they spoke only to audiences of women, the Congregational Church of Massachusetts sent out a letter in 1837 censuring them and declaring that they would ‘fall in shame and dishonour into the dust’. 300 men walked out of a meeting in New York in 1840 to protest the presence of one woman, Abby Kelly, on the committee of an anti-slavery group. In every case the participation of women was understood to be a ‘defiance of the New Testament’. A women’s rights convention in New York in 1853 brought out mobs of men, clergy and their supporters to sabotage the proceedings ‘with hisses, groans, stamping and ridiculing remarks’ bringing the proceedings to an end.

As a matter of record, it was women who were not members of organised religious groups who did the most to further the cause of women’s rights. A colleague of Elizabeth Stanton, Matilda Gage, wrote the influential Women Church and State. This owed little to religious ideas and she and her supporters would have been described as freethinkers. Another freethinker, Charlotte Gilman wrote: ‘one religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man’s original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race’.

I bring these various incidents of religious aggression against women before the reader to remind us all that attitudes on the part of Muslims towards women were part of our societies for a very long time. Not only were they endemic in the societies of 100 years ago, but the echo of the same attitudes is with us today. The open opposition to the concept of equal rights for women in society is not often articulated by religious groups but hidden misogyny still stalks congregations up and down the land. The basis for this opposition is to be found in the application of the identical Pauline texts that were thrown at the women’s rights pioneers. For the sake of tidiness I list them here. I Corinthians 11. 3, 8-9, I Corinthians 14. 34-35 and 1 Timothy 2.11-14. Whether Paul is the author of 1 Timothy is not here important because the writer is clearly following the Pauline tradition in this matter.

In my previous post I suggested that the way to deal with difficult texts is to apply the principle of seeking to establish the wider context. In the first place as a counter-balance we have the remarkable statement by Paul that in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female but all are one in Christ. This appears to be Paul speaking in a lyrical frame of mind, while the ‘anti-women’ passages seem to reflect a far more sober approach. Paul’s writing often seems to touch heights of inspired poetic grandeur while at other times he comes over as rather pedantic and legalistic. While this comment is subjective, I invite the reader to contrast the poetic power of Romans 8 and the dry argumentation of chapter 9. Still more important for our desire to qualify the Pauline sayings about women is a cursory glance at the attitude of Jesus himself. The gospels cannot but reveal an approach to women (and children) by Jesus which was revolutionary in the extreme. I have not read feminist readings of the Bible, but anyone interested will have no difficulty in locating all the occasions where Jesus turned upside down the conventional patriarchal attitudes to women that were part of all the cultures of the ancient world. Certainly it can be said that there is nothing about Jesus and his approach to women that gives the tiniest support or encouragement to the attitudes that Paul seems to possess in the ‘proof-text’ passages mentioned above.

The anti-women rhetoric of yesteryear has given way to hate-filled rhetoric against same-sex relationships. Uncomfortably for those who follow the line that ‘the Bible clearly states …’ , exactly the same type of arguments are used to make their points. In another hundred years time, I hope that we will be looking back to this age and saying: ‘How could the Christians of that time really have argued in this way?’ The Bible is a document to read in order to understand the mind of Christ, but let us always read it with care, sensitivity together with an awareness that we might be reading our own political and psychological issues into the text when they are not there.

The argument between supporters of exclusivity and inclusivity in the church is made more complicated by two passages in the Gospels that seem to say something diametrically opposite to one another. Does the Bible paint a picture of a church clearly identifying believers on the one side and unbelievers on the other? St Mark’s gospel appears to be on the side of the inclusive cause when Jesus in chapter 9. 40 states that whoever is not against him is for him. This is said in the context of a query by the disciples over a man said to be casting out devils in Jesus’ name but who is not part of the group. The exclusive case is given strength by the passage in Matthew and Luke (12.30 & 11.23) where Jesus says: ‘whoever is not with me is against me’. How often have I heard that passage being used in an abusive, even threatening, way against people who do not agree with the speaker who claims to be speaking the mind of Christ. The passage is used to marginalise all non-Christian religions, non-religious philosophies of life, New Age ideas and indeed anyone who is not a Christian within the speaker’s definition. Indeed it is one of the passages most often used to defend a Christian against perceived attacks from others. John’s gospel is also mined for quotations that seem to support the exclusivist case.

The issue that we need to face first of all in noticing these two apparently contradictory passages is that they seem to reflect a difference of opinion within the New Testament church itself. I do not have the reference books to go deep into the question but my commentary notes that Matthew and Luke, in using this identical saying, here draw on a common source known to scholars as ‘Q’. This abbreviation is taken from the German for source ‘Quelle’. Mark did not have access to this particular document which is mainly a source for a tradition of Jesus’ words and teaching. The ‘exclusive’ passage ascribed to Jesus is thus a ‘Q’ passage while Mark drew from elsewhere for his material. We may speculate that there was, at the time of the early church, a difference of opinion over the question of whether the church was to be open or very strict about its membership. Each side appealed to the words of Christ for support and we are heirs to both traditions. The texts suggest that the Marcan traditions favoured the inclusive understanding of the church while the traditions associated with ‘Q’ went with the idea that the church needed to preserve fairly strict boundaries with the outside world.

The question then arises as to how we are resolve this divergence of opinion within the Biblical text itself. Which understanding in this question of inclusivity and exclusivity was Jesus likely to have had? The well tried answer to such a question is to look wider than just these single passages to discover Jesus’ attitudes. My readers will suspect that I am very suspicious of any argument that appears to be resolved on the authority of a single passage. I personally find the inclusive case to be supported strongly by other evidence in the gospel records. Jesus welcomed and ate with all kinds of people who were very definitely not ‘with us’. Eating with tax-gatherers and sinners was clearly not in the spirit of Old Testament purity laws as there were many rules concerned with ritual contamination. Impurity could come from many sources, some involving people with ‘unclean’ occupations and others particularly involving the contamination of shed blood. A readiness to subvert these purity laws is also to be found in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The hero of the story, the Samaritan, was not hesitant to get involved with the contaminating blood and gore of the wounded traveller. Compassion played second place for the priest and Levite who passed by on the other side to avoid becoming impure. Jesus freely disobeyed other rules set out in the Jewish law, speaking to a woman, allowing his disciples on the Sabbath to roll ears of corn as they crossed a wheat field and healing a sick man on the Sabbath. The acceptance of the attentions of the woman from the street who anointed Jesus, was also outside an exclusivist stance. For me the picture of Jesus as the one who reached out bravely and courageously across barriers and man-made boundaries is summed up in the curious saying about him in Luke 7. Jesus is accused of being ‘a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners’. Since most commentators agree that such an accusation would not be recorded unless it was an actual historical memory, this taunt is likely to have been made. The point is that Jesus, by being such a friend of these groups, was breaking the laws that would have kept him as a respectable law-abiding Jew.

It is clear that the evidence points to the tradition of Jesus reaching out over barriers of class and taboo during his life-time and this is very strong. Such a reading of Jesus’ life suggests that he was unlikely to have wanted strong barriers between his group and those outside to exist. But it is likely that the Jewish faction among the early Christians may well have wanted to re-erect the barriers that Jesus spent so much time trying to dismantle.

This examination of two apparently contradictory passages in the Synoptic gospels is a good illustration of at least two things. First it reflects that the gospels were put together by editors who were themselves caught up in debates and discussions about how the church was to be organised. There was for them more than one tradition of interpretation of what Jesus had said and taught. Secondly we approach the truth of what Jesus may have meant, not by the examination of a single passage, but by looking more widely at signs of coherence in the emphases of Jesus’ overall message. Such coherence does in fact exist and much of the historical evidence for the nature of Jesus’ ministry will show us the fact that while he followed many of the Jewish traditions, he also adopted a critical stance towards it.

I hope that this discussion of these two passages in the gospels has helped some of my readers to recognise that there are issues beneath the text as we have it which cannot be easily resolved by simple text-quoting. The exclusive text of Matthew and Luke needs to be balanced with that appearing in Mark. Whether we like it or not, important issues about who is or is not a Christian are not sorted by text quoting outside the context of a thorough understanding of the whole. It also, needs, dare I say, some access to the work of critical scholars who have been working on this and other problems for the past 200 years. The work of biblical scholarship cannot be wished away to flatter the opinions of conservative Christians who use texts to support their particular agendas.

The Yes-No Question
The upcoming Scottish referendum is causing real heart-ache for many of the residents of Scotland. They are under pressure to make a decision which may be life-changing, not only for them but also their descendents in generations to come. As a former resident of Scotland for seven and a half years and now living within twelve miles of the boundary (frontier?), I am obviously going to have feelings on the matter. I can in fact see both sides of the argument, even if for personal reasons, I hope the union of the countries is not broken. It is clear that the debate has engaged many passions and divided families. The reason for the family divisions is quite simply that some members of the family think more of the emotional side of the arguments and others think more of the practical. Which side can claim to have the best arguments in both these areas is not for me to say, but there is clearly a complex interaction between the arguments being presented and the personalities of the voters.

In the opinion polls there is one group that stands out which are the ‘don’t knows’. I am in fact surprised that there are not in fact far more of them that the 15- 18% recorded. If the arguments are as finely balanced as they appear to be, then it would seem likely that a lot of people would not want to be committed until they enter the voting booth. Many, I would suspect, might actually want to vote ‘don’t know’ as they can see both sides of the argument. This blog post is perhaps a plea for people who are in the ‘don’t know’ category, not just in the Scottish referendum but in other areas of life.

The nature of politics means that the ‘don’t know’ category has no power beyond that of not voting at all. In Synods and other church bodies, there is the slightly stronger power of abstention but this is still seen as a weak gesture. In practice then a voter has to commit to a Yes or a No. Often that will be taken one way or another for the most small reason. The genuine ‘don’t know’ voter will vote yes or no for such reasons as wanting to please a partner, or because she approves of the choice of fashion worn by a representative of one of the parties who speaks on television. Clearly the vote in the Scottish referendum may go either way and it may be won or lost for the most trivial of reasons.

Although in the case of the referendum I am on the side of the Union side, there are many occasions where I want to keep my options open indefinitely. This may sound like a weak decision but I question whether that is in fact the case. The nature of politics requires people to make up their minds and choose a particular political party but in making these decisions they perhaps lose something. The undecided individual in a voting booth may feel they have to follow a family tradition in the choice of party, thus never working their way through to finding out what they think as a mature adult. I have already spoken much of the way that Christians sometimes make decisions out of a loyalty to a ‘tribe’ or particular fellowship. In last Friday’s Church Times there was an interview with the Director of the Evangelical Alliance, Steve Clifford. In the interview he made the statement the ‘vast majority of Christians around the world’ take a ‘biblical view’ in their attitude to homosexuality. I question whether this statement is even true of self-identified evangelicals, let alone other Christian groups. I would maintain that among the ‘vast majority of Christians’ are many who embrace the ‘don’t know’ category. Many, many Christians have simply not engaged with the issue properly, let alone come to a mind about it.

The question of who is right and who is wrong on the gay issue is not here important. My own position, whatever my post on Vicky Beeching may have suggested, is to side with the large company of ‘don’t knows’. What exercised my passion at that point was the pretence, even fantasy, that there was an inevitability that all Christians should side with the so-called biblical view which is set out by the Evangelical Alliance in their 2012 report, Biblical and Pastoral responses to Homosexuality. The implied implication is that I and anyone who does not agree with the received point of view is somehow not properly Christian. I experience that kind of pressure to think in a particular way in the same way as a political dissident in a dictatorship. My hackles rise on behalf of my fellow ‘don’t knows’ and also of anyone who is unhappy to be lumped as assumed members of the ‘vast majority’. If I appear to side with the supporters of gay liberation, it is not because I agree with them totally but because I see them as persecuted minority, deserving of support in the face of tyranny.

Years ago as a student I lived almost a year under the fascist government of the Colonels in Greece. The government were not out to get me personally but I watched the effect of arbitrary tyranny on people I knew and that affected me deeply. I suppose I would claim that any attempt to tell me what to think, using any kind of pressure or force, sets up in me a reaction that wants to argue for the opposite as well as challenge that use of power. I want to challenge Steve Clifford with the observation that he does not have the right to assume he knows what people believe. He is entitled to hold a position based on his study of Scripture and I, for one, respect a well argued position. The fact that his position is based on use of Biblical texts does not mean that it possesses a specially privileged status in the debate and can ignore the arguments coming from the other side. The talk about what the ‘vast majority’ think would suggest he has not properly considered the position of the many ‘don’t knows’ in the discussion, let alone the people who argue that his use of the Bible is in fact deeply flawed. We are coming uncomfortably close to the kind of mind-set known to dictators and anyone who deals in absolutes which cannot handle difference or disagreement. The ‘don’t knows’ challenge such authoritarian assumptions and demand the possibility of free, open and fair debate. There is still a lot more debating to be done over the gay issue and perhaps the ‘don’t knows’ are those who are most championing the need for continuing discussion. Talk about the ‘vast majority of Christians’ holding a particular position does not create the best environment for that debate to happen. Closing down or discouraging discussion is the behaviour of authoritarian groups, whether political or institutional. It will not do either in our nation or in our churches.

A letter in the Times today (Thursday) makes the point that the ability by young British men to commit murder on video is the result of the failure of the policy of multiculturalism in this country. This word ‘multiculturalism’ is a word that needs to be unpacked a little. It is one of those words that gets freely bandied about so I need to be clear for myself and for the reader what the word actually means before considering how it might relate to the themes of this blog. Multiculturalism is the promotion of diversity in society, the advocacy of equal respect towards minorities and their cultures. As a political policy it allows the growth of a rainbow of different cultures and attitudes in society, with none being given special privilege. As its best it allows for a huge amount of cultural variety in society, together with the promotion of respect for all that is different. At its worst it creates ghettos, intolerance and ignorance because some groups are tacitly encouraged only to know what is in their culture and be effectively trapped by it.

It is the aspect of multiculturalism that creates ghettos that is an issue that will exercise many of us. Ghettos serve the purpose of separating people and creating chasms of misunderstanding between groups. From the point of view of those within the ghettos, the barriers of separation are experienced as protection. The ‘other’ who lives beyond the ghetto is felt to be a threat to the particular way of life that is lived within it. Among the negative aspects of multiculturalism in Britain are the sight of women wrapped up in Muslim headgear who are never allowed beyond the areas around their homes, or given any help in learning English. The walls of protection that are offered by their ghetto way of life are walls also of an effective prison.

Multiculturalism in education has also, arguably, given rise to the promotion of attitudes that have allowed 5-600 young men to travel to Syria and behave in the most extreme way having the capacity to commit appalling atrocities. These young men were in our State primary schools as little as 15 years ago. These same schools were teaching them, we all hoped, kindness, tolerance, sharing and a respect for others. The actual reality was that the influence of certain extremists within their culture and sometimes ghettoised communities effectively overrode the gentleness and tolerance of a British education to produce something indeed monstrous.

I have allowed my angst over what is going on in Iraq to take me longer than usual to come to the point of this blog post. The issue over ghettos is one that should be faced, not only by immigrant groups, but also by all Christians and churches. In a recent post I talked about the seductive appeal of puritan ideas, the thought that we can and should separate ourselves from the impure, whether people or ideas. The ideas of multiculturalism seem to encouraging this tendency to be puritans by every religious group. We are all guilty to some extent of this. How much easier to live only with people like us?

My reader will not be surprised when I point out that some manifestations of Christianity, the conservative in particular, promote ghetto values. But as I write this, I see that it is in fact an issue for all Christians to resist allowing themselves to retreat back into their comfort zones. These are all too often ghettos of some kind. So-called fellowship groups or any gatherings of the like-minded in a church can all too quickly become exclusive and ghettoised. In short, if we are to challenge the negative aspects of multiculturalism, which the Times letter referred to, we will have to spend much more effort in refusing to collude in the separatisms that exist in so many aspects of our churches and in society.

One point that the Times letter writer demanded was that the values of democracy and respect to be promoted in British schools and other extreme forms of behaviour to be declared to anathema to British values. By democracy I understand him to mean a whole cluster of values that I believe this blog also is passionate about. Democracy is the right to debate issues. It is the right to be heard, even when an institution deems your point of view or insight inconvenient. Democracy in short is against systems of thought or belief that are intransigent and incapable of change. It supports the right to go on discovering and exploring even though those around you declare that the values that the group holds, whether Christian or Muslim, are fixed because they can be extracted from a book. The democratic, dare I say it, British liberal tradition, will want all children to see that values belonging to their society are still being discovered, still being refined by each generation. Education in schools is to be become party, not only to a tradition from the past, but to an ongoing process which will continue for generations to come. Everyone in society is invited to this process of learning how to live creatively and well with people who are different in terms of belief and culture. We will all be changed by the quality of that encounter and perhaps understand our own traditions better through the process.

In my attempt to make some sense of the awful things going on in Iraq, I find I have to return to this restatement of values that are intrinsic to the liberal quest. Truth is a value that continues to be uncovered and cannot be said to have reached its final form. Chris mentioned to me recently the idea of ‘progressive revelation’ and it is a topic to which I will return. While we have the encounter with Christ as in some way definitive for Christians, it is a personal relationship and that cannot ever be complete in terms of words and concepts. The same is true of any human relationship; it goes on revealing new facets for as long as the parties are alive. When Jesus talked about the Spirit, he pointed out that work of revelation was not complete but would go on into the future. The Holy Spirit ‘will lead you into all truth’. That promise in the future tense means that I, with many others. look as much to the future as to the past for my understanding of truth. What lies in the future is of necessity incomplete. In the same way my version of truth is incomplete and can never be any other way. Hopefully all those who do not have final truth can never be tempted to be fanatics. Who, with a profound grasp that truth is incomplete, could ever want to kill another for their version of truth or even abuse them verbally? One day beyond the grave, we may see truth clearly and completely but not yet.