After writing my last blog post, I was reminded of some writing I have recently done which sets out the thinking of an American political commentator called George Lakoff.  The relevance of George Lakoff, and indeed my piece about him, to this blog is that he attempts to account for the  chasm of thinking that exists in the States between the conservative Right and the progressive Left.  At the risk of over-simplifying American politics, we see conservatives largely siding with the Republican party and the progressives voting with the Democrats.  The interest of this divide in American politics for this blog is in that conservative Republicans will attract the vast majority of ‘Bible believing’ Christians.  Thus to understand the political Right is to have some insight into the so-called Religious Right with their concerns for issues of personal morality.  We in Britain have not escaped the influence of American conservative religious thinking in our churches, even if the political landscape in the two countries is quite different.

George Lakoff is an academic with a particular interest in linguistics.  The main concern of the two books that I studied was in the way that political rhetoric or language is used and abused in the course of debate.  Particular words are introduced into a debate between political opponents but it sometimes becomes apparent during the course of the debate that the word has been defined to suit the purposes of the conservative argument.  For example in a discussion about same-sex  relationships, the word ‘marriage’ is brought in.  The progressive wants to use the word to describe a legally recognised relationship between two responsible adult people whether or not of the opposite sex.  The conservative may well argue that the word ‘marriage’ cannot be used for same-sex relationships.  Marriage can apply only to a relationship of people of opposite sex.  There is obviously a debate to be had over the meaning of the word marriage, but it is presented in the argument as a self-evident claim which is beyond contradiction.  It is rather similar to the technique of a conservative Christian to clinch a discussion by bringing forward the argument, ‘the Bible says’.   The person trying to oppose the conservative position then has find a counter argument from Scripture and the discussion descends into an unhelpful exchange of texts.  Those of us who are not conservative Christian do not find this activity of bolstering up arguments from quoting scripture something we are very good at.   It is also hard to see much value in this kind of discussion.  The Bible is not known for a perfectly consistent point of view.

To return to George Lakoff and his writing, we find that he has an intriguing observation to make to help us understand what makes the Republican right voter tick from a psychological point of view.  He hypothesises that the difference between conservative and progressive voter may lie in their experience of family life as they grew up.  His argument is that the conservative voter supporting the Republican party may well have been brought up in a traditional family where the father was firmly in control.  The bringing up of the children was seen to be a matter of maintaining firm paternal discipline with the fear that unless discipline was maintained the children would descend into chaos and be unable to make their way in the world.  Such ideas are reflected in many books on child-rearing favoured by conservative Christians.  They also echo a traditional belief among such Christians that the natural state of existence, particularly for children, is one of dominated by original sin and chaotic living.

The political and social implications of such an experience of the past are extensive.  Conservatives will believe that there will always be an authoritarian solution to the world’s problems, whether discussing personal morality, social issues or the problems of the wider world.  Poverty, for example, will be understood as the result of fecklessness or lack of discipline.  The poor have only themselves to blame, whether you are talking about the ghetto inhabitants of America’s inner cities or the poor in countries overseas.  This attitude might explain the incomprehensible Republican opposition to health care reform.  If you resist the improvements to social care of the poor, you are, so the thinking goes, helping them to find self-improvement through their own unaided effort.

In contrast to this authoritarian experience of family life, the progressive politically minded  Democrat may well have experienced life in a family where cooperation, mutual respect and trust take central stage.  If that is the internalised memory of how things worked in early life, then there will be a profoundly different understanding and expectation of how political ideas are put into practice.  Without spelling it all out, Lakoff locates a liberal hopeful political attitude among those who have had the good fortune to have been brought up in a liberal family.  In summary conservatives and liberals, whether political or religious, have been created, not by ideology or intellect but by the emotional environment of their early family life.

I offer these arguments without much detail as I have had to shorten and simplify quite complex ideas.  The position of Lakoff is presented as quickly as possible because it seems to help us to have some fresh insight into a variety of issues that might otherwise baffle us.  When we try to talk to conservative (fundamentalist) Christians, why do we feel that they cannot and will not shift on any point?  What is it about the conservative Christian that behaves in an irrationally prickly way over issues of sexual morality?  Is the issue of gay sex such a big deal or does it reflect a shame laden experience taught in early life? These and other issues are topical at present in the Anglican Church as conservatives constantly throw into the arena of debate their obsessional fixation on matters of sex.  Most of us on the more liberal wing want to move away from this area of life to pursue wider issues, such as justice or poverty.

What do others think?

To attempt to ‘explain’ fundamentalism in the sense we have defined in the previous post is clearly an impossible task.  Whether one writes a book or pens a 500 word blog post, this is an undertaking that can never be completed.  But I want here to suggest one or two leads that may not have occurred to you the reader and may be useful to your thinking.

In the last post I offered a definition of fundamentalism which pointed to the individual who had convictions which are held in such a way that they are unable ever to be questioned.  This would exist alongside a failure or inability to listen to another point of view.  I thus described the fundamentalist as someone who cannot and will not listen.  Such a definition, in as far as it has value, focuses very much on the individual, their personal thinking and convictions.  If one stays at this level of a person, one would expect a psychological investigation to proceed along the lines of an examination of his or her experiences in early life.  The question might be asked: why has this individual chosen to occupy a place which shuts off openness, dialogue and discovery?  Is there something about this early life that predisposes them to a shut-off non-communicating approach to the world?

The psychological literature does indeed offer clues as to why some individuals appear to prefer a ‘place of safety’ rather than taking the risk of exploring reality and life in an open way.  The same personalities may well seek the security of an authoritarian political party which offers answers to a variety of issues, those that allows them not to have to think out issues for themselves.  We know that certain newspapers are particularly good at telling people what they want to hear and allow them to feel that the ‘party’ line is one they have thought up for themselves.   Psychology will have something to say about this desire for safety and may well offer us some understanding of why people long to be secure.  The insights proffered by the discipline will in all probability focus on the early stages of life in the family of origin and the way that the individual may have failed to negotiate those stages successfully.

The approach that I want to open up in this post is somewhat different.  It looks, not at the individual and his past, but at the groups to which each of us relates to.  Everyone in society is a combination of an individual identity and a group identity.  Some of the time we experience ourselves as an ‘I’ and at other times we become part of a ‘we’ identity.  The way we oscillate between the two is the stuff of a relatively new theory within social psychology called social identity theory.  No one lives entirely outside the group or entirely within a group.  Somehow we try to find a balance between the two.

The book that I read a couple of years ago by by Peter Herriot , Religious Fundamentalism and Social Identity , has an intriguing take on fundamentalism within this way of looking at individuals.  He suggests, to put it at its simplest, that fundamentalists are people who live perhaps excessively at the ‘we’ end of the spectrum.  That observation would apply to certain Muslims, Christians and a whole variety of political and religious groups.  In other words fundamentalists of whatever kind exist almost entirely in and through the groups they are attached to.  Their individuality is thus stymied or repressed.  Outside the group context they have few if any opinions and little in the way of personal identity.  At the opposite end of the spectrum we find people of maverick independence and maybe eccentricity.  From a Christian point of view such people might well be suspect as having heretical or unconventional views.  Clearly the place to be is not at either end of the continuum but somewhere in the middle.  Here there is a balance between our participation in the world of belonging and our self or individual identity.

The reason that individuals opt to remain within groups for their self-definition is an interesting issue to ponder.  Perhaps carving out individuality and our own opinions is too much like hard work for some.  If we really want to look for reasons why people fail to get to this point of avoiding having worked out personal opinions and thoughts, we might find ourselves back in the families of origin, the place which never really allowed the child to grow up and leave behind mother and father.  Clinging to the group, the ‘we’, may simply be a clinging on to old family patterns that should been left behind.

Clearly there is a lot more to be said on this subject of psychology and fundamentalism!

When I was writing my study of Christian abuse, Ungodly Fear, I became aware very early on of the dangers of using the word ‘fundamentalism’.  I took two steps to avoid these dangers.  One was only to use the word as an adjective – to describe not an –ism but a tendency for an individual or an institution to think in a particular way.  Secondly I familiarised myself with the up to date literature on the subject, particularly the weighty tome of Harriet Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals.  Her work was extremely careful not to use words loosely  but I followed her in seeing that historically and theologically fundamentalism and evangelicalism were close bedfellows.

In the end my own definition of the word fundamentalism chose not to include any reference to this past (and present) association with evangelicalism.  I had glimpsed that the kind of behaviours that I was glimpsing in people of a fundamentalist disposition were not confined only to evangelicals but to anybody who had a strong system of belief which was militant and even sometimes aggressive towards others not sharing that belief system.  My definition of the F word was that of an individual who holds on to a system of belief that cannot and will not listen to or dialogue with others who do not share in this belief.  Fundamentalists can be political and as far as the church is concerned they can be liberal or traditional but they still sometimes qualify for the F word.

My book and many other studies will normally locate fundamentalist Christians among evangelicals, particularly those in the independent churches.  This is partly because this is the place where the modern phenomenon began in America in the 1920s.  It is also because the temperament associated with fundamentalism ties neatly into the sometime aggressive claims made for the Bible by many conservative Christians.  The Bible is a large complex book and if Christian leaders, particularly those in independent churches, claim to have discovered simple direct answers to life’s problems amid all the complexity, they will always gain a following.  These Christian leaders themselves will not normally have spent very long studying the Bible and the simple answers will have been the ones that they have picked up in their year or two at Bible college.  It might sound elitist to suggest than some understanding of the original languages in which the Bible was written help in the task of deeper understanding.  A little Greek and Hebrew do wonders for stopping any preacher being able to claim that he or she has fully mastered the meaning of a text. As Socrates famously said ‘The more you know, the more you discover you don’t know’.  For myself the task of understanding Scripture is something that has developed over many years and still continues.  For me preaching is about sharing insights from exposing myself to scripture, not delivering a predictable ‘party’ response to a complex moral issue.

One of the things that puzzles me is the way that conservative Christians seem to come up with an identical answer to a problem right across the world.  It is as though someone somewhere has decided on the correct answer and everyone in that network has blindly followed the leader.  It is as though freedom of thought has been surrendered to an invisible belonging to a ‘correct’ position.  Freedom is something that I would always want to fight for.  The freedom to think for myself and continue to explore the mysteries of faith.  In this, the passage from Revelation comes to mind when the risen Christ says ‘Behold I make all things new.’  Is not this newness something we should always be searching for?  We cannot find newness in following a strict predictable party line as practised by fundamentalist Christians.

To follow – The F word, some psychological insights.

The Church of England along with other churches and caring organisations has policies designed to  protect children and vulnerable adults from potential abusers.  Not being currently employed by the church I am not up to speed about the details of this protection but it does involve levels of scrutiny for all those who have access in the name of the church with these categories of people.  Thus criminal record checks are made of everyone who visit the elderly or have contact with others who are deemed to be vulnerable.

Who are the vulnerable?  Probably my definition of who is vulnerable in the context of church life would include far more people that those envisaged by the compilers of the policies.  But rather than quibbling about definitions, I want to turn the issue upside down and suggest that in many cases the church actually creates vulnerability which did not exist before.

What do I mean by this?  Talking with Chris with his concerns for the many in society who live on the edge, whether in terms of esteem or poverty, my awareness has been opened to the way that many have few resources with which to fight people and situations of power.  If you are poor or have no self-esteem then you occupy a place that is extremely vulnerable.  You are potentially a victim of a rapacious landlord, a loan shark or other people who want to exploit you in various ways.  The advantages of literacy, the confidence to write a coherent letter to authority may be beyond your grasp, so you simply have to ‘grin and bear’ the indignities and humiliations that life throws at you.

A few individuals out of this vast swathe of vulnerable people sometimes find their way into the church.    Many churches are places where a bookish culture is assumed.  Certain levels of knowledge are assumed in order to take part in the services.    The plethora of words used is enough to put off many people who do not live in this literate articulate world.  There are however churches which sit lightly on words and initially at any rate welcome the poor, the less educated and the vulnerable.  Such individuals are going to be attracted to aspects of the church that might be considered fairly marginal to some others.  Music is for some is a way into membership, particularly when the music resonates with what they have already found pleasant and attractive elsewhere.  The church that attracts them also appears to offer them an experience of acceptance, something that either their birth family may not have given them or something that has slipped away through the fickleness of their adult entanglements.  The attraction of the church is for these reasons largely an emotional one.  While there is nothing wrong is being drawn to the church for emotional reasons, an issue arises for the individual when things go wrong.  Chris’ testimony bears vivid witness as to the depth of despair that takes place when the scaffolding of certainty that was on offer when he first joined the church begin to crumble. Having bought into a emotional package of music and acceptance, he then found himself in thrall to what felt like an arbitrary system of control and exploitation.  Like many others Chris found it difficult to answer back to the increasing and arbitrary demands made which he felt to be wrong.  As one woman in my book Ungodly Fear declared after being terrified by the threat of demons in her life, she found it difficult even to protest because she had bought into the idea that the people in charge were so much more knowledgeable than her.

There are many ways to disempower individuals in a congregation.  One is to convince them that their immortal soul depends on obedience to those in authority in the congregation.  Another is to convince them that everything they think has to be vetted in some way by their ‘elders’.  When total control has been established over an individual, other forms of abuse may follow, including financial and sexual misbehaviour.   In short the arbitrary exercise of authority by those in charge has created the possibility that the church is a place where individuals can charge from being independent people to vulnerable adults.  The church becomes then a place for making people vulnerable rather than protecting those already vulnerable.

This claim may be thought of as fairly extreme but it is borne out by the experiences of people that I have met over the years.  Sometimes people are attracted to the church because it provided something in the way of affection that was missing in the rest of their lives.  They become locked into that relationship even though a part of them knows that it is doing them harm.  It is rather like a relationship between a controlling husband and a battered spouse.  The woman in the relationship cannot find a way to leave and this vulnerability is ruthlessly exploited by the husband who has his own emotional needs.  People become enmeshed with the church and they find it impossible to break away for similar reasons.  Meanwhile they have given their assent to a series of doctrines and beliefs that they only a quarter understand but the emotional toll of these beliefs gradually dawns on them over the years.

Abusive beliefs include a teaching about God that are interpreted as saying that he is only interested in saving a few favoured ones.  As I have said in the previous blog post, abusive teaching is found when the people in the congregation are threatened with eternal punishment in Hell.  Other dysfunctional themes are imbibed related to doctrines of the death of Christ.  Some expressions of atonement teaching come very close to saying that God wants to see his Son tortured to death as the only way to assuage his anger against humanity.  Sometimes it is not what the Christian teaching is actually about but it is what is heard in church and feeds negatively the imaginations of the already vulnerable.  I have this very day challenged an individual on a blog discussion who really believed that Jesus never stood up to wrong because he always forgave.  Such sloppy misreading of the Bible is actually harmful because it encourages a passivity in the church which is inappropriate and will tolerate potential abuse.

The Blog post has gone too long but I would be grateful to hear from others examples of the Church creating vulnerability in her members.  I believe that it is a problem and if it is, then surely it qualifies as Spiritual Abuse.

There are two texts from Scripture that come immediately to my mind when the word ‘fear’ is mentioned in the context of the Bible.  The first comes from Proverbs (9.10) and states ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’  The second passage is a story told by Luke (5.1-11) where the disciples were in a boat so full of fish that it began to sink.  Jesus says to Peter just before telling him that they were to go on to catch people, ‘do not be afraid’.  We could go on and do a search in a concordance to see that fear and its absence is quite an important theme in both Old and New Testaments.

The two examples that I have given both talk about fear but is quite clear that what is understood by the word in these two passages is very different.  In the Proverbs example, a better translation might be ‘awe’ or respect.  The New Testament example is much closer to our idea of fear, in terms of being terrified that our life is in danger or that something ghastly is perhaps going to happen.

This latter experience of fear is common not only to all humans but also appears to be shared by a large number of animals.  It is what we might refer to as a primal response to a situation of danger.  The human or the animal struggles to do whatever it takes to find a place of safety.  Whenever we experience fear, a large number of our faculties shut down in the effort to concentrate on survival.  When the Bible talks about love casting out fear, it might equally have said that fear casts out love.  Fear also casts out creativity, altruism, intelligent decision making and most of what we would consider normal human flourishing.  In short fear shuts us down beyond a very minimal and primitive functioning.  Remaining in this place for more than a short time will damage us as the body releases stress hormones to enable us to fight or flee.  None of us are designed to live with such stress for long periods of time.

When one human being chooses to put another in a place of fear or stress then they are doing a lot of damage to that individual.  Abuse of any kind, whether physical, emotional or spiritual is putting another in a place of fear and that is a place of cruelty and stress.  When this weapon of fear is exercised over another, the victim effectively shuts down in large areas of his or her life.  They have the lifeblood of proper human functioning drained away from them.  Of particular horror is the abuse of children who have no defence against the abuser.  This is why sexual and emotional abuse of children is considered particularly abhorrent in our society.  But all abuses of power use this damaging potential of making others experience fear.

The whole dynamic of power abuse whether against adults or children takes on a particular twist when it is done by Christian leaders.  A particular strand of teaching from Scripture is taken to be a major part of the ‘good news’ .  Put simply the hearers learn from ‘gospel preaching’ that they have a choice between accepting a message that Jesus ‘died to deliver them from their sins’ which will lead them to a place called heaven after death.  If they reject this teaching or even believe it in a different way, they will end up in a place of eternal torment called ‘hell’.  Traditional Catholic teaching also distinguished between ‘mortal’ sins which must be removed by penitence and absolution and venial sins which were of less significance.  If a Catholic believer died with unconfessed mortal sins attributed to them, then there was no prospect of reaching purgatory or heaven beyond it.  Until fairly recently mortal sins were believed to include masturbation alongside murder so consciences could be very troubled for a lot of the time.

The existence of hell for both Catholics and evangelical Protestants has been a source of deep anxiety and fear for many years.  Alongside the crushing of the human spirit that such fear causes there is also a rampant process of human control and power at work.  Power to crush, humiliate and belittle is being exercised by leaders who have claimed the power to decide who belongs and who does not belong to God’s people.  When such tyranny is being exercised it is hard to see how any human flourishing  is possible either on the part of the abusers or the abused.  In short ‘good news’ has become a means of spiritual murder.

The ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ becomes in the hands of certain preachers a tool of abuse and cruelty.  ‘Conversions’ are achieved through the weapons of spiritual terrorism and fear has become the motivation for discipleship rather freedom or love.  To the reader of this blog post I challenge you to ask in every Christian setting whether you are in the presence of a truth ‘that sets us free’ or a fear that shuts us down in the name of a narrow, bigoted power abusing version of the Christian faith.

I have mentioned on one of the blog posts that one of the weapons of Christian abuse is the Bible itself.  Verses which have the effect of putting another person down are quoted to enhance an existing sense of shame or guilt in the victim.  Other verses to emphasise the position of the leader and his (normally a his) authority are trotted out so that the Bible, as I mentioned before, has become used as a powerful bludgeon against which the recipient has little or no defence.

While a discussion of these issues of the Bible as a weapon will come up again, no doubt, there is another weapon used by Christian abusers that I want to discuss.  The weapon is rhetoric that mentions the Devil.  An individual who may disagree with an authority figure in the Church, can easily be accused of being afflicted with the devil.  Anything that challenges the person of power can be interpreted as caused by a devil of deceit or devil of ignorance.  The literature that describes the way that the devil operates conveniently allows a leader or powerful Christian to belittle an opponent by making this accusation.  If you live in a universe where the Devil goes round corrupting anyone who speaks against power and influence in the church, then you will be able to see that such an accusation is a very telling one indeed.  To be accused of such a thing, and to believe it, is to be cast into a very dark place.  It is indeed a kind of blasphemy to suggest that a person with a different perspective on life has in some way been taken over by a devil.  I am not sure whether there is any way that you can humiliate them or beat them down more, especially if they actually accept in any way the truth of this accusation.

The devil’s power in the imagination of Christian evangelicals has waned somewhat over the past fifteen years.  There are in fact some factual historical reasons for this.  The roots of the modern phase of interest in demons, Satan etc among evangelicals finds its origins with the publication of a particular book in 1981, Michelle Remembers.  This book was a lurid account of the recovered memories of a young woman called Michelle who claimed that she had been abused as a child in Satanic ritual.  The book was fairly quickly shown to be a tissue of fantasy and lies but the impact of the book was enormous.  If a story is a good one it will be believed regardless of whether it is true.  Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic started introducing satanic and demonic rhetoric into their preaching and the situation soon got out of hand.  By the early 90s in Britain ‘satanic panic’ had gripped other institutions beyond the church and there were always ‘experts’ who could brought be brought over from the States to teach the signs of the devil’s influence within the domain of social work and education.

The UK government was alarmed and commissioned a study by a retired Professor of Anthropology . Jean La Fontaine.  Her report, appearing in 1995, concluded that there was no evidence for satanic abuse or any other demonic infestation.  The panic subsided very quickly and one could claim that the devil had been found in the paranoia created by the rhetoric and the need for many evangelical preachers to preach against something, using military imagery.   The damage caused by this ‘demonic abuse’ was massive and still today there are people who were genuinely convinced that they had been possessed by demons and then had experienced the abusive practice of exorcism.  The whole process was encouraged by certain Christian centres who ‘taught’ ordinary Christians to be involved in spiritual warfare as it was called.  Every form of distress, especially psychological, was interpreted as an incursion of the devil.  It is hard to see how you can do anything worse than tell a disturbed person that they have a devil inside them.

No doubt I shall return to this theme again in the future as I feel quite deeply on the folly and cruelty of telling a mentally vulnerable person that they are possessed.  It would be interesting to know if anyone who reads this blog has experience of this particular expression of spiritual abuse.

These are some words that I have recently found on the internet but they express very well how my position within theology differs from that of conservative Christians.  I talked in the last blog post about ‘propositionalism’, the idea that valid truth has to be expressed in words, concepts or propositions.  Although I rejected the idea, my argument did not draw out a point which Gregory of Nyssa, the 4^th century author of my quote, understood well.  His insight reminds us of the power of wonder, the contemplation of that which cannot be reduced to words.  The word contemplation also has a currency within Christian spirituality and prayer.  It indicates that prayer is not about asking but involves watching, waiting and listening.  To contemplate allows us to reach into the essence of something, whether it be beauty, the sublime or God himself.

I do not think that it would be exaggerating to suggest that some Christians have made the Bible into an idol.  It is held up on a pedestal and claimed to be a source of truth and guidance but the way it is actually used seems to hold it at arm’s length.  Quite often the words of scripture are used not to edify or spiritually feed but as weapons with which to beat an opponent.  To wonder at something can never objectify it in this way.  Just as objectifying another person makes it impossible for us to relate to them properly, so objectifying the words of scripture makes them into ‘idols’.

Approaching the words of Scripture with a sense of wonder is in no way to downgrade or devalue them.  But it does require us to let go of the attitude that wants to prove something or reinforce a position when we read it.  Wonder is open to the unexpected or surprising that can come from a perusal of Scripture.  Speaking personally as someone who has fairly regularly to find something new to say about a familiar passage of the Bible when preparing sermons, I find myself amazed that Scripture does go on finding new things to say to me.  Any attempt to articulate an idea in a sermon nearly always results in my having a new insight based on the passage in front of me.  Scripture is in this sense ‘inspired’, because it goes on being capable of producing new insights in me.  Because the Bible is a source of such insight, I can respect it as in some way as the ‘Word of God’.  But from all that has been said, it can be seen that that Word can particularly be grasped through this faculty of wonder.  The Psalmist captured something of this when he said: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. Ps 119: 105

Chris and I recently shared some thoughts on the word ‘doubt’.  For me the word is not a threatening one because I find myself with many others to be an heir to the liberal tradition of the 18^th  century Enlightenment where doubt was seen as a key to knowledge.  If you did not doubt, then new truth was impossible.  The motto of this great movement of the Enlightenment was ‘dare to doubt’.  In this way doubt comes to be a tool for discovery and  for learning new things which go beyond the old certainties.  Because doubt challenges the old certainties and traditions that were around in the 18^th century as well as today,  it is highly subversive to the vested interests and those who guard them.  These interests include religion, politics, philosophy and even science.

In contrast with this somewhat radical view held by the followers of the Enlightenment, the vast majority of people even today have little patience with this 250 year old intellectual revolution.  This fundamental idea that doubt is part of a creative process of questioning and discovery is unknown to most people.  People prefer to have certainties and they find these in facts that their minds can grasp.  Some facts are grasped in the course of life’s experience and others are transmitted as part of  the educational process  that most people are exposed to.  It is today a cause of regret that at school level facts are the mainstay of the educational process.  Religious education is not immune from this process and  teachers of religion, past and present, have focussed on imparting facts and making rote learning the highest form of understanding.  Knowledge of the Bible in the sense of being able to recite it and quote it has come to be seen as the mark of an educated Christian.  This way of teaching the factual content of the faith and requiring people to accept it has traditionally been understood to be the task of the Church.  The facts of the Bible and of  traditional Christian teaching have been handed on and in this understanding, doubt is seen as an enemy of the process.  Facts and the certainties they bring are the traditional currency of the Church.

The problem of this kind of teaching facts is that it is a trap.  It is a trap for people both within and outside Christianity.  Some people on the outside of faith have been taught that certain facts make it impossible for Christianity to be true.  T he ‘facts’ of science contradict the statements of the Bible eg the Creation story.  Others within the orbit of traditional Christian teaching and who are taught the ‘facts’ of Christianity are trapped in a equally mind-numbing place.  They are taught the entire body of Scripture and the Creeds are all ‘facts’ because that is the only one possible way to understand them.  Conservative scholars spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to reconcile conflicting facts in Scripture

Both sides of this argument have been thoroughly betrayed through this kind of teaching.  Behind this emphasis on fact is a philosophy known as ‘propositionalism’.  Put simply it says that truth is only contained in statements of provable fact.  This philosophy is a variation of materialism, the idea that matter is the only reality we can know.

Before I go on to criticise these philosophies, whether used to attack Christianity or trying to stay within it, I must come back first to the way that people have been let down by this false teaching.  Chris has communicated in his writing his own experience of betrayal and ‘agonies of despair’ when he discovered that faith and salvation presented as a series of facts and the Bible as a text of true fact were not as they seemed.  He recognised that his own position as a barely literate young man in the 1960s had been taken advantage of by Christian leaders with a gift of words.  He had been sucked into a system which fed on people’s longing for certainty.  The evangelical machine reassured him of various things.  He knew truth, his longing for certainty could be satisfied and he was ‘safe’ in this world and in the one to come.  The moment that the bubble of this certainty was pricked, Chris had nothing with which to replace it.  He had been living in a binary universe where truth and falsehood, black and white were presented in stark contrasts.

This blog is wanting to talk about a place where we can find a place to stand which does not insist that we have to be certain about everything all of the time.  The blog also maintains that Christianity is always about a becoming and not an arriving at a destination.  The journeying image seems so much more biblical than any other and I (SP) am much happier with the journey analogy complete with the attendant doubts and grey areas of as-yet undiscovered reality.

To return to the ideas of materialism which seem to lie behind the false teaching which Chris has imbibed and have been the source of so much pain and suffering to him and many that he knows.  Materialism is inadequate on two fronts at the very least.  First it cannot make any sense of ideas of value, beauty and love.  It is a description of a universe without what we would call ‘soul’.  Facts of course exist, but as we humans experience them, they come packaged with value, meaning and sometimes beauty.  To isolate them from these attachments is to do violence to their real significance.   In this way materialism and ‘facts’ are a shallow and incomplete description of the world as we know and experience it.

Materialism is also undermined by what we are discovering of the sub-atomic universe.  Matter simply does behave in a common-sense fashion when we enter the quantum dimension.  I am not proposing to do more than hint at the way the discoveries of quantum physics undermine many of the old certainties that were grasped by classical physics.  The implication of these findings are relevant to our pursuit of truth whether as a Christian or not.  At the very least the post-modern quantum world is one where words should only be used  and statements made with a degree of hesitancy and humility.

So the 21^st century world has returned to the 18^th century in a significant way.  It is a world where people ‘dare to doubt’.  They do not do this in a negative spirit but in a way that allows reality to impinge on us gradually and in a many faceted way.  If Christianity is ‘true’, it is not true as a list of provable facts about life.  It is true because it brings us into touch with a reality that transforms us in some way.  The faith is something which combines a knowledge of story, experience and inner stillness that resonates with the Christ event as found in Scripture.  More of this in a future blog.

This blog is concerned with many examples of abuse that happen and have happened in churches up and down the land (not to mention across the world).  I am concerned not only by the fact that it happens but also to offer some reflections as to why it happens.

The word abuse is one that is often associated with sex and indeed sexual exploitation with members of the congregation or pastoral clients is unhappily fairly common in the church.  I leave the abuse of children to one side because although it does happen, its occurrence is dwarfed by the incidence of so called ‘affairs’ in the church.  Estimating from guesswork and some American research I would maintain that while one clergyman or minister in forty may have sexually abused a child, up to one in eight may have behaved inappropriately with an adult member under their pastoral care.  A perusal on the Web will produce some confirmation of whether my figures are more or less accurate.

While abuse of power in a sexual way happens in the church (and I will return to this topic in another blog) , more common is the simple use of power games to bolster up a flagging ego within a Christian leader.  In summary power is abused for one of three reasons.  These are sex, money or the desire to make the abuser feel important.  When we talk about power abuse in church, we are normally talking about the third one of these.  It is a phenomenon which is similar to bullying by children.  Why do children bully?  The short answer is that they themselves have little esteem and if they can put someone else down using physical threats or dominating behaviour they get a sense of being important.  That sense of being important temporarily relieves their inner sense of insignificance and not mattering to others.  Clergy play the power game in rather more subtle ways than children in the playground but it would seem that the fundamental reasons are the same.  For whatever reason, clergy sometimes suffer a crisis of confidence and experience threats to their well-being.  The reason for this may be located in the individual’s remote past or it may be a consequence  of demoralising conditions of their work in the present.

The abuse of power by the clergy can take many forms and readers of this blog will have their own stories to tell.  The abuse of power is often accompanied by a constant reminding by the clergyperson of their ‘superior’ status or education.  The clergy who have extra titles may insist of having these used on every occasion.  Often clergy will only want to associate with the socially significant among their congregation and ignore others of less importance.  This need constantly to be in a superior place to the people ‘below’ them can be seen on examination to be an expression of inadequacy verging on paranoia.  If it were not hurtful to those affected by it, it could be almost seem as comic.  But being subtly put down by a ‘superior’ person is never funny and congregations where this happens are unlikely to flourish.  But just as the abuser may be a victim in some way of the past or present and finds it difficult to change, so the abused find it difficult to walk away because they do not know how to reclaim their power.

Recovering from Evangelical rhetoric

Having had over 40 years of exposure to the evangelical rhetoric and sermons, Chris rings me (the editor) up from time to time to try and ask if I can make sense of the issues that still bother him to this day.

My part of the conversation is to listen and try and understand the issues and ideas that he has encountered.   I then try and reflect these back to him in a restated way so that he can re-assimilate them into his thinking or reject them, whichever is more appropriate.

Recently Chris mentioned the phrase that he had heard a lot of when he was younger  ‘work out your salvation with fear and trembling;’  This passage from Philippians had encouraged him to take a very inward almost selfish attitude to faith.  The passage seemed to imply that his personal salvation was the idea of key importance and took precedence over any ideas of social responsibility.

Other passages quoted and drummed into his consciousness were those which talked about personal holiness.  ‘Be ye holy as I am holy’ and ‘keep yourself unspotted from the world’, are two passages that come to mind and reinforce the idea of personal purity above other responsibilities.

Chris grasped very quickly that these passages and others were being used in a way that would help to isolate the Christian group from others.  In other words the Bible was being used to create what most of us would call a cultic group.  This effect was particularly apparent when, as in his experience, the idea of purity was linked to personal salvation.  In other words unless you kept yourself apart from the contaminating effects of non-Christians your eternal destiny is in peril.

Responding to Chris I pointed out that purity doctrines were very much a feature of Old Testament morality.  Separation from paganism was a major area of teaching implicit in the sacrificial system as revealed in the early Law books.  One of the horrific episodes of the Old Testament, and there are many, is the event in the Book of Ezra when the Israelite men are commanded to cast out their non-Jewish wives and children.  It is hard for us to identity with the cruelty that such separation involved.  Purity ideas, even when they lingered on into the Christian period do not seem to have preoccupied Jesus, although the encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman shows even Jesus sometimes struggled to make sense of the strong Jewish traditions about personal purity.

Whatever we think about the Syro-Phoenician woman story, the story of the Good Samaritan shows that by the time this story was told ideas about ritual contamination were firmly on the back burner.  The way we treat people and our responsibility to help others can be clearly seen from this story to outweigh any ritual obligations placed on us.  I could of course continue to point out the way in which that the story of the Samaritan is deeply subversive on the ritual obligations of the Jewish faith but I am sure most of my readers have heard enough sermons on the topic.

To summarise, Chris is correct to notice that certain passages from Scripture are being manipulated to create the impression that Christianity is all about getting into small groups and shutting out the world and all its problems.

What I have written does not make the passages that were made important to Chris in his early days go away.  They still exist but they need to be balanced against other passages which speak of a wider fuller way of dealing with the world.  These passages might be summarized by the texts in the Sermon on the Mount which speak of the importance of being salt and light.  Such salt and light was destined for the ‘earth’ and to shine ‘before men’.  It is hard to suggest that this teaching was a request to be active only in the context of a special closed group.