Us & Them On So Many Levels

June really hasn't been a good month.

This is a picture of Stanford rapist Brock Turner: white, wealthy, privileged. When he found an unconscious women rather than helping her he began to rape her.

Some people came along and caught him so technically I suppose he is an 'attempted rapist', but he got far enough that the woman reportedly had dirt and grass inside her when they treated her in hospital.

He was sentenced to just six months in prison, reportedly reduced to four, by a judge who shared his background, and he and his family are appealing that as too harsh. His victim, once she had been treated, was articulate enough to ensure the case came to wider notice: a shocking example of 'them & us' in US society.

Melissa Etheridge's song, at the top of this post, was written in response to the mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando this month.

A deeply homophobic man shot dead 49 people and wounded 53 others. Behind him lay a deeply homophobic family, living in a deeply homophobic culture, surrounded by deeply homophobic churches (and presumably mosques).

Homosexuality has been a divisive issue across the world in recent years. My question on such things is "where are the haters?" Those who spread hatred of others are not God's people; and those who would divide Christ's body are nothing to do with Jesus.

Then we come to the UK's EU referendum campaign. The picture shown was probably the low point of a generally negative campaign. 

Both the Leave and Remain official campaigns focused on fear-mongering and negative propaganda. Both the official and unofficial Leave groups hammered away relentlessly at immigration and at people's fear and resentment of 'the other'.

Now the result is out and it seems the Leave campaigns worked - at least among older voters. The picture below, in many variations, is widely shared on social media by younger people angry at what they see as a betrayal of their future by those who won't have to live with the consequences. I suppose 'us & them' across generations is nothing new, but the anger is real.

I was going to put up picture of those utterly stupid politicians whose response to a crisis is to play politics and ignore the needs of the country. In many ways it was the Conservative party's internal politics, especially the ambition of Boris Johnson, which created the crisis, now Labour's MPs have decided they'd rather play leadership games than help rebuild the unity this country desperately needs to face a challenging future. The us & them of a broken political system.

In my view the most apposite comment was used as a headline by the Guardian newspaper: "If you've got money, you vote in ... if you haven't got money, you vote out." Subheading: "Brexit is about more than the EU: it’s about class, inequality, and voters feeling excluded from politics. So how do we even begin to put Britain the right way up?"

So much of the anger, so many of the divisions, arise from the deep and increasing inequalities within our society. A lot of the Remain campaign was based around fear of losing what we have got; to many that means nothing. A lot of the resentment of immigrants and minorities flows from insecurity, uncertainty, and a feeling someone must be to blame.

I'd like to come up with a nice 'Christian' solution to all this: "love one another," perhaps, "then everything will be wonderful." Meaningless! If we loved one another we wouldn't have the problems anyway. "Jesus Christ died to bring reconciliation," is at least apposite, but lacking in how and when.

At the moment my feelings are more in line with Habakkuk: how long, O Lord, is this unholy mess going to continue? When will there be justice and peace and cleansing?

Darkness and Light in Paris and Beirut

The appalling attacks on Paris and Beirut just a few days ago have spawned a lot of comment over the internet, some of it constructive, a lot less so.

Personally I  am struck by the essential similarity between a massacre delivered on the ground and one delivered from the sky.

Maybe a fundamental question raised by such events is the old one about what such actions tell us about God, and about mankind.

It's a fundamental starting point to Christianity that people were created in God's image but that this image has become distorted and spoiled. In other words people are a strange mixture of good and evil, right and wrong, light and darkness.

So the basic question in Christianity is not why God allows things like these brutal massacres to happen, but what is he doing about them?

One answer lies in the bravery and selflessness shown by many in response to the horror around them - I am sure that in both Paris and Beirut there were far more people of courage and compassion than there were killers with their hatred and destruction.

But underlying that is a long term transformation of humanity: a preparation for a final cleansing which will bring healing and new life to a struggling world. The key enabling moment in that transformation was the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But that was nearly two thousand years ago! I trust that there is good reason for the long wait for Jesus' return and the transformation of heaven, earth and humanity that he will bring. Nevertheless, with the prophets of old, at times like this I have to ask:

"How long, O Lord?" 

PS: Clicking on the above image - a pyramid in Giza lit up with the flags of Russia, Lebanon and France - takes you to an extremely depressing list of terrorist attacks so far in 2015. One thing I do notice is that the vast majority are carried out by adherents of one particular extreme sect of Islam against members of more mainstream groupings within Islam - especially against Shia. Blaming Muslims in general for these attacks is about as accurate as blaming Christians for the actions of Westborough Baptist Church; although Wahhabist Salafists do get a lot more funding, thanks to Saudi oil money.

The Evil That Men Do

I came across a quote from Canon Andrew White - the 'vicar of Baghdad' - recently. He had been asked why IS hates Christians and other minorities so much, and he replied:

They hate because they hate. They hate because they are evil. It is not an issue of 'these are Muslims and they're radicals and that's what they're like'. They're like this because they're evil ... They don't know God at all.

Every now and again it seems people get an excuse and an opportunity to cast off the restraints of 'civilized behaviour' and some of them do things which can only be described as incredibly evil. We saw it in Ruanda, we saw it in Bosnia, now we see it in Iraq: people who had lived together comfortably enough as neighbours suddenly descend into anarchy and chaos. It is tied to dehumanising others - the Ruandan Hutus famously described the Tutsis as 'cockroaches' before going on the rampage - rather than religion (Orthodox Christians in Bosnia, Sunni Muslims in Iraq, and no real religious element in Ruanda) or race/geographic region (Africa, Europe and Middle East in these three examples).

That is 'chaotic' evil - where people seemingly just lose the plot and wildly act out the darkness within them. There is also a cold systematic evil, such as the Israelis deliberately killing civilians in neighbouring countries every few years. They dehumanise with terms like 'terrorist', yet their aim is to cause terror and to destroy - in the latest attacks on Gaza, hospitals and those who managed hospitals were targetted, to teach them a lesson.

I've also been reading (again) Steig Larsson's wonderful book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The four parts to the book are each introduced by a statistic about violence to women in Sweden:

"18% of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man."

"48% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man." 

"13% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside of a sexual relationship." 

"92% of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police."

Currently in Britain various child sexual abuse scandals roll on. Last night Channel 4 news quoted a child support worker as saying:

"Rotherham is not the exception, it is more likely to be the norm."

Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. According to NSPCC research the vast majority of child abuse happens in the home: their figures suggest that one in twelve children (around 8%) is sexually abused during their childhood, the vast majority by either family members or family friends.

It's about power and accountability. Where people have power but do not have to answer for it then some abuse it. Where they can shield their activity in darkness, anonymity and secrecy then some give way to the evil within. And some don't.

Maybe that is a working definition of that horribly degraded term 'sin': when we have a choice between what is evil and what is good, which do we choose?

Most religions, I think, follow most people in condemning those who choose such evil, who sin in this way. A distinctive about Christianity is that it also offers a way back.

When you have made the wrong choices, when you have sold your soul to evil, Jesus offers hope - light in the terrible darkness. Churches still struggle with what on earth that means in practice, and lots of churchgoers are really not keen on this idea at all, but following Jesus means little without it.

For someone who has sold their soul, Jesus has paid the price to redeem it. The Bible calls this 'Grace'. We all need grace ... maybe some more than others.

True Religion

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

James 1:27

Continuing from my last post, about Jefferson (aka Jeffrey) Bethke's Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus poem/video: the above Bible verse makes it clear that God, and by implication Jesus, is not against all religious behaviour. This is no criticism of Bethke - his is a poem not a carefully balanced argument - but it should be a starting point in considering how to respond to that poem.

The other useful reference point would be clarity about what we mean by 'religion' anyway - something which all the responses I have seen manage to forget.

A key point to consider is why that poem resonates so widely. Those who have publicly responded to Bethke seem to miss this reality: 'religion' has become a very dirty word, not just among young churchgoers, but within much of non-churchgoing society. I see it in New Scientist, a scientific magazine (really!) which has become outspokenly anti-religion over the past decade or so, and I see it as a general trend within the liberal end of the media, in letters pages, and in comments across the internet.

In many ways I can see their point:-

• The US religious right has spent the past twenty years becoming increasingly vocal and influential with their rhetoric: anti-education, anti-science, anti-healthcare, anti-environment, anti-gay and now anti-women.
• The attack on the Twin Towers by religious/nationalistic extremists, followed by other atrocities around the world.
• The Middle East: the wars in Iraq - presented as religious 'crusades' - and Israel's unopposed flouting of international laws and standards.
• Roman Catholic child abuse scandals. Some blame religion for the child abuse (unfairly: child abuse happens at least as frequently in a non-religious context); others for the cover-ups and for allowing abusers to re-offend elsewhere.
• The Anglican/Episcopalian church tearing itself apart over equality of treatment for women and homosexuals.
• Intercommunal violence between groups with different religious affiliations: Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Nigeria, and so on.
• General partisan bickering within 'Christianity': protestant against catholic, evangelical against liberal, Calvinist against Arminian, little-enders against big-enders, whatever.

Responses along the lines of 'our religion isn't like that' honestly don't help.

"What if I told you, Jesus came to abolish religion?" -  I'd reply that there is no evidence to support that in the Bible. Equally, there is no evidence that Jesus came to start yet another religion: the Bible tells us he came to save the world, surely much more important.

It's not really that "Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums"; comparing Jesus and religion is like comparing apples and aadvarks: what Jesus did and what religion does are qualitatively different.

"One is the work of God one is a man made invention ... because religion says do, Jesus says done." These two phrases make an important point ... one which can as easily be positive as negative.

The Bible tells us that Jesus came to save the world, to rescue humanity, to bring an end to sin (injustice, abuse, intolerance, hatred, that sort of thing). We are given the opportunity to accept what Jesus has done and to become a part of God's Kingdom, citizens in the new world that God is preparing. We can become Jesus' followers, disciples, children of God, however you like to put it. But that is a beginning not an ending.

Accepting what Jesus has done for us through his death and resurrection is the beginning of a journey, not the end. If we have become followers of Jesus then we need to live as such. Jesus has saved us, now we need to live in that salvation. God has done, so we must do. As the apostle Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith ... created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

If religion is the doing, then religion is intended to be the way that Jesus' followers respond to God's grace. Religion is humanity's answer to God's mercy.

But humanity is fallen, we may be saved but we remain part of a world that has gone horribly astray. Some followers of Jesus take their eyes off him and miss the point; many others want to follow God but have never met him. We try to live out God's love together and it often goes wrong.

Religion is not binary true/false, bad/good. Religion is a spectrum, from more true to God's way to less true. It covers those who don't know Him and are trying to do their best in their own strength, through those who are desperate to be Jesus' disciples but don't really know how, and those who just want an excuse, a fig-leaf for their own hatreds and intolerance.

Religions support the poor and they encourage repression of the poor; religions promote love and they preach hatred; religions stand up for education for all, and they oppose teaching of truth. Religions can be a blessing or they can be a curse ... just like any other human activity.

Religion is not the real problem, fallen humanity is the problem. And for that Jesus is the solution.