What kind of God do we believe in? My previous blog argued that contrary to the claims of conservatives God is a revisionist. A God who is invested in a constant process of revising life, matter, the universe, seems to be one of the truths in reality that human beings have discovered about God. But my question is an open one – what kind of God? I believe ‘God’ is ‘there’ and ‘here’, open to discovery. I believe the discovery of truth is a universal evolutionary task for Homo sapiens, our species, conscious of living with existential questions and driven to seek answers to questions reality raises.
We are all to a greater or lesser degree programmed, indoctrinated, born into a time, culture, family and context in which certain contemporary religious forms and characteristics are normalised. I am learning how my version of normative faith – Western White European Protestant Christianity - is infected with versions of God, ideas about God, theological norms, some of which are dangerous, unhealthy and prejudiced, leading to abusive teachings and behaviour patterns, un-Christian and un-Christlike, some of which are profoundly inspirational and healthy. It was the unhealthy elements of Christianity that were on display, readily visible recently on the floor of General Synod and in the public gallery, in the House of Bishops as revealed in the reports of their meetings, in the Wilkinson report into the Church of England’s Independent Safeguarding Board and in the racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia that are integral elements of the Church of England today.
All these elements are present in each of us, affecting us emotionally and intellectually, often in a polarised way because we take sides, for or against certain beliefs and teachings. We are affected – I am affected – because I carry a reluctance to examine and re-examine my inherited ideas and assumptions. Remember that in the previous blog I wrote about how angry the Archbishop of Canterbury was when I asked him: “What kind of God do we, do you, does the Church of England believe in? Do you want to grant equal status to versions of Christianity, theology, teaching and practice that enshrine prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism?” The question Archbishop Justin seems to have heard was “do you believe in God?” I don’t doubt that Archbishop Justin does believe in God. The question for him and for all of us is, What kind of God?
I am continuing to read Adrian Thatcher’s new book, Vile Bodies, and it is having a deeply unsettling impact on me. Adrian’s book raises so many examples of the way in which traditional, orthodox, Biblical theologies underpin the Christian norms and teachings that enshrine prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism.
Bodies: Colonised, Lynched and Traumatised by White Religion
This morning I reached chapter 16, ‘Oriental’ Bodies: Colonised, Lynched and Traumatised.’ The bodies of this chapter belong to the millions of people whose lives were colonised by European powers and to all their successors who struggle to come to terms with racial violence and the threat of violence in the present; and to all people who demean themselves by racist attitudes.
Thatcher writes about the American sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) who condemned ‘white religion’ as an ‘utter failure’. The ‘plain facts’, he wrote, are ‘The church aided and abetted the Negro slave trade; the church was the bulwark of American slavery; and the church today is the strongest seat of racial and colour prejudice’. Thatcher says ‘a perverse theological scheme offering self-delusion was required to pretend that racism is consistent with God’s will, like sexism and homophobia. In order not to confront these evils, a white male God and a soothing doctrinal orthodoxy supplied the means.’
Thatcher also draws on the work of Robert Jones in White Too Long (2020). Jones describes how the consciences of white Christians inoculated them against any suggestion of self-criticism
by projecting an idealised form of white Christianity as somehow independent of the failings of actual white Christians or institutions. The mythology – really, the lie – that white Christians tell ourselves, on the few occasions we face our history, is that Christianity has been a force for unambiguous good in the world. No matter what evil Christians commit or what violence Christian institutions justify, an idealised conception of Christianity remains unscathed. This conviction is so deep that evidence to the contrary is simply dismissed.
Robert Jones writes from an American perspective but Thatcher says similar shuffles abound in UK Christianity – the spiritual abuse shuffle, the racist shuffle, the homophobic shuffle, the gynophobic shuffle and so on. The problem of how to begin to account for the cruel behaviour of these white followers of Jesus in previous centuries is almost insurmountable, says Thatcher. His book documents the propensity of Christian doctrine to manufacture patriarchy, sexism, anti-Semitism and racism, and to place these at the service of European powers. The arrival of Protestantism with its determination to elevate the literal meaning of the text of scripture above other possibilities, along with its determination to elevate and equate the written words of the Bible with the living Word made flesh, undoubtedly encouraged the owning of slaves and their cruel treatment. The priority given to ‘the personal Jesus paradigm’ was another factor - the spiritual relationship of converted individuals, a religious tradition with this relentless emphasis on salvation (core to the theology of the Living in Love and Faith book), and one so hyperattuned to personal sin.
The Protestant God who sacrificed ‘His’ ‘Son’ is both unspeakably violent and unspeakably unjust, so it was perhaps inevitable that believers swayed by the image of this violent God themselves became unspeakably violent and unspeakably unjust in following ‘Him’.
Exploring our beliefs
In September, five members of Changing Attitude England met in a London garden one afternoon to explore our beliefs about God. I had circulated a position paper beforehand setting out my thoughts as a framework for our conversation. It began with an introduction titled “The quest”.
My starting point has been the contrast between my direction of travel from Church of England life in the Diocese of Southwark in the early 1960s through the adventure of Christian life into the 70s, 80s and 90s as an architect, then a priest, then a campaigner and into the twenty first century and Christianity that is no longer healthy, inspiring or manifesting the vision and consciousness needed to respond to contemporary knowledge, experience and challenges.
A contemporary world view for me is about learning to see life on planet Earth and in the Universe as in essence evolutionary, holistic and seamless and in which mystical, spiritual, visionary energies are essential if the human race is to navigate the challenges we face – and they are multiple: climate crisis, Covid, migration, refugees, asylum-seekers, political, economic, health, addictions, spiritual, conflicts, abuse, prejudice. All these are to me manifestations of a decadent era in human culture and society.
I concluded the paper with this:
What works for me is a Christian life and practice woven around consciousness of the inseparability of the climate, economic and human crises and injustice combined with a spiritual practice rooted in the idea of life in all its fullness and living into a loving, healthy, creative self. I have for a long time lived ‘as if’ the highest, Christ-like ideals are true, living openly, trusting, woven around experience, values, relationships, friendships and networks.
More recently I’ve begun to try and understand the relationship, the primal link, between Jesus, the records of his ministry, his life, his wisdom teaching and his understanding of the relationship between our human experience and the divine, spiritual dimension of our lives. The accretion of dogma, doctrine and ritual that evolved over the two millennia since his death may be outdated and are certainly having a very unhealthy effect on the Church today but Jesus’ essence, his life, teaching and practice, have to be universally valid and of primary value. Life is a seamless continuum and our experience of the sacred spiritual dimension, our God-awareness, is integral to the seamless continuum of the universe.
The five of us who met in the garden, plus one, wish to extend the conversation we began by organising an open event on 2nd March 2024 at St Andrew’s Short Street, Waterloo from 10.00 to 16.00 when we hope many of you will bring your own experience to the gathering, exploring our understandings of God in our human awareness and vision, an understanding that is and always must be undergoing revision.
More details, such as how to book, will become available in the new year. All of us are somewhat busy with Advent and Christmas activities at the moment. If you would like to register your interest, please email me at ccmcoward@aol.com. Offers of practical help in organising the event would be welcome from those with such skills and experience!