BOOK REVIEW: POLITICS

Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative by Carl Trueman, and City of Man: Religion & Politics in a New Era by Gerson & Wehner

We are in the middle of a publishing deluge of books about how Christians should approach matters cultural and political. This phenomenon is itself probably worthy of a book exploring why it should be the case, but the two books reviewed here (both published in 2010) give an answer anyway: The Religious Right has failed.

These are two thin, quick to read books (I read Republocrat on Christmas Eve, and City of Man yesterday – Happy Christmas!), which approach from different angles the Evangelical approach to American politics over the past few decades. They are very different in tone and style. Carl Trueman is an historian and academic (and a British exile in the USA), and a polemical and humorous writer. I doubt that anything he writes here would much upset a British reader, but in the States it seems to go down as very hot stuff. Gerson & Wehner are political insiders, both having served in senior positions in the Bush Whitehouse.

Trueman throws punches around, taking as easy targets the ‘shock-jocks’ of American political punditry and Fox News. He also expresses incomprehension at the unthinking right-wingness of a section of American evangelicalism:

I was rapidly disabused of my self-image as a moderate. On one of my very first Sundays in the USA, I was engaged in a conversation with a friend over coffee after church, and mentioned in passing what great work I thought the Clintons had done in Ulster. I might as well have said that Jack the Ripper had really helped to make the streets of London safe for women and children. I was given the full forty-minute “truth about Billary” lecture, and left the building in no doubt that the Clintons were, after Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, probably the most dangerous and wicked leaders in the history of world politics.

Trueman is also critical of the Left, and claims to have been stranded in a political no mans land, where he does not feel comfortable with any political grouping. But even if things had not got to this dire pitch, there should always be a sense in which Christians are uncomfortable in the political process,

I would suggest that all Christians should vote, as part of their civic duty, but they should also feel pain when they mark the relevant box, knowing the trade offs they are having to make as they do so, and how their action belies the complexity of reality.

As an historian, Trueman is especially strong in the first chapter of Republocrat in which he describes the strange fusing of Marxism with Freudianism in modern left wing politics. This is probably also the most helpful chapter to British readers, as it applies more widely than to just the scene in the USA. The rest of the book is great fun though, and a helpful insight into things politico-religious Stateside.

Gerson & Wehner’s very different approach is nonetheless just as critical of the Religious Right, albeit in less polemical terms – and this might reassure those British readers who have a culturally-programmed assumption that anyone who has had anything to do with George W Bush is a loony tunes warmonger. With Trueman they agree: The vitriolic, bullying and partisan approach of the Religious Right was wrong. Yet they also claim that this hasn’t been a complete failure – there has been some success,

By providing a structured opposition to cultural liberalism, religious conservatives have slowed the movement toward a permissive society and prevented the complete victory of liberal secularism.

There are doubtless some statements in City of God that will make the typical European Social Democrat steam under their right-on cultural collars, but Gerson & Wehner’s overall analysis of how Christians should politcally engage is measured and helpful. Unsurprisingly, they defend the significance of what politics can achieve, taking issue with the arguments of commentator du jour James Davison Hunter. While largely sympathetic to his thesis, Gerson & Wehner claim that Hunter,

imputes too little influence to the state and the political process. They are more important than he thinks… Hunter is right that neither politics nor the state can “provide fully satisfying solutions to the problems of values in our society.” Nothing can provide fully satisfying solutions to the problem of values in our society. The question is the degree to which perennial human problems can be ameliorated and habits improved.

There is little that is ground-breaking in City of Man, but it is worth a read. In practical terms (again, thinking of a British readership) the concluding chapter on Persuasion and the Public Square is particularly useful. Here Gerson & Wehner describe how Christians can be involved in politics in a way which is winsome, and maintains personal integrity – something that is so often lacking in political discourse.

The other big politics book of 2010 is Wayne Grudem’s Politics According to the Bible. While this is sitting on my desk I have yet to get to grips with it; although at over 600 pages it is not such an easy fireside read as the volumes reviewed here. However, as a British reader, perhaps one thing that particularly stands out from these books is that there is no British equivalent. Our political and church world is very different from that of America, so really we could do with something written that reflects our context.

Maybe in 2011…

NO SANTA, NO CHRISTMAS?

From the excellent Gateway carol service - a funny sketch about Christmas without Santa...

BOOK REVIEW: TWILIGHT

Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer

OK – I know this is the review you have been waiting for.

And you are probably expecting me to rip into it like a vampire into a succulent neck. But – shock, horror – I actually really enjoyed Twilight, and found it quite gripping. So there – I really am in touch with my inner adolescent girl…!

My reason for reading this was purely research, as I do have an adolescent girl living under my roof who has been devouring the Meyer vampire quadrilogy, and I thought I should check out what she is in to – help to keep the parent/offspring conversation flowing and all that.

Meyer has somehow hit that authorial hotspot which seems to connect with a vast audience of teenagers (and their mothers) in a similarly phenomenal way that JK Rowling has for slightly younger children (and their parents). She does it brilliantly, and it is easy to see why the story of Bella (a human) and Edward (her vampire boyfriend) resonates so strongly with teenage girls. The emancipated sisterhood might not like it, but Edward hits all the buttons that make a feminine heart flutter; and it is this aspect of the book that is most interesting for me as a parent and as a pastor.

First off, Bella tells us right at the beginning of the story that she doesn’t fit in, thus forming immediate sympathy with the vast majority of teenage girls who also feel this way. From a broken home, starting out in a new school, with all the potential for embarrassment that involves – Bella is a character girls can relate to.

Then there is Edward’s overpowering appeal.

Edward is physically gorgeous – he is the ultimate bedroom poster fodder. He is unobtainable, and thus all the more desirable. He is dangerous – and there is something in the female heart that tends to sing along with the song, “It’s the bad boys who always catch my eye…” Why? Because women want a man who is manly in the sense that he represents risk, and excitement, and strength. But Edward is also a hero, rescuing Bella from life threatening events, and every girl wants a hero. And Edward is sexually overwhelming (the first half of the book is basically an increasingly ramped up prelude to their first kiss) yet at the same time terribly restrained – which must be something of a turn on.

Edward is also extremely emotionally switched on. (And the bits of the book where I turned off were the long emotional dialogues between Bella and Edward about how they feel about each other. Yada yada.)

So here we have the perfect fantasy object: incredible good looks and emotional intelligence; impeccable manners and self-control; brute strength and ever present danger. That’s quite a hook for a teenage girl.

As well as this hook, Meyer is also a pretty good story teller – this is much better writing than, say, something by Dan Brown. A sure fire winner as an international bestseller then.

But what of my response to Twilight as a parent and pastor?

Well, in teaching men what it means to be men, there is some stuff they could learn here. As my thirteen year old put it, “Edward is loyal, and does things the old fashioned way.” Those are precisely the kind of qualities I will be looking for in the young men who will inevitably start appearing at my door over the next few years. The other obvious point is that our daughters need to be taught about what to look for in a man, and they need to be taught how to guard their hearts so that they make good relationship decisions. Finding a man who will be faithful to them for life, and who is prepared to lay down his life for them is a standard from which we should not budge.

And that also means that in a way Twilight is a gospel story, because the ultimate man – the one who is truly dangerous yet utterly good, completely self-giving yet totally demanding, and in the end even death defying – is Jesus. All of us (and not just at Christmas) need to savour the romance of that story.

As for the other three books in the series? Well, that’s my holiday reading sorted!

HELPING THE HOMELESS

At this time of year many of us are motivated to do something for those who are less fortunate than ourselves. At Gateway we take an offering for the poor every Christmas, which this year is going to Routes to Roots, a charity who work with the homeless in Poole.

Another fantastic charity doing this kind of work is Friends First in Brighton. As their website explains, Friends First started with the efforts of a group of volunteers from Church of Christ the King in Brighton who began befriending homeless people in the Brighton & Hove area in 1990 and provided a weekly 'drop-in' for those on the margins of the local community.

The drop in continues to offer a hot meal and friendship in a relaxed café atmosphere and sees around 50 people each week. One of the consequences of getting to know this group of people was the realization that, however motivated, unless they had secure accommodation and daily support it was unlikely they would be able to escape from the life controlling issues and cycles of dependency that dominated their lives.

In 2002 Friends First Supported House was set up by Church of Christ the King in cooperation with the Council’s Supporting People Team to provide accommodation for eight men and four women who had been assessed as in need of a period of intensive support so that they can work towards independent living. It Includes a separate women’s area to provide a safe environment for women who may have experienced abuse or domestic violence.

Friends First House offers a place of stability, safety and support, where issues from the past can be thought about and addressed and where realistic and achievable plans for the future can be made with confidence. It houses men and women who have expressed a desire to live independently but who need a period of support in order to achieve this.

We all know that charities like Routes to Roots and Friends First need support all year round and not just at Christmas and there are all kinds of things we can do to help with this. Something I am doing next year is to run the Brighton marathon, and as if that were not enough of a challenge on its own I have been set a target of raising £750 for Friends First.

If you would like to sponsor me, I would appreciate it! You can do so here. 

BOOK REVIEW: THE CASE FOR WORKING WITH YOUR HANDS

The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good, by Matthew Crawford

(Published in the USA as Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work)

When I last got my hair cut (yes, it does happen sometimes) I got home and said to Grace that we ought to get our girls to train as hairdressers. My hairdresser charges £8.50, which is so close to a tenner that anyone with any decency says, “Keep the change.” So, £10 a time, for say, fifteen cuts a day, five and a half days a week. Lets call that £800 per week. Of course, this is all cash in hand, and while not wishing to cast aspersions on the barber’s trade, I should imagine it is easy to make a low estimate of income when it comes to filling in the tax returns. Assuming the hairdresser takes four weeks leave each year, that is an annual income of nearly £40,000.

Not bad.

And this train of thought then meshed neatly with the ideas Matthew Crawford sets out in his study of work. Basically his argument comes down to the idea that the only jobs secure from outsourcing are those that are always in demand and demand face to face contact between customer and deliverer. He also argues that it is these jobs that are inherently more satisfying, as they require the involvement of the whole person – mind and hand. Accountancy and architecture can be automated,  outsourced and sent offshore just as surely as manufacturing has been, but we will always need mechanics, plumbers, surgeons and hairdressers. Don’t send your kids to college (unless its for something like medicine) – teach them a trade.

This of course segues neatly into the current student protests about tuition fees. Crawford would say, “Learn a trade in your long breaks – and you’ll earn enough to pay your fees.” He would also say that too many of our young people are staying in education too long because we have swallowed the misconceptions of the “knowledge economy.” Get a degree, get a white collar job, and earn decent money is the mantra. But, as Crawford demonstrates, much of that white collar work is unfulfilling and – in reality – menial. It is the tradesman who genuinely gets to use his brain, and who controls his own destiny.

Which is not to say that Crawford is anti-education. Indeed, he has a degree in physics and a PhD in philosophy, and this is a philosophically written book. Crawford combines philosophical observations of work with ‘testimony’ of his own experience, as philosophy student, a short spell as a ‘cubicle worker’, director of a think tank, electrician and motorcycle mechanic. He is clearly an unusually talented and multifaceted man, and thus better qualified than most of us to plough his own furrow in life.

Crawford traces the way in which contemporary working practices have evolved and comes to the sobering conclusion that, “Corporations portray themselves as results-based and performance-oriented. But where there isn’t anything material being produced, objective standards for job performance are hard to come by. What is a manager to do? He is encouraged to direct his attention to the states of minds of his workers, and become a sort of therapist.” Crawford contrasts this with the life of a tradesman, where the objectivity of spirit level or plumb line are their own irrefutable measure.

Not surprisingly, it is the office rather than the job site that has seen the advent of speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation. Some might attribute this to the greater mixing of the sexes in the office, but I believe a more basic reason is that when there is no concrete task that rules the job – an autonomous good that is visible to all – then there is no secure basis for social relations. Maintaining consensus and pre-empting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells. Where no appeal to a carpenter’s level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary.

I make an effort to encourage the congregation I lead to see the dignity and value of their work, but the reality is that many office-imprisoned workers find it very hard to see the real worth of their paper-shuffling existence. There is something in us that responds much more strongly to what is tangible – a car engine fixed, a garden dug, or hair well cut.

It was only when I got to the end of this book and read the acknowledgements that I realized it was written with the support of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, where James Davison Hunter is professor. Hunter’s recent book, To Change the World, is having a profound influence on many who are trying to think about culture theologically, and discovering his fingerprints on The Case for Working with Your Hands added an extra dimension to what is written here. While Crawford is not writing a theological book, and shows no indication of personal faith, the realm of our work is certainly one that needs to be high on our agenda as we consider what it means to live in “faithful presence.” To this end, Crawford offers some of the application I thought missing in Hunter’s own book. Read it, and be inspired to fix something.

FAITH LEAKS

The ‘data war’ against those companies perceived to be hostile to Wikileaks is gathering pace with the Operation Payback campaign targeting firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.  This is interesting on a number of levels – not least the way in which technology can be harnessed by loose coalitions of activists to significant effect.

The extent to which the leaked cables are banal, significant, or dangerous has been much discussed elsewhere, but those who are ‘pro’ the leaks seem generally to be united in a dislike of the USA, or at least of its government.

I have been thinking about this in the light of the observations (previously posted on this blog) of George Matheson and C.H. Spurgeon regarding Islam. For those Victorian men, Islam was a religion in terminal  decline – its death throes imminent. This perspective seems to have been tied to the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a faded glory, which would hang on a little longer, but finally be overwhelmed by the First World War. Islam was the religion of the Ottomans, and without their Empire it would fade away into the insignificant faith of a few backwards tribesmen.

How different things turned out to be.

But we could very easily see something similar with Christianity, which tends to get imagined as an American religion. If America is toppled from her perch as top nation, then her religion will fall too.

That this is an unlikely outcome can be extrapolated from historical example, but also by current evidence – Christianity is increasingly becoming a religion of the South and East, rather than the North and West.

One hundred years from now, what the American ambassador thought of George Osborne will be of very little interest to anyone; but what the world thinks of Christ will still be of huge global significance. Nations come and empires go (as do leaks), but the word of the Lord remains.

A DOG’S DAYS

Jess the dog died today.

Nearly fifteen years ago, on a cold spring day, Grace and I picked her up from a ramshackle cattle farm in Derbyshire at the end of a holiday. We drove with her, a little bundle of fluff in a cardboard box, on Grace’s knee, back to the south. Today we buried her under the apple tree in our garden, in cold, wet ground, among the fallen, frosted apples.

There were plenty of tears.

For fifteen years Jess has been a wonderful companion. Free of vice and always good natured. She was the best £35 I have ever spent.

Jess came before the children, and once we started a family we often remarked that the girls would be approaching their teens when Jess’s time came. I have used her as a sermon illustration over the years – of the inevitability that forming relationship results in pain. “Even having a dog,” I have said, “guarantees sadness. Our kids are going to be sad when our dog dies – tears will be shed.” But rather than keep us from forming relationships, it is the certainty of pain that in one sense is the evidence of the genuineness of our love – and of our humanity.

Yesterday I preached from Revelation 21 on “the former things have passed away,” and, ironically, our small group notes for this week begin with the question, ‘Do dogs go to heaven?’ I’m pretty certain that if any dog were to go to heaven, it would be Jess, even though my theology doesn’t really allow me to believe it so.

But even the death of a dog – and in the final analysis, she was only a dog – sharpens the hearts desire for that new world where, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

DOING GOOD

After living in our house for a year we have finally got some carpet down on the stairs and in the bedrooms. While moving some books back into a bookcase, once the carpet fitters had finished, I picked up a copy of the works of William Cowper. It opened at a deeply ironic poem titled “Pity for Poor Africans.”

I OWN I am shock'd at the purchase of slaves, 

And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves; 

What I hear of thcir hardships, their tortures, and groans 

Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, 

For how could we do without sugar and rum? 

Especially sugar, so needful we see? 

What? give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea!

Besides, if we do, the French, Dutch, and Danes, 

Will heartily thank us, no doubt, for our pains; 

If we do not buy the poor creatures, they will, 

And tortures and groans will be multiplied still.

If foreigners likewise would give up the trade, 

Much more in behalf of your wish might be said; 

But while they get riches by purchasing blacks, 

Pray tell me why we may not also go snacks?

Your scruples and arguments bring to my mind 

A story so pat, you may think it is coin'd, 

On purpose to answer you, out of my mint; 

But, I can assure you, I saw it in print.

A youngster at school, more sedate than the rest, 

Had once his integrity put to the test; 

His comrades had plotted an orchard to rob, 

And ask'd him to go and assist in the job.

He was. shock'd, sir, like you, and answer'd -- “Oh,no 

What! rob our good neighbour! I pray you, don't go; 

Besides, the the man’s poor, his orchard’s his bread, 

Then think of his children, for they must be fed."

"You speak very fine, and you look very grave, 

But apples we want, and apples we'll have; 

If you will go with us, you shall have a share, 

If not, you shall have neither apple nor pear."

They spoke, and Tom ponder’d -- !I see they will go: 

Poor man! what a pity to injure him so 

Poor man! I would save him his fruit if I could, 

But staying behind will do him no good.

"If the matter depended alone upon me, 

His apples might hang till they dropt from the tree; 

But, since they will take them, I think I'll go too, 

He will lose none by me, though I get a few."

His scruples thus silenc’d, Tom felt more at ease, 

And went with his comrades the apples to seize; 

He blam'd and protested, but join'd in the plan; 

He shar'd in the plunder, but pitied the man.

Cowper was a close friend of John Newton and part of the movement that campaigned for the abolition of slavery, and he used his skill and fame as a poet in the struggle.

The BBC is currently running a series fronted by Ian Hislop called “Age of the Do Gooders” taking a look at the great social reformers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The energy and achievements of this passionately concerned group were incredible. They were not content to live with the status quo, and they created new systems of thought and practice that transformed so many areas of British life, from education to working conditions to slavery. And most of them were motivated by their faith.

But this isn’t only a history lesson. An increasing number of Christians today are asking questions about how we can contribute to the shape of our society. One expression of this – and one I am involved in – is the Everything Conference. If you haven’t yet done so, why not check out some of the articles being posted on the Everything website; and while you are about it book into next years conference. Maybe we can begin to form a movement that allows some Wilberforce’s, Newton’s and Cowper’s to emerge; and maybe we can help make our society a better place.