furtherandfaster

Cultural Christianity - at the barrel of a gun

Quoting someone who has committed mass murder to give his views a platform they would otherwise not have - I already feel I am on dodgy ground. However the purpose of Anders Breivik's actions has been a warped defence of a way of life he labels cultural Christianity. His reasoning may be far from normal but his notion of cultural Christianity is so mainstream that it does merit some exploration.  What he affirms is that there is such a thing as a Christianity which does not require a personal attachment to the founder Jesus Christ.   You can find Breivik's quotation here. Now quite aside from the inconsistency of using violence instead of the democratic process. Or targeting those who bore absolutely no responsibility for the actions of the multiculturalists he despises. The idea that Christianity is a civilisation which ought to be defended and protected against foreign incursion. Whatever might be the intentions of the person who started it. Well this seems bonkers to me but sounds to me like something which an awful lot of people in British society would agree with.

Actually I would argue the opposite view. Which is that a personal attachment to the person and teaching of Jesus Christ is a lot more life changing than trying to preserve residues of Christian culture even if it has in 2 millenia transformed the planet

The problem with cultural Christianity is that it naively assumes that Christianity is European. And white. Which it isn't. Its a Middle Eastern faith and despite the troubles of the last half century when Christians have been emptying out of the Middle East in droves it remains a Middle Eastern faith. More powerfully faith in Christ has crossed culture after culture much to the disapproval of the culture brigade who regard this as imperialistic. The missionaries were devoted but they weren't that good. The global Christianity which is spreading even now is  a testament to the ability of the Christian faith to become embedded in the cultures which absorb it. Christian culture in Brazil looks a lot different to Christian culture in Sri Lanka.   

Secularism is an attractive idea. I can go and eat in the local curry house without troubling myself with sharing the values of the chef. As long as he subscribes to health and safety that is..  But Christianity isn't a curry. Its a way of life built around the life of the God man.  And naive as that sounds you can't have one without the other.   Plenty of people have picked up weapons in the name of Christ and have done appalling things. Intriguingly Breivik didn't kill teenagers in the name of Christ but in the name of white cultural Christianity. Mark that a fail..

Here's a commentary from the same blogger on Breivik's logic

God and Englishmen

   

oops - just missed it. I had wanted to post this on Saturday which is when the poet and priest George Herbert is celebrated in the lectionary. Largely because of a book If you meet George Herbert on the road kill him. Not a book I have read yet but am hoping to attend a seminar run by the author. Who argues that George Herbert casts a long shadow and has screwed up parish priests for generations by giving them an ideal which is neither appropriate or helpful.

The reason for this particular tangent is because I spend Friday morning with an old friend Cole Moreton talking to him about lots of things but particularly his up and coming book Is God still an Englishmman - which looks at English national identity - and how the English have continued to cast God in their image (though shall we say God has been on the move?). And English identity is nowhere near as polarised or conflicted as the intelligentsia or the BNP would have you believe.  Actually it is taking on all sorts of fascinating forms. Full on cooked Pakistani breakfasts before dawn (with halal meat) during Ramadan and goth morris dancers dancing to heavy metal tracks were some of the fascinating glimpses of the English determination to keep buggering on to use the immortal Churchillian phrase. And not to hide themselves in the folds of the St Georges flag.

I have put the interview on you tube - the limitations of the video form mean that I have had to chunk it down into 2 video clips. Enjoy! Cole is now a freelance journalist but in his last role was executive editor of the Independent on Sunday. Friday was a bit of a catch up for the two of us. The book is out at the end of April but you can follow Cole's blog on the topic here. 

Go to hell

Today I discovered that there is a blockbuster waiting in the wings due out early next month. Dante's Inferno turns the 13th century spiritual classic into a swords and sorcery romp. Its bound to offend - which is of course essential these days for publicity. I suppose it was inevitable that once the Dungeons and Dragons Lord of the Rings seam was worked out that someone would go looking for something better. And the Divine Comedy can fairly claim to be one of the greatest ever works of imagination with way more monsters and baddies than Tolkien ever thought of. Now rendered in CGI. Of course its not exactly the same book. Beatrice love of Dante's life has been snatched by the Devil so Dante has to weapons in hand to get her back. So a rescue plot - Orpheus goes into the underworld to get Eurydice - only the monsters in that story aren't a patch on Dante's. Then there's Dante's guide,  his conflicted helper Francesco died in the Crusades because Dante messed up (shades of Lion King there). So Virgil the greatest of Roman poets and auther of the Anead Dante's spiritual guide in the original has been dumped for Saint Tonto. And Tonto has issues. So its a buddy sorta revenge movie as well.   What it isn't is a road movie. Its fighting blood and guts all the way. Which curiously enough you won't find in the original - but that never got in the way of a great RPG.You have circles of hell which correspond to the deadly sins. There's a range of weapons including a cross. To quote a developer: "The cross is not used for physical contact. Its a form of crowd control. It can buy you time.You can use it to hold them in place till you're ready to beat the sh** out of them." Aquinas couldn't have put it better.

Actually the borrowing of the religious imagry of the Divine Comedy is very relevant as a kind of update. The travelogue pilgrimage is a staple of European literature from Dante's time onwards. Chaucer's canterbury tales, Piers Plowman, and Pilgrim's Progress all used the idea of spiritual development as a journey. And it was mirrored in medieval times by actual pilgrimages.  The idea is largely obsolete. I mean there are still rambling clubs and people who make travel documentaries for the rest of us to consume. But the notion of making a journey to spiritual enlightenment has largely gone. The paradigm we have with us now is the contest or competition. Its the story behind football.  Reality TV has taken the idea of a competition in which the winner is the last one to be eliminated and turned it into a dozen formats which have generated thousands of hours of cheap programming and even more hours of discussion.  Reality TV is moral improv theatre.  And competition/struggle is of course the mainspring behind just about every kind of gaming.  As it is for Dante's Inferno.

All deep immersion games involve action, but also problem solving, reflection and attention to context. The AI built into the game makes sure that the problem solving is strongly linked to context. The Christian imaginative tradition is ripe for exploitation. That relaunched blockbuster Dr Who regularly borrows Christian themes because there is still awareness of them in folk memory and US influenced science fiction dominated by  westerns and the cold war is too dull a resource. Why not use the resources of 2000 years of European storytelling?  So what's next: Paradise Lost?  The Inquisition?

Here's the Dante's Inferno website if you're over 18 - they actually checked - adult entertainment eh? Its out early in Feb

Between the twin singularities of Good Friday and Easter Sunday the double helix of the universe is spun

 Here comes Holy Week(end), three days and two events remembered. Christianity reduces to one really interesting idea – that God gets too involved.  To the extent that whether divinity or humanity is genetically modified by the other the outcome is equally outrageous. The concept of the incarnation privileges human beings above every other species we know.  Which is hubris of the worst kind or gives us a unique responsibility for the planet on which we find ourselves.

 

The event of Good Friday when in considerably less than a day’s work the Son of God mysteriously unpicks all the evil that has or ever will be committed by dying on a cross in a shabby corner of the Roman Empire. And the event of Easter Sunday when death and decay is rubbed out in a way which promises the remaking of the whole of the created order. These are not modest claims. But they are not naïve ones either.

 

Forgive the rant but I am frustrated by the widespread ignorance of the implications of the simple idea behind Christianity. And the perception that this represents a crude port of obscure writings from nomadic tribes in the Middle East. Or worse a bizarre 3 decker extension to the American Dream where God lives on the top storey, speaks Jacobean English and obsesses over single issue politics.  The concept of God becoming human has been foundational to every aspect of European and Middle Eastern life: law, politics, science, art, and philosophy. John Gray has shown that secular humanism has borrowed virtually all of its ideas about what it is to be human while denying the Christian story from which it came. The idea of the Godman is two thousand year old and has been tried against every philosophical and religious system it has encountered and is still substantively unchanged.

 

The viral form which Christianity took: no holy places, language or culture has meant that it has continued to cross cultural boundaries and take unique forms in every ethnic group it has encountered. Mutating without losing its simple central idea. The birth, death and resurrection of Jesus was no colonial incursion. And colonial powers who have tried to usurp the story have found that their subject peoples have absorbed the idea and threw it back at them.

These two events are singularities. Which means they cannot like any other singularities be observed and dissected. This does not make them merely subjective. We cannot observe the Big Bang but we can measure the outcome.  Christianity makes the outrageous claim that this person and these events are central to the construction of everything. They are not just religious events.

When religionists invoke the holy they normally wave people away. Its too late. God already got involved. The invitation this Holy Week(end) is to get right up close. And plunge our hands into the living divine clay.