The trigger for this piece was an article by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or, to be more accurate, a letter in the Independent by a new friend of mine, in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The new friend is Liz Slade, who is (among other good and interesting things) Chief Officer of the Unitarians in the UK, a denomination rooted in Christians who dissented (politically and theologically) from the Church of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Liz and I first connected as we in Hodge Hill were getting ready for our Lent series this year, 'God in the Ruins'.
"The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don't know how to to do that."
Welby then goes on to give examples of Christians rising to the 'moral as well as ... practical challenge': from reforestation in El Salvador, the Solomon Islands and Kenya, to the Church of England's commitment to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2030. 'We must seek to persuade the powerful that it is in their interest to do good and be green,' he concludes.
In her response, Liz affirms Justin that these 'are good things to do,' but goes on to point out that 'any secular leader could encourage them. It feels like the Archbishop of Canterbury pulled his punch':
"Planting trees or insulating buildings will not address the underlying causes of the climate crisis. Our economy is rooted in a love of money, and is causing unprecedented suffering as a result. But perhaps Welby knows that his flock is not ready to hear a different message..."
In a post on social media a few days later, Liz went a bit further: 'He was doing great but somehow ended up asking his flock to get solar panels instead of rebuilding a society that is based on loving one's neighbour and the vast interconnectedness of all life. I can't work out - does he not know, can he not comprehend it, does he feel the reality cannot be heard, is he too ensconced in the power structures that have most to lose, or does he have a cunning plan that we just have to be patient for...?'
And this got me thinking.
The problem here isn't just about Christian responses to climate change (although that, in itself, is enough to bring 'the end of the world as we know it'). It's related, too, to the CofE's current resistance (in some senior quarters, at least) to the language of 'deconstructing whiteness' in our work to tackle our deeply-ingrained institutional racism (more of that another time, but soon). It's entangled too in the bankrupt and utterly disingenuous concept of 'mutual flourishing' (designed almost solely to 'protect' those who cannot accept the ordained ministry of women) and talk of a 'radical new inclusion' in relation to same-sex relationships (which so far stops well short of embracing same-sex marriage, let alone reappraising the so-called 'doctrine of marriage' itself, while allowing the loud voices of powerful, wealthy conservative evangelicals to claim they are the real victims of exclusion). And it's there, with deep and tragic irony, in the refusal of many senior people in the CofE (and the wider Church) to acknowledge that our horrific history of abuses of power is not just about the occasional 'bad apple', or even in failures of structure and process (although of course there have been), but in our dominant theologies of (and our avoidance of asking critical questions about) power and domination themselves (and yes, this is a point about the importance of examining particular theological traditions in our safeguarding conversations; theology matters; bad theology is a thing).
The central question, I think, is: how radical are we prepared to get? How deep are we prepared to dig in pursuing 'deep culture change' within the Church (and here, because it's my denomination, I'm thinking particularly about the Church of England)?
And, as it's very easy to externalise this and make it all about 'them' (those in 'central' positions of authority and decision-making power), I want to engage instead in a moment of self-critique. It's four years, almost to the day, since Ruth Harley and I published Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In (SCM Press, 2020).
It's a book I'm hugely proud of. But it would be an understatement to say that a lot has happened since then (in the world, in the Church, in our own lives and ministries), and it feels timely to begin to explore some of the 'edges' of Being Interrupted: some of the places where we might notice its limitations, some of the opportunities to critique and develop its lines (more spirals and wandering wiggles, in reality) of thinking and practice in new directions. That's definitely going to take more than one blog post (and possibly even the beginnings of a new, collaborative writing project). But here and now, I want to offer just one wondering:
I wonder if we, like Archbishop Justin, have not yet got nearly radical enough, in naming and pointing towards the 'deep culture change' that we, the Church, need to engage in.
One of the 'lines' (of critique, of argument) we took in Being Interrupted had something like these three steps:
1. In the face of the crises around us, many Christians believe that Christianity already has everything it needs to address these crises - and indeed has the moral and evangelical responsibility to offer those resources to others (we might call this a 'Provision' mindset).
2. Some Christians are conscious that the Church as we know it claims to be for everyone, but in practice it isn't. And so, in the face of some of the crises around us, they call the Church to be more welcoming, to embrace more diversity within its makeup and structures (we might call this an 'Inclusion' mindset).
3. But who thinks they are doing the 'including', and on what terms? Who is the 'we' that imagines it exercises the agency of 'being the Church'? In Being Interrupted, we sought to shine the spotlight on that imagined 'we' - particularly where that 'we' is predominantly white, middle-class and male, in makeup or in culture. We examined the 'privilege' that comes with inhabiting that 'we' - including the privilege to be oblivious of the experience of people located differently to 'us'. And we called on a white-, middle-class- and male-dominated Church to open itself up to be interrupted, challenged and changed by the gifts and challenges of its 'others' (what at times we've called 'Radical Receptivity').
And this is where I find myself being stretched beyond the (hopefully reasonably expansive) horizons that Being Interrupted sought to point to.
I find myself needing to name, more clearly and more boldly, that the structures within which we are all caught up, do more than 'privilege' some and 'marginalise' others. They are more than just an unequal distribution of power. They are structures of domination and, ultimately, of death. And they are (as we acknowledged in BI) structures that are more complex than the trio of race, class and gender. We might name them, to expand the term offered by the great (African-American feminist theorist-activist) bell hooks:
[ecocidal] imperialist white supremacist capitalist [ableist hetero-]patriarchy
Or, if that is a bit of a mouthful (and it surely is, and that is intentional to make a point about complexity, and not about academic prententiousness), we might draw on the work of poet Audre Lorde and ecofeminist Val Plumwood, and call it, simply, boldly:
mastery
(As in Lorde's famous maxim: 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house'.)
The thing is, mindsets 1 (Provision) and 2 (Inclusion) above are still utterly captive to mastery: being in charge, in control, centre stage. And I'm beginning to realise that our proposal 3 (Radical Receptivity) hasn't always named the power of mastery strongly enough, because in some ways it was still hanging on to it. In our chapter on the cross, for example, 'being interrupted' was worked out (through the figure of the Roman Centurion who witnessed Jesus' death) in terms of 'relocation', 'repentance', 'relinquishing' and 'receptivity': a spiral journey of a kind of 'schooling'. It was only in our final chapter - on the kind of resurrection that is located in the 'compost heap' - that we began to explore the direction that I find myself going in here...
4. Sometimes, what needs to happen, is not for us to 'provide' all the answers, or 'include' more diversity, or even 'receive' in ways that challenge and change us. Sometimes, what is needed is for us - and the structures in which we are entangled - to fall apart. To die, decay, decompose. And sometimes that Decomposition is, in fact, the only appropriate response to the crises that we face.
On the one hand, it's little wonder that the Archbishop of Canterbury is unable to articulate - or perhaps even contemplate - anything more radical than preaching an inoffensive message that 'God is green', and advocate for more tree planting and solar panels. He is profoundly invested in the ongoing survival of the institution of the established Church in (and 'of') England, with all its structures and hierarchies, Canons, patronage, liturgy, theology and so on that are profoundly entangled in a historic and ongoing culture of ecocidal imperialist white supremacist capitalist ableist hetero-patriarchy - aka mastery.
On the other hand, as a prominent public disciple of the incarnate, ensoiled Jesus of Nazareth, who so profoundly challenged the cultures and structures of mastery of his day that they inflicted on him a humiliating death, we might be justified in hoping to hear something more radical from Justin.
But, to finish with a little bit more self-critique, reflecting on Being Interrupted reminds me that each of us is inescapably a 'work in progress'. When Ruth and I were finishing off writing that book in early 2020, as the first wave of the COVID pandemic was still new and strange and unsettling around us, I didn't yet imagine the ways in which I would experience - personally, professionally and more widely in my relationships, places and entanglements both local and global - the painful, messy realities of falling apart, death and decomposition (and yes, the personal and the structural are entangled, inextricable). It's fair to say I know now (in fragments of raw, embodied wisdom) things that I didn't know then. And I also know that there's no going back.
'Being decomposed' is, sometimes, what we need. Or at least, the unavoidable reality we need to embrace.
[(2 days later) This blog post has already sparked some fascinating conversations, including questions and pushback. One of the things that I wanted to say, but couldn't quite work out how to do, is that each of the four mindsets/approaches have their time and place. Decomposition is not the only way. We need contextual wisdom, conscious of our own positionality and the relationships that are most immediately present to us in each moment, to discern which is to be embraced here and now. But I'm suspicious of those (especially those in positions of power and authority, and including myself) who seem to be stuck in 1 and/or 2, and to resist and avoid embracing 3 and 4. And to return to where we started, ++Justin's response to climate breakdown presents as clear example of that resistance/avoidance.]
