A Christian activist was invited to speak about social justice at a conference for church leaders. He was introduced warmly, assumed the appropriate prayer position whilst the meeting’s host prayed for him and walked to the lectern, placing his notes carefully on the stand. Looking out at the faces, most attentive with the benign smiles we seem to adopt in these contexts, the speaker began his address. He showed some slides and outlined the statistics that reveal the extent of global poverty and injustice. The audience nodded, a few eyebrows were pushed together in consternation. Suddenly, the speaker paused and looked up at the crowd. He took a deep breath and said “It makes me so fu*”ing angry!” You can fill in the blanks and imagine the response. There was a sharp intake of breath. Jaws hit the floor. “Did he just say that? Really!?” The speaker continued...
“Are you shocked and offended? That’s interesting, because I’ve been speaking for 10 minutes about the terrible injustice in the world but the thing some of you are most offended by, and the point the majority of you will remember, is that the speaker today said F*”k.”
This may be an urban myth, but it makes an important point. As a society, we’ve come to a consensus with regard to which words we consider offensive. Christians, in particular, are more likely to be offended by these words. Somehow, we’re not likely to exhibit the same level of response when we hear about injustice. Maybe it’s compassion fatigue; the way in which our empathy diminishes over time in response to being bombarded with depictions of trauma and poverty. Whatever the case, as Christians and a society as a whole, we can be passive in the face of challenging issues. We’re very good at satire and cynicism; noticing injustice, a lack of integrity, corruption and false motives, then making witty comments and observations about the perpetrators of these acts. The problem is that satire and cynicism only notices, it doesn’t act. We’re not very good at acting in response to our discontent. And when others do respond, we’re often cynical and question their motives. Just look at Bono and Bob Geldof.
When 50,000 people took to the streets of London last Wednesday to protest against the planned rise in tuition fees, we took notice. It was unusual; it was counter-cultural. It seems like there were a significant number of people in the mix who just wanted an excuse to cause trouble, but the initiative was taken by a group of people whose discontent was so powerful, they felt compelled to respond in a public way.
We once lived in a bubble where our relative wealth felt like a right; where, for the most part, opportunities to progress and accumulate money and possessions felt like the way it would always be. I remember the adverts for loan companies in the days before the ‘credit crunch’. The scene is black and white, a worried looking father sits in his kitchen, sweating over how he was going to pay the bills until suddenly, his resourceful wife finds the phone number for ‘Fantasy Finance’. One simple unsecured loan later, life turns to vivid Technicolor; the bills are paid, there’s a new car in the driveway and the entire family is off on a foreign holiday.
I believe that the bubble has popped and that when we look back at this time, we’ll recognise that we were in a period of significant and rapid changes in culture and society. The status quo doesn’t seem so static any more. The change in government has catalysed the feeling that our cosy lives may soon not be quite so comfortable. It raises a number of questions, and perhaps unsurprisingly, these begin with matters affecting us. Is home ownership a right? Should everyone have the opportunity to go to university? Can we have everything we want and the job we always dreamed of? However, I think that the real question is: are we going to allow ourselves to experience discontent on behalf of others, and is the discontent going to spill over into action.
Any cultural shift is an opportunity to establish new norms. If the cult of consumerism dies, what are we going to establish in its place? Early Christians were known as followers of ‘The Way’. The gospel, Jesus’ message of Good News, reveals how God and humanity were always meant to interact with each other, how we were always supposed to live and it reveals the way to get back to that. One of the emphases of Jesus teaching was to remember the poor. This new way of life that Jesus demonstrated and explained, demanded that we stand up against injustice; that we don’t just notice, that we act as well.
James Treasure, a church leader in the West Midlands, shared an interesting point recently. He said “Everyone can read the Bible but it’s how you read it that makes the difference. William Wilberforce read it in a way that said ‘slavery is wrong’. Other Christians read it at the same time, the same moment in the same translation and they thought slavery was right.”
This thought also raises another question: how many people read their Bibles in the days of Wilberforce, and realised that slavery was wrong, but did nothing to respond. How many people recognised this de-humanising injustice, but just made a pithy observation or shared a cynical insight about the slave traders?
As students around the UK continue to protest, I’m disappointed by the violence that seems to have piggybacked on this important debate. Despite this, I’m encouraged that students have been active and have taken the initiative to publically raise awareness of an issue that they feel passionately about. They haven’t just sat at home watching Cash in the Attic feeling vaguely disgruntled. One of the facets of these protests that I find most encouraging is the fact it’s pre-dominantly current students who are involved. The tuition fee debate is unlikely to have a direct impact on students who began their courses before 2012. Nothing will change much for them. The protests are a demonstration of a large group of people feeling discontent on behalf of others and responding to it with action. I think this is inspiring and I hope it heralds the beginning of a shift in the culture of individualism that has played a major role in landing us in the mess we find ourselves as a society today.
As followers of ‘The Way’ today, how are we reading our Bibles? What is it saying and how will we respond?
