What is in Kelvin's Head?

Wars and rumours of wars

16/11/2015

The message coming from France is reasonably predicatable – France is at war.

However, I am unconvinced that states can win a war against ideas. Although Isis is very much a real body of people intent on doing harm through wicked acts, Isis is not so much a group of people as a group of ideas. It is the coherence of those ideas which makes it possible for Isis to attract people to commit its barbarous acts.

The lack of knowledge and thinking in the West about Isis and similar religiously inspired terrorist movements frightens me very deeply.

We know from our own history that one of the best ways to spread ideas is to persecute those who hold them. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church and all that. Bombing those sympathetic to Isis may lead to short-term military gains but it will also spread those ideas, ideas which feed off resentment against the West in the first place.

There has been a huge amout of effort in the last 48 hours that has gone into putting out a coherent statement that these acts have nothing to do with Islam. And it is true – these acts have nothing to do with the Islam that I know locally in Glasgow, with Muslim friends or with those who are trying to seek sanctuary in this country as refugees. However, the existance of Isis is very much to do with religion and is proof positive of just how bad things can get when religion goes wrong.

One sees from time to time the vacuous statements of those who exploit situations such as this to argue that as religion is the cause of all this then religion itself should be wiped out. However, I think that there are multiple causes for all this, many of which go back to the real colonialism of years ago alongside the neocolonialism of the actions of elite states such as the UK in our own day. Poverty, instability and injustice stoke the fires of resentment that allow extremism to flourish. Some might well take the view that religion is the cause of all this but an argument can just as easily be made that extreme fundamentalism flourishes precisely where moderate religious voices have been silenced. Attacking moderate religous people for being religious seems to me to be more likely to result in extremism flourishing rather than being overcome.

Yet, even as we stand alongside one another we are deeply ignorant of one another and the ignorance that we have makes it very hard to have any meaningful dialogue with one another. I know why I get told about the five pillars of Islam whenever I go to a Muslim event – it is because most non-Muslims are so completely and utterly ignorant of that faith that you have to start somewhere. But the consequence is that we struggle to have a very meaningful conversation about things that do really matter.

Do we believe in the fundamental equality of men and women or don’t we? Do we believe in freedom of expression or don’t we? Do we believe that blasphemy laws are appropriate to a modern society or don’t we? How do you deal with offensive humour? How should each of the religions (my own included) deal with its own internal contradictions and sectarianism? These are all things that need rather a lot of conversation. There is a lot to talk about and few venues for that conversation.

For me, the clear narrative that Isis have needs to be challenged by a much clearer narrative of the kind of society that we want to have in the West. We need ideals to fight for not just enemies to fight against.

And what do we really want? Do we settle for mere tolerance of one another. Do we want to recommit ourselves to multiculturalism? Do we have the wisdom and discernment to be able to argue for a gently secular state that allows all to thrive rather than the fundamentalist delusions of some of today’s secularist voices? There are different Islams in the world. There are different secularisms. There are different Christianities.

Are there a set of British/Scottish/Western values that we can all articulate? Fair play, cricket and a stiff upper lip are not going to win these battles. At the very time that we need to rally behind the human rights cause that might bring us together, we have politicians in power trying to undermine the Human Rights Act.

What kind of society do we believe in? What kind of society do we think is worth fighting for. A very great deal of thinking needs to be done to work out the answer to that question. Wars and rumours of wars seem to be coming our way. They will be won or lost not merely by the strength of our military might but by the world we chose to believe can be created.

Now is the time to think.

We are more likely to win with shock and awe thinking than shock and awe bombing.

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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