The trouble with echo chambers

Back in 2012 I attended a conversation between AC Grayling and Archbishop Rowan Williams on the former’s Good Book: A Humanist Bible. I won’t elaborate on it at detail since I wrote about it for my friend Jo’s website (1) except to say that it was as befits anything involving Mr Wispy Beard, a remarkably polite and respectful affair. After the event I got chatting to a group of folks from Central London Humanists who were disappointed by the tone, having hoped for something a tad more rambunctious. It may be a tad unfair a remark since I have only got so far into Grayling’s Bible but I think they got off lightly. I started reading it around the time that my wife was dying and to put it mildly I didn’t connect to Grayling’s conviction that what I needed at that time was more and more and more knowledge.

So it’s an uncomfortable truth that while peaceful accord is often far more helpful in pointing the way towards a solution to a dilemma, it’s also sometimes necessary to be just a little confrontational.

This ‘peace versus confrontation’ dichotomy came to me recently when attending a ‘debate’ at the Royal Society on the significance of Christianity’s ‘decline’ in Great Britain.

A fellow audience member to whom I spoke afterwards didn’t seem too overwhelmed by the experience. ‘Who cares if Britain’s not a Christian country?’ he asked. ‘God does’. Well that’s not my theology but I could see his point of view and was not much less confused at the end of the ninety minutes than him The only panellist who betrayed any sense of spirituality was a Muslim. The mind boggles at the reaction had one suggested a moment of reflection prior to commencement of proceedings. The phrase ‘farting in church’ comes to mind. Furthermore, all four panellists appeared to espouse ‘liberal’ values, opposing bishops in the House of Lord, supporting gay marriage and assisted suicide. The intelligent (as opposed to prejudiced) counter-arguments in all three cases were not discussed. What was noted was that the assertion made by Justin Welby that Christianity defeated secularism on assisted suicide while losing to it on gay marriage is simply not supported by the data. In fact 80% of Christians in a 2015 survey are in favour of assisted suicide whereas 47% were in favour of gay marriage (compared to 60% in the population as a whole).
So what say I. Much of the population favours capital punishment but thankfully that’s never discussed as a possibility. Concerning Islam, suspicion was expressed towards any word that ends with ‘phobia’ – a remark that might inspire a wry smile among opponents to gay marriage.

The panellists were Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church Iain McLean, Professor of Politics, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-religious Studies and Polly Toynbee, Vice-President and Patron of the British Humanist Association. Among audience members subsequently asking questions were a representative of Theos Thinktank, Karen Armstrong and Derek McAuley, Chief Officer of the Unitarians in Britain. The panoply of subjects discussed included Christianity’s history within Britain, faith schools, new atheism, Islam and the role of ethics.

In 2011, according to Toynbee, 59% of respondents to a census defined themselves as Christian, but in a 2014 British social attitudes survey, just over 50% of the population considered themselves to have no religion. Only 1 in 20 people under the age of 20 define themselves as Church of England compared to the majority of those over 70. On the other hand, according to McCulloch, Cathedral attendance has increased by 30% in the last decade.

Siddiqui stated that religion is often seen as something that drags people back into an intolerant past with secularity conversely pointing the way to a hopeful future. Yet she suggested that despite declining church attendance, our calendar, formal occasions, legal system all testify to Christianity’s very strong presence. She quoted one student: “My Mum’s so Daily Mail. She’s only Christian when Islam is in the news”.

None of this was particularly fresh, And discussion of disestablishment of the Church of England seemed even more far off. Still, there were at least a few suggestions in terms of building bridges that seemed linked into the real world. The Chair of the meeting, Sameer Rahim, Prospect’s arts and Books Editor, recounted visiting an East London Church of England school with a 98% Bangladeshi Muslim population. When it came to collective worship, a Christian prayer was used with the word Allah substituted in the place of God.

Throw in too much disagreement and the proceedings stall at the outset. Yet somehow at the end of this evening I felt that the opposite had happened – that in seeking so hard to create accord a vast panoply of subjects had been over-simplified and freed of nuance and I doubt that consequently things have been brought much further forward.

(1) http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=18227

Thank you Thi

I have a guilty confession to make! While I don’t mind his writings and am sure that he is a wonderful human being, I have never been overwhelmed by the writings of Thich Hnat Hanh. That may mean little to you but it should mean something to me because I regularly attend a Buddhist meditation sangha based around his ideas. He speaks a good deal of sense, I value his bridge building with Christianity, the people at the sangha are very kind and I do benefit spiritually from the meditation practice. Yet in truth there are mindfulness teachers whom I much prefer over ‘Thi’.

Yet last month when attending the sangha I was moved in a way that I hadn’t been for quite some time. There is always a reading and while normally that consists of a book passed around with participants taking turn to read a paragraph, this time around we heard a recording of the man himself.

It was introduced by the woman running the group that day as a rather unusual New Year’s message, not least as it was delivered on the 29th December 2013. That was not the only time that morning when I felt the need to blink. The talk was on the idea that time is a mental construct so in fact the ‘new year’ already exists, just in an unmanifested form. That’s not an easy concept to get your head around if you’re not versed in Buddhist philosophy. However it got more personal from there.

The key point that Thi was making was that 2014 might appear to mark the death of 2013 but in fact it no more does so than the end of an individual’s active life marks their absolute demise. They live on in ways too innumerable to list, through memories, through the influences that the no longer extant individual makes on those left behind through memories, through their influence on the outside world and through genetics. Those were exactly the points that I wanted to make when seeking to solace a couple of atheist friends of Fanta’s. Casting my mind though back to the 29th December 2013, I recall my mother and I going for a pub lunch before my brother phoned me up on my mobile. I collapsed in tears as he offered his condolences on the death of my wife the night before and he almost apologetically made what he readily admitted might sound the most inappropriate wish that he could make at that moment, that he wished me a happy birthday.

So two years on, and still regularly thinking of Fanta, after listening to that recording more with stunned amazement than with grief but still feeling profoundly moved, one thought came to my mind: I wished that Thi had been with me that day. Then I realised that in fact he had been.