The Benefits of Brexit

Yes, you read that correctly. I want to write about the benefits of Brexit. It may be news to you that there could be any. Or at least, that I might imagine so. Am I losing my head?

I don't think so. For the avoidance of doubt, I've not changed my mind about Brexit. I believe it to be a disastrous decision for the United Kingdom. If you've been following this blog, you'll know that I've rehearsed the arguments ad nauseam. To me, it makes no sense either economically or politically. It cuts across the idea that I imagined was becoming mainstream opinion, that we are better off together than alone, that a world in which we collaborate to tackle the threats we face is more likely to be one in which we all live more safely and at peace with one another, care more effectively for the poor and vulnerable, share our resources in combating the climate emergency, and have more likelihood of flourishing. Pooling our sovereignty gives us leverage to achieve what is beyond the reach of any of our peoples separately. To me as a Christian, this comes down to loving our neighbour as ourselves. The best future for our world is based on relationships and community, not on isolation and self-interest.

I've not changed my mind about any of this. If anything, I believe in these (to me) self-evident benefits of EU membership more strongly than I ever did, the more I listen to the spurious arguments against them.

It's these very arguments, in fact, that lead me to think that Brexit could bring benefits after all. I have two in mind. The lesser benefit would be for the UK finally to rid the EU of the burden we have become to it. When you are a thorn in someone else's side, the kindest thing to do is to remove yourself from a relationship that is giving the other party so much grief. We don't deserve the longsuffering patience our European friends have shown to us British since 2015. And they don't need, and never needed, our foot-dragging, curmudgeonly, resentful attitude towards them as the EEC and then the EU, our reluctance ever to become fully-fledged Europeans who pull our weight in this family of nations.

The greater benefit would be that Brexit, hard or soft, would provide a response to David Cameron's endlessly repeated mantra before the referendum campaign, when he tried to renegotiate the UK's EU membership. "What's in it for Britain?" he kept asking, "What's in it for us?"

Here's my answer. What Brexit would (will?) achieve is quite simply to make it clear beyond any doubt that the UK has now become a very ordinary, very average, unexceptional middleweight nation. It no longer has a special role in the world, or at least a role that's any more special than any other nation. It has lost any credible claim to exceptionalism. It is one nation among many, better than some, not as good as others, a middling kind of power in global politics and economic strength that can expect to be overtaken in terms of influence, wealth and political clout by a dozen other nations in the next few decades.

Why would this be a benefit to Britain?

Simply because it would require us to pursue a more modest way of being in the world. From being a significant world power with enormous moral influence and reach across the globe, and with a strong sense of a unique British destiny, we would have to become used to a less exalted, more humble role such as we have not been had since at least the eighteenth century. We would have to learn to know our place.

All this would pose something of a spiritual and moral crisis for the United Kingdom. For if we were to learn true humility, it would require us as a nation to become a great deal more self-aware, more spiritually and emotionally intelligent, than we have been during this decade. It has been a national embarrassment to watch ourselves behaving as if we were suffering from some kind of corporate psychotic episode, a collective nervous breakdown. It's been instructive, if cruel, to read the commentary on Brexit in the overseas media, and see ourselves as others see us. We have become a source of bafflement even to our allies, and of scornful ridicule to our enemies. Brexit has already demonstrated its capacity to humble us in the sight of others. And this can only increase as the clock ticks down towards Hallowe'en and, as seems increasingly likely, we crash out of the European Unon without a deal.

The biblical and classical stories of what we tend to call a "fall" are essentially about how peoples, nations and individuals have to face the truth about themselves as a result of some tragic flaw or misplaced hubris, when grasp exceeds reach and we are toppled from some place of privilege or pride. This seems to me to be the crisis we are reaching in Britain. A crisis is literally a "judgment", and implicit in the idea of "fall" is that of nemesis, just deserts that are reaped not as a result of some external intervention but because of what we do to ourselves through our own presumption, how decisions and their consequences draw out of ourselves a hitherto unguessed potential for self-harm if not self-destruction.

In the case of Brexit, I think we can ascribe a good deal of this to the naked self-interest (not to say self-importance) that has dominated the EU debate for years. Instead of asking how our membership could benefit other members of the Union, all that has seemed to matter to us has been our own profit. And as the gospel says, if we strive to gain the whole world, we put at risk our own soul. This, I fear, is the condition Britain is reaching, may already have reached. Brexit has driven us to the brink of spiritual, ethical and moral bankruptcy. Appeals to collaborate for the sake of social justice, peace-making, security, the environment and the welfare of the most needy members of our society fall on increasingly deaf ears. The clamour is "do or die", Brexit at all costs, deal or no deal. If ever a nation was suffering a nervous breakdown that clouded judgment and common sense, this is it.

Which is why I'm reluctantly coming to the view that Brexit may actually be necessary if we are to come to our senses and be healed of this craziness. Could it be that to learn to see ourselves as a rather ordinary offshore island could be good for the national psyche? Could it be that this fall from perceived privilege could give us back our soul?  Could it be that the sheer shock of Brexit teaches us lessons we are incapable of learning in any other way. that it could bring us to our senses? I'm thinking of the prodigal son who lost everything in his far country, and only then began to find himself again and make the long journey home.

"He that is down need fear no fall; he that is low no pride" wrote John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress. I wonder what this quintessentially English writer would say to the Britain of the twenty-first century. I think he would tell us that humility is the first lesson we need to learn if we are to become truly wise and, in any sense that ultimately matters, truly great in our moral stature and spiritual character. St Benedict, patron saint of Europe, says the same which is why he devotes so much space to humility in his Rule. It's a principle we have forgotten in the shrill politics of our time. If "righteousness exalts a nation", then humility is the first step to it.

I'm resigned to Brexit now. I shall continue to resist it by any means possible, especially in its no-deal incarnation. But in my waters, I don't believe it can be avoided. I won't deny that I feel unutterably despondent about the prospect of waking up on All Saints Day no longer a citizen of the European Union. But something in me says that this could be a profoundly important moment in the history of our nation. If, after 1 November, we begin to experience buyer's remorse and ask ourselves, as I think we are likely to, "how on earth could we have committed such a foolish act?", it could lead to a new seriousness in public life that restored truth-seeking to the place it ought to have occupied all along. It could be a kind of conversio.

If that in turn helped foster a more realistic self-understanding on the part of the nation, a more sober perception of our place in the world, an altogether more humble view of ourselves and our destiny, that would have to be a good thing, wouldn't it? And if we were to find ourselves more free of our historic ambitions for power, hegemony, growth, influence and wealth, it might just bring about our capacity to become the best selves we have it within us to be. It would put us back on the path of healing and reconciliation after years of bitter division, help us be at ease with ourselves once again. That would be a vocation worth pursuing. We might well be a sadder nation, but I think we would be a better and a wiser one.

The hectoring, relentlessly upbeat Brexit rhetoric of Boris Johnson and his government doesn't encourage me to think that this will happen very soon. But in the longer term, under a leadership that is less in thrall to romantic notions of past greatness, and more realistic in scanning horizons and responding intelligently to events, change might be possible. And then we shall need to apologise - to our European neighbours whose friendship and trust we have abused, and to the people of Scotland and Ireland in particular who will find it hard to forgive the English for the forces of disintegration that we have unleashed. Indeed, saying sorry and meaning it is always important evidence that we have learned from our mistakes and can begin to tell the truth about ourselves once more.

Which is what humility, recognising our ordinariness and knowing our place are all about.

Vicky's Book

I've just finished reading Vicky Beeching's memoir Undivided: Coming out, becoming whole, and living free from shame.

It's a remarkable book, and an important one. Vicky is known across the conservative evangelical world as a song-writer and performer. Her songs have been sung in mega-churches in the Bible belt of the USA where she lived and worked for several years. After much personal struggle she accepted her sexuality and came out as a gay woman. She immediately incurred the wrath of the constituency she had served faithfully for so long. It entailed not only a spiritual and emotional crisis but an economic one too, for evangelical Christian music was not only her love but her livelihood.

This book is Vicky's story and her apologia. It will have taken real courage to write, just as it took real courage to come out in the first place. I guess that the journey of coming out almost always entails greater or lesser ordeals, or at least the threat of them. So much depends on how your family, friends and community view same-sex relationships. When you are immersed in the environment of conservative religion, still more when you are a public figure in that world, the hazards are infinitely greater. Here's one response on Vicky's Twitter account today that gives a flavour. Vicky you don’t appreciate how vile, debasing and degrading your vision of Jesus is. The gospel is inclusive of those who hear and respond to the call, turning from their selfish, sinful ways, giving up all for Him. The church is meant to be exclusive, keeping out sin and sinners. I don't quote it with any pleasure. You have to wonder what kind of Christianity that Tweeter is following.

So the first thing I want to do is to salute Vicky's bravery in writing so candidly. She has been subject to shedloads of abuse on social media and in hostile reviews that no-one should have to put up with. This book has been written out of a great deal of personal anguish and pain. Those who don't see human sexuality as Vicky now does need at least to respect the integrity out of which she writes and the personal cost to her of doing so. When we hear another person's story, what we do not do is to rush to judgment as some are doing. Rather, we learn to listen empathically, try to understand what has motivated her, even ask the question, could it be that we need to think again about our assumptions and maybe see things differently?

This is where a narrative approach to personal life can be so illuminating. In the book, we overhear Vicky negotiating the spiritual and theological dimensions of her emerging identity as a gay woman. As a Christian formed within evangelicalism, her integrity necessarily demanded that she take the scriptures with the utmost seriousness, as well as examining her conscience before God. For me, the truth-seeking aspects of her book are among the most moving. In the spiritual tradition, conversio is never a once-for-all decision. It's a lifelong habit of "turning round", re-orientating ourselves to the light and grace of God, always seeking "truth in the inward parts" of ourselves. At its best, this is what the journey of personal discovery and awareness, "coming out" if you like, should mean. Vicky exemplifies this beautifully.

It's not that she makes a strikingly original contribution to the church's understanding of homophile relationships. She doesn't set out to, though as a theologian in her own right, Vicky comments on some of the more contentious biblical texts that are quoted in the debate about homosexuality. She also offers analogies from history that show how the church has at times radically re-evaluated its traditional stances when it comes to, for example, the inclusion of uncircumcised gentiles, the place of the earth in the solar system, slavery, and the role of women in the church's leadership. But the major contribution she makes is to invite us as readers to venture inside Vicky's personal spirituality and thought world. That's a cherished place where we need to tread carefully and respectfully as we consider how to respond. For we are accompanying her on what is possibly the most fraught journey any of us ever have to undertake, that of not only searching for and discovering who we are, but learning how to speak about it before others.

This is what makes Vicky's book more than mere memoir. I want to describe it as a necessary act of witness. That word means pointing to the fundamental truth that belongs to the story we tell. I used the phrase truth-seeking earlier. Witness is about truth-telling. It always has a public aspect to it, the assumption being that where truth is at stake, we bear witness before other people to what we have seen and heard. The lived experience is the thing. No doubt Vicky will have "borne witness" to her Christian faith hundreds of times at the evangelistic events she has taken part in. That's a privileged but often costly thing to do, for it involves declaring who we really are. Now she has had to learn what for her has proved an even more costly way of bearing witness that entails disclosing another, hitherto concealed, dimension of her persona. I come back to her integrity and bravery once again, in being willing to tell us: "this is who I am under God".

But Vicky is doing more than bearing witness to the importance of personal integrity in human life. The book is a plea to all Christians, especially conservative evangelicals, to revisit their attitudes to LGBTQ+ people. The visceral hatred exemplified in some of the interactions quoted by Vicky ought to have no place in any community of faith that wants to live according to New Testament principles. Differences there will always be, "good disagreement" as we are learning to call it. But always with respect, courtesy and above all, charity. We ought to have learned the hard way by now that discrimination is always a sin against the image of God in humanity. The book bears witness to necessity of honouring that truth in the church. We all subscribe to it. But as Vicky makes painfully clear, living out that aspiration is another matter entirely.

What do I take from the book? Two things especially. The first is how damaging it can be for LGBTQ+ people to suppress their identity for fear of what others will think of them. It's entirely understandable, and Vicky's story explains why. But the damage can be extremely hard to put right and can take a lifetime. She writes about the experience of shame in relation to affection and intimacy. The sexual dimension of this is something I understand well from my own formation as a teenager within conservative evangelicalism. But in Vicky's case her denial of her sexuality was also associated with distressing mental and physical illness that required specialist intervention. It's shocking that even in the so-called enlightened societies of the west, there are still suicides among the young due to the shame they feel about their sexuality or the public disapproval they experience. Vicky's book will help young Christian readers conflicted by their own sexuality not only to befriend it but to discover how the vision of radical inclusion as "beautiful, restorative, and life-giving" is truly transformational.

The second thing I take from the book is how urgent it now is for the churches to affirm same-sex relationships publicly and embrace equal marriage. Some have already done so, but not yet the Church of England. I last blogged about this in early 2017. It's not just a question of how we as a church welcome and embrace our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters and celebrate their covenanted relationships. It's about how we become a genuinely inclusive church that recognises and honours the God-given humanity of every person. I believe that the C of E will in time recognise and celebrate equal marriage among its laity and clergy, just as it came round to accepting contraception and the remarriage of divorced people in the twentieth century. I hope that this time, however, we do better than merely "come round to accepting" same-sex relationships. I hope that we shall want to affirm them generously and gladly. My hunch is that there is now a majority among the active membership of the C of E who want to press for change. Let's hope it happens in our own lifetimes.

Thank you Vicky for your courage and candour in writing, and for the rich gift of your personal and spiritual experience. Thank you for a book that has helped me see things more clearly. You are part of the movement for change in our church. May it happen quickly.

Billy Graham - A Personal Reminiscence

I was one of those who went forward at a Billy Graham Crusade. It was the early summer of 1966, at the Earl's Court Arena. He preached there for a month. Close on a million people must have heard him. I was one of about forty thousand who responded to the "altar call" (though I don't think that phrase was being used any more in the 1960s).

There. I've come out and admitted it. I won't say it changed my life. I'd consciously become a Christian earlier that year, thanks to friends in the school's Christian Union. Before that I'd been a chorister. I hadn't been brought up in a church going family. My parents told me on my first day as a chorister not to bring any of "that religion" back home with me. It was for the music that they were encouraging me, that alone. So they were not best pleased when I announced my conversion, though they did come to my baptism and confirmation a few months later.

So yes, 1966 was an annus mirabilis, a year of joyful wonder, no doubt about that. And Billy Graham was part of it. I went with friends to hear him several times. I didn't care for the musical style of Cliff Barrows and George Beverley Shea - I'd have preferred O worship the King and There's a wideness in God's mercy to Blessed assurance and To God be the glory (still do). But I remember admiring the sheer professionalism with which these vast events were managed. I also recall being impressed by the diversity of people sitting on the platform - Anglican bishops, civic leaders, some black faces I didn't recognise. All in all, it was great theatre. You couldn't but be impressed.

He was a master of rhetorical technique. Where had he learned it, I wonder - from the study of classical Greek and Roman rhetors, or from American politicians or the great preachers of previous ages? Maybe he was one of those natively gifted people who come to realise they have power to sway human minds and hearts. He knew how to work a crowd. And he knew exactly how to speak in such a way that you would think it was directly and personally meant for you. To achieve that calls for charism of a high order.

But most of all, I was drawn to the man. It wasn't so much the content of his addresses (none of which I can now remember), but the way he gave them, the kind of human he came across as being. (I wonder if this is true of all of us preachers most of the time?) What struck me more than anything was the sense he conveyed of a profound personal integrity. He seemed to have no "side". It was hard to suspect hidden agendas or imagine ulterior motives, though the cynics tried hard enough. He believed every word of his own message, and as far as we the audience could tell, lived by it. All the obituaries I have read confirm the impression that he was a genuinely humble man who "loved his Lord", as Donald Coggan would have said, who never regretted giving his life to the gospel.

I think, looking back, that it was his essential goodness that impelled me to go forward that evening. I craved innocent, unselfconscious goodness (and still do), that singleness of mind and purpose that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount calls "purity of heart". I was already aware as a teenager that I fell well short of it myself. I wanted, so to speak, to nail my colours to that mast. It was an aspiration. Perhaps I knew in some obscure way that this would be a life task, that conversio is never a once-for-all decision, but a lifelong turning away from what is destructive or corrupting or evil towards all that is good and true and beautiful. "Think on these things" says St Paul. I believe Billy Graham was one of those rare people for whom this was a daily habit.

I met him once, briefly. This was in May or June 1984 when he came to the original Sunderland FC ground at Roker Park to preach to the North East. Nearly twenty years older than when I'd last seen him, he had not lost his good looks. I'd been sent to report the event for a newspaper. By then I'd moved away from conservative evangelicalism into a more catholic and sacramental spirituality. So I perhaps went to Sunderland prepared to be critical. The stadium was only half full: maybe it was the keen wind blowing off the North Sea that night, or maybe the people of County Durham and Northumberland were just worn down by the miners' strike that had begun a few months earlier.

I went to the press conference. You could tell that Billy Graham understood how to engage with, if not a hostile, then a suspicious media. (The press mostly don't care much for religion until a significant exemplar of it dies - today's obituaries strike a very different, and far more positive, tone from the press commentary of thirty years ago.) He was courteous, direct and shrewd in his answers. He wouldn't get drawn into debates about American politics, what he thought about Viet Nam, Watergate and so on. I asked him a question, possibly about race relations in US; or was it about Nicaragua? I don't think it was the miners, though that would have been interesting. I was probably trying to be clever. But he played a straight bat, and you couldn't quarrel with that. He looked me directly in the eye as he spoke. His gaze was piercing, questioning, placing me under scrutiny. I thought: here is a man who deserves to be taken seriously.

So why didn't the Billy Graham brand of evangelicalism "stick"? I was asked a similar question by George Carey once, when he was Archbishop and came to preach at Sheffield Cathedral. "You were on course to be an evangelical leader, Michael. What went wrong?" I said I didn't accept the premise that anything went wrong. But it would take a long series of blogs to explain. Maybe I don't entirely understand it myself, though as I get older and look back on my life, things gradually fall into place, even if gathering the fragments is always a work in progress.

I suppose that as the prophets said to Elisha, "the place where we live is too small for us". I don't mean this unkindly. We all move home many times in our lives, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. I have good evangelical friends whom I honour for their faithfulness to Christ and their loyal witness to the gospel. But I found the evangelicalism of those days too talkative, too busy, too extraverted. There was not enough silence in it, not enough space to contemplate, not enough imagination or playfulness, not enough awareness of the place of beauty in religion. And it didn't seem to reach into the complexities of the human heart (well, mine, anyway). No doubt a lot of it comes down to temperament. But I have to say that I became increasingly at odds intellectually with the way conservative evangelicalism did theology.

But I want to think (and pray) that I haven't lost what has been most precious in my evangelical formation: a love of the scriptures and a belief that they must be central to Christian life and thought; a conviction that personal relationship with God is the essence of all religion if it is to mean anything; and not least, a spirituality that is ardently focused on Jesus' cross and passion. As a student (at Trinity College Bristol!) my tutors told me to read the radical New Testament critics and John Henry Newman's Apologia. Oh, and to try to grasp the principles of liturgical prayer. I realised how much bigger the Christian world was than I'd imagined. That's it, really. The rest is history.

There are many mansions in our Father's house. God not only moves in mysterious ways himself, but moves us in ways that are just as mysterious when we try to make sense of them. I know that on many matters, Billy Graham and I would not have agreed since those heady days of the 1960s. He probably wouldn't have been comfortable in my liberal catholic, inclusive-church world, nor I in his. Except for this. I have no doubt whatsoever that he would have honoured my stumbling attempts to walk my Christian faith journey with integrity, just as I want to honour his. For what matters most is the same, to "turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ" as the Ash Wednesday words put it. Discipleship is as simple as that, purity of heart. Billy Graham helped me to start out on that path. For that, I'm grateful and glad.

Farewell to a great Christian man. RIP.