Good Story? Bad Story? (+ Lynne's Story). #113. 28/03/2023
Out of Many, One People
Welcome. A long read only needs a short introduction - so please read, comment, critique, commend, subscribe. Since next week is Holy Week, followed by the Easter break the next blog will be on Tuesday, 18th April. May this special season draw us closer to the crucified and risen Lord Jesus.
Good Story? Bad Story? (+ Lynne’s Story)
What was it like for Paul in Ephesus? ‘Brilliant’ says Luke (see Acts 19). Paul sees followers of John the Baptist baptised in the Holy Spirit. False exorcists are soundly routed. People in the synagogue are persuaded by his arguments; then for two years he is a ‘public intellectual’ in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. The adjuncts of magic and false religion are destroyed; and when those who exploit them start a riot they are rebuked by the civic authorities. Paul departs (20:1) leaving a community of disciples and elders. When he subsequently recounts his experiences to the elders (20:17-38) it is story of faithful, sacrificial, intentional ministry, reciprocated by heartfelt, loving gratitude.
So, one more faith-strengthening episode in the word of God spreading out from Jerusalem, not least to the very heart of the Empire in Rome. How could Theophilus (Acts 1:1) not be impressed?
What was it like for Paul in Ephesus? ‘A nightmare’ says Paul. Writing to the Corinthians from Ephesus he describes fighting ‘with wild animals’ (1 Cor 15:32) – real animals in an arena? violent physical opponents? demonic forces? Whatever - ‘I die every day’ (v 31). Regardless of the precise nature of his enemies in Ephesus, he faced them along with the concurrent distress of hearing news of criticism, complaint and usurpation of his leadership in the church he founded in Corinth. In his biography of Paul Tom Wright suggests (pp 259-269) that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, and that the combination of ferocious mob hostility, the extreme physical deprivations of imprisonment and the crisis of his relationship with the church in Corinth led to a form of breakdown reflected in 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, or in the bleak account in 2 Cor 1:8 of ‘the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself’.
Thus, in the more intimate setting of a letter to a church, in contrast to a public-facing history, the emotional pain, contradictions and realities of evangelistic and pastoral ministry could be laid bare.
Do we tell a good story or a bad story? In a fascinating passage in Christopher Watkin’s ‘Biblical Critical Theory’ (pp 320-331 - this will not be my last reference to the book!) he writes of ‘the perspectival diversity’ of the Bible. Prompted by the markedly contrasting approaches of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, he then writes of the various ways in which scripture presents us with contrasting accounts: 1 & 2 Kings set against 1 & 2 Chronicles, the various gospel accounts, or (I would add) different evaluations of the Exodus in Jeremiah and Psalms such as 78. The multiplicity of different genre (as above, between history and letter) means that ‘when something is said differently, something different is said’ (p 329). The same period of Paul’s life hits the readers in quite different ways.
I want to apply the reality of telling different stories about the same underlying reality to the question of how we perceive, and more especially present ‘race’ in modern British society.
An appropriate starting point is the controversial Sewell Report of ‘The Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities’, which chose – against the mainstream academic perception of race in Britain – to tell a ‘good story’. Racism, the Commission argues, whilst unquestionably real, was by no means the only source of racial and ethnic disparities; rather Sewell also foregrounded social class, differences between ethnic groups and cultures, or British regions, as also being significant factors. Disparities, then, could not be unequivocally laid at the door of racism, including undefined and carelessly applied explanations focussing on systemic or institutional racism. Rather Sewell chose to produce considerable statistical evidence of other factors underlying racial disparities. As regards ‘race’, overall and certainly against the widely held consensus, we had a ‘good story’ to tell rather than a ‘bad story’. Sewell’s critics, as with the Runnymede Trust response, tended to simply itemise the disparities without engaging with a possible variety of causes, and instead majored on his neglect of people’s ‘lived experiences’ - it is here where the realities of the ‘bad stories’ are found.
My first exploration of the ‘good story’/’bad story’ contrast was in contrasting the stories of the sportspeople Emma Radecanu and Raheem Sterling (Blog # 45, 14/09/2021): both coming under the hopelessly capacious umbrella of UKME/GMH, yet from the starkly contrasting backgrounds of a wealthy, international global elite, and from a struggling, impoverished Jamaican migrant community.
More controversial have been the explorations of Britain’s colonial history, where incontestably ‘bad stories’ – not only enslavement in the Americas but also land appropriation, economic exploitation, violence and racial arrogance – have abounded, and rightly been circulated to significantly alter our national historical self-understanding. Yet nonetheless not only have those narratives often needed closer, historically detailed ethical nuancing – as in the analyses in Nigel Biggar’s controversial ‘Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning’ – but also the bigger picture holds ‘good stories’ of how colonial rule improved on what preceded it, or was accepted in various places for significant periods as beneficial, or followed (the juries are often still out) by post-colonial worse stories. (Next Tuesday’s lecture by Professor Martin Daunton, listed in the ‘Add Ons’ below is clearly very relevant here).
Telling a ‘good story’ about race in Britain today: the triumph of integration – ‘gradually, then suddenly’.
The phrase ‘gradually, then suddenly’ has been taken by the American writer Tanner Greer (originally from a Hemingway novel about becoming bankrupt!) to describe the social changes where a two-generation gradual build up of ideas and institutions suddenly transforms into startlingly rapid change (in his article ‘Culture Wars are Long Wars’).
I believe that well describes what has happened with race in Britain. Over the past half century there has been gradually growing opposition to racism. Suddenly the situation has changed quite astoundingly in much less than ten, or even less than five years. How long ago would it have been thinkable that the future of the United Kingdom would be in the hands of an Indian-background Hindu and a Pakistani-background Muslim? I would guess less than a year. (Some fifteen years ago, when working on the idea of a book about church and race I thought I would be very daring and suggest Britain might have an Indian woman Prime Minister by 2050!)
A quite different indicator of change has been the sudden ubiquity of Britain’s 3% black population in a large slice (majority?) of tv adverts (see Blog # 52 02/11/2021). Advertisers are paid to know what the British public want; suddenly the British public wants to see our society as harmoniously multi-ethnic rather than normatively white, though the ‘gradual’ build up was perceptible well over twenty years ago in the youth-orientated adverts for Pepsi or Benetton.
On a similar level of rapid change in sentiment, the public support three years ago for Capt Sir Tom Moore was dismissed by Rev Jarel Robinson-Brown as ‘the cult of White British Nationalism’. Today a surely very similar constituency is eager to pack out the funeral of the brown-skinned veteran RAF sergeant Peter Brown.
Of course, social change and mobility are not irreversible. Thirty years ago Britain had a Prime Minister who grew up in Brixton and an Archbishop who grew up in Dagenham; last year both offices were held by Old Etonians. Nonetheless, and whilst various qualifications may be needed, the last few years have seen the startlingly sudden establishment of a national consensus that we are a multi-ethnic society, that we are glad to be so, and have a commitment to seeing equality of opportunity.
Such a claim will be contested. In the USA the black You Tubers Glenn Loury and John McWhorter pour scorn on the mentality of those fellow blacks who continue to vainly argue as though the racism of the 1960s or 1970s still prevailed. Similarly in Britain the conservative writer Douglas Murray has described those who want to continue fighting yesterday’s battles as having the ‘St George in retirement syndrome’: having once killed the big dragon what is now left to you but to find ever smaller dragons to kill (in ‘The Madness of Crowds’ p 7). Thus the veteran black activist Gus John reacted to the sudden emergence of minority ethnic Conservative Cabinet members with what seems a bizarrely nostalgic longing to put himself back in the days of deep-rooted white supremacy, indeed even slavery, making the truculent observation ‘Why should I rejoice because massa has recruited a bunch of house negroes and handed them whips to keep me in bondage and under control?’
For in reality, overall a good story has been in the ascendant. Emphasising this has heuristic value, that is it provides a more positive way of seeing the world; it helps builds up momentum to seek an even better, more just world. It is antidote to a helpless and hopeless sense of passivity, and to the atrophying of a sense of agency. My sense is that this motivation lay in part behind the Sewell Commission’s intention to emphasise the ‘good story’.
In this respect, I think the Church of England is giving a misplaced ‘dismal’ story. Certainly repentance for past racism and exclusions is in order, but we have done ourselves and our faith an injustice in allowing this be seen as the dominant public face. In reality Anglican churches in urban areas are almost invariably ethnically mixed. The American gibe that 11am on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week simply doesn’t hold true in this country. Friends who have moved to parish churches in small villages report a warm welcome. We need to be foregrounding good stories.
Telling a ‘bad story’ about race in Britain: the experience of racial discrimination.
The Casey Report on the Metropolitan Police has revealed the persistence of institutional racism in the police. Almost a quarter century after the MacPherson Report exposed all the ways in which they failed to respond with professional competence to the murder of Stephen Lawrence, there is still a mind-set that disregards the worth of black people – how else could police officers not only photograph but also shamelessly circulate pictures of the two black women murdered at Barnhill, Wembley?
Even more startling and appalling was the Windrush scandal were the British government ‘repatriated’, or threatened to, long-standing, British-schooled, tax paying black citizens, showing an obdurate refusal to attend to the manifest injustice of the policy it implemented.
The disproportionate number of minority ethnic people dying from Covid was not directly racist in that it reflected their disproportionately high involvement in vulnerable occupations such as working in care homes or driving busses, but the disgraceful carelessness of the authorities in not taking rapid steps to provide adequate protection highlights a devaluing of people who work in occupations where ethnic minorities often form the majority.
For many black people in Britain these high-profile injustices resonate with their own ’lived experience’ of racism. (See Lynne’s Story below for one specific, historic example). The report of the somewhat right leaning Henry Jackson Society on ‘BLM: A Voice for Black Britain’ (summarised at Blog # 17, 25/02/2021) provided firm - though in various respects qualified – evidence of discontent, thus 58% of black respondents saw Britain as fundamentally racist. Whilst the lived experience of individuals can not be allowed to trump the perspective of more widely gathered evidence, nor can it be brushed aside. Christians, who are used to giving weight to personal testimony, need to hold in their minds and hearts the experience of those for whom life in Britain has been demeaning and embittering. Our commitment for justice as all people are made in God’s image, should give particularly sharpened eyes to notice and respond to bad stories of people suffering from racism.
Summary.
In considering race in Britain we need both to attend to the major currents in our society – which I have argued are generally positive; and to peoples’ ‘lived experience’ which often highlights injustice and mistreatment. Both need to be given their respective weight. Watkin writes: ‘Feelings are real feelings, experience is real experience, history is real history. But feelings are not real history, and history is not real experience. The Bible attends to different realities – emotional, experiential, historical – validating them all but not confusing them all. (p 328). This means it can overcome ‘the false dichotomy between reason and imagination that hamstrings much of modern Western thought’ (p 331). In various blogs I have had a Gradgrindian concern to focus on ‘facts’: statistics, percentages, history; information that often subverts the simplistic suggestion that our society is dominated by ‘white privilege’. But such ‘reason’, Watkin recognises, always risks lacking an emotional and imaginative engagement with the reality of peoples’ pain and suffering.
One example of ‘perspectival diversity’ that Christopher Watkin offers is the contrast between wisdom and prophecy – the book of Proverbs is alongside the king in giving wise advice on how to rule justly, the prophets often stand against the king upbraiding him for his injustices. ‘While the prophets repeatedly and forcefully denounce Israel’s disobedience in black and white terms, the wisdom literature takes a more diplomatic approach’ (Watkin, p 328). We need to be wary of both the cheap ‘prophetic’ luxury of standing on the sidelines issuing rebukes which cost us little; and of holding on to the comfort and respect that comes from ignoring, excusing or minimising grievous injustices. In multi-ethnic Britain we need to be cheer-leading for the remarkable progress that has been made towards fairness and unity; and we need to be rigorous in exposing racist behaviour and policies.
The purpose of ‘perspectival diversity’ is not to find a medium between opposing stories. Rather it is seeking to be honest to the situation we face and to give full weight to both the ‘good story’ and the ‘bad story’. Which one we choose to emphasise may depend partly on our context, and especially by praying for wisdom to know where and when to talk up one or the other; though it may well be that we need to emphasise one in some contexts, the other in a different context. But our hearts and minds need to be familiar with both stories. Perhaps, too, a contrarian spirit that leads us to focus on whichever emphasis is being most neglected at the moment helps provide a rough and ready guide.
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Lynne’s Story.
Earlier this year I was due to preach at a Week of Prayer for Christian Unity on the theme of ‘Who is my Neighbour?’, with a multi-ethnic focus. My instinctive response to the question put to Jesus would have been a dissertation on its theological, philosophical and sociological dimensions, followed by a few application bullet points. Instead, Jesus’ response to the question was to tell a story. So I decided to. Unfortunately, in the event I was unable to preach, but what follows is roughly what I would have said;
“I met Lynne’s son, Mark, when I became a vicar in Alperton in 1979. He was in our Pathfinder group: black, twelve years old, happy to enjoy life. Sadly, as was too often the case, he stopped coming in a year or two. It was well over a decade later when his mother, Lynne, started attending the church, brought along I assume by friends. Eventually it became apparent that over time she had found a strong, warm-hearted and very committed relationship with Jesus. She joined a training course for lay pastoral ministry. As part of the course, at a residential weekend, there was an extended period of quiet attentiveness to the Holy Spirit. Into Lynne’s mind came a memory from her early days here following migration from Jamaica. She was working at a Lyons Corner House (at the time a mid-range chain of restaurants). She had quite a responsible job as a supervisor, and at a supervisor’s meeting made a suggestion about improving their procedures. It went down like a lead balloon. A few weeks later a white colleague made a similar suggestion that was warmly received and rewarded, and effectively implemented.
In the session of prayer and meditation Lynne reflected on the experience and realised that the hurt of being rebuffed made her withdraw into herself, and over the following decades to avoid the humiliation of rejection by not stepping forward. Meanwhile, no doubt her white colleagues would have had a ready-made arsenal of responses to her experience -she had a chip on her shoulder, was over-sensitive, didn’t realise how things worked in Britain.
As a result Lyons Corner House lost out on receiving the input that an intelligent able woman like Lynne might have offered. She herself didn’t flourish as she might have done until her late discovery of faith. One can ruefully contemplate too of how the experience of a more vibrant, socially comfortable mother might have benefitted her children. As it was, her son Mark had become a crack cocaine addict, regularly stealing from her. (It was a privilege to journey with Lynne as Mark finally agreed to attend a Teen Challenge addiction centre, where he came to faith in Jesus and freedom from addiction). At Lynne’s funeral, one of her sons was referred to as ‘Bin Laden’ – no one ever knew where to find him! On one level that was amusing brotherly banter, but on another level it pointed up the anomic rootlessness that was an all-too-common tragic outcome for the children of the ‘Windrush generation’, resulting from the routine racism and rejection that their parents’ endured, and leading to an instability that hindered the formation of stable work routines and families, and secure, confident subsequent generations.
Much as we rejoice that the grace of the gospel brought a new birth of hope for Lynne and for Mark, the cumulative effects of the racism, rejection and humiliation that her generation endured, and which still persists, is a continuing ‘bad story’”.
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Add Ons
Decolonizing : Theology: Being Interrupted and Holy Anarchy – on-line event on Thursday 30thMarch from 19.00-2030. A curated conversation with Al Barrett, Graham Adams, Anthony Reddie and Ruth Harley. You are invited to listen in, ask questions and make contributions to this amazing panel discussion.
‘Who Benefitted from the British Empire’, lecture by Professor Martin Daunton, Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Cambridge, from Gresham College, on Tuesday 4th April at 6pm either live, on-line or subsequently on You Tube.