Raptured into the VIP lane

Remember John Nelson Darby, that very well-connected chap who came up with the idea of the godly being physically taken up into heaven in the Rapture when the End Times kick off? The Exclusive Brethren guy? Turns out the Exclusive Brethren are still a thing. And they're still extremely well-connected:

At least £180 million – and up to £300 million – in ventilator and PPE contracts appear to have been awarded to companies linked to an evangelical movement described as a “cult” by former members which has multiple ties to the Conservative Party, Byline Times can reveal.

The Exclusive Brethren is a subset of a Christian group, often described as Plymouth Brethren in the UK. It came to prominence after being investigated by the Charity Commission over whether it was delivering enough “public good” to maintain its charitable status.

The sect, whose members are subject to strict disciplinary practices, enjoys tax reliefs and rebates reportedly worth as much as £11 million a year.

 Byline Times

Apparently the movement has stayed true to its establishment roots and, ironically, these committed evangelical Christians are still doing their bit to ensure that the meek are as far from inheriting the earth as they ever were. It's also still a bit cultish, apparently.

The rapture of the elites

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here,* which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Matthew 16:28

In its original form, Christianity looks like a doomsday sect, rejecting the transient things of this world and scorning worldly power and riches, based on an explicit belief and expectation that the end of days, when the established order would be torn down and remade, was at hand. So don't accumulate wealth, don't even think about how you'll support yourself. God will provide. Consider the lilies. Sell all your stuff, give to the poor and come and follow me. The big guy upstairs gonna sock it to the Man and all you meek shall inherit the earth. 

Which sounds to me very much like the voices of alienated people keenly anticipating the destruction of an existing order that isn't doing it for them and which they're not invested in.

When The End Times self-evidently hadn't rolled around before all of those standing there had tasted of death, the belief system adapted itself, the millenarian elements retreating further into a more or less vaguely specified future. By the time Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire, the contempt for worldly splendour had been dialed down a lot and the faith had developed into a religion more palatable to those with various degrees of worldly wealth and power, not the exclusive preserve of aescetics who wanted to give it all away, embrace poverty and let the Lord provide until his imminent return.

None of this is particularly original, but it does point to an expected pattern - in general, you'd think millenarian religion and apocalyptic belief systems would appeal to the less powerful, to those with the least to lose, while more established religions and philosophies which have come to an accomodation with secular power would be more appealing to people who are more or less comforable and happy with their status and place in the existing hierarchy. 

 

In secular terms, you could almost see the proto-Christians as revolutionaries and the conventionally pious majority in the Christian Roman Empire and subsequent Christendom as conformists. I say almost, because the early Christians, unlike secular revolutionaries (and some other religious groups) weren't actively trying to engineer the downfall of the existing order. Not for them the credo of Auden's radicals:

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; 

To-day the expending of powers 

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

The overthrow of the established order was to be accomplished by God, not by Party cadres mobilising the masses.

 

We still have  people with a millenarian mindset, notably believers in The Rapture, who think that the End Times may be close at hand. In their belief system, true believers will be bodily teleported to heaven immediately before a seven-year period of strife and suffering called The Tribulation afflicts the sinful remainder of humanity. This time of troubles will end when Christ returns and establishes a thousand-year godly kingdom.

This is where the plot twist I wasn't expecting comes in. I would have expected a belief system like this to have originated with the marginalised and excluded, with people with no investment in the established order.

 

But then I happened across a radio programme** about John Nelson Darby who, I found out, was the guy who first came up with the idea of The Rapture.

 

Darby was very much not poor, marginalised or oppressed. He was born, in 1800, to a wealthy Anglo-Irish land owning (and castle-owning) family and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Dublin. An accomplished scholar and linguist, Darby won a gold medal on graduating in Classics in 1819. Influenced in his choice of career by an evangelical tutor at Trinity, Darby was ordained as a curate and, shortly thereafter, as a priest in the established Church of Ireland. And in case you think Darby wasn't already well-connected enough, he got his middle name from the Lord Nelson who was a family friend and Darby's godfather because of course he was.

As an evangelical and Bible scholar, Darby became unhappy with the established church, but not because it was too exclusive, or oppressive. For Darby, it wasn't unbending or exclusive enough. In particular he seems to have become disenchanted with an established church linked to a state which had already taken the first tiny baby steps towards Catholic emancipication,*** something which he saw as acts of state apostasy towards his Protestant faith.

 

Coming from the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency, people like Darby, his family and peers saw any extension of the rights of the Catholic majority as a personal threat to their own status in a zero sum power game. And legislative emancipation wasn't the only threat they saw - shortly before Darby was born, the certainties and confidence of the Ascendency were violently shaken by major uprising against British rule in Ireland, the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

 

It was an echo, on home soil, of the turmoil that people of Darby's class saw all around the world. The Irish rebels of 1798 had some support from the French, whose own revolution in 1789 had terrified the established elites of Europe. Going back to the American Revolution and forward to the Napoleonic Wars which had been raging in Darby's youth (when some had explicitly identified Napoleon with the Antichrist), it seemed to people who valued order, hierarchy and their personal stake in that hierarchy that the natural order of things was being violently upended. 

If state apostasy, violent revolution and globe-spanning wars weren't enough to put Darby into the frame of mind to contemplate the End Times, in 1819 a pro-reform rally was held in Birmingham, protesting about the fact that the city had no representative in Parliament, at a time when pocket boroughs with tiny populations and controlled by landowning interests returned members to Parliament. The same year authorities in Manchester put down a similar rally in the Peterloo Massacre. These sort of demands stuck people of Darby's class as an affront to the natural order.

 

Darby broke from the Church of Ireland and went on to devise the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture in which Christ will suddenly take up the true believers (but not members of what Darby regarded as an apostate established chuch and believers in false religions) into heaven, leaving the less godly down below to endure sufferings of The Tribulation. Darby first popularised these ideas in annual meetings of Bible students organised by his influential evangelical friend, Theodosia Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt. 

 

Darby was also a co-founder of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren, where his eschatological ideas gained some traction. When the movement later split into "Open" and "Exclusive" Brethren, Darby became the de facto leader of the Exclusive Brethren, who were also known as "Darbyites." In his later years Darby undertook missionary tours of America, where the idea of pre-tribulation rapture was took hold among members of various Protestant denominations including Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congregationalists.

 

It's a bit of a counter-intuitive origin story, but it is one that resonates in the current climate, where the recent big, noisy attempts to overturn the status quo, have been elite-led and profoundly reactionary in nature. The status anxiety of Darby and his class and their wish-fulfilment dream of seeing the decadent, apostate modern order smashed feels very familiar. As they say, "When you're privileged, equality feels like oppression."

 

Bonus piece of trivia: in 1875, a few years before Darby died, a wealthy couple from Leamington Spa, who had become converts to Darby's Exclusive Brethren, gave birth to a son. The father was particularly devout and became an itinerant preacher, reading a chapter of the Bible to his wife and son every day after breakfast. It's a remarkable testament to the  power of reverse psychology that the son was none other than Aleister Crowley, later to become the notorious black magician, occultist, self-styled "Great Beast" and "the wickedest man in the world."

 

 

*My italics. 

**BBC Radio 4's In Our Time (link to BBC Sounds here also on YouTube here, also available on Stitcher).

***e.g. the Roman Catholic Relief Acts of  1778 and 1791.

The eternal mystery of Piers Morgan

That noted public intellectual, Piers Morgan, recently posed an interesting question to Twitter.

Atheists can never say what was there before the Big Bang. They just say 'nothing' but they can't explain what 'nothing' actually is. No human brain can, which is why I believe in something that has superior powers to the human brain. 

OK, I was being sarcastic. His question itself isn't that interesting. Dara Ó Briain more or less answered it in a stand up session where he had a go at the sort of people who justify their supernatural beliefs by saying "But science doesn't know everything!" His response was something along the lines of "But science knows it doesn't know everything. That's why we still do science."

What is interesting is how Piers's statement challenges theology. Think about the logic here: "The human brain can't explain everything about the universe, so why should I accept your incomplete atheistic world view?" Yet Piers is happy to believe in a God who is supposedly beyond human understanding. So why should I believe theists who can't fully explain what "God" actually is?

At best it's a draw between two incomplete world views. I don't understand everything about the universe. You don't understand everything about God.

But the universe is the thing that we both agree exists.

The mystery of faith...

The placebo of the people

In the Nineteenth Century, when Marx decided that religion was the opium of the people, some variety of organised religion was the one stop shop for all of most peoples' religious and spiritual needs. Now that organised religion has lost a lot of its (sometimes coercive) power across the more prosperous areas of the world, we have a new distinction, with increasing numbers of people identifying as "spiritual, not religious."

I've never been very impressed with this formulation, but it's only just occurred to me how useful Marx's famous quote is for clarifying the difference between religion and spirituality.

The thing about opium is that it contains an active ingredient which has a real effect in the physical world. Likewise, religion, as opposed to spirituality, also produces real-world effects, whether you believe in it or not. People actually get off their backsides and congregate together on a specific day and go through a specific ritual. They raise actual money to support good causes, or to propagate their ideas, or to build/renovate churches, mosques or temples, or to educate/indoctrinate children.

Religion has, for good or ill, a presence in society and creates objectively real things, from community cohesion (and sometimes exclusion), to some pretty stunning buildings and music, all of which undeniably exist the real world.

Spirituality, in contrast, is one of those things that might work for you, if you believe in it. So if religion is the opium of the people, then spirituality is the placebo of the people.

A compulsory dip in the Sea of Faith

Here's a familiar Victorian lament about the decline of religious faith:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...

Why the decline? As any half-awake student of poetry, or the history of ideas, can tell you, it was Darwin wot done it. "In the third stanza, the sea is turned into the "Sea of Faith", which is a metaphor for a time ... when religion could still be experienced without the doubt that the modern ... age brought about through Darwinism, the Industrial revolution, Imperialism, a crisis in religion, etc."

And I agree with this analysis, as far as it goes. Even many educated people literally believed in the Biblical account of creation before Darwin. After Darwin, there's been such an inexorable decline that non-creationist Christian apologists now routinely claim that most pre-Darwin Christians never believed that the Genesis story was literally true (although contemporary evidence suggests to me that such apologists are just plain wrong).

The Darwin effect was amplified by Nineteenth Century German scholars like David Strauss abandoning the idea of "gospel truth" in favour of an analytical approach which tried to work out which bits of the sacred texts were probably factual history, in the sense we would understand it, and which bits we'd classify as myth, or fiction.

But there's an extra contributing factor which tends to get played down these days. When the Sea of Faith was at the full, you could be fined, or worse, for not going to church:

"Among other complaints made to me by prisoners, J. C. came forward, and stated, that he was placed in the Ecclesiastical Court, 310 and sentenced to pay a fine of 1s., and 14s. costs; that he had been in prison ten weeks, and had no means of paying, and hoped that a representation might be made of his case, or he must remain a prisoner for ever. Upon referring to this man's commitment, I find that he was summarily convicted before two magistrates, that on the of June, being the Lord's-day, called Sunday, in the township of—, did neglect to attend a church, or at some other place of religious worship, on the said day, he not having any reasonable excuse to be absent, and adjudged to forfeit and pay 1s., together with 14s. costs, and, in default, to be kept in prison until the said sums shall he paid. It appeared that the following number of persons had been committed for a similar offence, and been discharged upon payment of the fine and costs:—"

This account comes from evidence presented to the House of Commons in 1842 (a quarter of a century before Arnold's Dover Beach was published), in favour of repealing "certain acts of Elizabeth and James 1st, as inflicted penalties for the non-attendance on divine worship."

A fact worth remembering, whenever anybody makes the standard rhetorical contrast between the warm, simple faith of our forefathers and foremothers and the supposedly cold, calculating rationality of a less religiously-observant age. That simple faith was often encouraged by the simple threat of fines or, if you were too poor to pay a fine, prison.

Fidelis defensor

As noted by most of the commentariat, a lot has changed for Theresa May over the last year. But one thing has stayed the same:

Theresa May underlines Christian heritage in Christmas message

As I wrote in May:

There's something very regal about Theresa May these days. Regal in the specific sense of resembling the only UK monarch in my living memory, Elizabeth II. Years ago, I linked to an acute pen portrait of Our Dear Queen from a sadly now-inactive blog. Some of the parallels with our famously sphinx-like Prime Minister are striking:

Of course the monarchy can survive, or even flourish, when the monarch does a reasonable job, which in Elizabeth II's case has meant keeping her head down and never saying anything remotely interesting...she understands (unlike her eldest son) that a constitutional monarch is better seen than heard, and that the role consists in being rather than doing.
The present Queen may well be the most boring monarch in British history... She has been for sixty years a vacuum at the heart of the state. Anti-monarchists, like atheists, need something to get their teeth into. Just as it's easier to opposeMichele Bachmann's God than Giles Fraser's, it's easier to oppose a despot or a crowned fruitcake than Queen Elizabeth II... Where public affairs are concerned, the weight of inertia is typically huge. It certainly is in the case of the monarchy (or the NHS, or the BBC). Boring is good, or at least safe from too much scrutiny.
Heresy Corner

Dutiful about things that nobody in their right mind cares about any more, conventional, incurious, unimaginative, pious, platitudinous, out of touch with the world outside her privileged bubble, reassuringly dull, too bland to be objectionable, only there by historical accident, but still there for fear of something worse.

Yeah, I reckon I got that one about right.

My new favourite Christmas song

King of toys and hippopotamuses, full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus

He was born in a wonderful christmas tree

Run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run

Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run

Rudolph, run, run

Rudolf the new born King.

I think Mariah Carey has finally lost Christmas. From a festive post on Janelle Shane's Letting Neural Networks be Weird. Our seasonal Bible reading is taken from Psalm 10010111:

And the wild beasts of the field exult about the sheep of thine anger

Their heart shall be abundantly satisfied with frogs...

Won't somebody think of the Solstice(s)?

We're so used to people complaining about the commercialisation of Christmas that we're in danger of forgetting the colonisation of this solstice (and the other one) by Mammon. At this special time of year, remember that a solstice is about more than:

"affordable dental and vision plans for individuals and families" (Solstice Benefits Dental Vision and Life Insurance Plan)

"help[ing] Fortune 500 companies seize new opportunities through groundbreaking digital solutions" (Solstice innovation and emerging technology consultants)

"24 HOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE" (shouty Solstice Sunglasses)

"one of our more decorated ships at sea. From world-class staterooms to specialty restaurants" (the cruise ship Celebrity Solstice)

"cannabis growers in Seattle, Washington, for medical marijuana patients and legal recreational marijuana users" (Solstice Medical Marijuana)

"artisan-inspired cuisine in an elegant and relaxed setting" (Solstice Restaurant, Vermont - dress code smart casual, dining style casual elegant, it says here)

"Health Care is Broken - We Have the Solution" (the never knowingly under-hyped Solstice Health Weight-Loss Program)

"a core-based, all levels, family-friendly yoga, barre, and pilates studio with babysitting on-site" (another thing called Solstice)

Let us take a moment to amid all this busyness and commercial hurly-burly to reflect on the true meaning of solstice.

Axial tilt- it really is the reason for the season.

Just thank Jólner that there's no solstital equivalent of the "War on Christmas" - yet. Although in a world where the US Environmental Protection Agency is banned from using phrases like "evidence-based" and the Gove-leaning parts of UK have allegedly "had enough of experts", it might only be a matter of time before we have to give equal time to axial tilt deniers, claiming that the seasonal darkness is God's punishment for humans abandoning family values and no longer being horrible to gays and that the light only returns because people make amends to the deity by sending their kids to crib services.

My solstice wish is that that this new dark age turns out to be as much of an unreal fear as the "War on Christmas" is, so we can all can enjoy a cool Yule this solstice and for many solstices to come.

Furious celeb SLAMS Hull's Christmas trees as ISLAMIST PROPAGANDA

Any insufficient display of enthusiasm for things Christmas-related is usually cited, by members of the alt-right, as evidence for a mythical "war on Christmas" allegedly being waged by an improbable alliance of hard-line secularists and Islam's most inflexible God-botherers. The people behind this odd victim narrative have to get quite creative to come up with anything that looks like evidence for this apostate/heathenish plot (the zombie legend of Winterval, or subversive symbolism hiding on Starbucks coffee cups, among other outlandish claims), because of the overwhelming evidence that most people in the UK routinely celebrate Christmas without any fear of persecution.

Still, at least this means that if you do do something Christmassy, these silly people will get off your case, right? That must be what Hull City Council thought when they came up with the bright idea of decorating the anti-terror bollards around the city's Queen Victoria Square with Christmas trees. As a make-over, I think it works pretty well, but the local authority hadn't reckoned with the now-too-toxic-even-for-the-Daily Mail former reality star, Katie Hopkins, who tweeted, bizarrely:

"Do not use OUR symbols of hope to cover up for THEIR hate. Deport jihadi bastards."

Her (hastily-deleted) Twitter outburst is a useful way of reminding everybody else that there's obviously no pleasing these people, so there's absolutely no point in trying to appease, or reason, with them. Fortunately, now she's lost her soapbox at the Mail, it should be easier than ever to do the right thing and completely ignore Katie Hopkins and her incoherently ignorant opinions.

Inspirational spiritual quote of the day #3

Tbh I'm glad Christians kicked off and Greggs apologised for replacing Jesus with a sausage roll. No other religion would stand for that nonsense.

— Idealist (@ClinicallyLuxe) 15 November 2017

*goes to mass and eats Jesus, who the church has replaced with a small piece of bread*

As far as I know, Greggs' Advent calendars will still be going on sale in selected Greggs’ shops across the UK from Monday November 20. Available, while stocks last, at a price of £24 (RRP).

#1

#2

Inspirational spiritual quote of the day #2

“Calling the bishops spineless nerds and sycophantic half-wits is not going to encourage them to adopt your point of view.”

Benedictine monk, Dom Mark Patrick Hederman, OSB, former Abbot of Glenstal Abbey, County Limerick, addressing the annual meeting of the Association of Catholic Priests.

"And if I ever catch you using that sort of language, I'll kick your sorry arse into the middle of next week, Crilly", added Bishop Brennan...

#1 here

Santa Claus 2: This time it's Easter

So archaeologists may have found the last resting place of Saint Nicholas. Cue the inevitable headlines:

Santa Claus's tomb may have been uncovered beneath Turkish church 

Of course, the original Saint Nick had nothing to do with all that sleigh bells in the snow stuff. There is, however, another Saint Nicholas who would have looked far more at home in a winter wonderland, not to mention a winter palace, namely the sanctified Nicholas II, former Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know they'd canonised the old bugger until today, when I came across a mention of his sainthood in this article.* But sure enough, they did:

The canonization of the Romanovs was the elevation to sainthood of the last Imperial Family of Russia – Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei – by the Russian Orthodox Church. The family was killed by the Bolsheviks on 17 July 1918 at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg; the site of their execution is now beneath the altar of the Church on Blood. They are variously designated as new martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and as passion bearers by the church inside Russia.

The family was canonized on 1 November 1981 as new martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Their servants, who had been killed along with them, were also canonized.

Coming from a land of snow, ice and reindeer, Saint Nick II fits in rather better with the contemporary Santa mythos than his Turkish namesake, but the fit isn't exact. There really should be something about sacks of presents in there, too, but though the Romanovs were into extravagant gifting, it's a tough sell to make Easter eggs sound Christmassy, however much festive bling they're encrusted with.



*Or maybe I did know, but just forgot. Age-related memory loss, here I come!

Inspirational spiritual quote of the day

"My spiritual side took over and I kicked her in the face.”

Abdullah Cakiroglu, explaining how the sight of a 23-year-old nurse wearing shorts on a bus left him with no alternative but to attack her.

Fortunately,  the assault was captured on CCTV,  so Mr Cakiroglu will be able to continue his exploration of the ineffable during a spiritual retreat of three years and ten months, spent in the contemplative atmosphere of a Turkish prison cell.

The six children of Pope Jacob the First

The MP [Jacob Rees-Mogg] joked that as a Catholic male he is eligible to become Pope, and that if the holy ghost called upon him to do so "I will do my duty".

I guess they'll need to squeeze a few extra beds into the Papal Apartments to accommodate Jacob's wife, Helena de Chair, his six children, Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius, Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan, Peter Theodore Alphege, Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam, Mary Anne Charlotte Emma and Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher, along with their long-suffering nanny, Veronica Crook.

Although The Birmingham Mail assumed that Jacob Rees-Mogg was joking, it's also plausible that the obsessively Eurosceptic Catholic knows as little of the actual rules and procedures governing the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church as he does of those pertaining to the European Union. Which would explain the holy mess his lot are making of this Brexit malarkey.

Mind you, there are precedents, of sorts. There are passages in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, as well as in the Epistle to the Corinthians which suggest that Saint Peter was married, and Pope Honorius IV, who died in April 1287, was the last pope to have been married (albeit before he entered Holy Orders). Several pontiffs, most notoriously Alexander VI, are known to have fathered offspring, some of them while in office, so maybe the Moggster's right to consider a position even more elevated than leader of the Conservative Party.

Sorry, doggy, Calvin still prefers his stuffed tiger

No, not that Calvin:

Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? Not you. You are a dog who exhibits signs of total depravity, and has as yet failed to produce any outward symbols of the inward condition of grace. I begin to suspect that you, dog, are not a member of the elect. 

Unfortunately, Calvin died over three centuries too soon to fulfil his obvious vocation (judging the dog world's elect in the Crufts obedience competitions).



via

"I spit on your grave (more tea, vicar?)"

"Theresa May wades into 'Easter egg hunt' row despite apparently thin grasp of story

Intervention appears to ignore fact the word 'Easter' still appears on promotional material for the event and on the National Trust's website"

Interesting to see that Prime Minister Mayhem isn't confining herself to the European Union when it comes to stirring up a national sense of fact-free grievance. The word is that she's been radicalised by home-grown religious extremists. Some of the extremists' language has been quite disturbing:

The Church of England sparked the row, with Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu accusing Cadbury of "spitting on the grave" of its religious founder, Quaker John Cadbury, by removing references to Christianity's most sacred festival from the spring event.

Steady on, Your Grace! Maybe Elmer Fudd Amber Rudd should  have a word with YouTube and get them to take down this sort of hard-core Anglican material.

___________

Update

It's hard to believe that this could get any more stupid but, apparently, it can. There's one detail that the archbishop and the vicar's daughter seem to have overlooked. As one self-described "godless liberal" has pointed out, "Quakers don’t actually celebrate Easter."  And he's not wrong - at least according to this, from the "What do Quakers believe?" section of the Berkhamsted Quakers' website:

Holy Days
Quakers do not celebrate Christian festivals such as Easter and Christmas.

But please don't let that stop you lecturing the rest of us about the need for "religious literacy", Anglicans...

Literally anti-establishment

We in the Anglo-American world are constantly being pestered by over-privileged self-publicists waving their fake "anti-establishment" credentials in our faces, so top marks to the Norwegian parliament for literally socking it* to the establishment, by disestablishing the Church of Norway. I doubt whether this move will have many practical consequences, but it is at least a real thing, as opposed to a pseudo-event funded by tycoons and realised through media manipulation.

I'm not expecting anything quite so real to happen to our established church in Brexit-addled England any time soon, although some, more thoughtful, Anglicans, including the Archbishop of Canterbury,** admit that disestablishment might not be such a terrible thing.

One of the advantages of disestablishment would be to make thoughtless Anglicans seem slightly less embarrassing. I came across a good example of thoughtless Anglicanism this Christmas, when children from my son's school held a Christmas show with carols, songs and assorted readings at the local parish church. Just a normal primary school production for kids a bit too old for a nativity play.

It only got kind of embarrassing right at the end, when the new rector came forward to say how good the kids had been (which they had been - nothing wrong with that), then started gushing about how wonderful it was that they'd actually dared to mention Jesus, because too many schools these days, he alleged, are terrified to mention The Real Meaning of Christmas for fear of offending somebody.

It takes a extreme lack of self-awareness to come out with this sort of War on Christmas whinge when you're a cleric in the established church, presiding over a retelling of a specifically Christian story, which children and families of all faiths and none are expected to participate in as a matter of course. Sorry, Reverend, but Christians, and especially members of the Church of England, are not a persecuted minority in England. The head of your church is the head of state, your clerics get an automatic block of seats in the upper house of parliament, you have an extensive network of publicly-funded faith schools with which to indoctrinate young minds - that's not what a persecuted minority looks like.

What you are is a privileged minority and what you experience as oppression by political correctness is really just the steady erosion of your privileges. People don't leave Jesus out of Christmas because they're terrified of causing offence and falling foul of some humanist Gestapo. It's way simpler than that - most people just aren't that into Him. In fact, there's evidence to suggest that a lot of people never were.

If anybody's afraid of causing offence, it's non-believers like me. I could object to your incessant proselytising, I could decide not to sing carols containing words I don't believe in, or sit through a church service that doesn't reflect my beliefs, or object to attempts to indoctrinate my child. But I don't, partly because I'm generally too damn polite to go around upsetting people who do believe in this stuff (except when provoked beyond reason) and partly because I'm not so doctrinaire that I can't appreciate some of the trimmings of religion, like the music, the architecture and the words of the scripture and liturgy (at least when they're not being mangled in some tone-deaf primary school-language happy-clappy iteration).

There's nothing very dignified about pretending to be a persecuted victim when you're nothing of the sort, but at least if the C of E renounced its existing privileges, this sort of pretence would look slightly less ridiculous.

Although maybe a better solution would be for those clerics with a major persecution complex to leave the Church of England and take Jesus with them. They could then be left free to lecture anybody who cared to listen about how they'd totally be preaching to packed pews if only it wasn't for all this politically-correct fear of causing offence. Meanwhile, a network of buildings cleared of all those off-puttingly paranoid God-botherers might be a more attractive and welcoming place for people keen on the "religious, not spiritual" benefits of getting together with other members of their community and having a good old sing-song once a week. Who knows, it might even reverse the C of E's Incredible Shrinking Congregation problem.

If the Archbishop of Canterbury wants me to flesh out my radical plan for reviving the Church of England, he can contact me via the comments section of this blog...

Via


* OK, not literally hitting an establishment, but you know what I mean. Shut up.

** Ironic, considering that it's almost impossible to imagine a more establishment figure than Justin Welby, in every sense of the word.

PS - apologies for the incoherent fragment of this post which got inadvertently posted last night when I pressed "publish" instead of "save."

And some, I assume, are good people

Well, the Trumpocalypse didn't seem that likely back in September 2015, at least to me:

But if we want a meaningful measure of what a great wizard Oink Balloon is, we should define some goals beforehand. Here are three simple metrics to assess the success of Oink Balloon's alleged wizardry. In order of increasing improbability, 1. Oink Balloon becomes the Republican presidential candidate, 2. Oink Balloon is elected President, 3. Oink Balloon persuades the Mexican government to erect, at its own expense, a wall, chicken wire fence, or whatever, to stop its own citizens from trying to enter the Land of the Free and the Home of the Slightly Deranged (as it will be known, in the unlikely event that condition 2. is ever met). If Oink Balloon achieves any one of these, I'll concede that there's something here that requires explanation.

At least we're not short of explanations - there are almost too many. I'm mostly happy to go with the unoriginal theory that Trump happens when people realise they've been Fukuyama'd.

That's to say that Trumpism was an equal and opposite reaction to the self-congratulatory elite consensus that America had arrived at the End of History and discovered the best of all possible worlds, a proposition that probably didn't impress folk who hadn't seen a real wage rise in a generation and a half and were working harder, with less job security for their pittances, (assuming they were lucky enough to have a job, or the two or three jobs it takes many to make ends meet). In short, the left behind gave politics as usual a massive middle finger.

But that can't be the whole story. After all, it was Scott Adams who spent this election cycle telling us all that the tangerine huckster was a great and powerful wizard and Scott's had a very successful career, definitely not finding himself left behind (except by members of the reality-based community - he may have called the election, but Scott's Trump eulogies have had all the self-justifying craziness of The Donald's own 3am tweets). Scott, I think, falls partly into the entitled, mens' rights activist subset of Trump fandom, although there's a deeper level of psychological identification going on here, between a seriously needy guy, desperate to force the world to acknowledge his unique genius, and the alpha narcissist himself:

Finally the endless, orgiastically affirming victories (“The Master Persuader filter continues to predict with spooky accuracy”). Every time Trump wins, Adams wins, too—Trump is the giant crushing his rivals one by one; Adams is the genius who saw that he would do it.

Political correctness also played a part. Not the phony political correctness complained about by the various reactionary bigots who feel that they can't be truly free unless they're bullying and demeaning women/racial minorities/LGBT people/the disabled.

What I'm talking about is the actually existing form of political correctness in mainstream politics and the media, which defines what are - and aren't - "legitimate concerns." It is, apparently, "legitimate" to be concerned that foreigners are coming for your job, your job security, your services, your access to housing, or your culture. Your concerns, however, stop being legitimate as soon as you mention who's actually been hogging most of the pie in our increasingly unequal societies, while the rest of us have been scrabbling for crumbs - the super rich, the offshoring corporations and high net worth individuals who get to dodge paying tax, the bailed-out bankers, landlords, other rent-creamers and the rest. Start being concerned about what they've been up to and your concerns are delegitimised as whinging, or "the politics of envy."

Trump may have been spouting his toxic bigotry loud and proud, but it was the cynical mainstream press and politicos who handed him a loud hailer by framing such scapegoating as "legitimate concerns," just as they've done here in Brexit Britain.

The Trump/Brexit parallels are obvious and worrying but, before the polls, some people comforted themselves with the idea that America might not fall for the same bullshit, because it was a different place. Myself included - I re-posted the YouTube footage of Samantha Bee's horrified post-Brexit show, in which Samantha warned that it could happen in America but probably wouldn't, for two reasons that seemed plausible to me at the time:

1. Because America is more racially diverse than Britain, the blacks and Hispanics would come out strongly against Trump's open racism (which, in the end, they did, but not by enough to defeat the white Trumpists).
2. Because America, unlike Britain, has "a butt-ton of evangelical Christians" who couldn't possibly support anybody so horrifically incompatible with such core Christian values as humility and loving your neighbour as yourself.

OK, this second one seemed a bit counter-intuitive to me at first, given political Christians' past record of prioritising the preservation of America's traditional social norms over any of the sandal-wearing Nazarene's more hippyish notions about peace and love. But Samantha illustrated her point with a clip of a Southern Baptist preacher deftly brushing off a "ban the Muslims" bigot with the perfectly reasonable point that Christians should extend to others the same religious tolerance that they expect to enjoy themselves.

So I put aside my preconceptions and assumed that there really were a butt-ton of evangelicals who were way too nice to vote Trump, maybe socialised by the "religious, not spiritual" aspects of the church as family. I've got in-laws who've gone to an evangelical church for years and, though I don't share their beliefs, I know from first-hand experience that they're kind, generous, socially responsible people who have never shown the slightest hint of bigotry and put most of us to shame by any reasonable measure of good citizenship.

Sadly, the plural of anecdote is not data and when it came to the crunch, it seems as if over 80% of self-identified white evangelicals listened to every horrific word that proceeded out of the mouth of Trump and cried "Amen!" And some (around 16%), I assume, are good people.

Having failed to prophesy the coming of the Tangerine Antichrist, maybe I should quit while I'm behind here but, for what it's worth, here's my prediction about the remaining metric of Trump success. The useless wall may, or may not, get built now, but I'm still prepared to stick my neck out and say that Mexico won't be paying for it, at least in any sense of the word "paying" that a reasonable person would understand. That doesn't preclude the possibility that Trump will impose some wholly unrelated cost on Mexico - a Tequila tariff, or something - then turn round and boast "Look, I made them pay, just like I said I would!"

Burkini bedlam

After Trump and Brexit, along come the French to prove that these aren't just isolated aberrations - people all over the industrialised world are totally losing it.

This Burkini ban. Now I'm as secular as the next person (in fact, I'm quite likely to be more secular than the next, randomly-selected human). But this idea is just completely barking mad. Even if we put to one side the feelings and rights of people who have done nothing more antisocial than choosing atypical swimwear, what problem is this intervention supposed to solve?

Seriously - if "banning people from wearing full-length swimsuits to the beach" is the solution, what, in the name of sanity, is the problem? If Monsieur Lisnard had said something like "heatstroke" that would have sounded implausible, but still vaguely rational. Instead, he just shrugged his shoulders at reality and went full Trump:

The burkini is like a uniform, a symbol of Islamist extremism. This is why I am banning it for the summer.

"Like a uniform"? Yeah, that really makes sense. Because, now I come to think of it, when countries decide to celebrate the awesomeness of the motherland with a great big parade of people marching about in spiffy military uniforms, they always include  a 1970s Miss World-style swimwear section.

OK, they don't really. That snark was for comic effect, although I don't know why I bother when reality does comedy so much better, with classics like self-appointed defenders of the liberal,* secular state enforcing arbitrary dress codes with all the po-faced zeal of those morality police tasked with upholding conformity in such enlightened parts of the world as Saudi Arabia.




*"Liberal", in the sense of letting people get on with their lives unmolested, so long as they're doing no harm, as opposed to one of the definitions of "liberal" which involves some specific flavour of political economy.

The Anglican Rapid Rebuttal Unit

According to an article in the Graun, a study has concluded that "People of no religion outnumber Christians in England and Wales." So far, so unsurprising.

What was quite interesting was this prompt response from one of the Church of England's Spin Doctors of Divinity:

A spokesperson for the Church of England said: “The increase in those identifying as ‘no faith’ reflects a growing plurality in society rather than any increase in secularism or humanism. We do not have an increasingly secular society as much as a more agnostic one."

Like the Labour Party's pre-election Rapid Rebuttal Unit, the C of E's PR people were eager to get their response out there. The problem in this case, it seems to me, was the content, not the rapidity.

The conclusion of the study was clear and quite simple to grasp - overall, Christianity is declining in England and Wales and levels of unbelief are going up. But the Church of England's response was obscure and confusing. The difference between a secular society and an agnostic one might be clear to the person who prepared the C of E's response, but it isn't clear to me and I don't suppose it is to most people. For all practical purposes, these two types of society sound pretty much interchangeable. This is how the National Secular Society defines secularism:

Secularism is a principle that involves two basic propositions. The first is the strict separation of the state from religious institutions. The second is that people of different religions and beliefs are equal before the law.

As for agnosticism, well, it comes in all sorts of flavours, agnostic atheism, agnostic theism, total agnosticism and, my personal favourite, ignosticism. The one thing all of these outlooks have in common is an emphasis on uncertainty and a rejection of one-size-fits-all dogma. So it's hard to imagine an "agnostic society" that wouldn't necessarily be a secular one, in favour of stuff like freedom of thought and against ideas like privileging one belief system above all others (see "secularism" above).

Or was the Anglican spokesperson saying that the individual unbelievers who've apparently tipped the balance against Christianity are mostly agnostics, rather than atheists?  If so, did she or he have any figures, or other evidence, to support this belief? Or did it just feel like there had to be some way to argue that the unwelcome thing that looked as if it was increasing wasn't really increasing?

It looks to me as if the C of E spokesperson knew that the evidence for growing secularisation was unanswerable and was just trying to muddy the waters by creating a distracting distinction without a difference.

If only Labour's original Rapid Rebuttal Unit had the excuse that they were struggling to make a weak case against overwhelming evidence. Speaking as a broadly sympathetic non-party member, I'm astonished at the sheer brass neck of the Labour old guard, carping on about how Corbyn isn't getting a message out to the voters.

I seem to remember that when these people were in positions of power through five years of Con-Dem coalition, they had a Rapid Rebuttal Unit on tap and they had a strong, easy to understand, overwhelmingly-evidenced case to make. Namely, that the Global Financial Crisis was caused by the failure of those financial institutions which were in all the headlines when the government stepped in to bail them out on our behalf, while the Conservative counter-claim that everything was Gordon Brown's fault for overpaying nurses and librarians and that Lehman Brothers, RBS and the rest were just innocent bystanders, was obvious hogwash.

But despite their self-proclaimed political savvy, they failed to make anything of that case until the closing weeks of the election campaign, by which time the Conservatives' ridiculous hogwash had gone unchallenged for so long that it had assumed the status of a fact that most people believe in, despite the lack of evidence. That was bad enough, but you could taste the defeat when you listened to them literally begging to be forgiven for the original sin of overspending .

It's easy to mock the Anglicans' feeble attempt at rapid rebuttal, but at least it was rapid, if confused. It's harder to forgive the negligence of people with a far stronger case to make, who should have known better, but left their rebuttal far too late and made almost as big a hash of it. If the Labour old guard had made their case better, believers in the doctrine of austerity might be dwindling even more rapidly than the Anglicans.