Telling People What To Think

I'm cheating a bit today, for the sake of time, by just copying-and-pasting my think-piece for the parish newspaper - but it encapsulates some things that have been going through my mind lately. I was set thinking about this not just by events in the world as a whole, but also by reading Tom Wright's How God Became King which points out, inter alia, that the preferred political form in the Holy Scriptures is not representative government in any shape or form, but a theocratic monarchy, something which I might consider again.

"The church is closed for public worship at the moment; the PCC (the church council) has met a couple of times to consider what to do and as I write we have so far decided to wait until the public health situation is clearer before reopening. Back in March last year and then again in November the Government told places of worship to close, but this time it’s been our decision to take (though I would rather it wasn’t).

"There are churches that have stayed doggedly open as long as they have been able to, and are quite proud of having done so. A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who looks after a church in another part of the country that hasn’t shut. He saw it as a matter of principle and there hadn’t been any discussion about it. ‘We’re not a democracy!’ he told me.

"People often like being told what to do by someone who seems authoritative and confident – provided either that they’re being told to do what they agreed with anyway, or don’t have any strong feelings about the matter in question. The problem with democracy is that you don’t get everything you want, or when you want it. It requires negotiation and compromise, and recognising that the people you may disagree with aren’t simply going to go away: they’re always going to be there, and will probably always see things differently from you. Most of the time democracy is dull and undramatic, which is why every society, even ones where democratic systems have been in place for a long time, can head away from it surprisingly quickly. The trouble with handing over your public decision-making to a charismatic individual or group is that it starts to corrupt the things that protect our well-being. Accountability disappears. The powerful get greater scope to enrich themselves and their favourites, and to protect their interests with violence. If this relationship of money and power starts to affect the legal system it’s very dangerous: eventually nobody has any security of property or person. We need to keep remembering this because it’s so easy to forget it and to let it slip.

"Most British Christians are nice, liberal-minded people who will find this easy to agree with, and to imagine that God thinks the same. But, if he does, it’s not because he is a nice, liberal-minded Western person. It’s because he cares about what happens to the poor and the weak (he tells us often enough in the Bible) and a free society is the best protection the poor and the weak have against the powerful and the rich. 

"I recently heard an American historian commenting on the state of democracy in the USA, and the spread of conspiracy theories and strange ideas. He thought a vigorous local media was one of the best protections against these things. Now, this publication doesn’t really deal with news so we’re not a major element in that! But I hope we help, from time to time, with the absolute basis of a free society – exchanging and listening to the experiences of different sorts of people, and understanding the truth about others’ lives rather than the fictions we might otherwise swallow. And that’s certainly what God wants, and is a bit of an adventure, and not boring at all."