Omerta

There is an Area Dean in the church-set TV comedy series Rev, but she has a minor role next to waspish Archdeacon Robert, who turns up at the vicarage almost every week to patronise Fr Adam Smallbone and tip his coffee into the sink. And yet thanks to the horrible scandal of David Tudor the phrase ‘Area Dean’ is all over the place: he was a ‘senior priest’, say the news reports, ‘in charge of twelve parishes’ in the Chelmsford diocese. Well, says anyone who knows anything about how the Church of England works, Yes and No.

An Area Dean is a bit of a dogsbody. You don’t get paid to do it, but generally you do the job alongside your parochial duties: someone who isn’t a parish priest can technically be an Area Dean, but it’s uncommon. They act as a conduit for information between the local clergy and the diocese, and have a pastoral brief over those clergy. It’s a task nobody generally wants, because we’re all busy enough, thank you, and yet everyone likes to be asked, because it shows that the bishop and your colleagues have enough confidence in you to think that you’d be good at it. Or at least no worse than anyone else available.

But appointing the Area Dean in a deanery is very much the bishop’s initiative. Which is why, in David Tudor’s case, it not only baffles that Stephen Cottrell, as Bishop of Chelmsford, kept re-enlisting him to do it when he, Tudor, was subject to a safeguarding order, but that he was ever asked to do it in the first place. Just like Stephen Cottrell, his predecessor John Gladwin would have been perfectly aware of the restrictions Mr Tudor had had placed on his ministry some months before he was appointed in 2008: why did that happen at all? How could the bishop, whichever bishop, really believe that being subject to a safeguarding order didn’t make a difference to David Tudor’s ability to carry out this extra duty? Today, clergy in a Deanery – and their Parish Safeguarding Officers – would have been told that one of their number wasn’t allowed to be alone with children, but this clearly wasn’t the case in Chelmsford Diocese in 2008. Or maybe they were told, and decided not to believe it, a habit which crops up in many of these depressing narratives.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether institutions that are seduced by abusers or the bishops who make mistakes in dealing with them are liberal or conservative, evangelical or catholic; instead the real conflict is between openness and secrecy. Priests get used to keeping confidences, for very good reasons, but perhaps the habit tends to extend into areas it very much should not. The next step is to imagine that keeping the secrets makes you important, and that only you have the wisdom to deal with them in the right way. You picture yourself as one of a special cadre defined by the secrets they keep. That's above the non-existent pay grade of an Area Dean: that's bishop territory. 

Unedifying Accounts

The latest Anglican safeguarding scandal to come to public attention depresses in the same way any other has, though it carries its own special quality with it, apparently coming close to closing an entire cathedral in an attempt to get rid of one residentiary canon. The current Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North – as redoubtably Anglo-Catholic as his predecessor Julian Henderson was a conservative Evangelical – blames it all on the outmoded structures of the Church, though there do seem to be other factors at play. I raise an eyebrow when anonymous sources complain of the ‘absolute power’ Canon Hindley exercised at the Cathedral – I’ve never met a member of any cathedral staff who felt they had the slightest influence over their colleagues at all – but when you hear that a judge concluded he had assaulted a man, but nothing was done because nobody could be sure the victim was underage, you do gape a bit.

It takes me back a few weeks when my Antipodean regular reader and correspondent Dr Wellington asked me whether I’d come across the older scandal in the Diocese of London, where the one-time diocesan ‘fixer’ and Head of Operations Martin Sargeant had been convicted of fraud. Yes I had, I replied, and my interest was more than it might usually have been because when the miscreant’s name was first reported I’d realised I’d been to school with him. Within the outline of the middle-aged bloke in the pictures I could just about glimpse the teenage boy I remembered from Bournemouth: you didn't believe much of what he told you even then.

Part of Mr Sargeant’s story involved a now-infamous debrief with the Archdeacon of London when the former left his diocesan post in which he delivered what was described as a ‘brain-dump’ of what he claimed to know about London’s clergy. We now know that this was a compendium of gossip and personal bile with very little truth to it, but the Diocese treated it as positive allegations of abusive behaviour that had to be followed up. The typical Church of England habits of secrecy and inefficiency kicked into motion and one result was the suicide of Fr Alan Griffin who spent a year being investigated for crimes that were never made known to him, and which, the coroner who examined his death decided, ‘were supported by no complainant, no witness, and no accuser’.

It struck me that given our current, and completely understandable, safeguarding culture, it’s hard to stop this happening. We are all taught that any allegation must be reported and followed up: it rests with others to decide what is to be done next. What if, as seems to have happened in London, everyone in the chain feels they dare not be the one who says, ‘this is just poisonous gossip and we will take it no further’?

The integrity of the local safeguarding team is presumably crucial. I have had a case which ours regarded as less serious than I did, and it turned out they were right. On the other hand, I know someone against whom an allegation was made many years ago, then withdrawn (in neither case by the supposed victim, who maintained nothing had happened) and, when the priest demanded in a meeting with the bishop and the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser the right to begin the long, difficult process of having the matter expunged from his record, was told by the DSA that as far as she was concerned he was guilty no matter what anyone said, and implied that him being ‘obviously a homosexual’ was proof of paedophilia. The bishop, my informant said, ‘went white’ and insisted on dissociating himself from the remark (I can mention this as all concerned are long gone).

At theological college I once found myself marvelling at the ability of the kitchen to both overcook and undercook rice at the same time, and the CofE’s safeguarding practice seems caught in the same place, at once hopelessly lax and unacceptably hypervigilant. The answer, as so many voices say, is simply to bring the police in whenever any allegation is made, like every other organisation. Why, yet again, should we imagine we’re so special?

Disgusted Of

'Never read the comments' is of course sound advice in almost any corner of the Internet (not here as all the comments are informative and kind). So I can't recall what led me to take note of some letter to the Telegraph lately in which a gentleman in where else but Tunbridge Wells opined in the following terms:

SIR – Although there are social and demographic reasons for the Church of England’s decline, a major contributory factor must be finance. The wasteful pursuit of woke causes by both the central Church and dioceses, as well as the unnecessarily large number of bishops, are putting huge burdens on the parishes. ... It is not clear to me why there are nearly twice as many now as there were 200 years ago, and four times as many bishops, while the number of parish clergy has fallen by three quarters.

As soon as anyone denounces 'woke causes' their views should very largely be put carefully to one side, but apart from that I bring this up only to mention that I don't recognise any of this picture. I'm not sure about the decline in numbers of parish clergy, but there are about 13,000 ordained people in current ministerial roles (as opposed to retired priests still doing stuff) and just over 100 bishops, which doesn't seem all that top-heavy a structure. And bishops don't really cost all that much either, certainly not enough for cutting their numbers by, say, half to make any material difference to the funding of the Church of England. I have questions as to what bishops do - at least ours, who we barely see from one year to the next - but there's little reason to think that their existence is pulling the rest of the structure down. I also struggle to think of a single 'woke cause' that might be imposing any burden on the parish of Swanvale Halt. Race, sexuality and gender identity - no, there's absolutely nothing that our diocese has demanded we campaign on or develop a position about. I think the hearing aid clinic run by Sally our Pastoral Assistant is the closest I can come up with. Special treatment for the hard of hearing? It's political correctness gone mad!

Christmas Revival

As Christmas approaches there is often a spate of journalistic comment about religion that doesn’t necessarily bear on the season, but on the state of Christianity as a whole. Dr Abacus recently called the attention of myself and other clergy he knows to a piece for the FT by Camilla Cavendish, about the benefits of religious observance, while in The Scotsman Tory leader in Scotland Murdo Fraser tilts at the long-toppled windmill of Dr Richard Dawkins to allege ‘early signs of a Christian revival’ in the UK. I thought both were a bit questionable. Baroness Cavendish describes herself as an unbeliever but prescribes religion for personal wellbeing, while Mr Fraser, while also declaring Christianity’s utility in answering what he reports as Nicky Gumbel’s summary of human needs – ‘to be loved, to have a purpose, to belong’ – adds to them its role in underpinning 'Western values', basically roping God into culture-war discourse. His description of Christianity’s ‘inspiring message of hope and light’ rings every bit as hollow and unconvincing as you might predict. I’d never dream of using arguments like this. The first amounts to ‘come to church and you might feel a bit better’, while the second translates as ‘come to church and together we can stop the Muslims’. Never satisfied, me.

Meanwhile over on Radio 4 we have a somewhat more rewarding and intellectually hard-edged diatribe from Will Self:

It’s precisely in order to hear [these ultimate questions] posed that I attend church services of all denominations, and ones in mosques, ashrams, gudwaras, and synagogues as well. Other non-believers may go for aesthetic reasons, and especially at this time of year, for a live enactment of some Christmassy reverie; I go, as I say, to test the mettle of my own understanding of my self, and its relation to others and the world, and for this to work for me, I require a sermon! Often, I’ll find the sermon in the established churches so woefully bad I have to restrain myself from heckling. It’s not just a matter of banal popular cultural references, it’s the reduction of the majesty and awe that should be associated with this extraordinary belief system to a kind of weak humanist jus.

… which all acts as some sort of cautionary warning as I compose the five sermons I will preach across Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, just in case someone like Will Self is there, ‘believing that any sermon I hear could be the one that triggers some profound conversion experience’. At least he was mildly approving, despite one throwaway reference to Nigel Farage, of what he heard ‘on Advent Sunday as I sat with about forty others in the exquisitely beautiful St Jude’s-on-the-Hill’, preached by, as it turns out, Revd Emily Kolltveit, former Mediaeval Baebe and leader of symphonic-metal band Pythia before she caught religion. I wonder what sermon got to her.

Nouveau, Arabesque, Gothic

Time ticks on and the next Goth Walk approaches fast: on Thursday I traced the route, discovering that we would be going past the houses of both Noel Coward and Bram Stoker: now what a double-act that would have been. We will (all being well) finish at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, the one-time home of Ruth Baldwin. Socialite and prodigious drug-taker, Ruth was the girlfriend of heiress and motorboat racer Marion 'Joe' Carstairs, and died from an overdose in the flat of Oscar Wilde's neice Dolly in 1937. I didn't realise the house would look like this: built in 1913 for a Danish aristocrat and stained-glass designer, it's a startling block of Art Nouveau sensibility in a Bohemian portion of London. It's not the only example in the streets nearby, either.

I had enough time to return, after an initial visit twenty years ago, to Leighton House in Kensington, reacquainting myself with its startling neo-Moorish decor. Frederic Lord Leighton's actual art was superb and empty, its classical dullness enough to make me forgive Watts who at least put some soul in his soporific allegories; but his house is another matter, a tiled jewel. Nobody at all mentions the great green-painted iron girders and pillars to its rear, which are just as striking in their own way. 

On the Tube back home I found myself sitting next to a gent who was flicking through what I later discovered was ES, the Evening Standard magazine. He wasn't interested in an interview with Marina Abramovic, and eventually settled on a piece about holidays in Greece, but not before passing a series of photos of young people in what seemed like Gothic outfits. What was it? The paper exhausted the fellow's interest and he stuck it behind him, but although I tried to attract his attention before I left the train to see if I could have it, he was embroiled in Candy Crush and big headphones and so I abandoned the attempt. It was only through a friend that I found out the ES was profiling Slimelight, the veteran Goth club in Islington, and the whole article is on Slimelight's Instagram. It's gratifying to have such favourable coverage, though it does rather give the impression that Goth fashion has been taken over by a fetish aesthetic which, though it does seem quite prominent at the moment (rather like Steampunk was a few years ago and Cyber a few before that), isn't completely hegemonic.

Radio Vicaring

It may be - I forget - that the Reverend Alan Franks has been vicar of St Stephen's, Ambridge (and its linked parishes which The Archers refers to but never covers, for even longer than I've been at Swanvale Halt. This would be unusual but it fits with the way the Church of England in the show works. The local diocesan, the Bishop of Felpersham, appears so occasionally that it took a while for the writers to realise it was stretching credulity for the Rt Rev Cyril Hood to occupy the position for nearly 30 years as they dragged the same actor, Peter Howell, back in to the studio every time they needed episcopal input. Bishop Cyril would have been about 90 by the time he retired, and that's even older than Eric Kemp.

A few days ago Revd Franks was confronted with the appalling Rob Titchener asking to be baptised. Even though Mrs Vicarage Usha saw this instantly as one of Rob's mind-games, one can understand Alan (who's only spoken to the wretched man a couple of times) feeling obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even he could see the ructions that baptising Rob might cause among the other members of his flock who he had deceived and harmed, yet it took his wife to remind him that he had a responsibility to protect them. To any of us who might imagine ourselves in a similar position the answer was blindingly obvious: to get a neighbouring colleague to deal with the matter. In reality people move around between parishes for baptisms all the time because they have pre-existing links with this or that church (or occasionally because a church makes demands on the families of baptizands that are simply impractical, and are sometimes designed to be). We all accept this happens and the polite thing is to inform the home parish when it does; it's no big deal. But Revd Franks tied himself up in emotional knots before calling the Bishop who told him to do what anyone else would already have decided days ago.

Alan Franks, it seems to me, invariably gives the impression of being hunted around his parish and always wanting to be somewhere other than where he is, and talking to anyone other than the person in front of him. It was understandable that he didn't want to speak to the dreadful Titchener, his brother, or anyone else who wanted to refer to the matter, but unless he's beaming pacifically at people leaving the church on a Sunday morning Alan never seems to want to talk to anyone. While all this was going on he got into a conversation with another character about ghosts which he clearly couldn't wait to escape from. This is odd because he seems able to come up with quite concise and convincing answers to questions in a far more ready manner than I ever can. A parish priest, it's true, spends a certain amount of time talking to people they'd rather not, but most of us I think learn quite quickly never, ever to let our impatience show on the surface because anyone other than the thickest-skinned souls will be very hurt by it. Perhaps the Vicar of Ambridge just isn't having much fun and needs to move on. I wonder when his next Ministerial Review is? Mine's next month.

To Bury Caesar

Fr Donald the ex-hospital chaplain was very exercised the other day about The Times's scraped-together survey of Anglican clergy who were, to a person it seemed or was made to seem, exhausted, despairing, and convinced the UK can no longer be described as a Christian country in any sense of the term. 'Just selling newspapers', he fumed, though why the paper should have thought what the Anglican clergy think about themselves or anything else is a matter anyone outside the Church of England should be interested in, I'm not sure. I don't feel particularly overworked and I suspect my moments of despair are to do with my deplorable character rather than my circumstances, but the state of the nation's faith is nothing more than obvious: unbelief triumphant, it seems.

In the Co-Op that evening I met Ella the Rainbows unit leader who runs an engineering business with her husband in town, who described a work event - and I can't recall the context, it must have been rather specific - in which it became apparent that 'our millennial junior staff' didn't know who Julius Caesar was. 'Wasn't he sort of a Roman?' was the closest any of them got. I tried the question on the young lads who I turfed out of the church porch when I locked up this afternoon, and they looked at me blankly. Clearly no point advancing any further into Classical history there. 

Now, lay to one side my feelings about my priestly ministry - as a historian I find the idea that young people don't know who Julius Caesar was deeply depressing. We live in a time in which vast areas of human knowledge and experience are there for the looking-up, easily available in almost everyone's home - in almost everyone's hand, for heaven's sake - and yet very, very basic things that frame the mental landscape of humanity are mysteries.

Could it be, then, that the advance of unbelief in the modern West is not due to increased human knowledge, but the lack of it? I was reluctant to accept it, but perhaps it's the case. Atheists might fondly imagine that millions are disconnecting from religion and religious awareness because they have taken conscious decisions to do so, analysing the claims of faith and finding them wanting, whereas in fact they're just falling into line with the people around them. A triumph, not of progress, but of ignorance.

Is There Anybody There?

My science-fiction enthusiasms are limited and lie elsewhere, so I never got into the BBC comedy series Red Dwarf. I did read one of the books, though (I can’t quite remember how I was in a position to do so) and was struck by the fact that in the story there are no aliens. Obnoxious former spaceship maintenance technician Rimmer, reduced to a virtual existence as a hologram, dreams of one day encountering aliens who will have the technology to restore his body, but he is doomed to disappointment as the somewhat bleak narrative insists that life was a one-off terrestrial accident, and all the races the Red Dwarf crew meet are evolved from Earth creatures. Gradually the truth becomes clear, even while Rimmer refuses to accept it.

I suspect that life is indeed unique to this planet, but I might be about to be proved wrong. On Sunday the BBC carried reports of the US Congress investigative sessions looking into Unidentified Aerial Phemonena, UAPs, as UFOs are now generally known having undergone a rebranding. The committee had been hearing from David Grusch, a former senior military intelligence officer who claims – while not having seen the evidence directly himself – that for some decades, according to many officials he had spoken to, the US military has been in possession of alien technology and ‘non-human biologics’. The congressmen and -women seemed to be trying deliberately to remain sober and unexcitable at this startling claim, The World This Weekend averred. Why should we believe Mr Grusch? Jim Naughtie asked US journalist and writer on UAPs Leslie Kean; ‘not only have I spoken to him about this’, she said, ‘but to others off the record, and they all told me exactly the same thing’. And there, somewhat frustratingly, the news show left it.

If any of this has substance, the question arises as to why everyone involved has kept quiet about it for so long. To all appearances, alien technology doesn’t seem to have made its way into US military hardware, so it doesn’t seem that there are secrets of that sort which have been guarded to keep them away from the States’ enemies. I’m also unconvinced by the picture we seem to have that cities will be full of people running around screaming the moment it becomes clear that there are aliens: ‘the government keeps it quiet to avoid panic’. In fact most people seem to accept the argument that the universe is so vast that there must logically be life out there somewhere, so it would seem bizarre to be thrown into hysteria by having this belief confirmed. If the aliens are technologically advanced enough to have reached Earth (and then crashed), presumably they could destroy us already if they wanted to, so that doesn’t seem worth worrying about either. In fact, the sheer unlikelihood of so big a secret being kept for decades is, for me, the strongest argument that there isn’t a secret at all.

The Christian religion is absolutely Earth-centric: ‘in the fullness of time you made us, the crown of all creation’, one of the Common Worship communion prayers goes, echoing the language of Psalm 8. It will take quite some readjustment to cope with a sudden expansion of the horizons of life beyond the bounds of this small globe, to shapes and forms that possibly won’t resemble us and our understandings at all. I have no doubt that we can do it, given flexibility and imagination, and come up with some explanation for the eternal and universal God choosing this one miniscule corner of the Milky Way to be incarnate that might, perhaps, make sense to a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. Perhaps the time is approaching when we will have to.

And All The People Rejoiced

'We do pageantry better than anyone else', you often hear as a verdict on royal spectaculars, and it would be churlish to reply to anyone who might say so that you might rather we did cancer screening better than anyone else. We never used to, of course. Struck by how magnificent and simultaneously manipulating Handel's Zadok the Priest is, I looked it up and discovered that when it was first performed at George II's Coronation in 1727, the Westminster Abbey choir got it in the wrong place, having forgotten to sing one anthem completely, and mangled another so badly that the choristers couldn't finish anywhere near together. Famously at George IV's Coronation his estranged Queen Caroline ran round the Abbey knocking the doors and shouting to be let in, while Queen Victoria had the ring jammed on the wrong finger before the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to hand her the orb when she'd already had it. 

So we might legitimately ask when we began to do it better than anyone else, and why. Even at Edward VII's Coronation (which had to be delayed after the King fell badly ill) the Archbishop put the crown on the monarch back to front, but it was around that time that royal events became carefully-managed spectacles that aimed at perfection. This must have been for two reasons. Before the early 1900s, the only way of recording Coronations would have been in paintings and prints, rather than photos and film, and ritual howlers could be safely erased. Secondly, they only matter when the audience isn't the aristocrats and grandees for whom the ritual was originally devised, who know what to expect, but the mass of the population. Errors and blunders may lead them to find their betters ridiculous, and learn to hold them in contempt, whereas the point of the thing is that they should become accustomed to revere them. Because no matter how fine a person Charles III may be, and however much he may believe the moving words about service and humility embedded in his oaths, the institution he embodies locks together and renders more palatable the way things are. It makes them look eternal and natural, and at the same time as it radiates 'history', it obscures the actual historical processes which have led to our current moment.

Some lovely musical moments, especially, aside, I found the Coronation service looked curiously cheap. This sounds like an absurd thing to say given how expensive we know it all is, but the merciless clarity of television made it look like The Mikado done by a ropey travelling theatre. Take the Crown of St Edward, a lavish, grandiose, charismatic object if ever there was one. Under the camera it might as well have been plastic. As it was, it rested on the head of a tired elderly gentleman who very clearly was anxious it didn't fall off (a reasonable worry as he apparently isn't allowed to touch it). Even for me it was hard to discern the mystical action of the Holy Spirit in this.

I wonder whether the issue is to do with what we expect. Any liturgical function has to work with the human as well as the inanimate material to hand, and I think we may have come to expect that such events should be managed by movie directors and carried out by beautiful or at least impressive thesps. Everything should look like Game of Thrones, and it just can't. The basic bonkersness of the whole thing becomes unavoidable, and it will interesting to see what long-term effect seeing it all will have. 

In the same way, watching a eucharist online is a strangely weird and unaffecting experience even if it's done perfectly. You are supposed to be there - and a Coronation is designed for those present too. But the British establishment wants it to be a moment when they can persuade the whole population to buy into their continued dominance. Can it do so the next time round?

Stretching Credulity

Here's another in our occasional series 'Media Misrepresentations of Clergy and Churchy Stuff' and given the last post it's a coincidence that it comes courtesy of a TV drama scripted by former Dr Who  showrunner Steven Moffat and starring David Tennant, having a break in between stints portraying the good Doctor themselves. Not having a TV licence I have no option of watching Inside Man as broadcast, and judging by the reviews I am not much inclined to seek it out. The story begins as parish priest Harry Watling agrees to look after a memory stick from a parishioner who wants to hide it from their mother. His son's tutor ends up looking at it, finds it contains child porn, the vicar's son claims it's his without knowing what's on it, and his father knocks the tutor over the head and locks her in his cellar while he works out what to do next. Needless to say, this is not a wise move. What's more, he does this not to protect his son, but the parishioner who gives him the USB stick because he claims he has a duty of care to a vulnerable person. Several reviewers have pointed out how weird and unrealistic the whole show is. I will merely observe that Rev Watling has somehow managed to avoid the umpteen and endless safeguarding courses that all the rest of us have had to go on over recent years which lay out in pitiless detail what we are supposed to do whenever anything remotely like this comes our way. The procedure is roughly:

1. Break out in a cold sweat

2. If you are in a safe place, such as your parsonage, run around screaming

3. Call the Diocesan Safeguarding Department and gabble an incoherent explanation

4. Do what they tell you

5. DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE LIKE LOCKING PEOPLE IN YOUR CELLAR

That this drama has come out at the same time as the Church of England's Past Cases Review is especially ironic, as it's clearly written by someone who doesn't know how we now all have safeguarding processes positively riveted into our heads by those responsible. Perhaps Mr Moffatt should have conversed with his fellow Dr Who writer Paul Cornell, who's married to the Vicar of Fairford. Nothing like having a clerical consultant on hand.

Move Along Now

Well, I was disappointed. From the descriptions ahead of the event, I really thought the Lord Chamberlain was literally going to snap a ceremonial white rod over his knee at the Queen’s funeral and lay it on her coffin, whereas what he actually carried was a plain wooden stick somewhat less charismatic than a snooker cue and which just clicked apart with the slightest touch. How undramatic.

There was something to offend everyone within the space of ten minutes on the World Service this afternoon. Rob Watson’s statement that the monarchy makes British people ‘think, Our history is pretty cool’ might be taken as an insult to all the many victims of that history, but it was a matter of opinion. When, however, he went on to say that ‘a head of government and a head of state were changed in 3 days with the minimum of fuss’ he neatly glossed over the fact that changing the head of government took months of the ruling party arguing with itself, and then that new head of government being selected by a tiny group of party members without reference to anyone else; and that it would never have happened in the first place without the previous incumbent’s trashing of truth, the law, and the constitution. Pretty cool, all that. He was followed by Professor Alice Hunt from Southampton University, who topped her comment that the Coronation would be ‘the only ceremony that has any constitutional standing’ (OK, so Edward VIII was never really king and the many Acts of Parliament he signed were invalid) with the breathtaking insistence, speaking for the late Queen and the whole nation, that ‘nobody really believes that there is a divine being at work here, and yet that is what the Coronation will say’. Where does the BBC get these people from? Southampton University, apparently.

I pondered my own reaction. I don't feel emotionally involved in the Queen's passing, though I appreciate the emotions of those who are, and in fact it's those who affect me. I don't feel watching a TV programme is 'taking part in history', and I deal with death and life every day so I don't need more meditations on mortality. And yet, even I could hardly fail to be affected by the pipes and drums, especially when the pipes, at least, were at a safe distance. When the jabbering commentators straining to find something meaningful to say fell silent it was even moving, not least because inside that grand coffin draped in the royal standard was the body of a tiny old lady: ‘if she gets any smaller, she’ll disappear completely’, S.D. said to me the last time we met – but he was friendlier with the late Queen Mother, it has to be said.

At Swanvale Halt, we had just enough big candles to keep the memorial to the Queen illuminated until today was passed. In the short commemoration we kept at the end of mass on the 11^th I used the Kontakion, so it was pleasing to hear it in the committal service today; and because His Grace of Hornington was on holiday I ended up reading prayers at the local Accession Proclamation alongside our republican Mayor. I hadn't intended to do anything else: I watched in increasing incredulity the goings-on at Fr Thesis’s church in London where it seems nothing has been celebrated but Requiem Masses for the Queen since her death, and pondered dropping him a line to remind him he was allowed to do something else. But in the end I weakened and did do a Requiem of our own yesterday evening; we sang a bit, and got 16 souls. 73 people signed the Book of Condolence deposited with us by the Town Council, and a member of the congregation had to be persuaded not to walk out yesterday morning after Greta the Lay Reader alluded to the new King not paying inheritance tax in her sermon. She was the only one.

As we say with our Spring Fair, planning for the next one has (probably) already begun. I look forward to the choir of St George’s Chapel Windsor singing ‘Ying Tong Iddle I Po’ in twenty-odd years' time ... !

Follow the Science

Back in the depths of the pandemic over a year ago, we talked a lot about the social lessons we had learned, or at least hoped we might learn. I have also, I think, picked up some new thoughts about how science works and how it interacts with the media, which may not be new to anyone but me, of course.

Firstly there is what I would call the distinction between experimental science and experiential science. The first is what happens in laboratories: it’s about measurements, the physical properties of substances, double-blind trials, repetition of results, proving or disproving theses. It is controlled and discrete. It’s this kind of science which has produced our vaccines. On the other hand, experiential science happens outside the lab: it brings data and observation to bear on the ‘real world’ and seeks to answer questions about it. It is a far, far more hazardous venture than experimentation. In truth, it isn’t amenable to the ’scientific method’ at all, because you can’t isolate, say, an entire society and screen off various factors which might be affecting it to assess the truth of your hypothesis: you end up with a mass of data and really very limited means to analyse them in a way that would rule out other analyses. Human behaviour is too complex. It’s this second type of science which characterises the epidemiological decisions governments across the world have had to make, and its relatively indeterminate nature obviously makes it much more subject to bias. This leads onto the second observation, how different scientists and groups of scientists, once they move outside the laboratory, are driven by their own preferences and personalities to read the data they confront in different ways; perhaps not as much as the rest of us, but to some degree. My favourite covid commentator is possibly Sir John Bell, the Canadian Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, favourite partly because he is the living spit of 1940s band leader Spike Jones so whenever he comes on the wireless I half expect to hear him playing farty noises on a trumpet and firing a gun. ‘You know me’, Professor Bell told an interviewer on Today once, ‘I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy’, and so he is. At least he admits it, and thus you can apply an optimism discount to his pronouncements. Then there is (for instance) Dr Carl Henegham who I heard opining the other day that there isn’t anything really wrong at the moment, and that everything we hear about the Omicron variant is exaggerated. Everybody seems to have forgotten about the study his Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine published in May 2020 alleging that covid had been in the UK far longer than anyone thought, that therefore everyone had had it already and it was massively less lethal than supposed, and that the pandemic was essentially over. An academic friend of mine commented that ‘Carl Henegham tests my belief in tenure’. Again, does anyone now remember the days when the World Health Organisation was advising us not to wear masks? The reasoning seemed to be that masks encouraged ‘a false sense of security’, and this is a piece with the WHO’s apparent concern less with medical facts than with how it thinks people behave, and ought to behave. Whereas it changed its mind about masks, it’s consistently argued against travel restrictions: now, it seems to me that, while restrictions on international travel obviously aren’t any kind of long-term solution to a pandemic, they logically must do something in the short term to impede a pathogen’s spread, in exactly the same way that getting people to stand two yards apart does something. The WHO’s concern appears to be that travel bans break down international solidarity, which I can’t help thinking is a) not necessarily true, and b) isn’t its business. 

Finally, the media. I am a great defender, in general, of the BBC, but a lot of its coverage, even via the sedate medium of radio, has been disgraceful. Barely a day passes without some headline along the lines of ‘Professor A says Y is possible’ or ‘Dr B warns of risk of Z’ when neither Professor A nor Dr B are speaking on behalf of anything like a consensus. Well, you can always find someone to say nearly anything, and the fact that someone says it is hardly of itself worthy of a screaming news item, especially when you can just as easily source an opposite opinion. Very few things aren't possible, and hardly anything isn't a risk.

A friend complained some time ago that the reporting of the different brands of vaccine was a capitalistic development, making heroes out of the companies that manufactured the medicines, whereas once we had no idea where our drugs came from. I argued that this was in fact a good thing: it cast light on the process of pharmaceutical research and procurement which had previously been mysterious and obscure. People would know more in the future. I think that probably applies to ‘the science’ as well.

Bishop's Move

I learn that the Diocese of Rochester is seeking a new bishop. I will not bother applying as I doubt I could fit the requirements. The first half of the explicatory video is fair, though dull, enough. And then they get on to trying to explain the role of bishops to people who don't understand churchy language (weird, technical language, it seems, such as 'listening', or 'worship'). No, the huddled masses need to know that 'a bishop is a bit like the lead singer of a rock band. A front man, or woman, who shapes the band's identity and brand'.

Priorities, even strategic vision, I could understand. But identity? Brand? What brand could a diocese of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ conceivably have that it does not have by way of being a diocese of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ? A diocese is a jurisdiction of church communities in communion with a bishop who is, in theory, themselves in communion with the Church Catholic or as much of it as possible. It doesn't have a brand which is separate from the Church because it doesn't exist separate from the Church. 

If this reflects how the current bench of bishops understand their role, heaven help us all. I'm not sure they understand how rock bands tend to work either: the phrase 'splitting because of artistic differences' comes to mind.

Tipping Point

The latest LiberFaciorum post from my friend Jasper, who as I mentioned a little while ago has advanced over the last year from lockdown-scepticism to full-scale covid-conspiracism, includes a Tweet from Dr Zoe Harcombe, alleging that nothing unusual is happening in India at the moment and that reports of covid deaths there are exaggerated by Western media. I don’t know what her expertise in this matter might be, as she is a dietician, and a much-criticised peddler of pseudoscience. But Jasper has reached the point where criticisms of someone’s integrity or expertise by the mainstream of their profession is precisely a reason to accept their opinions: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Not that I expect he’s checked her out.

It's interesting (if depressing) to speculate how individuals make this progress. Once you adopt a very non-mainstream opinion, for which there is, ipso facto, little evidence, you must cast around to find that evidence and before long every little scrap of overinterpreted information has to be pressed into service. The world in general isn’t going to endorse your opinion and you have to come up with an explanation why. As far as covid-sceptics are concerned, the most egregious manifestation of this is their approach to medical professionals. There has to be something that explains why the overwhelming majority of doctors across the world, trained in a wide variety of independent institutions and operating in very different political and professional structures, are all saying the same thing: they must have been brainwashed, or bribed. Following Jasper’s promoted links I have found myself staring on my computer screen at the most extraordinary statements of rage and hate against doctors – as the chief promoters of lies, dangerous medicines, and fake diagnoses and death certificates, it must be infuriating for sceptics to see them taken so seriously by the rest of the population.

Just in case there was any doubt, I do talk to a great number of people from day to day and find little evidence of the situation Jasper believes is prevalent. Most of our congregation, being older folk, have been vaccinated and a great number double-vaccinated, along with people I meet in the Co-Op, the cafes, the school, the streets in general. Nobody has had a reaction worse than a few hours of headaches, while Jasper believes ‘if you don’t end up blind or dead from your vaccine you’ve been lucky’; technically this may be true, but not very lucky as it was never all that likely to happen. He reports that ‘I am overwhelmed with the amount of people I am discovering daily, cowering in their homes, nervous wrecks as a result of the fear inducement in order to get onboard a clinical trial [ie, receive a vaccine]’. I, on the other hand, haven’t heard of a single one. We live in very different worlds, he and I.

Unless you’re going to do a volte-face and admit you were wrong, when contrary evidence grows, the only option is to double down, and that forces you further and further away from the surface. Jasper now seems to be veering off into climate-change scepticism as well, because anything there is a consensus over becomes suspect. It’s a strange alternative world, but a very beguiling one as it provides its residents with a sense of self-worth: look at the photographs of the last anti-lockdown protest in London and you can see a woman with a placard reading ‘We R the ones you failed to fool’. Jasper has been known to make references to sheep and other allegedly unthinking herd animals when describing the rest of us.

Just like the farther reaches of the climate change movement, there are similarities between covid-scepticism and Christianity, or at least the brands of it that take you far away from the worldview of most other people. There, you are also given a sense that you have a privileged insight into the way things really are beneath the apparent reality the herd accepts, but at the same cost. If your insight relies on denying the evidence everyone else accepts, and positing a hidden enemy who directs the deception, you’re inevitably pulled by the same current, forced to interpret everything you see in the light of that denial and polarising the entire world into facts which endorse your view and those which don’t (in short, lies). What a bargain to make.

We Interrupt This Programme

'I quite liked the man until about three hours ago, but now I don't mind if I never hear about him again', my mother told me about 6pm yesterday, 'and I'll be very annoyed if they don't show the final of Masterchef', which of course they didn't. She is not the only person I have heard about making the same comment regarding the return of normal TV service, and I have to say when Radio 4 broadcast an old episode of Great Lives yesterday evening and it turned out to be about Mary Anning (a clever gay girl in a peak bonnet picking fossils! It doesn't get better than that. OK, well, she may not have been gay) I almost cheered. I don't dislike the late Duke of Edinburgh particularly but it was a huge relief to hear about someone different after six hours of the same thing over and over again.

Meanwhile the Establishment (including, I strongly get the impression, a lot of clergy) is hugely enjoying itself with protocol and speaking-for-the-nation stuff, and normally sensible souls can be found saying daft things. 'I always wondered', said Simon Schama on the wireless, 'why he volunteered to join this establishment and sacrifice so much. It was, I think, because he thought so much of Britain'. The great historian didn't seem to believe - and nobody else on the programme corrected him* - that it might have had something to do with the fact that young Lt Philip Mountbatten had fallen in love with the heir to the British throne and thus accepted what came with it. But I wonder whether the British people is not quite where the Establishment thinks it is. I rather suspect the British people doesn't regard the death of Prince Philip as the epoch-making event that it is supposed to, certainly not worth postponing the final of Masterchef for. In Swanvale Halt, I have heard absolutely nothing about it at the Co-Op or the café. The Diocese advised churches to have lots of spare candles available, but here, Rick the verger, who commemorates the death of anyone famous, printed off a set of Wikipedia pages about HRH and sat in the church all day, and the only person who came in to light candles was Selina. She always lights candles for her relatives but is increasingly unclear whether they are alive or dead, and certainly doesn't really know which day it is. It isn't indifference, as I think people definitely care about the situation the Queen is left in, thinking, surely, of their own bereavements; it isn't hostility. It's simply not regarding the Forth Bridge event as that much more important, say, than the death of Albert down the road who didn't quite make it to 100 and who they spoke to a couple of times and wasn't he a character. 

The Diocese has suggested we change the altar hangings to purple, which we are not doing: as my friend Cara in Emwood put it, 'the last time I looked, Jesus was still alive'. Instead our republican mayor and her republican husband our senior churchwarden will come to church and she will read a short Bible passage and light a candle while Rick will toll the bell and I will attempt to record the scene for posterity. I wasn't really a republican at midday yesterday but now I think I probably am, too.

London Bridge will of course be a different scale of event, even I will concede that. It really will mark the passage of an epoch. But even then, I wonder whether the national mood will really be grief, as the Establishment will imagine, rather than a stoic awareness of time sweeping all its sons (and daughters, and those who identify as neither) away, a sense that from that point on we will have to conceive of ourselves differently. They will misread things, as a way of imagining that they matter more than they do.

(* But said show did furnish one wonderful quote from a journalist who stated 'I have refused to watch The Crown on the grounds that I am still upset at Matt Smith leaving Dr Who')

Jabbed

Well, since you ask, so far all I feel is a little bit thick-headed but that could be due to a variety of causes. Mind you, it hasn't quite been twelve hours since I attended for my first vaccination, and there is plenty of time yet for some symptoms to kick in. 

The theatre in Guildford, adapted for the purpose, was impressively well-organised, the volunteers and staff thoroughly drilled in what they had to say but with the air of people who were buoyed through what otherwise might have been a boringly repetitious experience by the knowledge that they were making a difference. In fact, it struck me that there might have been slightly more there than strictly necessary, but at least you knew that you were never going to get lost and end up wandering around the wrong side of the building as you were never more than about twenty yards away from someone in a hi-vis jacket, smiling behind a face mask. Given my enviable ability, proven over long years, to misinterpret signs and instructions, this was probably all to the good.

I only know one vaccine-sceptic among my acquaintance, a warm-hearted gentleman I met through Ms DarkMorte and who believes - in so far as I understand what he believes - that the provision of vaccines is part of a long-laid and determined scheme by governments and tech companies to control our lives. He doesn't doubt that covid-19 is real, as he has had it himself, but is adamant that we are better off fighting it naturally rather than handing our futures over to those who mean us no good. He has sent me a link to a video on Youtube which I am reluctant to click on as it will be something that at first sounds reasonable until you check and realise where it's coming from. A few months ago it was the former Pfizer employee Michael Yeadon and his long-discredited arguments that the pandemic was over, that herd immunity had been achieved naturally and that there was no need for vaccines; now it's a personable young New Zealand doctor who rubbishes everything you think you know in great detail, and you find yourself rubbing your chin in doubt until you follow up the independent UK news website she recommends and discover it's a far-right fantasy network with links to Infowars in the States. 

It all sounds like it's driven by not wanting to accept the patent truth, and hunting round until you find the evidence that justifies the decision you made long before. It's a little different from such lockdown-sceptics as Lord Sumption who simply maintain that the damage done to our lives by measures taken against the pandemic is worse than a few hundred thousand people dying, and who am I to disagree because there is no answer to the point, as I wrote nearly a year ago. 

I rather wanted to be a lockdown-sceptic: not in the sense of believing that they don't work (how can reducing contact between human beings not reduce the impact of a disease that spreads by human contact?), but wanting to think the one here hadn't. For a short period in the late Spring of 2020 it looked from the figures as though that might have been the case, but it clearly wasn't, and I faced the fact that my scepticism, in this instance, was driven more by what I would have preferred to be true rather than what obviously was, and so I had to discard it. There's no suppressed truth, no great thing that we could have done, no secrets, no hidden agendas. Certainly there are people making the monetary best out of the conditions we all labour under, but such profiteering is pretty open, and always happens. No alternative story. There is only this, and getting through it as best we can.

Circular Arguments

A couple of months ago I was caught up by a statement S.D.’s chum Professor Brian Cox made on the radio when being challenged to give pithy answers to scientific questions. Is there life after death? someone asked. ‘No’, Prof Cox answered definitely, ‘the rules of physics mean there can’t be.’ Now I am no scientist, but that struck me as such a sweeping statement that I wondered which rules of physics he could be referring to. The others in the studio clearly boggled a bit as well, because he stretched the parameters of the game to refer to some recently-published research or something.

Googling ‘afterlife scientifically impossible’ or somesuch phrase revealed that there was indeed a flurry of publicity in the autumn of last year about the comments of Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology about this subject, although I can’t find any reason to think what he said was very recent. The press reports all state that his comments appeared in Scientific American, but I can’t find any articles on the blog or in the magazine that would fit this subject published within the last few years. This dates from 2011, but I think it must be the one referred to. Why it should suddenly acquire such publicity I don’t know; perhaps the reports actually refer to his book from 2016, garbled into a Scientific American article. The Metro alleged that Dr Carroll had arrived at his conclusions ‘after extensive studies’ and one would hope he had, though it’s hard to know what those studies, as applied to this particular field, might consist of.

Dr Carroll’s argument goes back much further than 2011, however. It is that there is no form of consciousness we know of which is not linked to physical processes, whether you think of biology or more fundamentally the interactions of atoms and forces. Without those, there is nothing to bear consciousness; therefore once a living being dies and disintegrates, consciousness becomes impossible. This is called materialism, and it is not exactly a new idea. Arguably it goes back to ancient Greece. You may or may not think it very convincing to argue that a ‘soul’ by its very nature would be immaterial and that’s the point of it, but it’s a debate that has been had before.

Conversely a couple of days ago I was copied in on an extract from The Atheist Delusion, a 2016 movie compiled by US evangelist Ray Comfort to have a go at that rationalist easy target, Professor Richard Dawkins. The first bit interviews a variety of self-described atheists – mainly students – and then bamboozles them by trying to prove they are being irrational in believing that ‘something can come out of nothing’. The coup de grace in the segment is a scene of a debate in which Prof Dawkins is made to look ever so silly by claiming just that. In fact, Mr Comfort runs together the Argument from Design (how can all the complexity of existence come into being without an intelligence directing it?) and the Argument from First Cause (how can something come out of nothing?) in a series of rhetorical tricks which ignore a) that natural selection over geological time is quite sufficient to account for the biological complexity we observe and b) that although it is true that physics cannot explain the existence of the universe, there is no reason to assume that such a putative ‘First Cause’ is God. Among the things Mr Comfort’s film does prove are that Professor Dawkins can be amusingly manoeuvred into saying things that sound daft, and that most atheists aren’t actually that good at picking the holes in other people’s arguments; and neither of these things is a surprise. At least he shouldn’t be quite so pleased with himself at coming up with some ‘new’ knock-down argument against atheism: his case goes back a long way, too, just like Dr Carroll's.

And I suppose the more basic conclusion to draw is that very few people really know what they’re talking about.

Calming the Twitter Storm

We had a discussion about this after Mattins yesterday morning - concerning the ludicrous little spat the CofE publicity department got itself into after posting a Tweet referring to praying for celebrity unbeliever Richard Dawkins after he suffered a minor stroke a couple of days ago. The assembled Anglicans at Morning Prayer in Swanvale Halt (all four of us) were unanimous in feeling thoroughly uncomfortable and sympathetic towards those who accused the Church of a bit of internet trolling.

I have no doubt that whoever stuck this on Twitter thought they meant it sincerely; although I also doubt that there cannot have been a little frisson of ironical pleasure at being able to do so. And that's probably the problem. It isn't just that Dr Dawkins will not care whether anyone is praying for him or not: I regularly pray for a great many people who have entirely different world-views from myself, and have no intention of stopping regardless of what they might think about it. These are people I love, I'm a Christian and it's What We Do. But I don't feel the need to publicise the fact. 

Making a point of announcing that you're praying about a particular matter leaves a bad taste and not just because we're English and feel embarrassed about religion and emotion. What's the point of doing so, especially in this particular way? I'm reminded of the 'Pray for Paris' hashtag that zipped around the globe after the terrorist shootings there in November, and which several people I know with close links to France and its very secularist official culture got thoroughly aerated about. The declaration that you're praying about something, unless it's only passed around other Christians for their encouragement and information, soon becomes less about the prayer, or who you're praying for, than about you and your self-image, and I think non-religious people - normal people - can see through this very easily.

For an organisation, a Twitter feed isn't just about sharing your thoughts or what you're having for dinner. It's part of your public relations. That's why you can access the CofE Twitter account through the Media and Communications section of the website. Therefore, what goes up on that feed is what the CofE wants people, especially media people, to know about it. You may note, if you have a look, that not much of its content relates to praying for this or that at all, and as there is so much stuff in the world Christians might pray about, you might well ask what's so special about Dr Dawkins. What's special about him, clearly, is that he's the world's most public atheist, and that's why I can't take at face value the Revd Arun Arora's very defensive defence of the original Tweet as something entirely innocent and with no edge to it whatever: a bit of Lenten self-examination might be in order. 

Public relations isn't just about sending out via social media the things you want people to know about you: it also involves having some sense of how normal people will react to that content, and it seems the CofE is still some distance away from that. 

Doubt, Public and Private

The radio news report at 5.30 yesterday was frankly dismaying. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has admitted that the killings in Paris led him to doubt God,’ the report went, ‘but he said he spoke to God who reassured him of his presence’. The dismay, as far as I was concerned, arose not from the news that ABC has had flashes of faithlessness in response to a terrible event, but the resolution of those doubts which must surely come across to any non-Christian as glib and weird. The wording of the headline changed as the day proceeded, thankfully, and the original interview on the never-failingly gruesome Songs of Praise made it clear that Abp Justin was not hearing divine voices: ‘God told me’ turned out to mean ‘I went for a walk and thought about it and remembered a bit from the Psalms that helped me to see things differently’. So not much different from the rest of us, then.

I suppose Abp Justin wanted to suggest that questioning the presence of God in such extreme events was normal and understandable. As friends of mine pointed out, this is on the face of it odd, as there is plenty of cruel and unnecessary death around all of the time without the need for mass-murder by terrorists to shake one’s faith. An act of very human evil, too, surely calls God into question rather less than a natural calamity, but even disasters of almost inconceivable magnitude are curiously rarely cited as reasons for doubt: Christians in the West seem to have been able very easily to mentally brush aside the 230,000 people who died in the great Tsunami of 2004, for instance.

The things that prompt us to doubt, if we have anything to doubt, are strangely personal and random. Terrible events such as the Paris killings don’t affect me on this level: I sort of discount them as the kind of thing one should expect in a fallen world. Instead, for many years the thing that set me off on a spiral of anger was the senseless suffering of my mother from arthritis and other frailties, which seemed not just random but strangely directed at her. I couldn’t see, and still don’t even though her situation is much better than it used to be, that this served any spiritual purpose or was of any benefit to anyone. I seem to have been able to digest that as time has gone on, and my own lapses into faithlessness are now caused, when they come, by tiredness or a succession of silly little personal frustrations which less make me doubt God as make me indifferent as to what I believe – an emotional disturbance rather than a philosophical shift. Then gradually I discover I do care once again.

If we conceived God as a remote and Olympian figure, these problems wouldn’t arise – they only appear when we believe that God takes an interest in what happens to us. Despite what I said about the Paris killings being an act of human evil, why God does not rescue people from such things is not as daft a question as it might appear. I can remember several occasions in my life when I might well have died, and one particular episode when I still can’t understand why I didn’t; talking to people suggests that this kind of experience is more common than one might think. If Christians are tempted to see in such events signs of God’s care for them as individuals (and the Scriptures encourage us to think this way), the question necessarily arises, Why these interventions and not those?

Of course there is no answer. Christians live in a world which is full of hazard and pain, and also one in which a man died and was alive again. Somehow we have to hold these two facts together, and the only connection between them is two pieces of bloodstained wood hammered into a cross, the site of that man’s death. That’s as much of a response from Heaven as we get. For some of us, it’s enough to keep us moving forward, and to provide the means of trying to understand and assimilate the disasters which afflict us; and for some it isn’t. 

These Are Not Necessarily the Facts

Several people I know have been most exercised over the study lately published that drew a connection between Goth and depression. Of course they are: it could all too easily play into the dreadful stereotype which Goths so badly want to refute that they're all doleful, terminally morbid, developmentally-arrested souls, and that any young person who gets involved in the Goth world is in danger of self-harm or suicide. 'Smells like clueless generalisation', commented Cylene, herself hardly a stranger to depressive moods. In fact the coverage that I've seen, at any rate, was remarkably sympathetic, largely repeating the suggestion of the researchers, echoed by Goth commentators themselves, that tackling prejudice and bullying directed at alternative people might help to make them feel less depressed and alienated. 

There is much to say about this. The study was expressly focused on 15-18 year-olds, precisely the time of life when alienated depression peaks, and older Goths who have long passed beyond that stage react badly to being bracketed together with it, perhaps forgetting what it was that led them to be involved with the subculture in the first place. Besides, the study did make an attempt to screen for other factors in the lives of the young people concerned that might lead to a predisposition to depression in the people who identified with Goth; it doesn't help that this section in the actual report is almost impenetrable to anyone (like me) who doesn't have extensive knowledge of statistical language. Nevertheless, even the strong apparent correlation between Goth self-identification and depressive experiences doesn't necessarily demonstrate a causal relationship, as the researchers point out. 

Those of us who have taken part in the Goth world suspect that it's a way of dealing with feelings of being an outsider, for whatever reason, in a somewhat different way from other subcultures and scenes. If you are a young person with feelings of alienation you might adhere to a group of people who will make you feel less like that. Goths, however, take feelings of alienation and externalise them, turning them into a sort of serious pantomime, and take control of them that way. Older Goths testify again and again to the way the subculture made them feel better about themselves, not worse. 

Which leads to a deep methodological flaw in the study which nobody seems to have mentioned yet. The researchers took their data from a massive, long-term project called the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which began in 1991-2 with 14541 pregnancies. Children were invited in for yearly interviews from the age of 7; at 15 they were asked questions about subcultural identification, and at 15 and 18 (so in 2006-7 and 2009-2010) about depression and self-harm. The pool of youngsters for whom both subcultural identification and depression data were available at both these ages was 3694; the number of them who 'very much' identified with Goth was 154.

This doesn't sound like much, but it is; it's about 4%. This would mean that one teenager in 25 in that cohort was a Goth; one for every secondary school class. I'm massively sceptical about that figure. It's true that the late-2000s were the high-water-mark of second-wave Gothdom, and Bath and Bristol at that time supported a number of Goth nights in pubs and clubs (unusually there still is one, Republic in Bristol); but observation does suggest that the number of Goths, of people who actually take part in the subculture, has never been as high as that. The population figures for the Avon region in 2006 suggest that, if the 2015 report is accurate, there might have been as many as 6000 Goths in the county. That somewhat stretches credulity.

The researchers are very careful in not going beyond their data: the paper is entitled 'Risk of depression and self-harm in teenagers identifying with Goth subculture'. This reflects that fact that the base of the data is self-identification: the teenagers were asked what sub-groups existed in the area and then how far they identified with each of them. But identifying with a group doesn't mean taking part in it. I suspect that perhaps the majority of the teenagers who 'identified very much' with Goth in Bristol in 2006-7 never went on to do anything about it, never got involved in a group, never went to a club; but however aware the researchers may have been of that ambiguity, it gets lost in the media coverage. This research, in fact, tells us nothing about the effect such participation might have on individuals, how it might calm or exacerbate feelings of alienation and help people to process them.