Against Debate

A couple of days ago Dr Sam Wells of St Martin-in-the-Fields read a Thought for the Day considering certain people being banned from certain social media platforms, and why it was fundamentally a Bad Thing. It was a classic liberal defence of the power of reasoned discussion, of debate and the exchange of ideas shining light into dark places, the kind of reasoning a reasonable person might advocate.

As we live in an age of polarisation some of the most interesting thinking at the moment tackles how people fall into unreason. A little while ago (also, inevitably, on Radio 4) Sarah Dunant described how she’d seen her hairdresser for the first time after the Spring lockdown and discovered that during the time shut up at home he’d transformed from someone who evinced no interest in politics to a teeterer on the brink of QAnon and other fringe ideas, beliefs which he didn’t swallow whole, but felt there was something to. Not so long ago I had to do Prevent training as chaplain to the Air Cadets locally; like everything else at the moment it consisted of watching a couple of videos and answering a multiple-choice quiz you’d have to be remarkably inattentive to fail, but at least it discussed the various circumstances which might propel individuals to fall into extremist ideologies either of Islamism or the far-Right, the common factors which, quite apart from the actual belief in question, lead someone to view these overarching explanations of what was wrong with the world and with their lives: how they become committed to them as essential constituents of who they are.

One of the relevant articles a friend shared via LiberFaciorum asked why Christians are prone to conspiracy theories. Among the broader reasons why such theories take hold, the writer reckoned, was narcissism: the feeling that, by subscribing to the non-mainstream truth you are privy to superior knowledge and understanding, which makes you superior to non-believers. Perhaps Christians, as well as people who think they are marginalised more generally, are primed for that sort of thinking. In fact, as we know, not all Christians go down these rabbit holes and I do wonder whether they are really statistically more likely to do so even if atheists might see an exact parallel between, say, the unreason of QAnon and the unreason of believing in the Resurrection. I think, rather, that Christianity is, to an extent, inoculated against grand, maximalist narratives of unreason partly because the Lord himself is notoriously hard to pin down ideologically, focusing instead on human relationships, states of mind, and standing with God, but more importantly because the Faith rests on such a small, single, self-contained event: what happened to one man two thousand years ago. You can believe he was raised from the dead, and this does not require you to form any opinion about who runs the world, or why, or who should do. It does not unproblematically map onto other beliefs, though it can.

Recently I was sent almost a full set of the Instructions of the great Anglican spiritual director, Fr Reginald Somerset Ward, and have been reading through them. In the most recent one I’ve read, he discusses the distinction between opinion and conviction, using the story of the Blind Man in chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, whose conflict with the authorities moved him, says Somerset Ward, from an opinion about Jesus to a conviction:

An opinion is a view held as probable but based on grounds which are short of proof. A conviction is a settled belief so final that it is accepted as absolutely true by its owner. … We are constantly observing facts and people around us and trying to work them into some logical scheme … These opinions seem to us probable although we cannot prove them. We do not in practice give very great weight either to our own opinions or the opinions of others; we are ready to lay them aside or to alter them under the pressure of events or feelings … In contrast to this, convictions have the highest value in any life; we are prepared to sacrifice almost anything in preference to them; we expect them to be recognised by others as unalterable; they dominate our actions and colour our whole view of life. … We can change our opinions without any sense of guilt, we can even act in a manner contrary to our opinions without feeling that we are doing wrong … In the case of convictions we believe that the highest spiritual authority of our lives in in question … to deny them is a high treason of the spirit, a breaking of the law of life. … There is always some form of struggle before a conviction takes shape, an intellectual struggle or an emotional struggle … It was in this manner that the Blind Man attained his conviction [about Christ].

Reason is the proving-ground of opinion: individuals can debate and perhaps shift each other’s views when they don’t have the whole of their identity at stake. But reason can do little with convictions in Fr Somerset Ward’s sense. Those represent deep decisions which the individual has taken long before any debate happens, and to deny any aspect of them will deny a profound element of who they are. So Trump supporters, or Brexiteers, or Haute-Remainers for that matter, are absolutely impervious to detailed arguments refuting this or that aspect of their position: they can always find an alternative explanation, one which comes not from a place of reason but from the basic commitment the person has made, like reinforcements sent to remote outposts of a battle line from the fortress far, far in the rear. People like this need engaging with on a far more intense and deep level (which, for all its faults, is what the Prevent initiative recognises).

Timothy Snyder, professor of politics at Yale, was also on the wireless this morning making three points about all this: that fascism can happen anywhere and longstanding democratic institutions are no guarantee that it can’t; that the collapse of truth is the first stage in the rise of fascism; and that the bigger the lie a malign politician tells, the deeper it draws in the people who have identified with that figure – the less amenable to reason they become because the more reality they have already discounted.

So don’t be deceived about what free speech can, and can’t do. Shine a light onto a rock and it remains a rock; if the rock is a problem, you either have to smash it or cast it into a place of darkness – which is only one of the reasons I don’t think of myself as a liberal anymore.

Shutting the Doors Again

Thankfully the fundraising thermometers you used to see quite frequently outside churches, revealing how far away the congregation of St Shoddy's was from plugging the leaks in the roof, seem to be much rarer now. Over recent days I've felt rather like putting one of my own outside the church in Swanvale Halt, detailing the latest local COVID infection rate, as I have checked the government website daily to see how things are going. On Sunday we ticked above our self-defined trigger point of 500 cases per 100,000 population average across the seven Medium Layer Super Output Areas that (in my opinion, playing epidemiologist as I am apparently supposed to do) form the Hornington 'catchment area'. The PCC voted to close yesterday, and today the Bishop confirmed the decision. 

I didn't really feel the relief I expected given how tense I have been since it became clear that this was on the cards. I think this has been because the last few services in the church have had such a warm and devout atmosphere, possibly due to people being aware that this was something they valued and which was probably about to be denied to them. That's a useful sensation which I'm trying to encourage!

Ironically yesterday and today the figures slipped back to 498. Perhaps we have hit a peak after all ... but I'll need more data before I believe that.

A Name to Note

Under current circumstances I can't get very far with the Anglo-Catholic history project, because it's a bit difficult getting into churches and in fact going anywhere that's too far to walk to. All I can do is scout out the website of some churches and associated information. 

I've already mentioned here the church of St Peter, Hascombe, a dizzy Tractarian jewelbox designed by Henry Woodyer. The Catholic tradition at Hascombe didn't halt in the 19th century, as there are photos of incumbents wearing birettas in the 1930s (as my predecessor at Swanvale Halt did at the same time). But I'm becoming more interested, too, in the role of the man responsible for the rebuilding of the ruinous former church, Vincent Musgrave. Fr Musgrave came from a clerical family: his father Charles was Vicar of Halifax and Archdeacon of Craven. He himself had had a first incumbency at Mattersey in Nottinghamshire, and spent the rest of his ministry at Hascombe. He wasn't in the position to found daughter churches as his slightly earlier contemporary John Brownlow Chandler at Witley did - more about him another time - and instead concentrated on schools. He was part of the committees that set up Cranleigh School and St Catherine's School in Bramley, both of which ended up having something of a Catholic tradition: I will have to see the splendid chapel at Cranleigh, and Bramley I had the chance to visit a few years ago; Musgrave gave an amazing reredos, designed by Kempe and carved in Oberammergau, to the chapel at St Catherine's in memory of his wife in 1903. The role of schools in the Surrey church landscape is something to which I will have to give more thought.

In a little book describing the rebuilding of St Peter's, Fr Musgrave makes a statement that probably tells us why he became a Tractarian: early in the 19th century, he believed, 'through the Abuses of the Episcopate, and the worldliness of the Clergy, religious feeling had sunk to a low ebb', inplying he was part of the generation to restore it. I wonder whether he included his uncle, Archbishop of York Thomas Musgrave, among the Abusive Bishops.

Epiphany 2021

My first Epiphany in Swanvale Halt was celebrated in snow and ice; I would happily have swapped the pandemic conditions of 2021 for that. But ten of us managed to meet and celebrate, and pray especially for our Orthodox friends who keep January 6th as a higher and holier festival than December 25th.

I experimented with using my new laptop to record, and in fact livestream, the service - not that I told anyone else that it was being beamed onto Youtube! It worked, but the sound was muddy and the video indistinct. I have asked my friend Cara the vicar of Emwood's husband for advice as he is a wiz with these things and he has recommended a nice neat webcam which I think I may well ask the diocese for help with buying, given the price. Oh, nothing about this is easy.

As is customary (here, anyway), chalk was blessed and taken home to mark our door lintels, or anywhere else suitable. 'Mine are all white plastic', Martha from the flats next to the church told me. 'I'll have to be creative.'

Hitting the Bar

The Government’s decision to allow public worship to continue even under the current ‘lockdown’ caught me so much by surprise that, reading the details on Monday night only from the BBC website, I changed the church website to inform the public that services were suspended only to have to change it back after finding the actual regulations. I am deeply torn. If I were responsible for public health policy, I would have closed places of worship in Tier 4; but equally I know that worship at Swanvale Halt is as safe as anything else you might choose to do, including doing your shopping at the cramped village supermarket or sending your children to school. More importantly, I've argued over and over again in all sorts of contexts that private judgement is hazardous. We take decisions, these sorts of decisions anyway, as a whole society so that they carry weight and authority. People are different, so their own individual decisions will inevitably lead them in awkwardly different directions.

Not only have I met the entire range of opinions from ‘churches should have been closed since March, it’s obvious’, through to ‘churches don’t have to close, so we shouldn’t, it’s obvious’, but I also find that people almost universally find it very hard to distinguish between the risk for individuals in a particular setting, and wider considerations of public health. So I am sure that coming to worship at Swanvale Halt church carries a relatively low risk of infection, say, 1 in 300. Every time you attend, the risk is the same: it’s always 1 in 300. But add up a whole set of ‘attendance events’ over the course of a pandemic and it will be much higher. It’s like tossing a coin: every time, the chance of getting Heads is 50% (or as near to 50% as makes no odds), and always will be, but the chance of getting Tails at some stage in a long run of throws is much greater than that. Multiply the ‘attendance events’ across thousands of churches, perhaps, and someone is going to be infected, somewhere, sometime. It could be you. People in general seem to find that very hard to grasp: talk to them about it and they almost invariably gravitate back to the question of how safe it is to do this particular thing in this particular setting.

Not only did the Government throw the choice whether to stay open or close back to us, so did the hierarchy of the Church of England. The Church’s response to the lockdown announcement came from the Bishop of London, former Chief Nurse Sarah Mullaly: ‘the government has chosen to allow public worship to continue’, she said, a weird phrase which sort of implied that the bishops wanted to disassociate themselves from the decision without publicly dissenting from it, ‘but we understand any churches that decide to suspend it’. I was frankly furious at being put in this position. I’m not a virologist, and, going back to the previous paragraph, while I might be qualified to decide on the safety of the venue I’m responsible for, I am definitely not qualified to take decisions on matters of public health. That’s the government’s job, and at least the bishops could give me a steer.

It took a day before the bishops began writing to their clergy. ‘The government has calculated that only a tiny number of infections have occurred in worship settings’, +Andrew told us in an ad clerum. Other bishops were prepared to quote figures: 47 since the pandemic began, apparently. This at least drew a little of my anger as it demonstrated that there was evidence behind the decision, and someone was asking the question I wanted asked. But it didn’t resolve the matter. First, the figure of 47 is misleading as very few people know how they were infected; secondly, we don’t know how the new version of the virus changes things; and third, there’s still the public-health landscape to take into account.

I proposed – and the PCC accepted – that we should suspend public worship when local infection rates topped 500 per 100,000, and then resume when they fell below 300 for a fortnight. Then a church member pointed out that you can drill down to a lower level of data than the local authority here and that shows, in our area, that infections are considerably lower in Swanvale Halt’s immediate vicinity than elsewhere in the district. So I ended up defining a region of seven Middle-layer Super Output Areas (basically, postcode areas amended to net roughly 7000 souls each) based on Hornington, the local ‘catchment area’ that includes everyone who uses the supermarkets and other facilities in town. That’s our Valley of Decision.

Up the figures tick every day: we’re at 401 today, as opposed to 368 yesterday. We celebrated the Holy Epiphany today, but I suspect Sunday will be our last face-to-face worship for some time. 

New Year Navigation

Posting about COVID restrictions is thoroughly uncongenial today so here are some pictures from my alleged week off between the First and Second Sundays of Christmastide! They were taken on two separate occasions but the conditions were pretty similar both days - cold, dull, and damp underfoot.

Widelake Park has become a site of memorialisation. I can't remember seeing the collections before, but this one was clearly there for at least the second anniversary of the death of a child.

I liked the textures of this ruinous roof.

The dual bridge - one over a disused railway, the lower spanning an old canal bed - fascinated me. I could hear rough voices beneath the canal bridge, presumably from trolls. In the arch of the rail bridge you can glimpse the cheerful visage of what might be taken as a troll, but I think is in fact a tidied-up graffito phallus. Phalluses are perhaps not cheerful enough.

Chinthurst Tower - a folly I've visited before but on this occasion the focal point of my otherwise unfocused journey, and of many other people's as it happened.

This incredible and frankly baleful lopped tree is in fact two trees: as far as I could see, a birch growing inside the living carcass of a willow. 

Christmas Redux

In years to come we will recall the expedients to which we were driven in order to maintain the life of God's people and the connection with Him of the community more widely. I will certainly remember sitting at our 'Mini-Crib Services' on Christmas Eve, juggling the visual and audio input and my aging laptop and iPod providing them. I may even remember how Dennis from the congregation photographed me and managed to give me a very Bacchanalian crown of Advent greenery.