Unapologetic

by Francis Spufford

  It is not always clear how though, in a given situation, you are supposed to try to be loving. Since Christianity isn’t one of the law-religions, it doesn’t furnish you with a list of rules. It offers instead the impossible ideal of valuing other people as absolutely as you value yourself, which does not translate straightforwardly into a code of behaviour. ( To say the least.) You have the deep patterning in the Christian understanding of the human landscape to guide you; and you have the wisdom embodied in tradition, as well as the prejudices and blindnesses; and you have the history of the earlier attempts made by all your predecessors. But none of these can wholly fix or pin down reliably for you what it is going to mean in everyday terms, this very moment, to love your neighbour as yourself. So you will have to decide, and keep deciding, what you think it means. You will have the freedom – or, to put it another way, the unending responsibility – of working out which way you’re supposed to make your imperfect attempt at the impossible task.*

  * If, by the way, this sounds surprisingly like the standard situation of the autonomous modern individual, then what I can say but, duh. And also: no shit, Sherlock. You live in a very, very Christian culture. Christianity’s eloquent silences about the means to the Christian end lie behind large portions of modern thinking about liberty.

  To love people. Does that mean you should be trying to give them what they want? Does Jesus’s advice about giving away even your clothes mean that your answer should always be yes when someone asks you for help? But what about the times when love requires you not to give the £10 note to the junkie but to deny them the means to their self-destruction? What about the times when love requires you to lock your alcoholic husband out of the house? In that case, you’re distinguishing between what people want and what they need; between the cases where love is shown by trusting someone else’s desire and where it must be shown by overruling their desire and trying to give them what you judge they ought to have instead. But then who are you to decide? Maybe with a child, the responsibility is plain, no matter how wrong your decisions may turn out to be; but what is to happen when you are only an adult gazing sideways at your fellows? Who says then on which occasions it will be right for you to make presumptuous guesses about their wants and needs, or for them to do the same for you? Or what about forgiveness? When should the mercy we think all receive from God mean that the worldly sanctions for an action should be withheld, and when not? When is it a mercy to someone to let them off a punishment, and when, on the contrary, would it be love’s work, mercy’s work, to ensure that they are taken seriously enough to suffer their action’s penalty? How with your limited knowledge, your pathetically restricted view, can you do more than guess? And then, when is enough love enough? Need is endless, let alone want, and no signal is ever going to come telling you that the world is satisfied now, and you may stop with the job of love done; yet you are finite, and so are your resources of time and emotion, and presumably you are not supposed to immolate yourself, to damage yourself, to let the pile of need bury you. Presumably you must keep back enough of yourself for yourself so that (like the church) you can be there viably tomorrow. But how are you to know when some particular piece of need is one piece too many? It will be just as real, just as urgent, as any of the others, so how will you be able to tell that this time it is permissible to say no? The questions multiply. Accommodating impossibility within the possible world is tricky. As hard as fitting eternity within time, or making a set a member of itself.

  My local free paper regularly runs a pair of jousting small ads. Someone pays to put in JESUS IS 4 U, and someone else pays to put in YOU CAN BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD, often next to it. They’re talking past each other, though. Because if you’re a Christian, what Jesus is for, or maybe 4, is to make the offer of help woven into the fabric of the universe; the one you need when not being good becomes a problem. If you’re managing to be good, great. The existence of goodness is not in doubt from the Christian point of view: it’s just that we think that you’re likely to have to take a turn, in time, at being the puke-stained other brother. And yes, of course you can be ‘good without God’. I suppose from a philosophical point of view Christians tend to believe that all successful goodness is a remote reflection of God’s. But where motive is concerned, where adherence to a view of the world is concerned, there’s obviously no necessary connection at all between belief in God and virtue. The place is stuffed with atheists and agnostics doing devotedly benign things, acting on ideals of compassion and dignity and mutual aid, relieving suffering, working to save or improve the planet.* There are a lot of paths to virtue, mercifully, and absolutely no way there could be a religious or Christian monopoly on it. The point of Christianity is not that it produces virtue. It does, I suppose, have one advantage when it comes to doing good, in that your advance certainty, as a Christian, that you’re going to fail at goodness provides a kind of assurance that goodness is worth trying independently of results. It helps a little, therefore, with being good in circumstances where doing good can do no good as far as making progress is concerned. Where things just won’t get better, in measurable terms, for all the devotion you pour in. Virtuous and idealistic atheists are at work all over the place, but it is observable that a surprisingly large number of believers are to be found among those who volunteer to work with the dying, the demented, the addicted, the institutionalised and the very impaired and afflicted, where the best that can be done is to love for the sake of it, and to keep sorrow company.

  * And dying well, too. Witness the Humean courage and dignity of Christopher Hitchens’s exit in December 2011.

  The same uncertainty applies when you move, as a Christian, from individual behaviour to the question of what you’re supposed to hope for as a citizen. To politics, in other words. It is just as disputable how the Christian story should be put into public practice as into private. Again, there is no rulebook telling you how you should get from the general, impossible command to love to its embodiment in anything resembling actual policies. It’s a matter for judgement, argument, opinion. Historically, there is no such thing as a single ‘Christian’ politics, and there couldn’t be. In different times and places, different parts of the Christian repertoire come to the fore. To different people, Christianity has seemed to suggest, or endorse, or demand, very different political movements. Christian Socialism in nineteenth-century England and Christian Democracy in post-Second World War Italy and West Germany; fervent religious nationalism in Ireland and Poland and fervent religious imperialism in Russia; Marxism in Central America in the 1980s and self-help small-​business ownership in Peru and Brazil in the 2000s; the ‘social gospel’ of black churches in the US and the vehement right-wing Republicanism of white ‘values voters’ there. And absolutely all of these are intelligible developments of the gospel. None of them are illegitimate and none of them are compulsory. For again, you are free to decide for yourself. Or required to. Whatever the ‘Christian conservatives’ in America say, there is no one set of rightful opinions that follow on automatically from your belief. If you have signed up for the redeeming love of God, you don’t – you really don’t – have to sign up too for low taxes, creationism, gun ownership, the death penalty, closing abortion clinics, climate change denial and grotesque economic inequality. You are entirely at liberty to believe that the kingdom would be better served by social justice, redistributive taxation, feminism, gay rights and excellent public transport. You won’t have the authoritative sanction of the gospel for believing in those things either, of course. But you can. Manifestos can be built on Christianity, but Christianity itself is not a manifesto.

  On the other hand, what you can’t do, no matter how tempting, is to push wholly away from you those who do their Christianity very differently. You can’t say: no kin of mine. I can find Sarah Palin, for example, as politically ridiculous and terrifying as (perhaps) you do, but I can’t just shun her. No matter how strange, bizarre and repulsive the expressions of her faith may be to me,
I have to believe that she’s got something right, that she’s a member like me of the body of Christ, in need like me of the grace of God, and as sure to receive it. She is, despite everything, a sister. And I have to recognise her as such, while being very glad that Alaska is a long, long way away; and to hope that, in the same way, she would recognise a brother in me, despicable gunless high-taxin’ Euro-weenie socialist that I am. And the same applies to other alarming Christians down through history, from Serbian militiamen to Pope Pius IX trying to ban railways to all of the Protestant and Catholic massacre-merchants of the Wars of Religion. I do not consider myself to be on the hook for their actions, any more than A. C. Grayling should be considered answerable for an atheist monster like Mao. I disagree profoundly with them. But I can’t just disavow them. I share like them in the HPtFtU – and in the hope of its remedy. This is not very comfortable. Here Christianity overspills the separate categories by which we conventionally understand the world now, insisting to an awkward degree on common ground.

  Also, though you have to make your own mind up about how your religion should influence your politics, you don’t have a completely unconstrained choice. Beneath the map of modern opinion, Christianity draws your attention to an older map of experience, which it insists is realler, and takes priority if it comes to a choice. This is the reason why you can find yourself puzzling people by owning a set of perceptions which seem bizarrely jumbled, in terms of current partisan positions, as if you didn’t seem able to see the obvious boundary-lines on the modern map. You do see them, of course: it’s just that your older map in many places shows ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ terrain as variants of the same thing, both of them being descended from what was once one theological position. (Think of the way that an American Catholic who holds to traditional Catholic social teaching becomes simultaneously left-wing about the death penalty and right-wing about abortion.) But more importantly, the map of Christian possibilities has edges. There are some forms of politics, therefore, that just aren’t open to you as a Christian, because they’re off the edge of the older map. They depend on assumptions that are fundamentally incompatible with the Christian essentials, however freely and widely you interpret them.

  For example. You can’t be a Christian and hold that the ends justify the means. You may not declare it to be a virtue to inflict suffering so that good may come of it: that’s flat-out incompatible with the commandment to love, and its inverse, the prohibition on treating people as instruments or conveniences or objects. Of course, you will treat people that way, from time to time, the HPtFtU being what it is. You may even have to, like General Montgomery ordering his divisions forward into the minefields. Means–end problems are intrinsic to this world, and can’t be dismissed any more than the human need for law can be dismissed. But you may not call the ill you do, or have to do, anything but ill. You may not relabel it as efficiency, or patriotism, or passionate conviction, or being scientific, or being unsentimental, or shaking off the cobwebs of the past. You are to confess it, not build a programme on it. Or take a seemingly opposite (though in fact linked) political temptation. You may not, as a Christian, endorse any politics that dismisses the HPtFtU. You’re committed to Jesus’s kind pessimism, remember. Pictures of perfection are not for you.* You can believe in human betterment to your heart’s content, according to whatever policy prescription strikes you as good, but you may not believe, ever, in humanity reaching a state where our wishes are all in mysterious harmony, and our hearts are all conveniently scrubbed and disinfected. It isn’t going to happen. So you can be a revolutionary or you can be a reactionary, and that’s OK, but you can’t, exactly, be a utopian. Except, wait, there’s an irony here. The further reason you aren’t available for the project of utopia is that you’ve already got one. What inoculates you against utopia is the hope of the kingdom (of which so many secular utopias are echoes). The kingdom too is a dream impossible to realise in the medium of power; the kingdom too is an impossibility that changes the shape of the possible world by pulling and pulling at us with the promise of a fullness and a kindness beyond our limits, till we discover fullnesses and kindnesses we wouldn’t have believed we could manage, had we not set off towards impossibility. How we are to apply this in the world of finite choices and opportunity costs, God leaves as an exercise for the reader.

  * ‘Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked’ – Jane Austen. Quite.

  My own church is spared a lot of the temptations of power, thanks to its ramshackle state. (See the footnote in the previous chapter for a brisk survey of said ramshackle-itude.) There’s an assumption among the kind of atheists who think they’re engaged in a zero-sum prestige contest with religion, where Superstition™ loses every time Reason™ gains, that we must mind this terribly. That we must be in something resembling the agonised state of the Wicked Witch of the West as the water dissolves us; that we must be shrieking with despondency and humiliation as we lose our grip on our old public standing in England. But I don’t think this is really true. There were – still are – some benign aspects of the C. of E.’s established status, like the inclusiveness it implies, the readiness to be there for anyone and everyone who may need it. And I don’t, myself, see a problem with having Anglican bishops in the House of Lords, so long as it goes on being a revising chamber rather than an elected senate, especially if they were to be joined ex officio by some Catholic bishops, the Chief Rabbi, an imam or two, some Hindu and Buddhist representatives and a selection of secular philosophers. Why wouldn’t you want the accumulated moral traditions of the country on hand to look at our legislation? On the whole, though, the weight of power is a burden not missed, now that it’s gone.

  I’m only just old enough myself to remember the way things were before. The world I know, as a Christian, is the one in which we’re a small minority. A small minority with an organic link to the symbolism, the buried logic and the dream-life of the wider culture, but still a minority without clout. I know there was another world before this one, in which Christianity was the unconsidered default state of the civilisation, but it was dying when I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, and it’s gone now, and I don’t think I would like it back. This way, Christianity is no one’s vehicle for ambition. This way, Christianity has been detached from the self-importance of the self-important. This way, it isn’t part of the inevitable bullshit of dignitaries any more. This way, the extent to which God is greater than us and any of our stuff – Allahu akhbar! – has become helpfully distinct from the inequities of human societies. We’re no longer likely to perceive one continuous hierarchy stretching up from the poor to the rich to royalty to God, turning ineffable partway up but forming a single ladder of subordination. This way, the strangeness of Christianity can be visible again. Without the inevitability, without the static of privilege fuzzing the channel, we can pick out again more clearly the counter-cultural call it makes, to admit your lack of cool, and your incompleteness, and your inability ever to be one of the self-possessed creatures in the catalogues, or the loveless calculator that is Homo economicus, and to find hope instead; a hope that counts upon, is kindly raised upon, the mess you actually are.

  So, no, I don’t think that most British Christians are in mourning for times past. And though I wrote this book to try to extricate for people, from the misleading ruins of half-memory, what Christianity feels like from the inside, I don’t expect the religion ever to be any less ramshackle, in my time, where I live. And that’s all right. For sure, it would be nice if people weren’t quite so rude. It would be nice if they didn’t brandish crude cartoons of nineteenth-century thought as the very latest thing in philosophy, and expect you to reel back, dazzled. It would be nice not to be patronised by nitwits. It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except throug
h metaphor. It would be nice if people saw that the world cannot be disenchanted, and that the choice before us is really a choice of enchantments.

  It would be nice. But it isn’t necessary. Because the churches are open, doing their ancient and necessary business, and they will still be open tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, onwards into far time, in some form or other. And it doesn’t really matter what form, much though we may love the form they have now. They will still be offering the hush in which we can bear to find out what we’re like. Christ will still be looking across at us from the middle of the angry crowd. God will still be there, shining.

  If, that is, there is a God. There may well not be. I don’t know whether there is. And neither do you, and neither does Richard bloody Dawkins, and neither does anyone. It not being, as mentioned before, a knowable item. What I do know is that, when I am lucky, when I have managed to pay attention, when for once I have hushed my noise for a little while, it can feel as if there is one. And so it makes emotional sense to proceed as if He’s there; to dare the conditional. And not timid death-fearing emotional sense, or cowering craven master-seeking sense, or censorious holier-than-thou sense, either. Hopeful sense. Realistic sense. Battered-about-but-still-trying sense. The sense recommended by our awkward sky fairy, who says: don’t be careful. Don’t be surprised by any human cruelty. But don’t be afraid. Far more can be mended than you know.

  Notes

  I wrote almost the whole of this book sitting at the corner table by the window in the Sidney Street, Cambridge branch of Costa Coffee. I’d like to thank the staff there for their friendliness and tolerance as I nursed my cups of black Americano, hour after hour.