Not For The Faint Hearted

In the Catholic school I attended, we were urged, when faced with any kind of trial or difficulty, to ‘offer it up’. As I look back on this, I can see that urging us to ‘offer things up’ was a convenient way for the nuns to avoid having to engage with whatever it was that a child might be going through and to do something about it. But it was also part of their spiritual ethos. The idea was that you effectively sublimated whatever you were going through into the pain or ordeal that someone else was facing, or that whole groups were facing, persecuted Catholics suffering under Communist regimes figuring most prominently in this category. To be seen to ‘offer things up’ was deemed to be a sign of personal holiness. It was a noble idea, but I’m not sure how effective it was, or whether it was really something God wanted of Catholic 9 year olds.

That being said, the worst remedies can often contain a kernel of medicinal value, if not for the person on the receiving end of them, then for those administering them. The nuns were primarily in the business of saving our souls, rather than educating us to think and to take responsibility for ourselves. We were all destined for marriage and the home hearth in any case, unless we were going to become nuns, of course.

Needless to say, I gave up offering things up the minute the school gates closed behind me for the last time. But I am beginning to see that, looked at in a different way, the idea has some merit. It’s possible to engage with the ills of the world without being sucked into them emotionally with all the inevitable effects that brings in its train; depression, addiction, a generally nihilistic approach to life, to name only a few. So the exercise, I can’t help thinking, is worth it. It pins the reality of a situation onto the noticeboard of the real. In other words, it stops us looking the other way and either disappearing into a holy fog (as I fear the nuns may have been doing) or slipping lazily into a mindset that then becomes part of the problem.

One of the greatest evils at work in the world at the moment is coming about in part at least as a result of this second approach. I’m talking about the whole Trump, far right, Q-Anon saga that has been playing out in the West now for almost ten years. Even the most level headed are in danger of slipping into this mindset unless we can act proactively together to stem the tide of destruction that will surely follow the dismantling of government and democracy as we know it if Donald Trump is returned for a second term as President of the United States. This is not mere conjecture on my part. He has already announced his intentions from a Washington court room. So how can well-meaning liberals who don’t engage with US politics very much make a difference?

This is where the ‘offering up’ comes in. There is a way of turning things around in our lives that functions on a completely different level to the pragmatic and logical. It begins, I think, with turning the downs (the ups too, of course) of our lives into positive energy by engaging them as a kind of force for resistance in the face of perceived evil. It is an action of the will, a refusal to give in to whatever is making life particularly difficult right now; be it a relationship, an illness, a state of mind, exhaustion brought on by over-work, or by trying to resist alcohol or drugs, or by despair itself. We convert all these states of mind into something solid by refashioning them into resistance to the evil that is swirling around in the political stratosphere and inside the heads of some of the most powerful and influential people on earth. The idea that freedom and democracy are incompatible, that those who will ultimately control all of our lives will be either a powerful individual, or a faceless nameless entity, a kind of ghost built on the power of bitcoin and the dark web, is given some kind of credence and respectability by people like Lord William Rees-Mogg (father of the British MP) who part edited a book called The Sovereign Individual – Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. We should all be reading it with a view to understanding what it is we are up against, so that we can confront it from within.  

We do this by confronting lies with a greater Truth, a truth we have known by another name, perhaps, the name of Love itself. So we are not alone in this work. This is also where we part company with the ‘comforts of religion’, if ‘comforts’ is what they are. It is where we quite literally ‘put on the whole armour of God’ (Eph. 6:10) in consecrating our particular trials, great and small, into a greater concerted will to face down lies and call out plain evil. We do this together, as a body. The other name for it is spiritual warfare. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Is QAnon the New Religion?

‘The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people’ memorable, but by no means new words spoken by Martin Luther King Jr.

I want to reflect a little on those words against a backdrop of St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 6: 1-10) in the context of the rise of the ultra-right group QAnon in America and of our own sleep walking into neo-fascism here in the UK.

 You may think that I am implying that all the people who do not align themselves with extreme conservatism of one kind or another, whichever side of the Atlantic you live on, are automatically the ‘good people’ who are remaining silent. I would not want to make such a hasty and all encompassing judgment, but I would want to say that we, the people in between, the much disparaged ‘wokes’, the fair minded thinkers, the powerless and the voiceless (powerless because we don’t know how to use the democratic powers we still have and voiceless because we don’t know what to say) are still in bed and asleep long after the alarm has gone off. Also, because I am generally thought to be a ‘religious’ person, I’m particularly struck by the way QAnon in the US is being compared in size and impact to a mainstream religion.

It needs to be said here, that neither of these tendencies, the American or the much vaguer UK one, bear any likeness to good religion. Religion, as the word suggests (from the Latin ligare) is what binds people together in a common love for God, worked out in and through a love for all people and for God’s world. Love is the operative and the definitive word when it comes to good religion. This being said, I still want to try to look at bits of the letter to the Corinthians from the kind of religious standpoint that these misguided movements and political tendencies are either openly espousing or privately harbouring.

‘On a day of salvation I have helped you’, Paul writes, quoting Isaiah 49:8. They see themselves as agents of salvation. This is their religion. But, unlike Paul, who was appealing for reconciliation with God and confidence in his love and mercy, theirs is simply a way of capitalising on two of humanity’s most primal fears, the fear of loss and the fear of abandonment. They do this by openly or covertly advocating violence and by promulgating a deep distrust of others, especially leaders and democratically elected political parties who they oppose.

Paul, in his letter, lists the kind of tribulations he and other Christians have experienced in their ministry, but he is not making spurious capital out of being seen as a victim. Much of the violence that we see coming from QAnon is the result of perceived victimhood, notwithstanding the fact that many genuine victims of poverty (although the majority are white, it should be noted) are caught up in that movement. Right wing extremism appeals to the poorest. Its proponents are therefore seen as agents of salvation and the parties or leaders they oppose as responsible for abandoning the poor and the vulnerable.

In contrast to QAnon, Paul goes on to remind his readers of the real strengths that come with what we call grace. These include patience, kindness and genuine love, to name only three, but they are words that carry little weight if you are trying to make your mark as a revolutionary movement. They only begin to carry weight when you ‘slant’ them slightly so as to allow you to introduce them into the elements that make people truly afraid. These are the elements of loss and abandonment.

Material loss speaks for itself. We all fear the day we might wake up with no means to pay the bills. We also fear abandonment, that we are being governed by incompetent liars who, as is being revealed in the UK, may have disastrously lost control of a now rudderless ship and that there is no one in sight to take over – except the extreme right. I would hazard a guess that the former fear is especially strong in the US where one in seven Americans live below the poverty line[1] and the latter prevails just beneath the public consciousness here in the UK. The US is blessed with its new President, although it will take nothing short of a miracle for him to fully realise his fiscal ambitions. We, in the UK, are not so blessed. We lack both visionary leadership and the competence to run a country which is fast becoming one of Europe’s worst casualties, in every sense of the word, of the current pandemic.

            This leads me back to the second great fear that pseudo-religious movements can pander to, the fear of being abandoned, the primal fear of loneliness. Extreme right movements use this fear to give their followers a spurious sense of belonging which comes with ideas that will shore up their leaders’ equally false sense of purpose. What we then have is tribalism. Tribalism can very easily replace good religion and, in doing so, can supply a kind of religious alternative which far from confronting and seeking to change what is wrong with society (what we call sin) uses that to further strengthen its hold on whole nations by appealing not only to the poor, but by taking full advantage of the inertia of the good people who Dr King was referring to in the words I quoted at the beginning of this post.

We saw something like this happening in the run-up to the Second World War. Are we seeing it again?  

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[1] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103656/2021-poverty-projections.pdf