The Queen's Jubilee: A Reflection

Listening to the Queen’s 70th Jubilee Service of Thanksgiving, I was inspired to write this after considering what sermon I would have given had I been addressing the congregation (and the world) at that service.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

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Several years ago, I found myself in Bethlehem. I was an intern with a charity supporting refugees in the Middle East, and myself and my boss were visiting our charity’s regional projects and contact networks. I was having a bad day. I’d made my boss and I late for an engagement we were attending and then forgotten something important. I don’t really remember why else it had been such a rubbish day but suffice it to say it was one of those days where everything I did felt inadequate. All that remained of this mediocre day was dinner with a group staying at our hotel. I determined to get through it as quickly as possible and then slope off to my room.

We arrived at dinner (late), and I saw that all but one space had been taken. This was perfect. I took my boss to the final remaining space and prepared to slyly exit the scene. Filled as I was with melancholic inadequacy, the last thing I wanted was to make small talk with the polite middle-class society assembled. All I desired was the peace and isolation of my hotel room with the chance to emotionally switch off in front of the TV. Then, just as I made my move to leave, my heart sank as my Israeli colleague called out, “Here, have my seat.” “Oh no, don’t worry, I’ll be fine. You stay here and enjoy yourself.” But he insisted. Bother. So I sat down.

Next to me was sat an elderly monk, dressed in his Franciscan habit. For some reason, sitting next to this monk heightened the negativity within me. Perhaps, having considered both fancifully and seriously becoming a monk myself as a teenager, just being next to him pricked further at my own sense of insecurity and inadequacy. But regardless, I proceeded to just put my head down, focus on my plate of food, and eat my meal as quickly as possible. That’s when I felt his hand on my shoulder.

What took place next was one of the most profound experiences of my life. It's hard to put into words the transformation that took place next. What words I find seem hopelessly impotent to convey the depth of what occurred, while also at once seem a gross magnification of what was in many respects such an ordinary encounter. All I know is that with a hand on his shoulder and some kind words (which I’d forgotten as soon as he said them), this monk took me from a place of abject anonymity to feeling like the most special person in the room. I can’t say whether the impact of this encounter had more to do with the kindness, love and cheer that emanated from this man’s presence or was simply a reflection of how low I’d been feeling. What I do know is that I no longer wanted to leave the room. I no longer felt inadequate.

This weekend, we are celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – 70 years on the throne! Yesterday, I watched the Service of Thanksgiving for the Queen. Like many, I have a great love and admiration for the Queen, and I found the service very moving. But sometimes, I myself am struck by the strength of my emotional reaction to such things. After all, this woman only possesses her status via an accident of birth. Why then does she give rise to this deep desire within me to express my gratitude, awe and respect? Why do such expressions seem sincere and right, not sycophantic and ridiculous?

I think stories like the one with myself and the monk in Bethlehem give us a clue as to why. During the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, world-famous singer, Elaine Paige, shared a small anecdote from her life of meeting the Queen.

“One memory that comes to mind was when I was asked to sing at Windsor Castle. Sadly, it was in 2002 and the Queen Mother had died and obviously the concert was cancelled. Then, two or three weeks later, I met the Queen at the Royal Academy of Arts, and I was astonished that she came to me and apologised to me that the concert had been [cancelled]... She reassured me that it would be reinstated, and I was just blown away by that. I thought, here is a woman that was probably grieving, obviously, for the loss of her mother, and, as you said, her thoughts were not about herself, they were about others. Eventually I did manage to make the performance at Windsor Castle. Of course, she came out of the doors first… and [she] walked towards me with her arms outstretched, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Elaine, at last!' And I just think she is the most brilliant woman.”

“Honour one another above yourselves.” So reads Romans 12:10b, one of my favourite verses. It is too easy to read these lines quickly before moving onto the rest of the passage. But more than perhaps any other moral command found in the Christian Scriptures, I think this is the most profound. Except perhaps when we are truly enamoured by someone or something, our instinct is rarely to give honour, but very much to receive it. We want to be thanked, to be listened to, to be praised. But how often do we take intentional steps to give other’s thanks, to listen to others well and to give others praise? Not only that, but each of us shares pain and trauma from times when we have been dishonoured and humiliated. Bullying in school, someone not respecting our time, insults behind our back, rejection from someone we admired or loved – we feel these things acutely.

There’s a reason why in Jane Austen’s classic, Emma, (spoiler alert) when young Harriet talks about the man who ‘saved me’, she is not referring (as her friend, Emma, assumes) to the dashing Frank Churchill who rescued her from the physical danger of her gypsy muggers. Instead, she is referring to the noble Mr. Knightley who, despite his own dislike of dancing, saved her from humiliation by asking her to dance when she had been shunned by all the other men, worried as they were about affiliating with this woman of low-birth.

The Queen possesses great privilege and honour. It would be easy – as indeed many monarchs of the past demonstrate – to let this privilege and honour become all-consuming. Instead, what we see time and again is a person who uses her position of honour to bless others with the same. As former Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, mentioned elsewhere in the BBC’s coverage, “When she’s talking to you, she’s not looking around to see ‘What’s more attractive here’. She pays 100% attention to you.” The egotistical use their honour to generate greater glory for themselves; the loving use their honour to make others feel just as special.

In an age of celebrity, in a time where it is perhaps easier than ever to become self-obsessed, it is good, indeed right, to celebrate this remarkable woman who for seventy years has truly served her country and Commonwealth. Her privilege has not been a platform for her own personal glorification – we have no Instagram or twitter account to follow her latest personal trends – but instead a platform to honour, praise and uplift others.

Perhaps it is easy to consider others more worthy of honour than yourself when it is obvious your position owes itself to the accident of birth. Then again, maybe if we were more willing to admit how much our own achievements and successes owed less to our own deservingness and much more to the grace of God and others, we too might be quicker to consider others more worthy of honour than ourselves.

-The End-

Part 9: The Richness of a Tradition

This is part 9 of my series ‘There and Back Again: An (A)Theist’s Tale’. This series tells you my story of losing my faith and the slow journey of finding it again but not quite in the same way as before.

Part 9 looks at the rich history of Christian tradition and practice, and how this led me to to view Christianity afresh.

You can find the rest of this series under the 'There and Back Again: An (A)Theist's Tale' tab at the top of the screen.

Thank you again to Eleanor Vivian and Miki Kwek for their proofreading and critical feedback.

3,500 Words

‘The Last Supper’ from the Life of Christ by Giulio Aleni (1637), an early Jesuit missionary for the Church in China.[1]

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“Abba Poemen said that Abba John said that the saints are like a group of trees, each bearing different fruit, but watered from the same source. The practices of one saint differ from those of another, but it is the same Spirit that works in all of them.”

-Sayings XLIII of Abba John the Dwarf [2]

More than perhaps most people, I have spent my life aware of the role that culture plays in my own and others’ lives. My childhood was divided between a secularist, post-Christian, liberal and western society in Britain and an atheistic, communist, (neo-)Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist society in China. I have had the fortune to attend Christian churches in a myriad of contexts from a variety of traditions. I have attended Muslim, Hindu and Jewish religious services and visited many Buddhist temples. I have received hospitality from wealthy expats, penniless street homeless, warm suburbanites and welcoming rural peasants. In short, I have experienced numerous ethnic, religious and socio-economic cultures first-hand.

Yet, despite all this, I am not in the most literal sense a ‘global citizen’. I no doubt contain numerous quirks which give away my eclectic upbringing and life, but my body is planted just like everyone else’s. I am culturally British, Western in my intuitions, low church Protestant[3] in my religiosity and middle class (dare I say ‘posh’) in my preferences. My mind might understand a wide variety of cultures, religions and ways of life, but I still only walk in one pair of shoes. I always err on the side of excessive politeness. I value my personal independence and autonomy and instinctively believe in the equality of all people. The informal strum of a guitar will always stir my soul to worship more than the most beautiful church organ. And English tea and a fine glass of port will forever remain my two drinks of choice.

Why does this matter? Where am I going with this?

The cultural undercurrents we swim within are rarely noticed by us, but they certainly help guide where we end up. When I lost my faith, my intuition was that this was the result of an individual journey. Through my own reading, thinking and everyday experience, I had encountered problems with my faith which all of a sudden had become insurmountable. That other people continued to be Christians was most likely a result of their continuing ignorance or indeed wilful blindness. Of course, this assumption was implicitly quite flattering – I was one of the enlightened ones – but I also didn’t want it to be true. I still hoped that out there somewhere was someone who knew something that I did not that might salvage my faith. But I wasn’t hopeful of finding any such person; after all, if they existed, you’d have thought they’d have come and turned back the tide of secularisation by now. After all, it’s no secret that religion has been in decline in the West.

Or is it? The story of religious decline is often framed as a ‘Western’ phenomenon. But when you actually delve into the census figures, you discover it is much more specific, being confined almost exclusively to just White and Christian groups in the West. In the UK, the two largest Christian ethnic groups are White and Black British. Although White British outnumber Black British by a large margin, it is worth noting that while Christianity among White British declined by 16 percentage points between 2001 and 2011 (76% to 60% of White British identifying as Christian), Christian decline amongst Black British was just two percentage points (71% to 69%). In the same period, while irreligion increased among White British from 15% to 27%, among Black British the increase was much more moderate from 7.5% to 10.5%.[4] Meanwhile, like with Black British Christians, significant religious decline is simply not evident amongst British Muslim, Jewish or Hindu groups. The picture is similar in America where ‘religious’ decline over the last two decades is again almost exclusively white Christian decline. Non-white Christians and other non-Christian religious groups have remained largely stable over the same time period.

It turns out that losing Christian faith as a White British Christian (like myself) is rather unoriginal. And this raises an important point. What I had perceived to be my own individual journey was actually intertwined with a much more specific cultural shift among primarily White Westerners shedding or (perhaps more accurately) moving on from the Christian heritage that has dominated a largely White Western Europe for centuries.

However, it wasn’t until after I’d returned to Christian faith that I began to realise much of the above. Despite growing up across cultures, I was surprisingly blind to the cultural elements of both my particular evangelical Christian faith and my deconversion experience. Like most Westerners, I had fallen into the habit of assuming that the popularity of my Western (and Western Christian) beliefs was evidence that they alone transcended cultural boundaries and were universal rather than parochial. But it was actually when I began to recognise the inescapable link between the ideas we hold and the places, cultures and status we occupy that I began to see Christianity in a new light. Through the discovery of much wider Christian cultures and traditions, instead of finding someone with the answers I was craving for, these new perspectives helped me begin to re-think the questions I was asking and the assumptions I was making.

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When people asked me what religion I was growing up, I would respond simply with “Christian”. Inevitably would then come the follow-up: “yeah, but what kind of Christian?”.

I disliked this second question. People just didn’t get it. I didn’t need to be one ‘kind’ of Christian – I was just a Christian! I mean, if people really forced the question, I would say I was a ‘Protestant’. But I didn’t like using this label. Yes, all the churches I had ever been a member of were Protestant. Yes, 95% of theological books I’d ever read had been written by Protestants (and 90% of these books by Evangelical Protestants). And yes, why Mary was such a big deal in Catholic and Orthodox Churches thoroughly confused me. But hey, I liked the Pope! And anyway, all those differences in services, religious holidays, liturgies, music styles, architectures, not to mention the different theologies regarding priesthood, salvation, the church, Mary etc. – that was just cultural glossing. What mattered was that we all believed Jesus was the Son of God, saved us from our sins, and was coming again. Why put us in all these unnecessarily divisive boxes when we were all essentially the same?

So it was no surprise at university that I joined the Christian Union. This was a place for all Christians to meet, have fellowship, and also invite our fellow students to consider the Christian message for themselves. I became my college’s Christian Union rep and I was eager to involve all Christians in college. I had become aware that there were other Christians in my college who’d never come to Christian Union. These Christians were mostly (though not always) of the High Church variety, and I wondered why they didn’t seem to want to get involved. We were all Christians after all? Yes, most (if not all) the Christians in Christian Union were from 'Low Church', Protestant backgrounds, but why should that matter! We were all the same, weren’t we?

That’s when I met Elizabeth. She was from a Russian Orthodox background. And she wanted to come to the central Christian Union meeting one week. I had a fascinating conversation with her about Russian Orthodoxy on the way to the meeting and we took our places when we arrived. Perfect, I thought. This is exactly what Christian Union is about! Christians from all backgrounds coming together! But when the meeting began, it suddenly struck me how what I was witnessing was not so much universal Christianity but a Christianity that was highly cultural. The ‘Christianity’ of the Christian Union contained no liturgy, involved no formal priesthood, involved worship music played on modern instruments with emotive and informal lyrics, made little to no reference to the role of the Church in the Kingdom of God, emphasised our identity as individuals in the Christian story, and explained that conversion to a Christian life came about through an intellectual decision, not a life of embodied sacramental practice and ritual. Essentially, I realised that the ‘Christianity’ of the Christian Union was exactly what I’d grown up my whole life practicing, but it was definitely not the Christianity my friend Elizabeth had grown up with.

During my childhood in China, I had always attended large ‘multi-denominational’ international churches that only foreigners were allowed to attend. Numerous nationalities were represented in these churches, and every Sunday we would come together to worship the same God. This for me was evidence of the universality of my Christian faith – people of every tribe and tongue really did worship Jesus. Yet, reflecting back, though many nations were indeed represented in these international churches, each church was nonetheless pretty similar. Their theology was always Evangelical, Protestant and ‘Low Church’. Their music was always lively and modern. Taking communion always felt like an after-thought once a month. Sermons tended to implicitly assume life transformation came about by hearing new ideas and thinking the right things. The speakers and congregation never wore church robes. Finally, despite the diversity of nationalities and languages spoken, services were always in English and the cultural influence was undoubtedly Western. The books that were recommended, the songs we sung – these were usually written by Westerners. The more I thought and reflected on it, the more I realised that the Christianity I grew up with was in fact another ‘kind’ of Christianity among many. It’s just that this kind of Christianity called itself… ‘Christianity’.

Several months after taking Elizabeth to Christian Union, my Christianity was in tatters. Yet, what ‘Christianity’ was it I had actually lost?

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“For most of its history, Christianity was a tricontinental religion, with powerful representation in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and this was true into the fourteenth century. Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default: Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed. Matters could easily have developed very differently.”

-Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity[5]

The traditional telling of Christian history goes something like this. After a couple centuries of intermittent persecution, the Roman Empire under Constantine converted to Christianity. From this point on, Christianity became the majority religion in the Roman Empire and, after the Western Empire’s collapse, continued to spread across Europe. The rise of Islam, however, in the 7th century quickly put an end to the Christian presence in North Africa and the Middle East. Meanwhile, it wasn’t until post-1500, as European explorers first began to discover and then eventually colonise and conquer large parts of the Americas, Africa and Asia that Christianity finally became a truly ‘global’ religion.

It’s a telling of Christian history believed by many – including most Western Christians. Undoubtedly this is in part because Europe’s two most prominent Christianities – Roman Catholicism and Protestantism – indeed didn’t begin to expand significantly beyond Europe’s borders until post-1500. It comes as quite a surprise then for many to discover that Christianity was a global phenomenon pretty much from the get-go.

In the 2nd and 3rd centuries already, we have evidence of Christianity in places like India, Persia, and Ethiopia. Christianity became the official religion of the Kingdom of Aksum (modern day Ethiopia/Eritrea) and Kingdom of Kartli (modern day Georgia/Armenia) decades before the Roman Empire made it the official state religion in 380AD. In 591AD, Byzantine officials were surprised when Turkish envoys from present-day Kyrgyzstan arrived with crosses tattooed on their foreheads; the envoys replied that their mothers, on the advice of local Christians, had tattooed them when plague had spread through their community as children.[6] Just 40 years after St. Augustine was sent by Rome to begin evangelising my home British Isles, Mar Alopen was sent from Seleucia-Ctesiphon, home of the Church of the East in modern-day Iraq, to the capital of Tang Dynasty China in 635AD to begin his own evangelisation efforts there. From 780-822AD, the head of the Church of the East, Patriarch Timothy I, oversaw bishops from Jerusalem to China and from Sri Lanka to Central Asia – we even have records of him appointing a new bishop in Tibet.[7] In 1000 A.D., roughly the halfway point in Christianity’s history, estimates suggest that just under half the world’s Christian population lived in Asia and Africa, most of whom had been Christians for numerous generations unlike many of the relatively recent converts to Christianity in northern Europe.[8] In the late 1280s, the Mongol envoy and Turkic Chinese Christian monk, Rabban Bar Sauma, travelled to Catholic Europe causing a sensation and even gave the Eucharist to the King of England.[9] Clearly, Christianity existed and sometimes even thrived outside of Europe long before European missionaries arrived.

Early 16th century Ethiopian Orthodox Icon[10]

But by the time European missionaries did begin arriving in larger numbers from the 16th century, they did for the most part encounter lands empty of any explicit Christian presence. To cut a long, complex story short, essentially from the 13th century onwards a series of cumulative blows including violence, invasion, persecution, dislocation and resulting isolation meant most of the churches of Asia and Africa either were destroyed or slowly faded into the surrounding milieu of whatever religious majority surrounded them. Only in Ethiopia, Egypt, southern India and parts of the Middle East did Christianity manage to maintain some sort of official institutional presence. Fast forward to today, and what is left of Patriarch Timothy’s Church of the East is a splinter of churches presiding over a mostly refugee congregation dotted in small pockets in the USA, Canada, Australia and Iraq. Religions die as well as spread.

Palm Sunday Mural from the Nestorian Christian Temple at Qocho in modern-day Xinjiang, China composed in the 7-9th century A.D. [11]

Why does this history matter? In many of these same lands where Christianity disappeared, new forms of Christianity, often West European in origin, have taken root. Large Christian populations can be found across East Asia, most notably in the Philippines, South Korea, China and India. The Americas are thoroughly Christianised, while Christianity has spread throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa. But except in the case of the Americas, the Christianities most frequently found in these places today were not the first to arrive there.

Cross dating from 10th century at St. Mary's Knanaya Valiyapally, Kaduthuruthy in southern India[12]

And this is why the histories of the dead and forgotten Churches matter. They remind us that there has never been just one ‘Christianity’. Most Christianities tend to downplay the existence and validity of other Christian traditions for both good and bad reasons. In practice, what this means is that most Christians are familiar with only a small portion of their very large, diverse religious tradition. Evangelical Protestants of my tradition are rarely familiar with either high church Protestantism or Roman Catholicism, and I imagine it goes the other way too. Yet, move outside the Western world to the Christian worlds of Eastern Orthodoxy, Ethiopian Orthodoxy and more besides and the ignorance increases tenfold. Of course, there is much theological merit to be found in the West European-inspired Christianities that have come to dominate much of the Christian world. Yet, they did not reach such a place of prominence simply through theological merit but in large part for reasons of historical contingency. Europe was the continent where Christianity wasn’t isolated, suffocated or killed.

St Mary Church, Urmia, Iran, the construction of which dates to the pre-Islamic era. Before WWI, there was a plaque in the church dated to 642 AD commemorating a visiting Chinese princess who helped pay for the church’s reconstruction.[13]

What this means is that there is a treasure trove of Christian thought, tradition and theology out there to be explored![14] Believe it or not, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, C.S Lewis, Tim Keller and Pope Francis do not have a monopoly on what Christianity means in its totality. And since Christianity is a tree with many branches, what might be an intellectual problem for one branch is not necessarily one for all the others.[15]

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“It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Culture is a product of history, not an invention of the will.”

-James Davidson Hunter[16]

“In science, people were learning that they had to be ready to scrap the past and start again from first principles in order to find the truth. Religion, however, like art often consists of a dialogue with the past in order to find a perspective from which to view the present. Tradition provides a jumping-off point which enables men and women to engage with the perennial questions about the ultimate meaning of life.”

-Karen Armstrong[17]

Essentially, in the months following my atheistic epiphany, I realised more and more that what I had thought for so long as ‘Christianity’ in its entirety was the Christianity of a certain time and place. My tradition of non-denominational, evangelical, English-speaking Christianity was not necessarily the most authentic, truest, nor best form of Christianity out there. It was one among many ‘Christianities’, each formed by the place, culture and history of what has gone before. I was learning to shift my perspective.

I began to notice how the scientific progress of the last two centuries has led my culture to value certainty and to conflate truth with the literal. Any surprise then that many Christianities of my culture prefer to see the Bible as true only as long as it is literal and downplay tensions and contradictions within Scripture. Similarly, I had long been dissatisfied with the gospel message of my tradition. Its view of grace as a loophole to a legalistic dilemma, its preoccupation with people praying the sinner’s prayer rather than living lives of faithful discipleship, and its black-and-white, instrumentalist approach to evangelism were all things I felt lacking in substance and integrity. To then discover the ‘theosis’ tradition of salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy was an immense relief. Re-framing salvation as a process of transformation into the likeness of Christ makes the Christian journey both more relevant to the here and now and also something more substantive, merely beginning (not completing) at the point of conversion.

Having grown up across cultures, coming to a place where I could acknowledge rather than hide from the cultural bedrock of my beliefs, including my faith, has been rather freeing. While before I would equate anything ‘cultural’ with arbitrary opinion, now I’ve come to see that I am far less an individual with ideas than I first thought. My loss of faith ultimately mirrored a trend within my culture, and my return has largely come about by learning to view my Christian faith afresh through new cultural lenses. Now I see my Christian faith as an embodied pattern of Christian hope, faithfulness and love more than an intellectual assent to a set of beliefs; as something expressed more through my network of relationships than through my individual prowess; as a rich tapestry of tradition through which I find life, beauty and, by the grace of God, perhaps even salvation.

References & Notes

[1] https://sicutincensum.wordpress.com/2019/12/05/chinese-depictions-of-the-life-of-christ/

[2] The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Apophthegmata Patrum: The Alphabetic Collection: 59, Translated by Sister Benedicta Ward, Liturgical Press, 1975.

[3] 'Low Church' and 'High Church' were two terms that developed within Anglican Christianity. Low Churches hold informal and 'modern' church services and tend to be livelier. They come out of the radical Protestant influence on Anglicanism. High Church services are much more traditional and formal. They maintain older Catholic influences. Low Churches do not prescribe an order of service, set no liturgical pattern, and do not use developed rituals and ceremonies. Clergy also do not wear church robes. High Church services meanwhile emphasise the priestly, liturgical, ceremonial, and ritualistic aspects of historic Christian practice. Read more here.

[4] Nomis, 2001 Census Data , ST104 - Ethnic group by religion, Opened: April 2022. URL: https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2001/st104 & Nomis, 2011 Census Data, DC2201EW - Ethnic Group by Religion, Opened: April 2022. URL: https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/dc2201ew

[5] Jenkins, Philip, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, Harper One, 2009 pg. 25

[6] Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, pg. 62

[7] Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, pg. 11

[8] Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, pg. 70

[9] Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, pg. 95

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_art#/media/File:NMAfA-S20070140(1).jpg

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murals_from_the_Nestorian_temple_at_Qocho

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christian_cross

[13] https://travital.com/attraction/st-mary-church-urmia/

[14] A few I’d recommend for starters would be Gregory of Nyssa, Sadhu Sundar Singh, the Desert Fathers,

[15] Unfortunately, many of the great writings of the Church of the East are lost and those that remain are not always translated into English or easily available. However, what is available in abundance are writings from the orthodox traditions of Eastern Europe and the Near East, particularly some great theologians of the first few centuries of Christianity like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Isaac the Syrian/of Nineveh.

[16] Hunter, James D., To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, 2010

[17] Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, Vintage Publishing, 1999, pg. 359

Part 8: Faith Without Works Is Dead

This is part 8 of my series ‘There and Back Again: An (A)Theist’s Tale’. This series tells you my story of losing my faith and the slow journey of finding it again but not quite in the same way as before.

Part 8 looks at the turning point in the rediscovery of my faith. Following on from the discussion in Part 7 about the conflict between my Christianity and my Western Individuality Seeker ethic, Part 8 looks at the connection between ideas and place and how this impacted my return to Christian religion.

You can find the rest of this series under the 'There and Back Again: An (A)Theist's Tale' tab at the top of the screen.

Thank you again to Eleanor Vivian for her proofreading and critical feedback.

3,500 words

Image by StockSnap on Pixabay.

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What is your ‘calling’? It’s a term familiar to Christians of my tradition. It’s a question fundamentally rooted in the idea of purpose. What is God ‘calling’ me to do with my life? Why has He put me on this Earth? While a secular Westerner may search for their purpose ‘within themselves’, the Christian Westerner searches for their purpose both within and outside themselves. Within because they have certain gifts, talents and capabilities placed by their Creator indicating why they’ve been created, but also outside themselves because ultimately the Christian wants to do what God is asking her to do.

I too used to ask myself that question. In my most profound teenage spiritual encounter, I was praying when this thought, seemingly from nowhere, gently but unmistakeably filled my consciousness – “Would you be willing to give up your ambitions around university for me?” Was this God? Insecure as I was about pretty much everything other than my intelligence as a teenager, the idea of giving up the one thing that would ‘confirm’ my intelligence – and thus my status – in the eyes of those around me shook me to my core. However, after a day’s internal wrestling, I accepted this thought was from God, and I trusted Him, so I gave Him my ambition. The next few years were spent trying to work out what God might be calling me to do instead. Did he want me to go to a Bible College? Perhaps like the 17th century Moravian Christians, I should sell myself into modern day slavery and minister to those suffering most? Eventually, however, like Abraham who was asked to sacrifice his beloved son, God gave me back my sacrifice at the last minute. I got my university application in just before the deadline.

I enjoyed University and I really saw myself grow during my time there. But towards the end, it became apparent that I would once more start having to think about what came next! Again, the low-level anxiety began to creep in. What was God calling me to do? I prayed. I attended Christian seminars on ‘discovering your calling’, but still nothing. Eventually, I got myself accepted on a prestigious graduate scheme. This involved ‘helping people’ so I figured that in the absence of anything clear from God, He was probably happy with this.

That’s when it happened again. A visiting speaker came to my College’s Chapel. He worked with persecuted Christians in the Middle East. I was interested in the topic, but nothing more than that. Then suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere during a Q&A at the end of the service, a thought like the one when I was a teenager impressed itself upon me: “You should work for him.” Was that you God? Three weeks later, I had turned down the prestigious graduate scheme and accepted the job it seemed God had called me to.

Now I’d found my calling, I was going to start living my best life, wasn’t I?

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“The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed.”

-Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

We like to think that ideas resemble machines. Machines are constructed things which are easily transported from place to place. As long as you have the right materials and components, a machine in location A can be exported to location B without any obvious impact on the machine. But ideas are not like machines. The pastor and sociologist, Oleg Djik, coins the term ‘plural-spatial theology’ to highlight this.[1] Plural-spatial theology recognises that we are ‘embodied minds’: babies who first and foremost taste, touch, smell, hear and move before we eventually think, analyse and reason. Our spaces, cultures, families, nations, religion, and homes all play a part in shaping our perceptions, structuring our movements and directing our thoughts.

Like the minds then from which they emanate, ideas cannot be disembodied. They are intricately linked to the people and places where they develop. As such, ideas are much more like plants than machines. They must be planted, cultivated and grown. But what thrives in one climate may die in another. Still others might only begin to thrive if interventions are made through irrigation channels and greenhouses to replicate the plant’s necessary conditions. Finally, some plants will only begin to thrive in foreign soils when they become new sub-species, taking on fresh adaptations to their new conditions, yet no longer being quite the same as before.

Christianity – like Islam, Buddhism, Communism, Democracy…the list goes on – is a tree that has been planted in many lands. It has thus taken many shapes and forms over the millennia. This is obvious to anyone who compares an Anglican church in London with a megachurch in Seoul, a Catholic church in Sao Paulo, a house church in rural China, and an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Addis Ababa. The problem is that the global reach of ideas is not necessarily evidence of their universality.

One helpful illustrator of this is the Japanese author, Endo Sushake. Himself a Japanese Catholic, Sushake’s writing frequently explores the tension he feels between his Japanese identity and his Western-inspired Roman Catholic religion. In his book, Silence, a sombre tale of the horrific persecution of Roman Catholic Christians in 17th century Japan, Sushake’s protagonist, Fr. Rodriquez, a Jesuit missionary to Japan, is brought by the authorities to the apostate priest, Fr. Ferreira. Ferreira tries to convince Rodriquez of the futility of his missionary endeavours and tells him,

“This country is a swamp…Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp…Even in the glorious missionary period you mentioned the Japanese did not believe in the Christian God but their own distortion.”

Frerreira points out to Rodriquez that the Latin word ‘Deus’, meaning ‘God’, was translated by the early Japanese converts as ‘Dainichi’, meaning ‘The Great Sun’. Japan is known as the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ because its indigenous religion, Shintoism, upholds the Sun-goddess, Amatersasu, as its most eminent deity from whom all Emperors are descended. In such a world, is it any wonder that the ‘Deus’ sapling of Latin Catholic Christian monotheism evolved into a much more Japanese and Shinto ‘Dainichi’?

Frerreira continues:

“In the churches we built throughout this country the Japanese were not praying to the Christian God. They twisted God to their own way of thinking in a way we can never imagine…No. That is not God. It is like a butterfly caught in a spider's web. At first it is certainly a butterfly, but the next day only the externals, the wings and the trunk, are those of a butterfly; it has lost its true reality and has become a skeleton. In Japan our God is just like that butterfly caught in the spider's web: only the exterior form of God remains, but it has already become a skeleton.”

Now Rodriquez rightly contests the extent to which this mistranslation meant the Japanese converts were not in fact Christians. But Frerreira’s – and Shusake’s – point is an important one. Can ideas, let alone an entire religion, ever undergo translation unchanged? If not, what can we say is the fundamental essence of religion? Because if its essence be ideas alone, then what do we do about the fact that our ideas are not easily separated from the places we dwell?

Westerners more than any others in the world today struggle to grasp this limitation with ideas. This undoubtedly must be partly because while most parochial cultures remain quaint, the geopolitical dynamics of the last two centuries means the West has been lucky enough to spread its parochial, often English-speaking culture and ideas throughout most of the world. In so doing, it has become the gold-standard by which a people mark themselves as ‘modern’, ‘developed’ and ‘civilised’.

Everywhere Western institutions and ideas are constantly framed as universals. Our ‘World Wars’ are so primarily because they involved the entirety of the West. When the rest of the world was involved, it was usually due to their Western colonial ties. While the globally powerful Chinese Communist Party has no qualms with branding its form of communism as ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, rarely will a Westerner think of democracy as ‘Vote-Based Government with Western Characteristics’. This despite repeated failures of democracy in its ‘purest’ (i.e. Western) form to fully establish itself in most corners of the non-Western world. While Hollywood’s Oscar awards are expected to represent global diversity, neither Bollywood nor Nollywood have the same expectations. American-style shopping malls as opposed to Chinese wet markets or Arab souks are the gold-standard for modern marketplaces the world over. As an English-speaking Westerner, global international culture is much more comfortable for me than it is for those not lucky enough to find that their parochial culture has colonised the world.

It should come as no surprise then that my Western Christian tradition mirrors the wider West in many ways. And not just because it too has a habit of framing its parochial brand of Christianity as universal. It is relatively easy to point out the similarities between progressive forms of my tradition and wider Western culture. But even more conservative and traditional forms of my tradition, though they frequently like to portray themselves as ‘counter-cultural’ and wear this as a badge of authenticity, are counter-cultural more in theory than in practice. For instance, in the ongoing cultural debate around the fluidity of gender identities, counter-cultural Christians affirm traditional understandings of gender whilst failing to appreciate that their insistence on religion being a matter of personal choice with no tie to community or heritage in turn makes it possible to consider what else is a matter of personal choice alone.

In the arena of sexuality, ‘counter-cultural’ Christianities uphold traditional understandings of Christian marriage and prohibitions against pre-marital sex, while nonetheless embracing Western dating rituals which place the individual and romance at the centre of courtship. It is a ritual, like so many others in the West, which minimises responsibility while maximising the potential for pleasure and excitement. The goal of relationships within this context is not the procreation of children, who embody self-sacrifice and loss of freedom, but individual and romantic fulfilment. With marriage understood in this way, is it so unreasonable to extend the sacrament of marriage to same-sex couples who, until recently, would not be able to bear children naturally? When ideologies believed and rituals practiced fail to intersect, confusion, uncertainty and frustration are a natural consequence.

Institutionally too, its most successful churches mirror its most successful corporations. Examples of ‘Starbucks Christianity’ are prevalent in my tradition. They are hip and modern ‘brands’ where individuality is encouraged through informal dress codes and the Christian spiritual journey is focussed on your individual choice to follow Jesus. ‘Free grace’ salvation – again an indigenously Western concept in its modern form – minimises the responsibility of believers to live lives of dedicated sacrificial devotion to their crucified Messiah, while enabling them to nonetheless reap the benefits of his saving work. Church can easily begin to function as a pleasant euphoric distraction from everyday life where you get your ‘hit’ for the week and learn some useful self-help tips before returning to the drudgery of life.

Now, I do not say all the above because I think these are examples of how my Christian evangelical tradition is somehow ‘corrupt’. I merely wish to state the obvious. The Church of the West is…well, Western. It is foolish to think that religion can be so easily separated from culture and vice versa. Of course, the relationship between religion and culture goes both ways. Many of the West’s most distinctive cultural features – its emphasis on equality, the primacy of individual choice, its suspicion of arbitrary authority, and its progressive metaphysics which sees human history as inexorably proceeding to a shining utopia – are fundamentally linked to its indigenous low church Protestant Christianity. Secularism itself is at its heart a fundamentally Western Christian concept born in significant part within the specific European context of the post-Reformation Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th century. The Non-Religious cannot easily shed their place’s religion in much the same way that the Religious cannot loosen easily from their place’s culture. Only in recognising the contingent and embodied nature of our ideas do we firstly learn humility and secondly appreciate the importance of living out faith through ritual, culture and habit as opposed to simply believed ideas.

It was only when I’d lost my faith that I found it again precisely because I had no choice but to live it out.

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To return to our story, three months after my atheistic epiphany, I turned up to start the new job that God had so clearly called me too. Of course, now whether there was such a ‘God’ who could call me to anything was very much in doubt. But I had turned up nonetheless because what else was I supposed to do. But hey, I was excited, despite my internal turmoil. The next year promised new, unique experiences. God might not exist, but the promise of an exciting, ego-boosting life still remained.

This excitement burst soon after arriving. Firstly, there was the bruised ego. Within minutes of arriving, it became apparent that I’d misunderstood that this ‘job’ was in fact an internship. An hour later, as a recent graduate of the world’s most highly ranked global university that year, I’d been given my first task: cleaning, sorting and inventorising the charity garage. The second job wasn’t much better: dusting the office. My first day, I sat blankly at an empty desk, made cups of tea, and typed a couple letters. Not riveting stuff. Secondly, there was the disappointment. Part of the undoubted appeal of the job had been the prospect of global travel. Yet within a couple days of arriving I was told it would be at least several months before I would be going on any trips despite several being scheduled during those first months. While my colleagues were away, I was told that my job would be to stay behind and manage the office, keep it clean, answer the phone when it rang, and respond to enquiries – that is, if they arose in the first place. This tied into the final issue. I was bored and lonely. My girlfriend and family were all a long plane or train ride away. We were based in the countryside, and I didn’t drive and had no friends living nearby. Due to caring responsibilities that came with the role, I also couldn’t go out in the evenings to socialise in the local area. I had one day off a week, but due to the remote location, travelling to see anyone took time. All I could think about during that first week was that the future looked very dull indeed. I’d applied to this internship because ‘God’ had called me to it. But 6 months and an atheistic epiphany later, I was wondering if I’d just thrown my life away because of some mental deception played by my subconscious mind.

Now, fast forward to the present, and I realise that a lot of what I was experiencing that first week was somewhat part and parcel of beginning any new starter role. When you arrive in a job, your new employers are often trying to get a feel for you and your capabilities, and they don’t always know what work to give you. More importantly than that, they are still learning to work out what level of responsibility they can trust you with. But that is now, and this was then. It’s not that I couldn’t see in that first week my usefulness for colleagues. The garage needed inventorising; the office needed cleaning; my caring duties were appreciated. But in such a bargain, I felt like I had very much drawn the short straw. Anger, envy and despair began to well up within me. Life was not supposed to turn out like this. This is not what attending Oxford University was supposed to lead to.

Yet, it was at this moment – where everything inside me was angry, upset and disappointed – when the thought came to me.

Who says the reason God called me here has anything to do with me?

Unlike the time I was a teenager pondering university or in my college chapel considering this work, this thought did not seem to come from God. If anything, it was an epiphany much like the one that had led me to the fringes of atheism. But nonetheless, it punctured the depths of my soul. Why did I assume that my life and God’s role in it was ultimately about me? Was God’s calling ultimately about me living my best life, doing great things and becoming a famous figure? What if God had indeed called me here despite there being no obvious career development pathways or opportunities for me to shine on the public stage? What if all there was in my calling was a charity that needed an intern, a family who needed a carer, and a garage that needed inventorising – nothing more? This thought made sense on such an existentially satisfying level that though my feelings of frustration and disappointment didn’t just go, they no longer held mastery over me. Something else had won the war inside my soul – who says my life is about me?

It might sound strange, but the more I reflect on this moment, the more I think this marked the return of my Christian faith. My brain still thought the existence of God to be the unlikelier of two possibilities and it would be at least another year before I felt I could call myself a Christian again with any real sense of integrity. But it was here, when life was not going my way, that the Christian – not the Western – part of my soul was once more awakened. The part wishing to model the Christ,

“Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross.”[2]

The culture I had imbibed since moving back to the UK six years earlier was one infused by the West’s Individuality-Seeker ethic. Like many other Westerners, my own atheistic epiphany was foreshadowed by the internal conflict between my Christianity and this ethic. A year before the epiphany, I wrote in my journal, “The idea of doing something purely because God says so has lost convincing power over me. Wanting to obey God or even grant God any space in my life that takes away from my own autonomy has increasingly been a no-go area.” Submission – the act of placing your individuality aside in the embrace of another’s will – now came as unnaturally to me as it did to any other Westerner.

It was this individuality-seeking ethic which taught me to find life in new experiences, maximising my opportunities, seeking out excitement, minimising my responsibilities, and rebelling against anything that might seek to dampen my unique, individual authenticity. There’s no doubting that the convincing power of my individuality ethic grew over my time at university. Here, I lived at the heights of worldly privilege. University is a place that makes it easy to live a life centred around individuality. You are an unknown entity when you arrive with no past to your peers and therefore no expectations. You can make yourself whoever you want to be. If you want sporting glory, intellectual stimulation, sexual conquest, or popularity, you have an institution willing to spend millions to facilitate all these things for you. You have all the benefits of adulthood – the independence and the freedom – without most of the responsibilities. Aside from essay deadlines, it is an environment where little submission is required.

Perhaps if my loss of faith had happened at the start of university or even the middle, it might have lasted longer or even been permanent. But it happened at the end, not the beginning. Instead of finding myself in an individuality-enabling institution, I found myself in the opposite. My freedom was limited. My opportunity for excitement was practically zilch. And my need to submit was self-evident. Of course, I could have left, and perhaps I would have been within my rights to do so. But I stayed. And when I looked to my individuality-seeker ethic, all this brought was anxiety about my future, envy of my friends, and frustration at my colleagues. Only in looking upon the faith I had lost, the faith reminding me that “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it,”[3] did I find a modicum of peace, the strength to persevere, and the trust that it would all be ok.

My faith would have to be lived if it was to be believed again.

-The End-

Notes & References [1] Djik, Oleg, 2020, Church, Immigration and Pluralism, pg. 276, (unpublished manuscript) [2] Philippians 2:6-8 (NIV Translation) [3] Matthew 10:39 (NIV)