Confounding the Mighty. Stories of Church, Social Class and Solidarity, edited by Luke Lerner. SCM Press (Norwich, 2023). 176 pages. £19.99.
This is a valuable collection of essays, not least because the various contributions, despite inevitable overlaps, complement each other by bringing out different aspects of the themes they discuss. There is in fact one underlying theme to the book, class or perhaps more accurately the class system embodied in the system of production in most of the world. The book focuses on the impact class has on the clergy of the Church of England, this hierarchy that ‘dare not speak its name’ at the top of which is ‘the model of “the white (English) middle-upper class Christian gentleman”‘ as the ideal Anglican priest.
It is tempting to label the book ‘theology from the council estate’, as many of the contributors make a point of saying that this was where they started life – indeed the editor, Fr Luke Lerner, maintains that he is still ‘a working class person’. Nonetheless this emphasis is simply part of the book’s aim to push back at the conventional image of the Anglican Church.
Ruth Harvey movingly describes the discrimination people from working class backgrounds can be exposed to. At a drinks party in her tutor’s rooms she is already feeling out of place when her tutor comes over and says: ‘I’ve been meaning to say, Ruth, I should change that accent if I were you. Nobody will take you seriously sounding like that.’ Another aspect of this attitude is the assumption that students from a working class background, once ordained, could only serve in working class areas. Eve Parker quotes such a student: ‘I had a tutor who told me I could only serve on estates because of the way I spoke and how I dressed.’
A particularly interesting example of class pressure is Victoria Turner’s examination of the history of the Iona Community. The Community, she says is probably best known today for its retreats on the Island of Iona, its Celtic spirituality and link to the land. The founder of the Community, George MacLeod, was from a privileged Edinburgh background, but became conscious of this privilege while serving in the First World War. After the war, having trained as a Church of Scotland minister, MacLeod was appointed minister in the Glasgow district of Govan, where 80% of the population were unemployed. The shock left MacLeod with a ‘hopeless depression’, and in 1933 he went on a trip to Palestine with his father in an attempt to recover.
Subsequently trainee ministers would spend summers on Iona alongside craftsmen, rebuilding the abbey. The rest of the year the trainee ministers would work in disadvantaged industrial parishes. Over time the focus of the Community shifted to young people with summer youth camps on the island, reaching their climax in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1943 the Community received funding with which it set up a Youth Trust. As part of its work the trust set up a Community House in Glasgow which sought, says Turner, ‘to explore faith, politics and real-world issues through debate, fellowship and creativity’. A Community member said of it: ‘You had criminals, borstal boys, Divinity students, students from the university, people off the street for lunch. Everyone.’ The radical political climate in the immediate postwar period led to tensions with the funders and the wider Iona Community, and the Community House closed in 1977. In 1982 John Bell and Graham Maule set up a project known as Columban Houses, in which young people would train on Iona in the summer to live in communities on council estates to work with disadvantaged young people. This work too ended in the late 1980s.
A slogan Luke Lerner highlights is ‘not to mourn but organise’. Christian communities must not just think about social justice, but do something about it. This can mean working with trade unions, but what he sees as a more fruitful path for local churches is supporting trade union organisation, forming cooperatives and credit unions, and campaigning for a Real Living Wage. But there is a caveat, expressed by American pastor Dennis Jacobson: ‘Society is pleased to have the Church exhaust itself in being merciful towards the casualties of unjust systems.’ The ultimate aim is to change the systems.
Francis McDonagh has worked for two leading Catholic development agencies, translates for the international theological journal Concilium, and is an occasional contributor to the Tablet.