Just 4% of the 225 largest fortunes in the world would be enough to give food, water, health and education to all. ‘Jesus Calls Us from theWorship of theVainWorld’s Golden Store’ Graham Carey asks: But in Bradford? In the Church of England?
Rabbi Abraham Heschel has written: ‘It is customary to blame secular science and atheism for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.’ I believe my Church still fails to preach with vitality the biblical imperative with regard to the ecological collapse that faces us all. Some are aware of my work on this subject, which I set out in Ecological Collapse: A Silent Church. Channel 4 has broadcast a programme on a global failure in this same manner. Mark Dowd remarked that, of old, ‘the leader is there to warn the people.’ What we actually have is a situation pregnant with unrivalled opportunity and a church again last in line for capturing our imagination. Secular organisations have for decades warned, published and become martyrs not only to the material peril we are in but also to the social peril:
Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Women’s Environmental Network, Pesticides Action Network and, of course, the well-known EarthFirst! eco-warriors. Several Catholic nuns and priests have died defending forest and native peoples of the Amazonian regions. We could not only encourage our school teachers to celebrate such brave religious but even set up a specialist Anglican unit to teach non-violent resistance to evil. It seems, however, that we are too much in love with the material consumption that goes with worshipping the vain world’s golden store.
With a diminished and faltering church that has little will to reach out radically to a thoughtful, educated constituency, clergy would understandably have trouble in finding the language to use with their overwhelmingly conservative congregations; there is almost no one in my own town’s congregations pro-actively conversing with others on the new knowledge or the complex issues of the day; most appear to consume anti-Christian, non-compassionate low-grade papers and pop media trivia to the exclusion of the richest intellectual and artistic culture the world has ever seen: and this culture includes theology, the place where the church does its thinking. We can quote as examples Küng, Sölle, Kierkegaard. I hear little church comment on the spiritually ugly posturings of Deal, No Deal or on the cruel flaunting of wealth, in the eyes of the despairing homeless, on programmes such as Relocation, Relocation. Shouldn’t we be expressing views on such items that dominate prime-time television?
Especially in the city which has the largest number of bankruptcies and almost the largest number of house repossessions in the country – and the personal resentfulness to which these things lead. Why should young people come to church when we have nothing to say about such insidious harm, and little or nothing of personal, cultural or religious significance to them?
Invocation I thought now that I am old you would not come to dwell in my imagination.
But could Bradford clergy learn to lead? The evidence so far does not look good. What could we do? We have an excellent Bishop’s Officer, and the Diocese could relieve him of his present duties on full pay and instruct him to retreat, pray, meditate, rest and enjoy ‘thoughtlessly’ a three- month sabbatical at the Earth Connections Sustainability Centre on the remote Isle of Eigg in Scotland. This could be followed by a further three months on Iona, in which he would thoughtfully attend to the idea of how best to lead Bradford in a future of almost certain long-term social and ecological collapse. No Bishops’ Council could instruct him better than he himself could. We should not neglect the lessons of the great flowering of Yorkshire Cistercian monasticism.
We should celebrate the courageous, law-breaking life, not so much past martyrdoms, as those martyrdoms taking place today among EarthFirsters!, Greenpeace and Catholic religious globally. We could show film on this subject especially to the young attending our conferences; and film of anti-Trident activists dismantling weapons of mass destruction. The question does seriously arise of what we are going to say to young people that is not being better said by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Women’s Environmental Network and Pesticides Action Network.
The human agenda is not spent or yet going to fail us; but it is far larger than Synods and Councils of Bishops appear to recognise or have time for. The essential question for the Bishop’s Officer, Synod, Bishop – even parishes – is this: are they willing to consider the dismantling of the structure of global industrialisation along with its deeply false assumptions on life? Or shall we continue to pass motions that keep these structures in place?
There is no lack of suggested reading. For example, the items edited into my World Out of Control; Olivier Clement’s Roots of Christian Mysticism (1993). There is the joyous North American communitarian literature; there are Wendell Berry, Sandra Steingraber, Joel Steinfeld’s beautiful Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006). We have Jerry Mander’s important critiques of industrial technology. The church’s failure is as intellectual as it is spiritual, and we will not get far without studying and talking much harder than at present. As Adrian Hastings wrote in The Tablet, ‘There is little time to lose in preparing ourselves mentally for Christian life in the very hardest of times to come.’ A new awareness of the problem will not come about without consulting revolutionary Christian thought: ‘The problems we face today cannot be solved at the level of thinking that gave rise to them.
We need new thinking – an evolution of our ideas, feelings, values and perceptions: an evolution of our consciousness.’ Addressing a joint session of the US Congress in February 1991, Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, went on to say:
The church’s failure is as intellectual as it is spiritual.
This is an edited extract of a longer document.