Horror and Hope: The Conflicted Legacy of Christianity by Dominic Kirkham. Wipf & Stock (Eugene OR, 2021). Pbk. 173 pages, £18.00.
‘We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.’ These words from Leszek Kolakowski, philosopher and historian of ideas, from his 1986 Jefferson Lecture kept recurring to me as I read and reread Horror and Hope.
I warmly recommend this book to Sea of Faith members and to others, not because it contains anything new in the way of facts – for example, Karen Armstrong covered much of the same ground in her 2015 Fields of Blood – but because of the way the accounts are told.
From the very first pages of this book, we learn of the story-teller, his own intellectual and personal growth, the development of his values. In telling us of these, he sets himself as our companion in the journey which is to follow. He becomes a known guide – one who makes it possible for his readers to make their own judgements both as to his choices of story to tell, and the manner of their telling. For a reflective reader, to make such judgements is to reassess oneself. Further, I read this book as one from a writer who is ‘coming clean’ with his reader, to use an idiom from police fiction – and perhaps as importantly, with himself. In so doing, Dominic Kirkham gives us an example of how, to a significant extent, we are formed by the societies and cultures within which we live. Part of his authority, for me, is in the breadth of his experience. He was a member of a religious order and left after 25 years; later, he also left the Roman Catholic church itself. Since then he continues to be active in a number of social projects.
Knowing something of the storyteller has come more into focus in recent years, not only within the academic world, but also in our more everyday lives: BBC? Fox News? The Mail? The Guardian? Our Prime Minister? Michel Barnier?
Although acknowledging that Christianity kept alive some important values through what has been described as Europe’s Dark Ages, Kirkham faces us with many of the downsides of Christianity: Racism, Antisemitism from New Testament times to the present, Imperialism, Colonialism, Slavery. And he does not pull his punches. More, he makes connections showing how these interact and support each other and were enabled by the church. He adds ‘though civilisation and savagery are often seen as antonyms we now understand that civilisation brings its own kind of savagery’.
A critic, although conceding the ‘Horror’ features of the book, might ask for more about the ‘Hope’ which the writer sees. Whilst readers are bound to concede that hope is not articulated as powerfully as is the horror, Kirkham provides evidence for hope on many a page. Certainties are undermined, leaving space for fresh perceptions. New Testament scholarship questions our assumptions of the unity and confidence among the early churches which, in turn, gives a licence to question current dogma. Archaeology renders claims based on ‘historical truths’ as better understood as based upon legend. Christianity described simply as a moral code to be followed, is shown to be an inflexible tool.
Coleridge said of Shakespeare: ‘You feel him to be a poet, inasmuch as for a time he has made you one – an active creative being’. I suggest that Dominic Kirkham’s telling of the many stories, prompting fresh questions and images in his readers, will similarly result in nudging us to become more active, creative, beings. His conclusion suggests that ‘the one thing important’ is love. Yes, we can readily agree, knowing that loving embodies curiosity and imagination, even re-imagination.
Reading history in the company of Dominic Kirkham prompts a questioning of oneself in relation to the communities within which we are, and have been, formed, together with a questioning of those same communities. Further, such a reading offers the possibility of understanding that, paradoxically, hope rests upon our readiness to pay a price when called upon to do so.