Faith in our Media |
My thesis is that changes, both technical and financial, in the media of communication always lead to a crisis for established institutions. We have experienced a radical diversion of the channels of communication but the Church as an institution has largely failed to adapt or to discover the appropriate strategies for presenting faith in our media. Those new strategies will be found upon examination to be already part of the Church’s DNA.
I shall also reflect upon the former Prime Minister’s comment that if you confess to being a believing Christian in the public square you are dismissed as a “nutter”. Last Sunday night’s episode of the “Blair Years” laid particular emphasis on Blair’s religious faith. There was more than one suggestion that it was because of his religious convictions that as Prime Minister he moved away from the populist pragmatism that Ming Campbell startlingly identified as the proper posture for a democratic politician.
When the first daily newspaper The Daily Courant was published [although the matter is controversial and the palm is claimed by Norwich] the main competitor as a disseminator of opinion was the pulpit.
The licensing of preachers was a very serious matter for early modern governments. Here in sixteenth and early seventeenth century London, if you wanted to know what the official line was, not only on matters of faith but also on matters of state, you went to Paul’s Cross, the open air preaching station in the North Eastern angle of the cathedral on the very site of the mediaeval Folkmoot.
The new technology of printing and the development of commercial publishing had already dented the authority of direct verbal communication. Although Church and State struggled to control what poured from the presses, printing and publishing brought social and religious revolution in its wake. My predecessors were in charge of censorship of books and plays in the City and the courtyard where heretical and subversive books were burnt at Stationers’ Hall still exists.
Changes in technology and in the dissemination of opinions lead to institutional revolutions and we should expect the current revolution in communications via the world-wide-web to do the same.
But for a very long period it was possible to ignore the radical character of the change. The authority of the sermon [now often printed] survived despite the competition. Our ancestors had astonishing attention spans. Once when John Donne was preaching at Paul’s Cross after two hours he showed signs of bringing his remarks to a conclusion and the congregation set up a chant of “more, more”. Even at the very beginning of the 20th Century sermons were often reported in newspapers like “The Times” in extraordinary detail.
Soon however the gatekeepers who controlled the new popular press decided that the mass market did not want to be treated to dense reasoning, copious quotations and a Niagara of dependent clauses and qualifications. In consequence, we have all had to learn to some extent or another to be ecclesiastical Ernest Hemingways. This is an evident difficulty for people like myself who prefer to curl up with Dr Johnson. In other cultures, certainly in India and Africa, there is still an appetite for old style religious communication in the public square but not here.
This presents us with a number of challenges.
I had a very instructive experience of the need for a new laconic style in a conversation with a journalist about lifestyle decisions and the nature of sin. My thesis was unexceptionable. Sin as Luther said means living life “incurvatus in se”, turned in upon the self, unaware of the claims and needs of others. I made the hardly original point that we live in an interconnected world and decisions like whether or not to buy a weekend property which involved frequent flying had to be taken in the light of what we now know about the dangers of climate change. The result was an unqualified headline “Flying is a sin” says Bishop. I was denounced as a party pooper on Top Gear by Jeremy Clarkson himself. Far from being a disaster [except for my children who are still at school] the most extraordinary people took me to their bosoms as some kind of ecclesiastical Swampy and I have new friends and new possibilities of communication. If my thoughts had been presented in all their complexity and qualification, I might just have been squeezed into page 54 of the Church of Ireland Gazette.
But such opportunities have to be used with discretion because as Our Lord Jesus Christ would have said – “those who live by the media will die by the media”.
I suppose in this season of Advent that if Jesus were to come again in our town we would not make the mistake of crucifying him, which led to such disastrous results last time. Instead we would banalise him; interview him on the Today Programme; give him saturation coverage; ask him to speak out until everybody was sick and tired of him and we passed on to the next sensation.
But what would be his strategy to judge from the way he communicated last time round? Well his utterances were laconic and frequently oblique. He told stories which left his hearers to puzzle out a meaning. It is of course true that he did not have to run anything or obey the rules of the Health and Safety directorate. Instead he had a disturbing lifestyle. “Foxes have holes but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”. Some of what he said is now so familiar that we fail to see how outrageous it is. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. What would you think of your child’s head teacher if she said – “our aim in this school is to turn out children who are poor in spirit and mournful”?
Too much of the education of ministers of religion is dominated by learning the communications techniques of the day before yesterday in yesterday’s world. We may be able to write treatises to confute Cardinal Bellarmine but the ability to put a message on a blackberry; to enter the nous-sphere of 18-30 year olds; to produce a two minute video artfully shot with consummate professionalism to simulate the naivety and the believability of a home movie; to deliver a “mighty atom,” a message or a story which gets under the radar and reverberates in the inner spaces of people who are programmed to turn off as soon as you say “I take my text from the Prophet Haggai”; to develop the capacity to interpret the signs of the times through art – all these things should be part of the formation of Christian communicators today.
In London we are trying to learn on the job. The Londoninternetchurch.com operates from St Stephen Walbrook and we have established a College of Communicators. Wallspace, where this week we have a panel discussion on the role of icons in Christian life, is another significant initiative which has already attracted sympathetic attention and created new relationships with the media. I have much to say about these things but you cannot bear it now – and that phrase is also part of Jesus’s own strategy of communication.
At a national level the Church with its 1950’s polity and style is constantly convicted of fidgeting and dithering with an in-house ecclesiastical agenda while the real battle is raging elsewhere. We have invested a huge amount of time and effort in elaborating defensive committee based structures which confuse and inhibit communication.
I remember when I was chaplain to Robert Runcie at the time when he was appointed to Lambeth. The news emerged and an hour later a message from Cardinal Basil Hume arrived saying “well done” – Rome had spoken. Some ten days later a letter was delivered revealing that the Free Church Council had passed a resolution welcoming the appointment. It was a heart warming message, but failed to capture general attention.
At the same time while Madison Avenue teaches us that effective communication is achieved by simple re-iterated phrases and staccato statements, we continue to teach and communicate our position as a church by producing reports whose precise level of authority is rarely clear; which read as if they were high table conversations overheard; which treat things on the one hand and one the other at considerable length with the inevitable consequence that even church people in a culture in which pictures and jingles are more eloquent than treatises gather the drift of what the Church is teaching from the tiny gobbet which some journalist is able to smuggle past the sub editors. Almost always there is disappointment on the part of the authors at what they see as the distortion of their work but why do we keep on doing business this way?
There is room on the web for genuine growing conversations at considerable length and depth but formal Church pronouncements need a rather different style and one not so different from the communications of Jesus himself.
There has to be courage and I sometimes think that we are too timid in what we say but we also have to be clear sighted about the dynamics of the market place in which the media operate. Marx was not wrong about everything and he predicted that the nemesis of this civilisation would flow from everything being turned into a commodity to be bought and sold. The financing of the modern media entails our conversion into more and more voracious consumers. Conversion in the spiritual realm consists in turning away from having and possessing; from being a consumer towards being a citizen and a contemplative. It is a movement which can be entirely diverted by yielding to the temptation to merchandise God as the ultimate feel good experience. There is inevitable tension here but once again the language and the tools for uncovering the tension and responding to the challenge lie within the DNA of the Christian tradition.
The effect of “commodification” when extended to news and information is obvious. In a fierce ratings war you sell news and information as you sell anything by attractive packaging; by more titillating exposes on page 3; by privileging the extraordinary and extreme voices and by accentuating the conflict which is at the heart of drama. All the world is transposed into a stage with stock characters and anyone who seeks to articulate faith in the public square must be aware of the parts, some ludicrous, some oppressive, which they are being invited to play.
This can be very dangerous when for the sake of drama we can be seduced into giving airtime to extreme religious voices who pose as leaders of the community. The recent letter from 138 mainstream Muslim scholars has a context of frustration that excessive attention is so often lavished on those who are not representative of the best traditions of Islam.
Even the media however has learnt from painful experience to be very cautious when dealing with Muslim religious susceptibilities. There is no such inhibition with regard to the Christian faith – hence Tony Blair’s comment and similar reflections from Richard Dannatt. We should not underestimate the subversive character of faith for a consumerist culture or be surprised at the efforts made to deride and denigrate the principal local tradition of faith.
But I think that we must be a little cautious here. I regard the reticence which politicians are taught to observe with respect to God, to be a good thing. The Queen can talk about God without a solecism; bishops are licensed to do so and people are shocked if, as frequently happens, they studiously avoid the subject; victims and sufferers like the widow of the murdered head master, Philip Lawrence, can talk convincingly about faith but God preserve us from the politician who claims that God is on his side.
But there is a determined attempt on the part of a small number of fundamentalist secularists who resent the suggestion that they themselves hold a minority faith position to drive any reference to the Christian faith into the margins of our public life. In large measure they have succeeded as Christians have adopted a self censorship, painfully aware that we live for the moment in a culture in which public truth is largely defined by what can be counted and quantified.
I was struck by the truth of a prophecy from a Russian priest in the early eighties in Moscow. He said that “very soon believers will be able to speak on the radio”. It was a bold prophecy at a time when no one foresaw the disintegration of the Soviet Union but the priest continued “and they won’t know what to say”. I think that this is our situation.
But things are changing. The traditional gatekeepers for the moment have less power and the web has permitted an explosion of largely uncontrolled communication for good and for ill and which has played a role, for example, in the growth of movements like al-Qaeda. The web despite attempts to colonise it in the service of commerce reflects a world in which faith has a centrality which has not been the case in our own island since the nineteenth century. The existence of extreme elements in world’s religious traditions has licensed an intensified campaign against faith as such. The shrillness of the new attacks on God and the smearing of people of faith as fools or knaves – these are among the signs of a great sea change. The tide on Dover Beach which Matthew Arnold viewed as a symbol of the Sea of Faith has gone out unnaturally far. One girl on a Thai holiday beach read the sign correctly and shouted to her family to run because such a dramatic recession of the tide is one of the signs of an approaching tsunami.
There is a spiritual tsunami building in the new housing areas of greater Cairo; in the shanty towns of South America. The population of most the rest of the world is very youthful and it is already clear that they are not going to follow the pattern familiar from the experience of North Western Europe over the past three centuries in which modernisation and secularisation have gone hand in hand. The Economist has recently changed its editorial policy and produced a fortnight ago an eighteen page supplement on “faith and politics” because the new team does not believe that the daylight world can be understood by editing out religion. The phenomenon of the world-wide-web has increase the speed at which these developments have an impact on a domestic scene which is no longer insulated as it once was in an exclusively Atlantic communication zone. Once again a new mode of communication has challenged an incumbent establishment – this time, the Anglo-American secular elite.
There are dangers to be feared. Speaking as a believer, I know how dangerous religion can be. I respect the position of an 18th century Bishop who was a particularly good communicator. Bishop Warburton, the friend and defender of Alexander pope was said to occupy a small corner of rationality within the ark “as much disgusted by the stink within as by the tempest without”.
But the un-ignorability of faith also has potential for broadening and deepening public discussion and debate. The flatland ways in which we are invited to analyse and prescribe for the challenges we face as a society are crying out for a new engagement with the language of faith and morals. In consequence I find many journalists who cover environment and social matters and who do not specialise in “religious affairs” with its dreary round of predictable fussikins far more rewarding as conversation partners than was the case only a short time ago.
I found the debate on the second reading of the Climate Change Bill fascinating and instructive in this context. Both government and principal opposition speakers wanted to keep the discussion on the level of scientific analysis, economic incentives and technological innovation. In a remarkable speech Lord Putnam [significantly a film maker] demonstrated why the subject could not be considered without reference to its moral dimension and that the necessary energy for change would come from a more holistic appreciation of a challenge which had both a vital scientific and ethical aspect.
Many of the journalists and broadcasters who are now the senior figures in the media were formed in the sixties and seventies at a time of bewilderment and introversion in the Church, following what Larkin described as the watershed year of 1963 when “sexual intercourse was invented”. They are now retiring and new generation is taking their place – less familiar with the culture of faith but maybe more open to a new engagement between faith, the media and public debate – but will they find people of faith to meet them intelligently half way? That is the challenge to Britain’s churches. As so often I believe that the answer will be found by going back to the future and re-appropriating the un-oppressive non-coercive principles of communication so clearly present in the life and work of Jesus Christ.
