Let the children play?

Fundamentalism, I suspect, is an unfortunate but inevitable element in all religions.

Inevitable, because a capacity for a fundamentalist way of thinking seems to be a consequence of human nature, a product of the way our brains are wired, and therefore perhaps a consequence of our evolution.
Unfortunate, because it lends itself to simplistic, extreme interpretations of what religion is about. I think such ways of understanding are mistaken, even though the need for simple certainties is understandable. But they persist because any more complex understanding of religion is vastly more difficult to apprehend.

Perhaps a different case may illustrate more clearly what I mean.
Years ago I remember being slightly perplexed by the popularity of a book called 'Is God a spaceman?' It was interesting, of course, for many reasons, but also troubling because of the way folk seemed to take up so enthusiastically, but quite uncritically, ideas it suggested about religion. As I and many others have since observed, the difficulty arose because, though much of what the book suggested was transparently mistaken, the book you would have to write to say why, would be so long and complex that people who had been persuaded by the populist little book, would never be bothered - perhaps never be able - to work their way through it. And this is not a suggestion of intellectual snobbery; it is simply a description of reality.

Now something similar seems to be at work in popular understandings of religion. The Churches which make most noise and seem (if numbers and finance alone count) to be most 'successful', are those which engage in 'charismatic' worship and 'fundamentalist' teaching about scripture and faith. This troubles me, for I fear there is no easy cure for it, but I believe it is based on a serious misunderstanding of the Christian faith, a measure of deceit and self-deceit which can augur no good in the long term, for the Church. Especially at a time when Bishops cannot afford to ignore numerical and financial 'success', regardless of its origin.

It has come about the more readily because the balance of traditions in our church has been upset by several processes.

One, sadly, has been our acceptance of womens' ministry: a process which led many of a more Catholic persuasion (though also admittedly some of a very low church background) to leave the Church of England. In this diocese, two other factors have contributed: on one hand the damage to our mining communities - which were predominantly Catholic parishes - wrought by Mrs. Thatcher's war on the miners; and on the other the loss of our Catholic theological college at Kelham, and its replacement by the influence of a rather different institution, St. John's College. One might observe in addition, though it is symptom, rather than a cause, that heretofore our diocesan bishop has generally been a man of evangelical background, and the suffragan one of a catholic persuasion. It is not their fault, but we now have two bishops from evangelical origins. And I suspect this is symptomatic of a kind of thinking which is driving similar processes across the whole Church of England.

This 'evangelical' drive has been fostered, more, by the arrival of Alpha - an evangelical tool which I myself am not inclined to trust. Prevailed upon 'at least to have a look' at Alpha, I was unhappy to discover that this 'course' which makes so much of being, supposedly, a sort of open 'programme for enquirers' asked me on page two of its first evening session whether I yet felt able to make a commitment to Jesus... If that had not made me suspicious, the session which purports to teach of the Holy Spirit would have finished me off. Its theology strikes me as frankly perverse, misleading and fundamentalist American. More, what I have found of the 'Holy Spirit Week-end' speaks to me of a kind of psychological manipulation to which no church should stoop. An amused friend told me I should to have had more sense than expect better from anything which had slithered out of Holy Trinity, Brompton. So indeed I should.

Not that I wish to demean the many decent well intentioned folk who have been through Alpha courses, or as much of them as their local church felt able to teach (my reservations are not uncommon; it is just not politically correct in the church to express them!) I am just afraid they have been powerfully misled. Nor do I doubt that the folk who propound the Alpha Machine intend well and are sincerely convinced of their rightness. Only, good intentions and sincerity do not necessarily add up to much. You may with every good intention and deep sincerity believe that a Dustbin is God, and even persuade folk to worship it. But all the sincerity in the cosmos will not actually make it God. I am just unhappy that the huge resources poured into this 'evangelical' medium have fuelled even more the sort of Christianity which I think am not alone in believing to be as persuasive and easily adopted as it is mistaken. I suspect that someone has discovered there is much profit to be made in publishing for Fundamentalists across the western world; that probably goes for evangelical hymns and music as well.

The worst thing about this shift to fundamentalist religion, is that it is actually distracting the Church's mission away from most people. The charismatic fundamentalist congregations make much of their numbers and success.... but there is a serious problem with that. They are very successful in attracting certain folk from across of our society. Among those folk they are hugely 'successful'. But those folk are only a small slice of the total population - I suspect probably rather less than 10%. It ought to tell us something, if we can drag ourselves away from the Alpha spectacle for a moment, that such religion simply does not appear to speak at all to the considerable majority of our people.

I rather had the impression that Jesus hinted his disciples were to go into all the world and tell the good news... not that they should merely seek out the sort of folk who could be fitted into the kind of church they happened to like.....