Piety and prayer may be more effective than demonstrations on the streets.
In Wareham, Dorset, there is an Anglican curate, the Revd Hilary Bond, who sets out to keep on getting arrested by the police as she demonstrates against climate change. She explained her motivation to the audience of Radio 4’s “Beyond Belief” programme. It was born of frustration that signing petitions against climate disaster didn’t seem to change anything.
Radio 4 had brought together an eminent London rabbi, an activist Muslim feminist member of Oxford City Council, and me, to talk about the ethics of religious activism in the light of her use of the clerical collar to add moral weight to her protests. The media always like a good photo of a woman vicar being dragged off by the cops.
As it happened, none of the three of us was very impressed at the tactics of protest. Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion were unconvincing. Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg thought that any action ought to have a defin- able ethically just outcome. Shaista Aziz wanted to save the working-class poor from having their rail travel in East London hijacked by the protesters at the end of a long day.
But it seemed taken for granted that some kind of political protest was better than none and the only real question was where the red lines are. Where should activist clergy not go? The history of protest is one of very mixed outcomes. There have been some spectacular successes in improving the lives of people and, equally, the opposite. From a Christian point of view, surrounded by a world that hosts an increasingly raucous braying utopianism, it’s as well to remember that the Left’s attempts at protest and improvement were expensive in the currency of human lives: 60 million under Stalin and 90 million under Mao Tse Tung.
Progressive ambition begins with wanting to establish equality of outcome, and finds that a certain degree of compulsion is needed to achieve it. Compulsion leads to imprisoning. Imprisoning leads on to state murder. Protest can be deadly. Can there be any assurance of the outcome that protest produces? Does Just Stop Oil achieve anything beyond publicity and the infuriation of some of the public?
Within the Christian tradition there is a valiant history of protest at the practice of evil, but there is also something more effective. In the same way inspiration is more effective than prohibition, and compassion more than compulsion. Protest may be allowed for Catholics, and may even constitute a moral necessity in some circumstances, but the deeper resource within the Catholic moral tradition is sanctity.
The immorality and ethical incompetence of the body politic might be temporarily restrained by political action, but the Catholic ambition runs far deeper than temporary change of circumstances. Its ambition is the permanent change of the heart. Conversion is more pot-ent than protest; compassion and responsibility more potent than compulsion and restraint.
The real impact of Catholicism lies in the lives of the saints. There is something deeply attractive about holiness. Truly holy people make the God that so many people instinctively long for suddenly more accessible in a tactile and experiential way. The experience of history is that one saint affects many more lives than one movement of protest. And unlike the political arena, does so over a much longer period of time.
The great gift the Church has is not that of moral, political or pragmatic censure; it is the influence of the conversion of heart and the transformed mind and soul. And perhaps the most powerful reforming impact is the symbiotic mutuality of both piety and protest. Anglicans do saints differently, but looking back into the history of reforming Protestantism, the influence of the converted slaver John Newton is arguably not only as great as that of the politician William Wilberforce, but instrumentally responsible for his work.
Newton’s change of life from a slave trader to a practising Christian created some of the most memorable hymns the Church has known (“Amazing Grace” among them). When William Wilberforce was tempted to withdraw from public life to lead a life of private piety it was Newton who helped him clarify his political vision and guided his reforming political skills.
It is likely that the example of St Teresa of Calcutta in rescuing the discarded children of the poor from bins and gutters did as much to provide inspiration for social compassion rooted in the love of God as any number of political initiatives and protests.
Ecological responsibility and the self-denial in which it is rooted is more effectively achieved by the confrontation and reversal of selfishness through the conversion of heart than it is by stopping the traffic. The influence of the Curé d’Ars (to take one inspirational example), and his transformational effect on hundreds of thousands of people, was fuelled by hours of prayer and the pursuit of holiness.
The evidence of the history of the Church is that the key to ecological survival might lie more in the pursuit of piety and prayer than the politics of protest.
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