Letter from New Zealand

The religion which attracts most adherents in New Zealand is Rugbyism. An estimated 2.2 million of our 4 million citizens are ardent disciples of this faith and all this week the newspapers, television news and radio chat programmes focussed on little else than the upcoming first mission crusade featuring the indigenous congregation calling itself All Blacks and the visiting British and Irish congregation known as the Lions. Wednesday night’s TV showed a huge banner being hoisted into place on Christchurch cathedral where my cobber Peter Beck, himself a Pom, is Dean. The banner, recalling the way that Daniel, cast into the Lion’s den, emerged victorious and unscathed, offered appropriate encouragement and the promise of divine assistance for the All Black congregation.

Lest you should think that Rugbyism is a belief system entirely centred on human passion, it is the most scientific of religions. Friday’s edition of the New Zealand Herald presented a detailed analysis of the heights, weights and ages of the two forward packs. In New Zealand where Rugbyism is a youthful religion the oldest forward was 26. The oldest of the British forwards was 36. I was discussing this with Richard the osteopath, whom I have to visit frequently as I still bear injuries from my own youthful dalliance with this religion. Richard, a Welshman, thinks that the age difference is entirely due to the respective climates and that in view of the long, dark winters in the northern hemisphere it takes devotees there longer to grow and to blossom. In the height charts two All Blacks attain 2.02 metres, while the two tallest Lions are only 1.98 metres. The heaviest All Black weighs in at 118kg; the heaviest Lion at 117kg. Scientifically speaking, the odds favour the All Black congregation.

All week long the two denominations have been engaging in the Litany of ‘my religion is better than your religion’. On paper, the Lions would appear to hold most of the evangelistic cards, as their Guardian of the holy text is none other than spin doctor Alastair Campbell – the self-same man who was once responsible for spinning British prime minister Tony Blair’s pronouncements, until he became too much of a liability because the British public no longer believed anything the Prime Minister was saying. While this might be perfectly acceptable in religion, it is not always so in politics where it can be construed as lying. However, lying in the cause of the religion of Rugbyism is perfectly legitimate particularly on the eve of two denominations preparing to engage in a mission crusade. So Father Smug (who is referred to within his own denomination as Sir Clive) was behaving in a perfectly orthodox fashion when insisting that there are no divisions within his congregation, and that a Welsh and an Irish forward certainly didn’t come to blows during a training session as the newspapers reported, but accidentally bumped heads, leaving one of them nursing an enormous black eye.

More black eyes are predicted because Father Smug’s congregation constitutes an ecumenical experiment, drawing together four congregations of quite different class, ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. For the initial mission crusade, the Welsh congregation has been largely assigned singing roles in the choir, the Irish congregation will conduct the warm-up choruses, while the English congregation have been allotted all the key ministerial roles in the liturgy. This is appropriate in Father Smug’s view because the English congregation was the group to which, through divine revelation, the Sacred Text was first delivered, and they alone among all congregations really understand what it means and possess the sole authority to interpret it. The Scots congregation are nowhere to be seen but have been assigned the important behind-the scenes tasks of hospitality and welcoming any new converts. But rumour has it that members of the non-English congregations are less than happy with Father Smug’s determination of responsibilities, and that we will shortly see the kind of dissent emerging which was one of the sad features of the ill-fated last Lions evangelistic mission to Australia.

The crusade began last evening in a packed out St Jade’s Cathedral in Christchurch. The rain and sleet seemed to affect the commitment of Father Smug’s mission team who performed well below par. The Rugbyism liturgy which they enacted before the eager fans was the unreformed version, stolid and unimaginative, of little appeal to New Zealanders. The All Blacks on the other hand espoused a joyous charismatic interpretation of the faith, performing with flair that moved the souls of the faithful who, had there been a roof on St Jade’s, would surely have raised it. It was no contest.

Father Smug however, detected the whiff of heresy amongst the All Black team and demanded that the Bench of Bishops reconvene the Inquisition to punish a couple of heretics. This retreat into mediaevalism is decidedly unecumenical. One understands Father Smug’s disappointment, particularly after Alastair Campbell’s heroic efforts to capture the media high ground, but folk religion in these islands suggests that Father Smug has lost sight of the grand mission strategy, and unless he now abandons his elderly English congregation and seeks inspiration from the Welsh and Irish congregations, this crusade will never get off the ground.

And as for lost souls, the Scots hospitality team is disconsolate, because despite all the planning and all the praying, not a single convert was made.

Letter From America

I’m in a hotel room not far from Los Angeles Airport today having a breather between the flight from London yesterday and the long flight down to Sydney tonight, surrounded by roadside diners, shopping malls, gun-toting policemen, the San Diego freeway, very large men in Bermuda shorts, and levels of pollution for which LA is infamous, on what promises to be a very hot summer’s day. And all this paraphernalia according to the books I read is part of America’s rich postmodern cultural tapestry.

My first major task of the day was wrestling with the seven sections of the LA Times newspaper. Despite having spent a considerable amount of time over the years in this stimulating country, I’ve never learnt how to read an American newspaper. My paper at home has in-depth and sometimes learned articles which start at the beginning and finish at the end – and I’ve grown accustomed to reading in this way. Here it’s different with the front-page headlining seven stories, an index indicating the gist of seven further stories in inside pages, with synopses of three related stories which are also somewhere inside. There is scarcely a complete stand-alone story to be found. I launch into a news item from Iraq and after three paragraphs am told to turn to page eight for the remainder. Some stories take on the characteristics of a serial to be found on three different pages, and occasionally in different sections of the paper. It’s all very confusing. Should I follow my Iraq story on pages one and eight, and then return to the front page to commence a new story? Or should I read the entire front page, committing to memory as many continuation markers as possible, and then turn and read pages in sequence, picking up on the various narratives wherever I can? That would be decidedly postmodern. Deciding what to do takes up most of breakfast time as I wonder what it is about the American mind that has caused it to introduce such a fragmented style of reading and comprehension.

As one might expect, there is an American ‘take’ on each news item, which in many cases would constitute the opposite of what I imagine to be my UK paper’s interpretation. The first story, ‘A Clan Scourged by Death’ comes from Iraq and begins in a lyrical way: ‘It seems these violent days need more prayers than hours can hold, but the old man prays anyway, raising his hands and closing his eyes, whispering verse as the tribal boys watch from the dusty courtyard. They know what Mohammed Mousa Tahir prays about. They have heard the low moan of his voice, like wind through a field.’ This could be the opening paragraph of a novel. Then unfolds a tragic tale, now unfortunately ubiquitous in Iraq, about the old man’s son being shot dead in his car by US troops. Several days later comes news of the old man’s six nephews and cousins being slain and mutilated by attackers unknown. UK papers like the Guardian or the Independent would probably have said that civilian casualties at US troops hands, and the anarchic social and political conditions that the US inspired doctrine of regime change has created, is all bad news for the USA. But for the LA Times, which is at pains to point out that the old man’s account is based upon unconfirmed reports, this is good news for America because the old man says that if American troops were to come to his house ‘I will tell them “Peace be upon you”. I only want the Americans to help this society and stop the war’.

The story which I was really looking for however, was so brief that it was found in its entirety on page four – the international observance of Myanmar’s pro-democracy advocate and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi’s sixtieth birthday. Having won a legitimate election contest in 1990, she was imprisoned by the ruling military regime for ten years, and ever since her release has been held under house arrest. Several UK Sunday papers featured Desmond Tutu’s call for the world to bring the same pressures to bear on the corrupt regime in Myanmar, as it brought to bear upon apartheid and which contributed to the remarkable changes forged in that country. President Bush joined others in sending this extraordinary woman his best wishes for her sixtieth birthday. Sounding the freedom trumpet loudly, as he is wont to do in these situations, the President said, apparently ignorant of the country’s change of name, ‘Her strength, courage and personal sacrifice in standing up for the oppressed people of Burma have inspired those who stand for freedom’. If ever a case could be made for the doctrine of regime-change in order to allow democracy to take root, this must be it. But President Bush remains uncharacteristically low key, one might even say pacifist, when it comes to discussing Myanmar. And that makes me immediately suspicious. Might his reticence to act have something to do with the USA’s global strategy in respect to Asia? Many of us in the southern hemisphere recall the way in which the USA left support for ‘regime change’ in East Timor to the Australians because of, as we later discovered, keen US interest in developing the fledging oil industry there.

Putting the Bush administration to one side, there are many positive things to say about America. One is constantly struck here in California by America’s enormous contribution to science and technology, and particularly to computer technology. I find that even my modest two-star hotel room is wireless enabled, so that with my new laptop which came similarly equipped, I can now post this message halfway across the world without a cable in sight. Well, I can if I remember my screen name and password. Oops!

Maybe it's in the Genes

Sometime back in the 1980’s I had the misfortune to attend a meeting of the Christian Family Association in Palmerston North, New Zealand. The speaker was a right-wing, anti-Semitic activist from Australia, who harangued the audience about the decline of the community’s moral standards. She was particularly scathing about the HIV/AIDS virus, opining that God-rejecting evildoers, who had deliberately chosen to be gay, were malevolently passing the virus on to the straight community. And in the next breath she went on to say, ‘And in Queensland, mosquitoes are spreading this virus’. This prompted me to comment, probably a little too loudly, ‘how can you pick a gay mosquito?’ The audience reacted with laughter which completely nonplussed the speaker. But that’s another story . . .

It’s the gay fruit fly and not the mosquito I want to talk about. Way back in 1963 a man named Kulbir Gill discovered, very much to his surprise, genetically homosexual fruit flies. A mutated gene led affected male fruit flies to both initiate courtship with and welcome courtship from other males. Not a great deal seems to have been made about this discovery at the time, possibly because it ran counter to the commonly accepted wisdom that people become homosexual primarily through their environment and nurture rather than being homosexual by nature through their genetic constitution.

In the 1990’s Dr Dean Hamer who was researching Kaposi’s sarcoma, began also to focus on the possible role of genes in sexual orientation. His National Cancer Institute research team in the USA published the results of some of their research in Science in 1993. Their study of genetic markers appeared to indicate a predisposition towards homosexuality in a region known as Xq28 where homosexual brothers had different Xq28 markers from their heterosexual siblings. While Hamer and others thought they were well on the way to isolating the gay gene, attempts to replicate the finds by other scientists produced differing results, and the Hamer research became something of a nine-day wonder.

But other scientists continued to probe the wondrous nature of things. In 1999 biologist Bruce Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity which established that there is enormous variety throughout the animal kingdom in non-reproductive or same gender sexuality. Bagemihl documents evidence of same-sex activity across such an extensive range of animals that it becomes virtually impossible to argue that the behaviour is not ‘natural’. President Mugabe of Zimbabwe famously declared that in his country not even pigs do it, while not to be outdone, Anglican Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria is on record as saying that homosexuality is an ‘aberration unknown even in animal relationships”. Both are woefully unobservant because even domesticated animals like pigs and dogs exhibit same-gender sexual relationships just as their fellow species in the wild. Bagemihl adopts an almost religious attitude to his work saying that it is ‘a meditation on the nature of life itself and a celebration of its paradoxes and pluralities’ and that it is ‘capable of inspiring our deepest feelings of wonder, and our most profound sense of awe’.

So what’s brought all this on, I hear you ask? Well, this week our friend the fruit fly is back in the news again. According to the press, biotechnologists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and at Ohio University have discovered a single ‘switch gene’ which changes the sexual orientation of male and female fruit flies. One of the research scientists says, ‘We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies’ sexual orientation and behaviour’. Another comments ‘Hopefully this will take the discussion about sexual preferences out of the realm of morality and put it in the realm of science’.

One can’t imagine the religious moralists giving up without a fight however. Many with biblical literalist and evangelical dispositions have long insisted contrary to the belief of many gay and lesbian people that they were born with their orientation, that it is nothing more than a learnt behaviour which can be ‘cured’ either with psychological ‘help’ or with rituals of Christian deliverance. I expect they will continue to maintain this view even in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary.

But if a consensus emerges amongst the scientific community about the existence of the so-called gay gene, there will be an impact upon our theology. If some of us are born gay or lesbian what does this tell us about our Creator? And if we are all made in his image as the Bible avers, what will we now have to say about his image? No doubt the fundamentalists will come up with their own irrational response, something along the lines of ‘God creates us all as heterosexual, but Satan, always up to his wily tricks, muscles in and begins messing about with our genes’. Others will probably continue to argue that any genetic predisposition towards homosexuality is one of the results of the Fall. Like the pain of childbirth for a woman, it is a punishment that God inflicts upon us for our disobedience.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that God intended us to be this way – a wonderfully diverse humanity endowed with difference, imagination and artistry which echoes and complements the diversity of creation as a whole. Bruce Bagemihl puts it this way:

“Biological exuberance is available, if it is nothing else – at our fingertips, everywhere we turn, in the fibers and textures that surround us, in the spices that fill our nostrils as we walk past the corner store, in the cloud formations above us and the dandelion seeds strewn by the wind about us, in the embrace of a friend and the kiss of a beloved – in all the colours and patterns that fill our lives. . . . . . It is about the unspeakable inexplicability of earth’s mysteries – which are as immediate as the next heartbeat.”

Out of Africa

Africa featured prominently in the media this week. There was Tony Blair’s ill-fated trip to America to bring the Bush administration on board with his international plan for the salvation of Africa. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had his say, speaking perhaps too optimistically of what might be achieved when the G8 countries meet at Gleneagles. And Sir Bob Geldof weighed into the fray, announcing a series of world concerts on the scale of Live Aid, but on this occasion not to raise funds for famine relief, but to mobilise people to protest at the time of the G8 meetings that too little is being done by the richer nations to alleviate endemic poverty in Africa. There is talk of a million people taking to the streets of Edinburgh, an estimate which is making that city’s authorities rather twitchy.

All this mind you, at a time when Europe and the USA were indulging in a childish game of ‘my plane is bigger than your plane’. Both regions provide hefty subsidies and kickbacks to plane manufacturers Boeing and Airbus, but America has taken its case against Europe to the World Trade Organisation, initiating a process which the experts say will take years to reach a judgement and cost both sides billions of dollars – while Africa continues to starve. Given the state of Africa, this costly charade is scandalous.

Down at the Black Cock, the village pub, which (now that the ancient Church of St Michael keeps its doors firmly locked apart from Sunday service times) is the only community meeting place we have in Llanfihangel Talyllyn, conversation also turned to Africa. Paul the horse breeder, Charles the retired engineer, and Mark the shepherd were agreed about one thing. Nothing we do for Africa will work until corruption is rooted out of African political and economic life. What is needed is appropriate governance so that international aid doesn’t disappear into the bottomless pockets of African elites. When asked how our village stalwarts proposed solving that problem the view was that there is nothing we in Britain can do about it; it is for Africans to get their act together, which sounded rather like the familiar blame-the-victim syndrome.

Then the conversation turned into a discussion of African Christianity which has been receiving some bad press in Britain. There have been some terrible cases of child torture and abuse brought to the public’s attention. The torso of an African boy who had been mutilated was found floating in the Thames. The press corps muttered about child sacrifices and witchcraft, and went on to reveal that there are hundreds of African immigrant schoolchildren who seem to have disappeared altogether, provoking alarm in some quarters about the scale of the problem. One report suggest that many have been sent home to Africa to undergo Christian deliverance rituals, and that some are not heard of again. Then in a much-publicised case which has provoked changes in Britain’s child care and protection agencies, a young girl Victoria Climbie, whose relatives accused her of being possessed, suffered deprivations and beatings which culminated in her death.

This week brought yet another case to prominence when three adults who had branded an eight year old girl a witch and tortured her for months, were convicted of child cruelty in a British court. The girl had over forty injuries to her body: she had been cut with a knife, slapped, kicked and beaten; she had had chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes; she had been starved; she had been tied up in a laundry bag and told she was going to be thrown into a river. Investigations indicate that the family were members of an African protestant church which preaches the reality of Satan in people’s lives, and insists that those who display symptoms of possession or witchcraft be summarily dealt with. This particular child – known only as Child B in court – was the subject of a prophecy in the course of a church retreat which had branded her ndoki or witch.

Child protection authorities are careful to point out that there is no evidence of the prevalence of child abuse in African communities being any greater than in other communities but it is the Christian connection which is alarming many. Anyone who knows Africa is aware of the way that in many instances Christianity is a veneer overlaid upon traditional religion whose practices are maintained. Thus in my own work in HIV/AIDS education in Africa, there have been examples of men declared HIV positive who, upon returning to their village, have been advised by a traditional healer to seek a cure by sleeping with a young virgin, thus transmitting the virus to an innocent child. And in the case of ‘witchcraft’, some variants of African Christianity have adapted traditional practices which call for the body to be subjected to various forms of brutality in order to exorcise the evil spirits.

This is not true of all African Christianity of course. One thinks of the gallant support churches in South Africa gave to the struggle against apartheid, or of those churches which are engaged in impressive programmes of community development, or at the forefront of the battle against HIV/AIDS. But there are also churches which preach a ‘prosperity gospel’ to those trapped in endemic poverty or which seek to exercise power and control over the poor by preaching not the power of Christ but the omnipresence of Satan. And there are many unfortunate instances of the kind of corruption identified at the political level, also being manifested in churches. In one diocese where I have close friends, the former bishop declared that he was unable to pay his clergy while at the same time constructing an enormous mansion for his impending retirement. We don’t need the skills of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot to shed light on that situation.

So you must pardon me if, when Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria declares that the future of Christianity lies in Africa’s hands, or when my evangelical friends insist that Africa provides a model for the renewal of Christianity in Europe, I prefer to take a more nuanced view.