Jingoism and Jerusalem

When I was a parish priest on London’s Old Kent Road, I was initially bemused that virtually every couple coming to be married requested that the ‘hymn’ Jerusalem be sung at their wedding ceremony. I later discovered that this was a frequently sung song at school morning assemblies, so in some cases was probably the only ‘hymn’ with which South London’s young were familiar.

Jerusalem was being sung the length and breadth of England last weekend. And by England I mean England and not Britain, for I doubt that very few Celts in Scotland, Wales or Ireland were joining in. It was fervently sung as a patriotic gesture by Englishmen and women in two quite different settings. The first was at the final cricket test match between England and Australia at The Oval, one of London’s two famous cricket grounds. This is a game which has never appealed to me, and even less to my American friends who cannot understand the rules and conventions of a match which lasts five days. The Australians had held the symbolic ‘Ashes’ for nearly twenty years, but the English team, written off before the five match series began, had shown miraculous improvement but needed to win the final match to regain the Ashes, and as the English commentators kept arrogantly asserting ‘Bring them back to where they belong’. The England cricket team, seeking any help they could get, including divine intervention, requested that the fans sing Jerusalem.

The second setting was the last night of the Promenade Concert season at the Royal Albert Hall. This is festive occasion in which the promenaders who stand on the open floor space in front of the stage, bring flags, banners and toy instruments along to join in the final concert’s grand finale, which includes sea shanties, Land of Hope and Glory and, you’ve guessed it, Jerusalem. It is a moment for unashamed English patriotic fervour. This year however, the Observer’s music critic apparently had had enough of this rather loutish behaviour. ‘Let’s face it’, he wrote, ‘Britannia does not rule the waves any more. Those who think she does, or would like to, are clinging to the post imperial delusions beneath so much that is wrong in this country. This is not patriotism: it is the ugly face of jingoistic nationalism’.

If those who sing Jerusalem so enthusiastically were aware of the intention and meaning of the words they are embracing, they for the most part wouldn’t want to sing them at all! They were penned by William Blake who was regarded as a rather harmless lunatic by many of his eighteenth century contemporaries but is now recognised as one of the finest engravers and poets the country has produced. Greatly given to religious visions, he associated with Christian groups in London whose origins can be traced back to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a mediaeval Christian anarchist movement. The best biography I’ve read on Blake is Peter Ackroyd’s Blake and the best small book I’ve come across is Peter Marshall’s William Blake; Visionary Anarchist.

Blake was an anarchist in the sense that he believed that the Christian has a responsibility at all times to follow the law of Christ and where the law of the land conflicts with Christ’s law, to oppose the state. In 1803, in the course of removing a drunken soldier from his garden Blake was alleged to have said ‘Damn the King’ and to have intimated that ‘all soldiers are slaves’. These words led to his arrest and trial on the charge of treason, from which he was ultimately acquitted.

Blake’s poems are a complicated mix of religious vision and anarchist politics. The words of Jerusalem, are actually part of a longer work Milton and I regard them as one of the greatest works of anarchist protest against all that is oppressive, demeaning and dehumanising about authoritarian rule.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Now while it is probable that Blake was referring here to a very ancient legend that Christ himself in the course of his earthly life visited England, I think it more than likely that he also intended these questions to be rhetorical anticipating the answer ‘No’. Certainly for him there was no sign to be seen of Christ’s New Jerusalem blossoming amongst the ‘dark satanic mills’ and grinding poverty fashioned by the Industrial Revolution. In response, Blake issues his own call to action:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

‘Desire’ and ‘mental fight’ are very important to Blake’s understanding of education and politics. Our desires, our deepest motivations and intuitions are God-given instruments for progress, yet authoritarian societies try to repress them. Blake often referred to the way that the state works to control human behaviour through our socialisation and education – a process today we associate with ideological control and hegemony – as ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. Hence the important of engaging in ‘mental fight’ to overcome this power of the state in order to establish Jerusalem, the reality of Christ’s non-hierarchical and non-coercive Kingdom of justice and peace. We know that Blake’s intention was not a literal call to arms, as many people assume it to be, because of his insistence that ‘war is the health of the State’ indicating that states ultimately depend upon the force of arms to secure their objectives.

So my anarchist heart beats faster whenever I hear Jerusalem sung at weddings, at cricket matches, or at the Last Night of the Proms. I only wish that people appreciated and owned the significance of what they are singing, and in their politics were committed to heeding Blake’s call to resistance.

Where Did God Go?

Disasters tend to bring out both the best and worst in humanity. We have witnessed this in the devastation wrought by Katrina along the USA’s Gulf Coast. There have been tales of heroism, of selfless action on behalf of others, of compassion towards those who are suffering. And equally there was widespread looting, reports of armed gangs firing indiscriminately, and within the refuge of the Superdome, incidents of assaults, rapes and suicides.

It’s the same with theology. A catastrophe on this scale evokes both the best and the worst kinds of theological discourse. The worst generally take the form of interpreting disasters like Katrina in thoroughly Old Testament terms which picture God wreaking retribution upon disobedient and sinful people. Given the popular tendency towards simplistic and fundamentalist religious tenets, it is not surprising to read that Katrina has prompted an outpouring of this kind of theological rubbish.

I trawled through the Internet to discover a few examples, and was not altogether surprised to see that some Christians view the destruction of New Orleans in the same biblically simplistic terms as the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s all to do with homosexual sin apparently. Thus Repent America, an evangelical and fundamentalist organisation opined that it was no accident that New Orleans was destroyed just a few days before ‘Southern Decadence’, an annual homosexual celebration which attracts thousands of people to the city, was due to be held. According to the organisation’s press release this gay festival fills ‘ the French Quarters of the city with drunken homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets and bars’. Said Repent America’s director Michael Marcavage ‘Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city . . . New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin’. He prays piously, ‘From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge’.

As if this parody of Christianity is not bizarre enough, worse was to follow in a diatribe emanating from God Hates Fags, the homepage of Westboro Baptist Church, in language much of which I wouldn’t want to reproduce in this blog. Under the banner ‘Thank God for Katrina’ this website proclaims ‘America is irreversibly doomed. It is a sin to pray for the good of this evil fag nation’ and ‘It is a sin NOT to rejoice when God executes his wrath and vengeance upon America’. And it urges its readers to ‘pray for more dead bodies floating on the . . . rancid waters of New Orleans’. Here is an instance of the cynical exploitation of religion. In this rejoicing over Katrina’s destruction and praying for a rising death count, religion has ceased to be a force for good. Religion has become evil.

So where was God in all this destruction? The answer is that there are no answers except that at many points in life humanity is confronted by the silences, ambiguities and absences of God in the world. In the biblical narrative of creation God invests humanity with mastery over creation and expects humanity to take responsibility for it. He intervenes neither to prevent the catastrophes we engineer nor to punish us for them. That we suffer the results of bad choices we make and the bad planning we execute is well illustrated by this latest hurricane which exposed both our complicity in global warming and the American administration’s failure to protect and provide for its people.

The signs of God I saw in this catastrophe were in the kindness of strangers, in the way that ordinary people became ministering angels, in the solace being offered to the lost, the lonely and the heartbroken, in public displays of the heights that humanity can aspire to in its finest moments, in the indomitability of the human spirit in the presence of tragedy and chaos.

When the prophet Elijah had his dramatic personal encounter with God, God was nowhere to be found within the forces of nature. He was not present in the raging storm which tore the mountains, nor in the shattering earthquake which followed, nor in the consuming fire. God was discerned in something unexpectedly less destructive and judgemental. God inhabits sheer silence. That silence may have been the immense silence of the desert where the only sound to be heard is the sound of one’s own heartbeat. But it may also have been within the sublime silence of the human heart itself.

New Orleans

The disaster, which struck the Gulf Coast of the United States and the city of New Orleans in particular this week, was on a scale that no one could have imagined. We were transfixed in front of our TV sets as a flood of biblical proportions destroyed everything in its path, with no ark at hand to deliver people to safety. For day after day the poor of New Orleans looked in vain for somebody to come to their aid. The administration appeared to be totally paralysed by the scale of the destruction. The media quickly began looking for somebody to blame and to ask why other nations were not stepping in to help. One bewildered CNN reporter trying to make sense of the situation asked a representative of the United Nations committee that deals with such matters, “Is nobody coming to help us because of our involvement in the war in Iraq?”

The war has little to do with the world’s reaction, but certainly we have become so familiar with America’s self-assurance, with its confidence in technology, with its ruthless pursuit of its own economic and industrial interests, and as the only current superpower, its penchant for telling other nations how they ought to be living their lives, that many of us assumed that American technology and resources would cope with the crisis. It manifestly failed to do so, and the Administration’s request to the European Union this morning that it assist by supplying food, blankets and water tankers has unexpectedly reversed that trend of the poor, cap in hand, beating their path to America’s door. The experience of the world’s most powerful nation discovering itself to be vulnerable and powerless may be no bad thing if it can take to heart the lesson that today our global culture calls for mutual interdependence rather than a ‘go it alone’ mentality.

Naive theology often declares that humanity is powerless in the face of natural disasters, sometimes erroneously referred to, particularly by insurance companies, as ‘Acts of God’. But bad planning and human negligence have played their part. I was impressed with a pastoral letter issued by Bob Ihloff, the Episcopal Bishop of Maryland with whom I was a fellow student in Cambridge Massachusetts in the 1960’s. He said, “We know that hurricanes and tornadoes are increasing in number and severity because of global warming. Most scientists agree that global warming is the result of irresponsible human treatment of the environment. Yet, we, especially, as a nation, have refused to enter into global agreements which would over time eliminate greenhouse gasses and possibly reverse the trend. We selfishly are preoccupied with oil consumption to the point that even this most recent and particularly devastating tragedy gives way to our perceived need for more oil and our concern about its price!” While Americans may have been particularly resistant to giving environmental concerns priority over economics, there is a message here for all of us. Our lifestyles too have contributed to this disaster and we must accept a degree of responsibility for it.

Of course the President of the United States also has to acknowledge a degree of personal accountability. This morning’s British press revealed some sobering information. Work on the maintenance of the flood protection system around New Orleans is an ongoing budgetary item. So is preparation for evacuation of citizens in the case of flooding. Under the headline ‘Warnings went ignored as Bush slashed flood defence budget to pay for wars’ the Independent claims that vital measures to protect New Orleans from flooding were scrapped by the Bush administration to pay for its wars on terror and the war in Iraq. Funding was slashed by 80% and work on strengthening the defences protecting the city was halted for the first time in 37 years. Similarly, plans to provide emergency shelter for flood victims in the Superdome were abandoned when the funding dried up. And back in 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned the administration that ‘a hurricane hitting New Orleans would be the deadliest of the three most likely catastrophes facing America’.

So by all accounts the administration has a great deal to answer for. At the outset of the disaster the President declined to interrupt his holiday for 48 hours and spoke of the results of the hurricane as a temporary phenomenon. The Vice President still remains on holiday. Condoleeza Rice went shopping for a $7,000 pair of shoes in Manhattan. Meanwhile two of the world leaders high on the list of those the USA most despises were offering help. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela offered $1million via the Red Cross, and Fidel Castro of Cuba offered to send 1100 doctors and 26 tons of medicine.

The most shameful thing to emerge from the disaster is the blame-the-victim mentality displayed by some officials who claimed that people did not leave New Orleans when advised to do so. Middle class families climbed into their 4-wheel-drive vehicles and set off to stay with friends or relatives. British television reported other families booking into hotels and their children playing happily in the swimming pools. But the poor, mainly Black population bereft of transport, had no way of making it to safety, and it is they who have borne the brunt of the suffering. There was a dramatic moment on USA television yesterday when one young black man dared to articulate the words which were no doubt on the minds of many: “President Bush”, he said, “doesn’t care about black people”.