Dear Phantom 7 - Everyone Matters

Dear Phantom,

First of all, you are obviously a real person, or you wouldn’t be asking these questions.  So you definitely have a mind and a soul, in the sense that you have consciousness.

Whether there is life after death – whether we have immortal souls, as many religions teach – is something we can’t absolutely prove one way or the other.  But this is a different question from whether you have a soul in the sense of being a person, someone who thinks and feels and can make decisions.

If being middle-class meant you didn’t really have a soul, you couldn’t be in danger of going to hell, could you?  And if you have a soul, then Jesus doesn’t want to send you to hell.  However, this is something I need to talk about in a separate letter – probably in several letters, because your idea of God is so different from most people’s.

The reason mum thought you were ungrateful when you said you thought God was evil was that she didn’t understand what you meant, because it had never occurred to her to imagine God as Someone who gives people food and then punishes them for having received food.  She didn’t understand what your background assumptions were.  In fact, probably hardly any other Christians interpret the Bible the way you do.

That could mean that they are all wrong, of course.  But the fact that they all interpret it differently from you does show that your interpretation is not the only possible one.  Therefore, it is likely that when you think you’re just taking the Bible at face value, in fact you are seeing it through the lens of your own feelings about yourself and your beliefs about how other people – including God – are likely to feel about you.

So, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to concentrate for now on understanding yourself and how you react to things, and how you may have got the wrong idea about things.  Then you can come back to deciding whether you believe in God, and if so, what sort of God you believe in.

I know this feels scary.  As a Christian, you have been taught that your life should be centred around God, not around yourself.  Religious teachers tell you that your view of yourself should come from how God sees you.  But then, they assume that you have the same idea that they have about how God sees you – and probably, they believe that God loves and values you.  So they can’t imagine that you might believe in a God who plans to destroy you for things you have no control over.

As you know, most non-religious people distrust religion precisely because it is divisive.  Sometimes, it isn’t just divisive between people who believe in a religion and those who don’t, but reinforces class divisions between different groups.  For example, some slave-owners used to believe that black people were intended by God to be the slaves of white people, and that banning slavery was going against God’s will.

When you were ten and studying the Victorians in History, you learned about the hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander, who wrote ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.  Mum told you how when she was a little girl, there used to be another verse of the song:

 

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

 

As she says, she as a child just saw this as meaning, ‘Whoever you are, rich or poor, the same God made you, and all are equal before God,’ but it could be taken to mean, ‘The circumstances you were born into were the place God chose for you, so you mustn’t seek to make a better life for yourself.’  As with the Bible, the same words can be interpreted different ways (and here we’re looking at words written in English, just the previous century, rather than a translation of books written in other languages, in a very different culture, thousands of years ago!).

And besides, how poor is ‘poor’?  In the second line there, who does ‘his’ refer to?  Was Mrs Alexander thinking of a beggar at the rich man’s gate, as in the story of Lazarus the beggar, or of a cottager leaning on his own garden gate, surveying his humble smallholding of a vegetable plot and a few chickens and maybe a pig in a sty?

Still, because it could mean something unhelpful, that verse was crossed out of the school hymn-books while your mum was still at school.  However, people who are a bit older than your mum, like the headmaster at your primary school, still think of it as a classist hymn because it used to contain those words – and they also think it’s very unfair that children who don’t believe in God should have to sing it. 

So, instead, the headmaster told you to sing pop songs from the 1950s and 1960s, probably because those were the songs he remembered liking when he was young, so he thought of them as the sort of songs that young people like.  It probably didn’t occur to him that some of these songs were actually more classist than ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’!  Even if Cecil Frances Alexander did believe that God intended poor people to stay poor, she wasn’t saying that they were contemptible and not really real people, or that they couldn’t really be lonely or depressed.  But somehow, saying that about middle-class people seems to be acceptable!

Again, how middle-class is ‘middle-class’?  In practice, the people living in boring mass-produced housing are not the affluent people Pete Seeger is supposedly satirising in ‘Little Boxes’, but the working-class people in council houses and flats, and the lower-middle-class people living in whatever they can afford – in other words, everyone except those poor enough that they’re homeless, and those wealthy enough to be able to decide, ‘I think I’ll go and live in a 16^th century farmhouse in the countryside and commute into work.’

So in practice, it comes across not even as inverted snobbery, but the plain old-fashioned snobbery that says, ‘What you own is what you are worth.’  It is the arrogant attitude of someone who can’t be bothered to look closely enough to see people as individuals, but only notes that from a distance they look like an undifferentiated mass who are too boring to be worth getting to know better.

People have a terrible tendency to divide the world into categories, based on arbitrary differences like accent or skin colour.  So the people on one side of the division say, ‘We, Group A, are the ones who matter!’  And then, Group B will either meekly accept this, or, more likely, they will say, ‘Actually, the people in Group B matter,’ and while originally they might mean, ‘We also matter,’ after a while people start shouting, ‘It’s wrong to say that people in Group A matter!  The people in Group B are the ones who really matter!’

You remember how, on a recent holiday, your family’s car was stuck behind a car which had a sticker in the rear window which read ‘Violence against women and children is a crime.’  Artist Brother, reading this, exclaimed, ‘Well, duh, that’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?  Violence against anyone is a crime!’

Mum explained that yes, of course it is, but the problem is that some people assume that domestic violence is just part of the private life of a family and no-one else’s business, and that this is the attitude that the sticker was challenging.

Of course, she had a point – but so did Artist Brother.  If people assume that domestic violence is wrong not because it is violence, but because it is violence against women and children, then this implies that domestic violence where a man gets hit by his wife – or by his husband, for that matter – is less important.  (No, I know same-sex marriage isn’t legal in Britain in the 1990s – but let’s face it, couples who have lived together in a monogamous relationship for years are effectively married, whether it’s officially called marriage or not.)

Some of the people who run women’s refuges even assume that all domestic violence is male-against-female and is the result of patriarchy – which implies that if a woman gets hit by her wife, that isn’t a problem, either.  Obviously, the idea that only heterosexual women deserve protection from a violent partner is homophobic as well as sexist.  However, the people who rebel against the demonisation of homosexuality by idealising same-sex relationships, and can’t accept that gay people can be just as flawed as everyone else, don’t think of that. 

Again, it’s the same problem of category thinking.  People rebel against the traditional view of the Christian church that homosexuality is a sin (and yes, I know that, as an Evangelical Christian teenager in the 1990s, you aren’t sure what to think about this, but that’s another issue to discuss another time).  But instead, some campaigners seem to assume that same-sex relationships must by definition be more harmonious and egalitarian than heterosexual marriage, as though, if gay people aren’t worse than heterosexual people, they must be better than heterosexuals.

At any rate, dividing the world into an in-group who matter and an out-group who don’t is toxic.  However, most people at least assume that they themselves matter.  Either they disagree with the messages that tell them they don’t matter, or they filter them out and don’t even notice them.  You, on the other hand, do the opposite, and filter out the messages that do suggest that you are lovable and acceptable.

Recently I asked Artist Brother if he remembered the songs we were made to sing in school.  He didn’t remember the ones that bothered us at all.  The ones he remembered were the vaguely theistic but not too doctrinal ones which the headmaster considered safe, like ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’.   Now, this could be called theologically vague in that it doesn’t specifically contain the word ‘Jesus’, but it is certainly an affirmation of God’s love for everyone.  Yet you hardly paid attention to that.

If you, by the age of seven, felt so unlovable that the only messages you could understand and believe were those which you could interpret as rejection, you definitely had problems, regardless of whether Ralph McTell who wrote ‘Streets of London’ thought you did or not.  He didn’t even know you, so who was he to tell you that you didn’t really have problems?

I think one of your biggest problems is that you stopped trusting your own thoughts and feelings and preferences.  This is something I need to talk about in the next letter.

Just remember that you are a person, and you matter, no more and no less than anyone else in the world.  Categories aren’t real, but people are.

But on the other hand, you have a responsibility to yourself that goes beyond the responsibilities you have towards anyone else.  Even when you were a baby, needing your parents to feed and care for you, nobody other than you could breathe for you, eat for you, or digest your food for you.  In the same way, nobody except you can decide what you will believe, or make you happy if you choose to make yourself miserable.  You need to learn to care for yourself, emotionally as well as physically.

Love from

Temple Cloud