Winchester, 18 January 2006
Three years ago I took a small delegation of church leaders to meet with the Trident officers in the Metropolitan Police Service. In the course of our discussions they told us that 6% of all recorded murders – at a moderate level – was motivated by ‘a lack of respect.’ Within a few weeks I visited the Superintendent of the West Midlands Police Service. During the course of our conversation he told me that on his patch a young man could lose his life simply because he was suspected of disrespecting another person.
Last week Respect re-emerged as a current political football when the Prime Minister published his Respect action plan; the findings and recommendations of his twelve-month Respect drive. As a gesture of non-combative politics, David Cameron the newly crowned opposition leader rushed in to rubbish his proposals as a concession to ‘one dimensional, knee jerk populism.’ [1]
Respect is far too important for political games. It has become a matter of life and death. Eight years ago when I identified this issue as a priority focus for our work I would never have imagined its potential to enter the school curriculum, the Police Service or indeed, to become a major socio-political issue.
In these four lectures I aim to argue four things. First that Respect is a profoundly theological idea which claims that people are to be respected because they are made in God’s image. It’s what we are, not what we own. Consequently, any attempt to trade in spiritual principles for mechanical substitutes is an act of social vandalism. Secondly, that Respect is more than an abstract idea and is therefore invaluable to community cohesion. Thirdly respect is very closely linked to what we say about other people. Where our politicised ‘isms’ have failed to alter human relationships, perhaps the language of respect will take us farther. And finally, Respect is a state of mind – how we exercise our freedoms and values which drive us. But it’s also the responsibility of the State.
It’s easy to see how religion in general and Christian faith in particular might be regarded as a liability rather than an asset. Religion has added to the stockpile of inhuman behaviour. It is now wedded to terror and often parades as moralising conservatism. Where choice has become venerated, Christian morality is as unwelcome as an undertaker at a birthday party. We have mastered the art of reaction.
Despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary, these caricatures are celebrated by the press and opinion formers with a philosophical aversion to faith. And by doing so, Christian faith and its prophetic voice is often muted and marginalised in the important debates about what it means to be a person in the 21st Century. But no contemporary debate about Respect in Britain is honest or helpful if it ignores the values of the Judeo-Christian heritage which has shaped what the Prime Minister calls, ‘the values that almost everyone in this country shares…’ [2] To exclude this contribution is as inconclusive as a telephone conversation on a broken line. It’s worth remembering too, that Jung linked what he called ‘the alarming lack of balance’ in 1930’s Europe to the decline in religious life. [3]
So we must be grateful to our politicians for raising the issue and resist that very British attitude to be cynical. But we must also appeal to our political leaders not to make Political mileage out of this life and death issue for to do so would merely feed the scepticism which blunts our appetite to do anything about the problem. In talking up Respect from public platforms people – particularly the young – will understand respectful attitudes long before they unravel our policies. As so many columnists have reminded us recently, Respect – or a lack of it - has become an entrenched issue needing long-term answers.
And the starting point has to be within the world of ideas. Our non-differentiating egalitarian, winner-takes-all society is the product of ideas. Long before anyone thought about ASBOs, the battle for Respect was lost in our intellectual vision of what it means to be a person.
Whatever we make of the opening chapters of Genesis one thing is clear. God has laid the foundation for human society. It’s a society of mutual reverence in which two people - male and female - recognise that they are equal before God because, shockingly, they are like God.
This is precisely the splendour and the awesome power of one of the most celebrated Psalms in Christian witness,
“… what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.”[4] The Christian narrative begins therefore, not with sin and failure, but with people made in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness of God’.[5] There is no higher idea of what it means to be a person. The Christian narrative is one of creation, redemption and glorification. Properly understood it is the most enduring architecture of personal and corporate respect and respectability. And in this narrative the Christ-Event is God’s vote for humanity. In the celebrated words of Baloo the Bear to Man-cub, the Incarnation is God’s way of saying, for a short while at least, “I wanna be like you!” We are Fallen but not forsaken.
There is no better idea from which to fund the imagination as we debate Respect. They are infinitely more community friendly than Darwinian evolution, Marx’s capitalist categories, Freud’s introspective psycho-sexual definitions or Nietzsche’s depressing nihilisms. Contemporary thinkers such as Dawkins and Grayling offer us nothing beyond ourselves. In the quest to sweep away the improbability of God we have produced material answers to profoundly spiritual questions. A thirsty society has been given empty cups to examine.
As Voltaire once observed, to believe in God is impossible. Not to believe in God is absurd.
In our search for Respect, the battle of ideas cannot be overestimated and the idea that people are important because of who they are rather than what they have or do is critical. It was no accident that the most powerful idea in the battle against slavery two hundred years ago was that a Black slave was a Man and a Brother. Or as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it recently,
‘The Christian vision of human nature and human personality is that each person is made by God to have a conversation with God… So when I look at another human being I’m looking at someone God is taking seriously;’ [6]
Political policies are important. But in the battle to recover lost ground our ideas and attitudes may yet prove to be more powerful than our policies. As we know, attitudes can kill. In the current debate our ideas about who we are, are far more important than our ideologies about what we do. And much could be gained if, for example, our educational systems had the courage to look seriously again at the language and the place of faith and reconsider in the Old Testament description of God, the Rock from which we are hewn. [7] Indeed I suspect the motivation behind the Government’s recent commitment to faith schools has been the recognition that faith offers a worldview which has been drawn from these enduring values about personhood and Respect.
Who we are cannot continue to be informed by the underlying culture of despair. In his book Only Human, Don Cupitt sites the pessimism of the artist Francis Bacon in an interview recorded in 1962. Bacon’s analysis saddened me, for in it he said ‘that man now realises he is an accident; that he is a completely futile being.’ [8] It is a fatalism which has come to infect the present generation in which self harm, substance abuse, eating disorders and anti-social behaviour has become a hallmark of youth culture. In one of the richest economies in the world, suicide is the second highest cause of death in young men under twenty-five.
In a society which quietly nurtures a culture of death in the womb and which lurches to legislate for assisted death it will be difficult to recover Respect – even where we claim that these acts respect individual freedoms. Our immunity to the death of 600 unborn babies each day is a silent mockery of our rhetoric about Respect for the living. Respect based on who we are as created people – and our God-given potential - insists that a foetus is as human as a superstar. [9]
An understanding so profound offers a totally new dimension on selfhood and self-respect. Where it is missing we are vulnerable to the commodification of our personhood and Respect becomes determined by what I have. I become little more than what I own. It’s the value which says, “You smash my car, I’ll smash your face!”
As a Probation Officer in the 1970’s and 80’s this was all too evident in the clients with whom I worked. Take Eddie, for example. Eddie was a 19 year old Black man living in north London: an excellent thief who dressed immaculately and always laughed when I told him what I earned. At any one time Eddie was worth thousands in gold rings, chains, silk shirts, crocodile shoes and leather jackets. When he smiled he actually sparkled. One day I asked him why he felt he had to dress so expensively. I shall never forget his answer. ‘If I don’t wear my stuff,’ he said, ‘I’m nothing.’ Over twenty years later its still one of the few sentences I still remember from any client.
But Eddie didn’t get there by himself. And twenty years later this is still true of countless men and women who bully, steal and lie their way into lifestyles they would otherwise find unobtainable. The so-called ‘bling culture’ symbolises the cult of the economically and culturally displaced people who have no other index to work with apart from the images they copy from the MTV culture and the relentless advertising campaigns which tell them they are what they own. Western society is inundated by an advertising industry which amounts to a type of commercial violence which thrives by convincing people that they are what they own.
In 2004 an advertising survey in the USA showed that advertisers spent more than $12billion per year on messages aimed at young people and that the average child watched over 40,000 television commercials each year.[10] This amounted to what American psychologist Allen Kanner described as the ‘narcissistic wounding’ of children.[11]
Equally serious arguments can be made for the indebtedness caused by banking and lending agencies who systematically induce people to spend more than their income allows.[12]
If Francis Fukuyama is right in arguing that the triumph of capitalism and its institutions is the goal towards which history is headed,[13] then global capitalism which relies so powerfully on consumer instincts is poised to underwrite a culture of disrespect in which people measure their worth and the worth of others in commercial categories. Immediate gratification means wanting now displaces waiting. Materialism becomes menacing not just because it makes us obsessive about material things but because it addicts us to the present and steals our future. There is no such thing as deferred love, or deferred need. Everything must happen now. A woman carrying a purse now becomes depersonalised to a stash of cash and I become willing to violate another human being who gets in my way.
Rampant and excessive materialism is the most damning expression of a lack of hope and the most desperate distrust of the future. The present becomes my tyrant.
The Prime Minister is absolutely right to flag up the need to recover a culture of Respect. He is also right to implicate all of us in that task. And perhaps he is right too, in resisting the temptation to moralise on the issue. [14] The Prime Minister also has a horrifying task of balancing the responsibilities of offenders against the rights of victims of anti-social behaviour and the punitive responsibilities of the State. But it would be a sad mistake to assume that draconian legislation and tough talk will win this battle. Neither Thatcherism nor Michael Howard’s tough language of the 1980’s succeeded in accomplishing this. Similarly Britain as an increasingly wealthy nation continues to throw up alarming signs of social dysfunction.
The Prime Minister’s action plan highlights an inherent contradiction: on at least two occasions it identifies progress made since 1997: more people employed, more money spent, less people sleeping rough – but absolutely no indication that this has had a commensurate impact on a reduction on anti-social behaviour. Quite the opposite in fact.
The report provides us with a comprehensive range of responses on this issue. But any attempt to eliminate a culture of disrespect must go beyond the punitive responses and heavy handed provisions for the police service. What is Government seeking to do about the financial systems which push people more deeply into material debt? And what steps are being made to address those extraordinarily influential artists in the music industry who degrade women or promote violence? And as we battle with ideas about respect will there be creative dialogue which raises questions about the normalisation of ridicule in high profile television programmes such as the X Factor (which has many positive aspects) or The Weakest Link?
Let me end where I began with the recognition that Christian ministers can be prudish kill joys. I’m willing to accept that this may be Christian moralising but in a culture where ‘that’s rubbish’ has become ‘you’re rubbish’ I think the questions are worth asking.
And having worked as a pastor and a professional counsellor in the criminal justice system I have found no greater appeal in promoting a culture of respect than reminding people of the incredibly high view God has of them. People –Christian or otherwise - who really understand that to be human is to be God-like will not only respect themselves they will find it easier to respect others as well.
One final thought. It has often been said that you are what you eat. If that’s true then I should be something of a cross between a chicken and a pig. My wife does the best chicken and spare ribs in the world! So that might only be partially true.
But I can say very confidently that we are always worth a lot more than we own. Remember the Psalmist – we are only a little lower than the angels. And generally speaking, angels don’t need ASBOs.
Rev Joel Edwards
[1] David Cameron Guardian 10th January 2006, An end to Polarisation
[2] Blair Respect Action Plan January 2006
[3] Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul, pp 264,261,266
[4] Psalm 8: 4-6
[5] Genesis 1:27, 2:7
[6] Rowan Williams, Temple address, Evangelical Alliance 10th November 2005
[7] Isaiah 51:1
[8] Don Cupitt Only Human p.179
[9] Psalm 139:14-16
[10] American Psychological Association survey 2004
[11] Monitoring On Psychology Vol 31 No 8 September 2000
[12] Antony Elliott, Not Waving But Drowning Report on Over Indebtedness by Misjudgement 2005
[13] Cited Bartholomew & Moritz, Christ and Consumerism p.7
[14] See Introduction Respect action Plan
