Striking Francemp3

I made a comment the other day that I’m ashamed of. I never thought I would utter the words and I’m glad they were not recorded. But as I browsed the web and read news of strikes and sabotage I muttered: “I’m glad I’m not in France.” For the record I was only referring to this week.

I am a proud Francophile you see. I love the country, I love the people and I’d like to live there. Much of this is undoubtedly due to a romanticized notion of the place from Amelie and Stella Artois commercials. But I secretly imagine myself as an intense bohemian artist, sipping Absinthe on the Left Bank, reading philosophy in French whilst wearing a mildly camp beret. So far I have only managed the intense bit.

I find it easy to glorify the French strikers - working heroes fighting to protect a way of life that the new man Sarkozy wants to dismantle. In reality they may well be a bunch of lazy militants who don’t like the idea of work after 50 (after all it’s gruelling stuff driving a train). And the harsh truth is that the French economy is in trouble and tough choices do need to be made.

But my concern is that in his quest for reform the French president may fall into the trap that the UK appears to have done and see economic growth, low taxation and high consumer spending as the Holy Trinity of a nation’s wellbeing.

The answer from our shores appears to be that they aren’t. We may be materially well off but ours is not a happy nation. We work too hard, drink too much, have an obesity time bomb in our midst and our children have unparalleled levels of psychiatric disorders. There is something rotten in the state of Great Britain and the French may have a thing or two to teach us about la joie de vivre.

As, of course, does the bible. In the Old Testament we see God’s blueprint for a healthy nation and we see themes emerging of community, justice, fair distribution of wealth, care for the vulnerable and times of rest. Those who can work should work. This is not a manifesto for welfare scroungers. But there is a balance implied between making money and enjoying God, time, food and relationships. As psychiatrist Carl Jung once said: “Hurry is not of the devil. It is the devil.”

Our country is currently seeing the poisonous fruits of the secularist, individualist, consumerist experiment: fractured communities, huge inequalities of wealth and enormous pressures on family life. In this context it may well be that one of our strongest evangelistic tools is not to try to prove that our faith is true, but showing that it works. That the bible presents a handbook of human flourishing, with a wisdom not dimmed by the two thousand years since the book was finished. That when it comes to wellbeing we have far more sociologically and psychologically robust advice to offer our society than we are often given credit for.

Like the Jewish prophets of old, perhaps our role is to call our nation back to its senses. Vive la revolution (I’ll provide the berets).

Ian Wedd, Evangelical Alliance

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