Do we feel guilt for Liam Payne’s death?

We want the celebrity world to exist, but it returns terrible violence.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A crowd of teenagers gather by a Peter Pan statue to mourn a dead pop star

A fan vigil beside a Peter Pan Statue, London.

Sky News.

It’s no secret that fame is a poisoned chalice. Those reading about Liam Payne, the former One Direction star who died last week, will have noticed the theme: denied privacy, loaded with unbearable expectations, in a milieu where illegal substances were too much to hand - what chance did he have? The word ‘tragedy’ is scattered across multiple headlines.

One young Telegraph writer sees it as a generational trauma: “our first celebrity-induced reminder that life can be cruel, and fleeting”. Formerly Elvis, or John Lennon, now Payne; plus ça change. But what really haunts our society about Payne’s death is not a feeling it was unavoidable. It is, rather, our guilt: did we do this? Our rapacious appetites, consumer needs, and reckless licensing of rock-’n-roll form - did we tie this teen idol to the sacrificial altar?

Religious language is not inappropriate: thousands in cities around the world are holding vigils to Payne’s memory, and these shrines would have interested René Girard, who had a theory about how society works. While staying “a few pages ahead of the students” in French novels at Indiana University during the late 1950s, Girard noticed that humans want things, but not because of innate desires. We want things because other humans want them. There is always this undercurrent of rivalry to our world, even amongst close friends - in fact, especially for those whose goals are most similar.

What becomes of this collective aggression? It has to be banished through scapegoating. It’s everyone against one; a victim is butchered. For Girard, culture is what happens when a group achieves temporary peace in the wake of a sacrificial death. The bubble of built-up tension has burst, and an epoch of nonviolence means we get on with civilisation. We raise the kids, build some structures, or write a poem.

Religious mourning for Payne reveals these sacrificial contours of our culture. We want the celebrity world to exist, for its fantasies, desirable bodies, and danger. But it returns terrible violence - exploitation, harassment, and rejection (Payne’s own solo career had not kept him at the thrilling toppermost of the chart). The death of a victim sobers us up, momentarily, from our intoxication. But how long until we repeat it again?

Girard converted to Catholicism in 1959, after he encountered in the Gospels a religion that acknowledged these human trends, and offered a solution. It still required imitation - of Jesus Christ - but without the threat of rivalry. But in the crucifixion was a scapegoating that did not seem to leave things open to repetition. It had finished something, for good. Sunday morning yielded a new kind of peace.

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Race

30 November 2023

5 min read

How reconciliation underpins acts of reparation

The case for reparations is criticised for looking too much to the past. Anthony Reddie argues that the ancient roots of reconciliation are vital for today’s debate.

Anthony Reddie

Anthony Reddie is Professor of Black Theology at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture.

A diagram plan of a slave ship showing hundreds of body outlines.

Diagram of the ship ‘Brookes’ from Regulated slave trade: reprinted from the evidence of Robert Stokes. (London, 1849)

Lambeth Palace Library.

Reconciliation is the key theological motif that runs through the scriptures and across Christian Tradition - Reconciliation between God and humankind, reconciliation between human beings across the cultural, social, political, ethnic and economic divide, reconciliation between our warring selves within us.

Paul’s writings form the earliest documented texts in the New Testament canon. His writings are full of references to God’s reconciling work in Christ on the cross. This theme, however, needs to be read in terms of Jewish thought. This will correct the over-spiritualising of this in Christian practice.

To make sense of the notion of reconciliation one also must understand the Jewish antecedents that inform Paul’s writing, given Paul himself was a Jewish man. In the Hebrew scriptures and in Jewish thought, atonement and salvation are collective and corporate concepts. This is very different to much of what constitutes post-Reformation Evangelical Protestantism where the emphasis is on individual salvation in Christ, by grace, through faith.

The Hebrew Bible traditions of the Sabbath and Jubilee were moments for system re-set and dismantling inequalities which had accrued.

Essentially, being in right-standing with God necessitated that one should be in right relationships with others. In fact, one could argue that it appears to be the case that one cannot be in a right relationship with God unless you were doing right by the other. The above can be seen in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. The early verses of its sixth chapter clearly state the notion of restorative justice for that which was wrongly taken and used, which is described as a “sin against God”.

One can also see this concept or formula evident within the book of Deuteronomy 15:12–18. The key is verse 12 which states:

“If any of you buy Israelites as slaves, you must set free after six years. And don’t just tell them they are free to leave – give them sheep and goats and a supply of grain and wine.”

As Peter Cruchley’s work on the Zacchaeus Tax campaign has shown, the Hebrew Bible traditions of the Sabbath and Jubilee were moments for system re-set and dismantling inequalities which had accrued. They were moments of breaking the cycling, ongoing basis of debt and economic enslavement. It’s worth reminding ourselves that not one penny has been given to any of the descendants of enslaved Africans for the wrong done to them and yet Christian communities in the West still want to talk about redemption that is affirmed by their Judeo-Christian roots!

Understanding the scriptures in their historical context enables Christians to discern a theological pattern for using money and other resources for enacting restorative justice. Modern interpretive theories on how we read biblical texts take full account of the fact that the New Testament was written within the context of the Roman Empire, where the Emperor claimed divine honours which faithful Jews could not affirm. Today’s reader must recognise that the context in which ALL of the New Testament canon was composed was one that echoed to the restrictive strains of colonialism and cries for justice against oppression. Judea, in which Jesus’ ministry was largely located, was an occupied colony of the Roman Empire.

Contemporary scholars have shown that in the Jewish tradition, issues of reconciliation, redemption and salvation have a corporate ad a collective dimension to them as well as an individualistic one.

Scholars such William R. Hertzog II have shown the extent to which wealth in the Roman Province of Palestine was always connected with economic exploitation. So, when Jesus challenges the ‘Rich Young Ruler’ to follow him, he says this in knowledge that the young man’s accumulation of wealth was not amassed in a neutral context. The reason why this encounter is so compact is because both the Rich Young Ruler and those first hearers knew the expectation of how he should behave.

The Three Cs (commerce, civilisation and Christianity) were the underlying rationale on which the British Empire was based. The Three Cs were coined by David Livingstone (a London Missionary Society ‘Old Boy’) in Oxford in 1857. The exporting of Christianity via the European missionary agencies in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries was largely undertaken under the aegis of empire and colonialism. Christian mission, therefore, has had a difficult relationship with non-White bodies or the ‘subaltern’ for centuries as they are the ‘other’ and have been exploited for economic gain. There was no ethic of equality between missionaries and the ‘natives’.

One can see that Jesus’ teachings around wealth and its relationship to discipleship and living the “Jesus way” has political and economic implications. Scholars such as Musa W. Dube, Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera, have all shown the similarities between first-century Palestine, the slave epoch of the sixteenth to eighteenthcenturies, the eras of colonialism and our present globalized, postcolonial context. Each context is based upon imperialistic/colonial expansion, capital accumulation, forced labour and exploitation of the poor by the rich.

Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters is the title of a 2017 book by the famed anti-apartheid activist and scholar Allan Boesak, who reflects on the contemporary ‘Black Lives Matter Movement’ largely in the US and post-Apartheid South Africa. In this context he speaks of the corporate reality of ‘Cheap Grace’ as outlined by the famous German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The West has attempted transformation WITHOUT sacrifice or restorative justice. Bonhoeffer chided Western Christians for wanting to have discipleship without radical commitment to God’s word, and forgiveness and redemption without struggle and sacrifice. Boesak reminds us that there is no redemption without the cross. Reconciliation must cost us something!

Due to the influence of post-Reformation Evangelicalism, we have largely interpreted Jesus’ words in a purely individualistic way. Contemporary scholars have shown that in the Jewish tradition, issues of reconciliation, redemption and salvation have a corporate and a collective dimension to them as well as an individualistic one.

I believe that institutions like the Church of England can set a prophetic lead to other Christian institutions, and beyond it, to other civic bodies and indeed governments. ‘Cheap Grace’ NEVER leads to redemption and reconciliation. Without restorative justice there is no reconciliation, and the mission of Christ is diminished.