Hopes and fears for the year

Standing on the cold threshold of a new year, Graeme Holdsworth recalls past audacity and whether his aspirations are too timid.

Graeme Holdsworth

Graeme is a vicar of Marsden and Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire. He also cycles and juggles.

A starry night sky below which a signpost is silhouetted.

Luca J on Unsplash.

Standing in the Vicarage garden, under the clear winter sky, I feel cold to my bones, as though Jack Frost has thrown his coat over my shoulders. I’ve been successfully shedding body-fat since early October when I began to cut out ‘added sugar’ foods from my diet, but it has come with a downside: I need some third-party insulation, preferably lightweight, breathable, wind, and waterproof. I love cycling under clear night skies, pausing away from towns and lights to let my eyes adjust sufficiently to see stars more in number than the sands of the sea, but my enthusiasm for winter riding is dampened by this bitter cold.

My first truly long-distance bike ride was an overnight cycle across the North Pennines, about 300km. A good friend had turned 40 and invited me to his party at a nightclub in Glasgow. I lived in Teesside at the time and thought it would be great fun to cycle there. I loaded my bicycle bags with party clothes, a change of shoes, and an appropriately expensive bottle of whisky as a gift, then set off into the early evening sunshine. By Bishop Auckland it was raining. Passing across Yad Moss to Alston at midnight, it was snowing.

I’m older now and experienced enough to know that there is a point where the discomfort of endurance tips over into the endurance of pain, but I still long for the adventure. Like Tolkien’s elderly Bilbo Baggins torn between the comfort of his hobbit hole, and his yearning to see mountains again: my mind returns to summer cycling and riding through the night in shorts and short sleeves. Bilbo’s first journey was one of inexperience and unpreparedness, but he faced his dragon and returned home with tales to tell. Moreover, he didn’t do it alone, he also shared the journey with those who were older and wiser, those who knew what to expect but travelled anyway.

Will I limit my resolutions for the new year to those that can be achieved beside my metaphorical fireplace?

As I reflect on this, I think about our church community: those whose faith has been tested by experience, and those who are afraid to take their first steps into a wider world. A mixture of people who tell stories of spiritual wonder and joy, and others who seek comfort and refuge in the familiar. I’m also reminded of the people in this local community who have needed comfort during times of suffering. My soul has become filled with experiences, and I know that there are more frightening ‘dragons’ out there than those I encounter on a long bicycle ride.

As I stand in the Vicarage garden, shivering, I wonder if I’m at risk of becoming timid. Do my experiences, and those I’ve learned from others, teach me to tread more carefully in the year to come? Will I limit my resolutions for the new year to those that can be achieved beside my metaphorical fireplace? Do I hang up my cycling shoes for those furry lined Crocs my son bought me this year?

As I type this I realise, I have no desire to surrender to slippers just yet: my aspirations for the year ahead are to fly recklessly in the face of my own painful experiences, to embrace boldness in cycling, faith, and ministry once again. I pray for joy in my heart, and youth in my soul. I hope that my faith filled foolishness will be infectious in our church and our community as I stand hand in hand with the Divine, on the edge of eternity… and jump together. And as for wisdom born of experience: next time I take the dog into the garden, I’ll put a jumper on.

Column

America

Comment

Politics

31 October 2024

4 min read

Is Trump a fascist?

Fascism is fashionable again, what sort of vigilance is needed to guard against it?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A protester holds placards up in both hands. One reads: Trump is a fascist. The other: Repair the broken world

A protester outside a Trump rally.

dnyuz.com.

I was once called a fascist for saying that the only authority I recognised was God’s. Actually, it had the usual alliterative, adjectival expletive attached to “fascist” that was customary for those of us who received a leftist political education in the 1970s. Very Dave Spart.

Fascism is popular – or possibly populist – as an insult again. The epithet has been applied to Donald Trump in the final stages of the US presidential race. His former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, revealed that Trump had some emollient things to say about Adolf Hitler and retired US general Mark Milley has branded Trump “fascist to the core”.

Democrat presidential rival Kamala Harris endorsed their use of the F-word for Trump, in what must count as one of her more daring statements of the campaign.

And it’s not just evidence of Trump’s admiration for Hitler, historically the go-to evil icon for every anti-fascist. Trump likes tough-guy dictators and rulers. Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, President Erdogan of Turkey, China’s Xi Jinping have all received the Trump seal of approval.

That’s quite a list. What’s most worrying is that Trump has so many role models to choose from. Fascism seems fashionable again. Apart from trying to be nice and kind and not cruel to everybody in a Pollyanna kind of way, those of us of a non-combative religious faith are obliged to state quite why we do find this so worrying.

We’re in the territory here of the cruelty and savagery of the incompetent empty vessel.

Part of the answer to that is pragmatic. Fascist leaders are generally not supportive of their domestic religions, as they endeavour to build their own religious cults around themselves, though it has to be said that Hitler’s relationship with the Catholic Church was at best ambiguous, while Trump is quite reliant on the Christian Right in the US.

Another part of the answer attaches to my response to earthly authority as described at the top of this. It sounds like a cop-out and, in part, I accept that. It’s actually an opt-out, in that the Christian story doesn’t recognise worldly authority unless it serves its standards, rather than the other way around.

That’s why we’re feared by authoritarian political leaders – call them fascist if you will. By extension, the Christian faith isn’t politically populist, though it might be described as a popular movement. Our leadership model is among the people it serves, rather than from the front of them. That’s not a model that Trump or anyone he admires is likely to emulate any time soon.

It is what so confounded and ultimately threatened the political establishment in which it was founded. An itinerant preacher and miracle-worker emerges from the backwoods of a far-flung province of the Roman Empire – a fascist enterprise if ever there was one – to tell both it and its puppet state Judea that his and his insurgent followers’ authority comes not from this world. And the triumph of that claim is recorded in the subsequent two millennia of human history.

That’s not power to the people, nor really a power of the people, but a power of every person in a corporate unity. It is, if you like, the exact obverse of the Roman coin, the antithesis of the emperor and the antidote to every fascist leader that has ever followed and been followed.

I’m not at all sure that Trump is a fascist, as claimed. There’s a school of thought that he’s not bright enough, is too plain dumb, to join that rogues’ gallery. The most dangerous fascists of history, like Hitler, have a pitch-dark ideology that they pursue at all human cost to others and themselves. Trump has no apparent ideology other than the serving of his own vanities and insecurities.

That doesn’t make him undangerous, but it makes him a different kind of authoritarian from a true fascist. We’re in the territory here of the cruelty and savagery of the incompetent empty vessel. And we need to apply a different kind of vigilance from that of the authentic fascist. Because Trump is essentially a buffoon.

Idiotic or truly evil, ultimately the answer may not be to find electoral alternatives, but to measure them against what is transcendent and immutable in human nature.

The buffoonish authoritarian is a handmaid to fascism, but not the real thing. Perhaps every bit as destructive and oppressive of their people, but as an enabler of fascism rather than a principal. Like Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1930s and Second World War, these are preening clowns, though of course not in the least bit funny.

It’s hardly on a par with the Reichstag fire in 1933, which Hitler manipulated for absolute power in Germany, but let’s not forget that Boris Johnson as prime minister attempted illicitly to prorogue parliament to get his way with Brexit in 2019. Like Trump, contempt for democracy and the “great man of history” personality cult tick a couple of boxes for fascism, but it doesn’t make them any less stupid.

Idiotic or truly evil, ultimately the answer may not be to find electoral alternatives, but to measure them against what is transcendent and immutable in human nature. And that brings me back to the first line of this piece.