Article

Comment

Morality

Politics

11 March 2024

6 min read

The moral sugar high of the protest vote

We shouldn’t give politicians bloody noses over insurmountable single issues.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A winning candidate at an election address the audience from a lectern while the loosing candidates look on

The victorious candidate at the Rochdale by-election.

A cat was elected as a Member of Parliament. A cat. George Galloway - former Labour party MP and Rula Lenska’s former cat - has been elected as Member of Parliament for Rochdale. The unique circumstances of the by-election make this a less surprising result than one might think. The Labour Party disowned their candidate, the Tory Party hardly contested the seat, and the sheer number of inappropriate independents meant that a split-vote victory for Galloway was entirely foreseeable. One must also note Galloway’s many skills: as a campaigner, an orator, and a dirty-tactic by-election gadfly.

So…Rula Lenska’s cat did the unimaginable and won a seat in Parliament. How did the cat do this? He convinced people that they could vote for him to protest the current Parliamentary position on the Israel-Gaza War. In his victory speech, Galloway gave an ominous warning: “Keir Starmer…this is for Gaza.” He went on to intimate that his victory was due to the high proportion of Muslim voters in Rochdale; their disgust at the Labour Party’s response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza morphing into a wish to give Keir Starmer (‘one cheek of the same backside’ - Rishi Sunak being the other cheek) a bloody-nose. He warned that Starmer “…will pay a high price for…enabling, encouraging, and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza strip.”

My fellow voters are intelligent enough to recognise that the single addition of George Galloway to the green benches will do almost nothing to affect change. They have voted so, the general consensus goes, simply to register their fury at the plight of ‘fellow Muslims’. I simply want to respond with a question. Is this moral?

People vote for all sorts of reasons. If we believe political scientists and pollsters, voters might care about many things, but will end up voting on the basis of one thing. Normally the economy. One’s own economic interest is a perfectly rational reason to vote for one party’s promises than another. There is a potential immediate impact on our lives and those of our family and friends. But Gaza?

Sociologists have spilt a tremendous amount of ink describing how human communities tend towards ‘tribal’ affection. We tend to feel more connected to those who are like us - in terms of geographic location, in terms of obvious racial characteristics, in terms of language and culture, of course religion. The notion that the Gazan War is a war on Muslims would be a natural driver for the Muslim community of Rochdale to vote ‘for’ their fellow Muslims.

On the other hand, in the world of modern ethics there has been a move to recognise that such tribal allegiance is ultimately meaningless - a call to see all human beings as equally worthy of our care and attention, especially irrespective of geography. Peter Singer famously presented the thought experiment of a drowning child - if we are willing to get our shoes wet and muddy to save a drowning child we walk by a shallow pond, why aren’t we willing to give up some of our wealth to alleviate the war-stricken poverty of a Gazan child many miles away?

The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain.

The words of Jesus seem to support such an ethic, which is always global in its vision. We are not only to love our neighbour as ourselves, we are to go out into all the world, evangelising the nations. From its beginning the Christian faith has preached that loving our neighbour means loving everyone. Everyone is a beloved child of God. Everyone is our neighbour. Surely a vote for Galloway, a vote of rage against the occupation of Gaza, is fundamentally moral - either on grounds of tribe, or rejection of tribe. Surely its Christian!

I’m not so sure.

I’m not so sure we fallen humans actually have the capacity to ‘care’ about the horrors that go on many, many miles away. Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves, but we barely have the emotional energy to love ourselves. We live in a society of such activity and distraction - with a seemingly concomitant rise in the incidence of hopelessness and depression - that I don’t think we can really give our moral and emotional energy to an event as distant and overwhelming as the plight of Gazan civilians. We can barely give it to our families. We can barely give it to ourselves. C S Lewis once wrote that the best way of eradicating suffering was people working away quietly at limited objectives: “I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

Jesus was the ultimate localist - God became incarnate as a unique individual, of a particular tribe, of a particular nation, in a particular time and place. Jesus taught an ethic of universal love and dignity and respect, but lived out in specific acts of service. He didn’t wash the feet of all Jerusalem - just his disciples. He didn’t heal all disease everywhere and forever - but he did restore sight to the few blind people he met. St Paul wrote individual letters to individual communities. Yes, he asked them to pray for him and each other, but otherwise told them to focus on their immediate needs and charity and holiness. The popularity of Jordan Peterson is largely based on the achievability of his slightly nebulous self-help worldview: make YOUR bed, keep YOUR back straight, look after YOUR family. Improve yourself first if you want to even begin improving the world. You’ll probably never manage to improve more than your village…maybe only your own household. That might be enough.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. A new campaign, ‘The Muslim Vote’, has emerged to persuade Muslim voters to lend their support to candidates who commit to ‘Peace in Palestine’ – ceasefire, sanction Israel, and a state for the Palestinians. It is becoming clear that what appears to have happened in Rochdale may well happen in constituencies up and down the country. The idea of the ‘Muslim vote’, which Galloway was able to turn into electoral victory, is being given form and force. It is emotive and persuasive, and may well convince people who have no link to Gaza other than their Muslim faith. It is entirely possible that some of the voters have family and friends trapped in the siege. I empathise with their vote and weep for their sorrow.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. I do, however, worry that many have taken upon themselves a fundamentally unwieldy ethic. Galloway is not a one-man parliamentary wrecking ball - whatever he says. The position of the Government will not be changed by his election. The resolve of the Israeli military is unlikely to be dinted by the UK Government, no matter what resolutions the House of Commons passes. The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain. Perhaps they would be more fulfilled and more effective if they cast their vote on the basis of what could be achieved for them in their community, in the immediate future.

We must pray for the people of Gaza, and we must not cease praying; but I would suggest that we must vote in the interests of the people of our own place, our own constituency. Giving the Labour Party a bloody nose over Gaza might be an immediate moral-sugar-high. Electing an MP who will actually work for the needs of the community in their particularity will certainly be less instantaneously thrilling - but maybe it is more moral.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

War & peace

18 December 2024

6 min read

Watching Bonhoeffer from below

Does a new biopic capture a compelling and complex character?

David Emerton

David Emerton is Director of St Mellitus College, East Midlands.

Two men, dressed in the style of the 1940s look around shocked.

Jonas Dassler as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Angel Studios.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not live to see his 40th birthday.

Sentenced to death in a sham trial at Flossenbürg concentration camp, he was stripped naked, led to the gallows, and executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler in April 1945, essentially for treason. Ever since, Bonhoeffer’s life and thought has been subject to projects in wish fulfilment. Bonhoeffer has been secularised, liberalised, radicalised, and popularised by people across the religious and political spectrum, and in ways that evidence only casual concern for historical fact and little (or no) comprehension of his literary estate. Most recently and remarkably—in fact, repulsively—Bonhoeffer’s name has even been used by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to denounce the so-called “open-borders activism” and “environmental extremism” of the American Left in its Project 2025 wish list for the presidency of President-elect Donald Trump.

It was with mixed feelings, therefore, that I sat down in a movie theatre in downtown San Diego a few weeks ago to watch the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. Released by the Christian production company, Angel Studios, and written and directed by Todd Komarnicki (producer of Elf and writer of Sully), the film (coming to UK cinemas in early 2025) is trailered thus:

“As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is swept into the epicenter of a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler. With his faith and fate at stake, Bonhoeffer must choose between upholding his moral convictions or risking it all to save millions of Jews from genocide. Will his shift from preaching peace to plotting murder alter the course of history or cost him everything?”

The accompanying image has the pacifist-preaching Bonhoeffer holding a gun.

Like any big-screen biopic, Bonhoeffer mixes fact and fiction with a healthy dollop of artistic and cinematic license. This license is of course necessary for the screenwriting art: time needs compressing; biography needs enlivening; peoples’ character needs demonstrating; ultimately, the film needs watching.

There is no doubt that Bonhoeffer spent time at Union Theological Seminary in New York and that whilst there he bemoaned the state of American theology, actively participated in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and became close friends with an African-American student, Frank Fisher.

But learning to play jazz piano at a Harlem nightclub? Being beaten by a racist hotel owner with the butt of a rifle? And becoming an ardent advocate for African-American civil rights?

There is no doubt, too, that, as Hitler rose to power, Bonhoeffer spoke out against the dangers inherent in the Führer concept and that throughout the 1930s he steadfastly critiqued Nazism and national socialist ideology.

But were his words ever these?

“I can’t keep on pretending that praying and teaching is enough.” “Dirty hands ... It’s all that I have to offer.” Or, in response to being asked by his friend and student, Eberhard Bethge, if Hitler is the first evil leader since Scripture was written: “No. But he’s the first one I can stop.”

No one is going to dispute, either, that Bonhoeffer led an underground seminary at Finkenwalde to train future pastors of the Confessing Church in Germany; or that he said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” (Even if, in German, he more literally said, “Every call of Christ leads into death”).

But what is disputable is that (as the film suggests) Finkenwalde was a safe haven from which a plot to assassinate Hitler was launched, and that Bonhoeffer’s most memorable aphorism of Christian discipleship was intended to be spliced (as it is in the film) into footage of a conspirator preparing a suicide bomb.

And Bonhoeffer certainly did join the German Military Intelligence and act as something akin to a double-double-agent. He certainly did pass information about the conspiracy to international church leaders on his travels outside of Germany. He certainly did know about both “Operation Seven” (a plan to smuggle a small group of Jews and Jewish Christians out of Germany to safety in Switzerland), and the planned plot to assassinate Hitler.

But to suggest (as the film does) that Bonhoeffer was central to these plans and personally involved in them, or that he asked Bishop George Bell to lobby Winston Churchill to supply a bomb that the conspirators could use to kill Hitler, is nothing more than highly contentious, even conspiratorial, conjecture.

In a panoply of embellished facts, the film’s final scenes are in equal measure harrowing, arresting, and deeply moving.

Bonhoeffer’s life and thought is obviously compelling.

It is also complex.

Bonhoeffer left behind an array of books, essays, sermons, unfinished manuscripts, working notes, and letters, all of which are notoriously difficult to interpret, especially in the round. Bonhoeffer rides roughshod over this difficulty and complexity, and thereby trivialises the legacy of a modern-day, martyred Christian saint. It also tells in part an untrue story—the story of a man destined, indeed determined, to disavow a life of prayer, teaching, and diplomacy to become a would-be assassin and engage in violent political espionage and activism at any cost.

This is a (very) far cry from the man who, in 1930, urges American Christians to remember that they have brothers and sisters “in every people,” not just in their own, and that if the people of God were united then “no nationalism, no hate of races or classes can execute its designs and ... the world will have its peace.”

It’s a far cry from the man who, in November 1940, writes that “radicalism,” and “Christian radicalism” in particular, “arises from a conscious or unconscious hatred ... toward the world, whether it is the hate of the godless or of the pious.”

And it’s a far cry from the man who, at Christmas 1942, reflects on the “incomparable value” of having learned “to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”

Bonhoeffer therefore risks exposing Bonhoeffer’s legacy, as a theologian, pastor, and man of resistance, to yet further abuse. At a time when political and religious discourse is increasingly laced with xenophobic, authoritarian, and nationalistic rhetoric, and at worst Christian nationalistic rhetoric, this is not what is needed. It is not surprising that Bonhoeffer scholars across the world and Bonhoeffer’s own descendants have registered concern.

But is Bonhoeffer nevertheless worth the price of a ticket?

Perhaps surprisingly, I think that it is: if only for its denouement.

In a panoply of embellished facts, the film’s final scenes are in equal measure harrowing, arresting, and deeply moving. Shortly before his execution, Bonhoeffer leads his fellow prisoners in morning prayer, breaking bread and drinking wine with them in commemoration of the death of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer then walks to the gallows in peace, knowing that for him, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, his death is but the beginning of life.

It is such steadfast hope, in the face of all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions (to borrow some words from Fyodor Dostoevsky), that the church and our world today is perhaps most desperately in need of.

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