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Belief
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Film & TV
5 min read

When Faithfuls lack faith, there’s a lot more to lose

Having faith is hard. It can be a costly act of courage.
Four game show contestants and a host stand in the garden of stately home.
The Faithful Four.

And so The Traitors comes to a close once again.  

Despite the small matter of it reinforcing my anxieties about our modern predisposition for isolation, I’ve really enjoyed this series. It’s been full of twists, tension, and just the right amount of over-the-top melodrama.  

And in this respect, the series finale did not disappoint. Amidst the backstabbing, and the reveals, and the arguments, however, it got me thinking about the nature of faith.  

Be warned: there are spoilers ahead for the finale of The Traitors

As the finale begins, pseudo-Welshwoman Charlotte (I promise that makes sense in context) is the last Traitor standing. However, she is unmasked as a Traitor by Faithful Frankie, who wins the power to reveal one contestant’s identity and picks the right person through a mildly infuriating fluke.  

Charlotte is banished and the remaining four Faithfuls enter ‘the endgame’. At this point, if all four agree, the game ends and they split the £94,600 jackpot between them. That is, unless a traitor remains in the game. In that case, the traitor takes the lot.   

It was absolutely fascinating and more than a little heartbreaking to watch these four people – all of whom were Faithfuls – work out whether they can trust each other. If all of them agree to end the game, they each walk away with £23,500.  

But they don’t.  

Initially, all four contestants decide to continue. None of them quite trusts the people around them. And so, the hapless Alexander is voted off next. He was too pure for this game anyway; he would have given his share to charity. 

Three remain. All three once again vote to continue. 

One contestant, Jake, says  

“I’m just not confident that I can trust the people around me.”  

And so he, along with the other remaining Faithful Leanne, votes to banish Frankie. The same Frankie who outed Charlotte as a Traitor. The same Frankie who wanted the money so she could surprise her boys back home.  

Two remain. And so the game ends by default.  

But the doubts don’t end. Jake and Leanne are left wondering if they will leave with £47,300 each, or if they’re just about to be screwed over by the other. The viewer gets the impression that, if each could banish the other, they would.  

“Why won’t you look me in the eyes?!” Leanne asks Jake in a panic, now seemingly convinced Jake is a traitor, about to take away all her hard-earned money. About to take away her only chance at IVF, and a baby.  

Both are revealed as Faithfuls and the game ends with joy and tears. Jake gets to renovate his house, Leanne gets to try for a baby. All is well. Except for the 23 other contestants who leave with nothing, dreams in tatters. 

I’m not saying that Jake, Leanne, Frankie, and Alexander are wrong for being suspicious of others. Having faith is hard. It is an act of courage.  

The only way the common good is most fruitfully attained is through the exercising of faith in one another. 

It’s easy not to have faith in very much at the moment. Our politicians are a heady mix of inept and corrupt. Our institutions often appear as little more than opaque, faceless entities hell-bent on self-preservation and self-interest, costs be damned. 

It’s hard to make a compelling case for why you should trust the state. Or the police. Or even the Church. Or any other number of people or institutions. Each is surrounded by a litany of failure and cover up. In such a context, faith seems an act of foolishness. 

And notice, too, that having faith in their fellow Faithfuls would have been a costly decision to make. Leanne and Jake leave The Traitors with £47,300. Had they trusted their fellow Faithfuls, that number would be halved. Still a remarkable amount of money but, when you’re attempting IVF or renovating a house, this can be the difference between getting everything you’ve dreamed of, or not.   

That’s exactly what The Traitors finale brings into such sharp relief. It takes courage to have faith. It is not a cop out. To have faith in those around us is to put our neck on the chopping block and hope no-one swings the axe.  

To have faith is to risk that which is most dear to us in the hope that others might have what matters most to them. It is a deeply vulnerable act of selflessness. It is not meant to be easy. 

And so ultimately, we can forgive the Faithfuls their faithlessness. Would you trust a complete stranger if £47,300 was on the line? When I think of everything that money would mean for my family, I’m not sure I would. 

But the only way the common good is most fruitfully attained is through the exercising of faith in one another. Only through faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity can we reach a truly equitable society where Leanne gets her baby, and Jakes gets his house, and Frankie gets to treat her family, and Alexander gets to donate to charity. (Bless that man, but he is slightly undercutting my point with his selflessness here. How selfish of him.) 

Having faith is not easy, or fun, or comfortable, or without sacrifice. It is an act of love that costs much. An act of love that places us in a relationship with others that is vulnerable to abuse and deceit and harm. And for those who have had their faith repaid with abuse and deceit and harm, the cost of continuing to live in faith can understandably seem too high.  

But maybe, just maybe, there is truth and goodness and beauty to be found in humanity of those around me. Maybe, just maybe, The Traitors warns us of the dangers of allowing our suspicions to trump our faith in each.  

Maybe, just maybe, it invites us to imagine a better alternative.

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Article
Attention
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Digital
Monastic life
5 min read

The Sycamore Gap vandals were chasing the wrong sort of fame

Fifteen minutes of notoriety is nothing - just ask St Cuthbert.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A felled decidious tree lies sprawled on the ground. The freshly sawn stump and roots are in the foreground
The stump of the felled sycamore tree.
Wandering wounder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It was Andy Warhol who is said to have uttered the famous statement: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Never mind the fact that the quotation has been attributed to other people as well, whoever came up with it first can hardly have anticipated how quickly it would come true.  

In our times, social media has democratised information. We all now have our own individual press office, issuing our considered statements to the world in the form of Instagram or Facebook posts, comments on X, reels and the like. Secretly we all hope one of our gems of wisdom, a joke or a video of something weird will go viral - in a positive way - and we will get our 15 minutes of fame.  

I was thinking of all this recently on a walk by Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland in the North-east of England. It so happened that on that very day, the Wall was in the news, as the two men who had cut down the famous tree at Sycamore Gap – the one featured in the Robin Hood film - were convicted of the crime. We looked up at Sycamore Gap, and it was just that - a gap – denuded of its tree, it is now just like any other depression in the escarpment over which Hadrian's Wall runs. Only you couldn't avoid the memory of the distinctive tree silhouetted against the sky which was no longer there, like an awkward smile with a tooth missing. 

The story of Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers is a pretty unsavoury one. Two fairly low life characters without a great deal of purpose seem to have thought of this as a clever stunt which would somehow impress people. The video would go viral, they hoped, and they would be famous - maybe for 15 minutes - basking in the global coverage of their daring action. They seem to have totally miscalculated the affection with which the tree was held and the outrage this stupid act generated. They got their notoriety but not in a good way. Today they wait anxiously to see whether this mindless act of vandalism will lead to a prison sentence. 

It is perhaps another symptom of our culture’s desperate desire for fame. Social media is full of influencers who are famous for not much more than being famous. Similar stunts, one more outrageous than the other are performed daily, recorded on YouTube and put out there to gain attention. We are addicted to fame. 

The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form.

On the same Northumberland trip, not very far away, a very different approach to fame caught my eye. Cuthbert, a seventh century hermit was one of those hardy Christian monks and missionaries who spread the faith in these islands in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. He was known for his piety, astonishing miracles and sympathy with nature. His biographer, the Venerable Bede, tells us he would walk into the cold North Sea, standing up to his neck in water to pray, in order to increase his ability to focus on God, the object of his prayers, not the yearnings of his body. On coming out of the water, sea otters would come and warm his feet, sensing that this man was in tune with the heart of the universe and should be cared for and protected.  

As his fame grew, Cuthbert tried to find more and more ways to run away from it. He was given permission to leave his monastery in Lindisfarne to go out alone to live on the remote Farne islands, far from prying eyes, giving him the freedom to focus on the one object of his desire - to know God through a deep life of prayer and meditation. People would try to come to see him, fellow monks bringing supplies, or pilgrims looking for a word of wisdom from the holy man, yet his focus was ruthless. Eventually, says Bede, “he shut himself away from sight within the hermitage, rarely talking to visitors even from the inside, and then only through the window… in the end he blocked it up and opened it only to give a blessing or for some definite need”. 

The difference between Graham / Carruthers and Cuthbert could hardly be more stark. The hapless pair were desperate for their moment of fame and got it in a particularly nasty form - fame that turns out to be more like shame. Cuthbert fled from fame, longing for the attention not of other people but of his Maker and Redeemer.

Cuthbert’s relentless pursuit of God, and its results in a remarkable life - weird in a different and more nourishing way than the stunts on YouTube - fascinated people. After he died, his bones were transferred to Durham Cathedral where they still lie today. You find the name of St Cuthbert everywhere in the North East – on schools, road signs, coffee shops and fishing boats. It’s a name that will endure after the destroyers of the sycamore tree are long forgotten. We're still talking about Cuthbert 1,400 years later. 

Fame is an elusive and dangerous thing. Tom Holland once called it “a beast that you can't control or be prepared for.” If you chase it, it rarely turns out well. More often than not you get the wrong kind of (unwelcome) fame. The best kind comes when you’re not making fame itself the thing you’re looking for. If you ignore it, and seek something more satisfying, something really worth attention – which for Cuthbert was God, the source of all beauty, truth and goodness - you won’t be worried whether you’re famous or not, because your heart will be full of something much more lasting and worthwhile.

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