The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.

Essay

Belief

Creed

16 September 2024

16 min read

The eclipse of Christianity and what it means

Reversing spiritual climate change.

Rupert Shortt

Rupert Shortt is an author, biographer and journalist.

A star burst of light appears to emanate from the eye of a man's head in silhouette.

Gabriel Barletta on Unsplash

The mainstream Churches are faltering – or even at risk of dying out – in their Western and Middle Eastern heartlands. Surveys confirm that only a minority of people in a country such as Britain now claim Christian allegiance. The pattern is being matched in neighbouring societies.

At the same time many opinion formers preach secularist ideology with a self-confidence shading into dogmatism. Others, unsure of their moorings, feel some residual attachment to spirituality, while being sceptical about the existence of God and other articles of belief.

Yet, the wisdom taught by the church to its followers, and that is available to wider society, remains intellectually robust, as well as inspiring a transformative global presence. In a major and wide-ranging international study – both a report on the unsettling consequences of secularisation and a defence of a creed too often belittled by its opponents – Rupert Shortt outlines Christianity’s fading profile in the present, but also argues compellingly that Europe’s historic faith remains critical to the survival of a humane culture.

Where is the world when it comes to explaining what it believes? ‘Are we secular, Christian or Pagan?’, asked theologian Graham Tomlin, after analysing the Paris Olympics. Is one way of thinking about ourselves about to be eclipsed?

***

The philosopher Charles Taylor has distinguished between three kinds of secularism. One involves a whittling away of the religious presence in public life. The output of a public service broadcaster such as the BBC reflects this tendency. Secularism can also be seen in a decline of personal religious practice, often coextensive with a retreat from community into individualism. This move has deeper historical roots. Compare, for instance, Bach’s pietistic audiences in Leipzig during the second quarter of the eighteenth century with the Viennese concertgoers reacting as individuals to Beethoven’s music several generations later. Taylor’s third form of secularism rests on the decline of Churches and other faith groups as sources of norms governing personal conduct.

That Christians are troubled by all three kinds is obvious enough. They should also assume their share of the blame. The Church has plainly fed disillusionment or scepticism at times. But alternative visions should also face scrutiny.

‘Type one’ secularism amounts to telling people of faith that they are free to believe and practise if they choose, but that their convictions must be entirely transcendent and not at all immanent. In other words, religion is acceptable as an eccentric private hobby because both type one and type two secularism involve seeing communities of spiritual conviction in these patronising terms.

As to the question of how secularism fills the hollowed-out public square: opponents of ‘public’ religion have little follow-up to Taylor’s third category. This means that their stance can appear self-contradictory as well as essentially negative. To say ‘No one must assert that their views are normative’ – is itself to make a normative statement. Matters appear murkier still on closer inspection. While presenting itself as a beneficial negative grand narrative, secular rationalism finds itself in an uneasy and unresolved relationship with postmodernism, exponents of which dangerously and/or tediously assert ‘alternative’ facts (Donald Trump) or ‘my truth’ (the Duchess of Sussex). If even an atheist standard-bearer such as Nietzsche predicted that the death of God would spawn nihilism and totalitarianism, then Western society may be in far greater peril than is generally supposed. Perhaps – as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned – spiritual climate change should be ranked alongside the environmental crisis.

In demanding that marriage be consensual, the medieval Church also created a climate in which audiences would later sympathise with Romeo and Juliet’s urge to wed against their parents’ wishes.

Little wonder, then, that Christianity is regularly endorsed by the uncommitted as well as by believers, owing to the social blessings that accrue from it. I am not here referring only to goods generated by the prison chaplain or the soup-kitchen convenor or any number of other figures motivated by their faith to minister among the outcastoutcasts. There are also big social trends that we can be barely conscious of, if at all.

Two simple examples do duty for a bigger picture.

An important source of our beliefs about individual freedom dating from well before the eighteenth century is the ecclesiastical ban on cousin marriage, which nourished a more trusting world view opposed to clannishness and thus to xenophobia. In demanding that marriage be consensual, the medieval Church also created a climate in which audiences would later sympathise with Romeo and Juliet’s urge to wed against their parents’ wishes.

Or think of Milton. His defence of free speech, and even his anticipation of the principles of the American Declaration of Independence, are all present in Paradise Lost through the model it offers of genuine mutuality and rational conversation, even against the background of hierarchy and patriarchy.

Christianity served as midwife to advances including the scientific revolution, egalitarianism and democracy; theology fleshes out political accounts of the good life. These, too, are themes with many variations. Both on conceptual grounds and for reasons linked to their rootedness in communities at every social level, the Churches are better placed to diagnose deeper causes and richer solutions when deploring evils such as high inequality.

These causes include the decline of working-class men’s wages (the husband-to-wife income ratio correlates strongly with marriage and divorce rates), the bad side of the sexual revolution (married parents are on balance a huge advantage to children and should preferably be the norm), and prohibition (tighter controls on activities including gambling and drug-dealing are usually effective disincentives).

Just as capitalism cannot survive without trust and honesty, so individual freedom cannot last without some internalised moral order.

Christians and people of Christian heritage also have especially strong grounds for resisting free markets red in tooth and claw. It comes as no surprise that movements including Blue Labour and Red Toryism – along with their counterparts in Continental Europe – do not just present morally charged economic visions.

They also draw explicitly on Catholic Social Teaching. Even Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore lamented capitalism’s failings as far back as 2011: ‘A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise. How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan? But when loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption – that is different. And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few.’

Moore’s words are quoted in a very valuable essay by Ed West, a Christian conservative whose importance partly derives from his being justly critical of the Tory party. He grants that individualist conservatism, like capitalism, prizes freedom. Yet it was always dependent on established moral codes, and especially Christianity, to encourage good behaviour by force of example. Just as capitalism cannot survive without trust and honesty, so individual freedom cannot last without some internalised moral order. Modern Toryism’s failure is reflected in the appeal to some of atheistic libertarianism, whose exponents envisage ‘a moral bubble which they expect nothing but self-interest to fill’. West draws a piquant lesson. ‘[I]nstead, as we have seen in recent years, once the Church is undermined, the state soon becomes a Church.’

As he also notes, the state alone cannot reduce inequality in the absence of greater social capital – a commodity discussed at length in Robert D. Putnam’s bestseller Bowling Alone. West concludes that unless we see a growth in social capital, ‘in the levels of community involvement, in social trust, in virtuous, selfless behaviour – in short, in relationships – inequality will continue to remain high. As Britain has become more individual-obsessed, as institutions such as the family, the Church, the nation and, though conservatives are reluctant to include them, trade unions have become weaker, this reduction in social capital has disproportionately harmed the poor.’ The same applies to other Western societies of course.

West doesn’t just flag up the undoubtedly grave social problems caused by mass fatherlessness. He also emphasises the converse: that contemporary economies make it increasingly difficult for the proverbial ‘working man’ to support a family. The period known in France as les trente glorieuses (1945–75) was well known for exponential economic growth. That time has passed. A jettisoning of state socialism in China and India since the 1980s inevitably means that the centre of economic gravity has shifted back towards Asia for the first time in 500 years. This in no way discredits West’s message, however.

A more than simply ‘cultural’ Christian commitment could include the following additional elements. There is never going to be a point at which active church members can stop thinking, praying and acting for justice. A follower of Christ must be abidingly restless at some level. After making himself a thorn in the flesh of the Third Reich, the Protestant giant Karl Barth said that Christians are always going to be unreliable political allies. In other words, they will want to confront the powers that be with awkward questions and should never feel happy about signing up to a complete package. A preacher I once heard put it as follows. ‘At the end of the day, what matters most is that sense that the deepest reality in social life boils down to some fundamental issues. Are we acting as a society, as individuals, out of a love of self that leads to forgetting God, or love of God that leads to forgetting self?’

The Church is therefore not a triumphant illustration of what it looks like when social and cultural challenges are resolved. Rather, he added, it is an illustration of what it’s like when people turn to the big questions we confront again and again in repentance and trust, ‘and try to live out a life in which we’re not constantly at war with one another, individually and collectively, and are looking for what it is that we can recognise as allowing us to flourish side by side under the God whose concerned love is for all of us.’

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Granted the viability of these reflections, it is perhaps less surprising than may at first appear that the Somali-born ex-Muslim and feminist campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali should have announced in late 2023 that she now counted herself a cultural Christian. Made public in an article for the UnHerd website, the move was nevertheless eye-catching given Hirsi Ali’s past status as an ally of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheist campaigners. She posed two questions. ‘What changed?’ and ‘Why do I call myself a Christian now?’ Her answers are worth setting out at some length.

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in ‘the rules-based liberal international order’. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity – from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms – of the market, of conscience and of the press – find their roots in Christianity.

Hirsi Ali had had an epiphany around the centenary of Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’, a lecture later published under that title.

I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of . . . contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of (former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian country. Think about how unique that was nearly a century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country – then or now – and deliver a lecture with the title ‘Why I am not a Muslim’? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable – indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Christianity’s radical reservation about ‘the world’ of ‘principalities and powers’ springs from a sense of chronic brokenness in the human condition.

Many assumed that Hirsi Ali’s move amounted more to an acknowledgement of Christianity’s role in securing social progress than an acceptance of the Nicene Creed – though the situation is evidently dynamic. She also writes of learning about the faith bit by bit as she attends church Sunday by Sunday. In any case, although some more orthodox figures responded a bit sniffily to the article, ‘cultural’ Christianity has a long history. Churchill is well known for describing himself as a flying buttress – namely supporting the structure from outside. His leanings are widely copied.

Since her move towards cultural Christianity, Hirsi Ali has started attending church regularly and was recently baptised.* Like other Christians, then, she may now want to push a bit further. The grounds for doing so are philosophical as well as theological. Philosophical, because conserving the Judeo-Christian cultural inheritance should not be confused with ancestor worship. These traditions can and should be justified as expressions of our truth-tracking pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful. I follow a line extending back to St Augustine and beyond in giving a Christian framing to these Transcendentals. We are naturally not obliged to do so. Latter-day Platonists and perhaps Stoics will share a commitment to allied metaphysical principles. What certainly does remain necessary, however, is a commitment to objective standards of reference, side by side with a universal idiom for articulating them.

And the foundations are theological, because Christianity is not ethics misleadingly encased in archaic myth. It is about faith and hope in a journey from exile through a wilderness to springs of living water. Karl Barth’s political stance sketched above is biblically based. Christianity’s radical reservation about ‘the world’ of ‘principalities and powers’ springs from a sense of chronic brokenness in the human condition, and the corruption of even our noblest ideals. In short, we are marked by original sin, which in turn generates a quest for healing that is re-presented in liturgy. The Sermon of the Mount stands out for me with particular force here. In David Martin’s unpacking of it, Jesus preaches against a horizon of beatitude and promise. The sermon ‘asks how you stand, how you are placed when it comes to receiving, giving and making gestures of reconciliation and inclusion’. Right at the heart of Christian belief stands ‘the blood offering of the Blood Donor, and our loving communion with the Donor.’ Like all pastors worth their salt, Martin brought out the importance of Trinitarian as well as incarnational belief. In holding that the source of all created reality is itself an eternal exchange of mutual self-giving, Christians can infer among much else that differences need not lead to conflict or antagonism but can coexist in harmony and find expression in creativity.

Perhaps the most searching response to Ayaan Hirsi Ali came from Jacob Phillips in The Critic magazine. Aged 25, he converted to Christianity soon after the turn of the millennium while working in the City of London. His office ethos amounted to ‘rough-edged Thatcherism’ – the aim was to make as much money as possible in the shortest possible time. Phillips’s colleagues read Zoo and Nuts (then very popular but now defunct lads’ mags), while ‘popular culture had begun slipping into a level of pornification impossible to imagine just a few years previously’. Employees would disappear into toilet cubicles to snort drugs on Friday afternoons.

Leaving the office to attend Mass during the lunch hour – as Phillips did regularly after his reception as a Catholic – thus felt counter-cultural. ‘Mammon lay slain’ at the church door. ‘In the first few minutes kneeling in the pews, there’d be a radical decentring of all the values the world held dear. I’d return to work feeling reorientated by the uncontrollable centre of human life – the miracle of being restored to our origin out of nothing, after accepting the dereliction and dismay of the world.’

Christian radicalism continues to exert a strong pull on Phillips.

‘I read “when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or St Theresa of Lisieux saying, “I desire only to suffer and be forgotten.” As my colleagues raged through the City’s bars on Friday nights, I would pray a line from Psalm 88: “You have taken away my friends, and made me hateful in their sight.”’

He quit his job a year later to study for a degree in theology.

The move felt more subversive then than it might do in the 2020s. Churchgoers themselves – not just practitioners of civic religion, but also some members of an older liberal generation probably too accommodating of secular fashions – can be among those most surprised to discover the continuing potency of gospel teaching. Like Martin, Phillips sees that the civilisational benefits of Christianity are only by-products (albeit important ones) of faith itself.

Faith is . . . uncontrollable, and it is just as active in despair and dereliction as in the moments of great historical achievement. If your Christianity promises to improve life in a worldly sense, it probably isn’t that Christian.

The apostles didn’t lay down their nets to become fishers of self-fulfilment. The mystics didn’t emaciate themselves through fasting to defend our freedom of speech. The martyrs didn’t die for the good educational outcomes of stable families. At the centre of anything purporting to be Christian must always be the . . . disruptive reality of lives being lived, and societies being led, in ways which are not of our choosing.

These thoughts can be put in a nutshell, as well as endlessly elaborated. The brief version should include an avowal that our lives have a telos or goal. Christianity’s eclipse matters because the Church is the sturdiest vessel for the preservation of values without which civilisation will perish. And because Christian teaching goes further in maintaining that our human search for love and joy is at one with the order and purpose of the world as God’s creation.

Janet Soskice, one of my wisest teachers and a thinker to rank alongside Taylor, sums these thoughts up memorably with the simple comment that Dante was right. ‘In the end,’ she adds, ‘it is love which moves the Sun and the other stars, and which draws us on in our social and moral lives. We just need to be able to see it.’