The zeal of Simon Reeve

Is personal conviction enough to persuade others to change the world?

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

An enthusiastic hiker stands in front of a view down a valley, smiling and holding his backpack straps.

Simon Reeve on his travels.

It wasn’t until I took my seat in Exeter’s Great Hall the other Friday that I noticed the title of the Simon Reeve show I had bought tickets for over a year prior - “To the Ends of the Earth” - and it was to prove apt.

The seemingly ageless TV presenter was his usual effervescent self as he regaled the audience with stories from some of his journeys to the distant place of the world - the Ends of the Earth.

We were taken from the hottest to the coldest places, the wettest to the driest; and alongside humorous and poignant anecdotes, there was also an almost evangelistic zeal in Reeve’s frequent pleas to “green” our money and time.

“Less screen time, more green time!” he revealed is a Reeve family motto.

And if he could give us one piece of advice, he said, it would be to “green” our pension - ensuring that the money invested goes to good causes that reduce our carbon footprint, rather than, say, to tobacco or oil companies.

It may not make us as much money, he said, but it would do more for the environment and reducing our carbon footprints than never getting onto another plane.

Food for thought.

Although, perhaps surprisingly, Reeve is actually somewhat of an advocate for tourism.

For despite the carbon footprint and potential to tarnish some of the best places on Earth, tourism also provides an important source of income and an economic reason to keep beauty spots special, he explained.

We can ask people as nicely as possible not to cut down trees or to look after wildlife, he said, but if they have an economic incentive, it’s likely to prove more persuasive.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from the show was the passion with which Reeve spoke about the climate, “Mother Earth”, “Mother Nature”, “the natural world”, and “the spinning rock on which we live” - all phrases that he used.

At times, his language was almost spiritual.

But perhaps another motivator that could spur us on to action could be the knowledge that each of us have been charged by our Maker - another word employed by Reeve - with the responsibility to care for our world.

He talked about time in the great outdoors as being “good for the soul”. He even shared how on a recent visit to Greenland, it had made him - “as someone who is not religious” - consider whether there really might be a Creator, as it seemed as though the huge pool of ice there had been intentionally left there as a warning to the world not to melt it.

And as I reflected later on all I had seen and heard, I wondered whether, without a religious conviction, we may be lacking a persuasive motivation for people to stop destroying our planet ever further.

Humanists may argue that there's a shared humanity to fight for, but if we are just living for this one life, isn’t the most logical course of action to look out only for one’s own immediate interests?

Might we need another incentive, in the way Reeve explained that money can encourage people to look after their local habitats?

I wondered whether Reeve had known when he chose the title of his show that he was quoting the last words of Jesus, when he said his disciples would be his witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and “to the ends of the Earth”.

In the case of lovers of the planet like Reeve, perhaps their witness to the ends of the earth is the message of just how wonderful our planet is - and this is certainly a very valuable message.

It is to be hoped that the many thousands who will have heard Reeve’s message on this tour and on the screen will do their own bit to make our planet a better place.

I certainly find it a motivating factor.

And in spite of all our faults, Reeve said that the real highlight of all his travels has been the people he has met, and this has also always been my experience.

You can find such love in our species, he said - “the best species that there has ever been on our planet” - and I would agree, even if we reached the same conclusion based on a contrasting set of overriding beliefs.

Article

Creed

18 November 2024

3 min read

John Smyth: how evil masks itself as goodness

Be alert to the cloaked and warped wherever it occurs.

Graham Tomlin

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

William Blake's illustration of Satan, a winged angel, flying over a prone Eve.

Satan Exulting over Eve, William Blake.

Getty Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.

Much has been written over these past days about Justin Welby’s resignation and the turmoil in the Church of England. Attention has focused on who knew what, and who did or didn’t act on their knowledge. Less attention has been focused on the dark heart of this story – John Smyth himself and the way he conducted his sinister campaign of manipulation and harm. A campaign that was – the more I think of it – not just abusive, but demonic.

How could Smyth have got away with it for so long? How could he have persuaded these young men to go along with his sadistic beatings? Why did people try to ignore it, hoping they could keep it quiet?

If there is one note struck in the Bible about evil, it is its deceitfulness. Jesus called the devil ‘the father of lies’ – and lies always present themselves convincingly as the truth. St Paul once wrote of how “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.” The meaning of the name ‘Lucifer’ is literally ‘light bringer’.

This all reflects the ancient tradition taken up by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Satan as a fallen angel – one of the crowd of celestial creatures, usually invisible to humans, who appear at key moments in the Bible, like the visions of Isaiah or the birth of Jesus – one who unlike all the others, resented his subservient role as a messenger of God and set himself up as a rival instead. Yet the point is he still looks like an angel. And so, it seems, did John Smyth, with his fine words, clever sounding theology and earnest prayers.

A few days ago, I listened to an account from one of the survivors of the way John Smyth went about grooming his victims. Smyth presented himself as a father-figure for young boys away from home in boarding school, looking for older parental figures who would help guide them through the confusions and complexities of adolescence. To justify this, he would say that of course God is our Father, as Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer, but God is our Father in heaven, not on earth, and that he, John Smyth, was to act as their earthly father. And, as he claimed, fathers discipline their children, he had the responsibility to discipline them physically for their spiritual benefit, with the horrendous results with which we are all now too painfully aware.

The arrogance of this is breathtaking. For any being – human or celestial - to put themselves in the place of God, to presume to usher God into the distance and to step into his shoes, is an echo of that primal sin of Satan in the garden of Eden, who tells Adam and Eve that they don’t need to listen to God, but instead to him.

When you survey the carnage Smyth’s warped theology and evil practice has wreaked – most tragically to the lives of those he mistreated so deviously, it is hard not to see something more than merely sinful – but something demonic going on. John Smyth chose to obey the dark instincts of his heart, and to take the Faustian pact that grasps power over others at the loss of one’s own soul. He chose to give in to his evil desires entirely, cloaking them in phony but eloquent religious terminology.

Acknowledging the deceitfulness of evil is not to excuse those who tried to cover it up. In fact, recognising this is to hear a call to greater vigilance, in that when faced with something of this order we are not facing something obvious, ordinary, easy to spot. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” says the letter to the Ephesians, “but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” If we in the Church have not taken safeguarding seriously enough, it is because we have not taken the nature of evil seriously enough. Remaining alert for the evil that masks itself as goodness – whether in the church or anywhere else for that matter - is a spiritual and moral skill we need to learn more than ever.