The culture of outrage

The British media suggests that Christians are better known for what they are against than what they are for. In an age of supposed religious tolerance, Mark Greene asks, when did we get so angry?

A pope gives a lecture in Europe and nuns are murdered in Ethiopia. A writer publishes a novel and is forced into hiding. A teacher allows her class to name a teddy bear after a popular pupil and a Sudanese crowd call for her death. A Milanese football team wear a strip with a red cross in it at their home ground against a Turkish team and a Turkish lawyer sues them, grieved by the shirt’s similarity to the Templars’ garb and its associations with the Crusades. A company throws a party offering a champagne prize in its raffle and some of the Muslim employees sue them.

With all these people being offended, with all this intensity of response to what for the most part seem rather minor infractions, or no real infraction at all, it is tempting to be outraged oneself. Where is the forbearance in any of this? Where is there any understanding of other peoples’ cultures on the part of those apparently so deeply offended? Where is there any acceptance that others too have an identity, traditions, a God they may love?

Indeed, do not many of us now feel that a policy of appeasement towards minority but vocal, influential, Muslim sensibilities is doomed to failure? On the one hand, we are busy being told that the cross is offensive pretty much wherever it appears. On the other, a section of the Muslim community want to build the biggest mosque in Europe, presumably with a minaret to match and a crescent atop it, right next to the Olympic village. And is anyone allowed to build a church the size of a phonebox in Saudi Arabia? How easy it would be to get into a confrontation about ‘rights’, rather than a conversation about mutual respect, acknowledged difference and community-building.

In this highly combustible atmosphere of intense offence, intimidation and double standards, how are we to live? Skulk away in fear? Get outraged ourselves? Outrage is tempting. After all, feeling offended gets your cause airtime, the deference of politicians and the sympathy of community leaders, so why not get hot under the collar yourself?

On the offensive

The thing about offence is that it is hard to argue with. You can challenge the veracity of an assertion, you can seek to bring reason to bear against a reasoned argument, but if you tell me you feel offended, I can’t argue with that: you are offended. Like a five year old’s tantrum, however unreasonable it may seem, there’s very little reasoning to be done, you’re upset.

And of course, you can offend your own community. Monica Ali, the author of the widely acclaimed and recently filmed Brick Lane, and a woman of mixed Asian and English descent, found herself condemned by the Brick Lane community leaders for giving what they regarded as a distorted view of their community. No matter that it was a novel, no matter that the issues she raises are hardly uncommon, the community leaders were offended and refused the film crew permission to film in the Brick Lane area.

In recent times, as Ali points out, the overall liberal response has been that it’s broadly OK to offend majority groups like white middle-class Edinburghians offended by Trainspotting because they “can look after themselves.” Or Christians, for that matter, who usually restrained in their response to media blasphemy, sent over 50,000 emails to the BBC protesting against the planned airing of Jerry Springer: the Opera, featuring an adult Jesus in nappies. The BBC went ahead. However, it’s not OK to offend minorities. So Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti which included sexual abuse within a gurdwara offended Sikhs and had to be abandoned.
Here’s how Ali went on:

“I can understand this liberal sentiment but it is taking us to a dangerous place, a marketplace of outrage at which more and more buyers and sellers are arriving and shouting their wares and inflating the prices… The essence of this new economy is emotion. If the feelings run (or are seen to run) high and deep enough, a good price will be fetched. If the best we can say is how we feel about something, we turn reason into emotivism, in which the frameworks for moral and political judgements collapse.” She’s surely right.

We must not be intimidated by other people’s passion, or indeed the sometimes all too real threat of violence. We must find a way to overcome fear, avoid emotivism and live not only graciously but prophetically.

Are we scared of Muslims?

As it relates to fear, it needs to be acknowledged that most of the fear relates to Islam. The imprisonment of Mrs Gibbons over Muhammad the teddy, despite her release, only served to reinforce the growing perception of Islam as a repressive, violent faith. Perhaps even more damaging, it made ordinary non-Muslims even more wary of saying anything at all about Islam. And not incidentally, it made many mainstream Muslims wary too, lest a critique of extremism be interpreted as a slur against the faith or a betrayal of community. Fear increasingly stifles comment, debate, and even everyday conversation at school gates and in classrooms and workplaces.
This fear can easily drive a wedge between Muslims and the rest of the community. How do you develop friendships when the conversational field is so full of mines? As Christians, however, we cannot allow fear to create barriers between our Muslim neighbours and ourselves.

Whatever the solutions on the global stage, there is at least one vital way forward in everyday life. We must normalise conversation about Islam, about Muhammad and about the Qur'an. (And indeed about other controversial issues.) And we must do it at school gates and in classrooms and workplaces. It’s time to ask our Muslim neighbours and colleagues and fellow students: “What do you think about Muhammad the teddy?” “What does it feel like for Muslims when such stories fill the media?” It’s time to ask them what they love about their faith. “I am so thankful to Allah, so thankful to him,” a Manchester cabby told me two weeks ago.

It’s also time to share with our Muslim neighbours what we believe: that we are so thankful that Jesus loved us so much that he died on the cross; that we are thankful for his wondrous word and the guiding, strengthening, moment by moment reality of his Spirit; and that we wish that the Sudanese had reacted more swiftly to a (well-intentioned) teacher in the same way Jesus reacted to his mockers and murderers: “Father, forgive her, she didn't know what she was doing.”

Still, in an atmosphere of fear and distrust, we will need more than courage. Courage doesn’t drive out fear, it merely manages it. It is only love, the perfect love of God, that drives out fear (1 John 4:18). We are called to love our neighbours, not because we have special courage but because Christ’s love flows through us.  

To boycott, or not…

The second route is to avoid emotivism ourselves. Recently some Christians called for a boycott of The Golden Compass, accusing the film’s promoters of hoping that   “unsuspecting parents will take their children to see the movie, that they will enjoy the movie, and that the children will want the books for Christmas”. This hardly helps. Why wouldn’t a film’s promoters want people to watch the film and engage in the books? Is it because all these promoters are intent also on promoting atheism? And if they were? Pullman has not been hiding his atheism under a bushel, nor indeed would the vast majority of parents be that concerned if he had been.

Pullman’s books are being read and discussed in classrooms all over Britain and the best thing we can do for our kids is to help them know for a surety in their hearts that Christ is alive, to teach them to discern the difference between Pullman’s god and the God and Father of Jesus Christ, and to equip them to discuss Pullman’s ideas with their friends and schoolteachers. Indeed, the only real beneficiaries of the heat generated by these protests is the box office. There is nothing like controversy to boost cinema attendance. This, of course, isn’t to say that Pullman’s ideas aren’t dangerous but they are much more dangerous to people who don’t have a living faith in Christ, than those who do.

Paul’s response to the idolatry of Athens was not to call for a boycott, or a riot, but to ‘reason’ “in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.” Paul’s strategy was intentional and involved formal debate and informal conversation. We may not all be gifted as formal debaters but informal conversation is not beyond most of us.

Indeed, one of the positive things about Pullman’s approach is that he is completely open about his intent. The pervasive atheism of the vast bulk of contemporary culture is surely much more dangerous, since it simply assumes God doesn’t exist, as opposed to trying to either prove it or dishonour him.

What would Jesus do?

Interestingly, in the New Testament overall, there’s precious little emotivist ‘outrage’, expressed by either Jesus or his disciples. There is robust argument, there are uncompromising accusations – calling the Pharisees white-washed tombs and a brood of vipers – but there’s nothing that smacks of defensiveness or taking offence or emotivist posturing. It’s other people who get offended – the chief priests, the Pharisees, the silversmiths of Ephesus. Nevertheless, among the disciples there is courage, there is the prayerful readiness to confront issues, to enter into debate, and there are calculated actions – Jesus calmly fashioning the whip he uses to clear the money-lenders from the temples’ court of the Gentiles, Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem – and there is much engagement with the sick and the poor.

Furthermore, Jesus’ call is not only to love our neighbours but our enemies – those who try to limit our freedom of expression and worship. To do that,  we must somehow avoid resorting to tactics that undermine the grace and generosity of spirit that is at the heart of the Gospel.

When an Archbishop like John Sentamu cuts up his dog collar on national television, it not only dramatises the problem he has identified – Mugabe’s disdain for his country’s true identity – it maintains awareness for the issue wherever he appears. Like Gandi’s strategic fasts, it powerfully draws attention to the issue without resorting to violence.

Of course, this kind of symbolic public act depends on either being well known or there being a means for bringing the action to public attention, as there now is through public media. But the church is not called to match Richard Branson’s skill in PR for its own sake, rather to be creative in bringing God’s truth and love to people’s attention in a way that somehow ensures that it is only the Gospel that is the cause of the offence, not unnecessary cultural insensitivity. Of course, the Gospel may well cause offence, anger, intense opposition – it has done throughout history. There is no risk-free Gospel communication.

This is all very well on the national stage, and while we may all vote, write letters, sign petitions, phone into radio shows and perhaps even march in solidarity or protest, the question before most us is always: ‘How would God have us behave where we are? How do we show what Jesus is for, not merely what he is against ?’

So let us pray for the love that expels fear, and resists emotivism. Let us work hard to prevent the law infringing Christian freedom of worship and speech, indeed anyone’s freedom of worship and speech. And let us find ways to build the kind of relationships in which Christ’s love for our Muslim and Hindu and Sikh and atheist fellow-citizens can be known.

Tea is a start.

This article was first published in Christianity magazine and is reproduced by kind permission.