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https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/the-death-of-the-english-parish-and-the-politics-that-killed-it

It’s something of a privilege to write at the hinge of the year. But a challenge too. What a year to look back on; like no other for most of us.  Since this is New Year, we want to look forward as well as back. Looking forward after the after the surprises and crushing turmoil of 2020 is tricky too. It’s not enough to just hope things get better. 2020 has shown us some important insights into our society.

Shakespeare in King Lear gruesomely warns against thinking you have hit the bottom and the only way is up. “And worse I may be yet: the worst is not so long as we can say  ‘This is the worst.’”.

But there is no point if catastrophising. The media is too easily given to thoughtlessly apocalyptic at the best of times and it’s not good for our mental health. Forecasting what might come has always been a tricky trade.

One way of trying to make things better is the New Year’s resolution. But I’m no fan of them.. They seem to me to the shortest way manageable to self-disgust and the late January blues. If human nature could be improved by simply trying harder, we would have cracked the how to be happy thing a long time ago.

What can we learn from the last 12 months of turmoil, illness, rage and confusion?

I don’t think the fact that we have suffered from the release of a new worldwide virus tells us much. We were warned that it was about time for a global pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918, and here it is. But our responses to it might  be illuminating.

As it happens,  I came down with it about 48 hours ago, and am trying to type through a fearsome headache, an annoying cough, and sharply painful limbs. One things that cheers me is are the stats published today that of the 45,466 people who died with Covid only 1,911 have died who had no pre-existing condition. In which case I’m hoping to live through to 2021 if nothing else changes.

But the response to Covid has raise some issues for us. If it’s true, as it is claimed that the average age of those who have died from Coronavirus is 81.5 and the average age of death excluding the virus is older, 82.4, it’s hard to understand the level of hysteria. One reason for it is that having lost faith in life after death, our secular rationalistic culture doesn’t handle death very well. Preparing for our deaths, making sense of them, is made very much more difficult without a world view that puts our lives in a broader context  which includes life after death.   

Beyond the alarm that being reminded of our deaths causes, other fractures are exposed.

Society is somehow split down the middle, with each side getting increasingly angrier over a range of different issues.

Perhaps Brexit should have warned us with its 52/48 divide. There are a number of ways to describe the opposing values, but ‘independence v safety’ might cover it. The Brexiteers wanted independence and were prepared to pay for it, and the Remainers wanted safety and stability and were prepared to forego autonomy to preserve it.

Something similar seems to be happening with the Covidvirus. Those who favour lock-down and masks want safety first, at almost any price, and are terrified by the illness. Those who protest against the state placing them under house arrest against their will want to be able to assess the risks for themselves and live accordingly. Safety v independence again.

What has struck me greatly is the way in which there has been such a contest over the facts and the science. The media (by and large) have been uniformly presenting a slant of the science and a version of the facts that have been intended to strike terror into the hearts of its audience. They have moved from sources of information to projects of propaganda. While at the same time the social media outlets have censored voices that present a different view of the science.

Of course, it wasn’t really science we were arguing about. Modelling what might happen is closer to magic than science.

I don’t see any harm in having two sides, two points of view (strung out across a spectrum) for people to choose between. What seems deeply dangerous is that most of the public and social media are controlled by statist/safety factions.

In 2021, I hope the hard working virologists will continue their astonishing work on finding an effective vaccine for the virus. But even more important, will be the need to find a way of vaccinating our culture against being content with cancelling people and silencing opposition voices.

I don’t think I can do anything to  shore up the world-wide economic system against the damage done to it by international lockdowns; and I can’t do anything about the virus itself  except not frighten people, by continuing to keep my distance and mask my face.

But all of us can do something to fight for freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom to offend, freedom of conscience, freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. Bring on 2021 and with it a determination to fight for our freedoms.

Once in a blue moon, one of ‘those’ books falls into your lap. Living as I do partly in Normandy, and with an eye to the times we live in, I have started to read more about the SOE and the French resistance.

Not that the danger to our freedom comes from the Right any more. It comes from the Left (leaving aside whether or not Hitler’s National Socialism was or wasn’t socialism).

I came across a book called Gardens of Stone, ghost written exquisitely by/for Stephen Grady.

Stephen was a 15-year-old boy when France was invaded in 1939. His mum was French and his dad was English. His dad had been a Tommy in the First World War and settled to raise a family working as a gardener for the War Graves Commission, tending the graves of his erstwhile comrades.

The book is about how Stephen gets drawn into resisting the brutal fascism of the Germans in northern France. It’s written with captivating subtlety and frightening insight into the period. Time and time again through its pages the question is raised, why did so few people actually resist?

I find myself asking the same question today. Not that we are fighting the last war; we are fighting a very different enemy that is slowly strangling our freedom of speech. It’s hard to give a name to this enemy. We know them more by what they do than what they are called. 

This elusive enemy gets people thrown out of their jobs, and out of the public square, for the flimsiest of reasons that defy all common sense and most peoples’ values.

A few examples from the last month or so: Steve Thompson, a BBC radio reporter was sacked for describing a fracas on the football field as a ‘handbag fight’. The whole of my life, rugby players flailing arms and fists off the ball have been described that way. I don’t really care about the phrase. It’s not important. But sacking someone for using it? That’s terrifying.

Greg Clarke, the chairman of the FA was giving evidence to a select committee of Parliament and was explaining how totally opposed to racism and sexism he was. But he was a year behind the times. He talked about the injustices perpetrated on coloured footballers. And in an instant, he was gone. Lost his job. He got the word inversion wrong. Values right, words wrong. What an idiot. This year the phrase is ‘footballers OF colour”.  

Until very recently we have asked our actors to act parts that represented people different from their own characters. That’s what acting is. Not today. Seyi Omooba got a role in a show called ‘The Colour Purple”. She was cast to play a lesbian and was delighted to. But she had put on Facebook at some time that as a practising Christian she didn’t believe “homosexuality was right”. So she was cancelled. Respected theatre critics like Lloyd Evans came to her aid saying we had never up to this point expected an actor to agree with the ethical views or the feelings of a character in a play. Good luck with casting Othello on that basis.

So who and what is the enemy? Too easy and too useless to say “PC gone mad.” 

It’s a complex combination of a risk averse culture, terrified of physical,  psychological or emotional danger. It’s people willing to give up their individuality and ask the state to keep them collectively ‘safe’. If the price is not being free to think or act, and to always keep silence in the face of what other people tell you can be said or thought, they are willing to pay it and enforce it on everyone else.

Is this terror of risk and valorising of safety an unintended consequence or a spin-off of feminism? Mums prioritise care and protection; Dads enable risk and danger. Has our society become so feminised that we have outlawed any risk or danger? 

If we lost all balance between the masculine and feminine values that might be so. How could we test that? A posh public school might suggest the answer.

At Eton, an English teacher Will Knowland put a video together called the ‘Patriarch Paradox’. It was designed to teach older boys how to handle difficult opinions they might not like It’s about masculinity. 

The Headmaster got one complaint from a colleague and immediately banned it from being shown to the boys. Knowland accepted that reluctantly and instead put it on his private YouTube channel with a disclaimer saying it did not represent either Eton’s views or even his own. The Head summarily sacked him for gross misconduct.

If you want to see it (it’s rather skilfully done), check out ‘Knowland Knows’ on YouTube, and then ask yourself the question why a vivid and factually correct presentation of masculinity should cause a clever competent good teacher to be sacked and cancelled?

Over 1,000 of the boys have signed a petition demanding his reinstatement.  They ask “How can the school reasonably expect teachers to engage in the promotion of free thought inside and outside of the schoolroom when the consequence of overstepping some poorly-defined line of acceptability is to lose their livelihood and home? Is this not an abuse of power?”

Is this another Steven Grady scenario, with resistance being lead by teenagers once the adults have bottled it? 

We have several problems or questions at least which we need to solve to defend both our democracy and our freedom of speech. What is this abuse of power which brutally and permanently cancels football commentators, broadcasters, actors, teachers, journalists, academics politicians? The list goes on and on. 

What is this enemy? Why are so few willing to resist? Douglas Murray thinks we are suffering from a mass psychosis, which is why he called his book the Madness of Crowds. Have we gone mad or bad? Who dares to resist?

The treatment of churches during the Covid 19 scare has ranged from the unreasonable and illogical to the illegal. 

For the unreasonable and illogical we might turn to Mike Keirle, the Dean of Jersey who has a voice in the States legislature. This is one of those important moments when you need a Christian in a parliament. He asked the obvious and unanswerable question as to why the Jersey government was relaxed with 80 people in a restaurant but banned anything over 20 in a Church? A minister has generously agreed to meet him and ‘discuss it’.

For the illegal we might visit Milton Keynes where God has to be satisfied with being restricted to electronic worship, on line.

Some people may only know it as a rather bland London overspill with more than its fair share of roundabouts.

Not anymore.  The Chief Superintendent Robert France, Gold Commander for Thames Valley Police has had to apologisehaving discovered his officers found the law complex and didn’t know it. His police force  burst into a Church which was in the middle of an online broadcast they disrupted and finally closed down, ignoring the Government rules and legislation.

He explained how difficult it was for the police. 

“It appears… that there has been a misunderstanding by our officers of the legislation in place.” 

Any fair-minded person could see the difficulties the police were placed in, and perhaps the most generous among you may want to feel sympathy for them in this confusing time. 

As the Gold Commander went on to explain, policing churches “is an ever-changing and complex area of enforcement.”

The rather difficult implication is that when the law gets this complex, maybe it is too much to expect the Police to know what the law is.

Luckily, there are some well informed and publicly spirited members of the community who are ready to help them. As it happened, Mr Mateola, pastor of the Kingdom Faith Ministries Church, although busy as a pastor and family man, unlike the police who burst into his church and threatened him with prosecution, had read the law. He offered to help the police officers with it. In case their busy professional lives had got in the way of actually knowing what they were and weren’t permitted to do.

They might have thanked him for the courteous clarity that he brought to the situation, this being an “ever-changing and complex area” they didn’t. Instead they radioed for back up. 

This was a tough gig after all. Here was an unusually challenging situation of a member of the public who had read what the law required, threatening to explain it to them. Sevenmore police burst into the church to contain the situation.

It turned out that along with not knowing what the law said,the police could not count. They were outraged that there were 30 people in the building. 

“Not so ” said Pastor Mateola, ever helpful and unlike them, also numerate, there were 15.

He counted them out for the officers, and explained that each one of them had a job to do in the business of putting this service on line, and that they were observing social distancing and all in sperate rooms.

He pointed out that the law said “Attending a place of worship for broadcasting or filming an act of worship is permitted but should only involve those people working or volunteering who are essential for the content of the service, and for technical support to enable people to watch and worship online or via a television or radio.” He explained what each one was doing.

Luckily, although the police didn’t know the law, and couldn’t count, they did bring a certain technical expertise to the broadcasting enterprise. They told Mr Mateola that only two people were allowed in the church. “One to speak and the other to hold the microphone and press the record button.” 

After an hour of failing to persuade the police that the arrangements were a little more demanding than that, Pastor Mateola was forced to give up, cancel the broadcast and leave the Church.

Four days later, under cover of dark, the police knocked on his door at home. His home security camera recorded the conversation. 

The woman PC read him his rights as he opened the door and told him he was going to be prosecuted for breaking Covid 19 regulations.

“I am here to tell you that you are going to be formerly reported to court for what happened…you do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention now something you later rely on in court…you will receive something in the post to tell you what happens next.”

Pastor Mateola responded saying: “You have totally disregarded government guidelines, I kept showing them to you… but you said it didn’t matter and you were going to go ahead whatever the sergeant said…I complied with you, you totally destroyed everything we were trying to do with the broadcast…you didn’t even know the guidelines and we have ended up being harassed for no reason.”

You may wonder why I’m going to so much trouble to share Daniel Mateola’s experiences with you. He and I are part of a group of “122 Church leaders” who with the Christian Legal Centre are challenging the Government’s right to close churches that observe all the medical, hygenic and scientific guidance for social distancing. 

We may all have different opinions about the medical, legal and political issues as stake here. But is beyond a doubt is that we ought to be able to expect the police to know the law and apply the law even-handedly. I would like to ask the Gold Commander of Thames Valley police why they didn’t feel the need to apply the Law to BLM protesters wilfully ignoring all guidelines in public, but persecute and harass Christians in their churches who were observing the law.

As Mr France, the Gold Commander finally was finally forced to admit: ‘There has been a mistake in the issuing of this ticket and I would like to apologise for the distress I know this is likely to have caused.’