In a world where religion is given a bad press, Sarah Johnson provides a practical ‘toolkit’ for parents who want to give their children a happy and healthy childhood where God is honoured. She shows how faith brings perspective to life and provides a sane and viable alternative to atheistic materialistic individualism.
148 pp. Continuum. To purchase this book online, go to www.continuumbooks.com
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
My dear friends, let us love each other, since love is front God and everyone who lives is a child of God and knows God (1). 1 John 4. 7
There are thousands of parents up and down the UK who belong to Christian denominations or have connections with one. Many of these are young, hopeful and thoughtful people, who feel unease at the idea of a purely materialistic world without spirituality, which the secularization of the West entails. Many of these parents are touched by the beauty of the story of Jesus Christ and are prepared to give religion a chance; these are perhaps young parents who feel uncomfortable when they read yet another diatribe against God, yet another attack on Christians who are given little chance to defend themselves.
There are thousands of parents, in short, who would quite like there to be a God of the kind Jesus promised, and would like to tell their children that there is such a God, but do not know where to find the evidence for Him.
These parents probably also are well aware of the saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, and want their children to grow up with a sense of community. But they are also aware that a ‘gated community’ patrolled by security guards is not the same thing as a village. There are thousands of parents who are tentatively wondering if they would fit in at their local church … but are not sure whether they would find anyone there like themselves, are not sure where to start, are not sure if it will be worth it.
For these parents I have put together a toolkit. The toolkit is not the same as an armoury. The tools found inside it are not intended to be used as weapons against your children, but as tools for shaping their lives. They include tools for building opportunities for spiritual growth, for contact with the eternal and for
developing a deeper relationship with God. They include tools for adding strength to the walls of your life. They are to be used to create, shape and construct. Some of them are imaginary tools – they are symbols of parental virtues one or two are perfectly real (such as Wellington boots and an alarm clock).
I want to show in this book how the Christian faith is a support for parents and families and not some kind of antique hindrance. I want to show you different ways in which this faith can help you find a path through the thorny thickets of parenting and family life.
Often, in the course of compiling this book, I have met up with the families that are intensely grateful for the structure they belong to – their religion. This faith, which is routinely mocked by comedians, despised by the media and dismissed as superstition by academics, is, quite simply, their rock. It is their solid ground, their lighthouse, their lodestar. It provides not only comfort but also community and rhythm. It provides an unmoving star to steer by. It provides firm surface from which to launch out and a soft surface on which to land.
When followed humbly and with love, this faith does not smother thought, but encourages it. It does not crush creativity but inspires it. It does not close doors, but opens them. This faith guides the young and the old but as well as offering answers, it fills their heads with interesting questions, and often subverts smug or lazy assumptions. It channels and nurtures the human search for truth beyond the merely seen.
You can dip into the toolkit whenever you have something you want to fix, or else you can open it up and spread its contents out on the ground for major projects. You may not need all the tools at the same time but you will certainly need them all in the long run.
Note
All biblical quotations are from the New Jerusalem Bible, standard edition.
CHAPTER ONE
A ROAD MAP
Imagine no religion. John Lennon
That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. G K. Chesterton
Part of me thinks I’m God Almightly. John Lennon
If something terrible happens to you – something, gut-wrenchingly awful, which leaves your life in tatters – who will comfort you? Who will put their hands on your shoulders and steady their trembling? Who will make sure you have a cup of tea and a place to sit and weep? Who will stick around to see that you get enough rest and food: that you reremember to have a shower and change your clothes? Who will listen to your sorrow?
Will you be comforted by members of your family? If so, you are lucky indeed – but what if the family themselves are the cause of your pain? What if you are one of the many people with no close family ties?
Do you have friends to turn to? If you do, what if they blame you for your disaster? What if your tragedy, whatever it is, casts a shadow over your presence, splits some of them into ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ camps, and makes deserters of the rest?
These sombre questions crop up in all of our minds at one time or other but mostly when we are setting out on some new undertaking. Parenthood is an unknown territory full of hazards. and when setting out on any hazardous journey we are always advised to know who to call in an emergency. Those who fall by the wayside most rapidly are those with no support structure; those who find the road hardest do not have a family, or friends, or a community, or any sense of true belonging on which they call lay claim.
Setting out on a hazardous journey is also made easier with the help of a map. Maps are made by people who have travelled that road before. They have found out where the dangers are and have worked out ways of avoiding them. These people are in the past, a long line of them stretching out behind us for hundreds of years, linked to us by tradition. When we discard tradition we may sometimes be discarding some good advice: when presented with a road map, we are well advised to read it carefully and we generally assume that it has been made by people who’ve checked the route out before us. They may not have got it all down accurately, there may be mistakes on the map, but most of us feel more secure with the map handy than without.
There is a growing tendency to set aside the role which a strong religious faith, and particularly the most common faith of all – Christianity (to which three out of every five adults in the UK claim to adhere(1)) – plays in all aspects of social welfare. Looking at the news coverage of Christianity and the general attitude to it in the broadcast and print media, you would suppose that Christianity, far from being the road map of morality, was such a minority interest as to rate as little more than an offbeat cult.
On the other hand, if I pick up one of the broadsheet daily newspapers I will find a whole section devoted to theatre and performance arts. This section of the newspaper merits its own staff and its own contingent of specialist correspondents. It will include several theatre reviews a week and, in addition, a healthy sprinkling of interviews and features throughout other sections of the paper. It is very entertaining and I love reading about the theatre, even though I only go to see a play perhaps four or five times a year. Even at that low level, I rate as a frequent theatregoer compared with most people: less than a quarter of the country’s adult population (24 per cent) goes to the theatre even as often as once a year (2).
A slightly larger number, more than a quarter (26 per cent) of the country’s adult population, attends a church service at least once a year. More than half of the churchgoers in the country (7.6 million) attend at least once a month and a solid core of 4.9 million people ‘do it’ (as a bumper sticker would say) every week.
The theatregoers’ frequency of ‘doing it’ is spread out in completely the opposite way. The vast majority of them only go to the theatre once a year as a special treat on a birthday or as a traditional trip to the panto at Christmas. A tiny, minuscule proportion go to a theatre as often as once a month, but hardly anyone other than theatre critics goes to the theatre once a week or more. In other words, the bulk of the churchgoers are regulars, while the bulk of the theatregoers are occasional visitors.
As a journallst I can well imagine the stunned and contemptuous reaction I would get if I were to suggest to any news or features editor of an upmarket broadsheet that, since theatregoing is such a minority interest, and organized Christianity evidently so much more popular, why not scrap the theatre reviews altogether and use the space for news and information about what goes on inside the rich and constantly surprising variety of churches? Why not employ a few more columnists and leader writers who believe in God, instead of dozens of metropolitan pundits who feel that part of their job is to attack religion, and Christianity in particular?
Well, if I made such a suggestion, I would barely have time to clear my desk before being ejected, possibly forcibly, from the building. Yet it is hard to fathom why. For one thing, the open hostility to Christianity which I perceive in the ‘quality’ media is clearly not based on the preferences of their target readership, listeners or viewers.
Surveys show that churchgoers tend to be middle class and therefore more likely also to do middle-class things – such as reading broadsheet newspapers and listening to Radio 4. Since they go to church, they presumably believe in God and seek to follow Christ: it is strange, then, that broadsheet editors seek to woo them with headlines such as ‘Enough religion. Stop shoving it down my throat’ (Carol Sarler, The Times, 13 September 2007) or ‘Shout your doubt out loud, my fellow unbelievers’ (Matthew Parris, The Times, 21 April 2007). Interviews with prominent atheist campaigners such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and A. C. Grayling are plentiful, respectful and adoring; interviews with prominent churchmen and churchwomen are few and far between.
The problem is that going to church is an activity associated (in the mind of the average newspaper editor, though without any strong evidence from demographic surveys) with older generations. Wrongly, it may also be associated in this putative editor’s mind with lower-income groups. No newspaper wants to admit to itself, or to its advertisers, that it is read by the old and the poor, even when it is.
Meanwhile, in the world of education and the social services, Christian organizations which were founded to help, for example, the homeless or the addicted are increasingly finding that they cannot receive government or local authority aid, unless they relinquish outward symbols of faith, daily rituals expressing faith; there is sometimes pressure on them to relinquish aims and beliefs which are integral to their faith (3).
And – most noticeably to anyone who takes an interest in discussions about how we raise our children – any mention of faith is avoided wherever the life of the family and parenting is discussed. Christianity, being the most popular faith, is normally referenced as a negative influence, a source of indoctrination or repression rather than of strength.
Human beings need opportunities to gather on a regular basis simply to express their relationship with the unseen. They need a framework for putting into words their feelings about things not normally talked about in the office, the workshop and the supermarket. People need, in short, the language of prayer, the structure of organized religion, a support system manned by personnel whose job gives them experience with human tragedy and crisis. They need a road map for their feelings about what is right and wrong.
If such a framework had not existed at all, it would have been extremely hard, for example, for people who sympathized with the family of Madeleine McCann, the child whose disappearance on a holiday in Portugal in May 2007 became a national cause célèbre, to show their feelings.
Being practising Christians, Madeleine’s family had an automatic support system in place. There was a structure which made rallying round them an obvious and unproblematic thing to do. This structure was the presence of Anglican and Catholic churches in the area.
The believers and the tentative half-believers who took part in the Masses and prayers for Madeleine immediately after the child’s disappearance did not believe their prayers could bring Maddie back from the dead, if indeed she was dead. Perhaps it looked to an outsider as though the worshippers inside the church thought their prayers could miraculously magic Madeleine back into their midst: I venture to suggest to this rather patronizing (though imaginary) outsider that worshippers, on the whole, are not that stupid.
But the worshippers did know, deep down, that their prayers would do something very important. They would help the McCanns and the rest of their family find a way of formulating their grief – an essential first step towards the future they must rebuild: and would help to give strength to those who needed it.
In the eyes of atheists, when the McCann parents attended a church service a few days after the disappearance of their daughter they did so only in a primitive bid to propitiate a cruel and vindictive God, to beg Him for the return of their child.
Once the story became more complex, with charges being brought against the parents themselves, then the strength they had gained from their faith was used against them: ‘There is something odd about the energy of the McCanns. I would be confounded with grief . . ‘ hinted one BBC commentator (4) nastily as the Portuguese police indicated they had evidence against the parents. Even more hostile things began to circulate on the internet. In the eyes of atheists, the couple were, if innocent, flailing about misguidedly, begging an imaginary deity for help that could never come; or, if guilty, they were cynically using faith as a mask for their crime.
‘Imagine no religion’, runs the lyric of one of the world’s most famous pop songs: John Lennon’s Imagine. (The same song also contains the words ‘Imagine no possessions’ – words written, it has been justly pointed out, ‘by a multi-millionaire with one temperature-controlled room in his Manhattan mansion just to store his fur coats’ (5).
But religion is what we do. It is a natural human activity. True enough, it can be used as an excuse for all kinds of unacceptable human activities; but so can science be used to create weapons of mass destruction as well as medicines and mobile phones. For every atrocity in the name of Christianity, there are a thousand acts of goodness which never make the headlines.
Non-religious people often talk of praying, or use the language of invocation (as in saying ‘thank god’) when they are in need or in distress. The language of religion is threaded through our culture and the language of Christianity is threaded through Western culture in particular. We ignore it at our peril: one day we will look round and find that the structure has gone. People can’t pray well in an emergency if they have never had the experience of praying in a non-emergency.
Religion is our way of looking outside ourselves, our way of thinking about the ‘otherness’ of other people as well as the incomprehensible ‘otherness’ of God. It is a way of making us consider ourselves as part of a community, not as selfish, self-centred individuals.
G.K. Chesterton is often ‘quoted’ as saying that when a man ceases to believe in anything, he eventually will believe in anything. The ‘quotation’ is close in meaning to a number of the great English Catholic writer’s bons mots, but it seems that if he did say it, it was not in any of his published works. He did, however, write that once a person began believing in a vague, New Age ‘inner light’ rather than in orthodox religion, then it was only a matter of time before the person began to worship himself – ‘that Jones shall worship Jones’.
If you want to imagine no religion, imagine driving across Birmingham without a road map or road signs. If you do eventually get across Birmingham, it will be only by following what other people are doing, without any evidence that they know where they are going, or that they want to go the same way you do. You will get stuck in traffic jams you could have avoided. And you might end up going round in circles, or get lost altogether.
NOTES
1. Church Going in the UK: survey published by Tearfund, 2007.
2. Office for National Statistics, 2002/3 data.
3. Breakthrough Britain, published 2007 by the Conservative Party’s Social Justice Policy Group, passim.
4. Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4, 9 September 2007.
5. The Not so Fab Four, Robert Elms, BBC Radio, London, 2006.
