The problem with history on TV was exemplified by the programme I saw last night (on UK History channel) about ‘The Secret Files of the Inquisition’. Of its kind, it wasn’t too bad and in particular, they made some attempt to discuss the evidence, what it covered and what it didn’t. (Though given they made a big deal about the Vatican archives only being opened in 1988, it was odd that they started with material that had been available for considerably longer. Le Roi Ladurie’s famous study of Montaillou, based on the same records, was translated into English in 1978; I’m not sure how much earlier it was done in French). The reconstructions were, as always, slightly ludicrous, but there was at least enough material to give them some specific detail. The problem was the pace. It wasn’t helped by having a lot of advertising breaks, but why do history programmes feel the need to make it all so slow?! You have a shot to show that Montaillou’s a rural area and the visual wallpaper just goes on and on without a commentary, adding nothing. Given all our supposed new TV literacy, the rapid-fire dialogue and scene cuts that are common in other genres, why do history programmes still tend to treat their audiences as if they’re primary school children, who can’t have more than one solid fact every couple of minutes? Almost all the history programmes I see have this same tendency to tedium. Having heard David Starkey lecture, he’s about twice the pace that he is on TV. Maybe you can’t get up to lecturing speed (which is hard to follow for the inexperienced) in a show intended for a general audience, but you could easily have a bit more punch. A reasonable pace is possible: the current Peter Ackroyd series on the Romantics (highly recommended) shows that (Details at http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/). (There is, however, a reason for this unusual quality: it’s a co-production with the Open University and so specifically aimed at the better educated). With last night’s programme, a moderately interesting 50 minutes could have been a much more better programme, if they’d just been prepared to be a bit bolder about the speed. It would have been good to be given more of a flavour of how the interrogation techniques worked, for example. I find the subject interesting, but I’m not sure whether I’ll bother to watch next week, if it’s going to be so tedious a style.

There seems to be a surge in the UK at the moment of the American idea of the existence of the underclass, not only in the usual right-wing circles (see e.g. 'Glasgow: the new Gaza' in the Business newspaper, but also among such people as the maverick Labour MP Frank Field (http://society.guardian.co.uk/futureforpublicservices/story/0,,1683204,00.html). It also seems to be lurking in some of the Government’s pronouncements on Something for Something and threats to cut benefits. The underclass tends to be defined ostensibly as some feral sub-section of the poor, who have rejected the positive values of society and any sense of responsibility. (It’s noticeable, however, that discussions soon slide into criteria of being on Invalidity Benefit long term, drug statistics and the like, which have no necessary connection with a person’s lack of moral framework, but are easier to measure).

The first historical analogy which came into my mind was the Victorian distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. I know about this mainly from George Bernard Shaw and Pygmalion. Alfred Doolittle in this is the proud representative of the undeserving poor. (This also shows how the concept mutates over time: Doolittle drinks too much, has fathered Eliza out of wedlock and is vaguely criminal, but he is employed). But I wasn’t sure if the Victorians had invented the concept. Then I came across a chapter in Christopher Hill’s Puritanism and Revolution on ‘William Perkins and the Poor’. (It was also in Past and Present (1952), issue 2 ).

Perkins ‘was the first systematic Calvinist theologian in England who also had a clearly defined attitude towards social problems.’ He was influential in the reign of Elizabeth I both as a writer of treatises and even more as a teacher. Hill places him squarely in the middle of a change of ethics between a ‘traditional mediaeval catholic economic morality on the defensive’ and ‘a Protestant and capitalist ethic on the offensive.’ The Puritan response to increased vagabondage in sixteenth century England is interesting. People were increasingly driven below the poverty-line by a combination of reduction of feudal households and those driven off the land by rising rents or simply evicted. The growth of capitalism broke personal bonds between lords and tenants to replace it with an impersonal labour market. There was no gain from charity for the new small businessmen and the concern shifted to poor relief, provided that it didn’t interfere with productive forces.

The belief was that in the long-term these productive forces would solve the problems of poverty. Hill comments:

In the meantime the poor must be prevented by coercive measures from revolting, and, by relief, from reaching a stage of destitution that would make them socially menacing. But the main problem was to transform the mental outlook of the lower orders so that they no longer waited at the rich man’s gate for charity, but went out to offer their services on the labour market. Hence the sharp distinction drawn by the poor laws between the impotent but deserving poor and the ‘sturdy rogues’. ...indiscriminate charity, from the point of view of Puritans and employers alike, was a social menace. It prevented the poor from realizing their responsibilities and seriously looking for employment.

The result was a national programme of compulsion and discipline: houses of correction, family means tests, forcible apprenticing of pauper children to a trade. This attitude of mind and this programme survived until the early twentieth century in the Poor Law (and the workhouse). What Perkins and his like provided was a theological backing to the capitalist economic demand for the creation of the wage system. As Hill puts it: ‘it is very much nicer for a business man, finding himself under strong economic pressure to indulge in actions traditionally held to be sinful, to be told that those actions are in fact in accordance with the will of God.’

Perkins starts from the idea that every person has some ‘calling’, and must therefore labour industriously in that occupation. If they do so, they will have sufficient. Why are there therefore so many vagabonds? Perkins says ‘They are (for the most part) a cursed generation...They joyne not themselves to any setled congregation for the obtaining of Gods kingdome, and so this promise [of having sufficient for this life] belongs not to them.’ Those who are not part of the settled community are outside the church and this in itself is evidence of divine disapproval. It is only those with a minimum of worldly property and security who can therefore hope to be saved. Perkins, of course, has to read the Bible in a peculiar way and deduce that ‘When Jesus told us not to lay up treasures upon earth he did not intend altogether to forbid the fruition and possession of goods and riches; but only covetousness and excess.’ (He then shows his true middle class nature - the judgement of what is sufficient is to be made by the godly man himself).

Hill comments:

The problem of creating a new mental outlook was not solely or even primarily a matter of re-educating the paupers themselves. The whip and the branding-iron, and the pressure of starvation, would no doubt have done the job in time. Nor was there any insuperable difficulty in persuading the rich to close their purses, or at least to divert their charity into new directions. The real problem was...the artisan and peasant majority of the population...few villagers, few artisans near the poverty line would lightly believe that original sin was the sole cause of vagabondage.

Similarly, if you’re among the working class, even now, it’s not hard to imagine yourself sinking down into the chronically unemployed and the lost. If you’re in the prosperous middle class it’s all too easy to imagine it will never happen to you and that thus those at the bottom must be indicating their moral failings.

I don’t know how much purchase the idea of the underclass will get in the UK, which is far less Calvinist that the USA. I hope that memories of the last great attempts at Workfare will limit its introduction: New Labour, New Workhouse? I want to write more about the specifically modern aspects at a later date, but I thought this historical background might be illuminating.

I’ve been trying to brush up on my minimal knowledge of the (British) Civil War and among other things have been reading Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (Penguin, 1990). It’s a reprint of articles from the 1950s and so by no means the latest thinking, but there’s some very interesting material. One article gave me pause for thought, though. In ‘John Mason and the End of the World’ Hill discusses the millennial beliefs of a late seventeenth century Buckinghamshire Anglican clergyman. He points out that there was a considerable seventeenth century tradition of belief that the end of the world was near. One wonderful example:

Thomas Beverly, rector of Lilley, Herts., predicted the end of the world for 1697. He was still alive in 1698 and wrote a book to prove that the world had come to an end without anyone noticing it.

Between 1535-1661, however, millenarianism was particularly associated with the Fifth Monarchists, a variety of left-wing groups preaching anarchic revolt against the state. Christopher Hill’s main point is that John Mason’s teaching and behaviour (he was able to draw large crowds of the poor to him) had some parallels with Fifth Monarchism and thirty years previously would have caused panic to the authorities. Now Mason was simply seen as mentally ill. For Hill:

The age of reason had arrived. The age of revolutionary Puritanism, with its heroes, its passions, its eccentricities, was over. For 150 years the proclamation of the millennium had roused the lower classes to revolt, had shaken the established foundations of society. Now, like John Mason, it was dead...Henceforth millenarianism became a harmless hobby for cranky country parsons.

In 1999 I heard the late lamented Tim Reuter talk on the historiography of the Year 1000. One point that struck me was his reckoning that differing views on the apocalyptic significance of the year 1000 (or 1033) had a lot to do with the prominence of contemporary millenarianism. For scholars in the UK, from a moderate religious background or none at all, there was a natural tendency to see apocalyptic concerns as a minority interest. For someone like Richard Landes, writing as an American just before the year 2000, it was far easier to accept that there might have been widespread belief and fear in the End Times, not reflected in official discourse and even hidden by it.

I don’t know how to fit the current US craze for end-time beliefs into a historical context, not knowing much about its immediate background. It does seem to me historically unusual to have a seemingly widely-held belief that is not largely limited to the socially/economically disadvantaged. Anyone who knows more about US culture care to comment?

I have been feeling rather sorry for Gordon Brown recently (not a sentiment I often feel). His recent speech on Britishness has received a fairly hostile reception. A lot of commentators claim that it was just a political ploy to reconcile people to him as a Scottish Prime Minister. This seems to proceed from the fallacy that since many Scots don’t see themselves as British, any Scot who does think he is British must be faking it. I don’t think Brown is insincere on this matter, since he’s talked about the subject before. And after all, if Britishness is going to mean anything, it should be equally open for the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish to discuss it as well as the English.

The more interesting thing is what Brown actually said, which again was fairly badly reported. The emphasis was all on one small portion of the speech about flags and national days. I actually found a copy of the speech (http://www.fabian-society.org.uk/press_office/display.asp?id=520&type=news&cat=43) and its main thrust was to argue that Britishness was best defined by values rather than institutions. This is a more left-wing/liberal take on Britishness than some, but no less valid for that. I was less convinced by his choice of the values he saw as defining Britishness: liberty, responsibility and fairness.

This is clearly closer to French slogans (liberty, equality, fraternity) than American (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). I can see fairness as being a reasonable substitute for equality, allowing for the British tradition of being less keen on grand abstract nouns, and more on warm fuzziness. Fairness, like justice, is one of these things that no-one could possible be opposed to. What I’m less enthusiastic about is ‘responsibility’. This seems to me to be used in a rather double sense. When Gordon Brown discusses this as a trait of Britishness, he’s essentially focusing on voluntary associations and civic-mindedness: in this way it’s very like fraternity or possibly solidarity. But he’s using responsibility not just to approve of such voluntary taking up of duties, but to imply that everyone can have responsibilities imposed on them, which is a very different matter. It feeds into the authoritarian streak in this government, which claims that you can have no rights without responsibilities. L is currently completely irresponsible, like all toddlers - does that mean that she should have no rights?

Apart from this, the speech is largely a Whig take on history with a few socialist twists: so we get Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights and also the Levellers and George Orwell. If Tony Benn has given a similar speech, as he could well have done, he might well have been ignored, but it wouldn’t have regarded as some kind of impudence for him to discuss the matter. There’s an interesting debate to be had about what British values are/should be. I just wish that we could have that debate rather than simply condemn patriotism outright or think its discussion must be left strictly to English conservatives.

The Guardian had an interview with Linda Hirshman (http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,1685725,00.html), the author of the recent article on feminism and choice that irritated me so much recently. Most of it was a summary of the article, but there was one quote that was very revealing. [I'm assuming, which may be optimistic, that her views haven't been distorted by the interviewer].

She is convinced that a truly flourishing life is impossible without paid employment. Her moments of fulfillment came in 1978, when she racked up 2,700 billable hours as a labour lawyer and in 1984 when she was part of a team of lawyers arguing a case before the supreme court.

I think this explains a lot of why Hirshman's ideas are so stupid: she not only has a staggeringly impoverished view of family life, she doesn't even have an inspiring view of work. What do you think a successful lawyer would say was their big achievement, assuming they weren't stressing the altruistic side of their work in helping people? Maybe that they got to be a partner, or that they won a lot of important cases or even that they helped change the law? To have as one of your big achievements that you billed a lot of hours: that isn't the mark of a good lawyer. That's the mark of a mid-ranking corporate worker-bee who's never going to get to the top because she's got no vision beyond her immediate targets. Anybody who has such a narrow view of what constitutes personal fulfilment has no place telling any other woman what to do. The comparison of her with second-wave feminists seems to me to be an insult to them.

I've just come across the works of Reinhold Niebuhr (for some reason I'd never heard of his name until a few months ago) and am deeply impressed. I am reading 'The Irony of American History', which seems very contemporary, although written in 1952. I want to comment more about his ideas in later posts, but one neat thing he does is provide a non-theological definition of original sin:

Practically all schools of modern culture, whatever their differences, are united in their rejection of the Christian doctrine of original sin. This doctrine asserts the obvious fact that all men are persistently inclined to regard themselves more highly and are more assiduously concerned with their own interests than any "objective" view of their importance would warrant. Modern culture in its various forms feels certain that, if men could be sufficiently objective or disinterested to recognize the injustice of excessive self-interest, they could also in time transfer the objectivity of their judgments as observers of the human scene to their judgments as actors and agents in human history. This is an absurd notion which every practical statesman or man of affairs knows how to discount because he encounters ambitions and passions in his daily experience which refute the regnant modern theory of potentially innocent men and nations.

Original sin is a complex and normally somewhat unappealing idea (I'm not sure that I've ever got to grips with it), but this distils it down to its essence: a self-centeredness that can never entirely be overcome. This also provides a handle on one of the most controversial aspects of original sin: the claim that we are born with it. It is now seen as objectionable to suggest that babies and children are anything except completely innocent. Yet as any mother knows, the key characteristic of babies is their self-centredness: nothing matters but what they want and the universe must revolve around them. Raising small children in a moral sense largely consists of trying to get them to accept that there is more to life than what they want and that they have to consider others too. But it's good for the adults among us to be reminded that we haven't entirely outgrown the sin ourselves and never will. When I lament how hard my life is (although I've got a nice home, an education and a healthy child, something that many people would long for) or when I get angry with people for some relatively trivial fault, what am I doing other than overestimating my own importance and that of my needs?

I came across an article in a feminist theology journal the other day (Frank Reilly, 'Jane Schaberg, Raymond E. Brown and the problem of the illegitimacy of Jesus', Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21 (2005) 57-80) that was arguing that Jesus was probably the result of Mary's seduction or rape rather than a virgin birth. The article re-evaluated the work of Jane Schaberg, The Illegitimacy of Jesus (Harper & Row, 1987) and argued that it was plausible. What interested me was that Schaberg and Reilly were arguing that the Nativity narratives in Matthew and Luke both implied an illegitimate conception which was then marvellously sanctified by the power of God. In other words, this is a view based on taking Scripture seriously, rather than simply a belief that virgin births don't happen.

I'm hampered analysing their evidence by the fact that I don't know New Testament Greek: a lot of the debate centres around exactly how certain terms are best translated. (I can summarise the points if anyone wants details). Overall, there are some good points made, particularly the fact that one phrase of the Magnificat (Luke 1:48, the 'lowliness of his handmaiden') uses a term which in the Greek translation of the Old Testament means 'humiliation' and is usually used in the context of rape. But I don't think the evidence for conception via rape is in any way conclusive.

What interests me more is the suggestion made in the article that belief in a conception by rape would lead to a very different and 'more hopeful Mariology and Christology'. I'm not at all convinced about that and I want to explain why.

Schaberg is quoted as seeing the virginal conception as 'a deeply antisexual notion', but I'm not at sure that a conception by rape is any more of a positive basis for sexuality. In particular, it seems to me to put a gendered sin at the heart of Jesus's story (male rapist versus female innocent) and I think that would be as unhelpful in the opposite way as the continuing emphasis in some exegesis on Eve's sin as preceding Adam's.

The notion of rape also doesn't seem to me to add much to Christian solidarity with the oppressed. There is already a strong Gospel tradition of Jesus' and God's friendliness/warmth towards the marginal in society, including outcast women (the woman at the well, prostitutes etc). Similarly, even if Mary wasn't raped, it's still clear that she suffered suspicions of immorality about Jesus' birth, she had to become a refugee to escape his being killed and she then saw him executed as a criminal.

What I presume Schaberg and Reilly object to is the whole idea of the Virgin Mary as sinless and perpetually virgin, but that is not a Scriptural notion. The natural implication of the reference to Jesus' brothers is that Mary and Joseph had children subsequently. The idea specifically of the Virgin Birth (i.e. that Mary remained virgo intacta after the birth) appears first in the apocryphal Book of James. (Maria Warner, Alone of all her sex: the myth and the cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) has a lot on the development of the myths). Meanwhile Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia University Press, 1988) discuss the development of the exaltation of celibacy and virginity and shows incidentally that it was far more dependent on the assumed virginity of Christ than that of Mary. In other words, you don't actually need a rape-conception to demolish the dodgier bits of Mariology or the idea that virginity is superior to marriage.

Similarly, I'm not sure how it advances your ideas about Jesus. I personally don't see the suggestion that Jesus was born of rape as blasphemous, but then I don't think Jesus' conception is the key to who he is. The importance of the virgin conception is as a symbol that Jesus is both God and Man. The mechanics of it are secondary: my God is equally capable of a virgin conception or of filling a human-born Jesus with divinity. The problem with a rape-conception is if it used to imply either that God can't carry out miracles (there was no Virgin conception, because it's impossible) or that Jesus wasn't divine. Both of these do strike at the heart of the Christian message: that God came to Earth and that he has power over life and death.

Having heard so much about the US culture wars, I thought it was time to discuss the semi-equivalent situation in the UK. There are two reasons it's only partially equivalent. One is that unlike in the US, UK Christianity isn't disproportionately right-wing (And yes, I know there are some liberal Christians in the USA, they're just not very influential). There is a long tradition of social activism in most UK denominations and the Labour party was to a considerable extent a Nonconformist foundation. The other difference is that in our culture war (religious v secular), the majority of the fighting is done by the secular/anti-religious side.

This leads to an odd situation, if, like our family, you're liberal Christians. Politically, the paper we normally read, The Guardian, is very congenial. However, almost every week it will include articles implying or stating outright that no-one rational can be religious and/or that Christians are dangerous bigots. It's been very noticeable in the recent discussions of CS Lewis and the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One of the Guardian's main columnists, Polly Toynbee, decided that a column was not enough and had to have a whole special long article on how pernicious the film was. (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,,1657756,00.html) In this it was made clear that what she really hated was the whole concept of Christ suffering for her sins (i.e. the theological heart of Christianity). Similarly, in the middle of a short series discussing aspects of the book in 'Guardian book club' the author suddenly breaks off to give an unflattering personal anecdote on CS Lewis and then complain about his apologetic works. (http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/story/0,,1675431,00.html) All this is irrelevant to the book in question and isn't the way that other authors are treated.

My dislike of this tendency isn't enough to make me stop reading the Guardian, but it does get me wondering why the militant atheists in Britain are so worked up. (By militant, I mean not just those who don't personally believe in a God, but those who regard all religion as wrong and without redeeming features). The organised Christian influence in this country is now pretty minor and that's not likely to change in the near future. The attempt by some Christian groups to get Jerry Springer: the Opera banned from the BBC was unsuccessful. There has been very little vocal opposition to the civil partnership act, which gives rights analogous to the married to gay couples. It is unlikely that there will be any major changes to the abortion law: the most that the pro-life movement might get would be a slight reduction in the time limit.

Yet a lot of secularists act as if the UK is just about to become a theocracy and see Tony Blair as an alarming religious maniac. His current proposals: the bill against religious hatred, the wish to encourage more state-funded faith schools and to get more religious groups involved in social work may or may not be the right decisions individually. But the idea that somehow these changes (if they happen) are going to unleash the forces of repression is just plain silly. Maybe the militants are just fighting the US culture war by proxy, but I do get fed-up with their caricature of Christians.