It's Always More Complicated

But this did sound awfully like that spate of books where people had A Bright Idea to Do Something for A Year and got a book out of it, which was clearly the intention, and this struck my cynical ayfeist self as 'My Spiritual Pilgrimage to a Mystical Experience, Conversion, Faith, and Publishing Deal'.

Could I become a Christian in a year?

(How long did it take St Augustine? asking for a friend.)

For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corolla and stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.

I was also, in the light of this article today, intrigued that it was two bloke friends who set her on this path: I’m delighted to see gen Z men in the UK flocking back to church – I just hope it’s for the right reasons. So am I. I have a friend who has been involved in the much-delayed and still unsatisfactory response of the C of E to certain abuse cases and some of those seem to have been connected with cultish manifestations which were praised for bringing in that particular demographic.

(And having noted the other day that Witchfinder Hopkins was pretty much in that demographic of young men aged 18-24, I'd really like to know where these Gen Z converts are in relation to issues like ordination of women, LGCBTQ+ inclusivity, etc etc.)

Queerness and Atheism in Post-War [Northern] Ireland: the case of William McIlroy, who, both atheist and gay from a fundamentalist Protestant working-class background, who in fact left at the age of 17:

He refused to countenance ever returning to visit, even in advanced old age, implying that if he had done so, he might have become the target of a violent attack. It is difficult to say whether this reflected reality or a deeply held paranoia which itself spoke of distress. There seems a high likelihood that he had been verbally and or physically threatened prior to leaving Northern Ireland.

***

At a very different social level: the gay scandal, hidden for 120 years, that embroiled the noted British MP, connoisseur and philanthropist Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea, in 1902.

(NB I'm not sure who, these days, considers the Edwardian era - war in South Africa! fears of national degeneration! the Irish Question! the rising working classes! the SUFFRAGETTES!!! also a number of vice scandals of a more as it were conventional nature, to have been a placid time, wot, but this is pretty much par for the course when somebody 'stumbles across a story' without much contextual background.)

I do wonder about the 'prominent gay historian' who apparently cautioned him about where not to go in his analysis, and also the characterisation of The State of Sexual History. Um: I guess my own reading in the field began with Pearsall too, plus Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians, but hello, that was over 50 years ago and there's been a Lot of Historiography since then..

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It all comes back to ‘darling Peter’: setting Britten and Pears’s love letters to music:

Benjamin Britten’s letters to his life partner Peter Pears are intimate, honest and revealing – revealing of lives entwined at a time when their love was illegal. Could I, a 21st-century Northern Irish gay man, relate?

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Roz Kaveney reviews Samuel Delany's essays:

Being Black and gay, he has written fascinatingly about both identities, as well as their intersection, and in particular about his responsibilities as the first gay Black man to achieve distinction in a field that is not always as progressive as it likes to think. In these two slightly random collections of interviews, essays, speeches and social media posts, he regularly and kaleidoscopically flits between all of these aspects of his profession and personality.

***

A brief history of the public toilet as a political battleground. Logic never to to the forefront - I remember a conference paper about a big moral panic about cottaging in Christchurch NZ in the 60s (I think) which led to the local council closing down all public loos in the affected area, including the women's.

Oh, David Mitchell, I normally like and approve of your columns, but this one?

Our forebears’ unquestioning belief in a higher power gave them a confidence that it’s hard not to envy.

Which made me think of pretty much all societies, 'throughout history', where just because there was a belief in a higher power didn't mean that there wasn't massive conflict over: who was the real higher power and how best to worship that higher power. And even when there was a generally accepted overall belief system, there are differences within between schools of thought and practice (cf persecution of Christians or Muslims who are not of the predominant category within a particular nation). Heretics get persecuted at least as much as infidels.

And you may like to think

I know in my heart that had I been brought up in such a setting – say, in Anglican Victorian England – I wouldn’t have quibbled with those answers and would’ve been comforted by them.

That would Anglican Victorian England which a) pretty much invented the concept of honest doubt and b) within the C of E, massive conflicts between High and Low Church, no? Not so cosy.

Paging Mr Blake and the Ever-Lasting Gospel. Written at the same time that a large number of actual clergymen had gone into that line of work because they were the third son and it was a living, and why would anyone trouble themselves over the 39 Articles? and it gave them plenty of time off for hunting.

As previously mentioned, I am proposing attending a scholarly conference at the University of Notre Dame in June, and combining this with at least a brief visit to the Kinsey Institute.

I.e. Indiana.

Okay, college towns, and the Kinsey has already made a statement.

Still, we feel it might be unduly provocative to have a t-shirt made up saying something like 'Atheist Kinsey 1.5' (the latter might be a bit subtle?) or 'Why do you presume I'm straight?' -

(Though honestly, this whole 'refusal to serve LGBTQ people because RELLYJUN' - how can they tell?) -

- or large chunks of Blake's 'The Everlasting Gospel' (don't know about them, but it confuses the hell out of me).

Maybe just flaunt my Darwin bicentenary shoulder bag?

I am actually surprised you even got one response (off-list) to your question as to whether [Certain Eminent Victorian whose painful journey to non-belief is well-documented] was an atheist.

I am sure that most list members, like me, had a mental 'Do My Homework For Me' light flashing over this one, and resisted the temptation to post 'JFGI'.

Maybe there was something more subtle and nuanced going on, but as the question was posed: no.

Possibly this person is a little confused by terminology and the meaning of 'free-thinker' in context?

Or maybe they're supposing that this famously private person would or should have been a member of one or other of the various organised freethought bodies emerging at the time.

Or that someone who believed in compassion and tolerance would have been, if an atheist, militant about it in the Dawkins mode.

It's not even as though, as with Darwin, there is a longstanding factoid concerning deathbed conversion.

I think it's poor ton of anyone to guilt-trip busy scholars by posting that only one person answered your question, implying what a lot of meanies they are.

Go away and do the reading.

A certain noted atheist (whom I will not name, since it's not about him and I'm not sure how reliable the attribution is anyway), is alleged to have recently stated that 'teaching children about hell was worse than sexually abusing them'.

I really do not get the mindset that thinks you can rank abusive things done to children (or indeed, any bad things) in this way, rather than saying 'These are both/all awful, but for [whatever personally-motivated reason] and because nobody can fight all the battles all the time, I am putting my own energies into X struggle', instead of saying 'Why are you bothering about Y when X exists?'.

How is that not reasonable? (I am, for the sake of argument, assuming that the person making these sorts of claims is actually Doing Something about what they consider The Worst Evil, rather than invoking it for rhetorical purposes, which may be paying them a compliment they do not deserve.)

I also have a feeling that this kind of hierarchisation of bad things leads to people dismissing attempts to do anything about things they do not put at or near the top of the list, as distractions or even counter-productive. (E.g. this would be Stella Browne's problem, or one of them, with the Communist Party - they were all about 'birth control is a distraction and about patching up the evils of capitalist society, come the revolution it won't even be needed'.)

In fact things are far more connected - evils are not discrete entities but positions on various spectra. Somebody used the term 'rhizomatic' at a conference I was at recently and I think this is a far more useful model for thinking about things. Intervening at some level which may not be the Most Bad Thing may nonetheless have repercussions throughout the system of which it is part.

(And I can see how these thinks relate to my Infinitely Deferred Future Project...)

It's an 'Untold Story' published by a press which seems only to have produced other works by the same person (+ one on a topic related to one of his interests by someone who is presumably a mate).

No, I don't know why anyone would be sending me a flyer for their self-published work claiming that Darwin did indeed convert on his deathbed and Lady Hope (the original person to assert this) a much-maligned figure who was 'hounded out of the country by the Darwin family'* and their supporters.. I think it's possibly to do with my association with A Certain Learned Society.

What is perhaps interesting (or not) is that the author/publisher claims to be a 'noted academic' who has done serious biomedical research and also 'made important contributions to the history of science'. At least, according to the blurb on the flyer.

I do not think I feel like ponying up £12.99 (even post free) for this 'outstanding piece of scholarly historical detective work', based on 25 years investigating the incident leading to the uncovering of 'crucial evidence'. Maybe the library at work will get a copy, or even be sent a freebie.

Doubtless the malign hand of the Darwin dynasty is the reason that this is not being published by some serious publisher and is being self-published by someone who, ah bless his wee cotton socks, doesn't even have a website.

*One's impression of the Darwin family from Gwen Raverat's Period Piece is not exactly one that suggests hounding as opposed to going 'shoo' in feeble tones.

What is this that this is about church for non-believers?

I don't know whether Terry Eagleton, taking a tankload of codfish to Alain de Botton's new book, Religion for Atheists, makes a just assessment of the work and its arguments:

The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence.... De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low....

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society.
....
Like Comte, De Botton believes in the need for a host of "consoling, subtle or just charming rituals" to restore a sense of community in a fractured society.What the book does, in short, is hijack other people's beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise.

But it sounds creepy, nonetheless. (Well, Alain de Botton is reliably an up-nose-getter, no?)

So does this, in Dear Mariella's column, yesterday, A mother who works 60 hours a week wonders if going to church could help her cope with the daily frustrations of life:

[Account of the trials of her life]Do you think church is the answer? I don't believe in God, but all that singing and being grateful has to help, surely?

[Response}
It surely has. Who'd have thought that at this point in the 21st century, in an increasingly secular society, we'd need God's house more than ever? The unfairness of your situation is writ large for all to see so I'll refrain from my customary feminist rant. Where should those in need turn? Facebook? Mumsnet? The songs and solace offered by the church have taken on a compelling new allure.
....
Embracing religion is one of the few guaranteed ways of joining a real- life community, carving out a blame-free 90 minutes a week for yourself against the backdrop of Mass, and experiencing a cathartic blast of exuberance during hymn singing.

Okay, the idea that churchgoing provides social stability and a sense of community is probably slightly higher up the moral ladder than attending carefully and visibly to get your offspring into the right school.

But doing it for those reasons strikes as about as morally and intellectually valid as becoming an atheist in order to skip church on Sunday mornings and sleep in instead, or, in the harder-line versions of What Ayfeyism Meanz, become an incestuous cannibal because then one will have no restraints on one's conduct.

Furthermore, if you're going to participate in some community, might it not be worth doing a little comparison shopping? I am so not impressed by the subtext of 'local C of E parish church' as a default setting. There are other forms of Christianity, not to mention other spiritual paths that also make rather a thing of community.

As someone who got the rather predictable INTJ on that Jung personality test that has been doing the rounds again, I do see that I am not a target audience segment for an appeal to a sense of community in the company of people whose beliefs one does not even subscribe to, and perhaps for some people this does work? Who knows, it might even be a road to actual belief.

And I do not even want to go anywhere near the civilised values/social stability argument, because I start getting earwormed by Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander:

The rich man in his castle
The poor man at the gate
He made them high or lowly
And ordered their estate

Paging William, high on I know not what (isn't laudanum meant to soothe?):

If He had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues,
And not us’d the Elders and Priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obey’d Himself to Caiaphas.

I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we're doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don't like it.

This seems to me to fit rather neatly with reports of the wails of 'straight male gamers' apropos the inclusion of non-hetero possibilities in RPGs.

But, even so, could wish that the public face of atheism was not quite so heavily focussed on privileged white men of a certain age and class - in this instance, A C Grayling. It may, of course, be that they are the ones who gain credence and bring gravitas to the matter (wot? shurly not...)

Search fails at finding the piece in The Observer Review anent this: Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, which is happening at the Bloomsbury Theatre (which is, of course, within the Student Union building of the godless institution in Gower St). This aroused in me the question of whether there would be any George Eliot, in particular 'O May I Join The Choir Invisible' and whether there are musical settings of same (there is at least one, by someone who also composed an -?unproduced - opera version of Silas Marner).

Haven't I seen Tim Adams going WOEZ about evil computerz and teh intanetz and their malign effects on creativity, sociability, etc, before? Someone who spends most of their time hanging out in Comment is Free is bound to get a v distorted picture of what is going on.

I am perhaps a little more persuaded by Rachel Cooke in Jeremiah mood about public libraries. Which does seem to imply that yet again the debate is shooting right past the actual core constituency (or what would be, if so much wasn't wrong with them).

A lengthy piece on 'mash-up' novels, e.g. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - and are there any of these which are not based on something by J Austen (and we haven't, have we? yet seen Emma and the Evil Undead?). In which case, is it not simply about brand recognition but the contrast element? (The Brontes already having teh gothique up the wazoo.) Without ever having read any of them, the whole idea does strike me, as it does the author of this article, that the joke quickly grows old - and would perhaps be better as shorter jeux d'esprit than whole novels.

Biography of the apparently somewhat elusive Dorothea Lange (which after all is plausible for someone whose stance appears to have been 'I am a camera').

Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph is also... one of America's most famous photographs. It is her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker who, like countless others, had journeyed west from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. For a long time, it was known simply as Migrant Mother and, like many of Lange's images from the 1930s, it is stark and beautiful. It is also problematic, because of its contested context and the issues it raises about the morality of documentary photography.
....
In 1958, Thompson made herself, and her frustration with Lange, known though a powerfully inarticulate letter to a photography magazine in which she demanded that her portrait no longer be used without her permission. By then, of course, it was too late. The photograph had long since floated free of its subject, and of its creator, becoming a symbol of something greater than either of them could have imagined.
....
Gordon rebuts Thompson's claim that Lange had told her the image would not be published. Her case for the defence is a strong one: FSA photographers knew that their images would be widely disseminated for the common good so it is unlikely that Lange would have said otherwise. Likewise, Thompson's long anonymity was decided not by Lange but by the project's guidelines that instructed photographers contracted to the FSA not to record the names of their subjects.

Nevertheless, one's sympathies lie with Florence Owens Thompson who, it transpires, was not a white American but a Cherokee. She had lived on the margins of American society while Lange's portrait of her was reproduced around the globe, becoming an icon of American suffering and stoicism. "Its reputation grew," writes Gordon, "because it symbolised white motherhood and white dustbowl refugees… Would the photograph have had such popularity if viewers had known its subject was a woman of colour?" The ironies that attend this single image, then, echo the contradictions that attend America's collective – and revisionist – notion of nationhood.

Why readers crave the risk factor. From Hemingway to war heroes, there's a romance in writers who put themselves in their own story. And there's a danger in it too. While I am entirely there with Mr McCrum's suggestion that 'It does no favours to the powers of the imagination to perpetuate the romantic myth of authorship, however much unconsciously we subscribe to it', I feel he undercuts his own argument when he writes dismissively that 'The worst of the literary scene today is that so many of its protagonists, far from waving a standard for the darker side of human experience, resemble nothing so much as dentists, accountants and public-relations executives'. Given that Alaa el-Aswany, author of the internationally critically-acclaimed The Yacoubian Building was, and maybe still is, a dentist, and that it is conceivable that even a public-relations executive might write a good novel, this seems the kind of banal assumption he intends to subvert.

Euan Ferguson, WHUT??, Kingsley Amis was a 'splendidly humane old chuffpot' and women were one of the areas of life 'to which he brought grand amateur enthusiasm'. I find it hard to read those as simply coded ways of expressing 'curmudgeonly and misogynistic misanthrope alcoholic'.

To its supporters, the beaver is a keystone species. To others, it's a rodent with a huge appetite for deforestation. As these "charismatic beasties" are released into their new Scottish home, many are predicting trouble in the Highlands.