Unless you have a mind open to paradox, Jesus was a sissy. It’s taken a lot of effort over the years to claim him as a man’s man. Jesus, in the gospels, is not what we, or for that matter, the ancient world, would have thought of as “virile”, which is to say, “sexually dominant”, even aggressive. You can see the tension playing out in the gospels, in John the Baptist’s doubt, for instance, that Jesus was really the one whose arrival he’d been prophesying. That one was supposed to come with fire and a winnowing sheaf, and there would be trouble for all the wicked. And look, Jesus is just going about healing people.
Jesus’s reply is to tell John’s followers to say what they’ve seen, adding, “And blessed is anyone who is not offended by me.”
The thwarted desire for a certain kind of male Saviour has been with us from the beginning: we see it in Jesus’s humble birth, and in the insistence of some academics that it can’t have been all that humble. We see it when the crowd shouts for Barabbas, and in the stories of Simeon bar Kokhba, another type of Messiah. We see it when Jesus rides into Jerusalem on an ass, when he tells Peter to put away his sword, and when he dies on the cross. “If you are indeed the Son of God, save yourself and us,” grumbles one of the thieves crucified with him. We see it in the Victorians’ muscular Christianity, and its continuation in evangelical summer camps for public schoolboys. We saw it in the Nazi revulsion with what they recognised as an effeminate Jewish Jesus and the conflation of Christian doctrine with National Socialism by the German Christians movement. The gender binary, the question of whether there’s a hard line between men and women and the masculine and feminine, is one of the primary foci of the present political struggle. By which I mean, the one against fascism.
The new year opened here with the revelation that someone writing a letter to the website of The Conservative Woman has declared me “woke”. This was in response to a search for “non-woke” churches around the country. I wasn’t damned utterly, though, because I’m said to do a good funeral, and don’t allow people to dip the host in the chalice. So there’s that.
What makes a church, or a parish priest, woke? Reading through, I see that woke churches are ones where the clergy think vaccination is a good thing and Covid a bad thing, approve of the ultra-low emissions zone in London, bless gay people’s marriages (or want to), preach sermons that touch upon the climate crisis, pray for refugees, and, above all, ordain women.
Non-woke churches have male clergy. If Church of England, they use the Book of Common Prayer (1662), if Catholic, the pre-Vatican II form of the Latin mass. If they are Protestant churches, they firmly adhere to Biblical inerrancy. Your non-woke church teaches that England is for the English, marriage is between one man and one woman for life, and, above all, that a bloke’s a bloke and that’s no joke. I’m reminded of the bishop’s wife who said that the trouble with women’s ordination is that the kind of woman who goes forward for ordination is not the kind of woman you’d like to have for your vicar. She would have understood The Conservative Woman. I suspect she might even have sympathised with the Christian Fellowship for Reform. The Church of England has been described as the Tory party at prayer, so why not have Reform at prayer? Tommy Robinson has also had an evangelical turn. If the Church of England were to welcome and include these ventures, we’d simply be showing that we’re a church for all the (Christian) nation, building bridges with the Moral Majority, the Dominionists and the Seven Mountains movements in the United States.
The Church of England is anxious about its institutional survival. How much further will it go to keep on going? We worry about our status. We worry about our numbers and our money. We want to show that we hear the voice of the people of this land. The danger is in the temptation to put the Church in hock to what is, at its most extreme, fascism. Whether we will be able to resist is, I believe, the test that the churches of this country—the Church of England first, and then all the others—face now, and will continue to face in the coming years.
This week, in the city where I was born, a woke Christian woman was shot three times in the face by a man reported to be a committed conservative Christian, a servant of the federal government. Her last words to him were captured on the video: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” After the shots are fired, a man’s voice can be heard saying, “Fucking bitch.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this.
