Our strange and incoherent stance towards the unborn

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Earlier this year my wife and I discovered we were expecting our third child. We were happy about this. We were hoping to see our family grow, and we were quick to tell the people we love. But we found out things might not be okay with the baby when we went to the first ultrasound scan. This was followed by days of uncertainty about whether our baby was healthy and whether it would survive.

A few weeks later we were sent to a special appointment with the purpose of taking a closer look at the baby’s heart using ultrasound, and moments into this we could sense that something wasn’t right. The usual rhythm of the rapid thumping and swishing that fills the ultrasound room when you hear the baby’s heart was notably absent. All we heard was silence. All we saw was stillness.

Sie Yan gave birth some days after this to a lifeless little boy the size of my palm. I was numb, and later I was overwhelmed with sadness and uncontrollable tears. It was not easy to get my head around the death of a child I didn’t know. But we decided to name him Enoch, after a man who ‘walked with God, and he was not, for God took him’. [1]

While many miscarriages take place in secrecy, we had been very open with everyone we knew, and the torrent of love and affection we experienced had a healing potency. All of our friends – regardless of religious belief, political persuasion, or personal experience – offered us deep sympathy on the loss of a child. Even a child who passed away at a mere 15 weeks gestation.

Around the same time this was all happening, news broke that the Republic of Ireland was taking a referendum, and then secured a vote, to overturn the Eighth Amendment banning abortion. It was a clear majority of 66%, and public opinion expressed through the media was clearly supportive. There were comments such as, ‘The spell of shame has been broken’, and it was described as ‘the end of shame and guilt’.

To me, this exposed the deepest fault line of incoherence and contradiction in our approach to the unborn. It made no sense to me that people could express genuine sorrow that our child had died, while at the same time there was ecstatic celebration over the potential of many Irish babies being terminated in days to come.

It made no sense to me that if a woman wants her baby, it’s a child, but if she doesn’t then it’s a foetus. If the child dies, it’s a tragic miscarriage, but if the pregnancy is brought to a medically induced end, it’s a routine termination. If a couple is longing to have a family the loss of a child is a grief too hard to bear, but if a child doesn’t fit into their current life plan then ending the child’s life is a human right.

Perhaps the contradiction is never more clear than in the case of the hospital ward. There you can find operating rooms used to perform miraculous procedures in-utero in order to save unborn lives. You can also step into those rooms at other times to observe the disposal of bodies being cut up and vacuumed out, complete with tiny hands and tiny feet. And our reaction to both of these scenarios could not be more different. We give best wishes, prayers, hopes to those fighting to save their babies. We ignore those who are quietly disposing of them; no flowers, cards, sympathies. It was a choice, after all.

But why do we get to decide? Why is it up to us whether this is really a life or not?

I know that for many, the choice over whether to abort is impossibly difficult and is often driven by the utterly terrifying prospect of becoming a parent without the means to provide the kind of life we think a child needs. But that doesn’t change the nature of the question of whether a life is a life.

It’s right to celebrate life and therefore also right to grieve the horror of sickness and death that takes a life, even one as young as our own baby Enoch. And it’s wrong to think that we can make an arbitrary choice that changes the status of that baby into something less than human.

If anything, that makes us less than human.

[1] Genesis 5.24

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The myth of the freethinking atheist

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Somehow we have come to attach the idea of ‘freedom’, and particularly freedom of thought, to atheism. Religious people are shackled to ideas that exert power of them, almost as though they are helpless victims. But the atheist is free because nobody’s gonna tell him what to believe or do.

Well, sort of. But no.

One of the greatest myths we live with in day-to-day life is the illusion of freethinking. For one thing, there’s the fact that most atheists do not arrive at that conclusion independently, but rather through a sequence of influences, books, ideas, often imbibed unconsciously; which is not all that different from how we arrive at religious conclusions. In other words, the so-called freethinking atheist would likely hold to some other belief system if raised in some other age or in some other place. You’re not as free as you think. You’re just as much a product of your time and circumstance as any religious devotee.

But freethinking is still more illusive than that. Scratch beneath the surface of ordinary life and you discover a surprising truth, which is that we’re all driven by religious impulses all of the time, especially the impulse to worship. This was never more aptly put than by the late David Foster Wallace in his famous speech, This Is Water:  

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [1]

Most of us won’t accept this on the basis that we have a pretty narrow view of what worship means – perhaps singing, definitely involving a higher power, and probably some elaborate rituals. But really, worship is much more basic and ordinary than that: it’s allowing something in your life to become in some way ultimate. When something becomes the underlying driver, motivation, goal, passion of your life, then that’s what you worship. That’s what Wallace meant, anyway, and that’s why most of the stuff we worship will ‘eat you alive’.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough… Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you… Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. 

All of this rings true. Whatever you want so much in life that to have it would be heaven, and to not have it would be hell – that is your god, and that god exerts control over you. If worship can be directed at all these ordinary pursuits and passions – money, the body, power, intellect – then it doesn’t take much thought before you start to see a place like London through new eyes. There are temples of worship everywhere, and devout worshippers scurry through life offering their sacrifices on the altars to their particular gods. And, yes, these gods eat us up. Every one of us has tales of the damage we have caused ourselves through our uncontrollable desires and ambitions. 

The most sobering aspect of all this is that so little of it is voluntary:

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

This means you did not choose to worship, and you did not choose what to worship. Instead, worship arises from inside us as something unconscious, instinctive, irrepressible. 

So, even if we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, led by logic and evidence, most of the time the very opposite is true: we are led by the hidden drivers of the heart. [2] We are compelled by motives we can’t fully understand, in search of goals we can’t fully articulate, in hope of dreams we can’t fully express. 

Nobody is a freethinker. Nobody is a free agent.

Our humanity does not flourish in a spiritual vacuum when worship of something is so deeply hardwired into us. Without a sense of the greatness of the God who is over us we end up worshipping the material world under us. And that experience of being consumed and ruled by those lesser idols can awaken an awareness that running from God does not lead to freedom.

When you realise this you can begin to make sense of the impulse toward faith. Those who grow sick and tired of the endless pursuit of meaningless desires – who find that they are actually enslaved by their worship of money and intellect and sex and power – may at some point yearn for a different kind of worship, and may instead turn to God. To do so is not to surrender your reason, or engage in an act of mindless obeyance to some form of empty tradition, but rather to begin to be honest with yourself in recognizing that you are not as free as you think you are.

[1] This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace, accessible all over the internet
[2] See The Righteous Mind,by Jonathan Haidt

This article originally appeared at salt.london

14 things you probably didn’t know about Christianity, but really should

Most people I talk with who are not Christians have a lot of deep misconceptions about this religion. In a way, this is odd, given our rich Christian heritage in this country. But it also provides some great talking points in this otherwise (often) awkward subject of conversation. So, here’s my list of fourteen things you probably didn’t know about the Christian faith, but really should.

1. Churches are not buildings, and the buildings are (almost) unnecessary. A church is the people; a particular group that has come together to form a family despite often having zero things in common. This means that you could knock down all those old church buildings in Britain and the actual church (the group of people) would not be wiped out; arguably, it would flourish.

2. Not all (male) Christian ministers wear dresses. This might strike you as a slightly silly point, but here’s why it matters to me. The early Christians were a rag-tag bunch of men and women, with a very flat leadership structure, and very little in the way of special outfits or elaborate rituals. Today we call this style of Christianity ‘low church’ (as opposed to ‘high church’). It’s important because it means that Christianity is designed for the ordinary guy in the street, and Christian ministers should look pretty normal too.

3. There are more Christians in China than the population of Britain. There is simply no way you can describe Christianity as a ‘Western religion’ any more (nor was there ever!). Christianity is exploding in secret in China, as well as in underground, hidden churches in places like Iran and Nepal. The Christian faith in general is growing fastest on the continent of Africa. We may be a post-Christian country here in Britain, but that says very little about the fortunes of this faith.

4. You will never encounter deeper diversity than you do in the global church. You may be able to think of some community that is more diverse than the church, but I doubt it. The reason is that Christianity advances by the power of its message, and that the message itself is one of radical unity regardless of natural divisions. The earliest Christians managed to bridge some impossible divides, with slaves and masters worshipping alongside one another, as well as Jews and Gentiles, and every other societal division that existed in the first century Roman Empire. That makes sense when you understand the core message of Christianity: it tells us that we’re all broken (so there’s no room for pride) and that we can all be forgiven and brought into God’s family (so there’s deep unity). In reality, that means that on any given Sunday I could be sat next to a Nigerian, a Malaysian, or a Ukrainian at church, and that would be pretty normal.

5. If Christians were less involved in social issues, chaos would ensue. It’s estimated that the volunteerism of Christians in Britain is worth about £315 million every year [1]. At the same time, there are a lot of people who think Christians are dangerous and don’t fit in modern society. I wish these people would understand the selfless kindness and generosity of so many Christians, and the reasons they do all this. Believing in Jesus changes you in a very basic way, and I have never encountered any form of belief as potent or effective in changing individuals and helping them to become more loving and kind.

6. Nobody gets to heaven by being good or moral. These good works are a result of being a Christian, not the means of becoming one. In fact, if you think you’re a ‘good person’ then you are totally unqualified to be a Christian. It’s counter-intuitive, and that’s why so few people understand something so fundamental. But Christians do not believe in being good, nor do they think that being good will get you any points. The only thing that matters is being forgiven.

7. Being christened as a baby is quite likely totally meaningless. Too many people think that if you’re splashed with ‘holy water’ as a baby, you’re all good. But of course, if it were that simple then we’d walk through the streets spraying the general population with specially blessed holy water from fire hoses. Far fewer would call themselves Christians if they realised how meaningless this ceremony is unless you also have some kind of genuine faith.

8. There are lots of other practices that don’t make you a Christian.Being British. Eating fish on Fridays. Going to church. Praying. None of these things make you a Christian. The only thing that makes a person a Christian is whether or not they have faith.

9. Faith is not a blind leap. While some of the New Atheists like to claim that faith is some kind of wish upon a star, the word ‘faith’ has a lot more to do with (1) being persuaded of the truth of something, and (2) placing trust in those beliefs. You exercise this kind of faith all the time in ordinary life. It’s much more like the experience of being persuaded that a 150,000 ton lump of metal can safely float on water, and exercising trust the moment you step on board. For Christians, the faith you need is faith in Jesus to save you. It’s nothing more, and nothing less, than that.

10. There’s much more evidence than you think. A lot of people assume that Christianity was debunked at some point by someone. But that has never happened. On the contrary, one of the most unique things about the Christian faith is that it is based on historical events, rather than teaching that can be separated from events. What I mean is this: you could take the teachings of just about any other religious founder and scrub out the historical story, and the teachings still stand. That isn’t the case with Jesus. If the events didn’t happen (especially his death and resurrection) then there’s no Christianity. Thankfully, there are heaps of evidence that attest to it being true.

11. The reason we’re not progressive on some issues is not because of any phobias. It’s true that we continue to draw certain lines in the sand on issues of morality, but it’s not because we’re afraid of change, nor is it coming from judgmentalism. The most basic belief all Christians share is that we’re all sinners in need of God’s kindness, and that precludes any allowance of self-righteousness or judgment. But we also believe that God has the best plan for our flourishing, and we don’t get to simply make up the rules (since that road inevitably leads to tragedy and oppression).

12. Most of your deepest moral instincts come from the Bible. The instincts we think are either common sense, or part of the very fabric of nature, such as equality, human rights, justice – all of these (and many more) have been embedded in our culture from centuries of exposure to the Bible. Now that we Westerners have largely abandoned our Christian heritage, we are like a jumbo jet suffering engine failure: we continue to glide, but it’s not long before this thing will plummet to the ground. Morality without a Moral Lawgiver is arbitrary and vulnerable. 

13. Jesus was not a good teacher. CS Lewis put it best:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to [2].

14. We really do believe you’ll live for eternity, the only question is where. Some people think that if Christianity is to survive, it must accommodate itself to modern sensibilities. That would mean no more talk of an afterlife, and definitely no hell. Besides the fact that this strategy doesn’t actually work (the more liberal a church becomes, the more empty it gets), we have some pretty formidable reasons to believe that eternity is real. The most important reason of all is the fact that Jesus came back from the dead, a fact attested to by hundreds of witnesses. That is the reason it’s worth listening to the only person in history who spoke with anything like authority on the subject.

[1]  Cinnamon Faith Action Audit 2016
[2] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

This article originally appeared at salt.london

Sex is never NSA

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No Strings Attached. Few expressions better capture the modern view of sex. Which means that, despite their obvious respectability as philosophers and social commentators, the Spice Girls got it exactly wrong when they sang,

Are you as good as I remember baby, get it on, get it on,
‘Cause tonight is the night when two become one

They were (knowingly or unknowingly) articulating a very, very old view of sex as something that has deep soul-level power; the very opposite of No Strings Attached. And this is why Bloodhound Gang were much more in tune with the times with their immortal lines, ‘You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals // So, let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.’

Both of these songs come from the 1990s when few could have predicted how much mammalian activity would be enabled by the onset of hookup apps, so that now, more than ever, sex is mainly about fulfilling your appetites. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s not much different from eating, drinking, or sleeping. Who you do it with is not of much consequence, provided they’re good.

How did our view of sex change so profoundly, and so quickly? 

For one thing, it was not so long ago that sex was inextricably bound up with making babies. If you were a man and you got someone pregnant, you’d have to take responsibility (especially in a world with no state support for single mums). Your community kept you accountable. But that has changed: it is hard to exaggerate the effects of widespread contraception available since the 1960s in separating the act of sex from its natural, biological consequence. This has had a profound effect on how we think about sex, at a deep philosophical level. It used to be the case that only the rich or powerful could bed whoever they wanted, for the simple reason that they could get away with it. But contraception democratised the seeming freedom of sex-without-responsibility, and turned sex into a momentary act rather than a life-changing decision.

Another reason can be given. The secularisation of the West has been a potent force here. If your religion says sex is a sacred act with the power to bind souls, that view might linger for a little while after you have cast off religious restraint, but eventually it dies. The new narrative is that we’re clever monkeys, and if monkeys can do it with whoever they want (bonobo chimps being a perfect example of a ‘free love’ primate society), then the social construct of sex being sacred need not hold us back any more.

And so, we have landed in a new era. It’s an era in which love is optional, and sex is easy. In fact, it’s only a few swipes away. And you don’t need any of the traditional skills of seduction, which means you can get away with being clumsy and cheap. Hit upon a match, exchange a few texts, and you’re done and dusted within the hour. And it’s free. Did I mention that? And you don’t have to speak again. And you can try someone else tomorrow. And there are no babies. And nobody else need ever find out.

All of this rests on the assumption that sex can be No Strings Attached. But can it? I’m not convinced.

First, there is the problem of ‘catching feelings’ and the consequent experience of rejection. The subject of so many sitcoms and low budget movies, we might be tempted to downplay how destructive this kind of rejection is for the soul. But consider, how many times can you get the cold shoulder from a hookup and not suffer some kind of erosion on the inside? I mean serious psychological harm. It seems we have more compassion and understanding for dogs abandoned on the street than we do for ourselves, since we are willing to subject ourselves to relentless and repeated experiences of being discarded. The simple reality is quite straightforward: if they don’t call you back, they don’t want you. They want someone new. And we might bury this truth and pretend that’s not the case since we’re both consenting adults entering into a kind of social contract for meaningless sex. But lying to ourselves doesn’t change the facts. You were yesterday’s choice, not today’s. Of course, rejection is a risk in any kind of relationship, but the nature of NSA sex is that you are deliberately exposing yourself to hurt. And if you’re the one with the bullet-proof confidence, how can you know that you are not causing immense harm to the other person?

Then consider the reality of jealousy. I know that the word is usually viewed as a negative quality, a mark of a deficient, weak, and insecure person. But jealousy is also hardwired into us as a fierce guardian of committed love. It can set a wall of fire around a relationship that does not allow casual invaders to maraud and steal what is precious. And jealousy proves that we don’t really believe in NSA sex. We get jealous in talking about our partner’s old lovers and past experiences; an irrational and inconsistent reaction if sex can be meaningless. We also insist on exclusivity as love grows. But why? If your partner can claim that sex with another person was just NSA, doesn’t that let them off the hook? Absolutely not. Every fibre in your being tells you that. Your jealousy contradicts your belief in NSA sex. (Which is why Ross’s excuse, ‘We were on a break’, doesn’t hold water for Rachel; sex is never NSA.)

Another proof of the lie of NSA sex has to do with our inconsistency when it comes to taboos around sex. These taboos are still deeply embedded in our minds and our society (though for how long, I am not sure), and reveal that we still understand the power of sex as something that cannot be as meaningless as a handshake. Think about incest. If sex could truly be NSA, then why sustain such artificial boundaries? By what logic do we say that it is wrong for siblings to sleep together, or a father with his daughter, if it is No Strings Attached? We can’t have it both ways, and our deep and intuitive revulsion towards incest tell us that sex is never NSA.

Finally, consider the painful reality of rape and sexual abuse. Why is rape so damaging? What is it about sex that it has such powers of destruction, so that a person can be changed forever by one brief, momentary act? Why can it make people feel so dirty, so defiled, so used? The answer must be that sex is inherently powerful. Of course, you might argue that the crucial missing element here is consent. But does the giving of consent render sex impotent, as it were? And if so, why do so many feel dirty and guilty after a mistaken fling, or a casual hookup? It seems to me that we are fighting against our very souls when we try to make sex a meaningless act.

Sex is a force of nature; a force in our nature. It goes down to the roots of a person. It involves the most hidden parts of our souls. Such have humans believed for thousands of years. There is accumulated wisdom in beliefs that have transcended all recorded history and most cultures, and we discard such beliefs at our peril. The modern dating scene is an anthropological test tube, an experiment we are running, and nobody knows the future ramifications of a generation raised this way. How will it affect our ability to make long-term commitments (essential for our own wellbeing and that of our children)? How will it affect our ability to simply be happy and content?

The flip side to all this is that if sex is powerful, its power can be directed and used well. Sex can actively restore ailing marriages, reinvigorate forgotten love, and repair the bonds of broken intimacy. In other words, sex attaches strings.

It is with good reason that the ancient Hebrews spoke about sex as knowing someone, because it is essentially a relational act. We all want to know and to be known, and we want that deeply. Perhaps that is the deepest need of all. They also spoke about sex as uncovering your nakedness; it was a euphemism that somehow captures the pure vulnerability, total openness, face-to-face and soul-to-soul intimacy that sex is meant to involve. To be naked with another – in both the literal and metaphorical sense – is to reveal your very soul. That is why the walls of commitment are so vital, since you are never more at risk than when you are totally opened up to another.

And all of this makes me wonder, if sex is really about intimacy, perhaps the modern view of NSA sex is a thinly veiled attempt to experience love, even transcendence, if only for a moment. If so, there is great tragedy in that. It is a misguided quest, a fool’s errand. No amount of hookups can fill this gaping void. But it also signals a deep disquiet in the soul of this generation. What are we searching for? And, what have we lost? God only knows.

This article originally appeared at salt.london