Purity, Integrity and Determination
Hello. I’m Graham, and I am an activist. As anyone
who knows me will tell you, calling for an end to this
world’s injustice is central to my faith. As such, I was
heavily involved in this year’s Climate Camp (www.climatecamp.
org.uk) — protesting outside Heathrow Airport against the the
needless consumption that’s destroying our planet for the sake of
convenience and quick profit.
I was struck by what a small group of Evangelicals who came
along to Climate Camp had to say about the way they saw the
Direct Action movement meeting around them, something which
struck me as being both a challenge to my Christianity and to my
Radical side, and as a reminder of why Direct Action is actually
something Christians should be getting involved in, and why
ultimately lobbying is a road to ruin for so many.
So often people remind us that politics is about compromise, as
if this is somehow a concrete truth and not at all something our
culture has taught us. So often the compromise is really a case of
saying “well, its nice that you have those principles, but we’ll do
what economic reason tells us to anyway”.
Nowhere is this more the case than in the UK government’s
response to issues of the Environment and Aviation: Acknowledge
it’s bad, then completely leave it out of the white paper on the
environment and issue a set of plans that will see air travel
increase dramatically.
The big advantage in this respect that Climate Camp has over
the NGOs on this issue is that it’s committed to Direct Action;
to challenging the issues at a physical level, one where bold
statements have real effects, and where everyone can play a role
without compromising themselves.
As a Christian I’m taught to be ‘salt in the world’ and that if I lose
that saltiness I shall become worthless, yet that is exactly what so
much of the NGO campaigning going on around Britain today,
and with which the church some how finds huge affinity, is doing;
it seems to my mind that many, though not all, of the biggest have
already lost all the saltiness they ever had.
Organisational politics is something Christians keep complaining
to me about, and the one place I see people successfully avoiding it is in these very movements. Perhaps we Christians should start learning to listen to other radicals if we want to find something that actually works.
I guess another thing that Climate Camp proved was that organisation and physical force are no match for the determination of those who have little more than their beliefs to sustain them. In a world of materialism, it seems that this has been forgotten by the police forces of this country, much at their peril. And this is another thing which amazed me about the camp: the extent to which Direct Action favours those who have nothing else to offer but their own physical actions, and how I found myself realising that, to take a stand and risk arrest, was easier for those who had the least to lose by doing so. It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it would be for some to take such a stand.
So I’m left wondering just how Christian it is to lobby on behalf of the poor, in a system which will ultimately pat us on the head, say how nice we are, and then do exactly what the economy requires. Yes, there’s the historical connection to many charities which most Christians now feel. But I’m left feeling that any method of government that benefits big organisations, whether corporations or NGO’s, is simply not biblical, and that only through Direct Action can Mary’s song be fulfilled: “the hungry are raised up and the powerful brought low”.
By avoiding means and ends politics, by living and acting in simple ways that don’t restrain us from facing the effects of a confrontation with power, Christians could do so much more to bring about the kingdom of heaven.