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Thought Forgery

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I have begun experimenting with artificial intelligence. Using the available free programmes I am exploring how AI might be used, and what risks or concerns need to shape my approach. It is fascinating – if a little disconcerting. For example, last week I resurrected the towering Anglican Archbishop of the 20th century, William Temple. I asked ChatGPT what Archbishop Temple might say to the Church of England today. At lightening speed, after presumably trawling all available Temple content in cyberspace – and assessing the state of the Church of England today – the headline answer emerged as follows:

Temple might say:

“The Church must never be merely the chaplain of the comfortable, but always the conscience of the nation. We are stewards not just of grace, but of justice.”

From what I know of Temple’s writing, and my awareness of the Church of England today, this isn’t half bad, or inconsistent with Temple’s thought. Who else might we resurrect to offer their historical voice to the contemporary world?

As any tutor will tell you, AI is plaguing the world of academia. Not only are students asking programmes to write their essays, but as a consequence, numbers are falling in lectures. Why bother going to the class if you aren’t going to be the one producing the work? One of the greatest challenges for markers is spotting and addressing an excessive use of ChatGPT. After all, this is not plagiarism. AI produces unique content depending on the question asked and the time of asking. I imagine, as time goes on, that AI will become bespoke and personalised for the user, mimicking their mistakes and linguistic styles. This will be all but impossible to identify and may be the path back to some element of supervised examination.

If not plagiarism, then perhaps AI is best described as forgery. I have no idea whether my blogs have been mined by AI, or my books scanned and absorbed. In generating Temple’s pithy comment to the CofE today, AI hasn’t copied his words – but created them based on what cyberspace contains of Temple’s own work and the many commentators on his theology and public statements. This is why it is becoming so difficult to tell fact from fiction and, into this space of doubt, a whole world of mischief can be wrought. When something sounds so like someone, how do we know if it is true? Similarly, it casts doubt on photographs and their authenticity which, in somewhere like Gaza, can both undermine genuine evidence of war crimes and simultaneously manufacture material that conceals what is going on.

Photo by Beyzaa Yurtkuran on Pexels.com

Undoubtedly, AI has arrived and is here to stay. The questions is, how are we to live in a world where the level of power and sophistication demonstrated by AI continues to grow. Media outlets like the BBC have an important role to play in fact-checking and evaluating the validity of information. They will not be perfect, but few individuals will have the time or skills to do this for themselves.

For better or for worse, I won’t be using AI to write or proof my blogs. Perhaps we need this kind of statement on material that is published, indicating the level of AI usage, from entire authorship to copy-editing. In the meantime, I imagine that everything I write will be scoured, consumed and used to inform the continuing development of artificial intelligence. Thoughts will increasingly emerge that are second-hand amalgams, seemingly undetectable forgeries that don’t arise out of direct experiences, but appear uncannily authentic. I wonder what would William Temple say about that?

God in the City

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In the late 1980s I spent a year as a youth worker in the Isle of Dogs. The youth club operated in the crypt of Christ Church, and catered for local children up to the age of 11. Although I’d lived and studied in Hull, this was the first time I worked in an urban context. At that time much of the East End was undergoing the transformation from urban poverty to city banks and their associated wealth. Sparkling new buildings were springing up alongside docks where once no one had wanted to live. I was told that in those days taxi drivers had refused to drive into the island at night. During the 1980s the two communities, old and new, lived together uneasily. Some in the increasingly expensive gated estates, others in the council housing that was yet to be sold.

In my new role as Director of Leeds Church Institute I am once again reflecting on the relationship of ‘faith and the city’. Incidentally, it’s exactly 40 years since the report with that title was published by the Church of England, to be met with the ire of Mrs Thatcher and many other conservative voices. In the mildest of possible forms, perhaps this was the C of E’s modest response to the influence of liberation theology – the school of praxis and thought which arose chiefly in the favelas of Latin America. However, one of the criticisms of the report was its lack of a significant and developed theology to frame its analysis and recommendations. A subsequent publication, Theology in the City, responded to this criticism, partly arguing that the alleged lacuna arose from the misunderstanding of the more implicit theological approach Faith in the City had embodied.

During a year in Argentina I read Gutierrez’s classic work Teología de la liberación. Living in Córdoba and Buenos Aires, I grew more and more aware of the particular dynamics of city living, with rich and poor living cheek by jowl. A few metres apart, but separated in their different worlds by steel and security. Cities concentrate divisions in way often unseen in more rural settings. Gutierrez inspired a way of thinking that reflected his conviction, based on a liberative hermeneutics of the Bible, that God has a preferential love for the poor. This understanding led many followers of liberation theology to locate themselves alongside the poor, exhibiting a commitment to share and to learn before even considering the option to teach.

After years in which the power of the Church was used to contain and constrain liberation theology, the Pontificate of Francis marked a sea-change of significance. Rather than beginning with doctrine and only seeing the world through its parameters, Francis favoured attention to concrete situations and experiences as the place from which theology emerged. This was reflected most keenly in his persistent interest in the wellbeing of the poor and his sometimes stern address to the world’s wealthy and powerful (be they institutions or individuals).

The Church cannot abandon the city, because every city is its people. If cities shelter some of the poorest people in society then God’s preference and presence cannot be ignored. As a chaplain in Leeds for 16 years I was privileged to meet the whole spectrum of city dwellers although, poverty and illness being what they are, those encounters were weighted towards the most marginalised people in Leeds. In the conduct of funerals funded by the hospital (due to lack of means and/ore relatives) I visited homes whose meagre furnishings reminded me that, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions’. It would seem that when the balance favours the rich, with wealth removing many of the burdens of everyday life, the opposite end of the scale descends; as the weight of poverty, exclusion and injustices mount, one on top of another. As Francis wisely knew, a rich Church will never be sufficiently open to allow God to use it as a means to rectify and redress the fundamental injustices of the city. As he declared shortly after coming into office: “How I would like a church that is poor and for the poor”.

Where the Heart is

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On holiday I am enjoying the time to read three very different books. One is poetry; another a novel; and the third theology. Despite being different, I am also seeing (or making) many connections between the narratives. This is unsurprising in one sense as I am their common denominator: the one reading. Like the handmade and unique marbled pages in each of the first edition volumes of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, we perceive our own patterns as we mark and experience the stories mediated by print.

I came to A Dark and Stormy Night by Tom Stacey via an unusual route. At home we have a sculpture bequeathed by an old friend. In doing some research about the sculptor I came across the fact that her husband was a writer. In this novel, a bereaved suffragan bishop – a Dante scholar – gets lost in a forest in darkness while seeking a redundant chapel. It is notable that the bishop lived with and through his wife’s dementia – something Tom Stacey knew about at first hand. His description of this resonates strongly with what I experienced of my mother’s cognitive decline several years ago. Stacey’s insight evidently comes from deep and costly personal experience:

You are forever packing and re-packing to go home. To tell you we are at home only serves to rile you. This lost inner home of yours is never locatable.

Transgressing the boundaries of normal or accepted behaviour is a strong theme of Allan Boesak’s Children of the Waters of Meribah. Boesak is a South African theologian with an abiding commitment to liberation theology.

In a chapter exploring the story in Matthew’s Gospel of the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus seeking healing for her daughter, Boesak conducts a masterclass in hermeneutics. Experience shapes both writing and reading. Unsurprisingly, Boesak is alert to the location of this account:

She is a Canaanite, the people whose land had been conquered and occupied by Jesus’s people.

What should have been home was no longer home or, at least, a place now made strange and punitive. The experience of being South African leads Boesak, and the scholars he cites, to read this account with the painful insight of experience. The woman comes to Jesus in a “spirit of protest and reclamation”.

The final book is a collection of poetry by Koleka Putuma entitled Collective Amnesia. It is a work that has set records in South Africa in terms of poetry sales. Inevitably, with a heritage of the Group Areas Act, this is a nation that continues to live with “ongoing collective trauma” for countless reasons, not least the dispossession of peoples’ homes. Putuma writes out of her experience with skill, candour and wit.

You will realise that the elders in the room

Learned the alphabet of hurting and falling apart differently

For you, healing looks like talking and transparency

For them, it is silence and burying

And both are probably valid

And

Then

You will realise

That

Coming home

And

Going home

Do not mean the same thing

From the poem ‘Graduation’ in the book ‘Collective Amnesia’ by Koleca Putuma

Sins of the Fathers

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Until Ash Wednesday I had never thought my ancestry was connected to slavery. My forebears were working class people, engaged in factory labour and domestic weaving. They acquired no wealth and owned no property. Like so many in Lancashire in the 19th century they were caught up in the Industrial Revolution, trying as best as they could to survive. However, their connection to slavery was to spin the cotton that was at the heart of the exploitation of people and the associated growth in international trade.

It may seem odd to think of this as a connection with slavery. The usual focus is on the wealthy institutions that owned slaves, controlled plantations or invested in the transatlantic trade. However, it was a business that involved almost everyone. From governments to the academy, the creation of public libraries and art galleries, the economic benefits gained from slavery are in the fabric of British society. While there is a range of opinion about the precise economic advantage that resulted from transatlantic slavery, it is estimated that the British working class benefited by a small but significant rise in their living standard:

The change in worker welfare is the population-weighted average of the change in the real wage in each location and equals 3.06 percent, implying substantial welfare gains for domestic free workers from the enslavement and exploitation of black Africans in colonial plantations.

Heblich, S., Redding, S. J., & Voth, H. J. (2022). Slavery and the british industrial revolution.

It is understandable that Ash Wednesday made me think of this connection. Isaiah tells us: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” Sadly, one of the most grievous sins of our age is the toleration of inequality and the yawning gulf that exists between rich and poor. At the end of a year living in Argentina, almost 40 years ago, I had a conversation with my Spanish teacher. During my time in South American I had witnessed the severe challenges facing many communities. In my early 20s, I undoubtedly had a more passionate idealism than I do today. I asked her how I could return to my life in the UK knowing about the huge disparities in wealth and power which I’d seen. The answer was: “you’ll get used to it; you’ll feel differently over time”. It was a wise and accurate prophecy. It might be the greatest sin to accept – even joyfully embrace – this kind of moral anesthesia. To remain untroubled by the way of the world or simply wring our hands at the daily TV news, saying: “if only there was something we could do!”

The scriptures for Lent speak about lament that leads to action. We are not required to exhibit our distress, or acts of justice, but we are required to feel the shocking truth of the reality that our world falls far short of the Kingdom of God. It is only when we see and understand the terrible reality of a world which is constructed by entrenched inequality that we can ever hope to find a different path. It is tempting to see ourselves as unconnected from the blasphemous operation of transatlantic slavery, but the economic advantage it delivered is rooted in the institutions of the West (not least the Church). Work is being done to respond to this truth, but it is yet to be seen how successful it will be in achieving any kind of restitution. We speak of both financial currency and the body’s blood being in “circulation”. Money earned through oppression and slavery may be produced in on particular place but, once it is in the financial system, it becomes impossible to point at one part of the economic body and say “it isn’t there”. How would we know with complete certainty?

The bonds of injustice continue to shape our world. Visiting South Africa I am reminded once again of the legacies of slavery, not least in the system of apartheid. The abolition of laws is one thing, but the calling to be awake and alert for the ingrained divisions of an unequal world requires soul-work if we are to prevent the slide backwards into attitudes now surfacing in the USA and elsewhere. Restitution is more than reparations and requires a profound recognition of an evil which must be countered step by step, each and every day.

“Slavery cannot end through laws alone. We who survived were taught to hate ourselves, our bodies, our histories. I learned this in the way that I held my body as a thing despised, ashamed. Why do we need a museum of slavery? Surely the cobbles, the walls and the hills scream of that past. But outside all we hear is the forgetfulness of the city. Here, in this museum, we will call again into memory our languages, our resistances, the worlds we made in the city of slavery”

Quotation from Gebeba Baderoon, 2020, in the Museum of Slavery, Cape Town, South Africa

A Modern Nativity

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As Christmas approaches, and the end of the year draws close, thank you to everyone who has taken the time in 2024 to read one of these blogs. As always, much has happened in the past twelve months, not least in those places still torn apart by violence and destruction. Our Christmas carols arm us not with weapons, but with the foolish hope of peace. The only humane, sane and holy hope which befits the dignity of creatures made in the image of God: and for whom in turn, and with astonishing grace, God chose to become human.

Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!

From the Carol ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’

A Modern Nativity by Miles David Moore

A noise at midnight in my garden shed
Drove the dog nuts. We stumbled out to see
A newborn baby sleeping peacefully
Inside a rag-stuffed wheelbarrow bed.
His mom and daddy stared at me with dread –
Two shabby working folks society
Cut loose. The single light bulb, hanging free,
Gathered a glow around the baby’s head.

What happened next? I’m not sure I can say.
I can’t describe just how I felt, or feel.
I heard a voice intoning, ‘You can stay’.
It offered them some blankets and a meal.
The dog stopped barking, which is not his way.
I had no earthly clue a dog could kneel.

Published in The Poet’s Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Faith, Doubt and Wonder Ed. by Brennan, O., Swift, T. with Davio, K. and Cate Myddleton-Evans. Eyewear Publishing 2016.

The Matter of Time

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It is well over 20 years since I last visited Bilbao. This bustling northern city of Spain, and the largest in the Basque Country, lies in an impressive location between two small mountains ranges and the sea. It is full of local character and boasts impressive museums and galleries. The Guggenheim Museum, which opened in 1997, is a spectacular work of art in itself with its distinctive curved and shinning exterior. Frank Gehry’s waterside masterpiece claims that very rare accolade of being praised equally by critics, academics and the general public.

Inside the Guggenheim are the vast and imposing creations of Richard Serra, who died earlier this year. When I was last in Bilbao some of the steel structures were in place, but not all. I can remember walking around the curved and towering sides of this massive installations and experiencing the dizzying effects of being inside these metal behemoths. Today, walking around and within the complete set of structures is an even more spectacular assault to the senses. Light, space and sound are distorted in ways that question our certainties and give the world back to us in unexpected ways. In a venue visited by tourists from all over the world, words from many different languages echo around the soaring sides of steel, creating a Babel-like atmosphere of mythic confusion. For Serra the whole experience was intended to shape our awareness of time as, walking around the pieces, our perception bounces between the unexpected and the slow unfolding of different spaces.

“The meaning of the installation will be activated and animated by the rhythm of the viewer’s movement. Meaning occurs only through continuous movement, through anticipation, observation and recollection”.

Richard Serra – about the installations entitled “A Matter of Time”

This is what art offers us at its best – the opportunity to move beyond what we assume and project. To begin to perceive different possibilities and opportunities. It is little wonder that so much of the status quo in politics and elsewhere operates to curtail investment in such projects. The narrow measures of cost and benefit have little scope for calculating the value of these artistic expressions. In the political manifestoes currently on offer in the UK neither of the main parties offer any detailed vision for public art or community creativity. As Richard Serra said on more than one occasion: “art is purposely useless…” – which is part of its magic for humanity, as well as the reason politicians are unlikely to spend very much time speaking about it.

Better Answers

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Our visit to Cape Town created a palpable mix of emotions, thoughts, and insights. Encountering a world that is similar to and, simultaneously, different from the context of the UK can be a rich experience. From township Sunday worship conducted in Xhosa to the vistas from Table Mountain, including that distant icon of the horrors of apartheid: Robben Island.

Amongst all this I took the opportunity to meet colleagues at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Stellenbosch. In its own way, Stellenbosch is a very different emblem of apartheid. Its colonial era buildings communicate the purpose, wealth, privilege and power that enabled European-style institutions to rise in South Africa, and in so many other parts of the world. It was here that the nightmare of apartheid was conceived and developed.

Stellenbosch University has inextricable ties to the formulation of Apartheid Ideology and the formalisation of Afrikaans as academic language, and was thus central to the cultivation of Afrikaner Nationalism in the 20th century.

Stellenbosch University website

Thankfully a great deal has changed at Stellenbosch in recent years. In meeting members of the Faculty we were able to hear about the various initiatives and projects where theology is contributing to the Church’s work – and more widely. For example, this includes a key role in the ‘Courageous Conversations’ work that has brought together the parties involved in mining to address the working conditions and injustices faced by workers in the industry.

Canon Desmond Lambrecht, chaplain to the University, was kind enough to follow up our encounter at Stellenbosch with a visit while the group I was travelling with spent some days at the Volmoed Retreat centre. In our further discussions about chaplaincy Desmond gave me a copy of a book written by Allan Boesak: Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters (2017). This prophetic critique of Empire provides an excellent analysis of the persisting struggles and waves of nonviolent revolution across the globe. Boesak argues that this is evidence that we are not living in a post-racial and post-apartheid world, and that the Church has a critical role to play as a prophetic voice – a role Boesak finds it is failing to embrace.

A central plank of Boesak’s argument is found in the words of Pope Frances, when the Pontiff castigated the ‘globalisation of indifference’. A situation where we get excited about the latest digital device to enter the market while remaining comfortably numb to the egregious disparities of wealth and opportunity that are tolerated within a system of established injustice. In the West we travel on corridors which conveniently separate us from the sights and sounds of this economic apartheid. Standing outside a township church two weeks ago we became aware of how low and how loud the jets were as they came into land at Cape Town International airport. Silent forces continue to locate the poor in the places where others have no intention of living – and where the unaffordability and impracticality of double glazing mean that the sound and intrusion of the exhaust fumes of wealth are ever present.

Part of this indifference lies in our acceptance of poor answers to the challenges we face. Only in an economic system where relationships, communities and individuals are given little intrinsic value is it possible to operate the commercialism we take for granted. More than take for granted: comply with and perpetuate. It would be inhumane and illogical to conclude that there are no better answers than those we appear to accept as inevitable. For example, if the Church is comfortable with this status quo it means that its commission to preach the Kingdom of God is being abandoned. The Lord’s Prayer would need to be revised. Of all institutions, the Church cannot accede to the idea that there are no better answers for human society and creation.

Jesus Stood

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Many of us go with the flow and make sure we don’t stand out from the crowd. At least on most topics. There is a human urge to fit in, accompanied by a fear of separation from the mainstream and finding ourselves isolated. Of course there are also people who love to disagree with the herd: the contrarians. Hopefully, somewhere between these polarities, there are people who disagree when they see its necessity; not for the sake of disagreement alone.

One of the most memorable sermons I recall was preached at the University Church in Oxford, sometime around 1984. The preacher was Trevor Huddleston, and his text was about as short as you can get: ‘Jesus stood’. It comes from Mark 10:46 when Jesus and his disciples are on their way out of Jericho and blind Bartimaeus keeps calling out to him. Bartimaeus was not falling in with the crowd. People were telling him to shut up and behave, but he wouldn’t stop. Despite the swell of the crowd and the momentum to leave the city, Jesus stood. It conjures the imagine of the tide breaking upon a rock.

Huddleston spoke about the anti-apartheid movement and the challenge of speaking out in a society where the weight of social expectation was to keep quiet and behave. To collude with systems of oppression designed to privilege the few. Like Jesus leaving Jericho, we need to courage to hear the voices from the edge of the crowd: to stop, to listen and to act.

There is a lot of appeal in going with the crowd and not making a stand. In one of my favourite quotes from Murder in the Cathedral a tempter reminds Thomas of the venal rewards of compliance, saying: ‘the easy man lives to eat the best dinners’. Join the club; keep quiet; do what’s expected and never, never, rock the boat. Such behaviour can bring handsome prizes.

In the Passion Gospel we find Jesus ‘stood before Pilate’ (Matthew 27:11). This time he isn’t there because of a voice heard on the margins. His posture is an enforced sign of respect. By contrast, as we go on to hear a few verses later, power sits to pass judgement. All the robes and symbols of authority, and troops at command, are with Pilate. Jesus is alone. Yet, if there is no choice of posture, there is a choice to be silent. In the face of the choreography of power Jesus fails to conform to the etiquette of the room. He does not plead for his life. He does not give a rambling defence or seek to implicate others. Silence. In the few verses in which this is described it is possible to feel the authority of Pilate ebbing away.

In 2000 I visited Alison Wilding’s remarkable ‘Passion Project’ exhibited at the Dean Clough Gallery in Halifax. One of the larger pieces in the collection comes under the heading ‘Disposition’. It consists of a huge concrete disc towering over a black mat, which appears to grow wavy stalks (it can be seen here). Abstract art demands work from the viewer, even when set in an exhibition with an overall theme. What is going on here? There is a world of difference between the objects – in almost every sense. They appear only to be connected by a tension that lies between them. In a temporal sense Pilate should be the stone – ready to crush whatever pathetic resistance grows out of the Judean darkness. Spiritually, the disc hints at perfection and eternity. It is balanced and complete, requiring nothing from the sprawling stems that stretch upwards. This is a standoff and the stone will not be moved.

“At the heart of this episode of the Passion is both conflict and stand-off. There is a perplexing estrangement between both objects; the scale of one bears no relationship to the other, but the space separating them is tense and compelling. In the dynamic of the sculpture one part is continually brought into focus and deflected by the other”

Alison Wilding, ‘Contract’, exhibition catalogue, October 2000

Those who make this kind of stand seldom come off unscathed. Jesus knows this and he holds no particular hope of release or escape. The machinery of power will take its course and suffering lies ahead. It is beyond the imagination of this anxious and self-interested power that somehow, by battering and breaking this solitary young rabbi, an alternative power will be released into the world. A power that will enable anyone, no matter how poor or peripheral, to receive a dignity that cannot be removed. To become a child of the living God.

Bet Leḥem

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A long time ago I spent a year working as a bread-wrapper – in an ASDA store on that U-bend in the Thames, the Isle of Dogs. This was back in 1988, when the Docklands Light Railway operated, but the foundations for Canary Wharf were still being dug. It was a time of transition, and the supermarket was rumoured to have an annual staff turnover of 110%. The old East End was giving way to a flood of wealth and gentrification that would soon alter the character of the local community, and move low-paid workers elsewhere.

Working in the bakery at the store was an education. It enlightened me about the misleading nature of marketing, as the photo heading this blog illustrates. People might imagine that ‘baked in this store’ equates with ‘made in this store’. Little could be further from the truth. Frozen and chilled goods would arrive, produced in a factory far, far, away. The purpose of the bakery was to finish these products while filling the store with the comforting aroma of freshly baked bread.

As Christmas approached I opted for two overnight shifts. This only ever happened at Christmas. On the nights of 22/23 December, and 23/24, one baker and I staffed the bakery on a shop floor devoid of everyone bar a security guard or two (these were the days before 24/7 opening). The purpose was clear. Anything wrapped after 00:01 hours bore the date of the day yet to dawn. By 8 am whole stacks of baked goods were on the shelves ready for the deluge of shoppers eager for their festive essentials.

At this time of year special foods are synonymous with the season. Dodgy adverts also tend to proliferate, and we are lured into imagining that this gift, or fragrance or food, will enable us to have the perfect Christmas. More often than not, these illusions arrive part-cooked, and never deliver everything the advertising appears to promise.

Bethlehem comes from the Hebrew name ‘Bet Leḥem‘, meaning ‘House of Bread’. In the Bread House Jesus is made human, with all the pain and risk that any birth at that time might occasion. Wesley may be right, following George Herbert, that here is God ‘contracted to a span’, but incarnation isn’t the creation of a bite-size divinity. In Bethlehem and after Bethlehem, Jesus is being made flesh, and fashioned into the saviour he becomes. Bread that will feed the hungry and energise those seeking justice, but sticks in the craw of vested interests, and those bent on retaining privilege and power. I’m not always sure that the Church is advertising accurately the kind of God-incarnate who is ‘bad news’ for some, and a stumbling block to others.

But the child that is Noble and not Mild
He lies in his cot. He is unbeguiled.
He is Noble, he is not Mild,
And he is born to make men wild.

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) From the poem ‘Christmas’

Land and Liberation

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The forced loss of land is probably the chief cause of the world’s most entrenched political and personal discord. In The West Wing, in a throwaway comment about Palestinian resettlement in the episode entitled Gaza, Admiral Fitzwallace remarks: “You know, after 50 years, one option might be to get over it”. The comment doesn’t recognise the enduring wounds of injustice which haunt people who have been forcibly removed from their land. I was reminded about this recently when speaking with some visitors from South Africa. Their families had been relocated during Apartheid under the Group Areas Act. Part of the rationale for this was the argument that they were a growing population and needed more space – which wasn’t available. However, revisiting their original home-town they had noted that many of the areas they were told could not be developed, now had housing. The forced relocation of people, accompanied by lies and coercion, leaves a stain of injustice that lasts much, much longer than 50 years.

The commodification of land is a widely accepted aspect of economic life in the West. However, this was an alien concept for many peoples around the world during colonisation. The protracted, trans-generational misery of exclusion from historic lands continues to blight the lives of indigenous communities around the world. Having land removed, or the rights to access land denied, can contribute to a disintegration of culture, customs and wellbeing that cannot be easily repaired or replaced.

“The current discussion concerning the environmental crisis emphasizes the need for a theology of land. One of the key observations of this thesis is that Indigenous communal identity includes the land, and that has underscored for me the general dislocation from the earth of modern Western people. A theology of creation must move even closer to the earth, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between people and the earth. Indigenous people understand that the Creator put them in a specific place, and this forms a vital part of their identity”.

Aldred, Raymond Clifford. An Alternative Starting Place for an Indigenous Theology. Diss. 2020p. 251

A consideration of indigenous peoples, land and theology must include the religious dimensions and complex politics of a ‘promised land’. While some territories have been ‘virgin’ (from a human perspective), most people around the world are settled on land that was once occupied by someone else. When religious legitimacy is given to the removal of people from land it does nothing to diminish the sense of anger and injustice. The Radio 4 In Our Time series has an episode giving attention to the debates in Spain that following the conquest of indigenous people in South America. The assumed benefit of bringing Christianity to anyone was a key ideological factor in the approach that was taken to land acquisition. Around the world religious ideas, and the Bible in particular, were used selectively to underpin and implement egregious acts of violence and land acquisition.

Land that is understood to be promised is at the heart of many of the most politically complex situations in the world. In the Middle East the desire for peace is met with seemingly intractable complexities of religion; geopolitics and history. Despite the interventions and attempts by many world leaders the situation remains volatile and dangerous (and not only for the Middle East).

“For those who might have heard about what befell the Palestinian Arabs, it is possible that they felt sorry for us, but in the great master plan of God and God’s purposes for history, the Palestinians who were killed by the Zionists in the war and the hundreds of thousands who were dispossessed and became refugees were probably considered collateral damage and a small price to pay compared with what God was accomplishing through the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland”.

Ateek, N. S. (Ed.). (2017). A Palestinian theology of liberation: The Bible, Justice, and the Palestine-Israel conflict. Orbis Books.

In material gathered before the end of Apartheid, RS Sugirtharajah’s work Voices from the Margin there is a case study from South Africa which includes the following comment by a participant:

“We want to live freely as we used to before the white man came. When I was a small boy, my grandfather had land, cattle, sheep, goats, plenty of land that they tilled and could reap good harvests and had cows to milk, And life was good. You felt you had what you wanted. But they took the land away from him; something to do with title deeds and white farmers, and that happened to other blacks as well, and the men had to work for the white farmers or come to town to work. So that’s how we came here”.

Sugirtharajah, R. S. (1991). Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World.

Our ability, or capacity to restrain our intervention, seems to leave only tiny exceptions to the general rule of conquest and assimilation. A combination of economic exploitation, religious mission and academic curiosity has put an end to many distinctive cultures and civilisations. The people of the North Sentinel island might be one of the few remaining cultures almost entirely left alone. When an American missionary was killed on approaching the island even the US State Department decided not to pursue an investigation for murder. We have no idea what ‘murder’ would mean in the culture of the North Sentinelese, or what shared framework of human perception and understanding would enable a fair trial. In an earlier colonial era such acts would legitimate conquest and subjugation.

The legacy of colonialism undoubtedly leaves many indigenous people and communities bearing a burden of injustice. Today, in a different way, it is also these communities which are often those most affected by changes to our climate. A UN independent experts panel has called on the States attending COP27 to “allow for the full and effective participation of indigenous peoples and civil society… Indigenous peoples and civil society play an essential role in the advancement of climate action, and their voices must be heard”. When the voices of indigenous people are absent, or go unheard, humanity’s vision is diminished. This is especially true when such voices come from people often very close to the land, experiencing and lamenting the changes that make their way of live increasingly difficult. As we continue to debate and respond to a crisis from which none of us can escape, the relationship of human beings to land sites at the centre of any meaningful action. Altering our attitudes and perceptions about land, especially its commercial use, is essential for any meaningful sense of liberation.