7 minute read
Engaging with culture
Engaging with culture
Sarah Harding chats to Graham Tomlin, director of the Centre for Cultural Witness.
Eighteen months ago, Graham Tomlin helped establish the Centre for Cultural Witness, which through its website, Seen & Unseen, aims to provide Christian commentary on cultural issues and the stories that are hitting our headlines.
As a former Bishop of Kensington, Graham was deeply involved in the Church of England’s response to the Grenfell Tower fire. After doing a lot of media work at that time, he began to consider the importance of engaging well on a public stage. He says, “I’ve always been interested in that question of how the church engages with wider culture and how it shares the Christian faith in public, not just at a local level. If I’ve got my two minutes on the radio, how do I say something that is Christian as opposed to just what any community leader would say?”
With an academic background, having taught theology at Oxford University, Graham has also been a regular contributor to The Times and BBC radio, and has written many books and articles, both academic and more popular. Although born in England, he has strong Irish connections, with a mother from Limerick and a father who trained for Baptist ministry in Dublin and he has fond memories of many family holidays spent on the west coast of Ireland.
I think people leave the church…because they no longer see any connection between what happens in church and what happens in the rest of their life.
He explains that the Centre for Cultural Witness is aiming to “generate a thoughtful, intelligent Christian witness in contemporary culture that would offer direct communication, speaking to people outside the church; training, for both younger and senior leaders in public witness; and carry out research too.” Although it’s a tall order, Graham is clearly passionate about the importance of this remit and the difference it can make in our society.
The topic of cultural engagement can be a controversial one for the church. Why it is important for us not to ignore it?
I think there are two extremes with this. One is that we, as the Christian church, speak our message in a way that has no connection at all to people who are outside the church. They cannot relate to it because it doesn’t connect in any way with their lives.
The other extreme is that we just go with the flow. And we end up saying exactly what everybody in the wider culture says. And we just do it in a way that has a vaguely religious tinge to it.
It seems to me neither of these positions really help us communicate the gospel. What is needed is a kind of engagement with culture so that what we say about Jesus Christ, what we say about the gospel, shows what a difference that makes to the way you live your life – from the way we might run our society, to the way we might do our relationships.
When we look back over the history of the church, we see that the church has grown at times when it has engaged. It has spoken the gospel in terms that connect with the desires, longings and hopes of a culture, but offers something very different from what that culture offers. You could say that about the early church, or the time of the Reformation, or the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In very general terms, how would you describe the British/Irish culture of 2024?
I think we almost need to talk about cultures rather than culture because there are lots of different cultures around. You go to one part of the UK or Ireland and you’ll find a different culture from another part. But having said that, I think there are certain things you can say more generally about the kind of drift that our culture has.
One thing is the primacy of the individual. We are quite an individualist culture that says: no one can tell me what to do; no one can tell me how I should live my life. I have sovereignty; I have autonomy over my life.
We’re also a consumerist society – we see ourselves primarily as consumers rather than producers. We’re consumers of goods, of information, of material. That’s how we justify ourselves.
At the same time though, there’s a kind of strange mix of materialism and interest in spirituality. There are elements of our culture that are deeply materialistic – to say that material things are all that there is. But at the same time, I think there’s a kind of growing openness to the spiritual. I think we’ve gone down the line of secularising culture to the extent that people are now beginning to be a little bit tired of what secularism offers, therefore realising that a purely materialistic view of the world doesn’t really answer all the questions.
…people are now beginning to be a little bit tired of what secularism offers…
How do you view church decline in relation to culture?
I think people leave the church, not usually because they stop believing in God. They leave because they no longer see any connection between what happens in church and what happens in the rest of their life. And that’s why I think the pandemic had such an impact on church going, because a lot of people who were in the habit of church going, stopped. Then when things opened up again, they thought, “Well why was I going anyway?” So, they never really re-engaged. That’s why I think cultural witness really matters, because it helps Christians see that their faith has got something to say about things like the Israel/Gaza war, or about the cost-of-living crisis, or about the Post Office scandal.
Cultural debate can be difficult. How does the Centre aim to do it well?
One of the things we said when we set out on this journey was – we’ll critique ideas, but we won’t critique people. So much of public discourse today is about attacking people. But one thing that helps to get around that is critiquing ideas, but not people. I think the second thing is to try to be gracious in what we do, so we’ll try to aim for a tone which is not aggressive, which is not angry, which is thoughtful, which is measured.
What do you hope to achieve through the website Seen & Unseen?
We call it Seen & Unseen because we all know the ‘seen’ things – law, politics, economics, sport etc – but we want to open people’s eyes to the ‘unseen’ realities. So, I think that’s our task – to read culture asking: what is the dimension of the ‘unseen’ in this particular story? How does the gospel help you see this issue in a whole different light, and in a much more creative and positive light than secular options would give?
We say to all our authors – always write for the person outside the church – never write for the Christian. Now, we’re very aware, most people who read the site, will be Christians. But we find that by writing for the person outside the church, it helps the Christian but also, it’s the kind of thing you can easily pass on to someone who isn’t a Christian. And that’s part of the vision. It can be quite hard to start a conversation about faith, but it’s easy to email somebody a link to an article, or post it on a WhatsApp group. It’s a tool that they can use to help share their faith, to spark conversations, and to open other people’s eyes to the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
For more information, go to www.culturalwitness.org or www.seenandunseen.com
