Author Mohsin Hamid has published a new novel, The Last White Man, about a white American who wakes up one morning to discover he has become “dark-skinned”. Over the course of the novel, more and more white people become similarly transformed.
In interviews and articles in the Guardian and Observer Hamid says he thinks of himself as a “thoroughly hybridised human being”. He has lived in three countries, Pakistan, the US and the UK, for extended periods of his life. Someone like him, he says, has difficulty thinking of their identity as just one thing. The current impulse towards purity, towards identifying the “true people” of different countries or religions, of being “British” or “white American” or “Muslim” is fundamentally at odds with who he is. He thinks the impulse to group identity is becoming overwhelming – and threatening to us all.
Reading about Hamid, I thought of his understanding of identity in the context of the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops of all colours and nationalities and sexualities taking place in Canterbury at the moment. I see the dispute about LGBTQIA+ people that continues to haunt and obsess the Anglican Communion potentially overwhelming the Church, threatening to destroy the well-being of us all. It is already dangerously eroding the core Christian values and teachings that are the essence of life for me as a follower of Jesus. The Church pours resources and energy into a decades-long conflict about the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of people’s identity. This Anglican conflict is taking place in a world grappling with horrific environmental issues in what seem to be decreasingly tolerant societies.
I, Colin, priest and activist, think the dynamic of the Anglican Communion and the Church of England as Christian bodies is incredibly dangerous. I have stepped back from church attendance because of the danger to the health of my soul. I choose to live a contemplative Christian life independently of organised church activities because I perceive them to be at best, missing the mark and at worst, toxic and abusive and nothing to do with the tradition and divine/humane vision of Jesus.
The trajectory of human society
In the Guardian article, Hamid asks whether fiction can help us imagine a different future. He writes about an experiment carried out in 2017 at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. The experiment simulated cooperation and competition between machines. It identified that empire-building machines do three things increasingly well: identifying differences that permit sorting into categories of like-me and not-like-me, cooperating with those in the like-me category, and destroying those in the not-like-me category. The Church of England is becoming dangerously like an empire-building machine, sorting us into categories, acceptable and unacceptable.
The sorting narrative is similar to one Hamid has been drawn to himself:
“. . . that the rise and fall of human society is not merely something that has happened but also something that will continue to happen, that moments of peak cooperation contain within them the tendency for differences to become utterly intolerable, and that the transition from one societal epoch to the next is rarely a series of gently eliding waves, each a bit higher than the previous one – to the contrary, humanity’s trajectory on the way down is often far more steep than it was on the way up.”
We are finding that our differences are becoming more intolerable. When empires that span diverse populations disintegrate, history suggests that the potential for conflict is high. Christianity in general and the churches of the Anglican Communion in particular are not immune from this dynamic. Christianity does not have a magic, divine ingredient that protects the church from developments taking place in the ‘secular’ world.
Like-me and not-like-me
As empires diminish in our era, aggressive sectarian impulses are seemingly in the ascendant. It is our impulse to sort, says Hamid, people into those like-me and those not-like-me.
I perceive the impulse to sort traditional, orthodox, Bible-believing Christians from progressive, inclusive Christians to be an example of this. Twenty-five years on from the Kuala Lumpur Global South conference the conflict over gay sexuality and intimacy has never gone away. It has broken out again at Lambeth 2022 and is dominating the agenda. The organisers have not been able to control it. They were seemingly unaware that it is not controllable.
In the last two decades, say Hamid, we have become “attached to our screens, merged with the machine culture behind those screens, and changed far more than we understand. The machine world is a binary world . . . and we have learned to apply those zeros and ones to our thinking, intensifying our impulse to sort one another into like-me and not-like-me. We are already predisposed to sort excessively and to fetishise tests of purity.”
The like-me/not-like-me dynamic is strongly present at this Lambeth Conference – and three of the most powerfully not-like-me Provinces have chosen, for a second time, not to come at all.
I am always in danger of overreacting in response to attitudes within the Church of England and the Anglican Communion that I perceive to be homophobic, transphobic, prejudiced and sometimes abusive. Mohsin Hamid urges us to seek a more inclusive, equitable future - but how to do that when the dominant majority are opposed to inclusion and equality justified by the authority of God and the Bible?
Literature
Hamid says that:
[L]iterature, fortunately, is a profoundly weird creature, capable of being zero and one at the same time. A strange thing happens when we read novels. We are simultaneously ourselves and not ourselves. We are ourselves because we are alone, in solitude, without anyone else present. And yet we are not ourselves because we contain within us the consciousness of another person, the writer. This consciousness is transmitted in the form of words, words that we readers animate into people and emotions and images and events. Reading a novel is to experience two consciousnesses present in one body, reader and writer co-creating their novel as it is read, a novel unique to each reader-writer pairing, because it has been imagined into being jointly. The self while reading is uncanny, a plurally conscious peculiarity: transgressive, fertile, and very much at play.”
The Bible is literature, the most profound wisdom literature - mystical, prophetic and visionary. It is seen by traditionalist Christians as being in some way authored, not by human agents but by God. For them, to suggest that it is ‘merely’ literature, akin to a novel, is to downgrade the Bible’s divine authority and status. This feeds dangerously into the like-me, not-like-me dynamic that is tearing the Anglican Communion and possibly with it, the Church of England, apart.
Hamid says we are in a dynamic present when reading a novel. The dynamic present is, for me, essential when I read the Bible. It reinforces my commitment to the practice of silent, solitary, contemplative prayer. The practice is essential if I am to become conscious of and open myself to the simultaneous presence of my consciousness and the consciousness of another person, whether I imagine that as the human authors of the Bible or the Mystery some name as God, who we might also imagine as being present to the Biblical authors. A commitment to contemplative practice is not evident in today’s Church. I believe it is more than ever necessary if we are to create a better, more inclusive, and more equitable future.
What it is to be me
Hamid says a strange thing happens when he writes. “There is a an aspect of desiring to communicate what it is to be me and also an aspect of desiring not to be me, of opening a portal, of leaving myself behind, of being elsewhere, other places, of inhabiting from the inside other imagined people.” This is, for me, a rich description of the mysterious experience of reading the Bible and of digesting the experience in contemplative prayer.
Hamid also wishes to be free of himself, “free of his habits and his ways and his constant performances, the rituals of enacting himself that endure out of habit, sometimes even in the absence of true faith that the person I am playing and the person I am are one and the same.” This, also, is something I am aware of when I meditate and pray, when the habitual conscious separation, between the not-very-present-to-myself me and the very-present-within-and-around-me love of God begins to melt.
There is a wonderful, unresolved tension between the two, one we often shy away from but which remains when, in prayer, I am attempting to be fully present and fully human, fully myself, and at the same time being convicted that to be more fully myself, I am called to transgress many of the ideas that others claim to be fundamental to Christian belief and practice if I am to be open to the divine presence.
Hamid notes that our constructs of God and reality are not stable. They sprang into existence not so very long ago, they are constantly changing, and one day they will be gone. Meanwhile we risk being trapped in a dangerous and decadent tyranny of binaries. Can Christianity evolve and help us develop the courage to investigate the space between the ones and zeroes, the like-me/not-like-me, the space that in the Church can presently seem impossible, but, when entered, when occupied, continues to expand and expand, bending and stretching and eventually, possibly, revealing its unexpected capacity for encompassing us all?