At the Oscars Jonathan Glazer’s movie The Zone of Interest won the award for the best international film. It was inspired by the real life of Rudolf Hoss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows his idyllic domestic life with his wife and children in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the camp.
Describing the atmosphere he attempted to capture in the film, Glazer said: ”All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now’.” It’s not that Hoss and his family don’t know that an industrial scale killing machine is at work just the other side of their garden wall. They have simply learned to lead contented lives with what Glazer describes as ambient genocide. He has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the Holocaust but something more enduring and persuasive: the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them. “What do we do,” he asks, “to interrupt the momentum of trivialisation and normalisation? That is the question so many of us are struggling with right now.”
My Zone of Interest
Glazer’s Oscar acceptance speech jolted me into awareness of my own zone of interest. Homosexuals were also victims of the Nazis, incarcerated and murdered in the death camps. The Church of England today, contrary to what I believe to be the Christian path of unconditional love, wisdom, and evolutionary history, is normalising and institutionalising the abuse of and prejudice against LGBTQIA+ people by not challenging the dominant OmniGod theologies that legitimise homophobia and transphobia (and misogyny and racism). Omni-God is the name given by Linda Woodhead to the ever-present childhood images of God, God as an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-controlling, omniscient being.
We live in an evolving universe, the ‘creation’ of God. This is the nature of reality the cosmos, whether we think scientifically or believe in divine origins or synthesise the two. The world is changing and evolving. Global cultures and religious systems evolve and change. Conservatives identify progressive changes in Christian thinking as abandoning the foundational, orthodox doctrines of the Christian faith as the Church of England has received it. One comment on Thinking Anglicans put it like this:
“the account of the Christian Faith that is the same faith of the church catholic: from Origen and Irenaeus, from Antioch to Alexandria, to Augustine, Jerome, Bede, the Cappadocians, Gregory the Great, all the great monastics (Honoratus and Cassian to Benedict, Bernard and the Cistercians, the monks of la Trappe), Aquinas, and then disputants at the Reformation period (Luther, Sixtus, Clementine, Calvin, Erasmus, Bellarmine, et al).
This Christian Church of Catholic origins, doctrine and creedal affirmations is also the Christian Church of the Crusades, the slaughter of Moslems, the Inquisition, the torture and burning of Protestants, and “the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them.” It is an Omni-God version capable of terrifying beliefs and acts and. I, for one, am terrified that Donald Trump, idol of the Republican Christian right, might be elected President of the United States later this year.
Christianity is changing
The world is changing; Christianity is changing; the way we imagine God is changing; the fundamentals of Christian belief are changing. Human understanding of ourselves, our environment, our moral and ethical codes, the spiritual and dogmatic elements of our faith, all are changing. Our unmasking of the abuse and prejudice that has characterised Christian churches in recent decades, characteristic especially of those immersed in the old, traditional, orthodox, ‘Biblical’ models and systems of belief, is slowly changing the church – slowly. The Church of England is showing scandalous resistance to learning the lessons and changing the systems of belief and practice that result in systemic abuse.
I have had to re-examine my own norms and assumptions about the fundamentals of Christian belief, returning again and again to the Gospels and their account of the life, wisdom, teaching and ministry of Jesus.
I’ve written recently about living ‘as if’ the essence of Jesus’ teaching is valid for my life. I have to do this in the context of a Church of England where conservative, orthodox, evangelical, catholic, progressive and radical tribal groupings are caught up in the defence of their particular values in the midst of our sexuality and gender conflicts.
Doctrines, creeds and dogma
All human statements about God are overlaid by cultural conditioning and the fact that the perception of reality will differ between people. Any human attempt to define an infinite, unconditional God must, by definition, fall far short of actuality.
The basic Christian doctrines and writings contained in the New Testament were not laid down by Jesus or even the by any of the original twelve disciples. The process of recording the faith was started many years after Jesus’ death by Paul.
The creedal statements of the Anglican Church were formulated some 1500 years ago, half a century after the death of Jesus. They are the product of inference, experience and reflection settled at an arbitrary point in human history and evolution. The creeds were formulated amid huge political turmpil and power struggles, the products of fierce debate, negotiation and compromise.
Subsequently, any further significant development or refinement of the creeds has been denied, leaving Churches struggling to find a new identity and purpose in contemporary society, preferring to remain echo chambers preserving fixed and archaic views of God and of themselves and their purpose.
Who is responsible for decline?
Conservatives claim that declining numbers in progressive congregations are the result of progressive, non-Biblical, non-orthodox, non-traditional, non-creedal formulations of Christianity. I claim that declining numbers are due to people abandoning the Church because people think traditional theologies are no longer believable. I claim that Salvation theologies and Penal Substitution theologies adhered to by conservatives are responsible for abuse and prejudice in Christianity and reinforce people’s decision to abandon the Church. The Church of England system has committed itself to and HTB theology because it achieves growth – numerical success. In the end, we all get drawn into an argument about numbers. The right version of Christianity is the one that grows more and has the highest numbers. For conservatives, the proof of this lies in Global South success and North American declining numbers.
The majority of Anglican leaders, if not convinced by this success/failure scenario, are nevertheless persuaded one way or another to give it the HTB church planting model a try, or at least, in England, tolerate it because it has almost total control of resources and money. The result is a Church with theological, moral and ethical values that are damaging and dangerous to health and well being of LGBTQIA+ people, and less obviously, to everyone’s health and well-being and vision of God.
The Church of England’s Living in Love and Faith process is proving to be a total failure in terms of confronting whether the Church wants to prioritise safeguarding and the reality of abusive leaders and teaching the LLF model perpetrates. The belief in Omni-God trumps the teaching of Jesus. You know - the obvious things like God is love; God is known through your experience of life and your environment and your neighbours; the parables of the kingdom; life in all its fullness. I have visions and receive inspiration from the Spirit within me and in which I live and move and have my being – as do we all. The problem isn’t that I am right and everyone else is wrong. The problem is that humankind has lost its grip on the discernment of healthy and unhealthy models of life and belief, the fire and passion for truth and justice pursued by Jesus and compassion for the poor and marginalised.
A fire, a passion for love, truth and justice burns within me and around me. What is happening in our social, political and economic systems worldwide, in the climate crisis confronting our planet, in our religious systems, particularly Christianity, is damaging humanity’s health and well-being. In his speech Glazer said he wanted his film to provoke uneasy thoughts. He saw the darkening world around us, had the feeling that he had to do something about our similarities to the perpetrators rather than the victims, reminding us that annihilation is never as far away as we might think. In the recent past slavery, the Jim Crow south, lynching, apartheid, the Rwandan genocide come to mind; and in our contemporary world, Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Russia, Haiti, the declining social fabric of the UK.
The whole reason for the edifices of humanitarian law and order that were erected following the Second World War was to ensure that we would have the tools to collectively identify dangerous patters before history repeated itself on such a scale. Some of the patterns are being repeated now, including within and by the Christian Church. What do we have to do to change attitudes, to become more conscious, aware of the dangers and of what we can do as individuals and communities, Christian communities, to interrupt and transform this dangerous momentum?