The Cross in the Closet by Timothy Kurek

The Cross in the Closet

There was a lot of traffic on Facebook about this book a few months back with positive feedback from a lot of friends however the whole premise gave me the creeps so I felt I had to take a look and see if Facebook’s positivity was all hype or if there was actually some worthwhile substance behind it all.

The premise, that Tim Kurek a fundamentalist Southern Baptist spent a year living as a gay man in order to “walk in their shoes” just seems, at best, a bit naf while running the risk of so many clichés that it makes my skin crawl even imagining.

But thank God the book really is not that bad, I will go on to a number of things that were, for me, less than perfect but I feel it is important up front to say that my fears were unfounded – it is a book of great sensitivity, and I think Tim is a really sincere guy who has done a great service to a great many.

The first gap you have to bridge is that the context Tim starts in, the America Conservative Christian “South” which has no real mirror here in the UK, yes we have fundamentalist Christians but they are very much in the minority.  We simply do not have the “Christian” schools and universities that would allow kids it grow up so completely in the bubble of fundamentalist Christianity, as Tim clearly did.  Those who do create that kind of bubble in the UK have to do so in a very conscious counter-cultural way but for Tim and almost everyone he knew growing up the bubble was just normal.  The second gap is that the gay world he stepped into, it’s not like any I have encountered in the UK, it is perhaps a mythical “Gay Community” of the past, and perhaps in Nashville the gay community has by necessity a retro feel.  Walking into a gay bar and finding that everyone wants to talk, wants to know your story and buy you a drink, that there is a gay bar, restaurant, book store and café all on the one street at the centre of a vibrant cultural scene of artists and poets, I don’t know Nashville but I have been a gay man in both “small town” and “big city” UK and I have never come across any where that had this kind of haven on offer. 

But we must put these two gaps to one side, they are the context but not the substance – the substance it turns out has very little to do with being gay and an awful lot to do with being Christian.  The new Bishop of Winchester is busy seeking a vision for our diocese and is in the process championing Tom Wright’s book How God became King – from all that I have heard about it Bishop Tom is on the same lines as our Tim – perhaps he should give living as a gay man a go and see how it strengthens his vision (or perhaps not…).  The point of both books is that the Church loves labels, love the them and us divide, love being right and pointing out to everyone else that they are wrong, and at the end of the day when you add it all up the Church loves hate.  To admit this is to acknowledge that the Church this has very very little to do with an authentic witness and encounter with Jesus.  Jesus in not a “them and us” kind of a guy – Jesus loves only one thing - love itself.  To be authentically Christian is to delight in humanity, in all its weird and wonderful guises.  It is to celebrate the fact that we see in a glass darkly, and others may be seeing something else just as well in their own glass – the very second that we start to think we have all the answers the truth has departed from us.

One really interesting part of the book is after Tim has got over his homophobia and loves his new Gay friends he finds he has a major problem with the Church and with Christians. He comes to see he has exchanged one set of prejudice for another, and so then has to journey on to a place where, while still disagreeing with those Christians would are anti-Gay, he is able to love them.  He radically underlines this point by visiting the Westboro Baptist Church - he challenges us that until with can see that God loves the Phelps and we need to love them too we haven't understood the love of God.  However much we dislike someone’s attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviour there is no get out clause to love.  As the Church of England come to the final round of debates on Women Bishops this challenge to love across the divide has not been lived up to.  I struggle to engage with the organisations which are promoting the places of women and gay people within the Church because I have increasingly seen them as being unable to love across the divide.  The demonising of Forward in Faith, the joyful celebrations when some of our brothers and sisters left for the Ordinariate – none of this spoke of love.  To often these groups have turned to the dark arts of political lobbying rather than the honest declaration of truth to move their position forward – it is never enough to claim that ends justify means - it is not enough to pay lip service to love we must act like we love people to.

This is a powerful book despite itself, it is heavy on dialogue but much of it is clunky – maybe people talk clunkily in Nashville I don’t know – but there are times when it is a struggle to continue to suspend disbelief.  It could also have done with a better proof reading (but who am I to talk…).

That going to Church is such a part of normality is another gap, Tim is writing in a Church going society where as that great Ecumemist of our time, Dolly Parton, said in Steel Magnolias “God doesn’t mind what Church you go to, so long as ya turn up”.

Here in the UK, however much it might disappoint me to admit it, Church going is just not normal – it is not even normal among self defining Christians let alone the population at large.  This means that the denial of a place for Gay people within Church is a much bigger social issue there than is actually is for us – if “society” goes to Church and if you are not welcome in Church then, inter alia, you are not welcome in society while for us Church going is marginal and so the denial of a place for gay people is to denial them a seat at the margins, and seat nobody can really understand why we have a real desire for anyway. 

This is an important book, but I doubt many of the people for whom it could be so important will read it – it will end up (to use an American phrase) preaching to the choir. Part of the reason it won’t be read be the right people is because it is positive about being Gay – in a way I wish it was able to talk about all the important stuff about how Christians don’t have a monopoly of truth and how their calling is to Love not hate and condemn without it being about being Gay and therefore being beyond the pale for those who most need it – but sadly this is always the way.

Perelandra by C. S. Lewis

Perelandra (Cosmic Trilogy)

This is the second of the Cosmic trilogy and it has a much more clearly and straight forwardly allegorical tale based Genesis.  This might appear to be a limitation however the power of the telling is such that this gives a greater depth of feeling for Eden and for Eve. 

The beauty and innocence of Perelandra/Venus means the idea that it will be spoilt by the action of a human (even a human taken over completely by an evil force) becomes genuinely painful, the loss of The Fall became much more real than it had ever felt before for me. 

The persistence of Weston, the tempter, gave me new sympathy for Eve. While Genesis appears to say Eve weakly ate the Apple as soon as it was offered to her the tale of Perelandra makes it easy to imagine that there was in fact a much longer encounter between Eve and the Serpent.  This chimes with our own experience of temptation, often after an extended period that we find ourselves doing that which in the first instance we knew was wrong.

Ransom’s role is perhaps more difficult to resolve because the evil one is defeated by force, the fight is violent and vividly told in a way that is hypnotic – hard to watch and yet impossible to look away.  How this fits into the overall framework of Love that Lewis gives to the story is not clear.

After the fight there is a chase and from this point on my engagement declined. At conclusion of the narrative the King and Queen, figures of Adam and Eve, meet with Ransom.  The King has been absence up until this point and suddenly placing the planet into the hands of a “man”, while dynamic figure of the Queen we have journeyed with seems to play at best second fiddle, jars just a touch. At the very end there is a long pseudo dialogue which is full of great sentiments and ideas, but while it is rich stuff I found myself skimming over this – unlike Ransom I really did feel like they where talking for a year.

Overall I found this a more enriching narrative than that of the first story, “Out of the Silent Planet”, which was a good read but did not really push me to any new levels of thought. 

 

Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin

Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945

This book made a good holiday read (although how tactful it was to sit on a beach mostly full of Germans reading a book about the British success in two World Wars might be open for comment…).

It was divided into two parts, one for each war and in terms of the subject “deception” it quickly becomes clear that the First War was at best a dress rehearsal for the second.  Lessons were only just being learnt when peace arrived in 1918 but many of those who had been learning these lessons were on hand in the later thirties to pick up where they had left off.  

This is a book about “British Genius” and makes no attempt to claim to be a comparative study across the combatant nations of either war but this leaves the claim to “Genius” feeling a little precarious – that all the German Agents sent to Britain during World War Two were captured and most turned into double agents is a success but given the Germans did the same to the British Agents sent to Holland it would be hard to claim this as an example of a particularly “British” Genius. 

Overall while this is an enjoyable collection of characters and incidents the sum fails to be greater than the parts, we seem to jump around in time, place, and topic largely at random (especially in the first part), without any clear organizing argument or thrust or significant new scholarship.  This is also a good point to say a word or two about the title, “Churchill’s Wizards”, I get the feeling this book started life as a book about deception in the Second World War which grew to take in the First as the “back-stories” of so many of the leading characters required tales from that War to be included.  During the Second World War Churchill’s theatrical and maverick tendencies did give fertile ground to deception, especially around 1940 when Britain was under resourced with its back to the wall, it seems the more outlandish the scheme the more likely it was to get a Prime Ministerial blessing. But for most of the First War Churchill was in no position to give such blessing and any Wizards that were around could not in any proper sense by call “Churchill’s.  Rankin also make a spirited attempt to exonerate Churchill from the carnage of Gallipoli, suggesting that the campaign was only a failure to the extent and in those areas which it deviated at others command from Churchill’s original plan.  This all leaves one wondering if someone so securely enthroned in the nation’s heart as the greatest Briton really needs his reputation pampered and inflated any further? If Churchill was meant to be the tread that held the whole together it didn’t come off.

During Churchill’s time as Head of the Admiralty the Royal Navy made the switch from coal to oil and so British interests in the Middle East began to grow.  We tend to look down smugly at the oil driven American bungling in the Middle East - yet in so doing we deceive ourselves, the chequered map of the region who mostly drawn with British hands (and arms) as we installed client rulers and stirred up insurrections which are still rumbling today.  While standing back from endorsing these actions Rankin shows that these tactics and those used against the British in rebellions across the Empire were turned and used to great effect in the fight against Germany.Maybe this is the Genius, that the Imperial British had the spark of imagination to see that the successes of those fighting against them could be turned and used equally well for King and Empire...

 

Unspeak by Steven Poole

Unspeak: Words Are Weapons

I picked this up in the Oxfam shop thinking it would be a good read – sadly I was disappointed. 

Sat on the beach I noticed the review on the back comparing it to Naomi Klein’s No Logo and my heart sank – in my opinion No Logo is a massively over hyped collection of tautologies and non-sequiturs and while the reviewer meant the comparison as a complement, for my own reasons it equally stands up.

My first complaint is that Steven Poole puts forward “Unspeak” as some radical new idea, and in particular drawing a distinction between in and Orwellian doublethink, however nothing beyond the introduction backs up “Unspeak” as anything new.  “Unspeak” as a concept adds nothing to our analytical tool kit on the politicized use or abuse of language.

The second complaint is that Poole gets stuck in a rut on the “war on terror”.  He begins well with balanced analysis of the language games around anti-social behaviour in chapter 2 and climate change/global warming in chapter 3 but then from chapter 4 to 9 it is all the “war on terror”.  This completely unbalances the content of the book and worse still Poole gets distracted from his topic, language, and mostly just grinds an anti-Bush axe.  I would almost be interested to see how Poole would update this 2005 book to deal with the Obama era discourse on the “war on terror”.

While not all the examples that Poole quotes were to me as convincing or convicting as he believes it is not that I really object to most of the analysis, the US government (like everyone else) clearly tries to frame the scope of any discussion on its action by setting the terms that are used.  The “but” comes because this is really nothing new and nor it was it a big secret that Poole discovered and need to share to enlighten the world.

Some books are important and need to be read, while others are no more than a waste of good trees.  Sadly Poole has written the later.