Theologising Brexit

A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique

Anthony G. Reddie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429671470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the theological challenge presented by the new post-Brexit epoch. The referendum vote for Britain to leave the European Union has led to a seismic shift in the ways in which parts of the British population view and judge their compatriots. The subsequent rise in the reported number of racially motivated incidents and the climate of vilification and negativity directed at anyone not viewed as 'authentically' British should be a matter of concern for all people.

The book is comprised of a series of essays that address varying aspects of what it means to be British and the ways in which churches in Britain and the Christian faith could and should respond to a rising tide of White English nationalism. It is a provocative challenge to the all too often tolerated xenophobia, as well as the paucity of response from many church leaders in the UK. This critique is offered via the means of a prophetic, postcolonial model of Black theology that challenges the incipient sense of White entitlement and parochial 'nativism' that pervaded much of the referendum debate.

The essays in this book challenge the church and wider society to ensure justice and equity for all, not just a privileged sense of entitlement for some. It will be of keen interest to any scholar of Black, political and liberation theology as well as those involved in cultural studies from a postcolonial perspective.

Part 1
Behind the scenes

1 Setting the scene

Historical roots of Brexit – the problem with difference

I was born into a Caribbean family. My parents came to the United Kingdom from the Caribbean island of Jamaica, my mother arriving first, in January 1957, and my father, from the opposite end of the island, in September 1959. They met in a shared house in 1960 and were married on 6 August 1962. I was born on 10 October 1964, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, their eldest child. My own parents were part of the mass migratory movement of Black people from the Caribbean in the years following the end of the Second World War. I am not only a child of my parents but also the heir to one of the most significant developments in contemporary British history: I am a progeny of the ‘Windrush Generation’, so named because of the arrival of 492 Caribbean people at Tilbury dock on the Empire Windrush, on 22 June 1948.

I started school in September 1969. I entered the British education system as one of only two Black children in a school of approximately one hundred pupils. The other 98 or so were all White. The head teacher made it clear to me that he resented my presence in the school and that my parents had no legitimate claim to be in the country. My schooling coincided with backdrop of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.¹ Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ arose at a time when concerns over immigration from Commonwealth regions, such as the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, were causing alarm. Enoch Powell became a deeply polarised figure in British public life. Powell, a classically educated patrician Tory made his inflammatory speech on 20 April 1968, expressing his disquiet at the levels of Black and Asian immigration from the New Commonwealth, believing that these growing communities would destabilise Britain and would disempower and marginalise indigenous White people. His speech was seen as a cause celebre in the history of race relations in the United Kingdom.

While thousands of trade unionists at the time sent in letters of support for Powell, Edward Heath, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet. On the thirtieth anniversary of the speech, in 1998, 64 percent of a Channel 4 studio audience brought together to discuss the legacy of his speech believed that Powell was not a racist but a courageous nationalist.² In the early part of 2018, there was a contentious proposal to mount a historic blue plaque in Wolverhampton in Enoch Powell’s honour as a former distinguished member of parliament (MP) for the city.

In this opening essay, I argue that while the surface level indices of social, cultural and economic opportunities for Black people have improved, the unreconstructed, substantive underpinning notions of what it means to belong and be acceptable in the United Kingdom have remained largely unchanged. In effect, Black people³ are still the ‘other’ in this context. We are not authentically of this place in the fashion that is readily accepted by White subjects in this nation, and the Brexit phenomenon simply reinforces this notion, given the clearly marked way migrants were seen as the essential problem that the Leave vote would undoubtedly solve.

British Christianity and empire

This opening essay attempts to set the scene for the essays that follow. My central argument is that what underpinned the Brexit phenomenon was an unresolved set of religious and theological ideas that have helped to shape the national identity. Essential to the development of the populist thrust of British (more specifically English) nationalism⁴ is a conflation of religion and economic and political expansion abroad, namely the link between Christianity and empire. One cannot understand the development of the Brexit phenomenon within if one is not cognisant of the creation of empire and the process of colonialism beyond the shores of Britain. So my assessment, vis-à-vis the development of Brexit, commences with an assessment of the colonial context in which Christianity in Britain is deeply located in the construction of Black bodies in faraway places from British shores.

One aspect of the positionality of this work, indeed of my wider scholarship, rests on the existential nature of Black bodies as they have collided with the White missionary endeavour – a topic that will be explored in greater detail in chapter three. Thinking back to my first days in primary school in Bradford, West Yorkshire, I was aware of my difference and the ambivalence with which I was perceived in that context. My very existence in that school threw into sharp relief the contradictory and ambiguous nature of Britain’s attitude to its former colonial subjects. While the head teacher, like Enoch Powell, decried my presence in this country, my parents reminded me constantly of the British presence in their country. The fact that I am writing this piece as a Black African-Caribbean male whose parents came from Jamaica reveals a great deal about the positionality of Britain with a part of the world several thousand miles from these shores. In the words of a poster beloved of the anti-racist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, “We Are Here Because You Were There”.⁵ It should be axiomatic, therefore, that one cannot talk about Christianity in Britain without engaging with the broader thematic hinterland of empire and colonialism.

I write as a confessional Black Christian from within the Methodist tradition. Methodism found its way to the Caribbean via the missionary work of Nathaniel Gilbert, even though the indefatigable work undertaken by his two Black enslaved women has largely gone unheralded.⁶ The ‘historic church’⁷ version of Caribbean Christianity into which approximately two-thirds of all Black people of Christian faith in Britain have been inducted and formed is one that echoes to the continual strains of British-run slavery in the English islands of the Caribbean.⁸ Caribbean Christianity, which emerges from the comparatively more recent Pentecostal tradition, has nonetheless been influenced to an equal extent by the blandishments of empire and colonialism. Michael Jagessar commented on Caribbean British Pentecostal Christianity as it pertains to Joe Aldred’s book Respect:⁹

Further, in spite of his discourse on the richness of Caribbean diversity (ethno-religious), what comes across from this volume is the sense that the default mode represents Caribbean folks stepping off the Windrush, so fully de-culturalized and purified of their inter-cultural ethno-religious heritage that their faith resembled the chalky white cliffs of Dover and the pristine un-deconstructed euro-centric theology.¹⁰

The African dimension of Christianity in Britain has also been informed by empire and colonialism, which continues to circumscribe the parameters of acceptability and notions of what constitutes the status quo and normality in faith adherence.¹¹ This chapter and later essays will demonstrate that the relationship between mission Christianity and Black people, which operates through the refracting lens of colonialism, has an inextricable connection at a level only now beginning to be teased out. At the time of writing, only a handful of texts have explored this relationship to any satisfactory degree.¹² The relationship between empire and colonialism, in many respects, remains the unacknowledged ‘elephant in the room’ in much academic theological discourse in the United Kingdom.

R.S. Sugirtharajah, the doyen of postcolonial biblical hermeneutics, once noted that the relationship between British Christianity and empire is one that has been suffused with a collusive sense of mutuality.¹³ Both the Christian faith and imperialism, and the regimes that connote the latter, do so based on presuming themselves to be superior to the phenomenological entities they seek to usurp. Speaking with particular attention to the question of empire, Sugirtharajah writes,

Empires are basically about technically and militarily advantaged superior ‘races’ ruling over inferior and backward peoples. When imperial powers invade, the conquered are not permitted to be equal to the invaders. This was true of all empires, Roman to British and American. The basic assumption of superiority is never questioned in their writings.¹⁴

The superiority of Britain is built on a bedrock of Christian-inspired exceptionalism in which God has set apart the British, particularly the English, to occupy a special place in the economy of God’s kingdom. One can see an element of this in the rhetoric of Britain’s greatest writer, William Shakespeare, who in his play Richard II, written in 1595/1596, a few years after the Spanish Armada of 1588, states in unambiguous tones the import of the English when thinking of their sense of exceptionalism. Shakespeare writes

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.¹⁵

The outworking of this exceptionalism was the desire to export the superiority of the British across the world. Empire and colonialism found much of its intellectual underscoring based on White, Eurocentric supremacy, which marked the clear binary between notions of civilised and acceptable over and against uncivilised and transgressive.¹⁶ There are no prizes for guessing on which side of the divide Black people, for example, found themselves. Much of the epistemological weight for the buttressing of colonialism, when approached through the refracting lens of Christian faith, has been the seeming invisible trope of Whiteness. I shall return to this point shortly, because I believe that it is the inability to name and detail the epistemological construct of Whiteness that is a significant weakness in the scholarship of White academics and their failure to wrestle with the nature of White Christianity in Britain.

R.S. Sugirtharajah, once again writing on the development of imperial missionary Christianity, writes,

It is no coincidence that the founding of all these missionary societies took place contemporaneously with the activities of the trading companies like the East India Company and the Dutch East India Company. The East India Company initially resisted the presence of the missionaries. It feared that the interference of missionaries in local religious customs and manners might be counter-productive to its mercantile interests. However, the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1833 and the abolition of its monopoly, missionary enterprise received a boost… . Once the impediment to missionary work was removed, the missionaries themselves became willing supporters of commercial expansion.¹⁷

If the legacy of the under-explored relationship between “Christianity, commerce, and civilisation”¹⁸ in White British theological circles is a cause for concern, however, the record amongst Black Christians in Britain has, until comparatively recently, been equally lamentable (showing that ‘we’, of which I am a part, are really no better). The absence of writing on the latter topic has not been an indication of the inability or the lack of ability amongst Black people of African descent to write. One can point to such landmark texts as the now iconic The Empire Strikes Back,¹⁹ produced by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This work has become part of a larger tradition of cultural studies and sociological work that has made explicit the relationship between the Christian superstructure that buttressed and offered the necessary theological underscoring of the colonially led missionary enterprise that underpinned empire.²⁰

Whiteness as the significant thread in English Christianity

Thus far in this essay, I have sought to provide a rationale for the essays that follow, by critiquing the underlying theological constructs that informed the Brexit phenomenon. An important factor in ...