Losing faith in public life

At Choral Evensong on the Sunday after Ascension Day, Dr Matthew Grimley, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College, continued our series Faith and Public Life with a sermon entitled 'Losing faith in public life'.  In it, he examined the career and witness of the controversial Canon John Collins (1905-82), who, among much else, served as Chaplain at Oriel both before and after the Second World War (1937-48).

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I’ll start with a line from our Old Testament reading:

‘The God of Israel has spoken, the Rock of Israel has said to me: One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’

The very idea of ‘one who ruleth over his people justly,’ as described by David in the first lesson, seems a very distant one for us. When we open our Guardian or Times, we don’t expect to see David Cameron or Ed Milliband hailed as being ‘like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’ If we did, we’d just laugh. We’ve become very cynical about politicians of late. This cynicism is not new, but it has become more acute in recent years because of episodes like the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and the MPs expenses scandal. And its not just restricted to political leaders – we might also cite controversies within the leadership of the Christian churches, like the child abuse scandals or arguments about gay bishops. Though very different, all these episodes have left many of us feeling (in different ways) betrayed by our leaders. We seemed doomed permanently to be disappointed by them.

Three particular critiques of those in public life have developed in recent years:

• They’re only in it for what they can get – for vainglory, or for cash
• They all end up selling out – they become corrupted, either financially or in sacrificing their values and beliefs

The third criticism is particularly beloved of academics:

• If only it were so simple – in other words, public figures over-simplify, or present issues as black and white when in reality they are more complicated. As scholars, we’re trained to look for nuance, and we’re thus particularly suspicious of glib slogans or promises.

In this sermon I want to explore some of these charges by looking at the life of a political leader whom you’ve probably never heard of. He wasn’t a professional politician, but fifty years ago he was one of the most famous political campaigners in Britain. He also has an Oriel connection, which is why I’m talking about him today. His name was John Collins, and he was a Church of England clergyman who became Chaplain of Oriel in 1938, just before the Second World War. His education and early career had been quite traditional, but in the 1930s he joined the Labour Party out of concern for the unemployed. His radicalism grew when he became an RAF chaplain in the Second World War, and on returning to Oxford at the end of the war, and becoming Oriel’s domestic bursar, he was horrified to discover how poorly paid the staff were, and persuaded the other fellows to put up their wages.

But Collins had his eye on more global injustices, too. In December 1946, he held a public meeting in Oxford Town Hall to set up a movement called Christian Action.  Christian Action sought to get Christians to carry their faith into political action. It pioneered a number of campaigns in the 1940s for victims of famine in Germany at the end of the war, for the homeless and refugees, and against the death penalty. But it was in the mid-1950s that Collins found his two great causes – apartheid and nuclear disarmament.

In 1956, Collins visited South Africa, and became preoccupied with the evils of apartheid. He set up a new body called the International Defence and Aid Fund to raise money for the legal fees of those dissidents (including Nelson Mandela) who were arrested by the South African government. The following year, 1957, Collins was one of the founders, and the first chairman, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which argued that Britain should unilaterally give up its nuclear deterrent. It was CND that really made Collins an international celebrity.

It’s easy to forget now what a huge threat nuclear war was felt to be in the late 1950s. The invention of the H-bomb had led many people to fear that Armageddon was imminent, and this fear was to some extent borne out by the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war. This fear meant that Collins’ CND soon gained massive popular support, especially among young people. Collins had a good instinct for eye-catching gestures, leading the series of famous Easter marches between the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire and Trafalgar Square in London. CND became the prototype for a whole series of later protest movements in the 1960s and beyond, on issues like race relations and the environment.

So Collins achieved a lot, but he was also a very controversial figure in national life. His prominence as a political activist meant that Collins was the subject of all three of the criticisms of politicians that I’ve outlined. All three criticisms contained a grain of truth in Collins’ case. Take the first – that he had sold out. Collins was that recognisable English type, the establishment rebel, who spent most of his career in very comfy berths – first Oriel, then for 36 years, a canonry of St Paul’s Cathedral. His establishment mindset caused problems in CND, which hadn’t been going very long when a split opened up between those, like Collins, who wanted its protests to remain within the law, and those who favoured direct action, or civil disobedience. As a moderate, Collins found himself conflict with more radical CND luminaries like another Anglican priest, Michael Scott, and Bertrand Russell, who saw it as their duty to break the law and get arrested, and who felt that he had sold out. Eventually, the split made it impossible for Collins to carry on as Chairman of CND, and he was forced to step down in 1964. Some of his CND colleagues also complained that Collins behaved too much like a politician, not enough like the clergyman that he really was.

The second criticism, ‘they’re only in it for themselves’, was also levelled against Collins. Here too, there was some justice in the accusation. Collins was a bit vain; if you read his or his wife’s memoirs you get a sense of a naive egotism. Like many public figures (especially senior Anglican clergy), he was also sometimes tempted to make outrageous comments in order to get into the papers. He was also ambitious, and never quite got over not being appointed Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, the job he really coveted. The Labour politician Denis Healey said he reminded him of that other Mr Collins, the oleaginous and ambitious cleric in Pride and Prejudice.

And Collins was also vulnerable to the third criticism, ‘if only life were so simple.’ Many people, fellow Anglicans included, thought that he was deluded in supposing that if a waning power like Britain gave up its nuclear weapons, it would have any impact on the superpowers. Collins was accused of over-simplifying a complex international situation, and of proposing a kind of vacuous gesture politics. Worse, his naive willingness to attend Peace conferences and fraternal delegations to the USSR opened him to the accusation that he was a ‘useful idiot,’ a Russian pawn in the cold war game.

So Collins turns out to have been a rather complicated, fallible, political figure.  But did these faults matter? He was certainly irritating, not least to successive Archbishops of Canterbury, but he was probably a necessary irritant – the grit in the oyster, a thorn in the side to guard against Anglican complacency.. I’m not sure I’d have liked him very much, but that’s probably true of many saints too. Sometimes we need irritating people to challenge our values and priorities.

We also need to set in the balance the achievements of Collins, or any other political leader, against their failings. What ever else we think of Collins, he certainly displayed courage in challenging apartheid and the arms race, two of the great ills of the late 20^th century, and he forced other politicians to take those issues seriously too. We need to remember the achievements of public figures, as well as their flaws (and that’s particularly important if you’re a historian, like me). The dying figure of King David in our first reading reminds us of this. David’s last words on his deathbed extol the role of a righteous king, and that is how he himself is mourned, but David was, of course, one of the most extraordinarily flawed politicians in history. In his early career, he had seduced the wife of his colleague Uriah, got her pregnant, and then ensured that Uriah was bumped off. On this epic scale, Collins’ mild egomania, or the petty venality of modern MPs, all seem pretty small beer. But David is also - in spite of everything - a righteous king. He reminds us that leaders are flawed human beings, just like the rest of us. Sometimes we perhaps expect too much from them, demanding super-human virtues that they have no hope of living up to.

But as well as expecting too much from our leaders, we can also end up expecting too little of them, too, because we don’t want to be disappointed. In 1971, Pete Townshend of The Who summed up the disillusionment of many young people with the failure of sixties protest movements like CND when he sang ‘we won’t get fooled again.’ Townshend’s point was that the leaders of the protest movement had turned out to be no better the old politicians they promised to replace. ‘Meet the new boss/same as the old boss,’ he sang.  But, like someone vowing ‘I’ll never fall in love again’ after a bad break-up, there’s a risk that if we vow never to trust our leaders again, we deny ourselves the hope that they can actually achieve something good. Our lowered expectations can have a lowering effect on public life itself.

There’s also a danger that if we become totally disenchanted with public life, we end up withdrawing into a sort of comfortable quietism. A dose of scepticism of politicians and their promises is always healthy, but we need to be careful that it doesn’t become a cop-out for our own responsibilities as citizens and as Christians. The whole idea of public life has become so tainted that there’s a risk that we’ve thrown out the more laudable virtues that used to be associated with it, like duty and service. We need to recover those virtues, and to think seriously about how we are sometimes called to serve God and each other, by speaking out publicly against injustice or oppression.  We can’t – thank goodness - all be John Collinses. But perhaps we can all learn something from his flawed example.