Readings – Revelation 4; Luke 8:22–25
‘Where is your faith?’
I think we all know by now that the world’s Number 1 tennis player, Novak Djokovic, refuses to take a coronavirus vaccine. For many weeks now, this has been one of the most reported news stories all over the world. What I find odd is that nobody asks why his views seem to matter so much. He’s a great tennis player, but not exactly one of our era’s great minds. So why do we care what he thinks about any subject not related to a tennis court?
The Church is considered irrelevant. More than that, Church is deeply insecure about its supposed lack of relevance, and spends a huge amount of time desperately trying to be relevant, sometimes making itself look stupid in the process. Yet, is it the Church that has a problem, or is it a wider society that turns professional sportspeople into oracles of wisdom on every subject?
Now, let me read you an excerpt from the work of another prominent figure in the debate about coronavirus vaccines:
“Shorty I’mma only tell you this once, you the illest
And for your loving I’mma die hard like Bruce Willis
You got spark, you, you got spunk
You, you got something all the girls want
You’re like a candy store
And I’m a toddler”
This is the lyrical genius of the rapper Nicki Minaj, one of the world’s most successful musicians. Last September, Minaj tweeted to her 24 million followers that her cousin’s friend became impotent as a result of the vaccine. Since then her ever shifting views on vaccination have been the subject of endless media debate. The same society that considers the Church irrelevant obsesses about what vapid celebrities think about matters of medical science.
None of this is to excuse the Church’s self-importance. It has been the architect of many of its own problems. This week, I read news reports of another disastrously managed safeguarding case of the period between 1960s and the 1990s. I can see why people lost faith in the Church. But where did their faith go?
Once people had faith in political leaders, or in trade unionists or captains of industry, or in thinkers and self-help gurus. All of these people squandered people’s faith as determinedly as the Church did.
At the moment, the professional upper-middle-classes still seem to have faith in one thing: science and scientists. Indeed the dominant religion of the English bourgeoisie has shifted from the Church of England to the church of experts. That doesn’t, however, translate into the rest of society. If anything, the way in which questioning anything presented in scientific terms is treated as ridiculous and laughable by the best off and best educated seems to provoke a backlash from other sections of society, as the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment shows.
While social media and fragmentation of the mass media doubtless play a role, the crisis in faith in science has deeper causes. We, the public, are another contributor to the problem, by asking too much of science, asking it to answer questions that are matters of ethics or political philosophy. Scientists themselves have, however, often colluded in the politicisation of their profession, something social media has made clear as scientists argue among themselves in full public view. It has become too easy to guess a scientist’s position on the left-right spectrum from the way they speak about their field of expertise.
With the last pillar of traditional authority crumbling, it seems the only people left with any moral authority in Western societies are stars of sport and entertainment, the Novaks and the Nickis. God help us all.
