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Development
5 min read

Don't patronise: what the R20 means for development

The R20 meeting at the G20 global summit sheds light on development. Christopher Wadibia makes the case for a change in perception.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

Swami Govinda Dev Giri Maharaj, Dr. Valeria Martano, and Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, are greeted by R20 founder Yahya Cholil Staquf.
G20religion.org

God is dead,' wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882, in an effort to argue that every European imagination, community, and enterprise developed by faith in the Christian God would inevitably degenerate relative to Europe's dwindling commitment to belief in the former. Nietzsche's argument preceded the once popular secularisation thesis. The view that societies would increasingly adopt non-religious values and institutions as they modernise influenced global development discourse in the 20th century following World War II.   

However, in 2023, a year that marks more than 140 years since Nietzsche first popularised the atheistical three-word phrase ‘God is dead’, anyone familiar with the mechanics and forces driving the modern global development project would point out that faith-aligned actors play a pivotal, and even in some cases, unrivalled role. These actors promote growth, progress, and development globally, especially in the Global South.  

Albeit, Nietzsche once argued that Europe's declining belief in the Christian God signaled God's death, the fact that at least 85% of the world's over eight billion people claim some form of faith. Couple that with the reality that faith actors deliver the majority of local development services in many regions across the globe, and the suggestions is that God has risen from the grave and traded European burial clothes for globalised vocational attire. Far from being dead, God is alive and more engaged in developing the earth than ever before.  

Aside from state and private-sector investment, since the second half of the 20th century, the faith sector, comprised of thousands of actors, has become increasingly responsible for developing the modern world. A recent study on faith-aligned impact investment, completed by researchers at Oxford University's Said Business School, showed that four of the world's most influential religious groups (Christianity, Islam, Dharmic, and Judaism) collectively hold at least $5 trillion in net assets. The study linked this $5 trillion in assets to faith-aligned investment in addressing social and climate-oriented challenges globally.  

The study, which analysed over 360 distinctive organisations, attributed over $260 billion to Christian-aligned capital. Given the difficulty of securing accurate data on the total assets and capital held by the world's many thousands of churches and Christian  organisations, it should be acknowledged that this estimate sits far below the real net assets in Christendom that have been invested into global development. However, a key takeaway from this study is that Christian-aligned capital remains a game-changing force in the global development sector. After all, those organisations serve the approximately 2.4bn Christians alive today.  

  

'The R20's mission was grand but straightforward: fill the gap in world leadership that stresses politics and economics rather than faith and spirituality.'

In November 2022, two weeks before the G20 summit in Bali which brought together the leaders of the 20 countries with the world's biggest economies, another gathering took place in Indonesia that attracted less publicity. For the first time ever, the R20 (the G20 Religious Forum) united leaders from the major religions of the G20 countries whose heads of state would flock to Bali a few weeks later. The R20's mission was grand but straightforward: fill the gap in world leadership that stresses politics and economics rather than faith and spirituality as resources to provide solutions to pressing global challenges.  

One of the R20's more high profile speakers was Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, who currently serves as Anglican Primate for the Church of Nigeria. In his speech, Ndukuba cited the violent persecution of Christians and liberal Muslims in the majority Muslim region of Northern Nigeria. The R20's goal of elevating faith and spirituality in the hierarchy of resources that can be enlisted to engage with global issues should be viewed as noble. However, in practice, the concept of the world's major faith communities petitioning global peace and development stakeholders to be recognised as legitimate contributors to the sacred project of redeeming the brokenness of the world reeks of obsequious servility.  

Moreover, this unequal power relation fatefully overlooks the substantial contributions to peace and development made every day across the world by faith actors. Many of the world's major faith traditions share the vision of developing the world into a place devoid of disease, poverty, and suffering. The global faith and spirituality sector is truly not without its imperfections, but for centuries this multi-faith comity has invested immense resources into making earth look more like heaven. It does so by leveraging faith as a conduit to gather assets that aid in the deeply holy process of chiseling away at the degenerative evils and satanic forces plaguing the world until all that remains is the latter's Edenic base.  

The time has come for the world's faith actors to stop begging secular state actors to recognise them as stakeholders committed to promoting global peace and development. Getting on with the heavenly work of building God's cosmos, in anticipation of the New Creation, requires faith that God will provide the right people, ideas, and resources and that secular state actors should be viewed as partners instead of patrons in this divine enterprise.  

'The work we do in the present, then, gains its full significance from the eventual design in which it is meant to belong.'

N.T. Wright

Secular state actors should better understand what is driving those faith actors and the desire to balance the partnership. In his influential book Surprised by Hope, NT Wright argues that continuities will exist between Christian work completed in service to God in the present age and the eternal life that God's people will enjoy in the New Creation. Wright reasons,

'The work we do in the present, then, gains its full significance from the eventual design in which it is meant to belong. Applied to the mission of the church, this means that we must work in the present for the advance signs of that eventual state of affairs when God is ‘all in all’, when his kingdom has come and his will is done ‘on earth as in heaven’.' 

Every day a faith actor funds a school, hospital, or social development project somewhere in the world. They see these projects function in God's ongoing programme of redeeming the world by means of the intellects and imaginations of themselves and those who benefit. In their eyes, all are made in God's own image. In a world where they see sin's footprints manifest by way of suffering, violence, and destruction, every actor inspired by the faith in their heart to challenge the existence of the former should recognise that the impulse to build a better world is a nudge from heaven foreshadowing the New Eden to come. 

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Politics
10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.
Reform MPs in the House of Commons.
House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics? 

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union. 

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China 

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence. 

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.  

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer. 

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.   

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.   

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.  

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan. 

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them. 

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.” 

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.  

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” 

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.  

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal. 

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible. 

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy. 

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.