Article

Change

Community

Justice

Sustainability

2 May 2025

5 min read

Everything is a movement – and that’s as it should be

They’re powerful when they are marked by love, dignity and justice.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A digital billboard on top of a London building reads: Make Earth Day Everyday.

An Earth Day billboard, London, 2025.

Le Good Society.

I keep accidentally joining movements. In one instance, I had a go at submitting an essay for a competition; when it was (happily) selected to be part of the published book, the blurb told me that I was part of a movement of people embracing messy motherhood stories. At the same time, I am not parenting – and this apparently pulls me into a ‘sisterhood’ of women without children. These could seem contradictory, but I recognise that they are calls to togetherness. And yet, as I go about my life – trying to pay my bills, navigate community, play my part as a citizen of this world that is partly marked by climate crisis and conflict – I have to confess that my gut reaction at being called part of them is to feel tired. I don’t know if I have the energy for another movement in me.

Movements seem to be having a moment. Open the news or social media, and there will be stories of communities of people speaking up together. And yet movements are not new. History reminds us that they have long been one of the best ways to counteract unchecked or disproportionate power. The anti-slavery campaigners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the US civil rights movement, the influence of anti-apartheid and land rights activists… when we participate in a movement for justice, this is the heritage we are locating ourselves in.

What makes a movement? It’s a group of ordinary individuals, and it’s so much more than that. It’s marked by people trying to live the change they seek, but it doesn’t end there. There is something about a movement that is emergent, more than the sum of its parts. Groups of people taking collective action to see change happen. Crucially, the movements that bend the arc of justice are those that are centred on the voices and priorities of those most affected by their cause. In this, they reflect God’s heart; an invitation to us all to participate, with a particular emphasis for those on the margins.

The other week saw Earth Day, an annual event which celebrates the environmental movement. While for some, it can be co-opted to suggest green credentials that don’t bear out the rest of the year, but for many it is an entry point, a chance to meaningfully participate. What began in the US on 22 April 1970 is now marked by around one billion people – one in eight of us – around the world. It’s a particular moment to highlight action for this world that we share. This world with boundaries that are being tested and breached. Just a week earlier, communities in India and Pakistan were experiencing heat that tested the limits of human survival. Our bodies were not made for this kind of weather.

The theme of this year’s Earth Day was ‘Our power, our planet’, with a particular emphasis on scaling up renewable energy. But I have found myself thinking about other kinds of power: the influence of people when they come together. Do we greet moments like this with cynicism, self-interested opportunism, or genuine expectation for change? In the face of horrifying headlines and lived injustice, what motivates people to keep going again for change? There are many likely reasons, often personal. To understand a few of the common ones, we need to go back to the beginning.

“Much of my life goes irrelevantly on, in spite of larger events.”

Nora Ephron

In the opening passages of the Bible, the world was called ‘good',and the rest of the story is one of restoration; what has been broken being made whole and new. This articulates for us what we often intuit: the world was made to be better than this. Where cynicism offers a casual invitation to give up on change, when we look at our daily lives, we see the myriad ways that we demonstrate a quiet hope for tomorrow. Sowing seeds in spring is an act of faith that the summer will bloom.

This conviction might manifest differently for each of us. For some of us, it means carrying a persistent hope in spite of the hurt we see and feel. For others, it might feel grittier. Like the irritation of a grain of sand in your shoe; you can’t walk on until you do something about it. Either way, it is a longing for something that is brighter and fairer and kinder than what we have right now. Something more resonant with the deep cries of our souls.

Underlying these instincts is our God-given purpose. He made humans to draw even more goodness out of that which was baked into this world from the beginning. We were shaped to partner with God to see order brought out of chaos, freedom from captivity, a seed of renewal out of the grave. Allowing this to take root in our hearts can save us from a sense of nihilism, that nothing matters.

Like many women of my generation, I am a fan of Nora Ephron’s writing. She famously wrote about taking part in movements and yet “Much of my life goes irrelevantly on, in spite of larger events.” There is welcome honesty in acknowledging how privilege can insulate against the impacts of injustice. But there is also a provocation in these words. When we respond to God’s invitation to participate in his restoration work, we find our relevancy in the work we were always made for. In other words, our choices can be meaningful.

I may have stumbled into some movements, but I can see that these are invitations to move closer to each other. Acting for justice can require sacrifice of lifestyle, time, comfort. But outworking this together can also bring growth, empathy, joy. When we are weary, there is life to be found with others. God is inherently relational: three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – co-existing as one. In this relationship is unity, service of each other, appreciation of each other’s gifts. With God’s likeness in each of us, we too made for this kind of community. Our movements are powerful when they are marked by such love, dignity and justice. Glimpsing this induces us to look beyond ourselves, to step towards people and circumstances. Being part of a movement is to choose to be in closer proximity with each other and the world we dwell in together.

I remind myself that in such community, there is room to acknowledge weariness. At the same time, there is also an encouragement to move beyond disenchantment about days like Earth Day, about gloomy headlines, about discouragement or setbacks. It can be tempting to let our lives go irrelevantly on, but being part of a movement reminds us that we don’t have to settle for that.

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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.