Less John, more Joan. How Paris’ secular hymn fell flat

Despite launching a flaming piano of peace, France missed an obvious emissary.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is a curate in Leicestershire

A floating stage bears a flaming piano and singer standing at a mic.

That opening ceremony.

BBC.

Amid the furor around Dionysus and his flesh suit it was another point in the Olympic opening ceremony that got me thinking spiritually. Which is ironic, given the moment’s message. Silence fell after a chaotic, multi-barge disco. An atmospherically lit boat carrying a piano on fire sailed down the Seine, with a beautifully sung Imagine, by John Lennon, drifting from the singer.

Nowhere does secularism like France, with a religion-less public society so entrenched that a French Muslim sprinter, Sounkamba Sylla, had to swap her hijab for a cap at the opening ceremony to abide by its public religiosity laws. Telling a woman what she can and can’t wear is not a great look for a modern democracy. However, choosing Imagine, - a well-known atheistic plea for a world without religious devotion and the dogma, extremism, and warring that comes with it, perhaps tells us what France is going for. Beautiful, modern, peace. The world as one in Godless enlightenment. No hell to scare you. No heaven to inspire you.

Except. Humans have managed to do an excellent job of conceiving, enacting, and justifying extreme violence without religious devotion for much of the last two centuries. Side-by-side with religious acts of aggression were communist oppression, The Great Leap Forward, Gulags, Darwinian race wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Perhaps rather than blaming religion for the constant state of war the global populace finds themselves in, John Lennon would be best investigating our common human instinct.

Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

When God is taken out of the equation, peace is no better found in science, rationality, or self-actualisation, the twentieth century demonstrates that. These things are just as likely to be twisted towards conflict. Without God there is no inspiration to be selfless, moral, or compassionate, the impulses of each which might lead to reconciliation rather than war.

Just a little after the flaming piano, a figure that better points the way to peace came riding down the Seine. Billed as a Gallo-Roman goddess, it was more a recreation of Joan of Arc, the French saint who brought spiritual leadership to her country and defeat to English invaders. She bore the Olympic flag onto dry land. In a very medieval way Joan’s life after hearing from God was of breaking sieges and leading armies. It might seem strange to anoint her the bearer of peace, but she shows the way to the united humanity that John Lennon was striving for.

Christians await with anticipation the Kingdom of God fully coming on Earth which will bring with it peace and perfect justice. Joan, being led by God to challenge the oppression of English invaders, points the way towards it by rising up against injustice. And she points the way back to Jesus, her Lord, who turned the world upside down with his message of peace and his beginning of this Kingdom of God. Each time we go a bit Joan, and are inspired to overthrow injustice, the Kingdom of peace comes a little nearer.

Rather than seeking a Godless paradise which can never have enough moral force to be anything other than a selfish search for meaning, we must look to Joan’s God. We will find a God who calls any who will follow him to a life of justice and peace. Only in giving up our own desires, to follow the example of Jesus, will we ever have a world as one.

As my wife, Harriet, remarked whilst we watched Lennon’s hymn, it’s only a few words away from being spot on. Rather than taking the modern French approach and keeping God away from the public sphere, we might delve into Joan’s spirituality and find a burning for justice, a desire for peace, and a self-sacrifice which will one day lead to peace under God. Imagine there’s a heaven. It’s easy if you try. And it’s the only place humans will ever find the true and lasting peace of Lennon’s imagination.

Column

Comment

General Election 24

Politics

7 June 2024

4 min read

Who’s right when hurling charges of hypocrisy?

Accusations highlight the risk of self-deception.

George Pitcher

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

A newspaper headline, text and an image of the subject of the article.

Ashcroft's charge against Raynor.

David Yelland, X.

Lord Ashcroft launched an extraordinary new attack on Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, in the Mail on Sunday at the start of this week, claiming that his investigation into where she lived, allegedly for tax purposes, was never about money.

“Hypocrisy was always the charge against Angela Rayner,” he intoned, “not tax avoidance… And the stain will dog her for years to come.”

Leaving aside whether stains dog people or the other way around, this is extraordinary not because Ashcroft attacks a senior Labour figure – day follows night, etc – but because it’s the sort of volte face that journalists call a reverse ferret.

Had Rayner been found by investigating police officers to have committed a tax-fraud or electoral offence (and, to be clear, they didn’t), we need to ask ourselves whether Ashcroft would have run with the same line.

Imagine: “Angela Rayner has committed a crime, but this is really about hypocrisy.” Do you think he’d have gone with that? Neither do I.

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle.

Hypocrisy is invariably the charge when there’s nothing else to go with. And that must raise questions about what hypocrisy really is.

It’s clearly not just about telling lies. In the first televised debate this week between Rishi Sunak and his rival for premiership, Keir Starmer, the former repeatedly (12 times) claimed that Treasury officials had independently calculated that the latter’s spending plans would add £2,000 to the tax bill of every family in the UK. A published letter subsequently showed that the Treasury had specifically told the Government that this figure was bogus and not to be used.

Was this hypocritical? No, it was just plain wrong – in the sense of both inaccurate and immoral. The opportunity for hypocrisy came when both leaders were asked whether they would use private healthcare for a family member in need. Sunak said he would; Starmer said he wouldn’t. If Starmer now ever uses private health facilities, Mr Hypocrisy will be ringing his door bell.

From this, we deduce that hypocrisy is pretending to be what you’re not. So Donald Trump poses as a great statesman, the saviour of his nation, but goes down for all 34 felony charges of falsifying accounts to hide his pay-off of former porn actor Stormy Daniels, in order to protect his electoral prospects. That’s hypocrisy, precisely because he’s pretending to be someone he isn’t.

That hypocrisy is exacerbated when Trump holds up a Bible to support his authority – or, indeed, publishes his own. Likewise, when a rich TV evangelist is convicted of sexual abuse (there are, tragically, too many examples to choose from).

By contrast, is Rayner pretending to be something she isn’t because her family has used two properties? Very probably not. Similarly, we might like to ask whether SNP deputy leader Kate Forbes is a hypocritical politician because she’s a Christian, or a hypocritical Christian because she’s a politician. Very probably neither. Being both is who she is.

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle. Like when Labour MP Diane Abbott sent her son to a fee-paying school. Private education, like private healthcare, is only meant to be available to those who support it ideologically, rather than just financially. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy.

The problem here is the presumption that the private sector is only available to those who endorse it. So it’s hypocritical for socialists to use it. But that presumption moves very close to the view that working people should know their place (a social order, incidentally, that the Christian gospel defies).

There is no inconsistency – and consequently there can be no hypocrisy – in wanting the best for our own children, while concurrently wanting the best for all children. One might even call such a policy something like levelling-up, should such a thing exist.

We may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite.

A biblical definition of hypocrisy might be the hiding of interior wickedness under an appearance of virtue. In Matthew’s gospel, it’s the charge levelled at Pharisees whose good deeds are entirely self-serving.

In this manner, moral theology would point to hypocrisy being the fruit of pride. But simply to hide one’s own shortcomings isn’t necessarily to be construed as hypocrisy, because there’s no moral obligation to make them public.

In that context, we may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite. Otherwise, we’re all hypocrites (and there may be some truth in that).

It reduces to resisting the temptation to point to the mote of hypocrisy in our neighbour’s eye, while failing to attend to the beam in our own. That would also be to avoid self-deception. The kind of deception that pretends that one’s actions are in the public interest, when clearly they are only serving your own. Which, neatly enough, brings us back to Lord Ashcroft.