Podcast

Comedy

Culture

Poetry

S&U interviews

7 October 2023

4 min read

My conversation with... Frank Skinner

Re-Enchanting... Comedy. Frank Skinner is only interested in the weird. In the un-graspable. In the outrageous. Belle Tindall gets a lesson in "super poetry" from Frank.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Around a table with microphones, three people record a podcast, one leans in talking and gesturing with a hand while the others listen.

Recording Re-Enchanting... Comedy.

In David Baddiel’s (admittedly excellent) book The God Desire, he has a section on his long-time friend Frank Skinner entitled ‘In a Car with Frank Skinner and his Sins’ (not that Frank would know; he’s refused to read it). After my conversation with Frank Skinner for the Re-Enchanting Podcast, I’d like to similarly entitle this piece ‘On A Rooftop with Frank Skinner and his Doubts’.

Frank Skinner; a comedian, broadcaster and author who has entertained millions through TV shows such as Fantasy Football League, The Frank Skinner Show, Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned and Room 101, as well as many sell-out stand-up comedy tours. His penmanship is also a force to be reckoned with, having crafted the undeniably iconic Three Lions football anthem (which he penned with the afore mentioned Baddiel) as well as my favourite piece of his work, A Comedian’s Prayer Book. He’s always been open about his Catholic faith, determined to ‘keep his hand up’ as a (very often the) Christian in any given room. Frank’s faith has been, and still is, shot through everything he does – even his ‘sinning’.

This conversation was always going to be interesting.

And as such, there are many things one could take away from this conversation with Frank. Perhaps the value he places on doubt as a tool of refinement and source of growth, or his comparing of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to bullies at a Christian disco, or even his efforts in ‘responsible sinning’. It’s a fascinating conversation from beginning to end, as I rather embarrassingly told him to his face, I enjoyed "every moment of it."

However, there was one salient question that was left lingering in my mind days after our conversation ended – are we (by ‘we’, I mean Christians) interesting?

There’s been a theme that’s run through Re-Enchanting thus far, prevalent in our conversations with Jennifer Wiseman, Paul Kingsnorth, Francis Spufford, and now Frank Skinner. And that theme is this: in the context of our 21st Century cultural moment, Christianity is profoundly weird, and that weirdness is the very basis of its power. It cannot, and should not, be blended into the so-called secular moment we find ourselves in. This is confronting for me, someone who has admittedly spent her life watering down the ‘oddest’ parts of Christianity (only in public, I should state) in an attempt to make it more palatable to my secular peers. As a result, I’ve ashamedly become the type of Christian that Tom Holland would tell to ‘grow up’. Well, if one finds themselves somewhat disillusioned with such a boring ‘no-man’s-land’ of compromised belief, this episode is certainly the perfect antidote. In fact, this entire series is.

Frank is only interested in the weird. In the un-graspable. In the outrageous. The way he speaks of interactions with his (beloved) atheist friends made it seem as though atheism is one of the most obvious things one could claim to be, meaning that there’s nothing particularly interesting about it:

“There’s something I find a bit confusing about people in the 21st century saying “this is how daring I am – I’m going to come out as an atheist”… atheism given over as if it’s a brave stance. I’ll show them a brave stance, and it’s not atheism.”

Speaking , in comparison, of sitting in Mass in his local church, looking on as his priest holds up a piece of wafer declaring that it is the Saviour of the world, Franks says,

“in the 21st Century, the idea that there’s a God, that he’s got a lamb, a representative that came to earth, that he takes away the sins, and that here he is in this bit of wafer… it’s outrageous. I don’t like the idea that we have to go to them (atheists). It’s made it (Christianity) a dull half-way house."

Hence this lingering question: are Christians actually the more interesting ones? My conversation with Frank made me think that we may just be.

Even though, as I have mentioned, the entire conversation was one to remember, it was the final five minutes that that truly ticked the ‘re-enchanting’ box for me. Justin and I, along with our guests, have often discussed Christianity as ‘the greatest story every told’, but Frank introduces us to Christianity as a

“living poem, super poetry, poetry that’s physical, poetry made flesh, poetry that actually exists.”

And not only that, but

“we are a part of that poem, we just need to step into it. There is a blank line waiting for us…”

How beautiful. It’s clear that, to Frank Skinner, Christianity is not only very interesting, it’s profoundly enchanting. Listen to the first episode of Re-Enchanting Season 2 enjoy Frank’s disconcerting ability to make you simultaneously laugh lightly and ponder deeply.

Explainer

Belief

Culture

22 August 2024

7 min read

The questions that nobody can escape

Seeking answers about beginning, meaning, and of the end, explain why religion refuses to disappear.

Silvianne and Barnabas Aspray

Silvianne and Barnabas are theologians.

An arm and hand stretch out in front of some, a narrow street is the background.

Andrik Langfield on Unsplash.

In the twentieth century many people thought that religion was on the way out. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, it was broadly assumed that “religion would disappear and be replaced solely by secular, scientiﬁc rationalism.” But few people now believe this anymore. Fukuyama himself has changed his mind and says that the disappearance of religion “is not going to happen.” But why is religion refusing to disappear?

A core reason for the persistence of faith is that there are questions that everyone asks at one point or another that lead in the direction of religion. Religion, or faith, addresses questions that nobody can escape: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does it all come from? Is there meaning to this life? And what happens after death? Faith traditions are experts in such ultimate questions. Consider the following examples.

These questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are the questions that religion deals with.

When people experience the beginning of life, they are often caught up in wonder. How can it be that a whole new person is growing inside a woman? Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the great critic of Christianity, who famously declared that “God was dead”, also wrote, “Is there a more sacred state than pregnancy?” There is something deeply moving around the beginning of life. Many who become parents, or in some way experience the beginning of life, are led to wonder: isn’t something more than just biology happening here, something deeper? A new life, a whole new person – and our love for that new person – where does all of that come from?

Another group of questions that most people will face at some point in their lives revolves around meaning. What’s the point of growing up, a teenager might ask? What’s the point of my work, we may ask later on. Especially when we face frustrations, failures, challenges we might wonder what difference we are making to the world. Would anyone miss me if I was not here? Will anyone remember me if I die?

Finally, we all at some point come in contact with death. Even if we are spared the pain of friends dying young, it is the natural course of the world that our grandparents and our parents will one day die. What do we do in the face of such loss? It is hard not to ask: Where is my loved one now? And is there hope of seeing them again one day?

These are the kinds of questions that nobody can entirely avoid in their lives: they never fail to arise and press themselves upon our consciousness. Yet these questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are precisely the questions that religion deals with. And here lies one important answer to why faith won’t just go away: Because scientific rationalism cannot really address them.

Faith offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them.

To be sure, secular scientific rationalism does offer some answers as to how life begins – we know the biology of it all astonishingly well. And yet, biology is not everything, and in fact, it is not the biological aspects of it all that touch us. The wonder, the hope, the love that we experience when we are faced with the beginning of life is more than what can be rationally or scientifically accounted for.

Similarly, scientific rationalism is not well equipped to answer questions of meaning. Science is great at answering how something works or how it should be done, but why-questions fall into a different category. Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer “42” - which is a reference to the comic sci-fi series “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and we intuitively understand that this answer is nonsensical. It is funny precisely because it is nonsensical.

And again, around the end of life: Scientific rationalism cannot and will not, based on its methods and approaches, say anything about the afterlife.

So, the questions of beginning, meaning and end cannot be answered solely by scientific rationalism. And yet they come up in all of our lives. Right here lies an important reason why faith has not gone away. Faith deals with just these questions. It is good at dealing with them – they are the core domain of faith.

Faith offers answers to questions of beginning, meaning and end, but just as importantly, it offers a community in which such questions can be addressed and discussed. It offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them, perhaps showing them ways in which they can find answers. Different faiths and different expressions of faiths do this very differently: organised religions do it differently to loose association of the “spiritual but not religious”, but in all cases, it is faith – broadly understood – that addresses and deals with the questions that niggle away and are not otherwise addressed. Faith won’t disappear, because faith’s questions won’t disappear.

But why does this need saying? Is it not obvious that religion is about ultimate questions that concern everyone?

The problem is that modern Western life is full of opportunities to distract us from these questions. We are wealthy, comfortable, bombarded with entertainment, and often very busy with careers and children as well. All these things help us to repress the deeper questions about the origin and purpose of our existence.

Many people treat the question of life’s meaning like a school or University essay that they can procrastinate from indefinitely: “One day I’d like to figure it out: what it’s all for and where it’s all going: but today there’s another episode on Netflix, Instagram to browse, or tennis on the TV.” The entertainment industry offers alluring enticements to money, sex, fame or success. Wealth is particularly useful because it helps us get what we want, when we want it, and prevents us from facing the harsher realities of life. Making ourselves busy is easy, and we can leave ourselves no time for deep reflection on the bigger questions. All of this adds up to what we might call the “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

The “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

But the problem is that even ordinary everyday life is lived according to (at least provisional) answers to those big questions. Every daily decision we make displays our values, what we think matters. If we work late instead of coming home to play with the children – if we fly to New Zealand for a vacation, or buy beef, massively increasing our carbon footprint and contributing to climate change – we are making choices that have an impact on the planet. All our choices are based on values which reveal our beliefs about what makes life worth living and what we want out of life. You cannot be an agnostic. Your life displays belief in one thing or another. Consider one stark example. A pregnant teenage girl simply cannot be agnostic about abortion for very long. She has only two options: abort, or give birth. The choice she makes will be a practical consequence of her beliefs and value judgments. There is no agnosticism, no “not answering” the question.

Like every religious tradition, Christianity calls us to live lives that are rooted in things of ultimate and lasting value, rather than superficial or self-centred concerns. It challenges us to fight against the narcotic of everyday life by constantly drawing our attention back to the things that most matter. Through worship, Bible reading, and prayer, it incessantly asks us those vital questions: Is it really about making money? Is it about getting promoted? What are our ultimate values and how do we show them in our lives? The real power of secularism is not that it offers alternative answers to these questions but that it distracts from the question. All we need to do is un-distract.

Christianity is not just a set of easy answers to these questions. It is a way, a journey towards the truth. To be a Christian means to belong to a community that trusts what Jesus has revealed about our life’s origin, meaning and end. In that community there are some implicit answers to get us started. We live in the belief that life is meaningful, that selfishness and personal pleasure are not the most important thing. There’s plenty of room for debate and discussion, but let’s at least start talking about the things that matter.