Article

Comment

Easter

Politics

6 March 2025

4 min read

Amid the power plays the Passion of Zelensky stands out

How to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world?

George Pitcher

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

President Zelensky, wearing black, sits silently.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

It started with prime minister Keir Starmer’s shameful toadying to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, when he flourished a letter from his King inviting Trump for his second state visit to Britain.

My first thought was what Starmer was going to produce for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky when he visited London shortly afterwards. A Fortnum & Mason voucher? My second thought was marginally more profound. Thirty pieces of silver came to mind. And I wondered why. Was it possible that Starmer was betraying Ukraine for the trinkets and baubles of our monarchy, just to stay in favour with the world’s most powerful man?

As we have just slid past Ash Wednesday into the season of Lent, these thoughts take on a fiercer focus as the ends of our stories look like they’re in our beginnings, as the cast of characters in Passiontide ahead of Easter seem to take their places in our world politics now.

Is US Vice President JD Vance a little like the Temple high priest of Jerusalem, Caiaphas, when he demands rhetorically: “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish”? Isn’t the price of bringing Zelensky down and appeasing Russia’s Vladimir Putin worth it for peace in Ukraine?

It might be customary in a column such as this to continue to ascribe characteristics of the cast of the Passion of the Christ to the leaders of today’s great powers. But that’s too easy and doesn’t really work. Starmer is no Judas. His courtly flattering of Trump preceded the attempted humiliation of Zelensky in Washington and since that event Starmer is widely applauded across the political spectrum for playing a blinder and not putting a foot wrong.

He is no betrayer of Zelensky, quite the reverse. And, anyway, casting him in that role risks the sacrilege of deifying Zelensky, who is definitely not the Messiah. Indeed, you don’t have to be a devoted Trumpian to invoke Monty Python’s Life of Brian and note that his performance before Trump and Vance was not messianic, but that of a very naughty boy.

Such comparisons are not going to get us very far. Maybe it’s better to turn them the other way around. Of greater value, perhaps, is to use the power plays that we’ve just witnessed on our global stage better to understand the one we’ll shortly be commemorating from a couple of millennia ago in Jerusalem.

In doing so, we may even begin to peek into some insights that demolish any case that the historical events of Passiontide are of no relevance today. And this isn’t just about politics, it’s about our human capacity for abusive power.

Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him.

Take that scene in the Oval Office when Zelensky was bullied by the two most powerful figures (Elon Musk excepted) in the new US regime. It’s a classic weapon in any domestic abusive relationship to blame the victim. So it was that Trump/Vance sought to blame Zelensky and by extension his nation for his and its oppression by Russia.

And so it was when the Nazarene stood before Pontius Pilate, the mouthpiece of the most powerful man on earth of his day, the Emperor of Rome, Tiberius. The similarities between the two situations are striking. And not just because one can reasonably doubt that Jesus of Nazareth wore a suit on that day either.

The latter, a battered artisan and preacher from the provincial hills and a man described as being “without sin”, was a classic subject of victim-blaming. Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him. Like Trump, he told him that he had absolute power over his fate. And, like Trump, he is certain that truth is anything he wishes it to be in the moment when he asks contemptuously: “What is truth?”

The intriguing question is how this tells us to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world. In the immediate circumstances of interrogation in both the Oval Office and the praetorium, the answer seems partly to be silence. The Christ chooses it; Zelensky has it forced upon him by the coercive control of his interlocutors.

Again, I make no claim for a Christ-like Zelensky. But silence as a human response invariably has its source in humility. In the most worldly of senses, that is now very apparent in the conciliatory words of the Ukrainian president towards his bully, calling his leadership “strong”, regretting how the meeting turned out and expressing willingness to return to the table.

Humility isn’t weakness. It brings the power of peace and enables the triumph of love. That’s the lesson from two thousand years ago. And the lesson is also that no good can come from a total lack of it, just as for Trump as it was for Pilate.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.