Review
Attention
Books
Culture
Digital
3 min read

Only the rich will experience reality

We’re extinguishing our real world

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A phone shows a picture of the real view behind it.
Josh Power on Unsplash.

It happens so routinely, no-one notices the weirdness anymore. Tourists in front of a majestic site like the Taj Mahal or the Niagara Falls place a camera between their eyes and the glory of the scene itself. Fans at a stadium concert hold cameras up to the singer rather than dance to the music. Witnesses to a disaster choose to film it rather than go to the assistance of the victims. 

Our desire to experience the world around us is being limited by technology, especially the smartphone and there is a growing body of literature to show its harmful effects, the latest of which is The Extinction of Experience (The Bodley Head, 2025) by Christine Rosen. She is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington DC based think tank and she adds to the work of Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation who identifies what social media is doing to young people. Rosen, however, has the adult population in mind, as well. 

Every era has its subtle idolatries and perhaps ours is a slavish devotion to technology. It’s not that technology is wrong, but the expectation we conform to its development rather than the technology adapt to our humanity is slowly toxifying us. To paraphrase Jesus: the smartphone was made for humankind, and not humankind for the smartphone. 

Mediating our relationships by screen leads to instant communication, but also makes us impatient and emotionally careless. Human empathy is an embodied virtue. We learn to pick up emotional clues by watching the subtle facial movements and body language of others as they speak and listen. The growth of emojis is no substitute for this and has all the finesse of a face pulled by Thomas the Tank engine. And we more easily tune out of another person’s problems when they are expressed online rather than to our face.  US college students are around forty percent less empathetic than their counterparts only two or three decades ago, according to the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.   

There are growing signs that screens reduce human empathy, which may be the most disturbing thing of all and perhaps offers a clue why life is becoming angrier. We spend most of our time lamenting how algorithms polarise us, without addressing an even more fundamental problem: we no longer talk about demanding issues face to face, where listening skills are required, but shout across cyberspace, where listening barely happens. 

But the momentum is for more of the virtual world. The software engineer, Marc Andreessen has coined the phrase ‘reality privilege.’  It belongs to those whose real-world existence is full of flourishing – relationships, wealth, housing, holidays, hobbies.  The solution for those who lack these goods, according to Andreessen and others, is a migration to an ‘online world that makes life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in’. 

It is a case of Silicon Valley solutionism, where every problem must have a technological answer. The outcome of migration to an online world is that we no longer need to focus on solving knotty, unglamorous policy issues like poverty, poor housing and low-paid jobs. It also carries a curious echo of the theology which prioritises saving souls from a corrupt world rather than inheriting an embodied resurrection life in a new creation. 

In the two decades after 2003, in-person socialising between American adults dropped by thirty percent; among teenagers it fell by forty-five percent. According to Rosen ‘this changes our behaviour towards others, how we get along or don’t get along, how we resolve conflict, how we understand each other’.  The de-incarnation of human life continues apace, yet it is the physical world is where we flourish, where millennia of brain development has taken place and where God embodied himself in Christ.   

We may come to regret at length the rush to the virtual world, a bit like smoking in the twentieth century. But there is every chance we won’t, because technology is clever and so very cool. The meaning of the incarnation is up for grabs, only this time it’s human, not divine.  

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Review
Culture
Grace
Music
Race
5 min read

Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs

Today’s musicians capture both the barbaric and the beautiful.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

three folk musicians face the camera across a meadow
Angeline, Cohen & Jon.

John Newton’s Amazing Grace was originally written to accompany his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773 and has become the most recorded and most sung hymn in the world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of the hymn’s creation while next year is the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth. 

The former slave trader who became a Church of England minister and abolitionist, preached his sermon on the theme of God’s mercy as outlined in a biblical passage from the first book of Chronicles. There, King David prays ‘Who am I Lord and what is my family that you have brought me thus far?’ Newton found parallels with his own life, having been saved from sinfulness and a storm at sea. 

Among the many events and projects marking the two anniversaries, a folk album entitled Grace Will Lead Me Home may well be one of the most interesting. That is because, while it celebrates the hymn and its legacy, this album also explores “the distance between the world’s most beloved hymn and a most vile and shameful period in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade”. 

As captain of a slave ship when he became a Christian, Newton continued shipping Africans across the Atlantic. Later, he became Curate in Charge at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Olney, where he befriended William Cowper and wrote the words to many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. Later still, he lent his voice to the abolitionist cause. Despite these tensions in Newton’s life-story, the love that people have for ‘Amazing Grace’, including those who are descended from the slaves that Newton shipped across the Atlantic, became very apparent in a series of interviews conducted as part of the project before the songs forming the album were written and selected. 

‘I’m going to hear John Newton preach’ is a key track on the album in which Jon Bickley describes Newton’s transformation from “foul-mouthed drunken sailor” to the captain able to “talk about how Grace can set you free”. In between, however, Bickley notes that the slaves disembark “leaving a trail of blood across the quay” while “the Captain’s in his cabin” writing about grace. Bickley’s songs on the album culminate in a powerful plea for reparations for slavery entitled ‘Sorry’. He writes:  

“300 years after the birth of John Newton the road to redemption for those nations who profited from the slave trade looks long and difficult but surely it starts by saying Sorry.” 

Bickley collaborated on the album with two musicians who have also played on other recent folk albums exploring the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Both Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne played on a project by Reg Meuross entitled Stolen From God, while Morrison had also released The Sorrow Songs, which featured Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, to considerable acclaim. Both artists brought the weight of their study as well as their considerable artistic talents to the Grace Will Lead Me Home project. 

Braithwaite-Kilcoyne brought the profound and arresting ‘Press Gang Song’ to the album. This is a resume of what it takes to become a slave trader from a readiness to “sail the fierce sea” to the willingness to “abuse your fellow man lead him shackled in chains”, “brutalise and violate, disregard their cries of pain”, “cast them overboard to a watery grace”, “for when that you do you shall master your trade”. This was the journey taken by Newton in becoming a slave trader.  

Morrison, whose ‘Grace will lead me home’ is based on the Christian hope of resurrection, also writes from that perspective in ‘The Hand of Fanny Johnson’ from The Sorrow Songs. There, having noted the universality of death which “comes for the rich and the lowly”, she sings: 

“My dear mother said that a funeral is holy, 
The sanctified earth receiving the body, 
And in the hereafter that’s when we will all be 
Remade, entire and whole.”  

Stolen from God, while clearly noting and condemning the way in which European Christians viewed the degradation inflicted on others as their God-given route to wealth, also makes some words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator, central to the song cycle: 

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… so wide that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” 

The song ‘Stolen from God’ makes this contrast its central theme: 

“God made these hands to hold and caress 
He made these hands to worship and bless 
He made these hands to hold my own child 
God made these hands to be mild” 

Yet, those involved in the slave trade: 

“You made these hands to blister and bleed 
To slave for the white man and bend to his greed 
To cut coffee for gentlemen cane for their wives 
At the cost of my family’s lives” 

As a result, your legacy is “written in blood, everything stolen from God”. 

This contradiction in the Christianity that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade is central to the story of Amazing Grace and its legacy (see Bickley’s ‘The choir still sings Amazing Grace’). Newton did come to see the error of his ways and lend his voice to the abolitionist cause in support of those like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano. Meuross effectively captures the beginning of this change in a song called ‘Bridgewater’ about an early petition against slavery: 

“Reverend Chubb Mr Tucket Mr White 
Call on every Christian soul to join the fight 
To stand up as a nation ‘gainst this wicked violation 
Though it might be bad for trade you know it’s right… 
O brother oh brother oh brother 
First the tide must turn before the flood” 

The Sorrow Songs, Stolen From God and Grace Will Lead Me Home are three deeply moving and challenging albums, with Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as the exceptional musicians linking all three, that tackle the history of the transatlantic slave trade, unearthing both incredible tales and uncomfortable truths. The Church is among the institutions that need most to hear and receive the truths and tales these albums share. 

  

Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs (Topic Records 2022) 

Reg Meuross – Stolen From God (Hatsongs Records 2023) 

Angeline, Cohen & Jon – Grace Will Lead Me Home (Invisible Folk 2024)