The trouble with identity politics

Identity politics reflected two great longings, a desire for uniqueness, and a need to belong. It’s time to ditch it.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A head and shoulders portrait consisting of large disc-like pixels that obscure the real person..

Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash.

I’ve been watching the remarkable documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, and there is one story in it I can’t get out of my mind. Richard Moore was a ten-year old boy in Londonderry in the early seventies. Charles Inness was a 30-year old British soldier in the Royal Artillery stationed in the city at the time. During a local disturbance in 1972, Inness fired a rubber bullet to disperse a crowd of youths throwing stones at a RUC base at exactly the moment the ten-year old Richard crossed his line of fire. The bullet hit the young boy in the eye, blinding him for life.

Many years later, Moore expressed a desire to meet the man who fired the gun. And so, in 2006 they met. The British soldier, cautious, a little stiff and very proper, was initially defensive, refusing to apologise as he still felt he had acted rightly at the time and in the circumstances. Moore persisted, not out of a desire for vengeance or recrimination, but simply wanting to understand. Gradually the two became friends and Inness eventually found a way to say he was genuinely sorry.

The history of the troubles in Northern Ireland is full of stories of people being murdered simply because of one part of their identity - that they were Protestant or Catholic, UDA or IRA, British soldier or Irish Republican. What struck me listening to this story was Moore’s tenacity, to get beyond the simplistic identity of Inness as ‘the soldier who took away my sight’.

Summing up what he had learnt, Moore said: ‘Finding out who he was changes everything. To me, he’s no longer a soldier, he’s a human being. A father, a grandfather – it makes a person very real. And that’s a good thing.’ There seemed to me a gem of wisdom here that can get us past much of the polarisation of modern life.

“There are two striking human passions, the passion for uniqueness and the passion for union.”

Tom Morris.

‘Identity politics’ was a term borrowed from social psychology in the 1970s and quickly gained traction. It was an attempt to enable marginalised people to find solace and support with one another, by focussing on the common characteristics of one aspect of a person’s identity. It tried to help bring particularly disadvantaged groups together by describing the common experiences they had faced.

Since then it has gained a great deal of traction and generated much controversy. So why did it hit such a nerve?

The philosopher Tom Morris once wrote:

“There are two striking human passions, the passion for uniqueness and the passion for union. Each of us wants to be recognised as a unique member of the human race. We want to stand apart from the crowd in some way. We want our own dignity and value. But at the same time, we have a passion for union, for belonging, even for merging our identities into a greater unity in which we can have a place, a role, a value.”

Identity politics was a reflection of these two great human longings - our desire for uniqueness, and our need to belong. On the one hand we all want to be special, unique, different from everyone else. On the other hand, we want a tribe to belong to, whether defined by gender, race, sexuality, nationality or the like. And so, we choose an identity that defines us, marks us off to the world, and gives us a group to belong to.

Identity politics began with good intentions. Yet the way it is often used means that it encourages me to think that once I have labelled someone with a particular characteristic, that is all I need to know about them. If I know they are black or white, privileged or deprived, young or old, gay or straight, conservative or progressive, and so on, then I know all I need to know. I can then embrace them as one of my tribe, or dismiss them as different, without any further discernment.

One of the writers of the Psalms, reflecting on his own self-awareness, wrote “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The reality is that we are all immensely complex beings with multiple facets, different qualities and a number of overlapping identities. My neighbour may be Asian. And knowing that, I might think ‘I know what Asian people are like – and he must be like all the others.’ Yet he might also be a father, a husband, an Arsenal fan, of Bangladeshi heritage, a doctor, middle-aged, a Labour voter, suffering from occasional depression, a 2 handicap golfer. And so on. These are all part of who he is and if I want to get to know him fully, I need to understand something about all of these elements of his identity. If I fix on any one of these as the final truth about him, and ignore all the rest, I do him a disservice. To reduce the complexity and wonder of a fellow human being to one single characteristic is surely a mistake. It is to fail to do them justice, and display an unwillingness to take the time to understand them. It is, in the final analysis, a failure to love.

The final truth about each one of us can only be what is true of all of us - that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. In that same Psalm, the writer relates his sense that the God he worships, in a way that is both comforting yet unnerving, knows everything about him:

“you know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar, you discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.”

We are each one known, loved, understood in our very complexity by the God who made us, and invited to become capable of that same kind love – the love that looks beyond the surface to understand the complexities of others – in other words, to grow into the likeness of God.

Richard Moore may have been blinded by that rubber bullet in 1972. Yet in a strange way he learnt to see better than most of us. He learnt to see past the simple identity of Charles Inness as ‘the British soldier who ruined my life.’ He had the tenacity to learn that that this man was, like all of us, both complex and simple - a man with unique relationships, a history, in his own way shaped by his experience, and yet at the same time, worth getting to know in that complexity - that ultimately he was, like all of us, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’

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Comment

Death & life

7 August 2024

6 min read

Dying well: what is neglected needs to be put right

How each of us can prepare ourselves and those we leave behind.

Matthew Hutton

Matthew is the author of Your Last Gift – Getting Your Affairs in Order.

A group of grieving friends with their hands on each others backs.

The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash.

In their November 2023 Theos report Love, Grief and Hope: Emotional responses to death and dying in the UK, Madeline Pennington and Nathan Mladin produce the surprising finding that, over the past year, one quarter of Brits had thought about their own death at least once a week. They go on to consider related emotional responses, chiefly fear. But, however often we think about death (maybe never), what do we do to prepare for the certainty of it, when we are used to making all sorts of preparations for practically everything else in our lives?

First, we can, without being morbid, live our lives in broad terms in the consciousness that we are mortal (and, if you will forgive me as a classicist for delving into Latin, living ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ which means ‘from the standpoint of eternity’). Second, there are things we can do in terms of getting our house in order, both for our own peace of mind and for the benefit of our loved ones and those we leave behind. This is both spiritually and materially, though I would want to argue as a Christian that the whole of life (whether in this world or in the next) combines both aspects.

Having had quite a feisty and competitive brother/sister relationship (with not a little ribbing from her about my own faith), we came to enjoy the warmest possible sibling love for and appreciation of each other.

My dear sister Debbie died aged just 49 in July 2005. She had telephoned me only eight months before to tell me of the grim diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, saying that there were two things she needed to sort out: her will and her relationship with God. I replied (as a Christian and as a private client lawyer) that we could sort both those out. I referred Debbie to a vicar I knew in a church round the corner from where she lived. She was a bit hesitant, saying that, having kept God at arm’s length for all her life, wasn’t it a bit presumptuous now to be knocking on the vicar’s door? I suggested that she should think of it from his point of view, in terms of job satisfaction: that after all was precisely what he was there to do, telling people about God and helping them to find a personal faith.

So that’s just what she did, coming to that faith herself following time with the vicar, with me and with other friends, in the February. And she died as a self-proclaimed Christian five months later. For me, the most precious thing apart from knowing that she would be with Jesus forever was this: having had quite a feisty and competitive brother/sister relationship (with not a little ribbing from her about my own faith), we came to enjoy the warmest possible sibling love for and appreciation of each other.

Second, my mother, whose ideas of Christianity were never terribly clear, though she was a very faithful listener of my sermons, came to faith (as I saw it) just 12 days before she died in May 2010. It was at a home communion given by one of the local clergy team that, as she received the bread and/or the wine (I forget which), a most powerful voice within my spirit told me that she had received Jesus. And that night, by way of confirmation, my wife Annie had a very clear dream of my mother (it had to be her, wearing her most distinctive pink kaftan) dancing at the foot of the Cross.

We lived just five minutes from Mum and, again, my early evening visits to see her, to chat, to read from the Bible and to pray were somehow transformed. While I am not sure that she had the same clear consciousness of having moved from darkness to light as had Debbie, I was quite clear that she had – and noted in my prayers at her funeral that at the end she had received Jesus.

Third is my very close friend Jim who died aged just 67 in November 2020: I had talked to him about the Christian faith on a number of occasions, but he simply didn’t want to know. Then just one month before he died, in a telephone conversation with him in hospital Jim asked me to explain it, from a position of dire physical need and wanting to hear. I didn’t know how ill he was and, having explained the essence of Christian belief in very simple terms, prayed with him over the telephone.

As it happens, Jim survived another month at home, during which time I was able to visit him four times and (now having been ordained) give him and his Christian wife Judi Home Communion, as well as pointing him to and talking about Mark’s Gospel and praying with him. His new faith led to a new intensity in our friendship. Jim was quite clear about his new relationship with Jesus, seeing himself as the lost sheep, on which I preached at his funeral, before (as a profoundly moving experience) conducting his burial.

None of us of course knows for sure what happens after death. But Christians are by God’s grace given this ‘sure and certain hope’ of an eternity to be spent with Christ in God’s new creation. And it’s the clear Christian message that that eternity starts now, when we come to faith. There’s a new relationship with God in Christ and, which is my experience, with our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially precious when those folk are close to us anyway.

And then of course, perhaps most importantly, what is broken needs to be put right.

That’s the spiritual aspect. What of the material – by which I mean all the practical ‘stuff’: those who are left behind having to sort out our possessions, Inheritance Tax where payable and a whole host of other things? It is a subject touched on in the Bible, perhaps surprisingly. Consider Paul writing to Timothy that a person should provide for their relatives and especially close family), which I take it would include post-death as well as lifetime provision. And then supremely of course Jesus in providing for his dear mother by entrusting her to his beloved disciple John.

In this context, I can do no more than make a few pointers, which with other suggestions I develop in my book.

There are what I call ‘The Three Essentials’: Lasting Powers of Attorney in case of mental incapacity (for both property & financial affairs and health & welfare), Wills (including the all-important choice of executors) and funeral arrangements. Just 44 per cent of UK adults have made a will.

Then there’s a host of other things, including appointing guardians for any minor children, providing for dependent relatives and making arrangements for pets. What about access to digital assets, for example? Let alone dealing with things about the home.

And then of course, perhaps most importantly, what is broken needs to be put right - relationships, where forgiveness could be sought or given. And, more widely, are there people you want to spend more time with, things you want to do or places to visit?

My suggestion is that dying well embraces first of all the peace which comes from the belief that Jesus has died the death my sins deserve and consequently a restored relationship with God our Heavenly Father; and second, making what practical arrangements we can in advance, to ease the stress of those we leave behind in sorting out our affairs.

Matthew Hutton is the author of Your Last Gift – Getting Your Affairs in Order.