Article

Comment

Loneliness

Mental Health

5 March 2024

5 min read

What Bobby Brazier, Jo Marsh and Eleanor Rigby have in common

A public health campaign asks influencers if they are lonely.

Belle Tindall

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

a young man looks pensive as he answers a questuon while sitting in a fancy room.

Bobby Brazier at 10 Downing Street.

NHS.

‘Loneliness. It’s a part of life. Let’s talk about it’

That’s the new slogan offered by the NHS in partnership with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. As part of their campaign, they recently invited young influencers and TV personalities to Downing Street to do just that – to talk about loneliness.

With those aged between 16 and 29 now twice as likely to report feeling lonely as those over 70, these celebrities were tasked with answering a few of the questions most asked by people within that age group. Their questions went along these heart-wrenching lines:

Why am I so lonely?

Is it normal to feel lonely?

Will I always be this lonely?

And while their answers to such questions were a little ‘meh’ (whose wouldn’t be? They were given seven seconds to answer some of humanity’s deepest questions), it doesn’t much matter, their answers weren’t really the point. Rather, viewers were presented with a handful of popular, successful, lovable (looking at you, Bobby Brazier) and happy looking people doing something notoriously difficult: admitting loneliness.

And I think that may be the point.

I am of the firm opinion that admitting to feeling lonely is one of the hardest things a person could do. I have certainly never had the bravery to do it.

I remember watching Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of the beloved 1868 novel, Little Women, for the first time; I was always going to love it, I had decided as much before even stepping foot in the cinema. But there was one scene that felt as if it literally took my breath away. I was left winded in row C.

It is toward the end of the film, and Jo Marsh, the feisty, strong and independent protagonist, is giving a feminist monologue for the ages (albeit to her mum) as she stands in the attic of her childhood home. Jo speaks of women’s minds and souls, their ambitions and talents, she explains how sick she is of being underestimated, getting more impassioned with every word. That is, until she tearily ends her speech by declaring – ‘…but I’m so lonely.’

This isn’t in the book.

This final line was written by Greta Gerwig specifically for this adaptation. And the only person who seemed to be more taken aback by Jo’s words than me (an owner of more editions of the novel than is cool to admit), was Jo herself, who instinctively clasped her hand to her mouth as if she couldn’t believe that she’d just said such words aloud.

As far as filmmaking goes, it was genius. As far as human nature is concerned, it was, well, true.

Not only do we find loneliness acutely painful, but we also tend to find it near impossible to admit to, so much so, the government currently feels the need to step in. Why is that, I wonder? Why does ‘lonely’ seem to be the hardest word?

Those who admit to their own loneliness are wading into profoundly vulnerable waters.

Part of it is certainly because there is a social stigma attached to feeling lonely. Ironic, isn’t it? How loneliness has social connotations. Nobody wants to be Eleanor Rigby, nor Father McKenzie, nor any of ‘the lonely people’ that Paul McCartney so pities, for that matter. It’s one of the only Beatles songs you wouldn’t want to have been written about you. Loneliness feels like a failure somehow, and so we struggle to admit it, even to ourselves. A failure because, we’re supposed to be self-sufficient, independent, free-thinking, emotionally-sturdy individuals (which is the operative word, of course). That’s what individualism has taught us, isn’t it? And so, how do we reconcile that with the piercing pain of isolation? How do we admit that there’s a deep crack within us that can’t be papered over by success, or wealth, or another episode of our favourite podcast? How do we go about admitting such a lack? A lack, which despite individualism’s best efforts, has us naturally wondering why it’s there in the first place; are we unpopular? Unattractive? Unlikable? Or worst of all, unlovable?

Those who admit to their own loneliness are wading into profoundly vulnerable waters. And most of us are utterly unwilling to follow them there, lest we be spotted by a budding Paul McCartney and our loneliness be immortalised.

And then, of course, there’s the other side of the coin: what does our loneliness say about the people who we are in relationship with? Nobody wants to unleash the panic and guilt tucked away in that can of worms (which, I must note, is unnecessary panic and guilt - there could be any number of reasons you’re feeling lonely, despite your very rich relationships).

And so, we just don’t say the word. And that’s what appears to be making the NHS and, rather randomly now that I think about it, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport so nervous.

We need to admit when we’re lonely. We have to pull a Jo Marsh and say it out loud. We must give language to the lack that we feel.

To be known and loved is my deepest and truest need.

One of the things that I find myself most consistently thankful for when it comes to my Christian faith (you know, apart from the most obvious aspects…) is that it gives me such language. At the risk of sounding annoyingly self-centred, it dignifies the feelings that I find hard to even acknowledge. It offers explanation, and therefore, a comfort that I could never find anywhere else; a comfort rooted in truth.

It may sound nuts, but I have come to understand the reality of loneliness, not through influencers on a sofa in Downing Street (although that’s great), and not even through Jo Marsh’s monologue (which is even greater), but through an ancient Hebrew poem. This poem tells me that to be alone is ‘not good’.

Not good. Not right. Not as it should be.

That’s God’s point of view at least – that to be alone, properly, completely and permanently alone, goes against the very fabric of the world. It is at odds with human flourishing. I’ve come to deeply value how concrete that is. I’ve also learnt to relax into the knowledge that not only is loneliness ‘normal’ (referring to one to the questions referenced at the beginning), it’s natural, in every possible sense of the word.

To be known and loved is my deepest and truest need. I was designed for relationship, with God and with people. And therefore – with all the complex ways that life unfolds - to be lonely, is to be human.

So, with all of this in mind, I’m tempted to end where we began, to come full circle and once again borrow the government’s words:

‘Loneliness. It’s a part of life. Let’s talk about it.’

Column

Atheism

Belief

Comment

12 April 2024

5 min read

Defining cultural Christianity

There’s already a backlash against Dawkins and the New Theists.

George Pitcher

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

A speaker turns from the podium against a backdrop reading 'Centre for Sckeptical Inquiry

Richard Dawkins speaking at a sceptics event, 2022.

CSI

“Richard Dawkins says he’s a cultural Christian,” I said over breakfast.

“What’s that?” she asked.

I had a stab at it. “Someone who doesn’t buy the Christian faith, but likes hymns and churches and to live in a nominally Christian country, because it’s decent. Apparently.”

“So what’s new?” she said.

She has a point. I’ve just completed a decade as a rural parish priest and plenty of people came to church because it’s a respectable, middle-class thing to do. It’s as comforting as it is comfortable.

But cultural Christianity is a thing of the moment not just because of the pop-atheist Dawkins. To be honest, he’s struggled to retain his increasingly embarrassed atheist flock over the past decade, so in the public sense he’s not much of a trophy. But there are those of higher and more surprising profiles, who have come out for Christianity as the very essence of our culture and the bulwark against something much worse (for which read Islam).

The backlash against New Theism has been swift. And, strangely, most of it hasn’t come from humanists and atheists.

A key text for cultural Christians is Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. It posits, inter alia, that Christianity is the foundation of our civilisation, even the bits that try to destroy the faith. Holland has more recently experienced a miraculous cure from cancer through intercession (which sounds suspiciously like deal-making prayer, but never mind).

Then there’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose journey from Islam to atheism to Christianity traces her developing conviction that secular humanism is a reed in the wind against the threat to the West from militant Islam. Holland and Ali, among many others, including women’s rights activist Louise Perry in her apologia for traditional Christian morality, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, fuel the enthusiasm of Justin Brierley for a new renaissance in his joyful book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

Collectively, these are called the New Theists, who ride against the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse (more accurately, perhaps, the four hacks of the new millennium), Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris.

The backlash against New Theism has been swift. And, strangely, most of it hasn’t come from humanists and atheists, but from what one might call established Christians. I have heard the likes of Ali and Holland called cosplay Christians and their faith derided as Christianity-lite.

Dawkins still says the Christian faith is nonsense, but who’s to say the spirit isn’t moving in him?

Robert Thompson, a north London priest, has posted that “we will be in the midst of Christian revival… when we actually reorder our lives around the abused Christ and raise the abused Christ’s body”. He argues against Brierley’s championing of London’s oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great, because it’s “the gayest church in town” (no, I didn’t follow this line of argument either) and critiques Brierley’s account of Holland’s witness (if not conversion) by comparing it with “the worst Easter Day sermon I’ve ever heard”.

I accept that this is a savage paraphrase in its brevity. But it’s all there and it comes not from any of the (now old) New Atheists, but from someone ordained to the priesthood. Meanwhile, Chine Macdonald, director of the Christian think tank Theos, writes in relation to his claims of cultural Christianity that “Dawkins isn’t actually a fully paid-up follower of Jesus” and that she’ll save her excitement over New Theists until they start “talking about the ways in which their lives have been turned upside down by the radical love of Jesus Christ.”

Frankly, all this sounds a bit snobbish and patronising, as if there’s a minimum bar for Christian entry, as if it’s cosplay Christians indulging in Christianity-lite. Sure, Dawkins still says the Christian faith is nonsense, but who’s to say the spirit isn’t moving in him? Frankly, I have people at my communion rail who say the same thing. And, to be brutally honest, I can count on one hand those of my very many Christian friends who claim that their world has been turned upside down by the radical love of Jesus Christ.

To be clear, Thompson and Macdonald have important things to say. Thompson writes movingly about his pastoral experience of cystic fibrosis patients in hospital, to take theological issue with Brierley for writing about “an unbiblical God who simply does not exist” as he waited with his patients “until they died… generally well before their 40th birthday.” No Holland miracle cures, please.

Macdonald writes usefully about the difference between the word “Christian” as an adjective and a noun, the New Theists being Christian adjectives in action. She also speaks of Dawkins’ talk of Christianity as a “decent” religion (as opposed to Islam) and his feeling “at home” in a Christian country as code for “whiteness”. To my shame, I hadn’t thought about that.

This would all be an ecclesiastical spat, like arguing about angels on a pinhead, if it weren’t for a darker danger beneath it. I think of former nun Karen Armstrong’s work on the dangers of religious fundamentalism when outsiders are excluded. In that context, I worry even more about those who claim that the New Theists are the work of “the enemy”, or Satan, because they “hollow out” our faith more insidiously than atheists.

In contrast to that, Bishop Graham Tomlin gave a sermon at Lambeth Palace the other day in which he referenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s claim to a faith that proclaims Christ at its centre, rather than worrying too much about the boundaries of the Christian community, which are always a bit fuzzy. I like that, because with fuzzy boundaries it becomes harder to exclude New Theists.

It’s tough being a Christian, whether new or old. When a rich young man comes to the Nazarene and asks how he can acquire the kingdom of heaven, he’s told to sell all he has, give the money to the poor and follow him.

None of us can reach that bar. But the implication I hold on to is that he’ll walk alongside us anyway. And that applies to everyone in this column, without exception. Now that’s what I call radical love.