Dwinding congregations: the Truth?

When and why did the English stop going to Church en masse? Earlier than we think, perhaps. The Church in an Age of Danger, Parsons and Parishioners 1660-1740 is a rewritten PhD thesis by Donald Spaeth, that pokes about in the unfashionable basement of popular religion in 17th/18th century Wiltshire. He suggests the rot set in earlier than we like to think, and for relational rather than theological reasons.

Health warning: I have received considerable spiritual benefit from Evangelical and Tractarian revivals, and spent 21 years of ministry as a resident parson in a parish. What follows is hypothetical historical sketching, not bitter twisted comment on any of those fine things in themselves. But, remembering Ronald Reagan’s wise words “Don’t be afraid to see what you see,” here goes...

Evangelical and Tractarian historiographies have tended to suggest their people saved the Church from terrible neglect.

Terrible it may have been, but, paradoxically, far more people went to Church. Every place had its own story, but the mass of people seem to have become detached from their village churches as relationships broke down. The English did not become anticlerical like the French did, but got into habits of ploughing their own furrows, as the Church became more top-down, professional and exclusive.

So here’s one possible historical narrative of how congregations dwindled.

With box pews, churches began to look and feel like cattle pens, or our swimming pool changing rooms. Religion was becoming radically privatised. The parish church became an icon of class division, imposing a top-down order, dismantling previous relationships and practice, enforcing various new model ideologies. This set the stage for three new reforming clerical waves:

1. the Evangelical revival, with clergy enforcing their own particular apparently narrow bands of belief, Calvinistic or Arminian, as the way to salvation.
   
   
2. Resident gentlemen clergy after residence was legally enforced in the early nineteenth century. In came big Georgian rectories, out went peasant curates who were less learned and often part time, but radically incarnational in village life.
   
   
3. the Oxford movement, with robed choirs in the chancel and powerful organs to deal with the rough and ready village band.

All three waves brought new model professional guardians of the sacred, each with powerful authoritarian notions of how things should be, and a tendency to impose their will regardless. Each new wave recruited smallish groups of enthusiastic blue eyed boys & girls, but alienated all the others. As people moved to industrial towns in the 19th century, the village church was part of the social baggage they gratefully left behind.
Et Voilà! Any questions?

Twitter: How to be a Twit

What is Twitter, what isn’t it? People wonder how so much small talk can have any value. If you don’t read it all, what’s the point of having any of it? In fact, very few people religiously read every word of a newspaper, and most of the stuff in there is trivial or made up. Fact is, Human beings, social animals, have an immense appetite for low-grade information from and about people they barely know. Only Twitter’s cultured despisers, Hampstead journos, people like that, stuff all their social encounters with serious social analysis & breaking news:

Ah, the eighteenth Century! London grew wealthy on the back of its coffee houses, the birthplaces of significant institutions like the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England. Why were they born in Coffeehouses?

Well, BBC R4 women’s hour has been dramatizing Joseph Addison’s pieces for thee Spectator. This is how Addison described his work in 1711:

I have passed my latter Years in this City, where I am frequently seen in most publick Places, tho’ there are not above half a dozen of my select Friends that know me; of whom my next Paper shall give a more particular Account. There is no place of Resort wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s; and, while I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man, over-hear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James’s Coffee House, and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner-Room, as one who comes there to Hear and Improve. My Face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the Theaters both of Drury Lane and the Hay-Market. I have been taken for a Merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten Years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the Assembly of Stock-jobbers at Jonathan’s. In short, where-ever I see a Cluster of People, I always mix with them, tho' I never open my Lips but in my own Club. Thus I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species; by which means I have made my self a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever medling with any Practical Part in Life. I am very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Oeconomy, Business, and Diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the Game. I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forc'd to declare myself by the Hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper...

There you go. Twitter, in 1711. Addison wasn’t a printing press enthusiast, but a people enthusiast. I realised years ago that our kids go MSN’ing not to explore hi-tec, but to chat with their mates. It’s a social process, stoopid. The sign of a technological dimwit is to think it’s all about the technology.

So, to recap, this is how to use Twitter. You have a stream of short snatches of conversation fed to your desktop. Imagine a drinks party at which several hundred people stand in small self-selected circles talking. Like Addison, you circulate and engage, knowing fullwell you don’t have to respond to all of every conversation, or even hear it, to give and take social value. Unlike Addison, you can:

• select as many or as few as you want to be of your party;
  
• engage people simultaneously all over the world;
• read and recall every conversation going on in the room if you really want;
• paticipate or not, if, for example, you have a condition like Aspergers affecting enjoyment of social interaction, on terms of engagement with which you can be comfortable
  
• search every conversation almost instantly to find people talking about whatever you want. For example if you really must go on about Treaty of Westphalia, you Twittersearch it and if anyone else has been talking about it, off you go. If they’re not you can start a conversation;
  
• turn it off and do something else at any time;
• Spend your cash on other things as the whole party costs almost nothing in either time or money terms.
  

These are useful things to be able to do with and at a party, but that’s all there is to it. You need to bring and mix your own cocktails, or not. Some people hate social gatherings, and that’s OK. Others think they’re going to hate them, but enjoy them when they push themselves. Other people were made for them.

Small talk is both entirely trivial and the essential stuff of life. In that spirit, why not let’s all just relax and enjoy Twitter for what it is? or not?

For my basic first thoughts about Twitter, click here.
There’s a brilliant post by Matt Kelland on the Haiku aspect of Twitter here. Thanks, Matt.

Excellent Introduction and tips for Twitter by David Pogue in the New York Times, here.

Après-midi d’un(e) faune(tte)

Proud father of three daughters (like King Lear), I have to try and keep up with developments in Female Film, so I picked up Marie Antoinette off the post Christmas cheapie shelf. This could indeed have been the ultimate chick flick. Kirsten Dunst as an airhead Barbie princess should be a storming no-brainer, on a par with casting Skippy as a Kangaroo. Actually her performance is genuinely formidable, all the way from tearful teenager missing doggie to Ladette / Bo Peep young mum. Like Lady Di she’s a blonde bird in a gilded cage. Unlike Lady Di, she manages to keep her pecker up but flunks her charity work. It’s not her fault the movie fails. Design is wonderful. Sets, for once, are real and far better than CGI. Costumes are to die for. Soundtrack works brilliantly. The whole thing is seasoned by marvellous cameos, including Austrian Empress Marianne Faithfull (sans Mars Bar).

Unfortunately all this just isn’t enough. A lovingly accurate biopic about someone whose life was consumed tragically by Ennui can easily become rather boring. A great movie needs a great script, not just a collage of soundbites. There has to be conflict and/or tragedy. Actually this story contains plenty of both, but it’s so well hidden that few punters stuck around long enough to get enough of either — This movie was a box office bombe surprise.

Great movies also need strong enough characterisation for the audience to care what happens to the people on screen. Unfortunately, to cite one invidious comparison, there’s more hot human interest at teatime on a wet Thursday afternoon in your average Jane Austen Vicarage than the entire galactic court of Versailles seems to have been able to drum up in ten years. It’s a novel interpretation of the French Revolution, but perhaps the peasants just got desperate to make something interesting and different happen.

The decision to miss out any before and afters was a bad call. OK, you don't get anything about Marie Antoinette’s childhood because she was only a teenage bride, whose pedigree mattered more than her character. OK, Versailles was a bubble so she didn’t get to see any great events unfold in Paris — why should we? But just as one longs to see the whole thing unravel and a clotheshorse redeemed by mother courage, pride and resilience, the movie ends. Titanic would be less than half the movie it is, even with its sets and cinematography, if it ended with Rose saying to Jack over coffee and licquers “It'll be a bloody tragedy if this lot sinks tonight.” Without the ship actually going down, officers shooting toffs, decks flooding and lights fusing, there's something very fundamental missing from the whole experience.

Eat your heart out, Autrichienne. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon remains the Guv’nor for Eighteenth Century Ennui fans. Although it unfolds at an obvious stately pace, there’s a story, and a variety of things happen to characters it’s possible to care about if you try hard enough. Best use for this one is wallpaper for a theme party. But perhaps that is the truth about Marie Antoinette.