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I WAS STANDING in a faux-medieval village in Brittany, when a defiantly Celtic-looking character in a long beard offered to take my family on a local tour in a horse and cart. The village looked as if it had eliminated most evidence of the past few hundred years.
At that moment, I made an idle mental connection between the wearing of beards and a hostility to modernity. A moment later, I thought of Rowan Williams.
In 1965, the socialist historian Keith Flett founded the Beard Liberation Front (BLF). In 2000, the BLF joined the anti-capitalist May Day rally, highlighting what it regards as the waste of the world’s resources involved in shaving. In 2002, it considered a boycott of the Harry Potter films because the actors used fake beards.
For the BLF, beards are ideological. The socialist MP Jeremy Corbyn called his “a form of dissent”. Apparently, beards were none too popular with the spin doctors of New Labour. Keith Flett explains: “Beards are politically progressive. All the great revolutionary socialists had a beard.”
Rowan Williams, of course, is often described as a “hairy lefty”, though he has never yet won the Beard of the Year competition, losing out to Charles Clarke one year and later to Monty Panesar.
Of course, well before beards were fashionable for lefties and naturists, they have had a long and venerable association with believers. From Moses to the Taliban to Paul Vallely, the bearded holy man is an instantly recognisable type, beloved of central casting. One student from the London School of Theology has written: “Christian beard-wearing is about a dynamic, life-giving relationship that seeks to model one’s beard after the beard of Jesus.” Hmmm.
Mentioning the Taliban reminds us that there is a serious side to all this. In some parts of the Islamic world, it is extremely dangerous to be a barber. Barber’s shops — symbols of clean-shaven modernity — have been a popular target for violent jihadists raging against the modern world.
What has this reflection to do with anything? Yes, it is a trivial meander. But such is the human imagination. And so it was that last week, as I read Rowan Williams on Marx and Dostoevsky, beardy geniuses all, I found myself recalling that chap in Brittany, and wishing our
Archbishop would, once in a while, show a little more fondness for the time and place in which we now live. It can be hard to hear moral lessons, however well aimed, from those who seem instinctively to dislike so much about the modern world.
The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, in south London.
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