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Press: In wellness culture, hashtags transcend sin

17 December 2021

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I HADN’T realised that Tim Stanley was such a thoroughgoing traditionalist until I read his Monday Telegraph column against vaccination passports, which he thinks should be shunned, even if they work. There was a swipe in passing at Durham Cathedral: “It’s telling that before a single Briton had died with the omicron variant, before passports had been voted through Parliament, and contradicting the spirit of Church of England advice, Durham cathedral has stipulated that attendance at some of its Christmas services depends upon proof of vaccination, previous infection or a negative test.”

Of course, the traditional policy — at least for the past 70 years — has been to have the people in the pews die off quietly. But one doesn’t expect to see it proposed explicitly, as Stanley went on to do: “Christianity made its name in the Roman Empire providing care to people dying from the plague. Now some churches seem willing to abandon the ancient ethic of welcoming the stranger without question, presumably to safeguard their dwindling, ageing congregations from infection.”

This really does read like an an argument for infecting people with plague, so as to gain points for looking after them while they die. Might it not be an even better tool of evangelism to see to it that Christians don’t get the plague at all?


IT IS all very confusing, — but there’s an app for that: the Financial Times looked at the market for de-stressing apps on your phone: “Corporate interest in employee mental health is one of the main drivers of the wellness app investment boom. Headspace, co-founded by a former Buddhist monk, has done deals with more than 600 companies, including Starbucks and Google. This summer, it announced plans to merge with mental health service Ginger at a reported $3bn valuation. Calm, the first mental health app to become a unicorn with a valuation of over $1bn, has partnerships with American Airlines, M&S and Uber.

“Virtual reality company Tripp uses swirling visuals and sound to mimic the feeling of a psychedelic trip. Open, backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, charges $20 per month for breathwork, or breathing in and out. Revery, created this year, believes it can help insomniacs by using online gaming techniques.”

There is an obvious gap in the market here. I’m sure I could make a profit if I charged only $5 a month to remind people to breathe. Even that is probably a less efficient way of using your phone to avoid stress than simply throwing the damn thing away — once you’re through the withdrawal symptoms.

The appeal of wellness — as well as its futility — is the remorseless focus on the self. Where once a compassionate employer might have talked to troubled workers, now they give them an app on their phone so that they can work on their defective selves.

What is post-Christian, or at least post-Protestant, about this belief in the individual’s weakness and futility is the suggestion that it is optional, and can be transcended by the #blessed (the hashtag is nowadays used to denote material rather than spiritual riches). In this context, the old teaching clearly makes no sense at all, and, when it’s quoted, it’s only as sonorous nonsense.

I loved a paragraph in The Times explaining Pope Francis’s view that pride and hatred were the most serious sins: “The Catholic Church Catechism lists a bewildering number of sins and categories of sins, starting with the Bible’s mention of ‘fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like’.”

The story itself was another example of the Pope filter in the British press, which operates the opposite way to hate filters applied to most public figures. They are only quoted when they say something that will upset the readers. But the Pope is generally thought of as a Good Thing; so he is quoted only when he agrees with the readers. That is why The Guardian quotes him on refugees, the Telegraph quotes him when he says disobliging things about the EU — and The Times runs stories saying that he doesn’t really mind about your sex life.


BOTH The Times and the Telegraph ran stories of hundreds of religious leaders writing to complain about the proposed Bill banning conversion therapy and to announce their willingness to face jail if it became law (News, 10 December). Since no one seems able to define “conversion therapy”, it is probably a bad idea to make it illegal, even if some of the practices the phrase refers to are clearly abusive and wrong.


FINALLY, Xavier Novell i Gomà, formerly Bishop of Solsona, in Catalonia, who resigned earlier this year to marry a therapist who writes erotic novels, has found a new job, according to The Guardian. He is working for a company “that extracts and sells pig semen”. There’s a challenging theme for his wife’s next book.

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