ONE of the participants in a commemorative service on Sunday for the fifth anniversary of Covid-19 was the actor Sophia Myles. Her father, the Revd Peter Myles, ministered in several parishes in the diocese of London, and was among the first 100 coronavirus victims in the UK (News, 27 March 2020).
Edward Stourton interviewed Ms Myles on behalf of Sunday (Radio 4). Having rebelled in the way that clergy children often do, Ms Myles had already returned to belief in God and an eternal soul before her father’s death. As that was relatively early in the pandemic, the family were still able to spend time with him before he died. His funeral, held under social-distancing rules and lasting only ten minutes, however, clearly left her shattered.
Most interesting was Ms Myles’s articulation of a definite but entirely unorthodox faith: a clear expression of the instinctive but intentionally loosely defined “belief in something more than this” which, far more than atheism, is the actually dominant belief system of post-Christian Britain.
Has the Christian Right in the United States fallen in love with President Putin because of his brutal crackdowns on gay and trans communities in Russia? That was the subject of another Stourton interview, with Dr Katherine Kelaidis, a Chicago-based academic, practising Orthodox Christian, and the author of Holy Russia? Holy War? on the Moscow Patriarchate’s support for the Kremlin’s autocrat (Books, 2 June 2023).
Stourton spoke of the “ideological somersaults” performed since Evangelical America supported Ronald Reagan’s attacks on the Evil Empire. Kelaidis agreed that it was a “shocking turn of image”.
Hold on, though: the 1980s Soviet Union was an officially an atheist, Communist state, whereas today’s militantly nationalist Russia wraps itself in Christian drag. It is Russia that has performed the ideological somersault; so it is hardly surprising that America’s religious Right supports Putin in opposition to their bogeyman of a supposedly decadent and godless Western Europe.
Ideas matter. Establishment liberals and progressives struggle to take those of their opponents seriously, and consequently fail to address them. That’s a big part of why they’re losing.
While ideas matter, so does praxis. When praxis goes wrong, the consequences can be horrific. File on 4 (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week) provided superb public-interest journalism, investigating the case of Kasibba, who, aged only seven, was locked up in a hospital for the mentally ill and languished there for 45 years, 25 of them in segregation.
Doctors and professionals felt that they were acting in the best interests of this autistic, learning-disabled, non-verbal woman. Kasibba’s case eventually came to the attention of Dr Patsie Staite, a newly qualified psychologist given the task of reviewing the circumstances of long-term patients after the Winterbourne View scandal (Feature, 14 August 2015).
At first dismissed because she was a young practitioner, it took Dr Staite more than a decade to get Kasibba released. The programme raised further grave questions about the treatment of some of the 200-odd minors still sectioned today.