AFTER the racist riots in Belfast, Sunday Sequence (BBC Radio Ulster) promised to be essential listening — but the resulting programme was a curate’s egg. The Revd Brian Anderson, from the Methodist East Belfast Mission, gave a heart-stopping report of a burning bus outside his church, direct intervention with rioting youths, and then a brief but terrifying “complete loss of control”. His church that night served as a place of sanctuary for people who had left their homes after intimidation.
He also recalled challenging a teenage rioter about the accuracy of his claims that immigrants were attacking natives and taking jobs. The teenager accepted the challenge, but replied that rioting was the only way to get his voice heard on a wider range of issues. “He was wrong,” Mr Anderson said, “but had a coherent argument” that needed to be addressed.
After that, though, the conversation drifted. Allison Morris, of the Belfast Telegraph, suggested that Elon Musk’s social-media posts had helped to inflame the violence, and the presenter, Audrey Harrison, joined in the criticism of “billionaire puppet-masters who made our neighbours the enemy so we’d never look above”. But orchestrated campaigns of rioting and intimidating minorities — most often locals of the “wrong persuasion” — have been a perennial in Ulster for generations, long before social media, as Mr Anderson said.
Who will lead those young men towards something more positive? In a conversation about misogyny later in the programme, Andrew Cunning, a local teacher, said that church attendance among young men and boys in Northern Ireland had “gone up hugely” in the 2020s, but this was apparently a bad thing, because “boys look for simple answers,” and so had returned to church “to bypass hell and get to heaven”, just as they simplistically projected their problems on to migrants. That’s the first time I’ve heard a commentator say that the “quiet revival” was real, but also a bad thing.
Sunday (Radio 4) took a more positive view of a different sign of “quiet revival” among young men: that three-quarters of professional football clubs in England now have openly Christian players, a Christians in Sport survey reports.
The charity’s director, Dr Graham Daniels, saw several factors at work. The advent of the Premier League in the early 1990s attracted players from around the world — and often from strongly Christian parts of it. There was also a wave of well-respected home-grown players in that period going public about their Christianity and acting as role models.
More recently, young players who had grown up in a “post-modern age” found it easier to talk about interior feelings, including their faith. Christian players often display a “degree of existential security” that enables them to cope with professional football’s emotional pressure cooker. Perhaps there is hope for the boys.