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From Therapy to Social Change
We believe that insights and practices from the realm of therapy can contribute to a better world for all. At least, that's our hope... In an era marked by climate crisis, conflicts, and escalating inequality, any positive contribution is surely welcome. But what, more specifically, can the fields of therapy, psychology, psychiatry, and mental health offer to create a more equitable, sustainable, and flourishing world? This is the question we aim to explore in this podcast series.
Hosted by Mick Cooper, Professor of Counselling Psychology and author of 'Psychology at the Heart of Social Change' (Policy Press, 2023), as well as a father of four, and John Wilson, a Psychotherapist, Educator, and Co-Director of Onlinevents, we will engage in conversations with a diverse array of therapists, writers, and other perceptive and influential individuals.
We aim to delve into the depths of the human psyche while connecting it to current social and political issues—all with energy, enthusiasm, and a touch of humour, we hope!
Sponsored by Onlinevents: https://www.onlinevents.co.uk/
From Therapy to Social Change
Simon Cross in Conversation with Robbie Curtis: From Baptist Evangelicalism to Progressive Faith
What happens when a conservative evangelical embarks on a transformative journey toward progressive Christianity? Join us in an interesting conversation with Simon J. Cross as he unpacks his remarkable shift in faith and ideology. Simon reflects on his evangelical upbringing and the limitations he encountered within traditional evangelical frameworks. He explores how he balances his deep-rooted Christian identity with progressive values, offering profound insights into the importance of change as a cornerstone of his theology and worldview. Through his work at the intersection of mental health, spirituality, and social science, Simon delves into relational theology and mental well-being.
In our exploration of evolving Christian theological perspectives, Simon challenges traditional notions of a distant, omnipotent deity. Instead, he presents a compelling case for a relational understanding of God, one that is deeply affected by human suffering and social injustice. This chapter ties together themes from post-Holocaust theological developments and liberation theology, and addresses the dual role Christianity plays in Western society - both as a force for liberation and oppression. Simon's experiences in mentoring and his reflections on the diversity within Christianity offer listeners a nuanced perspective on faith's role in contemporary issues.
We move on to discussing interfaith and intra-faith dialogue, the preservation of community spaces and rituals, and the concept of Christian Anarchism, exploring how tradition may be rethought to maintain relevance in modern society and consider the mental health benefits of communal activities. We also dive into the concept of challenging imaginary borders, especially in the context of national boundaries and migration. Finally, Simon discusses his work as Chair of the Progressive Christianity Network, and talks about the diversity of its current membership and how people can get involved.
'In the episode, Robbie regrets not always using the most inclusive language - for example 'brother or sister' rather than 'sibling', and apologises to all affected by this.'
The 'Mill Hill' mentioned is the unitarian Mill Hill Chapel, in Leeds:
https://www.millhillchapel.org/
https://www.unitarian.org.uk/congregation/leeds-2/
This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents
Simon, it's so great to see you. Thank you so much for agreeing to do our podcast. Um, just, I've got a little bit of an introduction. So, um, I know you're a writer, a journalist, an activist and an academic, and now a minister as well. It's so many things um, working at the intersection of well-being, spirituality, mental health and social science and theology. You have so many fingers and pies.
Simon J. Cross:It's quite extraordinary, yeah yeah, I've got 10 fingers, 10 fingers, 10 pies, absolutely, if you count thumbs as well.
Robbie Curtis:Yeah yeah, absolutely, and you're also the chair of the progressive christianity network, which is, I think, where we met when you came to mill hill and gave us a wonderful sermon, um, and talked about that a bit. Um, I wonder if I could just kind of start, because I'm aware that you you started as an, as an evangelical christian, and then you've kind of moved into more progressive um, become more progressive in your, in your faith. I wonder if you could just maybe just talk us through that a bit and what that journey was like yeah, sure, so I.
Simon J. Cross:I grew up in a relatively speaking, um sort of small C conservative evangelical Christian family and associated church, and that was really sort of the place where I started my to use a very hackneyed phrase faith journey, and I suppose, well, there are many things that I'm grateful to that time for, for instance, it was a very politically engaged tradition, so that it was a tradition that emphasised justice, emphasised the need to be engaged with the everyday issues of exploitation and poverty and so on and so on. So, yes, I have a lot to thank that tradition for. But as I grew older and as I sort of learned more about myself and about the world, I found some of the increasingly found some of the answers that I'd been provided with in that tradition, theologically speaking, to be insufficient. So from there I sort of developed a more. These words are difficult.
Simon J. Cross:The Progressive Christianity Network uses obviously progressive, and for some people that's a very loaded term, but for me it emphasises the need to change and that change is constant. So, yeah, so I accept progressive as a sort of description of where I've moved towards. As a sort of description of where I've moved towards Broadly speaking. That involves theology that was developed through the sort of liberal turn of the 19th century and then you know. But much more than that, just an openness to change and to different perspectives that one comes across and because I'm a sort of postmodern Generation X type the sort of general feeling that there is no sort of settled answer that one must come to. It's a constant journey through evolving belief.
Robbie Curtis:That makes a lot of sense and I suppose, is that a sense maybe like a lot of sense, and I suppose so is that a sense maybe like a pluralistic sense, that kind of there's different paths and that you you're a christian, but it's not that everyone has to become a christian, but that you know you're more accepting of other ways to come into the truth, if there is such a thing yeah, yeah, I think so.
Simon J. Cross:I mean I I would describe myself as a pluralist in the sense that I think there are lots of perspectives on truth. I would hesitate to say that all perspectives or all ideas are equally valid. I don't necessarily accept that, but I do think there are lots of ways of seeing the same, lots of different directions one can look at the same object from, and you can see different things when you do that. So yeah, I am, broadly speaking, pluralist, and part of that means that, although I emphasise and uphold the teachings of Jesus as being, and uphold the teachings of Jesus as being central, I also accept that there are other ways that people choose to follow which have great value and a lot for me to learn from.
Robbie Curtis:That makes a lot of sense. I'm really curious now, I suppose, because you started in a very Christian framework. Do you see yourself a kind of Christian? I think I'm really curious now, I suppose, because you started us in a very kind of christian framework. Do you see yourself a kind of christian first, progressive second, or that kind of a relationship between those two identities for you?
Simon J. Cross:yeah, that's a really interesting question. Um. I I suppose that um christianity has always been central to my personal identity, um and um personal identity, and that's been the case since I was a child. But I do see myself as being somebody who is deeply invested in the idea of change and the constancy of change, and that is central to the way that I understand not just my thinking or my theology or my philosophy, but to my sort of physicality as well. I believe that everything is in a constant process of change and that is sort of an axiomatic truth. Effectively, that's something we we can't get away from. Um and is observable and um, if you like, measurable and all those sorts of things. It's something that's that's deeply true. So, yeah, progressive um in that sense is, is, is is crucial to my sense of who, who I am, what the world is, um that we live in thank you.
Robbie Curtis:Um, I'm aware as well that you've you've worked a lot kind of in the intersections, as we mentioned, around kind of mental health and spirituality. A lot of the people that will be listening to our podcast will be therapists, a lot of them progressively minded. I wonder if you can maybe just talk about how that fits in maybe with kind of what you've been talking about and kind of a relational theology that that supports people's mental health, maybe yeah, uh, yeah, so I suppose the the um.
Simon J. Cross:I've had a number of sort of um, different types of engagement with mental health, um and well wellbeing sort of practice. On the one hand, part of my professional work has been in journalism and I've written quite a bit about different you know aspects of different developments in the sort of science around mental health, in the sort of science around mental health. But also I've worked in sort of mentoring roles and kind of supervisory, in the sort of technical sense supervisory roles. So I'm a qualified pastoral supervisor, for instance, um and all of those, all of those kind of um pieces of work which have included for me, um, a lot of work with young people who've um, who who've who've got behaviour that challenges and you know who found themselves in different levels of trouble. Basically you know all of that stuff. I've learned to use sort of mental health tools and techniques from kind of coun, counseling or supervision or what you know, whatever it, whatever these different um uh things are um, and so the question, the question is how that fits in with theology. Now, most, most of the time, I wouldn't be discussing any kind of theological in inverted commas language with, certainly with the young people that I would have mentored. It would have been much more to do with them and their situation, those kind of things. They're not interested in. The niceties of theology, they don't care, they don't really have a sense of, you know, the importance of that sort of stuff. They're much more interested in why the world around them is so deeply unfair. But of course that is what my theology really is about. But of course that is what my theology really is about. Why do bad things happen to people who don't deserve it and why does nasty stuff happen all the time? And so that's part, I suppose, of my evolving theology thinking about why this reality exists.
Simon J. Cross:If you have a theology that insists there is a divine being who can control the world and can control, you know, human behavior or natural evil or whatever it might be, if you have that sort of theology and you're dealing with the realities of life where people are born with, you know, conditions that shape the rest of their existence and born into social situations that fundamentally are set against them and have expectations put upon them social expectations, societal expectations, whatever that are unfair and that you know cause them to feel the need to innovate or to change their situation, whether that's through some sort of criminal activity or self-destruction or whatever it might be. From my perspective, and from my perspective as a theologian, you have to take that seriously. And that leads to questions about the nature of the divine. And I do remain convinced that there is a reality which I would describe as God or the divine. God or the divine.
Simon J. Cross:If one is to remain convinced of that, then one has to take into account these conflicting realities that question the sort of all-powerful omnipotence type narrative. So yeah, so I have a relational theology which says that actually there is a God, but God is affected by the world and God is not like this sort of Aristotelian idea of the unmoved mover. I don't accept that, I can't accept an idea of God that is shaped in that way, an idea of God that is shaped in that way. For me and this is the sort of theology that came out after the Holocaust for me God has to be the most moved mover. If there is a God who is worthy of that name, then that God must be moved by and must be changed by the suffering, um that that is, that is real and experienced um here, not just in humans, but um in the earth itself. Long answer. I don't know if I answered that question.
Robbie Curtis:It was great you put on so many things.
Robbie Curtis:I feel like I gave you kind of things like connect these two things together, and it was fantastic it was wonderful oh well, that's very kind, and there were so many bits of the oh like, like I remember our talk that we both went to, but from thomas jay jay ord, who's written a lot on this as well, yeah, yeah, and, and there's so much to it and I think it really places god in the world, rather than this kind of you know, some might say in some sense it's capitalistic or very kind of projective of very Western values in the sense of this all powerful, you know, divine, judge, rather than, instead of bringing him into the world, you know, like we've talked about, like liberation, theology and stuff before, that actually is affected by us and he's in relationship in the most human sense, rather than this kind of some might can look forward and say this kind of you know, someone I can look forward and say are kind of a father figure, he's almost more of a brother or a sister, that's kind of one of us, rather than this kind of, yeah, judge, I suppose.
Simon J. Cross:Yeah, I suppose there's a nice line that comes through from one of the sort of founding figures of this sort of theology, which I'm going to butcher it slightly, but it basically says you know, the Christian tradition has developed an idea of God that owes more to poorly understood Greek philosophy than to the sort of deeply relational Hebrew theology that we see in the ancient Hebrew scripture.
Simon J. Cross:Now, there's an awful lot that you could unpack there, but certainly, I think this idea that people get from Greek, thinking that a god is sort of remote and distant, and all those sorts of things, well, yes, there is that coming through from Aristotle. But if you were to look at, you know, more broadly at Greek philosophy and ancient Greek theology as well, it's much more complex than that ancient greek theology as well, it's it's it's much more complex than that, um. So, yeah, so I, but, but obviously people have taken a more sort of a kind of a kind of way of thinking about the divine that emphasizes the right, the, the kingly right, or the, the right of um, certain sectors of society to dominate others based on, you know, class, colour, whatever it might be. So all of this has been it's a massively tangled knot and makes it, you know, very hard to unpick. So one he takes the sort of the Gordian knot approach and just cut down the middle with a sword and say, no, this is basically all wrong and it just all needs to change.
Robbie Curtis:I'm reminded kind of when you're talking of Tom holland's ideas of the west is fundamentally christian and when you think of you know the diversity we've got, from you know the american slave trade to liberation theology. In a sense of there's so much diversity that even the idea of christian can can mean so many different things. So many people and I think of kind of you know in client work that you know that that can be, that christianity can be hugely beneficial and it can be liberating for people. It can be so oppressive as well and it's so embedded in our society that you almost can't detect it because it's everywhere.
Simon J. Cross:Yeah, yeah, yeah, very true, very true. And of course it's like all these things, isn't it right? One word Christian means sort of a vast range of different things to different people. I have this same issue with the phrase believe in God, which I think I've probably already used today. But you know, in many senses it's a kind of well, it's either meaningless or it's overly freighted with meaning. Meaningless, or it's overly freighted with meaning um, because it can mean, you know any one of a of dozens of different things to people, depending on what one thinks of when.
Simon J. Cross:When you say the word believe, um, what you know? If you say I believe in god, then who is the I that we're talking about, what, what is and and certainly what is the god that we're talking about? That this, this is a, that's a massively contested idea, um, but you know, when somebody says oh, because people say to me all the time so I used to work as a chaplain and now I'm a minister, um, and so people are will always say to me oh, you know apologetically, oh, I'm sorry, I don't really believe in god, and, and you know it, I, I know what they, I know what they're saying but at the same time, I sort of think well, you know, the likelihood is that what you don't believe, I probably don't believe either.
Simon J. Cross:There are all kinds of things that are hidden within these kind of things and this is why you know um you get research shows that um, that people who are avowedly atheist, for instance, uh could still believe in angels or um. You know there's, there's all kinds of pieces of research that show these sort of uh, these kind of conflicting um beliefs that are held in, in tension with people, because these these words are um much too simplistic and don't don't allow for the complexity of real people's um, real um thoughts, beliefs, ideas, etc.
Simon J. Cross:Yeah, which also are in the constant process of change, so I'm back to change again, right you? Know you, you see something one day and you think, oh, actually, do you know what that? Maybe I do think that, um, and then the next day, oh no, I don't, but it is this, that that is it, because every momentary experience changes, um, the, the reality that you perceive.
Robbie Curtis:So you know, it's, it's a constant thing yeah, and I think that well kind of while in this area reminds me of I'm aware you've talked about kind of inter and intra face dialogue, um, and I wonder, is that something that kind of comes into you, kind of that process of change that we all change around, maybe some similarities, um, or if you maybe want to talk about your work in those areas more broadly and and how that's yeah, it brought into everything else that you do yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no.
Simon J. Cross:So well, one of the most formative and helpful and important things for me is has been in interfaith dialogue. There are problems with this terminology Faith is a Christian idea more than anything else, but it's still widely used so we'll stick with it. But discussion and learning between people of different belief, traditions and spiritual or religious traditions, that's been hugely helpful and supportive to me. And not just um discussion, but friendship, um and also um. You know reading and and listening to um thinkers who come from other traditions. So I've learned a lot from uh, from doing that, um, uh, and the same is true when we talk, so that that would be the interfaith thing, but intra-faith. You know talking and listening to people and being friends with people who are in different places within within christianity.
Simon J. Cross:Um, that again is is enormously helpful to me. It can be challenging because sometimes you have to sort of leave behind the sense of oh well, I'm done with that idea or I've already been there or I know all of that or whatever, and that's quite a hard thing to do. Well, it is for me. I'm not sufficiently enlightened to be able to kind of just um, leave that you know um behind um but, but, yes, certainly um sitting with this, of the challenges, some of the challenges that are posed by um, views that come from, uh, other parts of the church that that's been, that's been quite sort of foundational for me too.
Robbie Curtis:Yeah, it makes me think there's been so much recently around gay marriage and around what individual bishops can do, and I particularly think something like Church of England. I wonder, do you get a sense of kind of where you fit as a United Reform? I think, is that right yeah?
Robbie Curtis:Where you kind of view as a united reform minister, as a very progressive christian, where you fit in the whole kind of whether it's protestant or christian in general picture, do you? I wonder if you kind of sometimes feel like an outsider, or is the church kind of moving more in your direction?
Simon J. Cross:yeah, that's a that's uh, that that's something that I I think about quite a bit. Um, you know, I think I've spent most of my adult life feeling somewhat on the margins of things and to a degree, I suppose I'm perhaps a little more comfortable there than anywhere else. I don't like to feel too close to the centre or to the mainstream and I worry that I'd slip into a sort of well, I don't know, I worry it'd become too comfortable for me. So, yeah, so I prefer to have that sort of slightly kind of marginal existence. But, robbie, I need to say really that, um, I, I do recognize I I inhabit a very kind of privileged position. You know, I'm, um, I come from a working class background, but I'm I'm a middle class guy with um higher degree and professional job and I'm straight and I'm a cisgendered male, all these kind of things. I'm a white guy. You know, I've got everything kind of all the odds are sort of stacked in my favour. So it was a lot easier for me to be able to kind of say oh hey, you know, I can hang out in the sort of marginal, fringy areas, right, because you know, people, people have a go at me, which they sometimes do, you know, isn't, isn't, there's no kind of existential threat to my existence, so, uh, so I, um, I recognize that I've got a lot of um privilege church and unable to really find a home in that, and I was OK with that. And I was okay with that. I was employed by a charity that wanted me to be a community chaplain and wanted me to run sort of small kind of anarchic expressions of church, and that suited me well.
Simon J. Cross:But then some things happened and I found myself thinking. And then some things happened and I found myself thinking I'd like to find a way of re-engaging with sort of congregational models of church, if I'm able to. And so I looked quite hard and, as I said, I grew up in the Baptist. I don't know if I said this actually, but I grew up in the Baptist church and you know there are within the Baptist church, like L churches, there are various kind of progressive people and thinkers and congregations and things. And I thought, well, maybe I could find a home there, but locally to me, where I was living at that time, that wasn't really a possibility. The church, the Baptist church, that I experienced there was not in that place.
Simon J. Cross:So I looked more broadly and I realised that the United Reformed Church was the first no, this is again difficult, but sometimes people will say the first mainstream Trinitarian denomination to accept or to license same-sex marriage. I'm not sure of the correct terminology there, but basically URC churches were allowed to conduct same-sex marriages so long as the church itself chose to, and I thought, okay, maybe that's a good sign to me. So that sort of led me into more engagement with the United Reformed Church, which I found to be a place of great tolerance and a great kind of acceptance of difference, um and uh, not sort of obsessed with kind of um, uh, dogma and um and the things that that had been a problem for me, um and so yeah, so I sort of gradually increased my engagement and the point where I ended up becoming a member and then ultimately candidating for ministry and now I'm a URC minister.
Simon J. Cross:So I fully kind of drank the Kool-Aid and sort of jumped on board. But there's great, you know, there's huge overlap with other denominations, other ways of thinking and there's huge kind of range within the denomination of people from quite evangelical background folk to people like me who are on this sort of for want of a better word liberal end of things. So yeah, people like me who come from an evangelical background don't really like the word liberal because it sounds a little bit kind of, um, like you're not gonna be engaged in things, um, you're not gonna do the hard work, um, now that's. That's a slur on on on liberal thinking, absolutely, but it's still. There's something deep inside me which sort of you know finds the term liberal slightly problematic. But there you go. What can you do?
Robbie Curtis:I know what you mean completely, and especially when you think liberal has quite a different meaning in the UK to the US, whereas the US, I mean, I'm quite okay with, but the UK I completely know what you mean and there was so much to resonate with when you talked about kind of you know, you grew up, I grew up in the Church of England and I grew up in Bumper when I was 12. And I followed that quite and I'm very grateful for a lot of people I met and a lot of that. But then I went away from it for a while and now I've kind of I feel like I've come back with Mill Hill, which is a Unitarian church. I think we did the first gay marriage in Leeds back in 2014.
Robbie Curtis:Yeah, um, and it's so open and it's so I mean you know you came and spoke there but lucky us, um, and it's it to me it's so relational, like it's let me say it say that differently. I lost a lot of relationships when I lost my quite classical, well, quite orthodox Christian faith and I feel like I've, and then I kind of became quite a strong well, I don't know if atheist but and quite an anti-theist, let's say that and I gained different friends and now I'm kind of back in the church and I kind of lost those friends and maybe I'm kind of somewhere in in the middle, but it's.
Robbie Curtis:It's so to me. I it wasn't quite. You know, am I going to either believe my true thing or lose my friendship? But there was definite tensions of that. I don't know if I really want to follow this path because I've got these friends and it's not that anyone was ever horrible or saying you know, I'm gonna, you know, desert you because you think different things.
Robbie Curtis:We just had less in common um even to the point of like I remember. So I went to sell survivor, you know, back in the day and obviously I'm very aware of everything that's come out. I didn't have any horrible experience, I was very lucky. But I think you know someone putting their hand on my shoulder and saying we hope these lovely things happen to Robbie in in a church. You know thousands, of thousands of people. It was so intimate and I really missed that.
Robbie Curtis:And I think I see something like um I don't know if you know the um guy called James Partridge. He's done a sold-out show. He's going all over the country with primary school bangers of kind of you know, singing Shine, jesus, shine People that don't care about Jesus at all. But they were raised in this really quite Christian context with these Christian songs that have a huge nostalgia for it. That I think I mean my generation and lots of others. It's really part of our childhoods and lots of others it's really part of our childhoods and I think a lot of us we're looking at you know, we there was a dawkins phase that I think was kind of dying out now, but we're we're wanting something relational and and connected and kind of with some of those traditions that we had in our childhood, but just not the power structures, the patriarchy, the capitalism, all of the the baggage that some seems to come along with it, and something like the united reform mill hill is.
Simon J. Cross:I think it's appealing to a lot of of young people right now yeah, and that I, yeah, I, I certainly would hope that that was the case. I mean, uh, there, there, my experiential reality is that, um, still, these churches now, mill hill is not a good example of of my experienced reality, because it's a church where there are a variety of people from different generations and there's a sort of sense of quite sort of vibrant life there, which is beautiful to see within a quite sort of traditional context in a sense. But more broadly, you, I see a lot of small elderly congregations that are struggling and sort of fighting to keep something alive that well, you know, there's lots to be said there again about the reality of change. But I think, though, more broadly, that I agree with you. I was reading something in the Guardian I think it was John Harris writing it about Nick Cave's album Wild God, and Nick Cave's been very open about his sort of, about his sort of, I suppose, awakening to a form of Christianity or of something like that. I don't think he would necessarily use that terminology, but certainly the things he writes and the things he sings and all that sort of stuff is very much, um, he's using that kind of, uh, that kind of language. Um, and john harris said something like you know, uh, those empty, sort of those empty pews might not be empty for quite so long as as we thought they would. Now you have that, and then up against that you have, like um, in in the 50s, philip larkin wrote a poem about uh called church going, uh, where he said you know when, when, uh, what will we turn these buildings into when nobody goes to church anymore, kind of thing. Yeah, so sort of looking at the writing on the wall and and you? It makes me wonder which sort of vision will, will win out. You know what will, what will happen, and I I can't, I can't say for sure, I don't know.
Simon J. Cross:I think, I think, I think there is a need for people who are within inherited traditions to accept the need for, and reality of, change. You know, sometimes, just sometimes, you get the sense of people wanting to sort of perpetuate a kind of living history museum of culture. That was, you know, I don't even know when it's from the traditions of the British Christian church. They're old, but they're not very old, if you like, they're not. You know they don't go back to the 16th century or anything. I don't know when exactly they go back to. But some of those things need to, some of those sacred cows need to be bumped off effectively. But at the same time, yeah, I think there is a need also to maintain some of the space that people crave for community, for something that speaks to them of transcendence, that speaks to them of something that brings them comfort.
Simon J. Cross:There's all this sort of complex stuff going on. You need some psychologists on to work out what's happening. It's beyond my limited brain power, sadly. But yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. It's going to be fascinating to watch.
Simon J. Cross:I mean, the URC and presumably the Unitarians and sort of certainly the Methodists and other smaller sort of denominations are forecast to sort of be more or less dead within about 20 years. Now, fortunately, that's about what I've got left in terms of career. So you know I shouldn't be out of a job. But at the same time I sort of think, well, what will happen if that's the case? You know, what will happen to these chapels that I've got?
Simon J. Cross:I mean, the United Reformed Church is formed by Presbyterian and Congregationalist traditions that came together and it was supposed to be a kind of denomination that wouldn't last, because it was always going to be about bringing all the denominations together and accepting that. You know we need to be together rather than separate. But there's all this inherited tradition, all this wisdom, all this kind of stuff that goes back centuries, and if we lose that, then I think we stand to lose a lot that we perhaps don't realise. So yeah, again, robbie, I'm rambling, but it is a fascinating, you know, on paper it's fascinating in. In reality, on the ground, it can be quite startling and scary at times yeah, yeah, definitely.
Robbie Curtis:There was so much of when you were talking there around community and around around church. That, as as community helps, you know, regardless of theology, but actually people coming together singing, I mean I could go on forever.
Simon J. Cross:But yeah, we don't. We don't sing with people anymore.
Robbie Curtis:It's so sad yeah, how good it is for your mental health week.
Robbie Curtis:There's so much research on that and and there's a lot of research on like relational depth that I know, people in the group have done around, how you know if the therapist and client you know have that relational depth, happen, kind of go into their emotions, kind of have a real kind of human to human context, something like martin buber wrote about um around, you know, about treating someone as the vow, about really seeing them as as full people and actually, yeah, getting to know them.
Robbie Curtis:And you know there's all sorts of stories of pubs and churches closing, but they are, they seem to, and and you know, um, it's definitely the case with with mosques and synagogues and temples and everything, all religious buildings in a sense of bringing people together maybe the way that, without predicting how to fix the world of that is, the focus is on human relationships coming together, on that sense of you know as a shared theology, but not a sense of you know finding, you know finding your path to heaven per se, but just you having them as community spaces of bringing values and teachings and wisdom. But people first, almost, which sounds quite, um, um, heretical, I'm sure, to a lot of Christians.
Simon J. Cross:But there's also I don't think I disagree with anything that you said, but I would add in that there's also something uniquely powerful about ritual, and I don't know if you've read I mean Dimitris Zagalatis, I think it was, wrote a very good popular book about ritual, just called Ritual Not the most imaginative name, but a great book. And you know he talks very persuasively about the importance and the power of ritual in people's lives and in their kind of shared realities and shared existences. And where do we have those places for shared experience of something that we don't necessarily understand but we do anyway? Now, there may be other places that we have that, but church or mosque or synagogue or wherever, those are important places for these things or certainly have been. And I mean, you know humans have been ritual creatures for a very, very long time and there's fascinating evidence that other animals are also carrying out rituals of their own and that these things are meaningful on a very deep level, even one that we can't quite explain. But I think that's an important part of meeting together in whatever sort of community setting. I just don't see those kind of opportunities being created by people who have sort of taken away the, if you like the God element.
Simon J. Cross:The Unitarian Church is interesting in that sense because there are a variety of different strains within Unitarianism, where some emphasise much more the sort of the divine and some are quite sort of a bit of antipathy towards that, and I've been privileged to be able to speak in both types of Unitarian settings. But there at least there is the sense of a place to sing together, there is the sense of, you know, a place to sing together, a place to share a ritual together, a place to share ideas, a place to encourage and, if we are to, you know, be people who resist the sort of the powers and the pull of the world around us, we need those rituals of restoration, we need those kind of rights of resistance to enable us to do that. I just think that without those things we lose the energy, we lose the ability and the willingness to carry on, we find ourselves discouraged and disempowered. So, yeah, it's an important thing and it's something that certainly I've undervalued at times in my life and then, like I say, I've sort of rediscovered it. But that's not to say that I accept all of the kind of baggage that goes with it.
Simon J. Cross:As you say, the patriarchy, the problems around gender are full stop. I think when we've talked about the divine today, we've used gendered language, and I would aim, I try to never use gendered language um, or, if I do, to use sort of balanced gender, because all these things sort of have been part of our, they've formed part of our thinking um and created a world in which, you know, inequality is is rife, um injustice is rife and people are um subject to oppression of all sorts, and that gets under my skin um very, very much yeah absolutely yeah, yeah and I'm sure a lot of people listening will will think that, well, we'll know that the church has played a huge role in oppression and slavery and, as I mentioned, a huge.
Robbie Curtis:You know, there's all sorts of things. That's that. You know, we we'd like to think, oh, we're nice progressive christians, that we, we don't have any ties um, if, if we are um, but you know, even even today. You know around around bishops and there's all sorts of things around in that sphere that that I just just feels important to recognize, that absolutely that Christianity has both created and sustained a lot of these power structures and patriarchy, white supremacy and oppression.
Simon J. Cross:I think also in the Pacific. The theology from coming out of the pacific is deeply um relational. So people, people there, think in a very, very relational way. They see the, you know the earth as a as, as you know, a sort of everything is playing its part, if you like there, you know there is, there is person everywhere, if you like um, and christian theologians from the pacific have um draw a lot on this kind of relational um thinking, um, and what that means is um you know that it helps them to critique, uh, some of some of this sort of non-relational in inverted commas Western or, you know, western European, north American ways of thinking. So one of those things is what they call a one-truth ideology, this idea and this goes back to something I was talking about earlier on this idea that there is one way, one right way, and if you find that, then you've found the truth, if you like. And so they critique that idea and I think that critique is present across sort of relational thinking.
Simon J. Cross:It reminds me of Jonathan Sachs's um, the late jonathan sax.
Simon J. Cross:In his book dignity of difference he he talks about I think it's in that book he tells a story of um, an angel that comes down from heaven with, uh, with, with, sent down to earth with to carry the plate of truth.
Simon J. Cross:Um, apologies to the shade of jonathan sax for the way I'm butchering his story, but this angel is supposed to be carrying this plate of truth and then drops it and it shatters across the earth, and then what you get is people picking up pieces and going I've found the truth, I've found the truth, and of course there's only parts of the truth.
Simon J. Cross:But when we have this kind of idea that there's one right way to think, one right way to live, one right way to speak, to dress to, et cetera, et cetera, then that's this colonialism of the mind, effectively, effectively, and Christianity has been, you know, deeply invested in that, deeply, deeply invested in that, and that's massively problematic. So for me, you know, the Christianity of the future needs to be one that has space for, um, space for disagreement, space for broader pictures, etc. And I, you know, I recognize that again, I could say that because I'm in a place of privilege, right. So. So nobody's going to really be hardly questioning any of the, any of the things that I want to do, because I'm a boring white man with, uh, you know, with a wife and and children.
Simon J. Cross:So yeah, but that's still, that's still fundamentally what I think um, um, yeah, I probably just probably needs to be not me that's saying it.
Robbie Curtis:No, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. It makes me think of you, think of boring white man, I think of kia starmer yeah, well, yeah, I mean, you know.
Simon J. Cross:yeah, well, that's a whole nother thing. I suppose that one thing I I could say in my biography is that I'm also an anarchist. Um, because fundamentally I think if you're a Christian, it's hard to accept for a Christian that there are such things as national borders. You know, of course they are there, but they're imaginary, right, it's just a bit like money, it's all imaginary. And yes, we live in a world that sort of accepts these imaginary things as true. But you know, how far can one go in defending these imaginary ideas? I don't accept this.
Simon J. Cross:So Weber says what's the phrase Imagination? Oh, it's the monopoly on legitimate violence, right? This idea that the state has the monopoly on legitimate violence. But legitimate violence, what is that? What the heck is that? That's this idea that there is a legitimacy in defending this imagined border that we put around a certain piece of land or a certain piece of sea or whatever, and because we have this imagined border, we can kill people who don't, you know, accept that idea. That's extraordinary right. So I can't accept that idea. That's extraordinary right. So I can't accept that and I can't really fundamentally see how that's a Christian way to think. That seems to me to go against the teachings of Jesus. So on that basis I can't really accept the idea of the state, and so then that leaves me slightly reluctantly because I've always been quite political in a position of being effectively an anarchist, or certainly a pacifist, but effectively an anarchist also.
Simon J. Cross:So, yeah, so that's my little. That's only because you said Keir Starmer.
Robbie Curtis:Yeah, that's quite a joke. Yeah, I was thinking about your anarchism, because I know you've written about it and I have so much to agree with there. And I think, yeah, and you look at the horrible language. I mean illegal alien, that's like illegals.
Robbie Curtis:The economic migrants as if you know illegals, the, the economic migrants, as if you know, as if, oh, how dare you try and move to earn a bit more money, as if anyone wouldn't do the same. I'm, I'm completely with you, um, and there's so, and there's so much work to do, you know, on the refugee experience and the migrant experience of what that's like and kind of being othered in in society and then and then you know the trauma that maybe passed on second, second generation migrants and that is so. I mean, you know that there's, there's so many people in britain that have, you know, parents, different countries. You know I'm one of them, um, and me too.
Robbie Curtis:It's, yeah, it's a hugely different experience of kind of what that's like and it's, but you know it's probably quite we're quite lucky because it's not visible to us. I know um, yeah, yeah, and then it's slightly different. But mick and myra in a previous podcast, in this episode we're talking about so mick's jewish um, but you know he can pass as as non-jewish or as christian um, whereas myra is visibly jewish um because of how she dresses and and it is. It is a very different experience of do you choose to to tell people that or do you kind of keep it back and you can, you can stay hidden if you want to, and it's challenging both.
Robbie Curtis:I think that, as I say, kind of we don't, we don't have any experience or we can, we can learn about, but yeah, it's a hugely interesting um area. Maybe there's a liberation theology kind of for our century on that kind of maybe migrant experience of and you know, with we're seeing huge, huge numbers, you know across across europe um, and how a lot of europeans are are reacting to it not in a the most loving or caring ways, it seems, um yeah, that's fair to say, yeah, yeah yeah, I'm just conscious of the time run.
Robbie Curtis:I'm so, I'm so grateful that you've come on our podcast. No, no, great privilege, thank you. I want to just kind of end on the practical. If we kind of just just talk briefly I know we've mentioned it about the Progressive Christianity Network. Yeah, you can kind of just talk about kind of maybe how that got started, what, what you're aiming to do and if there was anyone listening that maybe wants to get involved, how they might do that, what you're aiming to do and if there was anyone listening that maybe wanted to get involved, how they might do that.
Simon J. Cross:Yeah, thank you. A nice opportunity for a little plug, yeah, so what? I? I chair the progressive christianity network, which is a um, uh, as, as it says on the tin, really a network of uh, of folk who take a progressive approach to, to uh, christianity. Some of those people are probably um what you know, loosely speaking, kind of open, evangelical, um, uh, folk, um, you know, who have a, have a fairly um traditional view of of god, um and the bible, etc. But um, uh, you know, want to find a kind of progressive way of approaching some of the issues arising from that. Others, at the other end of the spectrum, would be people who are effectively Christian atheists, who don't accept really a sense of God as being real, if you like, the idea of God, maybe, as something that we all make up or project or something would be, um, probably where they sit. But anyway, there's a, there's, there's a big sort of spectrum of people is what I'm trying to say within the network and really what what the network seeks to do is to provide spaces, um and resources for people who find themselves um, struggling with the sort of the kind of mainstream of um, of church or theology, um and, and you know, not really managing to fit into um, into that, and finding that they've got questions that they, that they don't feel they can ask, or um, or you know, all the answers they're getting are ones that they can't really accept, etc.
Simon J. Cross:So, yes, so the Progressive Christianity Network, pcn, operates a network of groups around the country, around the British Isles, which just basically serve as kind of discussion or, you know, sort of friendship groups basically, where people can get together, can talk about things, and they'll use all kinds of different resources to talk about books or ideas or speakers or whatever it might be. Um and as a network, we also try and put on events, conferences, we bring speakers in, we, you know we do various things. We're currently creating a small suite of podcasts. There's a number of things that we try and do to to give people to to uh think about, to engage with um. It was really founded by people who had read things like honest to god in the 1960s and then had kind of um really sort of questioned, uh, the trajectory of their, of their faith and their belief systems. They'd been bolstered by thinkers like Marcus Borg or Jack Spong later in their lives and then had basically sort of banded together to say, well, you know what? We're a network of people who are trying to take a progressive view of Christianity, and you know what? It's a great group of people to be part of. And we continue to have the same sort of discussions.
Simon J. Cross:The sort of things that we've been talking about today are the sort of things that you might hear about in a PCN group. You might just as well hear about. You know the difficulties of the language in a church or whatever it might be, all sorts of things going on there, the realities of the things that people struggle with, right? So, yes, that's what PCN is. I've not given a very good description of it. We publish a magazine thing where we review books and talk about things that, um, you know might be of interest to folk who think in this way too.
Simon J. Cross:Um, and it's a membership network, you know. So we're the biggest progressive membership network um in the uk. You know christian network um and the. The import of that is that the more people who are part of our network, the more kind of clout we have when we want to stand up and say something, which sometimes we do. We were part of the campaign, obviously, for things like same-sex marriage and changing the church's attitudes to that and so on, and changing the church's attitudes to that and so on. So, yeah, so that's us as a network in a very poorly described way, but it's a place where people can ask questions and don't have to accept the answers they get or anything else, but can have those open and honest discussions in a place of safety and a friendship.
Robbie Curtis:Sounds amazing. Thank you so much, simon. I'll see you around, but yeah, thanks again for coming on. Our podcast Not at all.
Simon J. Cross:Well, thank you, robbie, for this opportunity and, yeah, I hope that all the folk who listened. If you want to find more about what I'm doing or what I'm working, you can get me. Um, I have a sub stack simon j cross on sub stack which you can. Um, you can see some of the things that I do there. Um, but I'm quite easy to find, so come and say hello great thanks, simon.
Robbie Curtis:Take care. Thanks, robbie.
