The future of Christianity might be arts and crafts

Some are forecasting that in the near future that Christians will not be allowed to participate in any meaningful way in the public space. If you think I am getting hysterical or alarmist then are plenty of instances of this happening across Europe and in our own land. I am not going in this short article to list a long litany of how we are losing the culture wars but here is a recent instance from Oxford University.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/11/john-finnis-oxford-university-academic-freedom-law 

I have included the Guardian article because it astonishingly argues for the removal of Professor John Finnis from a Philosophy faculty because of his upholding of the Roman Catholic and general orthodox views on marriage. He had written a number of complex pieces which were quite erudite on the Medieval scholastic idea of the human person and sexuality. This is not some uber alt.right campaigner but a modest shy academic inhabiting (like C S Lewis) the general view of Christendom for the past two thousand years.  He wasn't looking for a fight but just happened to find himself on the wrong side of the dual carriageway as the PC juggernaut came his way. Splat! The anecdotal evidence is that many professional posts now require adherence to the 'new politic' in which Christians may find great difficulty and a suffer crisis of conscience.

Rod Dreher highlight this in his bestseller The Benedict Option. Christians are being pushed out of the public sphere unless they adhere to the zeitgeist. We have seen this all before. I have a friend who was brought up in the Czechoslovakia during the evil Soviet regime.  The whole family were practising Catholics and his father was removed by zealous Marxists from his university post on Philosophy and worked in a factory.

So if this is our future - how are going to survive and prosper in this time of exile? We will have to accept that many jobs are not going to be available to us.  Like Benedictines we will have to take up an amount of self-sufficiency and it may come down to growing our own food. But, then the Rule of Benedict saw positive spiritual benefits in manual work and even the superior of a community has to roll commit to daily graft.



I could see that we could specialise like our Victorian forebears in arts and crafts. This could be a rather attractive way of life that draws others from the rat race of modernity to Christian community.

In our intentional community (www.stpetersfoundation.org) we have a participant who has done just this. Indeed, Ed Hill left the stresses of primary school teaching to become a metal artist. Have a look at his website www.edhill.co.uk 





Ed uses scrap metal, knives and forks, to construct these outstanding pieces. He is doing well in sales and has even been the subject of a TV news clip.

There is another form of art which is also very apposite and currently experiencing a renaissance since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is Icon Writing, the art of painting theological pictures using egg tempera and traditional motifs. There is a real "arts and crafts" feel to doing this as well a strong contemplative spirit. It is both technically interesting, intellectually stimulating and artistically stretching. The tradition is for different members of a religious community to do different parts of the painting. There could a specialist in making the gesso boards as much as there could be a person who can do faces well. Icon Writing is also straight forward to learn.  We have been holding classes in our parish for the past 8 years and many have come to these who have not held a paintbrush since primary school.