Why I Stand with Rev Jarel Robinson-Brown

The late American theologian Walter Wink, in his classic work ‘Engaging the Powers’, understood the imagery of ‘Principalities and Powers’ in the New Testament (cf. Ephesians 6:10–17) to point towards the both the “outer, visible structure” and “inner, spiritual reality” of human institutions. Such institutions, Wink argued, have a life of their own, which is greater than the sum of the individuals involved, and cannot necessarily be controlled or reigned in by any one person.

A ‘Domination System” results from networks of Powers becoming “integrated around idolatrous values”, so that its transformation must address both its spirituality and outer manifestations. The worldviews that emerge – which readily come to be viewed as representing ‘common sense’ – easily seduce us into accommodating the powerful, and switching off our critical capacities.

For Wink, liberation from Domination Systems thus involves recognising and naming them, unmasking the “delusional assumptions” which can hold both oppressed and oppressor in thrall, and creatively embodying God’s loving alternative.

Although Wink’s work dates back to the early 1990s and comes from a different geographical context, it immediately came to mind as I watched my friend, Rev Jarel Robinson-Brown, subjected to horrific racist and homophobic abuse.

This followed a tweet he posted on 3rd February, which said, ““The cult of Captain Tom Moore is a cult of white British nationalism. I will offer prayers for the repose of his kind and generous soul, but will not be joining the ‘national clap’.”, in response to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s call in Parliament for people to clap on their doorsteps in honour of Captain Sir Tom Moore.
Captain Moore was a World War Two veteran who raised over £30 million for NHS charities, by walking around his garden and winning the hearts of many people. Having recently turned a hundred, he sadly died in hospital having caught Covid-19.

Despite having removed and apologised for this tweet on the same day, Jarel was hung out to dry by the disgraceful and tellingly unsupportive statement issued by the Diocese of London. He has since seen his reputation lynched (I use the word quite deliberately) in the right-wing press, been forced off social media, and had a petition raised calling for him to be removed from the curacy he is soon set to commence.

Watching all of this play out has been extremely hard, not least seeing the line in the Diocesan statement about the need for social media output to based upon “truth, kindness and sensitivity”. What bothers me so much about this critique of Jarel’s tweet is that I think he was telling the truth – the hard and painful truth which is often not heard as ‘kind’ and ‘sensitive’, but as with much prophetic speech, is no less true for the fact.

Allow me to explain.

Deeply intertwined with the Domination Systems that Wink draws attention to are the stories we tell about ourselves. Stories are incredibly powerful, not least (as many have argued before me) because human beings are storied people. They have a life of their own, bigger and deeper than the individuals who tell them, and we are all shaped by them. Stories lie at the core of our identity, and more often than not, it is the stories of the dominant and powerful that come to be viewed as representing ‘the way things are’.

Many of the ‘culture wars’ arguments we saw play out in 2020 stem, at their heart, from contention around the stories we tell about what it means to be British. Wink uses the language of angels and demons to describe the Powers and Principalities; I prefer to picture the dominant stories told about Britishness as being like ‘sacred cows’, which their defenders are willing to protect from being slaughtered at all costs. Even naming them is often deeply controversial.

As an example, consider the reaction to the National Trust’s plans to update material in some of their properties to be honest about their connections to the transatlantic slave trade. It is simply the case that many of our great buildings (including much of the City of London) were built using compensation paid to slave owners (not the oppressed people themselves!) in order to finally get the abolition bill through Parliament.

However, the National Trust’s desire to recognise this led to accusations of being ‘woke’, selling out to Black Lives Matter and, as Sir John Hayes MP claimed in November 2020, attacking British history. For the latter, “defending our history and heritage is our era’s Battle of Britain”, and he was backed up in his views by the Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who referred to “an avalanche of miserable Britain-hating nonsense filling the airwaves in recent months about our history and our culture”.

In other words, then, the act of naming the realities of Britain’s imperial past was cast as ‘hating Britain’, and this is very telling. Any suggestion that the stories we tell of imperial glory and national greatness might not reflect an accurate view of British history was pounced upon, and not just by Hayes and Rees-Mogg. Their interventions reflect the rhetoric of much of the (right-wing) mainstream media, and a fair proportion of Twitter users, alike.

Similar rows emerged last year over the content of the Last Night of the Proms, statues of slave traders, and the legacy of Winston Churchill. The same pattern was highlighted: even to name the ‘sacred cows’ of what one might call ‘Hegemonic Britishness’ or ‘Toxic Britishness’ was to run the risk of incurring a vicious and well-orchestrated right-wing backlash.

Partly due to the failures of our education system over many decades and administrations to teach children about the realities of the British Empire, and partly due to a failure to address the impact on English national identity in particular of the loss of said imperial power, together with the lingering sense of exceptionalism that arguably has its roots in the English Reformation, it has become very difficult to have an open and honest conversation about our nation’s past.

Moreover, it is arguably even harder to discuss how its legacy is still widely felt today, in everything from the Windrush scandal to the deep-seated unwillingness to make reparations for our past ruthless exploitation, cultural erasure and economic destruction, and to acknowledge the advantages still enjoyed by former colonial powers, as highlighted by post-colonial thinkers across subjects ranging from economics to theology.

In particular, in being stuck in delayed grief over the loss of Empire, a simplified and idolised story of World War Two, and the mythology of Churchill, have taken on great emotional and identity-forming significance.

They play to a lost sense of Britain as a global and military power, in an era when the United States, Russia and China have become the dominant international players, and globalisation and technological development are reshaping western economies in ways which have been very painful for many communities previously centred around traditional industries. Add to this the impact of over ten years of austerity measures, and you get the kind of volatile mix that arguably resulted in Brexit.

So, coming back to Jarel’s tweet (which has been wilfully misconstrued as a personal attack on Captain Tom, despite highlighting his generosity and kindness), several of the sacred cows of Toxic Britishness come into view – the belief in the superiority of white people in relation to people of colour that shaped the mindset of those driving Britain’s imperial ambitions and the Christian missionaries who saw themselves as bringing ‘civilisation’, the militarism that equates victory in battle with moral vindication, and the national myth of ‘greatness’ based on WW2. 

What has ethnicity got to do with it? Well, the stories we tell matter, but the stories we *don’t tell* are often more revealing. It is not an accident that Captain Tom has been lionised, called a national hero and the ‘best of British’, when others who have displayed the same kindness and generosity (such as Dabirul Islam Choudhury, an Asian Muslim man, also aged a hundred, who walked in his garden to raise money while fasting in Ramadan) have been largely ignored.

None of this is to take away from Sir Tom’s achievement, but it is to say that his story fits far more neatly with the narratives of Hegemonic Britishness, and who is considered acceptable to the Daily Mail crowd, than a Muslim gentleman undertaking a similar endeavour ever would. It is not wrong to draw attention to this, and indeed name it for what it is.

The way Boris Johnson and others have sought to manipulate and take advantage of his (Sir Tom’s) efforts to reinforce the same Toxic Britishness that led them to describe unease with celebrating colonialism as wimpy, is wrong. It is toxic, and it is playing to the same crowd who are the targets of their culture wars narrative. Is it an accident, after the controversies of 2020, that Johnson is now talking about a statue of Sir Tom? I suggest that it is no coincidence.

Could Jarel have phrased his tweet more carefully? Sure, but show me one person who has never regretted how they have phrased an online comment. Could he have timed it more sensitively? Again, possibly, but experience tells me that there hardly ever appears to be a ‘right time’ for people of colour to speak out.

The bottom line is that, because of who he is and because he dared to name the ‘sacred cows’ of Toxic Britishness, I seriously doubt that Jarel wouldn’t have been targeted, however carefully or sensitively he put his thoughts out there, He said more forthrightly and openly what many others (including me) also thought, and said in more guarded and less public ways without the same backlash. He has been targeted, I suspect, exactly because he is a black queer man challenging dominant narratives of Britishness.

Moreover, I am sure that his comments did come across as “unacceptable, insensitive, and ill-judged” when read by a Church of England hierarchy that is itself so in thrall to the same Hegemonic Britishness described above. After all, as they say, truth hurts. I pray that Bishop Sarah, who seems a decent person to me, will consider the consequences of the statement, reject it, and publicly and unequivocally call out the racism and homophobia directed at Jarel.

Thus, and as unpopular as I know this will be with some of those reading this, I stand with Jarel Robinson-Brown, and I am proud to do so.