Black Lives Matter, therefore Christianity

Some people are Christians. Some aren't. Why?

I try to answer this answer at some length below the break, with especial reference to Black Lives Matter, but also touching on Dives, Elvis, elves, Russell's teapot and an ancient child's grave. 

I have always been struck by the ending of the parable of Dives and Lazarus. You recall the story: rich man in his castle, poor man at his gate, poor man goes to heaven, rich man goes to hell. From hell, the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn his brothers not to do as he (the rich man) had done. Abraham replies sternly that they have Moses and the Prophets already, to which the rich man says something along the lines of: "seriously, man, no one listens to those dead dudes. But if someone were to come back from the dead ...!" But Abraham stands firm, saying, "If they don't listen to Moses and the Prophets then even someone coming back from the dead won't persuade them." 

As a child, I thought that Abraham's answer was pretty weak. Come on! A dead man coming back to life! That's got quite the wow factor. Much more of a wow factor than Moses and the Prophets. And you need a wow factor. 

But now I think that Abraham was right: "Moses and the Prophets" beats "wow factor".

Part of the impact of the parable is the dramatic irony apparent even to a child: hang on a minute - but Jesus himself came back from the dead! And yet still some people don't believe! So that means ... woah ...

If you think about the Gospel story from a storyteller's point of view, the resurrection bit is dealt with in rather an odd way. You take the main character. You kill him off. Then you bring him back from the dead. So far, so good, one might think: that's a good twist and now you can end the story on a high, with Jesus going round in triumph. But the Gospels don't do that: we don't see Jesus dropping in on Pontius Pilate and saying "you thought I was dead - think again, sucker!" There's frankly very little wow factor extracted from the twist in the tale. Luke's Gospel, for example, has Jesus coming back from the dead, quickly followed by him having a couple of modest meals with unexciting menus (bread on the road to Emmaus and then what some translations describe as a piece of "broiled fish" with the disciples). Jesus doesn't milk the whole resurrection thing: instead we see him hanging out with all the same people who already believed in him before he died and rose again. That is not, it seems to me, how most people would write the story.

The Doubting Thomas story is perhaps the most famous example of this, and also the best. What it is that Thomas actually doubts? He does not doubt Jesus, or his message, or his goodness, or his wisdom, or anything like that: after all, at the start of the story Thomas is still a follower of Jesus, still hanging out with the other disciples despite having to do so in secrecy and fear. No, what Thomas doubts is the idea of someone coming back to life from the dead. Thomas is someone who believes all the right things without needing to see a resurrection on top. Thomas is someone who is persuaded by, in effect, Moses and the Prophets - the wow factor is just a bonus.

Doubting Thomas is someone who proves Abraham's point. And I think the point holds more generally. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that you are walking down the road, minding your own business, when suddenly the heavens open above you, trumpets blast, you look up (and everyone around you looks up too - this isn't a private vision, it's really happening) and you see angels galore, brighter lights than you have ever seen before, and an old man in a beard sitting on a golden throne, as impressive and spectacular as can be. The old man looks at you, a wise yet stern yet kindly twinkle in his eye, points his finger right at you and says: "I am God and I have decided to give my revelation to you!" [Cue more trumpets.] "I have sent my revelation directly to your phone. Mark my words and heed them well." Then the heavens close and the amazed crowds gather beside you as you look at your phone to see what has happened. 

At this point, you are (I'm guessing) inclined to believe that God exists. If you are a rationalist then you would say that you are rapidly updating your Bayesian prior on this issue. If you are anyone else then you would just be awestruck. 

So you look at your phone and a new app has been installed, entirely without your knowledge, called "Word of God". You open it up and ... it's the Book of Mormon.

No offence to Mormons, but I suspect it would take more than that - more wow factor than the heavens opening and God Himself speaking to you - to persuade you to become a Mormon. You might be inclined to think that those Mormons have got some pretty cool visual effects going on: was it projectors onto low cloud cover? Hidden speakers? Hypnosis? Or perhaps you'd start hanging out with Mormons, a little sceptical but willing to give it a try given that you have had what seemed at the time to be a direct revelation from God. But after a bit, you'd see that Mormons are just people. And you're not really getting revelations like that every day. So you quietly make your excuses from the next Mormon meet up and book an appointment with a psychiatrist ...

You see my point. Big effects are all very well. Someone coming back from the dead sounds impressive. But if Elvis came back from the dead now claiming to have a message from God, you'd be speculating about CIA plots, or secret Nazi cloning camps, or amazing holograms, or saying that you never believed he had died anyway, or almost anything else well before you started listening to his message from beyond the grave. 

The difference between believers and non-believers is not the difference between people who have seen something with a wow factor and those who haven't. On the contrary, the wow factor is just another thing that needs to be explained. Being a believer has got much more to do with Moses and the Prophets.

So let's leave Dives, Lazarus and the wow factor behind. Let's look at Moses and the Prophets - but the prophets of today.

Perhaps the most weighty prophetic words of our times are the slogan "Black Lives Matter". Short, compelling, unanswerable. The only responses to those words that we regard as antagonistic are ones that accept the premise of the slogan itself: All Lives Matter; Blue Lives Matter. No one denies that Black Lives Matter. 

So, Black Lives Matter. But matter to whom? 

We could say that they matter to everyone. But what sort of a claim is that? If it is a factual claim, it appears implausible. Everyone, everywhere in the world? Babies? Everyone ever? 

Perhaps, it is better understood as a normative claim. Perhaps we mean that Black Lives Should Matter to everyone. But that's not right either. We are not saying that Black Lives might or might not Matter and we are trying to work out which of those options is the better one to choose: we are saying that, right here, right now, whatever you or anyone else thinks about it, Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter full stop, we might say, or Black Lives Matter absolutely.

That, I think, is the nature of the statement Black Lives Matter: it is the claim that there are certain lives - certain injustices - that just matter, regardless of your feelings on the subject.

We are familiar with the concept of things that matter to some people but not to others. We might say, to a guest getting dressed for a wedding, "It doesn't matter what you look like - no one will be looking at you", to which a perfectly good response would be "well, it matters to me". Or we can think of memorials, landmarks or traditions that matter to one community but to which others are indifferent. We might suggest that once the significance and history of such-and-such a place is explained then the outsider will (or should) come to care about it, but that idea doesn't withstand much scrutiny: we can readily imagine (for example) a rock haunted by Icelandic elves that, even when the full history and background of the subject is explained to us and we are fully conversant with the entirety of Icelandic folklore nonetheless matters no more to us than any old rock back home. 

Until recently it was commonly thought among educated people who had views on the subject that relative mattering of this kind - mattering only to someone or to some people - was the only kind of mattering that there is. Outside the community to which a thing matters, they would say, it does not matter at all; if we are being properly cold, sober and philosophical, we can stand conceptually outside even life itself - whatever the colour of skin of its possessor - such that it does not matter, not really, and that we have to make it matter by committing to it.

As I say, that used to be the smart thing to think, but it doesn't seem to be the way to think nowadays. Black Lives Matter is a good illustration of this development. (Separately from me, Ed West has had the same thought and set out it out in a good piece here.) You can't just wave your Gauloise and say that Black Lives don't Matter to me. Human suffering, it seems to me, is an obvious example of something that Matters. That a person is being tortured is something that Matters. Human joy similarly.

What else can we say about the fact that these things Matter? One thing is that they Matter everywhere. You don't escape Black Lives Mattering by going to Antarctica, or further afield than that. If you go on a sufficiently long journey, you don't reach the point at which Black Lives cease to Matter. These things matter on Earth, they matter on Alpha Centauri, and they matter on the farthest star in the universe; they matter more than the insensible creation or destruction of galaxies.

Moreover, it is not a function of time either. There is not a set of historical facts or scientific findings that could show that Black Lives started to Matter in, say, 2013 or will stop Mattering shortly after 2am tomorrow. 

We are therefore committed to the belief that the universe as a whole, of we are physically and temporally but one small part, is such - the very fabric of reality is such - that certain brute facts about humans Matter. They matter, in some sense, to the universe as a whole.

But nothing matters to a mere object. Nothing matters to my shoelace or to the planet Jupiter. Things can only matter to a person. So I think we are compelled to say that there is a person (for want of a better word) to whom everything that Matters matters. And what we know about that person is that they (I'm happy with the gender-neutral pronoun here) are present always and everywhere in the universe. God is as good a name as any for such a strange person.

Let me pause here. I am not pretending that what I say above amounts to a new or irresistible argument for the existence of God. Similar arguments based on the universal nature of moral law or the strangeness of moral facts are old and well-known. Instead, I am addressing myself to the kind of atheist, perhaps a rather old-fashioned one nowadays, who thinks that he or she is a no-nonsense, hard-headed believer in science with no time for God nonsense, the sort of person who likes to use the phrase "your magic invisible friend", or is mightily impressed with Bertram Russell's teapot. These people, I think, are quite happy to assent to the proposition Black Lives Matter, and the point I am making is that thinking clearly about what you believe if you really believe that Black Lives Matter involves thinking about a universe in which the existence of God makes perfect sense. Once you believe that the universe is studded with timeless moral truths inexplicable by quantum physics or cosmology then you are already a believer in magic invisible stuff. Once you have swallowed the camel of Black Lives Matter - which you have! - then God is a mere gnat to strain at; if you really believe that Black Lives Matter then you have already believed in five impossible things before breakfast and you might as well make it six. 

I started this off by saying that I was going to talk about Christianity. But so far my discussion has led only to a rather vague theism. Here are three final thoughts about how Christianity explains the truth of Black Lives Matter.

First, Black. Different features of Christianity seem strange at different times. Once upon a time, the idea of supernatural entities who require sacrifice and ceremony was pretty normal, but the Christian idea that God valued everyone equally, Jew or Greek, freeman or slave, was weird. Nowadays, we have little difficulty with the treating everyone equally but more difficulty with the supernatural entity side of things. The moral weight of Black Lives Matter - and the reason that the antipathetic response is All Lives Matter - is derived from this universalism that is now second nature to us. I don't need to take you through the labyrinthine debates of modern politics: the force of the slogan - the reason we all accept it as true - is that it reminds us that some Lives, which Matter, have been overlooked, or downgraded, or subjected to injustice. And the reason they Matter is not because they are Black, but because they are human. We can argue about what needs to be done as a result. But we do not argue about that starting point. And the reason that we do not argue about that starting point nowadays is because certain tenets of Christianity - strange at the time - have been so deeply absorbed into our moral discourse that we find it hard even to see them, let alone question them.

Second, Lives. Christianity is not the only religion to believe that all are equal in the sight of God. But one of the central and most striking features of Christianity - perhaps the feature that is most surprising to people throughout history - is the Incarnation, i.e. the idea that God became a human being. There are of course many ways to think about this rather strange mystery, but for present purposes I would pick just one. There is a modern tendency to say something like "the universe is so big; we're small; all our concerns are insignificant" as if third statement follows from the first two. At one level, this is just nonsense: who cares about size? Do people with achondroplasia matter less than basketball players or weightlifters? But there is a nagging suspicion in many people's minds that the discrepancy between our confined scales, in space and time, and the vastness of all that there is and has been and will be diminishes or devalues our concerns. The Incarnation is the Christian answer to this: the imponderably vast, immaterial and universal entered into our small, material and particular nature. Again, none of that will persuade you to believe in the Incarnation if you do not already do so; but if you are convinced that Lives, no matter how small, Matter, and if you are worried about how small our lives are, then it is worth being aware that Christianity has an explanation for how that gap between the large and the small might be bridged. 

Finally, Matter. Another of Christianity's more striking claims -  perhaps more unusual nowadays then when originally made - is that death is not the end of life. Why should anyone believe this? Christians see the same deadness in corpses as other people do; Christians don't tend to find people who have died walking around and eating broiled fish, any more than atheists do. So what is the claim here? 

One way of thinking about this is to note that Matter is a verb in the present tense. George Floyd is now dead. And yet he and his life Matters. We could say that he Matters because he lives on in our hearts, or his legacy will never die, or some such saccharine nonsense. But even if Floyd's life and death had not been the trigger for protests and palaver across the world, even if he had passed unmourned and forgotten, he would surely still Matter; the famous do not Matter more than the obscure. Indeed, that is the point of Black Lives Matter: the overlooked, the downtrodden and the weak all Matter. Floyd's death did not erase his value. 

Let's take another example. Here is a story that struck me recently. A grave has been found. Not just any old grave, but the oldest burial site in Africa, dug 1,000 lifetimes ago. The archaeologists carefully cast the entire grave in plaster to preserve the arrangement of surviving bone fragments and then carried the body to a laboratory. When the plaster was analysed it was found that the grave was the grave of a two year old boy, who was laid to rest wrapped up in a shroud, perhaps of animal skins, with his head lying on a pillow of leaves. 

78,000 years ago - surely an unimaginable gap in time from the present - a family lost a two year old boy and gently laid him in his final bed for the sleep of death. He is as dead as dead can be, and even if he had lived to a ripe old age he would still be as dead as dead can be. And so is everyone who ever knew or loved him. Yet finding his grave was not the same as finding the remains of tools or animals from 78,000 years ago. As the archaeologist Prof María Martinón-Torres said, when they moved the plaster cast "we didn't know we were carrying a child in our arms." The life of that boy is no more; but it is still the case that his existence has value - note "has" in the present tense.

I am not claiming that this kind of Mattering is the most exciting part of the Christian idea of eternal life. But nor is it nothing. That little boy in Africa and George Floyd: they are both dead; but regardless of what anyone thinks about them, they have not been destroyed, eliminated or erased.

There you have it. If you listen to the prophets, if you believe that Black Lives Matter, and if you wonder how that might be true, then you should at least be aware that Christianity has given the matter some thought. Consider doing the same before its your turn to debate Abraham face to face.