On 26 September, British journalist, Jon Sopel, released his book Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense. Sopel was motivated to write down this reflective and private work upon returning to the UK after eight years as a world correspondent within the US. The Britain he present in 2022 was not the country he had left in 2014, ‘This was a Britain that while I had been away had charted a recent political and economic course for itself with the referendum to depart the European Union.’
I doubt many individuals would query that the EU Referendum of 2016 was a seismic event that sent shockwaves across the nation, through our cities, countryside, friendship groups and families, including my very own. At the time, my uncle, Paul Brannen, was a member of the European Parliament for North East England and, standing resolutely behind him, we became particularly attuned to the rift that was rapidly growing between those that wished to stay within the EU and those that wished to depart.
A physical representation of this division was played out during a church service at my local CofE in Northumberland, because the vicar asked all the congregation to take part in a social exercise. Said exercise involved roughly fifty to sixty people lining up along the length of the church, with ‘Remain’ voters standing nearest the font and ‘Leave’ voters nearest the altar. Unsurprisingly, I made a beeline for the wall behind the font and pressed my back defiantly against it, glaring down the aisle at my opponents. ‘What on earth is incorrect with them?’, I bristled internally, ‘How could they possibly vote for Brexit? Bigots, racists, I’m right and so they’re incorrect!’
Then, something powerful happened. The vicar urged us to form the road right into a circle, forcing me on the one extreme to carry hands with a staunch Brexiteer. As I took the girl’s hand in mine, I realised I knew her. She was the mother of a woman within the junior choir that I helped to steer and, so far as I knew, a superbly nice, kind, unusual human being. I started to grasp that this woman didn’t deserve my enmity. As much as I would disagree along with her political opinions and selections, she was definitely not the evil, prejudiced, antagonist that I had built up in my mind. Was it possible that, because the late Jo Cox said, ‘We are much more united and have much more in common than that which divides us’?
Eight years on from the referendum, polarisation in global politics is rife and nowhere is that this more evident than within the turmoil surrounding the upcoming US election. Individuals on each side of the divide are quick to anger, chastise, demean, and unwilling to enter into actual conversations. In the echo chambers of social media, it is way easier to shout and fail to listen. Brexit, the Scottish Independence referendum, the Covid-19 pandemic, and 4 general elections within the space of nine years have all shown us that we’re definitely not immune. If only there was a vaccine for such animosity.
As Christians, we’re called to live our lives within the likeness of Jesus, and to ask ourselves what he would do when faced with such trials. In Luke 10:25-37, an apparent ‘expert within the law’ (10:25) asks Jesus what he must do to inherit everlasting life. Jesus, in turn, asks the person how he interprets God’s Law, to which the person responds, ‘Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your strength and with all of your mind; and love your neighbour as yourself’ (10:27).
Jesus praises him for answering appropriately however the man wonders who his neighbour is (10:29). Usher in ‘The Parable of the Good Samaritan’, the story of a Jewish man who, after being beaten and robbed, is helped, not by those paragons of morality, the passing priest and Levite, but by a Samaritan.
In the 1999 retelling of the Easter story, The Miracle Maker, we get some idea of what Jews and Samaritans considered one another. A gaggle of youngsters reply to the parable in shock, as one cries, ‘Samaritans throw rocks at us’, and one other, ‘I spit at them. I hate them!’ However, the group is clearly humbled when Jesus says, ‘So, you tell me, which certainly one of these three men proved to be the person’s neighbour?’. ‘The one who showed him such love,’ a remorseful man replies. And so, Jesus commands us to ‘Go, and do likewise’ (Lk. 10:37).
Let me take you back to the transformative, post-Brexit church service I participated in. It so happens that the sermon included a rendition of this very parable, with the roles of the Jew and the Samaritan replaced by a ‘Remainer’ and a ‘Brexiteer’. It was not only our hand-holding exercise that helped us all to start to see ‘the opposite’ as someone not so different from ourselves. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the opposing parties could just as easily be represented as Labour and Conservative, Democrat and Republican; the metaphor needn’t even be confined to politics. Wherever such division lies, Jesus’ message surely applies. He has called us all to contemplate who our neighbour is and the way we will put aside our political differences to like them well.
