I think if Christians can go back to the original roots of Advent, which was actually a penitential season in the church’s history, the vestments worn in church are purple which is what you wear in Lent. In other words, it is a time of reflection on our lives before God comes to be with us. And that is very easy to lose sight of when you are barging through the doors of Hamley’s toy store spending another £130 on all this stuff that people are screaming at you to buy.
CT: How do you think we got to this point as a society?
MD:I think a lot of it is the weakening position of the institutional churches in society, that their voices are less powerful. Rowan Williams has recorded an absolutely wonderful Advent message on the Church of England’s website. One hundred years ago or 50 years ago, the text of that is the kind of thing that would have been on the front page of the national newspapers, whereas now it is very much a sideline for those already in the know and isn’t an absolutely central part of our culture.
I think a lot of this is related to the erosion of the power of churches and faith and being replaced with what is crudely a very materialistic approach to happiness, which is basically the more you have the happier you will be. And of course we know that that is not true. All the analyses and think tanks and research shows that although the economic growth has gone up and up and up, the actual psychological and spiritual indicators on whether people are happy or not do not follow the same course.
A lot of this is about the enormous growth in the 20th century of an enormous machine called advertising. Even back in 1925 the American advertisers held a massive convention in Manhattan and they came up with one central idea, which is our job in the world is to recreate desire. In other words we have to tell people what they want and what’s good for them because once you can persuade people about that you can make money.
I think that’s in a sense where we’ve gone, in losing the heart. We should have built up more resistance and more awareness to the fact that we were being manipulated and told what to do. And I think as Christians we should be much more suspicious and independent in judgement about what we do.
CT: What do you think the church’s role is today?
MD: I think the church’s role is to find counter-cultural prophetic ways of challenging that. We launched Reclaim two weeks ago in Birmingham and we had a few events there. In one, the local bishop there and his staff encouraged the city to donate gifts and bring them into church. We get so much stuff at Christmas and half of the stuff we can’t find any use for and it just gathers dust on our bookshelves.
People brought in some really wonderful things. We had around 300 or 400 gifts – books, scents, soaps, CDs, and nearly all of them were extremely good quality. We went out and brought people into the cathedral where all the presents were laid out on the tables and we just said to people ‘happy Christmas, please have a present’. And they were like ‘what?! What’s the catch?! What do I have to pay?!’
Christmas is a time of giving and generosity but also these things were already out there. People weren’t spending more money so I guess it was like recycling.
What was really important about that was that out of the 300 or 400 people who came into the cathedral, about 80 per cent of them would never ever set foot in a church, I’m sure. So it’s evangelising.
