On 26 September, British journalist, Jon Sopel, released his book Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense. Sopel was motivated to write this reflective and personal work upon returning to the UK after eight years as an international correspondent in the US. The Britain he found in 2022 was not the country he had left in 2014, 'This was a Britain that while I had been away had charted a new political and economic course for itself with the referendum to leave the European Union.'
I doubt many people would question 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 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 who wished to remain in the EU and those who wished to leave.
A physical representation of this division was played out during a church service at my local CofE in Northumberland, as the vicar asked the entire congregation to participate 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 wrong with them?', I bristled internally, 'How could they possibly vote for Brexit? Bigots, racists, I'm right and they're wrong!'
Then, something powerful happened. The vicar urged us to form the line into a circle, forcing me on the one extreme to hold hands with a staunch Brexiteer. As I took the woman's hand in mine, I realised I knew her. She was the mother of a girl in the junior choir that I helped to lead and, as far as I knew, a perfectly nice, kind, ordinary human being. I began to realise that this woman did not deserve my enmity. As much as I might disagree with her political views and choices, she was certainly not the evil, prejudiced, antagonist that I had built up in my mind. Was it possible that, as the late Jo Cox said, 'We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us'?
Eight years on from the referendum, polarisation in global politics is rife and nowhere is this more evident than in the turmoil surrounding the upcoming US election. Individuals on both sides 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 far easier to shout and fail to listen. Brexit, the Scottish Independence referendum, the Covid-19 pandemic, and four general elections in the space of nine years have all shown us that we are certainly not immune. If only there was a vaccine for such animosity.
As Christians, we are called to live our lives in 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 in the law' (10:25) asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus, in turn, asks the man how he interprets God's Law, to which the man responds, 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbour as yourself' (10:27).
Jesus praises him for answering correctly but 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 thought of each other. A group of children respond to the parable in shock, as one cries, 'Samaritans throw rocks at us', and another, 'I spit at them. I hate them!' However, the crowd is clearly humbled when Jesus says, 'So, you tell me, which one of these three men proved to be the man'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 begin to see 'the other' 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 consider who our neighbour is and how we can put aside our political differences to love them well.
