Easter Rising: a new Carnival

Easter Rising: a new Carnival

(A talk delivered at the Greenbelt Festival, August 2005)

Theo Hobson

I have an idea for a new event that I would like to see happen – that I feel ought to happen.

But to be honest I don’t really know how to go about making it happen. I’m not very good at organizing events, and I’m not sure anyone would be able to organize the sort of event I have in mind. In fact, I’m not sure that it ought to be organized – the ideal is that it would happen without any central organization – committees, funding, et cetera – all the stuff that goes on to make something like Greenbelt happen.

So I’m talking about an event that probably can’t be planned in the normal sort of way. And therefore there’s a question-mark over its possibility. Maybe it’s a fantasy.

On the other hand I don’t want to overstate the unrealisticness of it, because there’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen. It just needs people to get the idea, to get excited about it on a large scale, to spread the rumour of it, and then it’s real. Anyway, I want to share this idea with you, to start spreading the rumour.

The idea is basically this. Easter ought to be a massive public event. It ought to be the biggest event in British culture. It ought to be like every carnival and festival and demonstration rolled into one. It ought to be noisy, spectacular. It ought to be something that every young person wants to go to – just as they want to go to the Notting Hill Carnival – to have a look, taste the atmosphere, have a dance, meet up with friends. An excuse for a day out.

At present Easter is a non-event. It is the quiet orderly festival of a tradition-minded middle-class and also of a religious subculture – its religious aspect is hardly noticed by the average person. I consider this the most appalling failure of our Christian culture – the fact that nothing really happens on Easter Day. Of course you might go to church if you’re that way inclined, but even then it’s likely to be a non-event. The service probably won’t feel very different from normal. And then it’s a normal Sunday, on which you’ll probably see your family, eat chocolate and watch telly. The evening news will report the messages of the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury – and that’s really the only intrusion of Easter into the public square.

This is the anti-climax of Christian culture. It’s a scandal of which every British Christian ought to be ashamed, that we allow this day to pass practically unnoticed.

Now some of you might say, ‘At my church, Easter is a wonderful joyful event – we sing ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ three times in a row’. Or maybe some will say, ‘it’s the culmination of our sacramental year, we build up to it for months, and we have an Easter night vigil’. Or whatever. Well, in my opinion this is not enough – for Easter to be a highpoint in the life of a little club.

In my opinion we need a more outgoing and imaginative approach to Easter Day, and to Christian culture in general. This is an opportunity to redefine Christian culture away from ‘going to church’ – and perhaps the means to a really fresh expression of Christianity.

What we must try to move away from is the impression that Christianity is the business of a dedicated club, and that either you’re in or you’re out. This is a bad model of Christian culture because it fails to communicate to the wider society, to challenge it, to interest it. It means that the Gospel is too easily ignored. It’s in a box called church that the average person can very easily ignore.

So a new approach to Easter could be part of a wider project – to move Christian culture away from a rigid church model. Of course this project is already going on – but it needs a boost, a new focus.

Let me briefly recount how this idea came about.

A couple of years ago I was occasionally attending an Anglican church near where I lived in London. I’ve always been an irregular churchgoer – never quite feeling at home in any style of worship. At this point I was making a new effort to get involved in a parish church. Partly this was because I’d recently got married and we’d had a baby. I had a sort of spiritual nesting instinct. I tried a few churches and found one that seemed OK, and we went on and off for a while.

We were there for Easter Day. It was a pretty normal service, except there was a sense that we were meant to be especially glad about something. We spoke words about the immense joy that we felt due to our redemption in Jesus, but this great cosmic event felt rather distant, rather theoretical. There was a lively song with actions, and most of us joined in a bit half-heartedly. It was a normal, slightly awkward, slightly dull, slightly happy Anglican service. But I felt this sense of anticlimax, this sense that the service didn’t really square with what it was meant to signify.

I remember saying to my wife afterwards: if it’s true, what Christians say Easter means, then something better should happen on the day when we commemorate it. We shouldn’t allow it to seem like just another Sunday. We have to somehow communicate the fact that everything has changed, that the world is made new, that Jesus has triumphed over Satan, that the Kingdom of God is coming. We have to communicate the extremity of this, the excitement.

Now again some might say, ‘Try my church where things are really exciting’. Or, ‘try a charismatic service’, or ‘try high mass’. The problem is I’m a good liberal Anglican who is suspicious of church services that are too exciting. In my experience exciting worship is accompanied by a sectarian ecclesiology – a sense that we Christians are neatly separate from society, and we have to abide by certain rules that set us apart. There’s a sort of Catch-22. Christian worship ought to be impressive, whether in a low or a high way, in order to communicate the reality, the power of God’s salvation, but when church services are highly ceremonial or highly charismatic, then this form of culture is likely to alienate those who are not committed, to deepen the rift between church culture and mainstream culture, to confirm the prejudices of secular people.

So I was wondering how this circle could be squared. How could Christians celebrate in a way that is both engaging and open to the surrounding culture? How could we develop a whole new style of Christian culture that was as immediate and powerful and authentic as a pop concert or a football match? Not something that people felt a duty to attend but something that they wanted to. Not something for a committed minority but something that attracts everyone.

To be frank I have never really unambiguously enjoyed going to church. I have always been conscious of a strong downside to it. It seems to celebrate the separateness of the congregation from the world. Sometimes I have enjoyed the communal spirit, and the hymns, and even the liturgy and the sermon, but I’ve still felt a nagging sense that this strange form of culture is cutting us off, it is not helping us communicate the gospel to those around us. It’s more about making us feel cosy and righteous.

So I had this sense that something completely different ought to happen on Easter day, something that felt authentically joyful and exciting. But also open. How could Christian culture be centred on a form of celebration that did not separate Christians from society but broke down any such separation?

I was aware that the Church of England was trying to promote new styles of church, to address the sort of questions I was asking. I started investigating this a bit. I spoke to a few people involved in innovative church groups, especially youth ministry. But it seemed to me that these new ventures were still firmly within a pretty conventional model of church – generally an evangelical model. As far as I could see all the talk about ‘new ways of being church’ failed to confront the core problem – that every form of Christian culture was offputting to the secular majority. Church seemed to be burdened by a sort of separateness from mainstream culture. If you’re not in the club you are going to feel alienated by its celebrations. Developing new forms of worship doesn’t really help if it’s within the context of the church service.

I also wondered whether the Church as an institution was serious about innovation. Even if there are interesting things happening on the edges of the church, it seemed that the official face of church would always dominate. The conservative institutional centre would always drown out any new experiments. So maybe the institutional nature of the church gets in the way, I thought. Maybe there could never be real cultural change from the Church of England because it’s too tied up in an official, authoritative role. Because it is the established church it has to be careful about what it does.

Partly the church is wary of doing anything new on a large scale because it is nervous about seeming authoritarian. It is unthinkable for the church to create some powerful new public form of celebration because it would be accused of making a bid for power. For example some Anglo-Catholics say there should be more public ceremonies, and parades on special feast days, so that the Church becomes more visible to the wider culture. But secular culture would be deeply suspicious, and rightly so, of bishops parading through the streets – it would look like a show of strength from an authoritative institution. You get this sort of thing in Catholic Europe and it’s deeply ambiguous: it puts the celebration of the Church into the public square, but also seems to confirm a negative image – of the bad old institution that thinks it owns society.

So I began to feel that the institutional church was unable to do anything significantly new. If we want to create a new form of Christian culture we have to bypass the institution. Greenbelt is an example of this – it didn’t wait for the permission of the general synod.

A few months after that anticlimactic Easter, I went to the Notting Hill Carnival. I’d been many times before, but this time I had a new sense of its power. Here was an authentic expression of joyful community. A celebration. Unlike Easter at church there was no sense of people trying to seem glad about something; it was totally beyond question that they were glad about something. And unlike Easter at church it was a public event – partly in the sense that it was outdoors and highly visible and audible – and partly in the sense that its content was totally accessible to the million or so people who turned up. It did not produce a sense in the onlooker of ‘I don’t really belong to that celebration’, but a sense of ‘this includes me.’ Why can’t Christian culture be like this? I wondered. Why can’t there be this sort of anarchic joyous festival, at least at Easter?

But for a year or so I was unsure what could be done. Maybe an alternative ritual could be developed, I thought – something in the open-air, something that showed a willingness to renew Christian culture, away from church. How could we move worship away from its narrow function of helping a little club to feel big and special, and towards a more open-ended idea: communicating the gospel to the world in a way that involves it, draws it in? At this point I was thinking on a smaller scale, rather than in terms of a large-scale carnival. And the whole thing was on the back-burner – a vague background dream.

I started thinking about it again earlier this year, when I went to the Chinese New Year celebrations in Chinatown, in Soho. It was something to do on a Sunday, take the family along to see something going on – and also we arranged to meet up with a friend. My main motivation for going was that I thought my children would like to see the dancing dragons. The event seems to have got larger recently – it takes over Trafalgar Square, where there’s a stage, and a large crowd was gathering to see what would happen. There was a sense of expectation, of excitement – of carnival. There was bunting and banners and people were buying little rattles to join in the noise.

As you may have guessed I am not Chinese – nor were the vast majority of the crowds in Trafalgar Square. Like at the Notting Hill Carnival, there was no sense of being an outsider, if you didn’t really belong to the core celebration. The event drew in onlookers rather than shut them out. It made you feel good about having a Chinese community in London- that it made life more interesting.

It struck me that there is nothing in British Christian culture to compete with Chinese New Year; there is not a single day of the year on which the wider public is invited to take an interest in Christian culture, to participate. Of course most of the British public is aware of the religious aspect of Easter, but not in a positive, communal, excited way – it’s a sober, private festival when pious people go to church and spend time with their families. It struck me that the Notting Hill Carnival and Chinese New Year were much more effective as models for religious festivals.

Masses of people who have no connection with Chinese culture go to Chinese New Year, out of curiosity, just for fun. In London there are millions who do have a connection with Christian culture – why shouldn’t they turn up and participate if there was some sort of public Christian festival?

So Christian culture must learn from these large urban festivals. At present it is living in a past era, when church going was normal, when life revolved around the family and the parish. It’s a model geared to small rural communities, little parishes. Our Christian culture is also hampered by its institutionalism. Our wider culture is suspicious of religious institutions, in my opinion rightly so. If the church put on a large scale Christian celebration, people would be suspicious about a new confident church, trying to control various aspects of culture. To be blunt about it, the institutional church seems unable to move Christian culture towards this festival model.

What Christian culture has to learn is that the contemporary idiom of celebration is carnival. And to move in this direction it has to bypass institutional church.

Gradually I realized that if I was going to pursue this idea it had to be focused on Easter Day. For a while I resisted this as too ambitious – people who are interested in Christianity already have stuff on at Easter, and an event on Easter Day would be unlikely to get support from the church. But then I thought there’s no way round it – Easter is the Christian festival and at present it’s a non-event. It needs to be on Easter Day that London has a Christian carnival.

So the idea was forming in my mind but I wasn’t quite sure how to come out with it. Then I had a new burst of enthusiasm earlier this summer, thanks to Bob Geldof and Live8. As I saw it Live8 was a sort of secular-religious event. Of course it was concerned with a particular issue, but unlike the original Live Aid it wasn’t seeking to raise money but awareness. It was an act of witness, a demonstration of a certain attitude.

Anyway, in the run up to the G8 you will recall that Bob Geldof called for a million people to join a demonstration in Edinburgh. That became the excuse for an article I wrote for the Guardian. Why couldn’t Christian culture do something similar, I asked. Why was it so unimaginable that Rowan Williams might call for a huge rally, perhaps in Why is the church so impotent in terms of creating cultural interest, getting positive attention for its message? My proposal was for a public demonstration; a huge anarchic festival in Hyde Park where there will be ‘drumming, dancing, parades’.

So what in practice do I have in mind, beyond that rather brief description? Well, not much else really. All that really matters is that such an event would be noisy, messy, anarchic, with lots of things going on at once. And that it should not resemble an open-air church service. Therefore there should be no official involvement of the Church, of any denomination. The last thing you want is some bishop trying to give a speech, or lead prayers. And if you tried to involve all London’s churches you’d have an organizational nightmare, as well as a rather bland event like a huge open-air Songs of Praise. And of course any such official event would need permission of Ken Livingstone and so on – and you’d be sat in committee rooms for years trying to organize it.

Another alternative I suppose would be to try and organize a non-church event - a sort of London Greenbelt – a music festival in Hyde Park, with bands and stages. But this would have to be a free event, and it would need huge funding, which takes you back to the question of institutions being involved.

So my feeling is that it has to be totally unplanned, unofficial. More like Reclaim the Streets – when the travelers and ravers used to just turn up in their hundreds and have a party in a bit of street. The central event – the reason for turning up – should be a sort of jamming session. At some festivals you get a crowd of people just banging drums in loose rhythm, creating a sort of primal atmosphere – that’s what I’d like to see.

It would be technically illegal. You can’t play an instrument without permission. So there’s technically a risk of getting arrested. But I hope that wouldn’t put people off. My hope is that so many people turn up with a drum or something that it would be a matter of having to arrest everyone. Which of course would be excellent publicity.

I also like the idea of the central event – the reason for turning up – being a sort of jamming session. At some festivals you get a crowd of people just banging drums in a loose rhythm. And there’s a sort of primal atmosphere. So the core idea is simply that huge numbers of people turn up with drums and things and make a big noise.

And ideally there would also be entertainments, street-theatre type spectacle, and also some bands and choirs. Ideally there would be lots of little groups performing, including groups of dancers, like Morris dancers, and street-theatre, and parades, and costumes.

All that matters is that there is joyful noise, and a sense of spectacle.

So there you have it – Easter Rising.

Now I agree that on one level this is a total fantasy and there’s no reason to think that anyone would turn up.

But if enough Christian groups get enthusiastic, and the idea is picked up by the media, there’s no reason it shouldn’t happen on a reasonably large scale. And within a few years it could be a well-established part of our Christian culture.

So my hope is that the desire for this sort of event begins to spread.

Thank you very much.