Snow White: A Practical Version

Lorenzo:         We’re doing a good thing.

Angelica:        Yes.

Lorenzo:         A noble thing.

Angelica:        Yes.

Lorenzo:         We’re putting our own feelings aside for the good of our families.

Angelica:        Yes. So we’ll get married and have lots of children and everyone will be happy.

Lorenzo:         Except us. Whoa, wait a minute, children? Who said anything about having children?

Angelica:        What did you expect? It’s what married couples do.

Leonardo S2 E11, ‘Hitched’ (2012)

It probably says something about the kind of brain I have that an idea it recently chucked at me for a fun twist on a fairytale was to explain the characters’ actions as having taken place for extremely practical and mundane reasons chiefly relating to the politics of running a small kingdom. This is the spirit in which the following monologue was written, which is intended to represent the thoughts of the prince associated with Snow White. I hope you derive some amusement from it, and if any possibilities for further filling out of plot details along the same lines should occur to you – I’ve left the story halfway through, after all – or, indeed, if any particularly fun possibilities for the rendering of other fairytales in the same manner should occur to you, then please do voice them, or rather, type them, I suppose.

 

Snow White, according to the digital paintbrush of the very talented xaolan at newgrounds.com.

***

Heirs.

That’s what it’s about, at the end of the day, this whole prince-charming gig. If you haven’t got an heir, then it doesn’t matter how good you are at duelling and dragon-slaying and diplomacy; it doesn’t matter how capable or virtuous or beloved by your people you are; it doesn’t matter whether you’ve managed to defeat your enemies and secure your borders and bring peace and prosperity to the territories over which you’re responsible, because if you haven’t got an heir, then there’s nobody to hand the peace and prosperity down to. No heir means that all those achievements die with you and the kingdom descends into civil war as your former advisors and even friends trample each other down in a vicious scramble to claim your vacant throne. A lack of an heir has spelled the doom of some of the most impressive autocracies in history; don’t think it won’t spell the doom of yours too.¹

At least, that’s how my parents seem to like to put it. And the thing is, parents, merely by virtue of their being parents, rather annoyingly have every right to put the pressure on as far as this point is concerned: they have, merely by virtue of their being parents, already enjoyed some success in the business of producing heirs. In other words, nothing less than my own very existence provides the basis for the standard I’m expected to meet.

But in order to produce an heir, of course, one needs a wife. And this, my friends, is why you’ve ended up under the impression that princes like me have nothing better to do with our time than pursuing potential brides, whether that involves something strenuous like slaying a dragon who’s keeping a lady captive, or something less strenuous like holding a lot of parties. It’s because we genuinely haven’t got anything better to do with our time. Nothing is more important than providing a secure future for the kingdom, and that means that nothing is more important than finding someone to marry.

Though, just to make life more complicated, it can’t just be any old someone. First off, she has to be a woman of high status. A noblewoman from your own kingdom might sometimes do, but really you want a princess from another kingdom, because then you can use the marriage to make an alliance. In short, the better her position is, the better your position and your heirs’ position will be. Second, she has to be in a promising state for childbearing. Princesses tend to get married in their late teens, to make maximum use of their fertile years. General good health matters as well; if she looks sickly or weak, that raises the question of how well her body will cope with pregnancy and childbirth. To a large extent, that’s the real issue at hand when we’re talking about beauty (or lack of it). And third, and trickiest, you have to be very, very sure that she is in fact – ah, how to put this delicately … that she is in fact a maiden. Heirs are the whole point; if there is any doubt about the parentage of the children she bears, any at all, then we have a civil-war scenario brewing already. I wouldn’t be so crass as to point fingers, but everyone knows of cases where a princess’ startling eagerness to get married has been followed by a reasonably short pregnancy resulting in a child whose resemblance to said princess’ husband is, shall we say, rather limited. So if one’s potential bride has been confined to the house doing domestic chores, or imprisoned alone in a secret tower in the woods, or trapped in a castle whose every occupant including herself is under a sleep enchantment behind an impenetrable hedge of thorns, or something, ever since she hit puberty, that’s pretty ideal. If you’d been thinking it was just sheer noble princely heroism that prompted us to rescue these kinds of damsels in distress, then I hate to burst your bubble, but think again. It’s far more selfish than that.

 

Thorns. Ouch.

I hasten to add that a rescued princess has every right to turn her rescuer down, but they hardly ever do. A nice marriage alliance and a few high-status heirs probably look just as desirable to her as to him. If her parents are still about, you can bet they’ve been putting just as much pressure on her as his have on him. Plus, if you’ve managed to climb the secret tower or hack your way through the hedge of thorns or slay the dragon – whatever the nature of the confinement may be – you’ve proved that you’ve got a bit about you, you know. You’ve got some guts and some physical prowess and probably some brains as well, and that means you might well do a halfway decent job of maintaining peace and security in your court and kingdom, which means the oh-so-important heirs will hopefully end up with something halfway decent to inherit, and Her Highness will be able to live in comfort while she’s busy producing them. A prince who’s competent enough to rescue her from her imprisonment is as good as she’s likely to get, basically.

I didn’t quite manage to properly rescue my damsel in distress in time.

Her name is Snow White,² and she is a princess, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it to look at her right now. Her parents both died before she came of age, so her stepmother starting acting as regent for her, and of course she made all the right noises about handing the throne back to Snow White just as soon as she was old enough, but come on, we’ve all seen that before. If the Queen Regent had been serious about ever relinquishing her power, she wouldn’t have had Snow White locked up in the bit of the palace where the scullery maids live, now would she?

Ah, you’ve spotted it. A princess locked up with the scullery maids since she was a child, but now teetering on the brink of adulthood – as potential brides go, she ticked all the boxes. The fact that she’d been functionally stripped of her royal status presented a slight snag, admittedly, but I didn’t imagine that would be too difficult to deal with: the Queen Regent was unpopular, and restoring the kingdom to Snow White would probably only take a small army, which is something I happen to have. So I did my heroic breaking-into-the-palace bit, which I figured should be enough to prove my worth, and had a bit of a chat with the princess. She looked in pretty good shape to me – very pale, granted, presumably from having spent so much time indoors, but the scullery maids had clearly been making sure she was well fed and looked after (and her hips weren’t a bad width either) – and she was keen to get her kingdom back, so when I offered her that in exchange for her hand in marriage, she jumped at the chance. It was all going swimmingly; all I had to do was nip back home to gather my troops, depose the Queen Regent, and arrange for Snow White’s coronation, and the deal would be done.

How the Queen Regent got wind of my plan, I have no idea. But she’s a shrewd and decisive lady, I’ll give her that: she immediately took measures to get rid of Snow White permanently. She’d presumably been hoping that if she just kept the princess out of sight, unmarried, and so heirless, she’d be able to establish her own line on the throne – because even though Snow White was the rightful ruler, if she didn’t have any heirs, then taking major risks in order to put her back on the throne wouldn’t necessarily look like a great option as far as her subjects were concerned. Again, it’s all about the heirs!

A huntsman was charged with killing Snow White, but he was loyal to her family and wouldn’t dare lay a hand on her, so she ended up fleeing into the woods, according to my sources – though that’s the last they’ve heard of her. I’ve got my people scouring the area for any sign of her, but I don’t doubt the Queen Regent will be doing the same by now; she’ll have twigged soon enough that the huntsman didn’t really kill Snow White. So it’s essentially a race. If I find her first, we’ll proceed with the original plan. If the Queen Regent finds her first, she’ll kill her. But I can’t make a move against the Queen Regent until I’ve found Snow White: if I’m not restoring the rightful monarch to the throne, it’ll just be a straightforward invasion, and I somehow think the people of that kingdom, not to mention my own, might look rather less fondly on that.

My dear parents, as you can probably imagine, are not exactly thrilled by these developments. I mean, I’m obviously going to stick to what I promised Snow White whatever happens, or my word will be worth nothing, and I’ll be very glad to find her safe and well whatever the circumstances, but I dread to think what my parents might say if it turns out she’s been spending time with other men since she, you know, fled for her life and that. Oh, wait a moment, here’s a messenger; he’ll be bringing the latest report from my scouts, I should think…

Oh, thank goodness, they’ve found her! And she’s all right! And she’s … been living with seven men in a remote cottage in the forest.

Oh dear. How on earth am I going to explain that?

Footnotes

¹ Notable example: Alexander the Great. I once read a really interesting novel based on psychological analysis of Henry VIII that made pretty much exactly the same point, so I probably owe some credit there: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/H-M-Castor/VIII/10802882.

² I wrote a bit about Disney’s Snow White specifically – and touched very lightly on some of the ideas covered in this post – in ‘In Defence of Snow White’ in October 2016. In the box on the right if you happen to fancy a read. Also, here’s a fascinating video that also makes a defence of Snow White as a great Disney princess, though on very different grounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7FF8nL42qw.

We the Capitol: Spectacle and Perspective in The Hunger Games

“It’s funny, because even though they’re rattling on about the Games, it’s all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred … Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.”

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)

But of course, it’s precisely because The Hunger Games belongs so well and readily and naturally in the medium of cinematic spectacle, that the story’s having been adapted for that medium from the original novel is such an unsettling thing.¹

Frankly, it stuns me that people lavish their phenomenal artistic talents all over the Internet and then allow me to freely purloin their work as adornment for my blog. This beautiful version of Katniss is by DocLew at newgrounds.com.

This isn’t, I don’t think, an altogether original suggestion on my part, but it would be altogether impossible to credit every half-remembered conversation and online post that germinated and nourished it in my mind. At any rate, I surely can’t be plagiarising too heinously if I can’t remember my sources well enough to lift material from them directly. Right?

So to return to the point, the thing about The Hunger Games is that cinematic spectacle is exactly what it’s about. Specifically, it’s about an overfed and oblivious elite goggling at a bunch of children who are being filmed murdering each other by whichever gruesome means they have available in order to secure their own survival. It’s about the broadcast on screen for entertainment of events which it is unambiguously reprehensible to broadcast on screen for entertainment. It’s about dazzling people with glitz and thrills and romance to the point where they become numb to the evil in which they are complicit. It’s about putting on a show compelling enough to distract people from the real problems.

The book – and I am, for straightforwardness, going to focus primarily on the first instalment of the trilogy – tells all this in first-person narrative voice. We the readers are granted privileged access to protagonist Katniss’ internal monologue; more than that, indeed, hers is the only perspective through which it is granted us to see the world in which the novel is set, and, for that reason, we are as constantly, inescapably aware as she is of the sickening vanity of the spectacle that is laid like a veneer over the real horror of the unfolding events. We are never allowed to forget that what this is really about is her trying to stay alive. All the pretty flame-adorned outfits and all the cute bits of dialogue and kisses exchanged with Peeta are contrived to win her favour with the sponsors in whose generosity her fate might rest. The audience within the world of the story are encouraged to direct their eyes to such pretty, cute, appealing things, but we, seeing through Katniss’ eyes, are always conscious that it is not these things themselves but the contriving of them that represents the true site of the drama.

When the story is transferred onto film, we lose that first-person perspective. We didn’t, arguably, have to lose it; plenty of films make use of spoken internal monologues to keep the viewers aware of what the characters are really thinking. Still, it’s a technique that can, unless done very well, come across as cheesy or lazy or amateurish, and I can see that it probably wouldn’t have worked brilliantly in The Hunger Games. And so we lose Katniss’ narrative voice. We lose that constant, inescapable awareness of her real motivations and the real appalling gravity of her situation. On top of that, we get to view her exploits in pretty much exactly the same way that the overfed and oblivious inhabitants of the Capitol do: broadcast on screen, edited for maximum entertainment value, sanitised to prevent us from grasping too fully and starkly the real horror of the unfolding events (and to keep the BBFC rating at a 12A, to avoid losing revenue from the very demographic that represents the story’s original target audience). Consider the moment in the film when the actual Games begin, and twenty-four adolescents rush to gather as many resources and slaughter as many competitors as they possibly can in the first few minutes of play: there is, if you recall, no sound (excepting music) for this portion of the film.² In terms of cinematography, it works well, in that it heightens the tension and keeps the focus on Katniss. Visually, we can flit from one bit of action to another before we have time to give any of them much thought: the glimpses we get of the other characters are brief and shaky, and the violence done by and to them is contained, limited to the quick thrust of a blade and spattering of blood across some foreign surface. Audially, things would have to have been a little more sustained. To have had our protagonist’s movements soundtracked by the choking and screaming and sobbing of the children being massacred by their peers all around her would have been … messy. It would have been overly busy. There would have been too much going on that we weren’t really interested in. Muting the story-world was an editorially sound decision for the audience’s maximum enjoyment of the scene.

I surely can’t be the only one who finds something at least a bit disturbing in that.

The nub is this: in reading The Hunger Games, we find ourselves in Katniss’ shoes, but in watching it, we find ourselves in the shoes of the overfed and oblivious viewers in the Capitol. Our eyes are directed towards the appealing veneer-story. Look at Katniss’ pretty outfits! Look at the exciting tension of her adventures in the arena! Look, above all, at the developing love triangle centred on her, and be sure to pick a side! It is so striking – isn’t it? – that the very element of Katniss’ story which most effectively garnered the attention of the viewers in the Capitol, namely the romantic one, has also garnered a rather bloated proportion of the attention of viewers in the real world. Katniss’ choice between Gale and Peeta is, I think it’s fair to say, frequently articulated as a if not the major plot point of the trilogy.³ Look at the glitz and the thrills and the romance, viewers! And don’t look too hard at what the story might be critiquing about our own society. Don’t look too hard at what it might be saying about wealth and poverty. Don’t look too hard at what it might be saying about political power. And don’t, whatever you do, look too hard at what it might be saying about media spectacle; about screened entertainment as the anaesthetic of the masses, bread-and-circuses style;⁴ about the exhibition of the suffering of some for the amusement of others; about the sacrifice of what’s true and fair on the altar of what makes a good show.

It’s not part of what I’m trying to do in this post to put my finger on precisely what The Hunger Games actually does say about the aforementioned concerns, but regardless, there seems little ground to deny that it says something about all of them. And in this way, turning The Hunger Games into a film sort of turned it into a target of its own polemic. Granted, it's not as if the actors featured in the film actually died the way the characters they were playing did, but the fact that one can have such an enjoyable time watching The Hunger Games makes it vividly and disturbingly clear how enjoyable a time one could theoretically have watching the Hunger Games, if you see what I mean. Either one goggles at the spectacle of death as blithely and numbly and engrossedly as the inhabitants of the Capitol, or one discerns in oneself the ability (or even propensity) to goggle at the spectacle of death in such fashion, and recoils. If the former is true, the film defeats the purpose of the book; if the latter, it defeats its own.

Or, alternatively, perhaps it in fact fulfils it. Perhaps the film is supposed to render us unsettled at our own voyeurism. Perhaps, indeed, there is no more effective way for it to do so than to place us in the shoes of the viewers in the Capitol. Reading the book, seeing everything through Katniss’ eyes, we were sure we were on her side; watching the film, seeing her from the same third-person perspective as the audience within the world of the story, we’re forced to confront the possibility that maybe we wouldn’t be. Maybe we would, in other circumstances, exploit her trauma for our amusement as readily as the people of the Capitol. By taking on this third-person audience role, they render themselves complicit in the evil at hand: surely nothing could show us the potential for similar evil in our own selves more compellingly than our being caused to take on that very same role.

Indeed, I reiterate, it’s precisely because The Hunger Games belongs so well and readily and naturally in the medium of cinematic spectacle, that the story’s having been adapted for that medium from the original novel is such an unsettling thing.

Footnotes 

¹ Surely you’ve read it. If not, do: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Suzanne-Collins/The-Hunger-Games/5976467. 

² Here it is, if you’d like to remind yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oISBveQNkzA. 

³ As in a slick and hilarious trio of music videos by the superb Studio C, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am1tzttZ8Pc. 

⁴ This famous phrase is from the eighty-first line of Juvenal’s tenth satire, talking about the common people having shrugged off any sense of civic duty: “For the one who once used to grant power, the office of magistrate, the legions, everything, now restrains himself and anxiously desires only two things, bread and circuses.” Translation my own from the text I got here: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/10.shtml.

Interdenondenominational

“So, you’ve heard of interdenominational. You’ve heard of nondenominational. Well, this church identifies as interdenondenominational.”

johnbcrist, ‘Church Hunters: Episode 2’ (2017)

All I was doing was explaining to my orchestra desk-partner¹ that I wouldn’t be able to make the all-day rehearsal later that month because I’d be travelling back from a friend’s wedding. That’s one of the things one encounters when one has a lot of Christian friends, I added: they display a tendency to get married at what is considered, in the mainstream of our society, an unusually young age.

“Are you a Christian?” my desk-partner asked me. Perfectly reasonably.

I freely confirmed that I was. Easy question.

“Which denomination?” she followed up. Again, perfectly reasonably: I don’t in the slightest mean to imply that that’s something she was at all wrong or insensitive or ignorant to ask me. It was, I think we’d all agree, entirely fair as a question – and yet I wasn’t at all sure how to reply. I ended up shrugging, pulling a bit of a face, and making a tsh noise, before remarking rather vaguely that I was going to an Anglican church at the moment.

 

This is not the Anglican church I currently attend, but it is the one with which the secondary school I went to is associated. It’s quite a good cathedral, as they go.

But of course, that doesn’t really mean anything. After all, Anglicanism is literally the archetypal broad church.² “I go to an Anglican church,” could mean almost anything: it could mean repeating endless archaic liturgy, kneeling for the confession, and turning east for the creed; it could mean meeting in a school hall and using a bit of PE apparatus as a communion table; it could mean taking notes on a forty-minute exegesis of some obscure minor prophet; it could mean staring at a candle in silence punctuated only by occasional Taizé chants; it could mean publicly crying on the shoulder of the nice lady who just prayed for you in tongues; it could mean discussing current social issues over coffee and cake – I could go on. “I go to an Anglican church,” doesn’t, in practical terms, say anything much about what I actually believe.

Nor are other denominational identifiers significantly more useful. The church I went to until the age of (I think) about fourteen belonged to two denominations, Methodist and United Reformed, the latter being itself an amalgamation of two further denominations, the English branches of Presbyterianism and Congregationalism (minorities of whose congregations continued independently after the merger took place in the 1970s). To this day, I have very little idea what the distinguishing features of any of these denominations are, though I can’t help but feel said features surely can’t be all that distinguishing if their bearers are so easily merged.

In short, denominational labels don’t really tell you anything. Surely there’s got to be a better way of doing things.

***

I hadn’t been particularly trying to turn the conversation into a debate about predestination; it just sort of happened somehow. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect anything else when one goes for a spontaneous lunch with two fellow Theology students who also happen to be fellow members of the body of Christ. The one of the two I knew less well had already asked me – in an unusually, though pleasingly, straightforward manner – whether I was a Bible-believing Christian, and I had freely confirmed that I was. Easy question. But then I began attempting to articulate what I thought the contents of the Bible compelled me to believe about the sovereignty of God,³ and he asked a follow-up question as to whether I would situate myself in the Reformed tradition.

It was entirely fair as a question, and yet I wasn’t at all sure how to reply. “Um,” I eventually managed, “I guess you could say I’m heavily Reformed-influenced.” What I meant by this was, I have read some stuff by some people who call themselves Reformed and I agreed with a good proportion of it.

‘Reformed’ doesn’t refer to a denomination; it refers to a theological persuasion that can plausibly span a number of denominations. Yet exactly what the defining features of that theological persuasion are is far from readily apparent. On one level, there’s surely a sense in which any Christian tradition that traces its origins back to the Reformation can claim the title (like the United Reformed Church I mentioned above), making it little more than a synonym for ‘Protestant’. On another, if you tap ‘Reformed’ into the search box on Wikipedia, you find yourself redirected to the entry for ‘Calvinism’.⁴ On yet another, I recently saw someone in an online discussion give the minimum components of Reformed theology as Confessional, Calvinistic, and Covenantal,⁵ i.e. that in order to call oneself Reformed, one must believe in not only the gospel and the doctrines of grace⁶ but also covenant theology.⁷ Furthermore, I think it’s fair to say that in certain circles, ‘Reformed’ seems to be used to mean something close to ‘evangelical’ or ‘orthodox’: calling someone Reformed is kind of a way of approving her or him as correctly believing in the truths revealed in the scriptures. But then, of course, this leaves it liable to turn into a way of approving someone as holding the same views as oneself on certain secondary issues. For example, in another recent conversation I had, a particular subgroup of churches calling itself ‘reformed’ was mentioned; I, curious, pushed on the point as to what its defining characteristics were, only to discover that its main one was an opposition to placing women in church leadership roles.

‘Reformed’ may only be one example, but from the sprawling mess of possibilities behind this one little word, I feel able to conclude that, although cross-denominational theological labels might tell you a bit more than mere denominational ones, they still don’t do an altogether satisfactory job. Surely there’s still got to be a better way of doing things.

***

I hadn’t thought my opinion was a particularly controversial one, but, judging from my friend’s evident surprise at my expressing it, it turns out that it’s not necessarily normal amongst committed Christians to believe that the events described in the book of Joshua actually happened in history. He said something about the apparent moral problem raised if the Israelites really did, on God’s orders, slaughter all those people in order to acquire the land they had been inhabiting; I replied with something about our human unwillingness to recognise the severity of punishment our sin justly deserves, and God’s right to execute said punishment by whichever means he chooses (making it all the more flabbergasting, incidentally, that, for those of us born again in Christ, he chose to execute it on his beloved, sinless Son in our stead). He countered with something to the effect that surely, then, by my reckoning, God could command us his Church to carry out a comparable slaughter of huge numbers of people, say, tomorrow, if it took his fancy – was I somehow OK with that? I responded with something along the lines that we the Church are under a different covenant to Israel, so that our inheritance is not of this world and will not be obtained by worldly force.

The conversation concluded about there, but another friend who’d evidently overheard it – and presumably discerned something vaguely theologically interesting in my responses – promptly caught my attention and asked me whether I’d mind informing her of the theological persuasion to which I subscribed.

Here we were, then. Fair enough if I was reluctant to affirm or deny the adherence of my theological views to somebody else’s contrived labels, denominational or otherwise – those ambiguous, polysemous identifiers that could easily mean something different to my ears than to someone else’s; those heavily loaded terms that could constitute the difference between being accepted as orthodox by another believer, or suspected as otherwise – fair enough, surely, if I didn’t want to be assessed according to those fickle categories. But what I had here wasn’t that sort of yes-or-no question; it was an open-ended one with room to show working and everything. It was the ideal chance to express my core theological views in whichever terms I myself felt were most suitable.

And what did I do with this golden opportunity? Well, if I recall rightly, I ended up shrugging, pulling a bit of a face, and making a tsh noise, before saying something to the effect that I didn’t really know. I just try to read the Bible, interpret what it says correctly, and then believe that.

I hasten to add that I’m not by any means trying to portray myself as terribly noble and pious and uncorrupted compared to all those dreadful people who actually appreciate the ease and efficiency of discussing their theological views using such pre-coined terms as are designed to make such discussions easier and more efficient. I’m not by any means trying to suggest that people who find it helpful to describe themselves using terms like ‘Anglican’ or ‘Reformed’ or whatever aren’t trying to read the Bible, interpret what it says correctly, and then believe that; on the contrary, an awful lot of them are probably making a far better job of it than I am. I’m not by any means trying to initiate some new movement modelling authentic, untainted, Bible-believing Christianity, because, let’s be real here, all that would really achieve would be to add one more denomination – or denomination-esque group⁸ – to the seething mass already in existence. (Not to mention that if I were in charge, it’d be a pretty terrible one.)

Indeed, it can be really useful to know and utilise a repertoire of technical terminology to describe and distinguish particular theological positions. Labels save time and streamline logic – assuming, that is, that everyone present is on the same page as to what those labels are being used to denote. The reason I shrink from them isn’t because I think I’m somehow above them; it’s because of my concern that what other people think I mean when I use them isn’t necessarily going to be the same as what I actually mean. How can I honestly state that a particular term does or doesn’t apply to me if I’m not clear on exactly what it is understood to refer to?

At the end of the day, adelphoi, we’re all trying to read the Bible, interpret what it says correctly, and then believe that. We all belong to one body, are indwelt by one Spirit, were called to one hope, acknowledge one Lord, hold to one faith, recognise one baptism, worship one God and Father of all.⁹ It may certainly be helpful to use (carefully defined) technical theological terminology when we’re having technical theological discussions, but the primary identity we need to recognise in each other is never one of belonging to this or that Christian subgroup, whether that be a positive or a negative thing in our thinking. On the contrary, the primary identity we need to recognise in each other is always one of belonging to Christ.

Footnotes

¹ Yeah, I play violin in my university symphony orchestra, https://www.exeterguild.org/societies/symphonyorchestra/, but please don’t be impressed; they only audition front-desk strings, so I can lurk at the back missing half the notes and still get my name on the concert programme.

² According to Wikipedia, the term was coined to describe “those Anglicans tolerant of multiple forms of conformity to ecclesiastical authority”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_church.

³ Which I most recently expressed in blog format in ‘Freedestination Revisited’, under ‘2016’ then ‘December’ in the box on the right.

⁴ See for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism.

⁵ This was in reply to a comment made on a poll created by The Dirty Christian, https://www.facebook.com/pg/thedirtyxian/posts/?ref=page_internal. If you’re at all tempted to argue that what some randomer says on the Internet can hardly be taken as an official definition, I counter that my point pertains precisely to differing usages of these kinds of terms amongst all the kinds of people who use them, rather than to lack of precision in any particular definition of an official nature.

⁶ A.k.a. TULIP: https://www.gotquestions.org/doctrines-of-grace.html. Which I affirm.

⁷ Namely this jazz: https://www.gotquestions.org/covenant-theology.html. Which I don’t.

⁸ Like ‘independent evangelical’ or ‘interdenominational’ or ‘nondenominational’. On which note, the video I quoted at the start of the post is hilarious and well worth a few minutes of your time, but it’s the second of two parts, so you should start with this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT70cA-7qMk.

⁹ I here allude to the beginning of Ephesians 4: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+4&version=ESVUK.