God and Girlguiding 2: No Need for Bubbles

“‘Good deed’ indeed! Well, it don’t look like it to me, and I’ve no patience with these Guides – seems to me Guiding’s about the last thing they do.”

Eve Garnett, The Family from One End Street (1937)

 

The bubble thing will get relevant, I promise.

Right, myth-busting time: Girlguiding has never actually been a Christian organisation.

What now? But you said last week –

What I said last week was that Girlguiding has historically held to the importance of putting God first in one’s life.¹ I never said that it prescribed that the God in question had to be the God revealed in the Bible and the person of Jesus. And the reason I never said that is because it never did. Some thoughtful human called Leslie has compiled a history of the relationship between religion and Guiding over the decades (which I shall be plundering heavily for the duration of this post, with sincere gratitude to the aforementioned Leslie);² she includes quotations from a number of relevant sources, and records that the first Guide handbook, written by Agnes Baden-Powell (sister of Robert) and published in 1912, included the following assertion:

There are many kinds of religion, such as Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mohammedans, and so on, but the main point about them is that they all worship God, although in different ways. They are like an army which serves one king, though it is divided into different branches such as cavalry, artillery, and infantry. So, when you meet a person of a different religion to your own, you should not be hostile to him, but recognize that he is like a soldier in your own army, though in a different uniform, and still serving the same king as you.

Argh! Pluralism! Help! Run! Or at least, that’s something like what my brain did when I first read these few lines. Honestly, I could not disagree more. Anyone who does not worship God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does not worship the same God as me. Anyone who does not worship Jesus Christ as the sinner’s sole means of being counted righteous does not worship the same God as me. Anyone who worships a God who doesn’t mind being conflated with other gods does not worship the same God as me.³

And so I seem to have backed myself into a bit of a corner, really. On the one hand, I argued last week that Girlguiding ought to stand firm on its historic foundations; on the other, it now emerges that Girlguiding’s view of God has historically been quite incompatible with mine. Am I not arguing myself out of belonging to the movement at all?

The thing is, when one’s doing one’s best to live under God’s rule amidst a world given over to outright rebellion against that rule, things are bound to get messy. There are all sorts of situations in which we are going to find ourselves required to work together with, or under the authority of, people who don’t share all of our values and goals. Essentially, there are only two possible reactions: we can either retreat, in every sphere of life, into a bubble populated only by people of very similar theological persuasion; or we can get stuck into doing stuff alongside people of various different theological persuasions, pray hard for wisdom and godliness, and do our best to draw the lines as to what we will and won’t do or affirm in God-glorifying places. And if we’re serious about making Jesus known to a world that’s doomed without him, the first possibility simply isn’t a runner.

And so I wasn’t advocating, in last week’s post, that Girlguiding ought to be a bubble populated only by people of very similar theological persuasion to me. There are enough church youth clubs out there; that’s not what Guiding is for. Nor has it ever existed to convert or to proselytise. Members have always been encouraged to be active within their own religious communities, and any participation in religious activities associated with a tradition other than a girl’s own has always been voluntary and required her parents’ permission (even in the days when the only other activity for which parental permission was required was camping). Apparently, a 1985 leaflet called ‘The Religious Policy of the Girl Guides Association in the United Kingdom’ said this on the subject:

Membership of the Girl Guides Association is voluntary, and is open to girls and women without discrimination as to race, religion or any other circumstances, providing they are prepared to make the Promise.

Here, then, is the nub. If a girl can say the Promise and say it honestly, she can be a Guide. This, I remind you, was the Promise I made:

I promise that I will do my best

            to love my God,

            to serve the Queen and my country,

            to help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.

I made the promise, incidentally, on the same day as my childhood best friend, who’s a Muslim. When she said that first line, I have no doubt she meant something different by it to what I meant – but we could both of us say it and mean it. Whether or not Agnes Baden-Powell had been a pluralist had no bearing on the situation; her views weren’t what we were being asked to subscribe to. And so it’s clear that it isn’t remotely necessary that Girlguiding be a bubble populated only by people of a very similar theological persuasion to a particular girl, in order for her to be fully involved in it. Certainly I don’t want it to be a bubble populated only by people of a very similar theological persuasion to me. Equally, nonetheless, I don’t want it to be a cult of the self, either – and that’s why I object to the new ‘be true to myself’ Promise.

It’s a messy thing belonging to any earthly organisation when one knows that the only authority to which one ultimately owes allegiance is the kingdom of God. It’s messy even just to be a citizen of a nation-state or an employee of a company or, I would argue, a member of a church denomination; to be a Girl Guide doesn’t strike me as particularly any messier. Insofar as the things that the organisations we belong to ask us to do are compatible with the higher allegiance we owe, there’s no reason for us not to do those things. The beauty of the Promise I made as a Guide was that it not only allowed me to acknowledge that higher allegiance, but positively obliged me to prioritise it. That was more than enough, no need for the organisation to be a theological bubble.

So I hope it’s clear that when I call for Girlguiding to stand firm on its foundations instead of trailing sorrily behind the moving status quo, I’m not advocating that it ought to work for me and people like me and everyone else can shove off. A balance can be struck: one can stand for something without making that something so incredibly specific that one is compelled to stand for it more or less alone. Yes, that’s going to be messy, but so is belonging to any sort of collective existing in the present age. And hey, I’m a Girl Guide; we’re good at figuring messy things out…⁴

Footnotes

¹ You may well want to read last week’s post before this one, particularly if you’re a bit hazy about what Girlguiding actually is – link in the box on the right, of course.

² It’s generally a very good and informative site, but here’s the particular page in question: http://lesliesguidinghistory.webs.com/religion-and-guiding.

³ Try Isaiah 46, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+46&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Incidentally, the Guiding higher-ups are currently in the process of developing a new programme, http://stories.girlguiding.org.uk/ourjourney/, which is a pretty big deal and so I thought I ought to mention it at some point in these two posts…

God and Girlguiding 1: Standing for Something

The Pirate Captain:        Pirates? What pirates? Nobody here but us Girl Guides.

The Albino Pirate:          I’ve got a badge for looting!

The Pirates! In an Adventure, with Scientists (2012)

This is a post – which is, as it turns out, actually going to be two posts – that I’ve been meaning to write for ages. This weekend, however, proved something of a catalyst for my mind and typing fingers actually to compose it in that I encountered some New and Relevant Information which I will probably struggle to re-consult in future. In other words, I am getting this jazz down while it’s fresh in my mind.

 

This is the Trefoil, the symbol of Girlguiding in the UK. The three leaves stand for the three parts of the Promise; the star stands for the Law. Thanks to G Filz at clipartlogo.com.

Girlguiding, in case there are any of you out there who are unaware of the movement or perhaps know it under a different name, is an international organisation for girls and young women, founded by Robert Baden-Powell in 1910 as a girls’ equivalent to his then-new Boy Scout movement.¹ I’ve been involved in Guiding pretty much continuously since I was five years old, initially as a participant (working my way up through Rainbows, Brownies, and then Guides proper) and subsequently as a leader, so it seems fair to say it’s been a pretty big part of my life. Indeed, Thursday evenings have in my mind become practically synonymous with Guide meetings – not that the programme for the girls in the Brownie and Guide units I help to lead is limited to our Thursday evening activities, as is immediately evident from the fact that this weekend we took a number of the girls camping, an annual fixture in this as well as many Guide units. The theme of our camp this year (and the name of the badge gained by attending) was Traditions of Guiding. That meant laying woodcraft trails through the forest,² lashing together camp-related gadgets using nothing more than logs and string, and learning odd bits and pieces about how Guiding used to work in days gone by, on which account our Unit Leader brought along a couple of vintage Guide Handbooks for the girls to consult, one of them from 1992 and the other from 1968.³

I was immediately fascinated. I love all the history-of-the-movement stuff, the traditions and the structures and the symbolism (the sorts of things that, on principle, I don’t allow my ISTJ brain⁴ to indulge in very much in a church context, and of which it is consequently starved and grateful for opportunities to indulge in in other contexts) – and so, when I got a spare moment, I settled down to have a peruse of these two snapshots of my beloved Girlguiding as it was in former decades. I found much that interested me, but, in order that this post end up something at least close to a manageable length, I’ll adhere solely to the relevant sections, namely what was said about God.

See, when I became a Girl Guide proper at the age of ten, I was required, like all Girl Guides throughout the ages, to make publicly the Guide Promise, the unifying statement of all Girl Guides throughout the UK, which, at the time when I made it, went like this:

I promise that I will do my best

                to love my God,

                to serve the Queen and my country,

                to help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.⁵

I was fine with that as a Promise. But apparently – unsurprisingly – not everyone was, and in 2013, after a nationwide consultation, the Promise was changed to this:

I promise that I will do my best

                to be true to myself and develop my beliefs,

                to serve the Queen and my community,

                to help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.

Spot the difference.

And I get that not everybody is happy making a solemn pledge to love her God. That’s obvious. It is, in fact, not even news. That 1968 Guide Handbook I mentioned earlier had a bit to say on the subject, in fact. (The Promise at that stage, incidentally, would have had its first component as to do my duty to God – that change was made in 1994). Essentially, the author, M. Elizabeth Brimelow, recognised that some people choose to live their lives without acknowledging God, but suggested that such people are severely missing out, and that part of being a Guide is being, as she put it, “alive to God”. This stuff wasn’t very specific or doctrinal – the concept of God expressed was, as I recall, basically limited to a good Creator who cares about how humans behave themselves – but it was firmly, unapologetically there. Brimelow went on to stress the importance of belonging to some sort of worshipping congregation, and encouraged the reader that if her family did not belong to such a congregation already, she should ask her Guide leader to recommend one to her – and this in a handbook which elsewhere exhorts girls to respect and adhere to the policies and traditions of their families (one of the clauses of the Guide Law back then was A Guide is obedient). In essence, Brimelow considered a Guide’s duty to her God to be of primary importance – a Guide without a God is, by her reckoning, no Guide at all – such that she advocated that that duty should be executed even should it stand at odds with other influences and authorities, as she was perfectly aware it sometimes would. She knew that not everybody would agree with her stance and apparently, she was OK with that. Apparently, the Girlguiding of her day was OK with that. It was OK with standing for something not everyone would agree with. In fact, we can shorten that: it was OK with standing for something.

Because, try as one might, one cannot stand for something that everyone agrees with. The new Promise was supposed to make Guiding more widely accessible, but even as it has opened doors to atheists, agnostics, and secularists of various sub-persuasions, it has shut or left closed other doors. Anyone who principally objects to the monarchy is still excluded, for instance. So, on different grounds, would I be, if it were required of me to make the new Promise in order to continue my role in Guiding. Happily, it has as yet not been, and so I count my commitment to the movement as continuing to be encapsulated by the version of the Promise I originally made. The substance of my objection to the new Promise, just to be clear, isn’t that I’m sulking in a corner at the removal of the word God, resolutely unwilling to give any alternative phrasing a fair hearing; it’s that I can’t very well promise to do my best to be true to myself when my Lord tells me to deny myself, take up the cross on which I am daily to put myself to death, and follow him and him alone.⁶ My objection is that the first component of the Promise is supposed to be about spiritual development,⁷ and it has been reduced to a commitment to the self and the self’s preferred values – an endorsement of our innate but immoral human tendency to obsess over furthering our own interests. Girlguiding has never stood for self above others; indeed, it has always encouraged a minimisation of the self and selfish desires in favour of helping others, being a responsible member of society, and doing the right thing. The Brownie Guide Law is still A Brownie Guide thinks of others before herself and does a good turn every day, and I don’t forecast that changing any time soon, but I deem it saddening that the new Promise sits so ill alongside it. Putting God first in the Promise made sense of the rest of Girlguiding’s values; putting the self first seems to me to contradict them.

On one level, I think we could all see the change coming. The trajectory was to some extent discernible from the 1990s Guide handbook I skimmed through at camp this weekend: therein the commitment to God was still upheld, but in slightly more embarassed tones, allowing that people have different ideas about God; the decision not to belong to a worshipping congregation was also legitimised. But surely such concessions were hardly dramatically ‘progressive’ at the time? And surely even the new Promise is, in the eyes of secular society, only the inevitable eventual surrender of a stronghold that had already been offensively holding out for far too long? Girlguiding is big on tradition. Change, whatever the current spin placed on the organisation’s history by its central leadership,⁸ does not tend to happen very quickly. At the rate we’re going, the Girl Guides would seem to be simply following the path of society in general, many miles behind the cutting edge.

What if we were to stop trailing reluctantly after the crowd, and take things more M. Elizabeth Brimelow style instead? It’s not news that some people are going to be excluded from an organisation whose foundational pledge includes a commitment to God – but the fact is that some people are going to be excluded from an organisation whose foundational pledge includes anything, or rather exists at all. If we want to stand for something, we have to stand for something not everybody is going to like. Is making incredibly delayed alterations to that something, vaguely along the lines of what appears to be the majority view, really the most attractive possibility we can come up with?

I’m not trying to whine here: If Girlguiding had always had at its heart something I fundamentally disagreed with, then it wouldn’t have been fair for me to have expected to find room within its ranks. But I did find room, and I grew to feel quite at home in it, and all in all the whole movement has become very dear to me – and so now, I would much rather see it take a stand on the foundations that made it great, than abandon them under a false premise of inclusivity.

Footnotes

¹ Official website: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/.

² Robert Baden-Powell has the symbol for ‘I have gone home’ on his gravestone, which is one of my favourite things. Seriously thinking about copycatting…

³ You can get copies of the 1968 one on AbeBooks: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-guide-handbook/author/m-elizabeth-brimelow/. It seems to have become quite iconic, actually.

⁴ I explain my ISTJ-ness in a post called ‘Myers-Briggs and Morality’, coincidentally written this same weekend – first in July, Guide camp – last year. (I’m sure you’ve got the hang of finding stuff in the box on the right by now.)

⁵ The Guide Law then consisted, as it still does, of the following six clauses:

1) A Guide is honest, reliable, and can be trusted.

2) A Guide is helpful and uses her time and abilities wisely.

3) A Guide faces challenges and learns from her experiences.

4) A Guide is a good friend and a sister to all Guides.

5) A Guide is polite and considerate.

6) A Guide respects all living things and takes care of the world around her.

⁶ That chunk is a if not the pivotal point of the gospel according to Mark: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+8&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Interestingly, Girlguiding still affirms its commitment to enabling the spiritual development of young members (along with five other areas of development). I learned that in an e-training module I did earlier this year, so I assume it’s still current.

⁸ See what I mean: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/about-us/what-makes-guiding-special/our-history/.

Something No Hero Will Ever Defeat

“I am not the god of war, Diana; I am the god of truth.”

Wonder Woman (2017)

The story goes something like this…

Long ago, the supreme divine being created humans. At first these humans were good and honest and peaceful, but then along came an agent of evil who persuaded them to do wrong, whenceforth humanity descended into an abyss of relentless chaos, bloodshed, and cruelty. Happily, the supreme divine being had an heir who was born on earth and would become, having grown up, the conqueror of the evil with which humanity had been corrupted.

Yep, that’s right, I’m insinuating that we can read the protagonist of the new Wonder Woman film¹ as a bit of a Christ figure: just chuck either Zeus, Ares, and Diana Prince, or God, the serpent, and Jesus into the appropriate places in the above narrative, and there you go. I did, however, have to be rather vague in that last sentence about the precise nature of the evil that the divine heir was destined to conquer, because that, I’d say, is the matter in which Diana, like all Christ-types, falls woefully short of the real thing. (Spoilers ahead. Count yourself warned.)

Thanks to Blue-Hat-Creature at newgrounds.com for the gorgeous fanart.

The situation as Diana understands it for the better part of Wonder Woman is that humans only behave cruelly towards one another because they are under the influence of Ares, the god of war. The mission she determines to undertake in order to stop the Great War she has just found out is happening, therefore, is to kill Ares. Get rid of the source of the evil influence that causes people to harm one another, and boom! It’ll all be sunshine and rainbows. Problem solved.

The trouble is that things don’t work out quite as Diana anticipates. She sticks a sword in the guy she’s absolutely confident is Ares, and nothing changes. The war is still raging. Plans that will keep it raging longer are still being put into place: specifically, a new chemical weapon devised by a very sinister lady called Isabel Maru for use by the Germans is still being loaded into planes for removal to the Front. No soldier has surfaced, blinking, from the stupor of Ares’ influence, and laid down his weapons. Chaos and bloodshed and cruelty march relentlessly on. It’s as if Diana hadn’t done anything; clearly, she hasn’t dealt with the source of humanity’s tendency towards evil after all.

Unsurprisingly, she has a bit of a crisis over this. Humans aren’t, after all, helpless thralls of Ares, but responsible for their own evil actions, responsible for the war that is causing them so much suffering; her faith that they were, at heart, ultimately good has been shattered. Even Steve Trevor, the American spy who’s been the companion and facilitator of her mission – and, more recently, her romantic interest – admits that although Diana at least is free of blame for all the chaos and bloodshed and cruelty, maybe there’s an extent to which he isn’t. A distraught Diana tells him that her mother was right to say the world didn’t deserve her; he replies that maybe it’s not about ‘deserve’. Maybe it’s more a case of whether one wants the war and all the accompanying suffering to end, regardless of the fact that humans brought it all on their own heads.

Diana isn’t convinced, but then the real Ares shows up (turns out she was wrong about the other guy, but he was horrid enough that we the viewers still feel fine about him having been stabbed to death). This, he tells Diana, was what he knew all along: humans are, at the end of the day, essentially bad. They were already of such a nature as to tend towards chaos and bloodshed and cruelty before he said a word to them: all he did was expose what they were really like. Even now, he might offer them the tidbits of information and inspiration they need to devise new instruments of pain and death – like Isabel Maru’s new weaponised gas – but he never instructs them to use them: they come to that decision all by themselves. And hence, he claims, he isn’t the god of war, but the god of truth. He doesn’t foster the evil of the human disposition, but merely brings it to light.

And so Diana can kill Ares all she likes – as she indeed does, the real one this time – but the darkness present in every human is, in her own words, “something no hero will ever defeat.” An impressive superhero she might be, but she’s not much cop as a solution to the problem of human evil.

I once heard a Bible-overview sermon series that, on its whistle-stop tour of the Old Testament, characterised the foretold Messiah primarily as the ‘serpent-crusher’ of Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The trouble with that principle is that the serpent’s role in the corruption of humanity according to the Bible was no more fundamental than Ares’ role in the corruption of humanity according to Wonder Woman. The serpent never even instructed the woman to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree; he only told her something appealing about what would happen if she did, like Ares standing behind the shoulder of Isabel Maru hinting that this particular chemical combination might achieve something like that effect. It was of the woman’s own accord that she ate, and then of the man’s own accord that he did likewise. They already had that tendency towards disobedience; the serpent just offered them an opportunity to reveal as much, so that it was all chaos and bloodshed and cruelty from there on.² And so merely crushing the serpent would have no more effect on the depravity of real humanity than killing Ares had on the depravity of the fictional humanity of Wonder Woman.³

The good news is Jesus’ mission wasn’t merely to do away with the agent who revealed the human capacity for evil, as Diana’s turned out to be, but rather to do away with the human capacity for evil altogether. “And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,” Paul wrote to the believers in Christ living at Colossae.⁴ We were, as are all humans, alienated and hostile and evil in our very nature, but by Jesus’ real, human, bodily death for us we have been made holy and blameless and above reproach in our very nature, so that we might be reconciled to God who is in his very nature holy and blameless and above reproach. This was not a mere serpent-crushing, the defeat of some external agent, but a vital transformation of what we as humans are fundamentally like. Jesus, responsible for none of the chaos and bloodshed and cruelty rife in a world that didn’t deserve him, took the blame for all of it, not because humans deserved peace but because he wanted to grant us it anyway, and now remakes all those who believe as much after the perfection of his own likeness.

Diana said the darkness in the human heart was something no hero would ever defeat. Thank God she was wrong.

Footnotes

¹ It’s seriously good. You should see it. Here’s a trailer if you need further persuasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeZ8X5FKl78.

² I’m getting all this out of Genesis 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+3&version=ESVUK. Do have a look, or you won’t know whether my conclusions are totally unreasonable.

³ I explored some similar ideas in a post about Merlin, called ‘Nice People’, which is under ‘January’ in the box on the right, if haply you fancy a look at all.

⁴ Check out the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=col+1&version=ESVUK.