My Life as an Oxymoron

My sister and her husband have just recently stopped working for Youth With A Mission. For about 5 years, my brother in law was the base leader of Holmsted Manor, a large stately home, picked up derelict for an absolute song in the 1970's. Now, it's a place for prayer and worship, thinking about God and trying to work out how to make the world a better place. Young people go there from all over the world, then they go back to all across the world, on projects in any and all areas of the world where hope is scarce - working with prostitutes in Thailand, in the slums of Kampala, at New York fashion week. A place of rest before a time of great activity.

My sister and her family lived there for 20 years, on and off. And at Christmas, everyone goes home to their various corners of the globe, blagging lifts and sharing airmiles to get back to the people they love.

What this meant for me was that this enormous house (which is absolutely beautiful) was empty at Christmas. So, by and large, every Christmas my mum, my dad, my brother and me would travel to Sussex, where my sister and her husband (net income at the time: perhaps £3000 a year) and their family lived in a stately home, and have Christmas surrounded by wood-pannelling, eating what we could afford in the one room where the leather wallpaper had not been taken off the walls by the years of neglect.

It was a great place to read Agatha Christie. And PG Wodehouse.

Anyway, I mention this now because Mark Denton has just completed a photography project there (online here). The photos I've seen are very very good, and it's fascinating to see this place I'm so familiar with be photographed in the way it deserves.

He says the interest for him was in the existence of a 'fundamentalist evangelical Christian community' existing so close to where he lived - and of course when you describe it that way, it does sound a bit like Waco-in-the-woods, so if you weren't au fait with YWAM, you'd go and have a look, wouldn't you?

It's a little odd recognising some people in the photographs, and being a little afraid that they're being presented as lambs to an ideological slaughter. Described in the terms he uses, it sounds quite sinister. Because 'evangelical' and 'fundamentalist' have become, respectively, code words for 'right wing nutcase', and 'shoe-bomber', of course. And they've got run together because of a narrative coming mostly from the States, where some people tell other people that God hates them, and are taken seriously as representatives of Christianity worldwide.

I've never come across anyone in this country who would even consider acting in such a way, and I'm from that precise area of the Christian community. I've been part of Evangelicalism - arguing with it, usually - for 2 decades now. So I know that's not what gets said. The idea that evangelical equals hateful is an idea imported from the States, and it's not true here. There is no British Jerry Falwell, and I'm proud of that.

But Mark Denton clearly thinks the narrative's the same. I wonder why.

Although, in fairness, American culture has great influence in the UK, it's surely ridiculously bowdlerised to suggest that the cultures are the same. This holds true in all areas - British film has its own visual language and style, and Britain bloody invented American popular music. It's a two-way street, which some traffic doesn't even travel.

Similarly, though YWAM is an organisation begun in the states, it's not as though it's an empire. It's a loose collection of bases operating with a single aim, of helping people talk about Jesus. Base leaders have great autonomy. There isn't a hierarchy of baleful influence, wherein nice young chaps and chapesses are constantly having to fight off mouth-foaming preachers from Rifleshell, Texas, telling them to bomb abortion clinics because God hates death.

I know this particularly to be true of Holmsted. My brother in law and I have spent quite a lot of time - while he was leading this very base - discussing George Bush and how we disagreed with him. We were both over the moon at the election of Obama. Recently we've been discussing Tony Benn in depth, and enjoying it, because he has some very wise things to say. And, to repeat: this community was led by him for five years.

Holy crap. Evangelical Christians who vote on the left. Who run communities which, from a distance, look like cults. And aren't.

Often I get the impression that left-wing newspapers in the UK have been so angry for so long about George Bush and the coalition which supported him that the lies of the American culture war have leeched their way into the way we understand our own culture. It's a bit odd to be a lefty (as I am) and a Christian who believes in the transformative power of God (which I do), and to live in a culture convinced that those two things are incompatible.

Not to say I'm not used to this - it's been a long 8 years, after all.

The dumb labels frustrate me, because they're always going to give descriptions that are laughably incomplete. And I've got a lot of respect for Mark Denton, not least because, as he says:

I started out from a very critical position – I’m a firm atheist and I was definitely critical in my own mind about what was going on in the community, about how people were being indoctrinated or brainwashed. But as the shooting commenced and as I got to know the students I was mixing with, the project shifted and became less about my opinion and more about their experience of the community and of the relationship between myself as photographer, and them. The photographs became evidence of a moment of shared trust between me and the sitter, and I became acutely conscious that these people were offering something of themselves to me and the camera. I’m drawn to situations and people where this possibility for connection exists. I love the ambivalence, the uncertainties and contradictions that are in some of those images.

You've got to be honest, as an artist. So he went in, fair enough, thinking about making a polemic. And he came out having got to know some people, rather than some labels, because he was honest.

I don't mind him thinking that brainwashing was going on. He's wrong, but I can see how he'd arrive at the conclusion, based on a description, and fair enough. But any artist that goes and truly sees instead of making art out of his own confirmation bias is to be applauded. I think I'll go and have a look at that exhibition.