3 Minute Theologian » 3MT : Dark Forces

Many years ago I was a student at the London School of Economics. It was a gloriously international institution, with students from more than a hundred countries, and a famously engaged institution, with a tradition of political and social activism, taken from its founders, and expressed throughout its history. I had arrived with an inherited suspicion of organised religion, a series of prejudices, not terribly well digested, against religion for the evil it had inflicted upon the world. I had been to church (except for weddings and funerals) twice in my life, but I knew what the church stood for and I rejected it. On my first day at the LSE, at the Freshers’ Induction, I sat unwillingly through the chaplain’s introductory talk to the first year students. He described how we would find LSE to be an international community, a multi-cultural community, made up of people with many world-views, some of which we might find hard to understand. For example, we would encounter some people who believe that all human life is controlled by an invisible force, which responds to inescapable laws of the universe, and from which the greatest human benefit comes from studying and obeying— and we call them “economists”!

We have seen the power of these unknown forces at work in the last few days: on Monday 21 January shares lost 5.5% of their value on the London Stock Exchange, equivalent to £77bn wiped off the value of the economy. That is, even today, a lot of money. The Armed Forces budget is only £33bn pa. Even the National Health Service only costs £104bn in a year, and this was a single day’s loss! And yet, if you listen to the pundits and commentators on the news, it would appear that there is nothing “out there” that is objectively causing this crash: people are selling stocks because they are afraid. The world’s economists are suffering from group-think.

What applies in economics also applies in law and politics. When the Queen was reported to have warned Princess Diana’s butler “There are dark forces at work in this country, of which we know nothing”, it is not important whether or not she actually said this— and it’s unlikely she did— but it is significant that many people believed the Queen could have said and thought it. The fear of “dark forces” resonated with peoples’ beliefs and experiences. There is someone out there, in the shadows, who controls us, and we don’t know who they are. Even someone as clear-sighted as the philosopher Simon Blackburn concedes: “The dark forces of language, culture, power, gender, class, economic status, ideology and desire are always assailing us, but their work remains dangerously hidden in our blind spots.”¹

This is a fearful way to live, and yet is portrayed as entirely rational. We don’t know how these forces work, we don’t know who controls them, we just have to live our lives subject to them. Which is where that irrational bundles of prejudices and pre-modern fearfulness called Christianity comes in. It was Paul who had the best answer to the dark-forces fearer and the economic miserabilist. There is nothing, nothing in or beyond this world that is more powerful than the love of Jesus Christ:

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8.38,39