The public face of religion in today’s society is more often than not determined by the heresy of the unpleasant bus driver, rather than anything religious people have actually done.

3MT : The heresy of the unpleasant bus driver [ 4:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (176)

There is a common heresy floating around which I have dubbed “the heresy of the unpleasant bus driver”— to understand why, I’ll have to tell you a story. One day, when my son was young enough to use a pram, he and I had spent the morning in the centre of the town in which we lived at the time. We needed to catch a bus, but when the bus stopped the bus driver was extremely unpleasant to me as we got on and I struggled with the pram. As we sat at the back of the bus, it suddenly occurred to me that if the bus had been a church, I wouldn’t be coming back. In fact, I would be convinced that all bus drivers were unpleasant (and hypocrites to boot). In fact, I would despise people who used buses. In fact, I would deny that we should allow buses on our roads and in our society, and further deny that there really was anything such as a “bus timetable” out there and people who believed in the possibility of a bus timetable were intellectual pygmies who also believed in the tooth fairy. All this from one unpleasant bus driver.

I am sure that I don’t need to spell out the parallels of the parable. Those of us in Christian ministry have all heard plenty of stories about the pillar of the church community who refused to have anything more to do with the church after the curate neglected to thank her for arranging the flower rota, who was cross at a sermon preached one day in 1973, who took out all the grief of a husband’s death on the poor devil who had conducted the funeral. And it’s not just Christian ministry which is susceptible to this impossibly neurotic heresy. Lisa Jardine, chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London (so, officially, a bright woman), gave an interview to the New Statesman in which she explained that she had ceased to be a believing and practising Jew because:

“I saw my just-bar mitzvahed cousin reduced to tears by the rabbi in the funeral service for his mother – who’d died of breast cancer at 55 –  because he couldn’t say the prayers right. I don’t need religion.”

This, she calls, “shocking inhumanity”.¹.

Hmm. Sounds more like the heresy of the unpleasant bus driver to me, a rather facile misconnection made between the behaviour of a representative of organised religion and the tenets of that religion. Or, rather, a facile misconnection made between a presumption of how the representative of organised religion ought to behave, no matter how unreasonable or unreflective that presumption might be.

There is a lot of this in the way in which the Archbishop of Canterbury has been portrayed in the British media in recent years, and how he will be portrayed in the coming weeks. The tone of the criticism is all thwarted disappointment, in that the Archbishop hasn’t behaved as all right-thinking leader writers would’ve behaved: he hasn’t said the right things, done the right things, or looked the right way. And because of that, most (but not all) journalists have given up on him. That’s good, because it shows just how far we can trust their opinions when it comes to other matters: politics, economics, international relations, sport. All these papers are being filled by people who suffer from the heresy of the unpleasant bus driver.

As so often, we have been here before: Jesus said to the crowds:

‘But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another,
“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.”
Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.’²

1. Sholto Byrnes, ‘Lisa Jardine on life and death’, New Statesman (Vol. 137 No. 4897), p. 24, 22 May 2008. Available online here. Sholto Byrnes is the jazz critic of The Independent, so ideally placed to judge theological arguments. [↩]
2. Matthew 11:16-17,19 [↩]