This is a story of the importance of place, as a biblical and theological category, and as a fundamental component of the politics of the common good. Ian Geary draws on his own experience coming from a post-industrial town to address class estrangement – a seriously overlooked issue deeply affecting both our politics and the mission of the Church. In this personal and nuanced story, he shows that by affirming the scriptural and theological significance of place, the Church can remake meaningful, spiritual connections with working class communities. He advises this as a necessary corrective to the social fragmentation caused by the damaging liberal assumption that the successful will inevitably leave their places of belonging. By contrast, the Church is called to a covenantal relationship with place and this is at the heart of the Christian calling to be peacemakers.

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the LORD: Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.” Isaiah 51:1–2 [1]

In 2017, I had the privilege of being allowed to attend the Catherine Programme Summer School in the Netherlands. This is a training programme on theology and social work, named after the formidable Salvation Army pioneer Catherine Booth.

A talk given by a Welsh Salvationist, Major Steve Dutfield, focused on Salvationist Doctrine. This is a fascinating subject matter, but it is what preceded the talk that encouraged me. He spent a good ten minutes talking about his upbringing, the town he grew up in and how his story impacted on his formation. His story of people, place and social justice was influenced by the Salvation Army but also the environment in which he grew up. He had a sense of place and was able to articulate it in a meaningful way in a Christian context.

I personally relate to this, as I grew up in a post-industrial small town and inherited from my family a sense of political history and faith. I have not lost this attachment.

This sense of place was further unpacked when me and Joshua Herbert, the only other British person on the programme, talked about our work in the UK to the assembled summer school attendees. Joshua was to be spending the following year in Goldthorpe Salvation Army Corps, South Yorkshire. By coincidence I had organised a visit by the local MP to the Corps in July 2016. John Healey MP had opened a new kitchen, where the Territorial Envoy and staff had overseen feeding many local people—from toddlers to the elderly. I recall meeting individuals with learning disabilities volunteering at Goldthorpe Corps who felt valued. At the kitchen launch, the officer said a few words about the love of God and read a portion of scripture. It was moving and powerful to see a church modelling what I understand “the common life” as accounted for in Acts [2] , which is a sign of the Kingdom of God. Goldthorpe was once a mining town and was significant in the Miner’s Strike of 1984-5. I reflected that context is important, but the Bible, tradition, experience and Doctrine are crucial too. This visit made a strong impression on me.

Oxford Reference defines place as: “Either the intrinsic character of a place, or the meaning people give to it, but, more often, a mixture of both.” [3]

I would submit that place is a biblical and theological category, it has personal and human significance and in this age of fluidity and identity crisis it has political importance. Furthermore, it is my view that the importance of place has been overlooked in a world of globalisation and allegedly open borders.

By place I mean an attachment to a particular area and community and I grant it emphasis as it has a particular resonance in theology and politics. Like any category it can have good and bad aspects if pushed too far. For the Christian, it is a penultimate rather than an ultimate category, nevertheless, it has received insufficient attention and that needs a corrective.

Place as a Category in the Christian Faith

This story began with a reference to the start of Isaiah 51. In a deeply challenging time for Israel, they are asked to consider their history and heritage as a guide and source of strength. Similarly, in our discipleship we need to be aware of our own background, history and formation, both good and bad.

The theologian of the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann states that:

“The Bible itself is primarily concerned with the issue of being displaced and yearning for a place. Indeed, the Bible promises precisely what the modern world denies.”[4] In pondering the failure of modernity’s offer of mobility and endless choice, he submits that: “It is now clear that a sense of place is a human hunger that the urban promise has not met. And a fresh look at the Bible suggests that a sense of place is a primary category of faith.”[5]

Place is an increasingly important biblical category. Bishop John Inge [6] has sought to properly affirm the scriptural and theological importance of place where it has been largely overlooked. An emphasis on place, particularly a geographical commitment, at first glance seems at odds with elements of the Christian tradition.

Certainly, Christian faith centres on themes of journey and mobility that appear to be the dialectical opposite of place. God calls people from places to other places, for example Abraham journeys at great lengths to fulfil his calling. The growth of the church naturally entailed geographical movement and displacement. Christians are called into a unique community that binds us to people of other places and nations in a covenantal relationship.

Furthermore, our belief is one day this earth is temporary and contingent, that it shall be renewed with a “…new heavens and a new earth.”[7]  It cannot be over emphasised that place is penultimate, to over stress it is to disavow other important Christian themes and even to lapse into a pale mimicking of nationalism. However, while it needs to be held in tension with other truths, my concern is it has been neglected and left unpacked. Within a theopolitical framework some attention needs to be given to the particular, so that the whole story is told and fulfilled.

Place is paradoxical and dialectical. Christians are part of a universal church and within that polity there is mobility, fluidity and attachment to and love of place. This needs to be set in context.

A good example of this was the work undertaken by a group of institutions to locate the importance of the church during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Plague and the Parish [8] wonderfully situates the importance of the church amidst the challenge taking place globally, nationally and locally with an emphasis on the particular.

Within the meta-narrative of this pilgrimage, there is attachment to place. For working class communities, place is highly important. In my experience it is more common for working class communities to strongly identify with an area, its history, institutions and football teams relatively more than for middle class professionals who have moved to areas because of work and social mobility. Of course, there are many examples of middle class professionals moving to areas and developing a commitment to the place and giving something back, yet sociologically there can be a distinction drawn. This is what David Goodhart was seeking to unpack in his work The Road to Somewhere [9]. There is a section of the population who have strong attachments to communities and geographies and another who are less attached to a fixed local or national identity. To a large degree these reflect class patterns. Although we can all be a mixture as life is complex.

Place is linked to personal spirituality

When I’ve needed to explain what is important, I often refer to place. I draw on my roots to make a point:

“Speaking personally, as an evangelical Christian, from a lower middle class background in South Staffordshire and the edge of the Black Country, my disposition is a strong moral compass. I am tribally Labour, independent in thinking and find southern, metropolitan liberal progressivism somewhat alienating. However, my roots and formation account for the reason why I don’t wholly connect with the political and cultural elite worldview and the dominant groupings on the left.”[10]

I always enjoyed walking and praying in my hometown of Aldridge past the cricket field and down country lanes on the border with Staffordshire. For me this was for many years a special place. The Celts talked of “thin places”[11] where the presence of the Kingdom of God might be experienced more tangibly.

Recently The Salvation Army has reopened the iconic Strawberry Fields, Liverpool, with a new purpose. Made famous by the Beatles Song, the original home was a special place for John Lennon who used to play in its grounds as a child. We may all have special places that might have a spiritual significance for us. People talk about locations or places being their happy place.

There has been much talk about cultural relevance in the UK church in the past twenty years, but only a small portion—perhaps—on place and class. There are exceptions. This is an insight yet to be further developed. It could help with mission. For example, my church in Bermondsey in recent years has held a special church service in line with Remembrance Sunday. It is gospel centred and has involved serious reflection on the experiences of the First and Second World Wars. This is an example of sensitive and contextual outreach in an area which experienced the Blitz and whose working class communities will have people who have joined the armed services in significant numbers.

Place as a Political Category

Place is political and has a class component: it is bound up strongly with identity. The failure to appreciate this has meant politicians on the left have missed a trick in recent years. Some people vote for the MP who best represents their local area rather than having an affinity with a political tribe.

As communities have witnessed huge and constant change, people have felt their place has been impacted upon, not always with their consent: from residential development, the impact of immigration, the closure of industries, and the reconfiguration of public services have been some of the factors. As the pressures on place and belonging intensified, they severed generations’ long links to established political parties. It is not difficult to draw the dots between a failure to appreciate a sense of place and a misunderstanding of a healthy patriotism.

For a period, political scientists showed some awareness of place. There was some attention paid to the changing values of the UK through the lens of “values modes”[12]  i.e., some people are pioneers and more socially liberal and optimistic and some are settlers, more socially conservative and less optimistic. At the time this was applied to some degree to explain Labour voters transferring their vote to UKIP [13].  I tend to think people do not easily fall into these neat categories—identity is complex—but at least this work tried to understand, but it was perhaps for instrumental reasons and had little purchase.

I feel in the years ahead respect for place is going to become an increasingly important political factor, although it interacts with other factors too. I would say if we can get the theology right, we can speak into the political discourse.

So why is this important?

The story of the Prodigal Son [14] is a story of place. The socially mobile younger brother leaving home for the far country, blowing everything and coming home to a place and a family and a father. It is a summary of the gospel message, and the homecoming is a deep, moving act of reconciliation with the Father.

Apparently, nostalgia (in its Greek root )—often deployed in a dismissive way—can mean to yearn for home, to be away from current pain [15]. As King David expressed when he cried: “. . . Oh, that someone would get me a drink of water from the well near the gate of Bethlehem!”[16]

Thus, perhaps to the modern mind, a sense of place linked to a perceived preferred past is prone to being classified as nostalgia and therefore being dismissed. However, place properly understood is a corrective to the liberal assumption that we all need to move on and out of where we were born – and that there is some global, free good life waiting out there for us all to discover.

By a reappraisal of place, we can discover an awareness of the importance of Christian commitment to places as mission, understanding areas, their history, their pain, and how the gospel story applies. As Mary Glenn reflected, this commitment to place takes time but it is part of our calling to be peacemakers.

“God calls us to live in places (i.e., cities, rural communities, neighborhoods), to invest our lives, to build relationships, and to share the journey. A theology of place shapes our beliefs and behaviour in and with the land and our neighbors. As we develop a theology of place, we become more deeply committed to the community that we have been called to live in and to seek it’s shalom. Shalom is a comprehensive concept that expresses society as God intended it to be, including a sense of wholeness, harmony, and justice. The church is called to be reconcilers and peacemakers in the world, in our specific location and context.”[17] 

This reference to Jeremiah 29 and the call for God’s people to work for the common good in the alien environment in which they found themselves embodies the prophetic importance of place and its political outworking. It can lead to a more informed, just, and contextual politics that is related to a real understanding of local communities. It can lead to a more generous conversation where people’s sense of place is not dismissed at the first instance. Furthermore, it can be more open to broader forms of political activity such as community organising [18] that facilitate a space for churches and faith groups and local institutions to work together for the common good.

It can lead to a re-evaluation of someone’s commitment to an area as something to applaud and celebrate and not just deride people who never move on.

The era of globalisation may be in crisis, but in spite of this and also as a consequence of the challenges we face, a reassessment of place is vital for a Christian sense of mission and politics in this disorientating time.

Referring to James Rebanks’ book The Shepherd’s Life [19],  about shepherding in the Lake District, Stanley Hauerwas points out that the contentment gained in a traditional vocation in a stable location defies the aspirations of liberal modernity. Toward the end of the memoir in which Rebanks describes the hard life and work of being a shepherd, he is lying on his back watching the sheep he has let loose in the fells, and he thinks:

“This is my life. I want no other.”[20]  

Contentment, perhaps elusive in this crazy world, may come in many forms. But we should not lose sight of the life that can be rooted in customs and places that secular modernity overlooks or has sought to crush. The Christian faith has the resources to revisit the riches of these dispositions and attachments and place them in the context of an expansive generous story that makes sense of them and does not belittle them. The reaffirmation of place has the potential to be a gift, if only it is given its proper due or indeed, its proper place.

Ian Geary

With the author’s kind permission, this story is adapted from Chapter 19 of Faith, Politics, and Belonging: A Reflection on Identity, Complexity, Simplicity and Obsession, a collection of talks and essays by Ian Geary (Wipf and Stock, 2024). The book is available to purchase from the Wipf and Stock website for £23 (paperback) and £35 hardback. You can claim a 40% discount here using the code BELONGING. This offer lasts until 31 December 2024.

Ian Geary has worked for many years at the interface between Christianity and politics, with hands-on experience of grassroots politics, trades unions and Christian political movements. Formerly a Public Affairs Adviser for the Salvation Army, Ian also worked in Parliament for Rt Hon Sir Stephen Timms MP and for the late Rt Hon Bruce George MP. His belief in a more constructive politics crystallised in Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics, a book of essays he co-edited with Adrian Pabst in 2015. Ian is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Divinity (Theology) on the role and function of the Church in Liberal Democracies in conversation with Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas. A loyal supporter of West Bromwich Albion, he also volunteers with a multi-cultural church plant and enjoys being with his family. Ian’s book of essays and talks, Faith, Politics, and Belonging: A Reflection on Identity, Complexity, Simplicity and Obsession, was published in July 2024.

NOTES

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[1] Isaiah 51:1–2 – ‘These were the Israelites who sincerely wanted to trust and obey God but found it difficult to do so because impending captivity seemed to contradict God’s promises. The Lord called them to consider their history, their origin’. https://netbible.org/bible/Isaiah+52, Constables Notes.

[2] Acts 2:44.

[3] OxfordReference.com, Line 1.

[4] Brueggemann, The Land, 2.

[5] Brueggemann, The Land, 4.

[6] Inge, Theology of Place.

[7] Isa 65:17.

[8] Together for the Common Good, “The Plague and the Parish – An invitation to the Churches”

[9] Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere

[10] Geary, “Reflections on Post-Liberalism and Post-Liberal Politics”, Lines 70-77.

[11] Sacred Journey, Thin Places

[12] A methodology developed in 1973 by Cultural Dynamics to aid political and marketing campaigns – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Values_Modes#:~:text=The%20Values%20Modes%20model%20was,%3A%20Settlers%2C%20Prospectors%20and%20Pioneers.

[13] Peccorelli, “The new electorate – why understanding values is the key to electoral success”

[14] Luke 15:11-32

[15] Wick, “Homecoming and Pain: On the Etymology of Nostalgia”

[16] 2 Samuel 23:15

[17] Glenn, “Jeremiah 29 a biblical framework for place”, Lines 16–21

[18] The Centre for Theology and Community, “What is Community Organising?”

[19] Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life

[20] Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life, 287 in Hauerwas, “Stanley Hauerwas: Don’t Lie”, Lines 23–28.

This story is featured in the Christmas-New Year 2024-2025 edition of the T4CG Newsletter.