Doorknocking

In which I realise everything is political.

The beginning of the Great British Spring is often difficult to spot and then you find yourself in a conversation about the sun, about how it has been sunny for several days or weeks now and you are beginning to wonder if it will ever rain again. You wake up and it appears to be another glorious day on the horizon, no clouds in the sky.

When I was young, my life was defined by political movements. My parents decided at some point that public schools were not suitable for their kids, for reasons that seem to have shifted over the years. I suspect now that the reasoning was much darker than it became. Now they say it was about wanting the best education for their kids, but I suspect it started as a genuine fear of the State and indoctrination. My father worked for a company that made altimeters for cruise missiles. Everything was saturated with the discourse of the Cold War. The end was coming somehow, the fear of nuclear war offset by a belief in the rapture, which offered an unstable hope. Sure, things were getting worse, and things would continue to get worse, but thankfully, at any moment, it could all end and Jesus would appear to take us all away. The only thing you needed was to be ready.

I’ve wondered for a long time what captured my parents about Evangelical Christianity, but this is never the sort of question you could ask them directly. The social reality of religious movements as situated in particular times and particular places, emerging from a particular set of interacting factors, cannot be a part of a fundamentalist story. It is, of course, the work of God, supernatural and completely without explanation. Instead, I’ve had to piece this together from things I’ve heard or know. Maybe it was the draw of a strong paternal figure or a community or a sense of absolute truth in a world of uncertainty. Or maybe it was just a thing to do among many: some people went left and others went right. Who can say why anyone does anything.

You can draw a straight line from the uncertainty of the eighties, the belief that white Jesus was the only way to save the world, to Donald Trump. He is the physical manifestation of the American Evangelical Christian belief that Capitalism is the best worst option, that if everything is going to burn, if everyone is going to suffer, some of us might as well get rich in the meantime.

I understand this now about the Christianity of my childhood, an understanding I’ve come to watching it play out for many decades, from watching Bush turn to Sarah Palin then to Trump. Finally, I accept that it was all irredeemably corrupt, that it was a movement of Nationalism above everything else. That it was Christianity in name only, that other Christian beliefs, older ones, existed apart from the very narrow set of truth statements that one either did or did not accept. There are, it turns out, many different ways to express this faith and just because you end up in one particular reality does not mean one must stay in that reality. You can, it turns out, deny it and leave.

My leaving has taken many different forms, but my most recent response has been to actually, tangibly embrace a neoliberal politics of resistance to the selfishness that the Evangelical Christian faith manifested in my parents’ worldview. I’m not sure I've done this out of ideological commitment, but because Trump has shown the dangers of not acting. I saw in a vision the British version of this future, where we were sat around giving one word reactions to wins by Reform candidates in what we thought were safe seats. Where we were suddenly fighting a set of immigration policies that would be even worse than what we have now. It’s bad, yes, it can get worse. It can get much, much worse.

So there is, I suppose, the same straight line you can draw from this to me standing on a doorstep, holding a clipboard, waiting for someone to answer, to tell me about bin strikes or parking or potholes, to complain about the Council as I studiously stand there, listening, jotting notes and nodding. I too hate the state of the bins, yes and the war in Gaza, yes. I, too, am wondering why the potholes haven’t been filled. There are reasons, yes, but not good ones.

I imagine knocking on a door and finding my father on the other side, my mother standing behind him in the hallway, as he gets angry about the politicians, about everyone being corrupt and sod the lot of them. He appears to me as a British man denouncing the government for letting too many people in, for not shooting the small boats. I try to challenge him on that, of course he doesn’t actually think we should kill people, does he. He laughs and scoffs and you realise he’s not actually thought it through, but he doesn’t need to, does he. You’ve come to his door, haven’t you? With your leaflets and now he’s having fun. He has an arsenal of things to say, he could ask you to define a woman. You can see in his eyes that he’s ready to say something even more outrageous, one more thing will push him over and he’ll say it, not because he means it, maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t, but because he loves to see you react to it, to be so offended by it. He won’t say it, but he could.

Or the Leftists who wanted change, who really voted for something different but have gotten nothing different. They are upset too, but they want to be polite because they were literally you in the last election, they were literally doorknocking — their father was a councillor. But now? Even he doubts it, even he is thinking about the Greens. What does it matter if you have a Labour government if you have cuts, if they use the same language of benefit fraud, if they can’t stop the war. Why won’t anyone actually take on the rich, why can’t they do anything but go along with it all. It’s terrible, people are dying, the war is going on right now, just today they bombed another hospital, a hospital, can you believe that, and I’m supposed to support Kier fucking Starmer, no thank you, honestly, I won’t do it.

My parents will tell you they are not political, that they are not religious. They will tell you that their votes for the lesser of two evils are justified, that they don’t like Donald Trump, but there were no other options. That all choices are bad in a burning world, but you can’t celebrate the ungodliness of a man who thinks he’s a woman. That gay people are fine, we’re all sinners, I lie and cheat too, but we need to stop acting like it’s okay. Some of it’s okay, of course. That Evangelical Christian abortions are fine because those were babies we wanted, but couldn’t have. That the youth pastor who slept with a teenager has said he’s sorry and cried in front of church so you can tell he means it. Some things are more okay than other things.

All these voices are in my head as I stand, waiting for someone to answer the door. My parents never did this, they went to church and paid their taxes and voted for the Bushes. This was a waste of time, this was not having an eternal mindset. They went to bible studies, and underlined words in the bible. My father gave my daughter a bible when she was in the States, and she took it out for a school project yesterday. I thumbed through it, looking at my father’s notes, things like ‘I am unclean’ underlined in a Psalm. This was our faith, myopic and self-centred and sad. We did not talk about our community or equality or race or a better world. We talked about the gospel, who we needed to share the gospel with. I wait, and no one answers the door. They mostly don’t answer the door, it turns out.