Paddington Bear and the Girl with Blue Hair

A little think-piece on class, faith, and evangelism in the England of 2022.

I encountered the girl with blue hair when we both replied to a mutual on Twitter. She was a graduate who worked in the arts in a university town. She didn’t agree that the Royal Funeral would do the Church of England any good, because in her social bubble the reaction to it and everyone involved in it had been negative.

I gently challenged her that her social bubble may not be representative, and she agreeably agreed that was the case; indeed the world would be a different place if her friends were representative, she said. She seemed genuinely amiable, in a way that few people on Twitter are.

Like all of liberal Protestantism and Vatican II-embracing Catholicism, the Church of England has long been obsessed with people like the girl with the blue hair – highly educated, thoughtfully intelligent, genuinely kind, and seeming to represent the future, something exemplified by enthusiasm to remain on trend culturally and politically. Much effort has been expended in trying to produce a Christianity that can be embraced from within their value system – one that is focused on building the Kingdom on Earth and minimises the importance of what it is in Heaven.

But the liberal upper-bourgeoisie has never been representative of the population as a whole – indeed, they may be the segment of the population most closed to coming to a lively Christian faith. Mainly from secure backgrounds and often with a healthy combination of agreeableness, intellect, and diligence thanks to having done well in the genetic lottery, they can expect to have comfortable and rewarding lives. Faith in the crucified God may not be appealing to them, whereas Faith in the perfectibility of humanity may, barring some major external personal or social shock, simply seem natural.

Indeed, many are genuinely kind, like the girl with blue hair, and therefore will have done right “to the least of them” often enough that I have little doubt many will be among those who ask with joyful surprise on Judgement Day when they did anything for Christ. (Matthew 25:34-40).

Of course, they’ll have their dark side – even the saints do – and I think part of the reason why they never flocked in any great numbers to the humanistic and desacralised Gospel of the late 20^th Century was that if offered nothing to them beyond what the secular world already did. This failed to seriously address the toxic side we all know exists within each of us, while virtue gained through acting constructively on the correct political principles was no more than membership of Amnesty or Greenpeace promised.

While it is inevitable that, beyond the normal run of human frailties, a segment of the liberal upper-bourgeoisie will consist of the sort of rancid hypocrites who revel in cruel and violent sins whatever their pious public pronouncements, and might well reasonably fear Hell and damnation, the same is equally true of a segment of practising Christians.

In the end, while a living faith in Christ can bring peace, joy, and a true conversion of life to people of all backgrounds and viewpoints, people in this group are hard targets for evangelism.

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I first saw the cartoon of Paddington Bear taking the Queen to Philip in the covered market in Devizes, placed next to the town’s official book of condolence. This is literally the first time I have encountered an Internet meme in real life before I saw it online (I think, on balance, my circle of online friends leans the same way as that of the girl with the blue hair).

On one level it is kitsch, complete with a profoundly un-Elizabethan grammatical howler in the very first word, and also ghastly and maudlin: a devoutly Christian woman is led to her deceased husband in the afterlife not by angels, but by a cartoon of a talking bear from a children’s novel. This is the cult of militant niceness in a more flaccid and stupid form than was ever presented by suburban Anglicanism in its much satirised Golden Age, or indeed any stream of the Christian tradition. Unlike the angels, Paddington could never fall to become Lucifer.

It’s also revealing of the actual religious beliefs of 2020s Britain: nobody’s quite sure if there’s an afterlife, but we sort of hope that there is, and if it does exist we’re sure it will be really nice. Most importantly, it’s a place where we will be reunited with those we loved on Earth.

Admittedly, this belief is a vague one and it crumbles easily – ask people what Paddington Bear does with Putin or with Jimmy Saville after they die and see how they react.

Nobody really believes that Paddington Bear brought the Queen to heaven, and that’s precisely the point. It’s just a nice cartoon metaphor allowing people to express their hope and their natural instinct that there is something more than this life and beyond this material world. People hope there is a reward for those who deserve it, and hope they and those whom they love have done enough to get the reward. A nice cartoon metaphor allows people to distance their sense of the spiritual from actual religions, which after all only serve to divide people, and in the olden days had an embarrassing history of talking about divine judgement, the prospect of which still horrifies most people.

Most people in this country and across northern Europe, at least among those from ethnic majority backgrounds, hold to a worldview that is definitively post-Christian and post-religion yet not atheistic, or at least not totally convinced of atheism.

Look at the way angels still saturate popular iconography. Angels embarrass the sort of liberal Christians who love interfaith dialogue even more than the idea of divine judgement does, even though angels are something Christians share with both New Age adherents and with Muslims. They’re also something we share with many of those post-Christian non-atheists; it’s pretty common to be unsure if there’s a God but definitely convinced of experiences of angelic intervention.

The world of people who have paintings and pendants of angels hanging in their living rooms, the ones sold by your local New Age shop, isn’t one that the C of E and the rest of liberal Christianity is much interested in. It’s too working-class – not merely a different world from that of people who work in the arts, but even from the world of nurses and teachers. This is the world of cleaners, receptionists, and carers. It’s predominantly White and English, mostly degreeless, and overwhelmingly female.

This segment of society enthusiastically shared the meme of Paddington and the Queen on their Facebook pages

The C of E’s disinterest in meaningful religious dialogue with these working-class women, even though they are almost certainly vastly more open to faith than the people whose adherence the C of E covets, might be explained by simple snobbery, or perhaps by them representing the past – at least according to the liberal graduate professionals who set the Overton Window of acceptable thoughts for most non-Evangelical Anglican priests.

As with our girl with the blue hair and her friends, I suspect most of these women, whose lives are often defined by looking after the least and the lowest and the lost for a modest reward, are in good spiritual health. Of course, each will have her individual dark side, and collectively this group will contain its share of cruel monsters and manipulative liars. Certainly, they deserve better than to be patronised with the sort of middle-class Christian presumption that working-class people are unable to stand up to any spiritual challenge more robust than being told they’re society’s victims and consequently in need of a few moral free passes from their more ‘advantaged’ neighbours.

Instead, if we worry about the institution of the Church – and I think we should, not least as societies where institutions always see the strong and successful trample over the weak and the poor – then perhaps the army of working-class women who believe in the angels might have much to contribute to its renewal.

That starts with acknowledging the Gospel can be a tough message – tough enough for a world of Putin and Jimmy Saville, more credible than either Paddington Bear guarding the gates of heaven or the idea that abandoning faith will allow us to rationalise away our dark sides. It also points the way to an eternal destiny with the angels, far too wonderful for us to provide more than a sketch of in language or art. Convince the cleaners of that, and you might find they are the ones who open the paths to the girls with blue hair.