WHENEVER it was time for me to move in my ministry as a vicar or bishop, I prayed: “Please God, not London!” And God is good, because for more than half of my life as a cleric, I have served in God’s own county, in Sheffield, in Wakefield, and now in Bradford.
A few weeks ago, I appreciated God’s goodness afresh. I had to travel from London Victoria to Canterbury during the rush hour. We were pressed together like sardines, with no interaction or conversation, and we swayed along together for mile after mile.
But two people did engage in conversation — a black man who radiated joy and defied you to be miserable, and a white middle-aged lady with an experience she couldn’t keep to herself.
I earwigged. The lady had just been on a course in another part of the country. Near the hotel where she stayed was a wonderful park, where families picnicked and played together, she said. Three generations together, just like it ought to be. And there were Asian and white and black people all mixing together.
“And”, the lady went on, “people up there are so friendly. They don’t ignore you like down here.” She and a couple of other women had walked around together in the evening — “And we felt perfectly safe.”
This all sounds too good to be true, but the lady had been on a course at the Bradford Royal Infirmary, and had stayed in Manningham. My heart was bursting with pride. “I come from Bradford, and I live five minutes walk from that park!”
And now some clever think tank reckons we should give all this up and move to London.
Another person who seems to have it in for Bradford is Professor Richard Dawkins. Defending criticism of the first of his Channel 4 programmes on Charles Darwin, he wrote: “I expect it’s true that the few believers Libby Purves meets over canapés are not Creationists. But ‘most believers’? Most believers in Bradford? The Scottish Highlands? Pakistan? Indonesia? The Arab world? South America? Indeed, North America?”
I live in Bradford, and I have never been a Creationist, not even as a child. The theory of evolution describes how we have come to be — up to a point — but I would not want “survival of the fittest” to determine how we share railway trains in the rush hour, or multicultural Bradford.
Darwin noticed, but couldn’t explain, that in every society he knew, it was the most altruistic people who were most respected, not the most ruthless; or, in Professor Dawkins’s language, a bundle of selfish genes somehow got together to produce selfless people.
We cannot survive on our own in this world. We need each other, and this means living in a counter-Darwinian, anti-evolutionary way — with values such as trust, mutual respect, and love. These values don’t just exist, like the law of gravity, or growing old. They have to be honed, nurtured, and protected. They are religious values. And the lady I met on the train had seen these values alive and well in Bradford.
Dr David James is Bishop of Bradford.
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