Movement_158_Digital

INTERVIEW
JONATHAN BARTLEY
Green Party
Jonathan Bartley studied at the London School of Economics and has been involved in campaigning and
politics since his student days. Founder of the Christian think-tank Ekklesia and drummer in the blues-rock
group The Mustangs, Johnathan is the current co-chair of the Green Party alongside Siân Berry.
Firstly, can you tell us a little about yourself? How
would you describe your faith journey?
I grew up in quite an evangelical, charismatic Christian
family, but, like a lot of people I think, I questioned the
faith that I grew up with a lot. Things like Greenbelt were
very important to me, and I used to go quite a lot when I
was younger. I’m descended from Elizabeth Fry who was
a Quaker and Prison Reformer, so that strand comes down
through the family too.
While I was studying at the London School of Economics I
found something called Workshop, an Anabaptist course run
by Noel Moules. For anyone not familiar with Anabaptism,
it’s very committed to equality and social justice, and has
a similar background tradition to Quakerism. Workshop
opened up a whole new world to me in terms of faith. The
things that I wanted to believe made sense, and it gave me
a rationale to believe them. For example, I’m passionately
a proponent of non-violence and Workshop enabled me to
see that within my faith which was amazing.
For me, joining the Green Party is very much an outworking
of my faith. Of course, you don’t have to be Christian to
be in the Green Party, and there are Christians in other
parties too. I’ve realised that there are many different
types of Christianity, and there are different value sets
that people hold as Christians. It’s astonishing that you
can find Christians on both sides of some debates and I
find that really strange, because when I look at Christianity
it’s as much about how you live, in fact more about how
you live, than the doctrines that we hold dear. When we
look at the early church and early Christians, and the
Epistle to Diognetus in the second century, when they are
asked ‘What is a Christian?’, they don’t respond with a
set of beliefs and doctrines, they respond with a set of
behaviours and describe themselves as following ‘the
way’. In the Acts of the Apostles, after the spontaneous
outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the response is
one of collectivising, pooling all they have and giving it to
the poor. And so that is the faith tradition that I find myself
in and following really.
You’ve said before that your faith informs your
politics. Do you think that there is an overlap between
the message of Jesus and the aims of progressive
politics?
Yes I think there is. Ghandi, and I’m paraphrasing him
terribly here, said that Christians would be great if they just
followed what Jesus said. Martin Luther King was someone
who did that in his nonviolent direct action. There is a very
strong strand of nonviolent direct action in my faith that I
feel a great affinity with.
In 2003 I wrote a book called The Subversive Manifesto:
Lifting the Lid on God’s Political Agenda, which looked at
the way Jesus took part in nonviolent direct action. Look at
his interplay at the Synagogue at Capernaum where he has
that interaction with a demon - Ched Myers is very good
on this, and he points out that Jesus is calling into question
the authority of the religious and political leaders of the
day, and the Gospel writers notice that he had an authority
that the scribes didn’t have, so this demon manifests and
belittles Jesus and tries to reclaim the authority by saying
‘I know who you are Jesus of Nazareth’. And we know that
it is an attempt to undermine Jesus, but Jesus regains the
authority. And again when he looks closely at both sides of
the coin and answers the question about taxation. There’s
this very strong political strand that runs right the way
though the Gospels, and you can only understand Jesus
as a political figure. When he’s tempted in the desert there
are three temptations to take power, and to bring about a
top-down revolution, and Jesus rejects all three of them.
I wrote another book, Faith and Politics After Christendom:
the Church as a Movement for Anarchy, which traces the
idea of Christians being passionate about social justice
and living ‘the way’ being annexed by political power
by Constantine in the 4th Century. The cross, which
was a symbol of torture and oppression, became under
Constantine a symbol of conquest and righteousness.
And now 1700 years later Christianity takes its place as
an oppressive force within western Europe, and actually
persecutes Christians who don’t see things in the same
way as the church.
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