This is the next instalment of the serialisation of my book – The Teeth of our Exertions – full details of which can be found here.
Different yet the same
The one thing that links deprived communities together are the markers that determine their deprivation. When an area is labelled ‘deprived’, it tells you that the average income level is low, employment opportunities are rare with typically low-level jobs available, educational attainment and provision is sub-par, expected health outcomes are poor, crime may be high, there are significant barriers to obtaining housing and the local environment is not considered optimal. These things will differ between communities, the reasons for them will be legion and not all deprived communities will be failing on every measure. But a deprived community is one that is falling behind in several of these areas.
That may help us understand what a deprived community is, but what is it about deprived communities that has led us to ignore them en masse as an Evangelical movement?
Quite simply, we are scared.
Given the breadth of difference between deprived communities, what exactly has so frightened us that we refuse to go?
Scared of the people
First, our imagined view of what deprived communities are like looms large in our minds. Tim Chester highlights two myths that are prevalent. It is commonly believed ‘that there are many people who opt not to work, choosing instead to sponge off the state by living on benefits’.[1] The other popular myth ‘is the feckless, anti-social, aggressive “chav”’.[2] If not these, we may conjure up all sorts of other images presuming drug-taking is rife, gangs roam the streets and life is generally chaotic and altogether terrifying.
This imaginary view of life in a deprived community is seen in some of the responses I have received when presenting on our work with Muslims in middle-class churches. Many react in such a way as to imply that living where we do is no different to undertaking mission work amongst Islamic State jihadist militants. Some are in awe at our ‘sacrifice for the Lord’ while others are amazed by our courage.
One man, typifying responses I have received, came up to me after a meeting in which I had outlined our work and said, ‘You’re a brave man!’ Nobody who has spent any length of time in our community would think there is anything especially brave about what we are doing. But this man thought there was, primarily because he had a view of deprived communities, especially those with large Muslim populations; a view that he had concocted in his own mind. Based on this, his image of what it must be like in a deprived community was not a pretty one. He marvelled at our willingness to go to a place he could only imagine; imagining it to be nothing but terrifying all the time.
We can scoff at reactions like that, as though we are all much more enlightened, but we shouldn’t. We ought to understand how such views, wrong as they may be, come to exist in the first place. It is not because the people who hold them are stupid or nasty individuals. At heart, it stems from a fundamental fear of the “other”.
This fear is predicated on the reality that many people in affluent middle-class communities – especially small, almost exclusively white villages – have never so much as clapped eyes on a South Asian Muslim, let alone befriended, lived with, or been in an area in which white Brits are a minority compared to them. Moreover, the only stories they have heard about Muslims come via the national news. Sadly, many such stories tend to be terror-related or focused on the worst aspects of Middle-Eastern theocracies. Needless to say, if you’ve never met a Muslim and the only information you hear about them in the news emphasises terrorism or unstable dictatorships threatening to wipe out Israel and the West in between breaks in their fights against other Islamic regimes for reasons you cannot fully grasp, it is hardly surprising that we frequently get the kind of reactions that we do.
A similar view of the white working-class poor exists too. Those who live in middle-class affluent areas rarely mix with those from local estates. When your only associations in your mind about the people who live there emphasise social problems, it leads to skewed, inaccurate views of estate life. When we do meet people from the estates – either because they have ventured into church or we meet them at the school gate – our presuppositions about them are reinforced in our own mind. The way a person looks, the clothes they wear, the language they use and the accent with which they speak may match the image we’ve concocted and so we extrapolate that all our other presumptions about estate life must be true as well.
The bottom line is that many people are scared of deprived communities – whether predominantly white British, Asian Muslim or anything else – because we have conjured up images in our mind of what life in those areas must be like. As we fundamentally fear those with whom we never mix, and that fear is reinforced by the small amount of information we ever receive about them, we have a view in our own minds of deprived communities that makes the prospect of moving to them almost unthinkable.
[1] Chester (2012), Op Cit., p.24
[2] Ibid., p.25