From Secular Activism to Bishop of Croydon: Why Rosemarie Mallett Changed Her Mind on the Church

0:00Ali Goldsworthy: Hello and welcome to Change My Mind. I'm Laura Osborne, Managing Director of WPI Economics and one of your Change My Mind podcast hosts. We've got a very special episode for you today, recorded a few weeks ago live in Islington, London. I won't spoil it by saying too much in advance, but let me quickly say thank you to the team at Place for Hope who hosted and recorded this with us and to Open Democracy who hosts and promote this show with us. Over to Ali in London. so hello everybody um i'm georgia i'm the director of place for hope and if you haven't heard of place for hope we're your hosts tonight along with union chapel and um place for hope is an organization that deals with conflict within and between religious communities so we do that in lots of different ways.

0:48Ali Goldsworthy: We train leaders. I'm like the support act here, so we're getting all the AV right with me. Oh, thank you, Paul. That's really cool because Paul's done that for really famous musicians, so now I'm kind of famous. So we do that in lots of different ways, primarily by training leaders to understand how conflict develops and what to do when it does, and also helping churches when they fall into conflict about things like changing what kind of coffee is served after the service and we're really proud to support in all kinds of ways we i'm really sad natalie's um not here at the moment but we hit our thousandth case this year of supporting religious communities with conflict of their own and in the last year alone we've trained around 700 leaders in how to recognize and respond to conflict conflict transformation in faith communities is really important because for many people their faith community can be their whole world and so when something goes wrong it is like when something goes wrong in their family um so it's work that we take incredibly seriously demand for our work has tripled this year we are overrun with new cases and people needing training.

2:09Ali Goldsworthy: We're a tiny organisation. And we're trying to respond to that by looking at some of the root causes and the systemic drivers of conflict, one of which is growing polarisation. So we are so delighted to be working with Ali and Laura, who are global experts in polarisation, to help us as an organisation build our capacity in understanding that. We're also trying to grow our organisation and raise money. And tonight is part of that. So if you've supported us in any way by buying a ticket or donating for a glass of wine, we're really, really grateful. We also can provide you with training and support for your community.

2:46Ali Goldsworthy: So if you need anything, just ask after the panel. I really want to thank our extraordinary panel, who I'm not going to introduce because they're going to do that in a minute. Massive thanks to Paul, who's our amazing sound technician. And huge thanks to Cathy, who is the minister here at Union Chapel and is an extraordinary place for her practitioner and who is letting us kind of crash at hers tonight. So thank you, Cathy. And most of all, thanks to you all for coming. I'm going to let the panel do their thing. So thanks, guys.

3:23Okay, so hello and welcome to this live recording of the Change My Mind podcast. My name is Ali Goldsworthy. I'm a lecturer at Stanford, have an affiliation at Cambridge, but I guess made my name as a professional troublemaker, which I'm now slightly rueful about, having spent quite a bit of time polarizing people, I now try and repair some of the damage that I did. I'll go on to introduce our wonderful panelists in a second, but the point of this podcast is to ask people about a time that they changed their mind and why. Because as society polarizes, that's something that becomes really hard to do.

4:00But if leaders can talk about how they've done it and why they have done it, it gives them permission to others to go on and do the same thing. We're hugely grateful to the people at Union Chapel for hosting us here tonight and for Open Democracy, who we share this with, with their many millions of readers and listeners and viewers, because this will be on YouTube as well, who pick up on this podcast, which has led to many extraordinary follow-on events. Without much further ado, I'm going to introduce our great panellists tonight. So Bishop Rosemary Mallett is the Bishop of Croydon. She started her career as a research sociologist, is an honorary fellow at South Bank University.

4:39She is a ginormous amount of fun. You can listen to a great file on 4 profile on her, which will tell you how she makes boozy cakes and can probably dance anybody in this room off their shoes. But she also, quite importantly, led this piece of work for the Church of England about racial justice and reparations, and we'll be coming back to talk about that later. Welcome, Rosemary. we are also joined by Aman Sethi Aman is editor-in-chief at Open Democracy he was previously deputy editor at HuffPost and editor-in-chief at HuffPost India his book A Free Man which you can buy from all good bookshops and some not good bookshops as well it looks like this will I'm sure be something that we'll talk about later on in the podcast welcome Aman and then I also welcome my co-author Laura Osborne who co-wrote Polls Apart with me.

5:31She's an expert on polarisation and really takes the lead on some of the... Thank you. And really takes the lead on some of the business relations that we do and the impact of that in her day job. Laura is Managing Director of WPI Economics, one of the UK's leading think tanks. So welcome, everybody. Bishop Rosemary, the first question I guess I wanted to ask you was to tell us a little bit about your work on racial justice in the church and whether you found people were open to changing their minds and if they needed to in that process and how it went for you. So good evening, everyone. So I've kind of worked on issues of racial justice, not just in the church but in academia before that, but in the church for the last 25 years, really, just trying to get people to understand the basic connection that we have as a church, our first principle that everyone is made in the image of God, and so therefore it doesn't matter your skin color or whatever ways in which we other people, we're all equally, equitably the same and should be respected in the same way.

6:49So to get that as an embedded understanding in the church, I can remember the first time that we wanted to have an event at a very large space. I probably should be very careful. Oh, please don't be. Go on. But we wanted to have an event which would recognize the work of black and brown people in the church in the diocese in which I serve. and we wanted it in one of our major churches. And when we asked about it, at that time, the response was, oh gosh, you know, not another special event. We have all special events for all kinds of things, you know, apple season and pet sundae. We don't need another event.

7:39That was, at the time, the way in which anything was seen. I have to say, you know, 19 years later, We have an embedded structure and system where people duly respect and understand the reality of racial justice. But it has been that 19-year journey of working with people. And I think building in within the institution that belief and understanding that racial justice is justice for everyone, not just justice for black and brown people, but actually for absolutely everybody. And so that, I think, has been the mind shift, that it's not a ghetto-ized understanding of racial justice, but that it's all of us need that same justice.

8:30And are you dealing with any of the same people now who previously held very different beliefs and gave you some of that reaction? Yes. And you have to also remember that it's not only... this isn't a polarization or binary by white or by non-white or white or black or whatever, because I remember doing some of this racial justice work and going out to some of our more leafy and more affluent areas, and the people of color in those areas said to me, oh, you're coming to bring problems here, aren't you? We've just been kind of getting along happily and, you know, enjoying being treated similarly like everybody else.

9:11Now you'll come and talk about racial injustice and then they'll think that we're troublemakers. So, you know, it's been a journey even with people of colour to say, actually, by denying that there is an issue, not only are you denying yourself, but you're also denying the opportunities to make a difference in the lives of everybody. So yes, we've had changes where people I know from that time would now be saying, thank you for the work that you've kind of done. And we'll see that on Saturday, when we have a major service, which will be extremely well attended, and we'll be honoring members of communities like the ones that would have previously said, please don't come, but we do love you, but don't come.

9:57And just before I move on to someone else, what was effective in helping to make some that shift happened? What did you find worked? Listening to people, paying a kind of respect in where they were from, where they were coming from, understanding the fear that was stopping them from wanting to have people kind of disrespect them or not honour them, and trying really hard to help them move, so I suppose it's a bit like conflict, to help them move on a journey of of understanding themselves as well. But it is about, first of all, listening and building a relationship with people which will enable them to change.

10:42And Laura, I just wanted to come to you about how much that might have chimed with your research and your work. Is that a general principle that people should try and take?

10:51Ali Goldsworthy: Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's really important that you identify the willingness to listen because I think we can all be very eager to change other people's minds but not necessarily start from a place where we're open. and listening to the blockers that they might be facing in the first place. And I think, as we might come on to talk a bit more about later, one of those major challenges there is that your opinions that you hold can really merge with your identity and then your social group and then how you feel about yourself and others. So I think sometimes when you're being asked to change your mind, it can feel like you're being threatened, and that can be very difficult for people, as you explained.

11:26Ali Goldsworthy: But giving people some space and some chance to reflect on that and be part of the conversation is absolutely vital. I mean, I wanted to completely shift geography now to ask you about your experiences actually in India, which has clearly become a very polarised nation in recent times, but that's not always been your experience, has it? Yes, to sort of think through the question of India, I've been thinking a lot about polarisation and depolarisation, especially given the politics as we discussed. I think one way that I have come to think about India is that you must remember that the creation of the Indian sovereign state in 1947 is accompanied by perhaps the kind of mega polarization event.

12:16There's a partition. Families are literally moving to lands they have never seen before on the basis of religion. My family, for example, is one of those families on both sides. My grandparents moved from what is now present-day Pakistan to what is now present-day India. And so in India, immediately after the sort of furrows and trauma of this experience, there was a conscious nation-building project which was premised on the idea of secularism. So it was something that as we grew up, we didn't quite understand that we were part of a project. and it was an imperfect project and it remains an imperfect project but it was from the songs that were sung at school from the lessons that we were taught it constantly produced at least an elite narrative of unity there was a kind of tradition of Marxist historians who talked about the idea of a syncretic culture so we grew up in some ways I went to military schools where, again, there was this idea of sameness, uniformity, sameness, uniformity.

13:26And so in many ways it was a cruistered existence that I think many of the Indian elite went on. And so there was a top-down narrative of secularism. India, of course, massively complicated, massively divided society, massively diverse society, meant that people still had a kind of bottom-up way of getting along. and so you would have these points of friction and then you start seeing at some point the sort of unaddressed undercurrents of difference of who has power, who does not have power India for example has a, what is called an affirmative action program is how you would understand it but in India it's literally reservations, these are numerical reservations for people who come from formerly oppressed castes and in some cases classes.

14:20So there is a full project. It's very interventionist. It's very both top-down and bottom-up. And what we see in the 90s and then with increasing urgency through the 2000s, culminating in the 2014 elections is you actually have a moment where these energies of Hindu nationalism kind of burst through and capture central power. And since then, the country's been on a, I guess what can just be described in common parlance as a journey. Very X factor. And you realize the, I think, two things, and we can get into them deeper. One, the immense power that a centralized country, like a centralized government has, and what it can do in terms of ripping up social fabric that has taken decades and in some cases, in some parts of the country, centuries to stitch together.

15:20And on the other hand, the power of federalism, because India is hugely federated. So to give you context, India's most populous state has as many people as Brazil jammed into a landmass the size of the UK. So you're talking many European countries kind of jammed into this landmass. And what it's allowed is spaces of respite. So southern India has managed to hold out in many ways because the language of society, of difference, of togetherness is premised on different understandings of society. And so at the risk of massively simplifying this, I guess I would just say that we've seen a set of dynamics of intense polarization, depolarization, interventions, and then kind of moments of rupture.

16:22and I'm struck we probably can't dig too much into it how much that sounds familiar to the former Yugoslavia which had this slogan of like brotherhood and unity between the six different nations there and obviously fell apart very very badly and very extremely once a strong leader left I guess before we move off that I wondered if I could ask you if you had any let's say lessons for the UK given where we are at in our own journey around a vision that might be hiding and bubbling not very well beneath the surface at the minute about what could be done to try and prevent some of that backsliding?

17:02I think... You're on video so we can see your face in response to that. I think I'm just kind of thinking of the moment of an Indian kind of now talking about lessons in civics to an English audience and I'm like, wow, okay, the world does change. I guess how I'm thinking about the UK right now and I guess what I can just put forward is a set of confusions is that the way that India has in some ways held together is that there has been multi-party politics which has allowed different groups to actually put forward concrete political demands. And I understand that for many people, this idea of we are entering a multi-party democracy in the UK now is fraught with terror, possibly because of some of the parties that are emerging in this.

17:56But you can't fight it. You have to live it. And you have to think about what it means for groups to be able to actually politically articulate their needs, right? Because right now, whether you're a community of, say, a Christian nationalist party, say you're also an Islamist party, say you're someone who comes from a different group that is class-based, for each of you, you have to funnel your specific political agenda through Labour or through the Conservatives and then figure out that somehow it will appear in line 75 of the manifesto. Right. But but when you actually have a truly fractured, somewhat chaotic political moment where each group is is actually saying, well, you know, this is actually what we think.

18:49You're actually able to have that conversation rather than having these weird shadowboxing conversations where if you look at, say, reform today, you're like reform is a big tent. Labor is a big tent. Conservatism is a big tent. And turns out big tents are very difficult ways to actually have genuine political conversations. So I'm not saying that's the answer. I'm just saying that's something I keep coming back to when I think about this moment here. I think probably that maybe the UK should stop being arrogant about where it can learn lessons from on some of this stuff. Bishop Ray, I wanted to come back to you, and particularly about some people who might have been reluctant to change their mind.

19:26In this quite extraordinary report that you did on healing, repair, and justice, you talk about reparations and are particularly erudite on what the reparations are not, that they will not involve payments to individuals. Yet if you read some of the coverage around it, that's explicitly what people are interpreting. And I wanted to ask you a bit more about why you think people might be misreading, to give it as generous an interpretation as I can, what you have written in this report. Well, I think the bottom line for why people are misreading it is because those who are don't want to really accept the story and the history of the church's involvement in slavery.

20:17They want to keep peddling the saviour line that we were the ones, we were the Calvary that came in and we were the abolitionists. and so if you kind of take it back and strip it back and say well you only had to you could only have abolition after you had slavery and you were very involved in that but people don't want to hear that so I think it's the same way that when we talk about patriarchy or the way we talk about white masculinity and the way in which that can disadvantage societies. People don't want to hear it because they... I wrote this thing about guilt, because people feel that you are causing them to feel guilt at something they never played a part in.

21:14That is what they will come to you and say, we don't need healing, repair, and justice because we personally were never involved in any of that. And slavery was a terrible thing, But if you think about it, the Church of England was actually the good person or the good guys in that because we were the abolitionists. So I think a lot of people, for them, this is like someone was talking about, it's like ripping off the plaster. It's making real the story of oppression and of slavery and then of colonialism. And I think that's the reason why people don't want to talk about racism, don't want to talk about slavery.

21:55and don't want to talk about the research that was undertaken. And so what they do is they pick upon perhaps sometimes petty points, small points, but in essence it's about rejecting the belief that we as a society, this country as a society, not only took part in a racialized agenda, slavery, the most industrial dehumanization of human beings in our history, and that that was developed by the British. And so people don't want to hear that. And so when you bring those realities and those stories to them, people would prefer to deny it. And so that's the reason why some people don't accept the report.

22:50Now, about reparations, reparatory justice, the conversations about reparations, which is the government, has always been about, well, we don't want to give cash to individuals or to people, but it's not about that. And people know it's not about that. Because I think my line was always, you don't have enough money. it's it's just not possible so that is not what it's about it is not about a kind of a this moment conversation it's about um first of all accepting um what has happened and then it's about how can we work for our our understanding of what happened what it means for people today the traumatized lives of so many people who still live in the story of racism that evolved out of slavery.

23:47And then how do we build a better future, not just for people of color, but for everybody? Just to say, I read an essay today from her mother sent it to me. I can't read it word for word. She's doing her GCSE, so maybe 15. She's of mixed heritage. And she wrote an essay for her first day back at school. And she talked about the impact of racism and colorism on her life and what that might limit her in terms of her opportunities because of the way the society works around those issues. And for a 15-year-old, 16-year-old to articulate so well the reason why we are here, where someone like that, born in this country, can still feel that she is not as welcome and not as accepted as a peer person in her class because of her skin color and the ethnicity of her father.

24:57and that's the reality of the life of a 15, 1612 today takes us straight back, as she said, straight back to the 1662 slave code and the way in which peoples were segregated according to skin colour and ethnicity and this is where we are today. That's the legacy and these are the lives that we want to change and enable people to take their full part in society and that's partly what this is about, is about recognising what we have engaged in as a society and as a church and then in terms of what we call repentance, so accepting and acknowledging that we've done that, but moving beyond the I'm so sorry, because we can all say the I'm so sorry stuff, but actually how do we take action beyond that to build a better now and a better future for people like this young woman.

25:58And I think you're so right. Well, there's so much I loved in your answer then, but particularly not that, you know, there's this one 15-year-old or teenage girl who's so deeply affected, but actually how much that resonates across an entire societal level. And I think that that's, you know, it's incredibly powerful to illustrate it in that way. Laura, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about some of the academic work and research and resistance to accepting new ideas and new information and how that sort of interacts, how everybody's brain can maybe find that hard.

26:29Ali Goldsworthy: Yeah, thank you. And you might want to add to this yourself as well, Ali, and there was so much in there that reflects that, which is I think on the one hand, there's that sort of real struggle that we have to accept stories that are different to the ones that we already know so that we have fallen into an understanding of ourselves. And, you know, obviously this will apply to the church too in some ways and not in others, where we're the good guys. And if we're the good guys, how do we absorb the nuance? How do we take on board the challenges? And that could be really difficult, not just for big organisations, but obviously for individuals as well.

27:03Ali Goldsworthy: You also maybe think that it is often people who want to do good, who are campaigners and activists, and again, you might want to pick this up, Ali, who can actually be quite rigid in their thinking, can find it quite difficult to adjust. There's some brilliant work by Lior Zimigrod, which touches on this, which is actually some of the people who are the most cognitively rigid are the people who are most engaged in activism and politics. And so it can be very difficult to look at that sort of wider lens that you're asking people to think about, which is, OK, that's not the whole picture, though.

27:35Ali Goldsworthy: Are you able to think about something differently? Are you able to see a different perspective? And that can prove incredibly challenging for people. So that makes absolute sense. Yeah, you're right. That's exactly what happens kind of in the brain with the brain chemistry is if you've got a strongly latent identity, which probably if you're active in the church or you're active in politics, it's a really big part of who you are. And when someone asks you a bio, you'd quite quickly tell them that information about what's going on. Your brain's not quite a muscle that develops, but it's sort of like you get bigger reactions in parts of your brain if you've built the habit of that being part of your identity.

28:13And that becomes much more automatic and a much more sort of self-defense mechanism. So it's almost as you were talking, like when you have that identity threatened, it becomes self-defense. You don't view it, like you view it as an attack and you feel incredibly threatened, which is why the environment that you're in can be so powerful. Like I find the way that you talk about it remarkable, like how calm and thoughtful and how you listen because it becomes easier for people to not get some of those dopamine hits. I wanted to move on and just a warning, I'm going to come to you first to ask people.

28:46Could I add one cheeky little point before you do, Ali?

28:49Ali Goldsworthy: Which is, I was just thinking as well, the other kind of consequence of that is that you miss nuance. So if your identity is fairly activated, if you are threatened, if you're uncertain, you miss the nuance in other people's arguments. That makes sense as well, why people try to pick on small points to make it seem less relevant to them. Because one of the other consequences of more polarized societies is the undervaluing of genuine expertise, especially when it goes against what you already believe, because what you already believe is so entwined with your social identity. So, yeah, very much part of that whole picture.

29:18I just have to jump in here. I've lost control, it's great. Good luck talking with three women. Just as you said that, I was remembering during my training for ordination, we had the one session on racial injustice, the one session, and the two wonderful people came along to talk to us about racism in the church and enabling some of our members, the trainees, to look at themselves reflectively, conscious and unconscious biases that they might have. Do you know that those wonderful people that were part of the group would not allow the conversation to go beyond, can you explain to us what unconscious bias means?

30:07Because they picked at the designations so that we couldn't have the conversation because it would mean that they'd have to actually look at themselves within the context of bias. And because they were good, they couldn't possibly be biased. So we could not have the conversation. Yeah. I'm always struck by the... It's slightly problematic musical in other terms, but Avenue Q has this song, which is everybody's a little bit racist, really, which I think can be quite powerful, to be honest. and it says it in a really good way with good humor, actually, that makes it easier for people to admit, oh my God, I've kind of done that too.

30:47The question that we ask everybody that comes on this podcast, which they all, normally we don't do it with video, but they tend to start looking slightly stressed as they begin to answer. So watch for those telltale signs as we ask people about a time that they've changed their mind and why. And Aman, I'm going to begin with you. All right. So that's the question. And there's your stress response. Playing for time. I thought about this because I thought this would be one of those questions, right? And I was just like, am I really that dogmatic person? Because I was just like, maybe I've never changed my mind because I'm just so accepting of other people's points of view.

31:28I think what's really forced me to change my mind is a thought I've been having a lot about language, which is that I come from a country where a lot of people speak English and English is very widely spoken, but the language of actually the mass audience is to not speak in English. And all through my childhood, I deliberately did not speak Hindi. And I don't know what it was a response to. I think it was, again, a consequence of an upbringing in a military background. It was constantly drilled into our heads that English is the language of advancement. English is how sophisticated people speak.

32:21My sister and I would constantly be complimented on how good our uptake of English was. And then I have this Hindi teacher who would always be like, you know when you grow up you will miss your culture and then you will wish that you had studied Hindi and I was like it's never going to happen and now I find myself reading in Hindi as I'm writing my second book I've realized that a lot of my work as a journalist in India for most of my life was actually an act of translation because you're talking to people they're speaking to you in Hindi you're writing about it in the English press and so I have sort of fallen in love with Hindi in a way that I never expected and was of course predicted by my teacher which is annoying.

33:12Have you written to them to say they were right? Yeah, yeah, they were right. They were right. I mean, were they a good Hindi teacher? We can debate that. But they were right. That's a satisfying moment for people when they've got things wrong. Was there a particular event that made you think, oh, I'm really pleased that I can speak Hindi or that this is important to me? I think it was when I started reporting on, you know, this current book that I'm working on, which is on the lived experience of COVID. And COVID was a very, very divisive moment in Indian society, as it was in many societies.

33:56the lived experience of whether of lockdowns, of the illness itself was completely divergent depending on whether you were in a town, whether you were in a city whether you were rich, whether you were poor, whether you were employed, whether you were not and I realized as I was talking to people in Hindi that language is also a world scape so when you exist in a different language you're actually looking at the world differently and I realized that as I would try and write about their experiences in English, it would come across as really dry and at some points almost hallucinatory but if you actually stay in the language, it all makes complete sense.

34:42It's an internally consistent and coherent worldview and it sounds strange as I say this but that has been I guess that moment where I was talking to one of my editors and they were like, so what what do you want to do with this book and I was like I want this book to feel like it was written in a different language and then translated into English and that's kind of what I'm trying to do now so I think that would be be my be my submission to this very difficult assignment although actually there's a bit and we can put some in the show notes there's a bunch of really interesting research and work about how people think differently in different languages if they're bilingual and if you're bought so i'm welsh so quite a lot of people where i'm from are bilingual and like how they engage different parts of their brain and respond in different ways so actually there is a real scientific underpinning to what you're saying and just to kind of quickly pipe up on when you think about languages of difference or terms of difference the way that you would say speak about a Hindu-Muslim religious question in English is kind of quite different when people are talking about why they think someone is different from them in their own language.

35:56And the translation, it's weird. Can you give us an example? Can I give an example? I think there are many words. So Hindi, for example, doesn't have a good translation for secular. So the word that is often used is, and I'm probably going to get skewered if I use the wrong word. We can't tell. I'm thrilled already. No, but I'm worried about this podcast when it goes into the word and the comments. I'll get dragged in the comments. But I think the word is dharam nirpekshta, which is without dharam, without a dharma, without a... And then again, dharam doesn't necessarily immediately mean religion.

36:37It also means purpose. it also means a sense of being. So if you talk about secularism, it is the denial of, right? So it is a negative term in Hindi. It is without X. It is not we are secular. It is we are those without Bharam. And that was part of the national identity. Just go back to your very first question. Was that how they built the nation? Was it without? So the question is how deep do you want to go here? We've got time you can edit, darling. It's your sign. Very quickly, Hindi itself as a language is part of the national project. So there was Hindustani, which is very Urdu-inflected, which has a lot of Persian influence.

37:21And then we have 16 national languages and a bunch of dialects. So they kind of create this language, which is drawn very heavily from Sanskrit on the one hand and Persian Urdu on the other. and the big kind of marker of one easy way to see where India is on the secular arc at any point is to look at the language that's being used in popular cinema. And if you look at language that was used in popular cinema even like 20 years ago, it had a lot more kind of poetic Urtu. And now it's a lot more Sanskritized. So it's almost clearly marking that this language is now so for example a lot of early songs will have the word Ishka lot and now it's all Piyar and Piyar is Farmo North Indian and Farmo, I'm really going to get dragged What does it mean?

38:13I'm going to stop now, love Oh okay This is my quick intervention No I'm very happy to be very happy to be schooled in that and go from there. Bishop Rosemar you've had a little bit of time to think about your answer to this question but I'd love to know about a time that you've changed your mind and why so I changed my mind about the church and so when I was about 13 I had my first really big racial incident that happened in my life in this country where I was excluded from something an event because of my skin color that made me very you know focused on understanding why people would do that.

39:02And then when I grew with my understanding that the church as an institution was very involved in building the kind of structure and system that racialized people like me, the kind of whole Windrush generation that excluded people from church because of where they came from and their skin color, all of that made me stop going to church, you know. So I know Normally, you go to university, you stop going to those kind of places that your parents used to drag you to. But I didn't have to do it because of my parents. I stopped going to church. I just didn't feel it was an institution that empowered people of color, that it cared about people of color, and that it even reflected on how it had been caught up in the racialisation, as I say, of not just people of colour like me, but actually the whole system of racial categorisations and the church's complicity in all of that.

40:06So I was well away from church and living my beautiful secular life. It's a good ride. And I've always been an activist, so whatever part of social justice that I was involved in, it's been activism. I lived in Tanzania, I lived in Ethiopia, I lived in countries where I felt I could put back into parts of the society in terms of the work that was going on in those places. Tanzania, I think, was the country I met the most amazing group of women, some nuns called Merinole nuns. At the time when I met the Mary Knowles, I think it hadn't been long since three of them had been abducted by the Sandinista and had been terribly murdered for their role in terms of engaging local communities.

40:59and I met a group of women who were absolutely committed by their faith and the institution to work for change and social justice not from a top down patronizing we know better than you what you need but from a bottom up liberation theology way of working alongside people to bring out the best of the people that they worked with and I thought gosh faith can do that faith can be something that works for the good of society so that's fine because I'd never lost my faith but I could see it in action in an in an activist way I mean nuns before that I'm afraid were just um not even Julie Andrews you know because she was you know can we move on from Julie Andrews to sister act yeah for the we might we might get to sister-in, but you know, nuns were, you know, they weren't, they weren't sexy, they weren't.

42:00I mean, are they not? You never know. The thing was, you know, it was either wimples and very boring dresses, and you know, you never knew kind of what they did, because they scurried around, and you didn't quite know that they were involved in really big things. These nuns that I met in Tanzania, the Maryknolls, one, as is new to me, they didn't wear habits and anything like that. They had their own names, and they were very involved in, as I said, engaged in the work of the community alongside people. And so that really, really kind of caught my attention. and then when I saw how politically involved they were to bring about change, particularly in societies that were developing, I just felt that's something that I might be interested in.

42:59And then they were part of an institution. When I came back to England after living in Tanzania, I thought, well, how can I do that? How can I be involved? And the one entity that I could see at every community, in every community, was a church. A church where people went for belonging and for connection. And a church which had the opportunity, if they wanted to, to be part of the change of the society in which they were placed. And so I went back to church. I went back to church because I felt that I could be part of making the difference. part of the story of the church becoming what it needs to be, which is an organization that represents the people amongst whom it is set.

43:52And also, and this is where we come back to the Oversight Group and the Spire Project, a church which, after 19 years, can look at itself, itself, I mean in many, many years, but in terms of the work of racial justice, can look at itself, can interrogate itself, can recognize the past and the pain that it's involved in in the past, and can make a decision to want to repent of that, and then take action to make a difference for not just in terms of paying some sort of compensation to people, but actually to try to build a legacy of a better society for all people. And that I felt, I mean, I didn't know that when I went back, but I felt that it was something that I could journey with.

44:46And so going back to church has been a huge change of direction. And the change of direction has taken me away from the potential to be a professor of sociology, which probably I was going towards as an academic, to being a parish priest, which is what I thought I was ever going to be. I never thought I was going to be a bishop. Gosh knows, that was never a direction of travel. If you ask me, the dancing person? So back when someone said, I think we should think about being a priest, my answer was to, one, I can't sing, so that's no good. I mean... And two, and two, I like to dance. Yeah. And I'm not too sure that people want dancing priests.

45:28And how has it gone with being a dancing priest? Oh, well, you know, like a dancing queen. Yeah. But just before I go to Laura to some comment on that, what do you think the sort of you that decided to come back into the church would make of where you've got to 19 years down the line? I would be absolutely stunned. I mean, when I rejoined the church, it was to make a difference in the local community. I thought, well, if I could be part of the church, I could make a difference here and build community because I believe in our society today, and we had a little bit of a chat about what society looks like in different continents and countries.

46:10In this society here, we have lost so much connection and so much of a sense of belonging in so many ways that people have become atomized. And we all know the conversations about where people are with smartphones and all of that. But communities and families have become so atomized. And for me, one of the places where you can go and it doesn't matter what you do, generally what you wear, but you can go and you can find a place of connection with other people who live in the same area as you. and depending on what activities they undertake, you can actually be part of undertaking work for the common good, work for the social good.

47:00And church can do that. In its best elements, it can do that. And that's what I wanted to go back and do. So just at that base level, where we would say the Holy Spirit has decided to kind of send me along to do the kind of work I'm doing now, I never believed that the Church of England would be able to produce a report such as that, the set of recommendations from the oversight group. I never believed that there would be a time when the church would look so closely at itself, would interrogate itself, and would come out honestly saying, this is who we were, this is what we've done, this is how we can change, and this is how we can build a better future for everyone.

47:48I never believed that that was going to be the case. I'm so proud. Whatever the contested stories, whatever the problems, I am so proud even for us to have taken that step and to still be defending it against all the people who are coming at us left, right and centre, telling us that we should never have done it and we should give it up now as a bad idea. And we're not. And I'm very proud of the fact that we're here and we're still standing proudly to say this is so important. This is the fundamental essence of who we are. And for the church to have finally realized that, I think it's a huge thing.

48:29And I'm very proud to be part of that. I think you should be. Not that you need our validation, I'm sure. but securing that degree of receptiveness can be tremendously challenging and I was just going to pass to Laura to add some expert comment on how tough that can be.

48:44Ali Goldsworthy: Yeah I was just thinking while you were sharing your experience that one of the things that I heard that was your openness to see people do something in a different way so when you were talking about those nuns and obviously you still had your faith at that point but maybe lost faith in how to enact that to see somebody do something in a way that's different to how you'd seen it before and be directly influenced by that and be able to change your mind as a result is a thread we've heard quite often on the podcast actually, isn't it, Ali, that people have seen that they've been surprised by something, they've seen something that's different, but they've retained that openness to be able, they haven't closed the door completely, so they've been able to take a different view.

49:18Ali Goldsworthy: And I think one of the things that comes out in a lot of the kind of polarization literature and stuff is, is that willingness to stay in that slightly more open space to be able to say, I don't know, or I haven't decided, or certainly I haven't decided forever, and be able to have that sort of ability to change your mind, to look at other ways of doing things. And one of the things we're also often struck by, which you might want to add to, Ali, on what's called the illusion of explanatory depth, is that often when you ask people to think about how something is done, not why it is done, or to explain the kind of individual parts of why something works, not why you thought it in the first place, you get a very different conversation.

49:59Ali Goldsworthy: So you say that sort of, you remind me again of that with the nuns, you know, how are they affecting that change? Like, what are they actually doing that's different? How is that delivering it? Starts to put your brain in quite a different place to, you know, why doesn't the church do this? Or why doesn't, you know, it's quite, it comes up quite often that actually if you're asking that sort of how question or you're observing something in a different way, your brain will often give you a slightly different answer. Yeah, no, I think you sum it up kind of perfectly how the illusion of explanatory depth works.

50:26And it can make it much easier to admit that you're taking intellectual leaps, in effect, and to see holes in your argument without feeling quite as threatened from an identity point of view. I suspect it might be a technique that you deploy quite regularly in your ministry. I often think that there's a lot that depolarization experts could learn from leaders in faith communities who go and minister people and try and help them navigate particularly tricky situations on a one-to-one basis on a very, very regular schedule, to be honest with you. There is one question we ask all of the guests. One more question.

51:03There is another one. There is another one, but this one's much easier. And Laura, I'll actually start with you and work back down, which is we ask them, yeah, who people would like to have on the podcast, who they would like us to ask the question of when did you last change your mind and why?

51:23Ali Goldsworthy: So I suppose because I've just come back from Labour Party conference, so maybe have the Labour Party on the brain, I think I'd like to ask Keir Starmer about his decision not to remain an MP. I'd be quite interested in how he... Obviously, he changed his mind of being Prime Minister. I mean, there were a lot of forces going into that decision. I'm not sure he changed his mind on his own there, but yeah. But I'm being generous here. He had some agents, I mean, not much. But I would like to know why he changed his mind about that aspect of it, because I think, you know, we've seen from a lot of people, they are somewhat forced from positions, but often choose to continue to represent the community.

51:55Ali Goldsworthy: I'd be interested to know why he changed his mind on that. Aman, who would you love to hear from? They don't have to be alive. Oh, yeah, it's like the dinner party game. It can be like anyone. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, suddenly you're looking less stressed, both of you. Why don't you go to her while I think?

52:19I think I would love you to get Nigel Bigger on this programme. and ask him about when did he last change his mind. Yeah, so Nigel Bigger, for the benefit of people in the audience, and actually I would be going for it, he has funded some of the polling work, which has been part of the commentary of the reaction to Bishop Rosemary and others' report, which is entirely properly deployed polling, which is why I know he funded it, but it suggests, I think, a degree of greater hostility with questions that as a former campaigner I would have been proud to use in a leading sense. They were not entirely neutral questions to try and work things out.

53:02And I think that there is something about when did he last demonstrate cognitive flexibility and why is it so hard for him to update his views, which may be very genuinely held, but why that is so tricky in the face of overwhelming and comprehensive evidence. I think it's probably easier for me to say those things than for you I mean I think it would be great for you to get all the tech pros building AI systems right now to maybe ask them what it will take for them to change their minds about building systems that they themselves think will end human life which sounds like a slightly odd quest so I think that would be good to get I think it would be quite hard for them to answer that one to be honest with you I can see your journalists' brain in action there, I guess that draws this live episode of the podcast to a close, I want to give a huge thank you to Rosemary, Aman and Laura for joining us, you can, well and for me for hosting obviously but I probably shouldn't thank myself and you can find the full back catalogue of our shows at opendemocracy.net or on Change My Mind wherever you listen to your podcasts.

54:18But Rosemary, Aman and Laura, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.