Customer Reviews

God and the Gangs

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In January 2003 two teenagers at a new year's eve party were killed in the midst of a firefight between rival gangs in the Aston area of Birmingham, it was an event that garnered national media attention. It is also symptomatic of a rise in gang related violent crime in the UK.

In this book Robert Beckford, then a Birmingham based theologian, examines the response of the the Black majority churches - Beckford calls these Urban Churches - to the problem of gun crime. This response is based on first hand experience of participating in community meetings that the above murders precipitated. At the outset Beckford notes one occasion when "at one of the meetings a black church leader received rapturous applause for stating that `no handcuffs could be put around Satan and that the task of the churches in the face of gun violence [was] to pray (p. 3)."

A primary focus of Beckford's analysis is the failure of the black-majority Pentecostal and Holiness churches to think ethically and contextually about the social predicament of urban centres (while more pronounced a tendency it shares with wider Pentecostalism). Therefore, in the main body of his book Beckford relies heavily on reader-response hermeneutics and race studies, particularly postcolonialism, to contextualise the urban church's understanding of their social context and hence that of the world in which this rise in ethnic minority violent crime has become such a disturbing factor. Those who have read Beckford before will in truth find little here that is new, what was in Dread and Pentecostal a slightly more abstract thesis about the errors of internalising social oppression and escaping through spiritualising experience as the work of God is in God and the Gangs given more concrete expression.

Nonetheless, as an example of how experience can be used in theological construction this is a good book although it does have its weaknesses, not so much in argument but in what was left unsaid. At the end of the book I had the sense that the really interesting aspects of Beckford's argument were only just beginning to kick in. First, one of the latter chapters, provocatively titled "when doing wrong makes us right" Beckford introduces in sermon form some glimpses of a positive response to the injustices that - in part - allow the rise in gun crime to continue under the rubric of `subversive piety' and `radical collusion'. The thread that ties both together is the belief that "ethics is not always a simple case of right v. wrong. Sometimes you have to make relative choices" (p. 109-110).

Obviously, there are important issues here, ones that are not unique to the rise in violent crime, Bonhoeffer's own relative choice concerning the assassination of Hitler is perhaps the most famous of recent cases. What concerns me however is how this issue is really not dealt with by Beckford, how is one to decide appropriate ethical action in such relative cases; this, of course, is all the more important because of the issue of violence that Beckford has brought to the table. It is surprising then that apart from the postcolonial legacy and the two murders of the teenagers is Aston violence is hardly discussed int he text.

Second, for a book about gangs then aside from two anecdotes concerning (seemingly parachurch) ministries to gang-members there is hardly anything on gang members themselves ( a little social psychology); what motivates them? why they join? what does it offer? etc.

If you have read Beckford before then I am not sure anything new is offered here, he has presented the same liberation theology inspired method elsewhere. Sure, if there's a specific interest in theology and gangs then this is probably worth reading, if not go and read his other works - they're better.