John Eldridge (17 th May 1936 – 24 th December 2022)

John Eldridge, sociologist, Christian socialist, Methodist local preacher, media critic, has left us. He was a man of remarkable warmth, sharpness, perceptiveness; someone who told things as he saw them, who was deeply intolerant of poverty and inequality and of all that went to spreading and perpetuating them; a person of faith and hope in an uncertain world.

He was born in Southampton where, like his friend Bob Holman in Ilford, he experienced the terrors of the blitz. He went to school at Taunton’s School, one of the local grammar schools, and gained an MSc (Econ.) and MSc at Leicester. He then worked as a research assistant studying conflict resolution at the steel works in Consett, Co. Durham. After a spell as a lecturer in York from 1964, he moved to a chair in sociology at Bradford in 1969 and then in 1972 to Glasgow as its first Professor of Sociology, where he remained till his retirement. He was President of the British Sociology Association from 1979–81. In 2018, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Edinburgh University. He was involved in many practical initiatives. In 1989 he helped establish The Ethnic Minorities Law Centre in Glasgow. He was for many years a director of The Balmore Trust. He was also a Methodist local preacher and a contributor to The Expository Times.

Once arrived in Glasgow, he quickly set up the Glasgow University Media Group. This was one of the pioneers of media studies, both practically and in setting out the theoretical framework of such work. The Group questioned the impartiality of much reporting of industrial disputes (e.g., Bad News, 1976), pointing out that in the national reporting of the Glasgow dustcart dispute, none of the strikers was ever interviewed. The BBC and ITV reacted fiercely to the publication. One of his former colleagues recalls the extraordinary hostility, ‘when representatives of the BBC and ITV attended a lecture he gave at Warwick University: “One of them jumped up and said: ‘We heard you yesterday and you said exactly the same thing at the University of Newcastle,’ to which he replied: ‘Well, truth doesn’t alter either side of the Pennines, you know!’” ¹ His work also included wonderfully thoughtful, analytic accounts of the work of other sociologists, Max Weber, C. Wright Mills and the cultural historian Raymond Williams.

John’s contributions to this journal give an insight into the way in which this remarkable Christian scholar brought together his various commitments: to the search for an understanding of how we act in society, of how our communities shape us; of the values and wider visions of the world that we hold to, of the kinds of religious experiences which shape us; and of the practical struggle for equality within society.

In his reflections on the massive, and largely unexpected, political changes of the Arab Spring, Eldridge turns to the Polish sociologist and former communist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman coined the term ‘liquid modernity’ to try to capture the challenges and opportunities which faced those who sought to shape and govern contemporary societies in a globalised world. ‘In a world of uncertainty, all is fluidity. For Bauman, keeping fluids in shape calls for constant vigilance and perpetual effort, with no guarantees of success.

Bauman does not, however, invite us to drown in a sea of liquid modernity but rather to equip ourselves for action in a world of competing values and interests. . . . The last word for Bauman is hope, not despair, even if it is without guarantees or predictive power. An enlarged concern for human rights and global social justice is called for. We do not have to sink into a postmodernist quagmire!’ ² That question, how we face uncertainty, how we find hope in situations of unpredictability and risk, came up sharply on one occasion in our deliberations at the Balmore Trust when we were considering the wisdom of taking on a substantial loan for our fair trade business, JTS. John reminded us that John Wesley had said that faith was the opposite of certainty, and encouraged us to see this as a time for acting in faith. We took the loan and JTS was able to continue its work to this day.

John’s contributions to our journal are marked by the emphasis he puts on different kinds of religious experience and its practical consequences in our lives. Writing about William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, ³ he highlights the importance of James’ drive to describe and capture the diversity of religious experience, not only of major figures like St. Augustine, George Fox, and St. Teresa but of a great range of lesser known figures. For James, religion was an essential part of human life and its truth lay in its fruits, in the ways it helped people live and cope with their lives. James’ contemporaries, the sociologists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber valued and challenged James’ views of religious experience. For Durkheim a proper assessment of religious experience, whose reality he in no ways doubted, needed to consider the social effects and outcomes of religious experience, and they would show themselves to have a different meaning to that ascribed to them by believers themselves. Weber, too, read James with great care and valued his work. But he wished to correct James’ emphasis on the subjective side of religious experiences and to pay greater attention to their content, as he did when considering the role of Calvinist doctrines of predestination in the shaping of the leaders of the new forms of business activity of the capitalist world.

Clearly for John Eldridge an emphasis on subjective religious experience should not, and need not, lead to purely individualistic forms of religion. He himself had grown up initially in conservative evangelical and Pentacostal circles before being introduced to Methodism by his first wife, Rosemary. As his colleague, Bridget Fowler testified, ‘it was this dissenting tradition that informed his reading of Karl Marx, Max Weber, R. H. Tawney, Mills and Williams’. ⁴

We learn much more about this interaction between dissenting traditions and classical social thinking from John’s longer piece on the social work thinker and activist Bob Holman. ⁵ Holman, also a director of the Balmore Trust, was a close friend of John’s. He had held the Chair of Social Policy at Bath University before resigning to live and work in deprived communities, first in Southdown, Bath and then in Easterhouse, Glasgow. John’s article places Bob Holman within a tradition of Christian Socialism which has its roots in figures like Keir Hardie and George Lansbury. Their inspiration was drawn partly from the experiences of deep inequality and poverty in industrial Britain, partly from dissenting traditions and the Bible, the prophets, the Sermon on the Mount and the picture of communal life in Acts. Hardie attacked the hypocrisy of figures like Lord Overtoun who was a Sabbatarian who forced his employees to work in health-threatening conditions in his Shawfields Chemical Works on Sundays. Holman wrote about Hardie. ⁶ He was also strongly influenced by his teachers at LSE, the Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney and Richard Titmuss. Tawney’s central concern was equality. All were equal in the sight of God. ‘Scaled against the majesty of God all human beings were equally insignificant. Against the goodness of God, all were equally sinful. In taking the outward material form of bread and wine, all equally received the life of God himself’. ⁷ Equality was, moreover a critical factor in the development of a just society. Not just equality of opportunity was required but, as importantly, equality of condition: the ability to take up those opportunities. Lack of equality bred poverty and poverty was a symptom of a dysfunctional society.

Holman was essentially a practitioner, one whose commitment to restoring health to deprived communities was exceptional and rooted in his own Christian convictions. His work with FamilyAction in Rogerfield and Easterhouse (FARE) drew national attention. He worked ‘from the bottom up’ believing that there were rich resources within the community for dealing with their problems. FARE developed remarkably creative programmes for dealing with gang violence and drug addiction. Today they have a turnover of £3 million and employ 100 local people.

John Eldridge too was a campaigner and an activist, influenced by this strong dissenting tradition. His work on media studies was intended to combat abuses in the relations between the media and police and politicians and to correct bias and distortion in public debate. In his piece on the Levenson Commission, John expressed his surprise at the, as he might have said, extraordinary extent of the abuses which had been uncovered. ⁸ Recent actions against the press by prominent public figures indicate that these issues have in no way disappeared. But this was not only about the protection of individuals of whatever station. It, too, was about the health of our democracy. In his sharp discussion of the Brexit debate, he attacks not only the vacuousness of the politicians’ contributions: ‘Brexit is Brexit’ (‘A pig in a poke, is a pig in a poke’, he rejoins). ⁹ He also points to the media’s failures to challenge the repeated lies of the campaign and to distract by promoting peripheral issues of inner party conflicts. What we experienced, he writes, was a ‘democratic deficit’.

And he concludes, as will this short obituary, with a tautology of his own: ‘Gospel is Gospel’. That, he says with Larkin, should set them ‘all running across the fields’, everyone from Don Cupitt to Billy Graham: ‘Different narratives, different interpretations, from the earthly, grounded Jesus of Mark to the cosmic Christ of Colossians may be offered. One or other of them may speak to our condition. Behind it all we may find a pearl of great price as we seek to discover and possess a new kingdom and a new creation. We can hold out hopes that here are kingdom values which can still turn the world upside down. Let the search continue to nourish our spirits. As with Brexit we may have to learn to dance with uncertainty. But the dance goes on under the good hand of the Lord of the dance’. ¹⁰