The journalist was impressed.
After the article ran, several readers wrote in to inform the newspaper of the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the cartoon, Avatar has the power to bend earth, wind, water, and fire. The Dallas Observer later admitted it felt embarrassed about the mistake.
When the Indigo meeting is over, Nikki gives me a lift back to the station. “Does it freak the children out to be told they’re super-evolved chosen ones?” I ask her.
“They were feeling it anyway,” Nikki replies.
We drive on in silence for a moment.
“I’ve been police-checked,” Nikki says suddenly. “Another medium called the police on me. I’ve been accused of emotionally damaging the children.”
“And what did the police do when they came?” I ask.
“They laughed,” Nikki says. Then she pauses and adds: “They told me they wanted to bring their own children here.”
Maybe they were just saying that to be polite. Or maybe they meant it.
A Message from God
It’s a Wednesday evening in early summer, and you’d think some high-society soirée was taking place in Knightsbridge, West London, on beautiful lawns set back from the Brompton Road. Porsches and Aston Martins are parked up and down the street, and attractive young people, some famous, in casual wear and summer dresses are wandering up a tree-lined drive. But this is no soirée.
We are agnostics. We are entering a church—the Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB)—to sign up for the Alpha Course, led by Nicky Gumbel. He is over there, welcoming agnostics; he’s good-looking, tall and slim. It sounds impossible, but apparently Gumbel’s course, consisting of ten Wednesday evenings, routinely transforms hardened unbelievers, the entrenched faithless, into confirmed Christians. There will be after-dinner talks from Gumbel, and then we will split into small groups to discuss the meaning of life, etc. There will be a weekend away in Kidderminster. And that’s it. Salvation will occur within these parameters. I cannot imagine how it can work.
But many thousands of agnostics have found God through Nicky Gumbel. To name one: Jonathan Aitken, the former Conservative cabinet minister imprisoned for seven months in 1999 for perjury against the Guardian newspaper. “I am a man of unclean lips,” he told the Catholic newspaper the Tablet, “but I went on an Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton, and found great inspiration from its fellowship and the teachings on the Holy Spirit.” The Tablet added, “He has done Alpha not once but three times, graduating from a humble student to a helper who pours coffee.”
Nicky Gumbel’s supporters say that within Church of England circles he is now more influential than the Archbishop of Canterbury; they claim that Gumbel is saving the Church. Other people say some quite horrifying things about him. I was told it is almost impossible to get an interview with him. His diary was full for three years. His people were apologetic. They said that the only way to really get to know Nicky, to understand how he does it, was to enroll in Alpha.
“Hi!” says a woman wearing a name tag. “You’re . . . ?”
“Jon Ronson.”
“Jon. Let’s see. Great!” She ticks off my name and laughs. “I know it feels strange on the first night, but don’t be nervous—in a couple of weeks’ time, this’ll feel like home.”
I drift into the church. There are agnostics everywhere, eating shepherd’s pie from paper plates on their laps. Michael Alison, onetime parliamentary private secretary to Mrs. Thatcher, is here. So is an ex–England cricket captain. I spot the manager of a big British pop group. The famous former topless model Samantha Fox found God through Nicky Gumbel, as did Geri Halliwell. I wonder whether Jonathan Aitken will pour the coffee, but I can’t see him. And now Nicky Gumbel is onstage, leaning against the podium, smiling hesitantly. He reminds me of Tony Blair.
“A very warm welcome to you all. Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Help! What have I got myself into?’” A laugh. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’re not going to pressurize you into doing anything. Perhaps some of you are sitting there sneering. If you are, please don’t think that I’m looking down at you. I spent half my life as an atheist. I used to go to talks like this and I would sneer.”
Nicky is being disingenuous. We know there are no talks like this—Alpha is uniquely successful, and branching out abroad, so far to 112 countries, where they play Nicky’s videos and the pastor acts the part of Nicky. “This just may be the wrong time for you,” says Nicky to the sneerers. “If you don’t want to come along next week, that’s fine. Nobody will phone you up! I’d like you to meet Pippa, my wife.”
We applaud. “Hi!” says Pippa. “We’ve got three children. Henry is twenty, there’s Jonathan, and Rebecca is fifteen.”
Nicky assures us that we are not abnormal for being here. The Bible is the world’s most popular book, he says. This is normal. “Forget the modern British novelists and the TV tie-ins,” he says. “Forty-four million Bibles are sold each year.” He says the New Testament was written when they say it was. “We know this very accurately,” he explains, “through a science called textual criticism.” He says Jesus existed. This is historically verifiable. He quotes the Jewish historian Josephus, born AD 37: “Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works . . . the tribe of Christians so named after him are not extinct to this day.” I am with Nicky so far. But the agnostics here—it soon becomes clear that Nicky can read our minds—are thinking, “But none of this proves that Jesus was anything more than a human teacher.”
Nicky tells an anecdote: He says that he once failed to recognize that his squash partner was Paul Ackford, the England rugby union international. Similarly, Jesus’s disciples, in the region of Caesarea Philippi, failed to recognize that their master was the Son of God.
I could live without the squash anecdote.
Nicky says that Jesus could not have been just a great human teacher. When he was asked at his trial whether he was “the Christ, the Son of the Living God, he replied: ‘I am.’” Nicky’s point is this: A great human teacher would not claim to be the Son of God.
“You must make your choice—either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else he’s a lunatic or, worse, the Devil of Hell. But don’t let us come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He didn’t intend to.”
This final logic (a quote from one of Nicky’s heroes, C. S. Lewis) is impressive to me. It remains in my mind.
Then it’s on to the small groups. I am in Nicky’s group: As is typical, it consists of around ten agnostics, some from the City, one a professional sports person, strangers gathered together in a small room in the basement. We sit in a circle. I wonder what will happen to us in the weeks ahead. For now, we gang up on Nicky and his helpers: his wife, Pippa, an investment banker called James, and his doctor wife, Julia, all ex-agnostics who found Christ on Alpha. We ask them antagonistic questions. “If there’s a God, why is there so much suffering?” And: “What about those people who have never heard of Jesus? Are you saying that all other religions are damned?”
Nicky just smiles and says, “What do the other people here think?”
At the end of the night, Nicky hands out some pamphlets he’s written called (such is the predictability of agnostics) Why Does God Allow Suffering? (answer: Nobody really knows) and What About Other Religions? (answer: They will, unfortunately, be denied entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven. This includes me—I am a Jew).