Even uplifting hymns not spared outrage

WE live in a weird world which it seems to be getting stranger by the minute – and not in a good way. Here’s an example of the sort of bonkers thing I’m talking about – this week I was roundly harangued by several people on social media for daring to mention the hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Now, I don’t know about you, but of all the things you could get politically correct about, you wouldn’t have thought All Things Bright and Beautiful would be anywhere near the top of the pile.

But this is how some bloke I’ve never heard of replied to a seemingly innocent post I put on Twitter. “Who wants to be associated with that hymn to class entitlement and denial of evolution?”

He wasn’t the only one, and it made me cross. There are a lot of things we can get angry about, but to me and I bet most readers, All Things Bright and Beautiful ain’t one of them.

I know the third verse isn’t exactly ‘woke’, as they say nowadays… “The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.”

But surely no one sings those words thinking: “Correct! Of course God made those clever toffs to be rich and all those oiks to be stupid and poor. Because that is how wise and wonderful God is.”

No one. Instead, we are aware the hymn was written yonks ago, back in the days when some people really did live in castles and many couldn’t even afford garden gates – and we know such feudalism has, for the most part, gone. A forgotten world, unless you visit an historic National Trust property. But maybe these people would ban opening stately homes to the public as well, because they hark back to an imperialistic age.

Yes, there are still multi-millionaires who kick around in big houses and poor people who live in sink estates – but churchgoers singing All Things Bright and Beautiful are not thinking about the politics of havesand-have-nots when putting heart and soul into the hymn. They simply like the cheerful tune and the upbeat words of the song’s title.

I mentioned the hymn on Twitter because I’d walked to the viewpoint near Dunster which is said to have inspired Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander and photographed the panorama on my phone. Then, after a friend who is a well-known art-critic retweeted the photo, lots of people were piling onto Twitter claiming I was wrong and it was really their local mountain which inspired the old vicar’s wife. Which is fair enough – there seem to be four locations that make the claim – and what do I care if it’s Dunster or not?

But if you grew up in West Somerset like I did, you were told it was Grabbist Hill above Dunster which offered the inspiration. And I’m sticking with it because Mrs CFA did holiday here and was so taken with the area’s beauty, she waxed lyrical about it to friends. And because the view from Grabbist is the only location claiming the connection which boasts all the ingredients mentioned in the hymn – namely, a purple-headed mountain, a river running by and bloomin’ great big castle. Dunkery, looming large at the head of the Avill Valley with its pretty river, famously turns purple for much of the year because it is covered in heather. Dunster Castle, meanwhile, dominates the valley below the viewpoint.

But I repeat: what do I care? I wouldn’t lose a second’s sleep if it turned out the hymn was inspired by a view in Wales or Ireland instead of Exmoor.

What I do care about is the ‘woke’ debacle when people started criticising any mention of the hymn on Twitter.

Political correctness first emerged as a worthy movement born out of thoughtfulness and concern for others – but the problem is that it can all too easily turn into a bullying form of fascism in its own right.

To me, All Things Bright and Beautiful is a good thing because people like it and often turn to it in times of need. It is, for example, a favourite – and comforting – hymn to have at funerals.

The idea that the elderly rural folk of the West Country could now be banned from singing it as a goodbye to loved ones offends me deeply.

It’s as if the thought-police are saying: “The white Anglo-Saxon peoples of the British Isles did very bad things in the past – therefore the modern world should forget or obliterate that past and certainly not rejoice in any part of it.”

If a popular hymn can be deemed politically incorrect, then so, as I say, can visiting stately homes. Or watching Downton Abbey. Or viewing masterpieces by artists commissioned by slave-owning aristocracies down the ages. The potential list is endless. And daft. Because being in denial about anything is daft.

And self-defeating, because going too far and rubbing a lot of people up the wrong way can provoke the opposite of what you desire. The massive support garnered by the last, monstrously incorrect US president was enough to prove that in a most un-woke and alarming way.

Nothing bright and beautiful to see there.

Going too far and rubbing a lot of people up the wrong way can provoke the opposite of what you desire