Health is Wealth

Just before the summer I went on a "theological retreat" for first-year systematic theology students and their supervisors. We were joined by a visiting scholar from Tuebingen, who presented a paper on God and medicine. One of the points he made - the one that has stuck with me - is that the things we used to do for God we now do for our health. A pilgrimage is a way of keeping fit and improving our mental health, fasting keeps us slim and cleanses the body, and so on. It is little wonder, then, that Silicon Valley is pumping millions of dollars into experimental medicine in order to discover the thing which God alone was once thought to offer: eternal life.

I live in the UK, home to the NHS, but I have private health insurance. Why? Because I am married to someone from the wrong country. For my wife to get a residence card, we needed to have something called "comprehensive sickness insurance," and the NHS didn't count. So we now pay a substantial sum of money every month for a service that we neither want nor need.

The reason I mention all of this is because I just received a call from our health insurance provider, and I have seen the future. The lovely gentleman on the phone explained to me with great gusto all of the fantastic little offers available to me as a paying customer. For example, I can get "free" cinema tickets by keeping track of my steps and earning rewards. I can also pay for the new Apple watch simply by exercising and uploading the data to their app. This, I fear, is the future. It is not a future without money. I cannot pay my health insurance provider by walking to my office, although there may come a time when that data alone will suffice. But it is a future in which the body is monetised not only for sex or for labour, but for exercise and well-being - in short, for energy (or "power" if you want to speak in a theological idiom). Energetic human beings are deemed valuable human beings. This is one reason why abortion in general - and the abortion of those with disabilities in particular - can be justified. Those without energy are deemed burdens, and they do not belong to our energy-harvesting and data-mining future.

I will continue to play my (ridiculously expensive) Tuesday evening and (free) Saturday morning football. I can't claim to feel God's pleasure as I play, and I get the impression that God derives increasingly little pleasure from watching me play. But I'll be damned before I wear a piece of technology which tells my insurance company how many (or, more likely, how worryingly few) steps I took so that I can get an Apple watch. Get me a machine that records nutmegs, however....