In 1927 the political scientist Ernest Barker remarked that the English were curiously blind to their own national character until a moment of peril. It was then that we discover that “there is a rock on which we stand and from which we are hewn … but we keep it shyly secret in reserve, and it is only in some destined hour of national crisis, such as came to us in the mid-summer of 1914, that we can see for ourselves and show to others the stuff of which we are made.” His metaphor was not sentimental: it suggested that beneath the shifting surface of politics lay a deeper foundation, something durable that was rediscovered in the face of existential threat — as it did, arguably, in the decade that followed in mass unemployment, the Abdication Crisis and then in confrontation with Nazi neo-paganism. In each, the touchstone of the Judaeo-Christian faith was cited as a defence against the exaltation of the Volk, of the dictator, or of an over-weaning state. A Guardian editorial of March 1939 saw the Church of England as a “safeguard against the tainting of this country … the association of Church and King witnesses to the Christian truth, now assailed in Europe, that man’s final allegiance is to God alone.
A century later Britain once again finds itself in crisis — not an existential war, as yet, but something subtler and in its way more dangerous: the disintegration of any common confidence in a national community. Across the political spectrum the upper echelons seem unable to articulate a vision around which the social contract can be sustained. Labour, captive to managerial technocracy and led by a Cabinet with little intellectual curiosity, speaks in the arid idioms of spreadsheets and “change”, yet offers no vision of what a Britain exhausted by culture wars and identitarian politics might actually look like. The Conservatives, drained of conviction in their own traditions, veer between empty gesture and orchestrated outrage. And while Reform channels raw discontent and the instincts of deeper England, it remains unclear how such anger could ever unify a nation rather than merely condemn its rulers. After decades of neo-liberalism hollowing out institutions, a debt crisis that stifled confidence in common prosperity, and a Brexit that failed to deliver renewed nationhood, Britain’s politics looks to be in a state of perilous drift.
If the Church doesn’t step in, what remains of us will be a common enthusiasm for mental-health programmes and the national football team
For all the incoherence at the top, however, beneath the surface a different story is unfolding: one Barker himself might have recognised. Quietly, a younger generation — men in particular — is reportedly rediscovering God and the Christian faith. This is not the tame, cultural Christianity of the parish fête, nor the tribal identification of “my community” against yours. What seems to draw them is something more elemental: a sense of belonging to a story and a mystery that stretches beyond the self.
That undercurrent surfaced perhaps most eloquently at the Coronation of Charles III, which served as a reminder that ritual retains the capacity to unite the nation around something greater than politics. Interestingly, it had been another coronation — of George VI in 1937 — which had become a source for theological reflection in the dark days of the late 1930s. Addressing the Empire Rally of Youth in the same year, Stanley Baldwin delivered one of his most strikingly Christian speeches as he told the assembled that
The King is a symbol of the union, not only of an Empire, but of a society which is held together by a common view of the fundamental nature of man. It is neither the worship of a tribe nor a class. It is a faith, a value based upon the individual, derived from the Christian religion. The Christian state proclaims human personality to be supreme, the servile state denies this. Every compromise with the infinite value of the human soul leads straight back to savagery and the jungle. Expel the truth of our religion, and what follows? The insolence of dominion, and the cruelty of despotism.
Reflecting upon the ancient liturgy of covenant and promise in Westminster Abbey, Baldwin saw in those words and gestures a source of national identity, liberty and civilisation that could not be conjured by the slogans of the day, tribal anger or the worship of an individual, but which was mediated by something transcendent — a “brotherhood of man, which implies the Fatherhood of God” which “we may deny … but we shall find no rest for our souls, nor will the world, until we acknowledge it as the ultimate wisdom.”
Here still lies the unique responsibility and opportunity of the Church of England. Informed by the post-liberalism that has shaped so much of public life in the past thirty years, the Church has too often been colluded with those who would reduce the nation to a set of “communities” — religious and secular — who share only fragments of a common moral language. It can hardly be surprising, then, that the evidence of young people returning to church suggests they come not for the softened rhetoric of progressive piety, but to encounter a mysterium tremendum — something deeper and more enduring than a wellness talk or the bureaucratic activism of the lanyard class. They are drawn when the Church dares to draw upon its liturgical, symbolic and aesthetic depths, animated by the countenance of God, pointing each of us beyond politics and markets to that “Fatherhood” which can bind us together and which alone can sustain civilisation.
This is not to indulge in nostalgia. To speak of the “rock” is not to yearn for empire, or for a mythical golden age of unity. It is to insist that no society can endure if it forgets its foundations, and that Western civilisation is built, however imperfectly, on the conviction that human dignity rests on something greater than power, preference or personality. As Danny Kruger MP recently told a largely empty House of Commons, to restore those foundations will require courage: the courage to name Christ as the cornerstone, and to summon the nation to recover its place in that order. If parliamentarians are anxious that Muslims may find this offensive, they ought to meet the many parents who send their children to Church of England schools precisely because they believe that there, rather than in a secular comprehensive, their children may yet find a moral and civic foundation.
Here are salient lessons for both Church, Crown and Parliament. If a new archbishop of Canterbury continues the Church of England’s enthusiasm for self-flagellation and ignorance of its own traditions of political theology, it may miss its final opportunity to hold not only itself together, but also the nation. And while our present Sovereign understands the power of symbol and religion to bind the nation together, will this be true of the next generation? Or will the forces of the day conspire to further disenchant the nation until what remains of us is a common enthusiasm for mental-health programmes and the national football team?
The deeper task for England — as discerned by Baldwin and Barker before World War II — is a restoration which is as much spiritual as intellectual. Its material inspiration might arguably be found in the newly refurbished Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery where — upon entry — you encounter afresh the greatest artistic treasure of medieval England, The Wilton Diptych. Painted for Richard II, it depicts the young king presented to the Virgin and Child by his patron saints, his eyes lifted not to the affairs of state but to Heaven itself. Behind the king stand Edward the Confessor, Edmund the Martyr, and John the Baptist, his personal patron — saints gathered into the same act of devotion as the realm they represent. Here is leadership not as technocracy or performance, but as mediation: the ruler leading the nation in prayer, subject first to God before he can rule his subjects. In these golden panels we glimpse a nation bound not by tribe or transaction but by a common gaze toward the divine — the rock from which we were hewn, and the rock to which, in our own age, we may yet return.
