“Ugly and aggressive new threats are now arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God, we do not have pluralism and tolerance, with everyone being nice to each other in a godless world … a wind is blowing, a storm is coming and when it hits we are going to learn if our house is built on rock or on sand.”
When did we last hear one of the Lords Spiritual speak in Parliament in such a compelling fashion? It has, to say the least, been quite some time. The speech I am referring to, of course, was not by one of the bishops in the House of Lords. It was by Conservative MP Danny Kruger. The speech has not only received considerable attention from conservative-minded Christian commentators in the United Kingdom and beyond: it went viral. On Kruger’s X account alone it has been watched 3.7 million times. It is something of an understatement to say that this is highly unusual for an Opposition backbencher’s speech, before an empty House of Commons.
As for ecclesiastical comparisons, one can only imagine how surprised a Church of England bishop would be for a speech or sermon to receive such online attention. And while a parliamentary speech by an MP cannot at all straightforwardly be compared with a Christian act of worship, the most recent online service on the Church of England’s X account had 1.7 thousand views.
It is very difficult to deny that Kruger’s speech resonated. This very fact, however, has unsettled a certain stream of Anglican opinion. A parliamentary speech setting forth a view of this realm as rooted in and as being an expression of Christian civilisation was bad enough for progressive Anglican opinion. That it should also have popular resonance was even worse. Something of this was seen in the negative response in the Church Times of The Rt Revd Lord Harries, a former Bishop of Oxford:
Rather than emphasise that we are a Christian society, I believe that what we should face up to is the decline in Christian influence, and, as a result, the consequent lack of any underlying and unifying ethical basis for our life together.
For Harries, Christian decline over the last half century in British society — which, it seems, must be accepted by the Christian churches — means that Kruger’s vision of Christian civilization is to be rejected. In its place, he proposes an alternative lacking any distinctive Christian witness:
We need to work together with people of other faiths and no faith to affirm certain fundamentals that are, sadly, lacking at the moment. These are that we are moral beings, that life is a moral struggle, and that, whether or not we think we are ultimately accountable to God, we are accountable to one another.
It would be charitable to describe this as bland and lacklustre, devoid of a distinctive Christian witness. What is more, it entirely fails to address the palpable sense of challenge and of crisis in our contemporary culture. If this is what the Church of England is to continue speaking into the public square, it will be no surprise that the “Quiet Revival” passes it by, as Anglican leaders prove incapable of addressing the concerns of a generation alert to the philosophical exhaustion, moral confusion, and political failures of secularism.
Anglicans, then, would be wise to politely ignore the bishop and instead heed the Member of Parliament. It is the Member of Parliament who has powerfully, compellingly articulated the vision of a Christian culture against “the public square … empty of any metaphysics” and its “desert of materialism”.
Harries also appears to suggest a context in which Christianity is challenged neither by Islam nor radical progressivism. Kruger, by contrast, discerns the challenge posed by Islam to a vision of Christian civilisation. This is, of course, a sensitive issue: protecting the rights and liberties of our fellow-subjects who are Muslims should be a matter of pride for Britons. But, it is obtuse — if not a downright deceit — to deny that a political realm and culture defined by Islam would be very different from the historic British experience of liberty, religion, and communal order. A public square ideologically indifferent to faith, rejecting its foundation in what Burke called “the great politic communion” of “the Christian world”, is incapable of offering a meaningful alternative to the civilisational claims of Islam. Related to this, just as Islam is a missionary faith, so too is Christianity: Anglicans, therefore, should have no reservations about sharing with Muslims the Christian truths of the Trinity and Incarnation. This does not contradict interfaith dialogue and being good neighbours: it is, rather, to take seriously the creedal claims of both Islam and Christianity.
Kruger’s speech is a call for a confident public Christianity
The other “public doctrine” to which Kruger pointed is the radical progressivism enthusiastically embraced by elite opinion on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 21st century. He described it as “a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations”. This is not, of course, the historic British Left, with its robust patriotism and solidarity, flowing from a Christian Socialist understanding. It is telling, however, that some voices on the Christian Left, loud in their criticism of Kruger’s speech, reveal a much greater concern with the weird preoccupations of contemporary progressivism than with the noble commitments of the historic British Labour tradition.
“We are going to learn if our house is built on rock or sand.” Kruger’s speech is a call for a confident public Christianity, discerning the signs of the times, recognising the need for the churches to offer a meaningful, distinctive Christian vision to a generation abandoned by an exhausted secularism, with its confused experiments and paltry offerings to the human soul. It would be a foolish dereliction by the Established Church not to heed and learn from this speech, a means of recovering a confident public proclamation of Christianity and the vision of our common life rooted in this truth.
