Christianity is not just a private faith, nor a set of traditions, but a way of individual and collective life
Is Christianity a dead force in British politics? The top of Westminster politics is as godless as it ever has been, a fact driven home by Kemi Badenoch’s revelation that she has been an atheist since she was a teenager. Where once British political parties mirrored a country at prayer (Anglicanism and the Tories, Liberals and non-conformists, Labour and Catholicism/Methodism) today they are as metaphysically confused as the nation they represent. Labour has long secularised its religious roots into a secular creed — though this too is wearing thin in a post industrial age — but for the Tories the loss of faith has proved a more existential challenge.
Whilst Thatcher had a powerful, almost Victorian religious faith driving her vision of personal responsibility, in which charity and mutual aid was imagined to take the place of welfarism, this moral vision is distinctly lacking in her successors. Cameron attempted it, but his weak character and intermittent faith saw the “big society” come to nothing. Indeed, secularism is not a problem of political vision alone, but also imposes limits to even the most inspired policy. Thatcher’s attack on the big state didn’t lead to the return of Victorian-style civil society because the culture had shifted. She might have been a pious and patriotic leader, but she was ruling in the age of the yuppie, and the faith that her successors imbibed from her was more Friedman than St Francis.
In the intervening decades, the Tory party has become an extraordinarily amoral force in British politics. It primarily attracts apolitical careerists and rationalistic young spods who want to run the country off the back of an economics textbook. Badenoch’s interview reflected this as much as any theological point, with a telling moment in which she got a fellow student expelled for cheating in an exam. Cheating might be wrong, but most of us intuit that betrayal is a more fundamental wrong than sneaking your notes into a test. And Badenoch’s raison d’etre was more telling still: she had worked hard, she was top of her class, and she resented anyone taking the easy path. What do Tories believe in? Themselves, mainly.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the receding of the tide of faith is unmooring the old political parties from their own traditions, and leaving godless politicians floundering in its wake, gasping for a lost coherence. In fact, religion has only become a more urgent question as we leave the comfortable shallows of the 80s and 90s, where faith was broadly present but weak and marginalised.
Perhaps the most significant detail of Badenoch’s interview was the fact that she felt the need to reassure viewers that she is a “cultural Christian”. Christianity has receded sufficiently that society can look upon it as a whole, like planet earth observed from an orbiting rocket. The success of books like Holland’s Dominion and Omrani’s God is an Englishman reflect a newfound anxiety over identity, belonging and tradition. The short-lived confidence of a secularising West in the latter half of the 20th century, at a time of massive economic and technological progress, has foundered. Tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel openly speculate that scientific advances have slowed, and advocate for the return of Christian faith.
We are waking up to just how dystopian post-Christian politics is proving
Recovering from the Promethean excesses of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, we are waking up to just how dystopian post-Christian politics is proving. The decline of Christian ethics has seen teenagers surgically altered by doctors, the euthanisation of the mentally ill, and the legalisation of abortion up to birth. Sex and relationships have been digitised and marketised through sites like Tinder and OnlyFans. Marriage and birthrates have declined to dangerous levels. Growth has stalled and house prices rocketed upwards, public and private debt is increasing.
Even as Western culture is tottering, global rivals in Moscow and Beijing have taken the initiative, as Russia marches westwards and China wages ceaseless economic warfare. The most insidious challenge of all is mass migration, compounding the West’s identity crisis still further. Unable, as I’ve noted before, to define who we are, we are unable to limit or define citizenship, control our borders, or deport illegal immigrants.
Cultural Christianity takes on a crucial role in this context — as we come to observe Christianity not merely as a discreet creed, but a civilisation and a way of life, we start to realise that we are Christians in spite of ourselves, and helplessly dependent on the fruits of a faith we now lack. An implicit Christianity fuels alarm at the rise of Islam, or the growth of non-European migration. Faced with the cultural other, we are forced to confront who we actually are, and rediscover our traditions.
Strikingly, Nigel Farage, hardly a pious Christian himself, has been loud and insistent in defending the Christian character of the United Kingdom. In this he is imitating not just the rhetoric of Trump or the US religious right, but a growing European populism which mobilises a largely secular population behind a Christian national identity.
But is this enough? The West has faced many crises and always before there has been intellectual renewal and renaissance in their wake. But the usual sources of new ideas and ways of life — our intellectual and cultural elites and institutions — are also the origin of our problems. The typical artist, academic or author of today is loyal to a creed of civilisational self-loathing and rootless cosmopolitanism. The idea of a cultural Christianity is, in Oakshottian fashion, more an instinct than an idea, and yet Christian culture itself is founded on an idea, not an instinct. The newfound significance of Christianity needs an intellectual and artistic elite to put flesh on its bones and add colour to its monochrome identitarian palette.
At present, discussions around cultural Christianity devolve into the relative merits of Christian culture versus Christian faith, and if one can have one without the other. Often, leftwing Christians opportunistically weaponise their faith against conservatives who want to preserve our culture and heritage, even as secular conservatives trivialise religion into an identity. But the deeper and more complex reality is that Christianity is a way of life and civilisation, a heavenly kingdom and not just a point of view. This should lead us to reject both its recruitment as a secular identity and as an individual belief system. Instead, we must look to Christianity as a uniquely political and ethical creed, one that is lived out as much as it is professed. Seen this way, in properly universalistic fashion, we can see that there is a role for everyone, even those who do not believe, or who have a different faith, in a culture and nation founded on Christianity.
In the face of self-hating secular elites and nationalistic identitarians, there is a clear role for Christians themselves to act as a via media. Christian churches, as the “quiet revival” suggests, are already starting to attract a newly thoughtful and curious generation of young people. Churches still have the inherited infrastructure and ideas to train and mobilise a new Christian elite, and Christianity offers both a variety and a coherence that can bring meaning to our politics without imposing a deadening homogeneity. By defining ourselves as a Christian country and civilisation, we can start to navigate the complex questions of citizenship and belonging, setting bounds, genuinely integrating new members of our society, and excluding those who break the rules or are hostile to our way of life.
The alternative is not a happy one. Absent the ethical guardrails, deep sense of purpose and living connection to our ancestors provided by Christianity, British political culture is adrift in an increasingly stormy ocean, vulnerable to mindless passions, extremist ideas and rapacious enemies. In the final analysis, Christianity is a culture, and one we cannot do without.
