In God's country?

Is Tragedy dead?

2009-11-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

'..Tragedy is that form of art which requires the intolerable burden of God's presence. It is now dead because His shadow no longer falls upon us as it fell on Agamemnon or Macbeth or Athalie. '

George Steiner’s observation, made towards the end his The Death of Tragedy of 1961, is unequivocal in its twinning of the tragic and the transcendental. Both man’s worth and dignity, and man’s spectacular ability to slip up, relates directly to the power of the God he worships, and to the absoluteness of the moral standards He imposes. In dealing with the sin of the Fall, tragedy performs the role of both purging and atoning: the audience’s catharsis re-enacts the flow of blood from Golgotha; and through the suffering of the tragic hero the audience is both cleansed and led to better behaviour.

But it's simplistic to suggest that the dawn of the secular hails the death of tragedy. For its groundedness in standards of moral rectitude – namely, in the audience’s notions of ‘what is right’ – tragedy’s potential extends far beyond a mere re-enactment, and mock-redemption, of the Fall of Man. In tracing the development of German drama (in particular) from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century, I want to suggest that the concept of tragedy has outgrown the religiosity of its past. That ‘the tragic’ has endured in the secular world of both the modern and the postmodern, is testament no longer to the prospects of damnation and judgment - prospects which have all but vanished from civil society - but rather to man’s inability precisely to locate his place and his role in a society which itself is trying to find a place and a role.

Bürgerliches Trauerspiel and the inescapability of social control

Bürgerliches Trauerspiel develops at a time of increasing national-cultural consciousness in Germany, and in artistic reaction to the seventeenth-century French neoclassical tragedy of Corneille and Racine. The aim – as in French neoclassical theatre – is very much to educate the audience, but to do so through the ‘Mitleid und Furcht’ (‘pity and fear’) characteristic of the Aristotelian tradition. I think Lessing speaks of the audience’s heartstrings’ being ‘plucked’ (in fear of a similar fate) and then ‘vibrating’ in harmony and empathy with the protagonist’s own suffering. A curious admixture of emotion and reason emerges in the final, cathartic ‘resolution’: the (intended) middle-class (or bürgerlich) audience empathises with the suffering of the (psychologically realistic) middle-class protagonist on the stage, and is thereby inspired to uphold Enlightenment-inspired bürgerlich values in resistance to the arbitrary rule of a capricious nobility. So the emphasis is still very much on tragedy as paedagogy, in conformity with a neoclassical tradition; but the Shakespearean dimension of both psychological realism and (attendant) emotional outpour over the reality of unstoppable injustice increasingly problematize and complicate the idea of reason's inevitable triumph.

If anyone sums up the essence of German tragedy’s subsequence development, it’s Hegel. To ham-fistedly copy and paste from Wikipedia’s article on tragedy:

“G.W.F. Hegel, the German philosopher most famous for his dialectical approach to epistemology and history, also applied such a methodology to his theory of tragedy. In his essay "Hegel's Theory of Tragedy," A.C. Bradley first introduced the English-speaking world to Hegel's theory, which Bradley called the "tragic collision", and contrasted against the Aristotelian notions of the "tragic hero" and his or her "hamartia" in subsequent analyses of the Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy and of Sophocles' Antigone. (Bradley, 114-156). Hegel himself, however, in his seminal "The Phenomenology of Spirit" argues for a more complicated theory of tragedy, with two complementary branches which, though driven by a single dialectical principle, differentiate Greek tragedy from that which follows Shakespeare. His later lectures formulate such a theory of tragedy as a conflict of ethical forces, represented by characters, in ancient Greek tragedy, but in Shakespearean tragedy the conflict is rendered as one of subject and object, of individual personality which must manifest self-destructive passions because only such passions are strong enough to defend the individual from a hostile and capricious external world:

‘The heroes of ancient classical tragedy encounter situations in which, if they firmly decide in favor of the one ethical pathos that alone suits their finished character, they must necessarily come into conflict with the equally [gleichberechtigt] justified ethical power that confronts them. Modern characters, on the other hand, stand in a wealth of more accidental circumstances, within which one could act this way or that, so that the conflict which is, though occasioned by external preconditions, still essentially grounded in the character. The new individuals, in their passions, obey their own nature...simply because they are what they are. Greek heroes also act in accordance with individuality, but in ancient tragedy such individuality is necessarily... a self-contained ethical pathos...In modern tragedy, however, the character in its peculiarity decides in accordance with subjective desires...such that congruity of character with outward ethical aim no longer constitutes an essential basis of tragic beauty..." (Hegel, ed. Glockner, vol XIV pp567–8).’

Hegel's comments on a particular play may better elucidate his theory: ‘Viewed externally, Hamlet's death may be seen to have been brought about accidentally ...but in Hamlet's soul, we understand that death has lurked from the beginning: the sandbank of finitude cannot suffice his sorrow and tenderness, such grief and nausea at all conditions of life...we feel he is a man whom inner disgust has almost consumed well before death comes upon him from outside.’(Hegel, ed. Glockner,XIV,p572).“

(And, in this connection, this article looks interesting http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/article/viewFile/222/229 . )

Hegel’s theory of tragedy can be perceived long before its formulation; and the idea of ‘inescapable predicament’ certainly characterize contemporaneous and later dramaturgic developments in Germany. In Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, the heroine gets her – proud, bürgerlich - father to stab her to death, in a desperate quest to recuperate dignity in light of her (adulterous) attraction to a – literally – princely seductor. It possible to advance the feminist-psychoanalytic argument that the masculinist bürgerlich discourse equates desire with the sexual act itself, with the result that Emilia is forced to have herself killed in order to remain unsullied; and that the stabbing reflects the father’s own sexual jealousy. But it was, by contrast, clear to an eighteenth-century audience that Emilia’s action to be admired, metonymic as it was of the maintenance of bürgerlich honour as set against the casual despotism of the petty aristocracy. With or without the proto-Freudian dimension, it seems that Emilia finds herself in a dilemma such as Hegel would describe: she either does the honourable thing and accepts her death, or she lets herself be deflowered by succumbing to the temptation (if only in thought) and becoming beholden to an amoral aristocracy, thereby sealing her moral destruction. In choosing the former, Emilia (much like Antigone) answers to a higher moral authority than that of the prince, and therefore does the right thing.

Ironically, of course, while there is very clearly a ‘right way to behave’, this is itself determined by domineering patriarchal expectations. So in light of a modern reading the possibility of any kind of audience-redemption – a cornerstone of bürgerliches Trauerspiel- seems somewhat remote, and Emilia meaningfully liberates neither herself nor her audience from despotic earthly authority. Whether aristocratic or bürgerlich, the Foucauldian logic of power is always the same. (Sorry – I know how much you hate Foucault; but his is the most eminently abusable name in literary criticism!)

And so we arrive at the argument that tragedy is an essentially ‘bourgeois’ artform, contrived mimetically to inculcate certain behavioural standards in an obedient audience. Certainly, Emilia Galotti smacks as somewhat ‘ritualistic’ in ambition: the tragedy is in some sense a distorted re-enactment of Golgotha, intended to purge the audience at the expense of the protagonist as ‘sacrificial lamb’. It artificially displays the more insalubrious or – to borrow again from Freud – ‘unheimlich’ aspects of human society with the aim of atoning for their (very real) existence. To put it less fancifully, and probably more accurately in view of Lessing’s own theorizing, the drama instils in the audience (again, as did Golgotha!) a fear of succumbing to the same fate, whether on account of one’s own sinfulness or simply through misfortunate confluence of circumstance, and, as a result, theoretically encourages moral rectitude and the maintenance of social order.

Pathetic Fallacy and Tragedy

I wonder if the subsequent development of tragedy is to be explained in some sense through the Romantic cliché of ‘pathetic fallacy’, as broadly conceived. The idea that the individual is at one with nature, and that he thereby paradoxically recognizes both his crucial importance and crushing insignificance, seems to be central, not only to the Romantics’ self-conception but also to a quintessentially Judaeo-Christian anthropocentricity in general. In fact, the concept of ‘positive German idealism’ (which is developed initially by Fichte, Schelling, W. v. Humboldt, and Herder, before finding later expression in the likes of Hegel, Schopenhauer and even Nietzsche) rests on the very premiss that the model of man’s internal mental and spiritual workings – his ‘Geist’ – lie at the centre of a much greater ‘Weltgeist’ (or world-spirit): a kind of philosophical ‘pathetic fallacy’ writ large, but one which instead of elevating the individual uses him to its grander ends.

Consider the pathetic fallacy of Goethe’s Faust: in the mould of the Sturm und Drang ‘Genie’ (or ‘creative genius’), he tries to unify himself with a much larger ‘macrocosm’ (a pseudo-Pagan world-spirit). A deliciously Gothic-flavoured opening scene sees him search for this being, which will supposedly reveal to him the mysteries of the universe; but to his great disappointed he is conversely told that he should make do with ‘a spirit your own size’, whereupon Mephistopheles appears instead, a figure which represents little more than his sordid alter-ego. Sturm und Drang might in some sense be characterized as Romanticism’s flip-side, at least insofar as it portrays protagonists (like Faust) as motivated by greed and personal ambition. But there is paradoxically something intensely anthropocentric and narcissistic in a yearning hypothetically to see oneself destroyed by one’s ambition, or condemned to eternal torment for one’s irredeemable sinfulness; and there’s something still more narcissistic is a desire to watch these things happen to someone on stage.

To see oneself elevated, or crushed, on account of one’s own thoughts and actions, is a mark of the individual’s importance; and even the individual’s insignificance in the grand scheme of things can by this logic be transmogrified into a mark of the individual’s redeemability, hence his centrality. In Goethe: The Poet and The Age Vol. 1, Nicholas Boyle offers a fascinating reading of the still-fragmentary, 1770s-written ‘Urfaust’, in which he points to Goethe’s own equivocal attitude towards this anthropocentrism. (Hutch avowedly disagrees with Boyle on this, but I disagree with Hutch!) There is no “Sie ist gerettet!” (She’s been saved!) at the end of the Urfaust as there is at the end of Faust, in reference to the misused Gretchen; but equally, there’s no indication that Faust is condemned. Boyle suggests that this question of final judgement is intentionally deferred to the audience, and that Goethe thereby underscores his conviction of a fundamental relativism: because Gretchen is beholden to a just if wrathful Christian God, she seals her own eternal damnation. By contrast, because Faust is and remains a self-confessed ‘wanderer’, beholden to nothing and nobody, he escapes divine judgment.

This relativism would seem essentially anthropocentric, and in some ways is just that. But the fact that it leaves the audience unsatisfied, and clamouring for justice, is telling. In the final analysis, Faust is nothing more than a prurient idiot who, far from ‘going to the dark side’ (such as would suggest his importance and significance), simply decides to lead a sordid, despicable little existence in which he’s allowed to pleasure himself at the expense of anyone and anything. To condemn him to hell would amount to a problematical acknowledgement, even *validation* of this decision, insofar as it would elevate Faust to the status of ‘tragic hero’. And so, in leaving this possibility of ‘escape-from-judgment’ open, Goethe powerfully registers his own contempt for Faust and suggestion of the futility of all such self-validating conceits, whether of sanctification (for the noble) or damnation (for the wicked). The young Werther’s lovesick suicide achieves nothing, intended though it is perversely to consummate his unrequited love for Lotte: neither she nor her husband attend his funeral, and the reader is left laughing at the his farcical self-indulgence. That the 1774 publication of ‘Die Leiden des Jungen Werther’ triggered a pandemic of twenty-something-male-suicides simply rammed Goethe’s point home with the blackest of comedy.

I wonder if this concept of ‘pathetic fallacy’ can be extended rather further to cover the problem of anthropocentric (and individuo-centric) delusion in general. This hallmark of the Romantic movement may thus be seen as grounded less in an avowed belief in the anthropomorphic potential of every phenomenon than in a creeping awareness of the individual’s absolute insignificance in the face of the dehumanized grand-narrative of human history and science.

This has very interesting implications as far as tragedy is concerned. Hegel suggests that the potential for tragic heroism lies in the individual’s attempt to ‘rise above’ his situation and prematurely to a good which is simply not recognized by the prevailing status quo. (And in this connection think of Danton’s defence of the individual in the face of the Robespierrean revolutionaries’ unquestioning submission to doctrine.) Friedrich Hebbel, in turn, argues in development of Hegel’s theory: “das Tragische taucht auf, wo der Einzelne sich aufhebt” (The tragic occurs whenever the individual rises up). The individual is ‘a solitary ice-crystal in the river of history: it will melt into oblivion’. I’ve not yet read Steiner’s ‘The Death of Tragedy’ (Steiner’s right up there on my to-do list, just below Barbara Taylor-Bradford), but I gather that one of his arguments is that since tragedy lies in a distinctly Judeao-Christian affirmation of the innate worth and fundamental dignity of every human being, its very endurance as an art-form is jeopardized by the cynicism, nihilism, and solipsism of the secular age (and, more recently, I suppose, of the postmodern).

With regards Hebbel, indeed, it’s very difficult to tell whether he wants to celebrate the individual’s ineffably dignified yet futile attempt to defy the all-crushing passage of history, or whether he worships the latter at the absolute expense of the former. After discovering that she is pregnant outside of wedlock, Clara, the tragic heroine of Maria Magdalena, commits suicide in an attempt to salvage the dignity of her reputation-obsessed, staunchly pious, lower middle-class father. Her love for him is genuinely affecting; but there is a trace of the narcissistic in her emotionally turbulent monologues. Not only do a number of telling indicators (such as the fact she dies at ‘the ninth hour’, in mock-fulsome reminiscence of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice) make of her noble intentions a rather sick joke, but the aim of her suicide is additionally wrecked beyond repair when she is spotted jumping into a well, scotching her attempt to make her death look natural. Her father’s hopelessly bleak closing remark, ‘Ich versteh’ die Welt nicht mehr’ (‘I don’t understand the world any more’) intones the absolute human pointlessness of her sacrifice.

I’m reminded, too, of Willy Russel’s Death of a Salesman, and particularly of Willy Loman’s suicidal attempt to extract a life insurance payment from the bank, which will hopefully give his son, Biff, a much-delayed ‘start in life’. A dive for redemption founders on the cold reality that the bank doesn’t pay out life insurance in the event of a suicide. Biff is left with nothing, and Linda and Charlie are left standing in the drizzly cemetery, considering how close Willy was to paying off the last of his mortgage.

In both cases – and as Sir Paul once sang – ‘no one was saved’.

A turn to the philosophical?

As an antidote to this useless suffering, we are forced to turn to the philosophical. In the same vein of the great nineteenth-century Hegelian system builders (and on a variation of Hebbel’s philosophy of tragedy), the pessimistic idealist Schopenhauer argues that true ennoblement, and a ‘sanctification’ of sorts, arises through a neo-Buddhist acceptance of the futility of one’s own will-to-redemption, peace and harmony in face of the suffering-fraught passage of history and the unstoppable progress of the ‘World Will’. True enlightenment – and liberation from suffering - emerges through a resignation to one’s ultimate helplessness, and a worldly-wise capitulation to mortality. Similarly, Martin Heidegger in the twentieth century talks in his seminal ‘Sein und Zeit’ (written here at Marburg University in 1923) of human existence as a paradoxical ‘presabsence’: knowledge of one’s authentic existence stems not from the fact and act of ‘living’ per se, but rather through one’s conscious ‘living towards death’. Our ‘presence’ is, in other words, consummated and hence authenticated at our ‘vanishing point’. Hebbel himself seems to be quite willing to accept this, and his idea of tragic heroism seems, far from reflecting moral judgement / moral eulogy of his protagonists’ motives and actions, to lie in an awareness and wholehearted embrace of the individual’s futility in the face of the broader passage of history.

The reason why the tragic seems to be a markedly ‘Western’ phenomenon is related, then, to a marked inability to accept both suffering and human insignificance and powerlessness: product as we are of an anthropocentric Judaeo-Christian tradition, we repeatedly resort to our self-ennobling ‘pathetic fallacies’ in an attempt to keep at bay the reality of what appears to be a crazily unjust and illogical (yet impersonally just and logical) world, and in order to delude ourselves into imagining that our suffering somehow fulfils a redemptive purpose. We tragically disavow the clinically scientific and impersonal progress of history with myriad pathetic fallacies and anthropomorphisms.

Consider Nazi ideology as a model of this very broadly defined ‘pathetic fallacy’. A glorification of the spiritual superiority of the German Volk was in no sense scientifically commensurable with the cold necessities of Social Darwinism; and Hitler acknowledged as much in Mein Kampf, just as Ludwig Jahn had, if only implicitly, in his polemically nationalistic early-nineteenth century writings. Both accepted that the German people will go down if they did not fight, and Hitler prescribed an implicitly eliminationist anti-semitism as a means of wiping out the most persistent and tenacious race on earth (and, by murderous extension, the German Volk’s most insidious competitor). The humanly uncontrollable socio-biological evolutionary process was incorporated into a pathetically fallacious racialist teleology, over which the Nazis would assume absolute control.

Perhaps in a vaguely similar vein, Homi K. Bhaba makes some a very interesting point in a fascinating (if often indecipherable) lecture here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yER4QwiSl14&feature=related. He suggests that post-9/11 American national identity is characterized by a paranoia which obscures any recognition that international attitudes towards the USA are, far from being absolutely hostile, rather confused and ambivalent. Needing as they do to keep alive the exceptionalist delusion of ‘God’s own country’, many Americans are forced to view the rest of the world as either ‘for us or against us’, with the result that foreign confusion at America’s identity and mission is exacerbated (or sublimated?) into an avowed Anti-Americanism. This sense of national embattledness lends an air of spiritual self-righteousness to America’s international self-conception, and constructs a definition of ‘the rest of the world’ based on ‘what America is not’. Likewise, of course, Edward Said points to a definition of the Orient that is both contingent upon, and yet far removed from, the essentialist self-definition of the Occident.

Much of this reflects the xenophobia (and agoraphobia) latent in human nature; but perhaps it also reflects the predominance of the ‘pathetically fallacious’ in Western thought and art. The growing emotional intensity with this anthropocentricity is expressed throughout the late-18^th and early-19^th century perhaps partly testifies to the growing (subconscious) awareness that man is most certainly not in control. Neither is he at the centre of his universe nor is he the meaning of it, in view of the rise of science and the grandly impersonal and deterministic post-Enlightenment philosophies of history and societal progress.

I wonder, then, if ‘the tragic’ in a sense grows out of the ultimate irreconcilability of the general and the particular, conceived here as a dichotomy between philosophy and poetry as ‘means of explaining the world’. What seems characteristic, and perhaps increasingly so as tragedy evolves as an art-form, is a growing discrepancy between the expression of the particular (the poetic) versus the expression of the general (the philosophical). For example, both Job and the psalmists are intellectually able to understand their various predicaments, in light of the poisoned chalice of free will, the resultant existence of evil in the world, and the sovereignty of God’s will; but both are absolutely unable to come to terms with their suffering on an emotional, spiritual, personal and poetical level. Likewise with King Lear, in Act III, Scene 2:

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!

It is self-validating – poetically so – to regard the elements as one’s personal enemies, one’s personal oppressors; and this pathetic fallacy masks a resignedly philosophical awareness of the situation’s nightmarish futility. A later passage, however, suggests both sobre detachment from, and grim acknowledgement of, both the shamefulness and the undeniable oddness of being a human king out here on an inhuman(e) heath:

Come on, my boy: how dost, my boy? art cold?
I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious.

As much as Lear tries poetically to incorporate his experience into a wider struggle of ‘pitiful me against the unjust world’, he cannot escape the scientific fact of his mental degradation: the unstoppable, strangely logical, and justice-indifferent descent from cosmos into chaos. Although we may since have domesticated and in some sense ‘normalized’ dementia, it remains our society’s most vivid and nearest encounter with ontological void, and a dark reflection of the strange contingency and coincidentality of human existence and experience. Little can be more frighteningly shameful for an eighty-five-year-old than the thought of having to change back into nappies – and yet little can be more logical in view of the relentless degradation of mental function.

Büchner explores precisely this degradation, albeit rendering it metaphysical as well as personal. Both Danton’s Death and Woyzeck start after the pathetically fallacious mechanisms of self-affirmation and ‘personal revolt’ have begun to crumble, and an awareness of essential nihilism and chaos begun to set in. Woyzeck never really had the ability to express himself, anyway, with the result that there is something horribly inevitable in his unthinking capitulation to all his surrounding superiors – as well as in his acceptance of the inevitable if fateful twinning, in Marie’s mind, of his financial and sexual impotence. Danton’s death seems a foregone conclusion from the first scene of the play onwards, and is admitted as such by Danton himself: a slow-moving, monologue-rich script, which is heavily (and bitterly) philosophical in style and substance, quickly reveals his acceptance of the inevitability of his fate, thus leaving little scope for heroism. A preoccupation with the philosophical tips over into surreal reflection on the strangeness of nihilism; and here the language of the plays is in some respects far more ‘modernist’ – thus emphatically not of its time – than it is ‘romanticist’. Consider Danton’s morbid “…Julie, ich liebe dich wie den Grab” (Julie, I love you like I love the grave), or the aberrant behaviour of the unnamed street-character, with his trippy assertion – out of the blue, and in no connection with the dramatic development – that “I don’t like to stay in one place for two long, because the crust is thin, and it is hollow underneath, and I don’t want to fall through”. (Misquotation!) Büchner thus conveys the incomprehensible strangeness and meaninglessness of a world upon which the likes of Robespierre try to impose their own rigid logics; and he reminds us that it would be presumptuous of us to believe, even if subconsciously, that suffering might be part of an anthropocentric teleology, whether Christian or secularly republican. Indeed, Büchner’s often meaningless, even oxymoronic, language is in some sense redolent of the famously surreal opening to T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

Let us go then, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table.

A scene which would traditionally invite pathetic fallacy instead inspires a disturbingly counter-intuitive description which refuses conceptually to be ‘mastered' and 'placed' by the reader. In one stroke, Eliot reminds us of the eminent strangeness of the world – and our alienation, even our anaesthetization, from it.

Is tragedy dead, then? I don’t think it is; and the reason for that is that the struggle between the poetical and the philosophical, the particular and the general, remains central to theatre’s survival. Nietzsche argued that tragedy would endure in an embrace of the weird, of the unhinged, of the Dionysian. But this embrace of the Dionysian would mark a fusion of the poetical and the philosophical, thus breaking down the very dichotomy and conflict which remains one of the very driving forces behind dramatic tension. The most tragic moments in Danton’s Death and Woyzeck occur where both protagonists suddenly (re)discover a certain personal agency and are able to express both their underlying desire for self-preservation, and their feeling for those around them. Woyzeck’s murder or Marie, indeed, is the tragic product both of his love for her, and his (pathetically fallacious?) belief that this external act will salvage his internal sense of dignity, thus ultimately validating him as a subject not an object. His reminder to his bullying army captain that “the savior said: let the little children come to me” can be seen as representing an appeal to some cosmic standard of love and forgiveness, in marked contrast to the Captain’s tautologous taunts over Woyzeck’s bastard-child: “Morality is moral, Woyzeck”. Danton, likewise, fundamentally accepts his fate; but in his occasional revolt against it, and in the kindness he shows his emotionally weaker comrades-in-arms, he too reaches out forn (absent) higher ground of justice and love.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot is certainly not to be described as a ‘tragedy’; but, as in Büchner, we see in the mutual (if gruff) love of Vladimir and Estragon the residue of a compassionate, and meaningful, humanity, as set against the leaden nihilism of the surrounding universe. Tragic indeed, if at the same time absurdly inexplicable and irredeemable.

‘Philosophy’ here in Beckett, as in Büchner, might be characterized as a belief in metaphysical chaos, in impersonal metaphysical cosmic (in)justice, or in metaphysical unknowability: in any of these cases it is a cold, unsympathetic knowledge. The tragic will endure as long as there is a conflict between this (rigorously scientific) philosophy and a distinctly unscientific, even improbable, poetry.

'Tolerance should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to offend' -- J.W. Goethe

2009-11-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

When abstracted from context, J.W. Goethe's observation is a pair of safe hands; unusual but basically wholesome; a wodge of wisdom with custard. It's the thinking man's honey-coated home truth, a dollop of axiomatic rightness which he thinks about for a while, imbibes, then comfortably forgets.

And yet, emblazoned on the wall of the concentration camp café, it is antisocial, jarring, obtrusive. Schnitzel and noodles are normally normal, but ordering and eating them here, at Buchenwald, isn't, J.W. Goethe reminds me. Your schnitzel is acquiesence on a plate, he says. "In spite of everything, you sat there on the banquette and ate", he says. I eat, all the same, and return my empty coke bottle to the counter for recycling in what I flatter myself to think is an act of redemption.

We chatter away in German - the last, solitary jokes before the seriousness starts - on our walk through the drizzle to the GDR memorial.

A walkway leads us through a landscaped of oak and imperious grey stone, the architectural déjà-vu of East Germany's fourth Reich. A stairway sweeps us down through a logic of class struggle, the slave-labourers in each granite-carved pieta whispering that they were Fascism's quarry.

A burial site lies at the foot of the steps, where the socialist-flavoured alternate reality is driven home by an accompanying plaque. We walk along an oversized terrace - redolent, and eerily so, of Speer's great oratory plinths - closed off by another burial site. No plaques this time, though, as there is no need for plaques. We have had our fill of the cup of sorrow, it is decided; we have acknowledged the party's authority, and cleansed we are drawn up a Jacob's Ladder towards socialism's bright future - an exultant sculptural tableau of emaciated Stakhonovites, and a sentinel of a belltower, silently watching the valley.

Everything can be redeemed; nothing is meaningless; nothing, nothing under the sun is vanity. Suffering will have its day and run its course; and you will see it happen, and know that we were not wrong, and you will know that Marx and Lenin were not wrong, and you will know that Rosa Luxemburg did not die without cause, when you watch the phoenix of the shop floor's everyman rise from the ashes of his oppressor.

Nothing is really redemptive here at Buchenwald, and there is little in the narrative of suffering that suggests any kind of teleology. But without a teleology - without a meaning, an 'overall scheme of things' - I cannot place this suffering. I can intellectually grasp it, but this is academic, it means nothing; what is unsettling is that I cannot 'recognize' the oppressed. Undeniably I feel bad about what has happened here, but the prescribed horror amounts to little more than numb acceptance; and a toleration of the sufferer that slips quietly, and dangerously, into a toleration and acceptance of his suffering. And so there we sit, eating our schnitzel and noodles and never doing the past the honour of contemplating the irony.

Where is hope?

2008-06-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday’s meeting was a little unusual in the sense that we let the Holy Spirit guide us entirely in our reading. The passages we looked at were: Isaiah 4:2-6; Isaiah 10:20-27; and Job 9:27-35 (as well as the rest of Job in general!).

The underlying questions these passages pose is seemingly a fairly obvious one: what is the source – indeed the bedrock – of the hope that Christians have?

Isaiah perhaps best illustrates the very real hope that we have today, through his very real prophesies of Christ’s coming.

Nevertheless, a lot of the writing in the first part of his book seems to provide little but a counsel of despair. God, Isaiah prophesied, would judge the people of Judah for their wilful disobedience of His will. Their adoption of pagan ways – their shameless worship of idols, their hedonistic living and their corruption of justice – would not go unpunished. God could see through the superficial religiosity used to mask a sinful heart. To cap all of this, Ahaz, the King of Judah, had refused to listen to God before turning on Assyria (Isaiah 7) – with the result that Judah was destined to fall at the feet of its Assyrian enemy. The Kingdom of Israel, too, would succumb to Assyrian invasion.

The writing of the book of Isaiah is apocalyptical. It alludes not only to the judgement and fall of Judah, but also to God’s final judgement of the whole world. And yet, despite this fairly heavy-going subject matter, Isaiah reminds us that it is those who hope in the Lord – and for whom the Lord remains, paradoxically, their ‘fear’ and their ‘dread’ – who will find salvation. Isaiah 4:2-6 paints a picture not only of the destruction of evil, but also of redemption. The ‘filth’ of the ‘daughters of Zion’ (women whose gratuitous passion for wealth and luxury was at the heart of Judean society’s moral dissipation) will be ‘washed away’. The Lord will have ‘cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgement and a spirit of burning’. Judgement will bring purity, the idea of a ‘spirit of burning’ alluding to an all-atoning, ultimate sacrifice that will cleanse and restore.

And therein lies the hope for the followers of the Lord. ‘In that day’, Isaiah proclaims, ‘the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honour of the survivors of Israel’. The ‘branch of the Lord’ is a frequent title of the Messiah himself. It is therefore the Messiah – whose reign will be beautiful and glorious – who will represent the eternal, steadfast hope of all those who trust in the Lord.

The hope we have in the risen Christ is certain and eternal. It is the central tenet of our faith. But how does this hope manifest itself and sustain us in our faith from one day to the next? Isaiah alludes to an answer in Chapter 4. The Lord, he says, ‘will create over the whole site of Mount Zion [the symbol of God’s restored Kingdom] and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night’. This is, of course, a reference to the Exodus of the people of Egypt. The cloud, fire and smoke used by God to guide his people were some of the most potent symbols of God’s leadership and guidance then, and can be seen as exactly the same for us today.

Exodus comes from the ancient Greek compound meaning ‘off [out of, or apart from] the route’. The fact that the period of the passage out of Egypt has given rise to many of the core Jewish festivals is no coincidence. This was one of the most significant times of testing of faith and trust in Jewish history: one in which God’s grace had to be relied on entirely, seemingly beyond all common sense, probability and human reason. There was simply no other option. Isaiah 10 20-23 shows that this trust will be hard to learn: just as, for us, trust and hope in God is hard to find and live by when things get tough. Only a ‘remnant [of the people of Israel and the House of Jacob] will return…to the mighty God’. They will ‘lean on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth’. ‘Leaning’ is suggestive of complete and utter dependence and reliance on God: a reliance that manifests itself when all other support, security and source of identity have disappeared. So not only does Isaiah’s use of the word ‘remnant’ tell us that the number of God’s people finally returning to their God will be small in comparison to the innumerability of their descendants: it also suggests that the part of each prodigal son’s heart and soul that holds on to trust and faith in the Lord will be but a ‘remnant’. But what is this ‘remnant’?

The hope we have in Christ might be described by use of two very similar French words: ‘espoir’ and ‘espérance’. Perhaps, as ‘espoir’ can refer to a specific, discrete and concrete hope, ‘espérance’ talks of an underlying, but not always distinct or tangible state of mind; not ‘hope’, as such, but ‘expectation’. It is the hope in our salvation through Christ – our ‘espoir’ – that underpins our faith. But it is the ‘espérance’ - the underlying, yet sometimes seemingly distant hope, expectation and trust that emerges from this concrete certainty – that often underpins our everyday lives as Christians. And it’s Job who most passionately and articulately explores the depths of the paradox that can emerge from the seeming irreconcilability between the most difficult events of our lives and this underlying hope in our creator and redeemer.

Despite his losing everything – his livestock, his sons and daughters, his health, his standing, and even his wife’s conjugal loyalty and friendship – Job does not reject the Lord his God. The reasons for which he remains loyal resist simple description. The Book of Job is not about a man who, despite all his sufferings, grits his teeth, casts a dignified eye heavenwards and holds on to the facile, albeit noble, hope that God will make sure that everything turns out OK in the end. Granted, his initial response to suffering – ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’ – suggests great dignity, stoicism, and, above all, spiritual wisdom. But Job is really a lot more human than that. ‘Let the day perish on which I was born, and the night that said, “A man is conceived,” let that day be darkness!’ he cries in Chapter 3. Some of the saddest verses in Scripture – in Chapter 19 – describe rejection at the hands of both friends and family: ‘my relatives have failed me, my close friends have forgotten me’. He even questions his creator: ‘why did you bring me out of the womb?’ is his angry appeal to God in Chapter 10.

Job needs no one to tell him (despite a wealth of officious reminders from a few self-styled philosophes) that God is capable of no wrong. He knows that. But that doesn’t defeat the fact that the human mind – always looking for reason and justification – cannot understand why intense suffering can exist alongside a completely righteous, just God. Job is no exception. His despairing, universally recognisable and utterly understandable resignations (‘my spirit is broken; my days are extinct; the graveyard is ready for me’), contrast with his inexplicably hopeful and seemingly irrational trust in God: ‘For I know that my redeemer lives…and after my skin has been thus destroyed yet in my flesh I shall see God’. Chapter 13 goes to the heart of what seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between reason and faith: ‘though he slay me, I will hope in him’.

So, in the end, that remnant of unfailing hope – of ‘espérance’ – defies human explanation. Despite the fact that it sometimes seems weak and distant, it remains intact. In spite of our human temperament and the sometimes wild fluctuations in our feelings of love and gratitude towards God, it never permanently disappears from view. Job’s hope in God endures despite all his railings against God; it is clear, therefore, that this hope ultimately does not emanate from Job himself.

The hope that Job had in God comes from God: it’s eternal, incorruptible and imperishable. For us, today, the hope that we have in God - through the Holy Spirit – has become such an integral part of our identity in Christ that it too is imperishable and irremovable. For this very reason, it cannot be broken down, analysed and explained in human terms. We are spiritually tongue-tied - unable to describe this hope that we have. All we know is that when all other apparent certainties and securities are stripped away, it is the only hope that can remain. Not only is it the proof of who Christ really is, in us: it is the proof of who we really are in Christ. No matter how irrational, how illogical and how contrary to some of the darkest human experiences and emotions our hope in God might seem, we can be sure that he will continue to keep us holding on to him by holding on to us. In other words, the mystery of hope finds its answer and solution in the one who created us, loves us, and died for us. And yet, for all that, it remains a mystery.

2007-08-18T16:52:00.001-07:00

Goodbye Socialism? (Lady in a strange shade of pink)

2007-05-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

The Internationale...or Bridge over Troubled Water?

A few weeks ago yesterday, on the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, 'Happy Day', that old evangelical paean, got a makeover. The day on which Jesus washed our sins away was still quite a happy one, it was implied, but didn't necessarily compare in the joy stakes to 'the day when Nicolas Sarkozy was born'.

Before things got too silly (there was more than a hint of irony in the hagiographical re-write), a return was made to the Gospel standard's original lyrics. 'When Jesus washed my sins away' was soulfully trumpeted, to the partial relief of those who didn't really like the amended version, across the symbolic centre of the capital city of one of Europe's bastions of Secular democracy.

Nicolas Sarkozy might be described as 'Gaullist', but his evident embrace of all things Anglo-Saxon makes him anything but a direct political descendant of the Anglophobic general. And, although Sarkozy has long been a member of Jacques Chirac's much-maligned government, there is little doubt that France is seeing something of a fresh start in his inauguration as president.

For a start, the Sarkozy household is anything but nuclear. Indeed, the Sarkozy family photos confidently blast forth the phenotypes of rather more than two sets of genes: both Nicolas and his once-estranged wife Cécilia have had other soulmates in their time.

And if this famously celebrity-style marriage alone is not evidence enough of a radical break with the public aloofness of previous administrations, the new President-elect likes to see dynamism caught in snaps of him out on a presidential jog. All sinewy legs and designer sunglasses, here is a man who's not afraid to let drop the regalia normally associated with the Elysée Palace. Hell, Monsieur le Président even admires the Americans. Whereas the constitutional similarities between the two republics might suggest a kind of ideological logic to this stance, such trans-Atlantic shoulder-to-shouldering isn't quite part of the European zeitgeist right now. Add to that the fact that both his parents were of immigrant stock, and it's no wonder that the French are being forced to re-calibrate their idées toutes faites of the meaning of the French presidency as an institution.

In his unapologetic lauding of the vibrancy - or, as his critics would put it, unbridled machismo - of American and British culture, Sarkozy seems hardly loath to take a legislative sledgehammer to all that prevents France from doing as well as it should be doing, be that the 35-hour week or its (some might say) cushy welfare state.

His is a campaign that had concentrated on getting France back to work, and on getting the French, once they're at the office, to work rather longer hours than they currently do. His manifesto was one of liberalization of labour, impregnated with industrial protection. His model was the Britain of New Labour; a dynamic place which, as the Sunday Times has recently mused, seems to be harvesting France's future (graduates looking for work), while French gets lumbered with Britain's past (baby boomers in search of somewhere nice to retire to). His was, on the whole, a coherent and realistic message. It is a shame that the same cannot be said of Ségolène Royal.

Of things white and red

Do hoodies need to be harangued or hugged? The question of what to do with disaffected youngsters from the notorious banlieues is a perennial one nowadays in France. It also happened to be one of the rallying points of the nebulous 'anyone but Sarkozy' camp. Royal aimed to play on her experience of motherhood, contrasting her empathetic touch with the authoritarian fist of her rival. She wanted the children of France, she said - referring in particular to these young people - to enjoy the same opportunities as her own flesh and blood. The white suits that intrigued and bemused punters and party members alike represented, it seemed, a conscious identification with maternal values: here was a woman playing on a kind of 'Virgin Mary' motif, some said. And to some extent, she succeeded. In portraying Sarkozy – who, as Minister of the Interior, had talked figuratively of clearing out the worst parts of the banlieues with a high-pressure water hose – as an aggressive and ultimately divisive figure, she initially showed herself to be the more inclusive and sympathetic of the two.

So Ségolène wasn't quite the grizzled party hardman of Les Mains Sales or Battleship Potemkin. And yet, for all that, there was an authoritarian tone. Talk of military-style boot camps smacked worryingly of her military-style upbringing; and the last-roll-of-the-dice television debate between her and Sarkozy couldn't exactly be described as a case study in Marian dignity. Sarkozy kept his cool: it was her who slung the mud. Voters were left not convicted of her empathy and ability to listen, but, frankly, a little confused at the picture of political aggressiveness that was emerging.

More worrying - for her party in particular - was the bankruptcy of her (largely leftist) policy ideas. It probably wasn't a good idea to have 100 campaign pledges, for a start. More head-scratching even than that, though, was their content. Royal stated her wish not only to raise the minimum wage (the smic) by 20%, but to launch a massive job-subsidy programme. That would, of course, cost quite a lot - and Royal didn't really have seem to have the necessary funding propositions up her snow-white sleeve. It's very commendable to want to pay for things by 'cutting waste', was the main criticism, but 'cutting waste' alone won't foot the bill. When push came to shove, Ségolène had few specific ideas as to how to pay for all this state-orientated, old-school Socialism. Leaving that question glaringly unanswered, however, the election's second round saw Ms Royal changing tack to encourage corporate competition, applaud profits and reach out to François Bayrou, the centrist whom she had previously condemned as being too far to the right. ‘Mishmash’ would be on the euphemistic side.

Inconsistency was perhaps one of the central hindrances to Royal's capitalising on anti-Sarkozy feeling, and hence to her winning the presidency. However, there is more to her loss than that.

First, it should be pointed out that, for all the apparent firmness of his central message, Sarkozy was inconsistent. In spite of the tough-love embrace of globalisation and the cries for the liberalisation of the job market, an agenda of protectionism lurked. 'If we let the factories go, we let everything go' he told a group of near-redundant blue-collar workers (as quoted by the Economist). While Bayrou cut an interesting figure as a French country boy - the salt of the earth - Sarkozy showed himself to be the grit of the factory floor. The more liberal of newspapers correspondingly – and rightly - saw an obvious contradiction in Sarkozy's putatively free-marketeering agenda. Besides, Royal was hardly alone in her manouvering: nitpickers might have complained about her coddling of Bayrou, but Sarkozy had followed more or less the same principle in cuddling up to habitual voters of the xenophobic 'Front National'. He too exhibited a shameless opportunism, even to a morally more dubious extent.

Second should be taken into account the pollsters' predictions for June's legislative elections. For all the French fear of reform, Sarkozy's Unité de Majorité Présidentielle is on course for quite a majority. At 40% (such being a recent poll's prediction), it wouldn't exactly be a whupping; but, given that a double-figure lead over the Sociaists is being expected, it would give Sarkozy's politically patchwork cabinet a fairly secure mandate for reform. Legislative elections perhaps being less personality-orientated than their presidential equivalents (the president is, after all, the most prominent face that France has to offer to the world), the implications of June's electoral activity are likely to be largely ideological in nature. Certainly, the presidential election, with its second-round left-right duel, was ideologically charged; but there is no denying the personality politics played a big role in the candidates’ posturing.

With a percentage share of the Assemblée Nationale predicted at around the late 20's, the Parti Socialiste won't be an also-ran: Francois Bayrou's new party, the Mouvement démocrate, probably will be. All the same, the relative electoral weakness of the Socialists - probably compounded by Sarkozy's deft appointment of one of their own sons as Foreign Minister - speaks volumes about the redundancy of the left’s political machinery.

The crisis of the left does not stop with Socialism. Head a few miles further left still, and you find yourself in a surreal political landscape of utopian Trotskyism. France's extreme-left candidates, among them the Communist veteran Marie-George Buffet and the young Olivier Besancenot, took a drubbing in the Presidential election's first round. Buffet's failure to chalk up any kind of score of note was particular marked: at 1.93% of the vote, hers was the worst ever result for a Communist candidate in French history. Is a nation whose revolution inspired both Marx and Lenin turning its back on the Left? And, more generally, what does France's new political landscape say about leftism worldwide?

Been there, done that, got the beret

For all their Iraq-inspired chagrin, and the periodic harrumphing about hospitals and trains, the British have had reason to feel a bit smug. It's not often - and certainly unheard-of in recent years - that a new French president compiments the descendants of Henry V on being role models for his charge. Yet, across the Channel, feelings are mixed. What is the significance of Sarkozy's victory? Should he be looking to make such a break with France's past? On the one hand, the move towards open markets and slimmed-down welfare states certainly seems to be inevitable: Adam Smith's principles have, after all, managed to impregnate the Chinese internal market – which was nothing less the birthplace and incubator of Maoism. It is tempting, also, to see France’s ‘where next?’ in terms of the Hegelian paradigm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It necessarily took the clinical, anti-communitarian and money-grabbing philosophy of Thatcherism – a political cold shower if ever there was one - to lay the foundations for the birth of a more moderate, but still market-orientated, equilibrium of New Labour. Will France end up doing the same?

On the other hand, it would be facile to superimpose Britain's recent past on France's immediate future. Aren't we, if we’re being honest, flying in the face of history to presume that France can do 'what we did'? It should be recognised, argue some, that there is a left-orientated, solidarity-orientated and intrinsically anti-individualist worldview imbued in the hearts and minds of the French people. The product of centuries of history, hearts and minds rarely go up for sale...at least not for a pittance. Surely, then, a long-standing leftist tradition will live on, if only in the abstract.

Don’t mention the S-word!

But in the concrete, socialism needs some propping up. If the Socialist International's logo (a resolute fist grasping a rose) looks a little quaint in an era of iPods and hedge funds, then some of the connotations of socialism are past their best to say the least. Tony Blair – Britain’s consummately talented statesman of a prime minister – clear-sightedly recognized that in 1994. After bagging the Labour leadership, he turned on the Party’s past. Labour’s symbolic commitment to the nationalization of all aspects of economic activity – a sentimental tie to the party’s founders – had to be ditched, Blair said. And the party’s new-found commitment to the private sector wasn’t enough of a sea change, even the logo eventually made a brief disappearance. The red rose of international recognition saw itself temporarily replaced with a strange cross between The MacDonalds’ Golden Arch and the Gay Rights lobby; a happy person waving a happy banner, which Anne Widdecome in a moment of deadpan brilliance described as resembling something her cat had thrown up.

Other, less cosmetic changes have impregnated the hull of the Left elsewhere. The Party of European Socialists may stick as resolutely as ever to its anti-exploitation guns (Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, a former Danish Prime Minister, called on citizens of Europe to ‘not trust Nicolas Sarkozy’, reinforcing that with a ‘please’); but doubts are abroad as to how the loaded S-word is to be re-branded – or, indeed, whether it should be re-branded at all. Piero Fassino, himself a key player in the Italian Communist Party’s migration to the political centre ground, has put his money squarely where his mouth is in his suggesting a change of both name and outlook for the leftie-uniting Socialist International. Something with ‘Social Democracy’ somewhere in the title would be a little more in tune with the people, and a little less reminiscent of hammers, sickles and heavy-duty dungarees.

So what?

All this might strike some as a bit academic: after all, a name doesn’t in and of itself change anything.

But in light of Socialism’s history of reform – as opposed to revolution - the recent tweakings make sense. After all, the late 19th Century saw a gradual adaptation, on the part of German Socialism, to the political realities of the day. The protagonist of the change – at least on a theoretical level – was one Edouard Bernstein, member of the SDP and editor-in-chief of the magazine Sozialdemokrat throughout the Bismarck-bestrode 1880’s. In his seminal work, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie, he set out a philosophy of ‘minimalism’, or ‘evolutionary socialism’. Bernstein saw a Germany in which Marx’s rather eschatological predictions of the collapse of the capitalist classes weren’t quite on track to fulfillment. If anything, factory owners were consolidating their position: capital was being propagated throughout ever larger sections among the population, instead of being hogged by the exploitative few; and the centralisation of capital industry was by no means as all-encompassing a process as the Communist Manifesto had suggested it would be. All in all, the answer as Bernstein saw it was to work within the Capitalist system to bring about change instead of trying to smash the status quo. As workers began to harvest long-overdue and hard-won rights, so correspondingly would their (legitimate) causes for grievance diminish, to such an extent that ‘revolution’ would become an unrealistic (if still symbolic) proposition.

Bernstein weathered more than his fair share of vitriol: Rosa Luxemburg, Iron Lady of the Left, responded with her polemic ‘Reform or Revolution’, in defense of the latter. But he was perhaps more prophetic in his outlook than Marxists – and, thirty years later, their Bolshevik enfants terribles – might have wanted to concede. The 188o’s social legislation of Bismarck may have found its cynical motivation in an attempt to keep the SDP under wraps; but when the behemothic SDP garnered an overall majority in the Reichstag of 1912, the former chancellor’s failure was unequivocal. The Socialist Party had achieved electoral credibility.

A conscience for us all

Bismarck’s failed concession inspired future governments, some of quite different hues to the angry crimson of the Second International. Indeed, the Liberals of the early 20th Century laid the initial foundation stones for the Welfare State of forty years thence: out of the window went Gladstonian principles of a hands-off government; in through the front door came the notion that the state had a duty to look after its citizens – regardless of whether or not their citizens were deemed to have deserved it. A New Covenant, of sorts: but, this being England, one which existed outside a set, constitutional framework. The NHS saw this ‘covenant’ hitting the big time, introducing a system of health care that now passes as a byword for all that inadequate about Britain, but which was – and is – remarkable in its being effectively a form of statewide socialism in what had been traditionally the world’s guardian of laissez-faire Liberalism.

As history continually shows us, the previously avant-garde has a habit of becoming part of the furniture after a while. In its 'coming of age', it gains a conservative acceptance, but loses much of its potency. While Socialism cannot easily fit into the parlance of the Antics Roadshow (and Liebknecht would have disapproved of a furniture analogy), its climb towards respectability, followed by a hike towrds indifferent acceptance, surely follows much the same principle. 'Socialism' in England is no longer so much a political movement as a gauge by which government is judged. Much the same will happen in France.

The Britain and America of the 1980’s were both socially virile places: there was little room in yuppieland for fluffy things like hugs and nice words. But despite a supposed break with the big-state government of the 70’s, Britain now sees a return to big-state ways. Such private and public sector-dovetailing projects as school vouchers and competing hospital trusts have to prove an overall commitment to social equity at large; private schools find their charitable status to be contingent on their commitment to the local community; and the government purports to spend rather a lot of time telling mothers-to-be not to drink during pregnancy, and slapping ASBO’s on those fifteen year-old mothers-to-be who’d get drunk anyway.

All are disparate examples; but all point towards a stealthy form of interventionism. Does this mean that Socialism is on the rise? Yes and No. Socialism is seeing something of a renaissance as a societal phenomenon. The ‘freest’ generation in the history of the world – if wealth, opportunity, social mobility and access to knowledge are taken into account – is paradoxically also one of the most ‘nannied’. Economic socialism, on the other hand, is increasingly a study in political cadaverousness: Royal’s defeat was an indictment of the hoary socialism of the past. Adam Smith’s writings seem, by contrast, sounder than ever.

Socialism can perhaps no longer find its true representation in the form of a ‘party’. It is far more a political standard, and a powerful one at that: the left’s justified and quite sincere concern for solidarity and equity – such as will find itself scrawled across the placards of Sarkozy-hating Parisians over the next months – are a much-needed counterbalance for unrestrained capitalism. The Left will continue to exert an influence, fighting quite rightly for social justice and continuing, albeit ineffectively, to peddle its dirigiste economic models. But capitalism – not socialism – will be the blueprint for the Third International.

Athens or Jerusalem?

2007-04-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

When Rosamond McKitterick complained, in her inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge, about an increasing lack of awareness within the British public sphere of the ‘continuities [and] discontinuities of human experience’, few of the eggheads sitting listening to her were wont to disagree. To put it more bluntly than a Cambridge historian might have wanted to, Brits don’t know their history. McKitterick was referring, to a large degree, to the obsessive concentration on 20th Century – to the expense of other swathes - that seems to characterise today’s history syllabuses. But she was also hinting at something more worrying. Our relationship with History – and hence our awareness of ‘who we are today’ – is perhaps losing its sense of communal, collective consciousness.

We live in a human interest age – which, in many ways, is no bad thing. Certainly, our post-MTV media generation is – largely thanks to the myriad wikis and blogs of Web 2.0 – being increasingly defined by the people for the people. Mass media gives way to democracy, you might say. Yet on the flip side, British pop culture finds itself increasingly dominated not by a reflection of who we are as a people and culture – but, rather, by the banal lives of individual citizens. The ‘YouTube’ revolution has seen the file-sharing of thousands of personal videos, documenting the lives of those who would otherwise enjoy nonentity status. Jade Goody’s comments find themselves splattered across the pages of The Sun. Documentary coverage of history might have achieved an unprecedented public interest – but tends to concentrate on an increasingly narrow subject matter. Once again, history is only interesting when it’s about people: Hitler, a figure who was actually as boorish and as uninteresting as historical personalities come, evokes a morbid fascination among all those who wonder how so much evil could be incarnate in a single man. A slew of Holocaust documentaries – most of them hooked on the interplay of edgy violin music and grainy footage of the gates of Auschwitz – commemorates the suffering of ordinary individuals, providing a focal point for mass catharsis while eschewing an analytical appraisal of The Final Solution as a whole.

A question of the Big Picture

Yes, history is about people. The fact that a failed artist could have plunged Europe into six years of turmoil might leave us all little imaginatively challenged: but no one can deny that while large-scale forces set the scene for events, it's small-scale people who make the events happen. The fulcrum of human history from a Christian perspective - the crucifixion - is the epitome of this. The crucifixion means nothing if it not about the person of Jesus; and the person of Jesus, at that, at His most helpless, wretched and doubting. Nothing apparently 'large scale' about Golgotha, then.

But in spite of its seemingly narrow focus, Golgotha radically changed the big picture of history. And, in spite of the allure of people-based history, we do need a more concept-orientated sense of the big picture of history, perhaps more than ever. In a society transfixed by the site of besuited stockbrokers flinging themselves from the upper floors of the doomed World Trade Centre, and bombarded thereafter by fulsome allusions to Holy Wars and Crusades – not to mention axes of evil - the past should be giving us less a sense of historical anomaly (as the obsession with Hitler currently seems to do), than an awareness of what it is that has brought our modern world to such a point, and what is it that we can do about it. We need to be able to give answers to big questions. In this light, the question I want to ask is a perennial one: what is preferable; the ‘religionisation’, or the secularisation, of humanity?

Cut and dried?

Not quite. It's tempting to come out on either one, or the other, side of the divide - especially given the fact that tub-thumping Born-Again Christians now have an equally uncompromising opposite number in the form of Richard Dawkins. In a country like England, where saying that you're 'C of E' is, it seems, one of those unassumedly respectable things to do, we haven't really ever been forced to see the religio-secular divide in a particularly stark light. But I would ventre that unbendingness is back in vogue.

Questions of national identity are at stake, the powers that be never cease to remind us, so it's time that we damn well nailed our colours to the mast. And given that radical Islam finds one of its central justifications in being at loggerheads with the dissolute West, religion plays a pretty central role in questions of national identity. Do we see religion as a good thing, which builds, nurtures, cherishes and maintains, or rather as something which thumps tubs, bashes bibles and blows things up? We'd like to choose one option or the other and then move on. And yet, it's not nearly as easy as that.

Given the events of the last five years, journalists and historians have been all too willing to embrace secular humanism. But that on its own is, as I will argue, a simplistic premise to work from – and one which is borne from a facile understanding of Western history. Television making at its best has intelligently broached this issue. Dr Jacob Bronowski, in his milestone 1973 series The Ascent of Man, alluded to the dangers of secularism. One of the most famous moments in documentary history saw Bronowski at Auschwitz, where a number of his relatives had been gassed. He spoke of the dangers of turning people into numbers: ‘[This killing] was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality – this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods’. Nazism was a secular ideology; one without the classic sense of a god. It was the German Volk that assumed a mythical, even divine, status. Bronowski articulately demonstrated the danger of this secular ideology, seeing it as a dehumanising, homogenising force. When there was no God to make cultural and scientific progress accountable to, was the implication, humans ended up doing inhuman things. Indeed, the (Catholic) historian Michael Burleigh has pointed to the system of ‘checks and balances’ that the idea of a King’s divine right brought to bear on what might otherwise have been a tyrannical, despotic conception of kingship.

Ours is a multifaceted, multicultural, broadband-permeated society in which any monolithic concept of nationhood and citizenship is bound to falter; and yet, Western European governments are beginning to wake up to the need for civil creeds that set in stone a firm concept of nationhood and aim to re-integrate the culturally alienated. And it is here that secularism and anticlericalism – rife throughout European legislature - has come a cropper. Clearly, any attempt to deny 1500 years of history – such being Europe’s Christian heritage – will result in a fairly empty, meaningless set of values. Christianity does seem to be (rightly) baulking at its marginalisation; Burleigh reminds us that it was only as a result of the indignation of Pope John Paul II, as well as Italian, Spanish and Polish Catholics, that the impact of Christianity on European history enjoyed the faintest adumbration within the draft 2004 European constitution. The Vatican is beginning to get a little stubborn in the face of constant demands for an apology for the crusades. The attempts of student unions at various British universities, made in autumn 2006, to clamp down on putative Christian ‘intolerance’ and exclusivity has provoked a surprisingly strong backlash both from student Christian unions and thoughtful broadsheet journalists alike. In other words, attempts to wipe Christianity out of the picture in the construction of coherent Western European national consciousnesses and identities are being recognised as both facile and contrived.

This is a good thing. To negate Europe’s Christian heritage is to exhibit what Professor McKitterick showed as being a lack of any kind of awareness of the continuities of European intellectual development. Indeed, given that the French Revolution – a series of events that was seminal in the crystallisation of modern Europe – is seen, symbolically as least, as a break with the ‘dark ages’ of religious superstition and civil submission, the influence it drew from the Christian doctrine and litany is remarkable.

This, by the way, is the point at which the 'religious bigots' smirk and say that, well, religion was there all along...even when atheism was supposedly having its finest hour. It seems, as the apostle John had it, the darkness 'overcometh not' the light. But these echoes of religion have an unsettling resonance. What, after all, do we mean when we call something religious and another thing secular? Religion, surely, is all about faith…and, because having faith in something means trusting in something you can’t see or immediately experience, religion flies in the faith of human rationalism. Secularism, by contrast, envisages a world whose precepts, principles and ethical and jurisprudential standards are governed by what can be seen, experienced or reasoned. It is therefore supposedly rational in outlook. But there’s a hitch. If we look at the secular behemoths of the 20th Century – Nazism and Communism, most prominently – what we see is not rationalism, but secular religiosity, fanaticism and dogma.

Why Richard Dawkins has a point

It is in this context that religion - religion with a small r - is an intensely dangerous thing.

The war against Orthodox Churches, launched by the Bolsheviks, marked one of the most vociferous campaigns of anticlericalism in 20th Century history. Parallels with the atheistic jiggory-pokery of the Jacobins did not go unnoticed. Burleigh comments wryly on the fact that babies in Bolshevik-controlled Russia were no longer baptised, but ‘Octobered’. The names ‘Giotin’ (‘Guillotine’) and ‘Robesper’ (‘Robespierre’) were in vogue. That any mother would feel it appropriate to name a baby in commemoration of an executioner’s blade is a morbidly amusing sign of the times. On account of the upheaval of the Russian civil war, clerical persecution stalled between 1918 and early 1922. It was the famine of 1921-2 which provided a pretext for renewed God-bashing. The ensuing persecution was not, as was claimed by the regime, an attempt to melt down church gold with the aim of buying foreign food relief: indeed, by the end of 1922, grain exports were touching a million tonnes. The American Relief Association had stockpiled more food in Russian ports than could be practically distributed. The Bolsheviks' refusal of an offer by the Vatican of a payment equal to the sum mopped up by the confiscation of church valuables show quite clearly that their priority was not to keep a few million peasants alive, but rather to make sure that God was dead. If, on the off-chance, there was a bit of confusion, the agitprop of the 'League of the Militant Godless' was there to gently propagate the regime's gospel of atheism writ large.

So how can this be described as 'religious'? The war waged against the Orthodox Church - a campaign of persecution that was resumed in 1937 - was indicative of the pseudo-religious aspects of Bolshevik mentality. This Kulturkampf a la russe ultimately failed (the militant godless turned out to be a fairly ephemeral, uninspired lot, and actually provoked a concerted digging in of heels on the part of many - very religiously minded - peasants). But the ideology that impelled it remained. Bolshevism, it seemed, shouted utilitarianism, pragmatism and rationalism; Lenin's judgment as to when is party should cash in on the Provisional Government's weaknesses revealed an exceptionally astute, realistic appraisal of the 'way the wind was blowing'. Trotsky's managment of the Red Army throughout the Civil War showed a remarkable tactical nouse. The Five Year Plans' focus on industrial development - to the detriment of cultural or social development - suggests a hard-nosed, intensely worldly way of looking at the role of the state, and hence, in Bolshevik thinking, the very nature of life iteslf.

And yet, before cynicism - and indeed, the oligarchs' hideous double-chins and rolls of fat - moved in and made themselves at home, Bolshevism as an ideology was never concerned with the here and now. It vapoured instead of a future reality - a future workers' paradise that was putatively being built. In this light, all present material shortcomings, all present ideological inconsitencies, found an ultimate justification. This 'living in the future' was a form of faith. So, too, were the purges of the 1930's. The Bolsheviks - and most notably Stalin himself - saw their ideology as being constantly under attack from within, to a point at which reasonable evidence was left far behind. What had been a distinctly aspiritual worldview thus assumed a notion of relentless spiritual warfare. Because the Soviet state became what was in effect a theocracy, with impregnation into all levels of state activity of the ideologically kosher nomenklatura, a kind of pseudo-spiritual purity became an ultimate goal. The new Soviet man (or indeed woman) was a unisex creature, devoid of any sense of family, seeing industriousness as a greatest good. On a spiritual, emotional and ideological level, was subsumed into the larger body of the state. The state - supposedly scoured by the watchful eye of the Party - thus became an extension of Soviet man's being and existence: no longer was he in any sense an individual, but was in every sense a component part of something far larger than himself. The parallels with the concept of faith and, indeed, a man's relationship with God, suggest that the Bolsheviks were a fanatically religious lot.

Thus the Great Terror was far more than a cynical attempt to get rid of active opposition and, hopefully, to then silence any opposition that might otherwise arise. The myriad Show Trials, middle-of-the-night disappearances and executions were about completely ridding the Party - and hence the state - of any hint of ideological impurity. An obsession with destroying even potential for dissent - of going to the heart of an individual's intentions and thoughts - is the mark of society playing God.

Just as it is a Christian's duty to unquestioningly accept God's will, so too it became homo sovieticus' duty to unquestioningly accept the will of the state - even if this will saw complete his innocence being turned into the pitch of guilt. That requires an article of faith - just as the Orwellian concept of doublethink, in which 2+2=5 if the State wills it, is a manifestation of faith par excellence.

But Soviet thinking went further; and Orwell made a brilliant extrapolation of its mad trajectory his dystopian 1984. Indeed, in O'Brien, the book's villain-in-effect, Orwell constructs a character who could only be described as a ideological exorcist; being the book's embodiment of Big Brother, his aim is not to draw any kind of begrudged recantation from Winston, but rather to fundamentally restructure Winston's very being before liquidating him. Anything less would be a blemish on the omniscient, omnivoyant conscience of the Party. The Party's past, present and future must be guaranteed. The Party must be the same yesterday, today and forever. Again, a society playing God.

In all this, aspects of faith - and religion - prevailed, most vociferously in the very psyche of those who attempted to stamp it out. The madness of Stalinism cannot be understood in terms of secular rationalism; but when seen as a product of intense faith, and devotion to that faith, it makes sense. The most striking aspect of 1930's Russia is not the fact that one individual of faith managed to theocratically impose his religion on the Russian people: Stalin was cynical in his attachment to power, as suggested by his coddling of the Orthodox Church for the purpose of boosting morale throughout Operation Barbarossa. It is instead the way in which the faith that was Bolshevism became a self-perpetuating monster. The purges, although often fuelled by myriad squalid jealosies and outright personal ambitions, became hyrda over which Stalin had no control. What started as one man's paranoia became a pandemic of religious fervour.

Why Dawkins is wrong

Whether or not you see him as a very clever chappy who's bringing everyone atheistic enlightenment, as Darwin's rottweiller, or merely as another lost soul who needs to know God's love, there's no denying the passion with which Richard Dawkins believes what he does. The passion might encourage and inspire some - but considered closely, it gets in the way of what he says. As Charles Moore of the Saturday Telegraph recently had it, Dawkins often proves - paradoxically - to be far more 'believing' than those 'dyed-in-the-wool faithheads' he's having such a hard time convincing. Dawkins' science is his religion. His is a faith in Empirical argument, in scientific reason, in the power of logic to explain away God. Dawkin's argument for the non-existence of God - based as it is on some substantial assumptions - turns out, therefore, to be as cyclical as those creationists he's decided to wage jihad against. All of this has a point. Man needs a worldview. It might seem that most people are content with EastEnders and the weekly Lady's Night (cocktails half price) at the Hare and Hounds: but something more is needed to make life what it is - and to fill that void that's left when the alcohol wears off and the hangover sets in. Man needs a meaning, an identity.

To put it in less trite terms, the democratic privilege of liberty - whether that be freedom of speech, freedom of association or freedom of aspiration - means nothing if you don't actually use it. The idea that we are all independent-minded individuals who can make our own choices is all very nice; but the fact that we are 'independent', on its own, doesn't mean that we have an identity or a raison d'etre. It's only when we close our open minds on a particular worldview, nay on a particular religion, that we find what we've been looking for in this respect. Interestingly, the Jacobins, who based their cult on the possession of rights, found it necessary to make a laughing stock of such rights by indulging in a decapitation of anyone who wasn't 'with' them. Rights on their own were abstract and boring, and the Jacobins found in the zealous enforcement of their reason-obsessed ideology a much juicier, more satisfying preoccupation.

Gordon Brown, now on the cusp of British premiership, likes talking about Britishness. He thinks the Brits need more of it. This, too, is indicative of a need for a unifying national ideal, for a corner of the world that, in spite of everything, will be forever England (though perhaps not Scotland and Wales for much longer). Multiculturalism not only doesn't work; the fact is that multilateral tolerance - such as multiculturalism is wont to encourage - means nothing in principle. It's a colourless, vacuous doctrine. 'Tolerance' is not an end in itself- but rather a means to an end. In other words, it's time to unapologetically assert some British values. I wouldn't want to compare Gordon Brown to Robespierre - but my point is this: all such examples testify to man's need for religion. When man abandons religion, he quickly takes it up again; and, anyway, he's probably been pretty religious in his abandonment of it in the first place. So when Dawkins rails against religion, he's railing against the human condition.

But does the fact that humanity is inherently religious in outlook - whether to society's detriment or to an individual's personal benefit and enrichment - mean that religion should a place within the public, political, or indeed societal, sphere?

The short answer is no, and with that we come back to the need for a definition of secularism. A state which is secular is a state in which no religious affiliation is favoured - and hence in which public decisions are in no way swayed by faith-based factors. The concept of Chrisitan value politics is anathema to a secular society. For this reason, secularism within a political context is to be cherished.

The reasons why I think this is the case are discussed in another article, 'Is God a leftie?'. But they might warrent brief summary here. First, a theocracy is by definition no democracy, since the Kingdom of God is not a democracy. But since the leader of said theocracy is not normally God (who'd probably do quite a good job), but instead - as is usually the case - an ostentatiously ascetic, anti-Western, oil-rich, Monte Carlo-holidaying oligarch, a theocratic government is a slightly problematic proposition. Since Holy Scriptures (such as the Qu'ran and Hadith, from which the precepts of Sharia law are taken), are seen as being 'from God', intepretation and concession is difficult to justify. Traditionalist shi'a Muslims reject, indeed, the idea that consensus - such being one of the central values of a democratic society - has any worth in and of itself. When God Himself has dictated what is written, what is written therefore has to stand for time immemorial.

Second, respect for human integrity and dignity can get lost when institutional secularism is abandoned. Once again, Islam provides the most extreme illustrations of this. The philosophy behind Islamic terrorism concerns the existence of a future reality whose construct is determined by all-encompassing, all-concerning laws and precepts. This end justifies every means of achieving it. Just as individual lives were perfectly dispensible in the construction of Socialist Utopia, so too are individual lives dispensible in the construction of a Islamic extremist's imagined pan-imperialism.

Ironically, laws, whether biblibal or koranic, meant to guarantee the dignity and integrity of individuals and their social constucts, quite often achieve the opposite effect. The literal sharia attempt to stamp out adultery goes as far as insisting the testimony of four onlookers to rape in order to rule out any foul play on the part of the woman. Anything more undermining of dignity seems somewhat difficult to conceive of.

Christian value politicians perhaps pursue a similar line in their insistence on the imposition of restrictions on gay rights. Despite a correct belief that homosexuality was not part of God's original plan for the world and the belief that it therefore undermines human dignity and integrity, it should be pointed out that an attempt to restrict a right to civil marriage on account of sexual orientation is even more damaging in this respect. Institutionalised religion gets things the wrong way round. It sees institution itself - law, tradition - as holding a greater value than God's human creation, and what should constitute the inalieanable rights of God's human creation to make its own lifestyle choices in relative freedom.

An intrusion of religion into politics therefore requires the generalisation and homogeonisation of God's people: the human mind is too limited and too inflexible to conceive otherwise of the coexistence of these two behemoths. But, as Jesus asserts in Mark 2:27, 'the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath'. To try and squeeze humanity into the straitjacket of moral laws and restrictions (in this case, the Old Testament Law) is to forget that God intended the Law for man's freedom and spiritual enrichment. That the Jews couldn't obey the Law was, indeed, testament to their need for a God-given salvation.

God's creatures are not of secondary importance to the system, to the framwork, created for them. On the contrary. Indeed, the New Testament gives no grounds for the idea of there existing a 'Christian morality'. Such a concept - indelibly ingrained in much of Western culture - is anathema to the idea of salvation by grace. The God that Christians worship proposes a way of life that could be described as 'moral', but which ultimately has nothing to do with this dry, dessicated system of ethics which ultimately comes to see ethicity as a highest good.

A mixed blessing?

The benefits that religious faith brings to society, on an interpersonal not an institutional level, are manifold. Secular humanism, when it extends beyond its rightful role as a framework for democratic government and makes itself into an all-encompassing worldview, ends up being an inherently egocentric doctrine. Kantian ethics might concern what is best for society as a whole - but the cynical, evolution-orientated philosophy that could be said to underpin the worldview of many secular humanists (Dawkins being just one example) hardly makes for a loving, inclusive social setup. After all, when human civilisation is reduced to genes and memes, the need for one's personal survival and thriving trumps everything else. Humanism is, if nothing else, a fancy way of saying 'Let's look after number one'. The preponderence of religious and religious-affiliated charities within the British voluntary sector testifies, by contrast, to a faith-motivated altruism on which often depend some of our society's most vulnerable members. Religion is at its best when it works on an interpersonal level; when it demonstrates God's love to those individuals whom secular humanism sees it as alright to ignore. But when religion deals in generalities, when it deals in dogma, when it deals in ideology, it becomes man's worst enemy.

Athens is epithetic of reason and philosophy, Jerusalem of religion and faith. So which of the two would I recommend you book your RyanAir flight to this summer? Well, neither, and this is where the debate irrevocably falters. The primacy of one - or indeed the other - was negated long ago, on a hill called Golgotha, by one man who said he was dying for the sins of many. Go to the Costa del Sol, and be happy.

Disestablishment...what?

2007-02-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

October 2006. Some six years to go until the much-hyped ‘London twenty twelve’, and Tessa Jowell suggests that the government’s budget might just have to be increased by the nominal figure of £1.3 billion. There’s something characteristically English – as characteristic as rain at Wimbledon and trains that never manage to run on time – about the government’s colossal failure to anticipate just how much it would cost to invite Johnny Foreigner to run round its brand new, as-yet-to-be-built running track. This seemingly characteristically English whiff of bathos and general ineptitude – the kind of ineptitude that fuels many a pessimist’s rant about wanting to go and live in New Zealand – is nothing new. And in spite of that old axiom of the grass always being greener on the other side, and the cynicism, dry detachment and distrust of authority perhaps traditionally encapsulated by the English as a race, there do seem to be a lot of areas where we just don’t ‘get it’. To most, it’s a bit of a joke: 150 years on from its imperial heyday, England perhaps deserves to be, well, crap.

But perhaps there’s something a little more sinister about this second titbit of Olympian revelation: somehow, planning permission is being sought to plonk the largest mosque in Europe (that is, with a planned capacity of up to 70,000 worshippers), on a brown field site next to the Olympic Stadium. Given that this will surely dominate the image – and general impression - that the world and his wife get when they descend on the East End, the odd eyebrow has been raised. Given that a very large evangelical Church in the neighbouring borough of Hackney is, by contrast, finding itself relocated in order to cater for the Olympics, it could be said that the plans are ‘touching a raw nerve’ in a few quarters – to quote from the Economist. The reactions will be ranging from the erudite (‘a poetic injustice’) to the slightly more blunt (‘a damned cheek’).

I don’t particularly want to sling any more mud at the walls of what is already a fairly muddy debate centred upon the somewhat crude question ‘Why should we build massive mosques for Muslims if Sharia law doesn’t let us build churches for us?’ This is a rather simplistic premise to work from, given that the idea of ‘quid pro quo’ – or, to put it slightly more irreverently, ‘tit for tat’ – would both undermine British democratic principles and prove to be a slightly childish way of managing inter-cultural relations.

But whatever one’s view (and the increasing cultural and ideological polarization of the post-9/11 world would unfortunately leave little scope for fence-sitting), Britons of every cultural and ethnic background are being forced to confront the question ‘What does it mean to be British?’ In our era of devolution, the question migh be more appropriately orientated towards 'Englishness', 'Scottishness' and 'Welshness', as opposed to 'Britishness'. But that aside, we still are a United Kingdom. I'd like to focus especially on the meaning of our putatively 'Christain' heritage. The Church of England, with a political influence which apparently extends little beyond its running of ‘yummy mummy’ CE primary schools, would seem to have little to do with the issue of modern national identity which seems, after all, to be more concerned with rabid, neo-Islamic clerics than extremist vicars. But the Church of England has had a long-standing connection to the English state – and, indeed, to the UK as a whole. Its roots run deep – and, because they run deep, perhaps need re-examining.

Given that the British state religion – and the religion that His or Her Britannic Majesty is obliged to profess – is Christianity (whatever ‘Christianity’ is supposed to mean in this context), it’s perhaps important to remember that barely 7% of Britons can regularly be seen at church on a Sunday. Considering that the corresponding figure for the constitutionally secular USA touches 40%, it seems to be a bit of a misnomer to call the UK a Christian country. There’s something highly idiosyncratic – and fundamentally paradoxical – about a state whose identity seems to rest on the formality and regalia of monarchy and its variously rum traditions, and yet still manages to eschew any firm ideological or constitutional grounding. The various ‘baptisms of fire’ that British history has seen down the centuries (taking just the Break with Rome and the chopping of Charles I’s head as examples), seem to have failed to create any coherent national consciousness. Indeed, the fact that Henry VIII’s 1521-endowed title ‘Defender of the Faith’ still holds is a case in point: it remains in fundamental contradiction to the idea that the monarch, not the pope, controls the English Church.

What results is a distinctly intriguing, baffling, and even slightly endearing, mass of sometimes incoherent, unwritten, but binding, traditions underpinning a modern system of government. That doesn’t make for national identity. France, by contrast, is an officially secular country which, in reality, is far more ‘religious’ than Britain. Its seminal 1789 Revolution has crystallised a French national consciousness which values political and civil principle (I’m talking liberty, equality and fraternity) as its lowest common denominator. Britain never has quite managed to figure out what its central ‘civil’ creed is, even if it has one: its Empire and naval power constituted its identity – and when its Empire was gone, there was little identity left.

Perhaps indicative of this lack of identity is the contrast between some very divergent immigration policies. While France – and the USA, for that matter – both rest on a ‘melting pot’ system of immigration and nation building, Britain has advocated multiculturalism. In an era of mass immigration (Britain has been a net importer of people ever since 1983), it’s clear that national identity is determined by the manner in which a country assimilates its immigrants. In France, as Napoleon famously had it, a Jew is French as long as he puts his Frenchness before his Jewishness. Britishness, by contrast, hasn’t really had to come into the equation. But, as Gordon Brown has quite rightly stated, “When we were an imperial power, the main industrial nation in the world, defining our identity didn't matter. Now it does.” To bring this full circle, the Church of England can only reasonably defend its status as a ‘national’ institution, shored up by ancient privileges and inextricably linked with the state, as long as it can show it represents, in some way, shape or form, the British people as a whole. The strange thing is that it doesn’t – and therefore perhaps need to reconsider quite where it stands.

The issue of ‘Faith Schools’, one of the most awkward thorns to have found itself lodged in the government’s side since London’s rude introduction to Islamic terrorism in 2005, has cast upon the question of ‘national identity’ a disturbingly lurid light. If 7/7 said anything about Britain’s cultural topography, it was that it was entirely possible for ‘extremists’ to appear to be an assimilated part of the British mainstream (and certainly to be assimilated on a socio-economic level), and yet to be as bloodily polarized to it as possible. Is this a problem with multiculturalism? Not necessarily. As the Economist points out, British history – one necessarily shaped both by the UK’s ‘union’ structure and by its time in the imperial limelight – has ensured Britain’s natural adaptation to a multicultural model of assimilation. Making Britain a melting pot would mean flying in the face of history. Besides, as such technological phenomena as the blogosphere (and, indeed, the Internet as a whole) demonstrate, we live in an era whose shapes and structures are determined more than ever by the initiative by ordinary people. Any attempted ‘top-down’ revolution – that is, the imposition of some kind of civil credo, such being the direction in which certain members of the government would seem wont to move – will be ineffective. Change has to be of the grass roots variety; and because of that, is dependent on education.

Since the Church of England runs a significant proportion of Britain’s 6,955 partially state-financed Christian Faith Schools – alongside the comparatively paltry tallies of Jewish and Muslim schools (36 and 7, respectively) – it perhaps has a little soul-searching to do in the current debate over the legitimacy of these selfsame institutions. To call the Church of England’s agenda one of indoctrination would be misguided: although timetable allocation of religious education is monitored by the local diocese, there isn’t, in practice, very much more of it than in ordinary state schools. Partially state-funded faith schools follow the national curriculum. Indeed, contrary to what seems to be, in certain respects, a thinly disguised vein of ‘Islamophobia’, the Chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools, Muhammed Mukadam, has emphasised that “[Islamic Schools] give our young people confidence in who they are and an understanding of Islam's teaching of tolerance and respect which prepares them for a positive and fulfilling roll in society”. Reinforcing his point, he reminded the Guardian that none of the 7/7 suicide bombers – nor, indeed, any of the protagonists of the Bradford and Oldham riots – were faith school alumni. So are faith schools – accused across the political spectrum of entrenching ghetto mentalities and unconsciously fostering extremism – the key to getting all members of our multicultural society to lay aside their differences in pursuit of a common, British, identity? Not in their present, seemingly state-encouraged form.

CE schools (and especially CE primary schools) perform better on average, in league-table terms, than their purely secular counterparts. But they tend to be breeding grounds of the middle class: one of their (rather dubious) means of selection rests upon church attendance, and so has become a veritable bonanza for – yes – yummy mummies. Education-obsessed middle class parents will, it seems, cynically abandon their scruples in order to ‘get their kids in’ – creating school environments permeated by a pseudo-elite of children who got read ‘The Hungry Caterpillar’ by their parents. A form of petty bourgeois ghettoisation? Perhaps. Admittedly, the projected commitment of church schools to widen their intake to accommodate for a 25% quota of non-practising families, suggests a commitment to open up the ghetto. But what is more worrying is perhaps a national perception of CE schools. According to a survey published by the Guardian in August 2005, some 64% of those questioned were adamant that the government shouldn’t be funding faith schools of any confession. This does suggest, for the most part, a somewhat shaken reaction to the July 2005 bomb attacks, and is a verdict directed mostly against the idea of ‘Islamic schools’. But there’s no doubt that the nature of church schools suggests, to some, a certain church-enjoyed, government-endowed privilege. That doesn’t quite square with the idea of multiculturalism.

Examine the nature of Islamic extremists, coupled with the demands of many God-fearing Muslims in British authority, and another dimension starts to emerge. A postmodern obsession with pluralism and political correctness – combined with the characteristically pluralistic framework of multiculturalism - has created a Britain which feels it has to bend over backwards. Both the bogeyman of post-imperial guilt and the realization it needs to emphasize its lack of ‘Christian bias’, have reinforced this mentality. Hence a willingness in some quarters to exempt Muslim schools from quota-imposing legislation. Given that the nature and environment of such schools – unlike, say, the education offered by CE establishments – does not adapt itself easily to those who do not confess faith, such quotas would probably go awry anyway. But that’s largely beside the point: the fact is that extremists see this conciliatory approach towards policy making as an advantageous loophole, and one through which they can extort, blackmail and, ultimately, find so-called ‘reasons’ to blow innocent people to pieces. While Islamic extremism is, rather like Nazism, slightly confused in working out exactly who its enemies are (‘are we fighting against Western Capitalists and their mistresses, or Western Christians and their wives?), there are aspects of modern Britain that help to fuel its fire.

It could be said that one of these factors is, albeit indirectly, the very church whose broad spectrum of religious beliefs would advocate inclusiveness. And, ironically, the question rests on perceptions of privilege. If the House of Lords houses Bishops, why shouldn’t it also house rabbis and Islamic clerics? That’s a fair question, given Britain’s tradition of multiculturalism, and it cedes significant leverage to those who would exploit what they see as Western exclusivity. As the historian David Starkey rather astutely points out, Prince Charles – never one to be anything more that platitudinous in his utterances of wisdom – is straying into ‘dangerous waters’ in his eagerness to be a seen as a ‘Defender of Faiths’.

As Starkey shows, the perceived privilege enjoyed by the Church of England is making for some rather apologetic political gesticulation. Since those who want to tear apart the fabric of British society exploit such weaknesses, it’s high time for the Church of England to re-think its position – and to consider whether or not it should disband.

Being a Christian, I see some quite significant religious matters at stake in this question. Archibishop of York, John Sentamu – a man I admire greatly for his eagerness to stick up for the gospel in what is indeed a very secular culture – has talked of Christianity’s ‘being systematically eroded from public view’. He attacks the rather naff attempt of Birmingham’s city fathers, made in 1998, to rename the Christmas Holidays ‘Winterval’. Given that Sentamu escaped inevitable persecution at the hands of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, it would seem natural that he’s not one to be too Pollyannaish in his views. But he’s been joined by others, among them his ecumenical buddy Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester. Nazir-Ali (whose name suggests that he, like Sentamu, isn’t quite of pure Anglo-Saxon stock) points to a cultural dualism among some British Muslims. There is, he says, a hypocritical tendency throughout some parts of the Muslim world to ‘dominate’ when it suits (in terms of the political oppression rife throughout Islamic states), and, simultaneously, to play out the role of the ‘victim’ of a hostile Western culture. Given that Muslims have been able to benefit from (and occasionally exploit) British political correctness, it’s time that Christians enjoyed the same level of recognition, respect and deference. In his 2006 Christmas Day sermon, Sentamu reminded his Yorkshire congregation that Christianity ‘is in the soil of this place’. The message was clear: if a new British identity is to be forged, it must draw on Britain’s Christian heritage.

Whether or not Christian soldiers are yet marching as to war is perhaps debatable; but certainly, believers are becoming more vocal. The Low Church-orientated Evangelical Alliance manages to find, almost on a daily basis, issues to squawk about, be they the loosening of gambling restrictions or the seemingly inexorable spread of gay rights legislation. Christian political lobbying (at the moment very much an American phenomenon) is, for some, an attractive prospect. But all this militancy – fuelled by the idea that Christianity has a small, put-upon minority which is trying to battle against the ruthless invasion of secular ‘non-values’ – is a little difficult to take seriously. As the Economist points out, there’s an inherent inconsistency in the concept of a state-endorsed Anglican Church, which not only has under its belt a good proportion of Britain’s built heritage, but which also supports a fair chunk of its state education as well, complaining about marginalization.

Once again, this is a problem of perception: Christian values are getting marginalized; but this doesn’t draw a huge amount of sympathy from many secular Brits. I certainly don’t advocate a dissolution of the Church of England from the point of view of trying to increase Christianity’s political clout: as I argue in another article, ‘Is God a leftie’, the avenue of value politics is a misguided one; and the worst thing the Church of England could do would be to try and lobby for more ‘Christian ideology’ in politics. But, as a Christian, I worry for the credibility of the Gospel message as a whole. More significantly, ‘privilege’ within the church – and within church-supported schools – is utterly anathema to Christ’s message. The idea of the Church as an ‘institution’, or – worse – a bureaucracy, as opposed to an inclusive, compassionate testament of God’s love, brings us back to the dry, desiccated and ultimately meaningless religiosity that Jesus came to subvert.

This, though, is the impression many are getting. The long-raging row over the ordination of gay bishops shows the Church of England to be a bit of a basket case. It could, indeed, be said that the Anglican Communion’s fragmentation and increasing irreconcilability is suggesting to cynical onlookers that a senile God is starting to lose direction. More importantly, the issue of ‘homosexuality and the church’ has been blown out of all proportion. While homosexuality is just one of a list of sins mentioned by Saint Paul, the very nature of human religiosity – its tendency to resort to a ‘fortress mentality’ of insistent partisanship and zeal – has made it very hard for the Church of England to avoid such a dispute. Homosexuality was not, I believe, part of God’s plan for the world; but what has resulted from this dispute is the increasing (albeit mistaken) perception, among many non-Christians, of an inherent judgementalism at the heart of Church.

The Church of England is doing neither the state which it serves nor the faith which it represents many favours. Multiculturalism is not, in itself, a problem; the excessively conciliatory ‘positive discrimination’ that the British government is trying to pursue (one no doubt egged on by a desire to cancel out the privileges that ‘Christianity’ has traditionally enjoyed), is. Britain does need an identity. In a recent poll, according to the Economist’s latest survey on Britain, a surprisingly large proportion of British Muslims identify themselves as being Muslim first and British second; British Muslims are more likely than their German and French counterparts to reject Western values. But that’s not to say that multicultural Britain can’t be the seedbed for the development – albeit a long-term development – of this identity.

Christianity, though, needs to detach itself from the British state. It doesn’t need to let go of its heritage; after all, a beautiful cathedral will always be a beautiful cathedral. But it does need to distance itself from a messy engagement in things that should be the state’s prerogative: politics and education. Religion needs to be ‘put back in its box’, as David Starkey argues. British society can certainly modernize and reinvent itself: both the Thatcher revolution and New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ vibes marked, it could be said, symbolic economic and social breaks with the past. It’s a long time since the UK was the sick man of Europe – but the haunting 7/7 dateline serves as a harsh reminder that Britain certainly hasn’t ‘got it all together’ yet. In building a national identity fit for the 21st Century, the nation should take another, hard, look at its national Church and consider whether it is an asset or a liability. Since Mr Blair likes ‘government targets’, I might modestly propose 2012 as a possible deadline.

A profile of where I am (Paris)...

2007-02-02T07:35:00.000-08:00

Paris is a city which can seem instantly familiar – if the ubiquity of the supposedly Eiffel Tower-dominated skyline on the front of the postcards is anything to go by. And in many respects, it fulfils Brits’ expectations: the quaint, vaguely bourgeois street café is here, as anticipated. Café culture isn’t just something Monsieur French teacher told you about in year 9 to make you want to do his subject for GCSE: it’s a reality of day-to-day Parisian living. The aesthetic of the city also lives up to the renown surrounding it: despite the obvious clichés that have attached themselves to the most famous monuments, no one but the most cynical could help but acknowledge Paris’ beauty. In terms of culture, Paris is matched by few other capital cities, from the variety of its art galleries and museums to the richness of its heritage.

But since a city is defined by its people, the profile of Paris is a profile of the Parisians. There are around 8-10 million of them (depending on your figures); a fairly large proportion of them is of ethnic origin (the Parisian suburbs are, for example, home to a substantial number of France’s 4-5 million Muslims); and they have a (not wholly undeserved) reputation for grumbling about anything and everything, being awkward, driving dangerously and being annoyingly sanguine towards their dogs’ toilet habits. The public sector is much stronger in France than it is in Britain: 40% of French people work either directly or indirectly under it. Because of this, French trade unions have much more power. What this means in practical terms is that, despite the efficiency of the public transport system (the Paris regional network, the RER, is extensive, and its service relatively dependable), it is quite often affected by strikes. In addition, it is perhaps more common than in London to see street demonstrations on a variety of political and social issues: in February-March 2006, for example, students crammed into central Paris in order to express their disgust at the new job laws for young adults (the ‘CPE’). Universities remained closed for weeks. But while stereotypes about endlessly striking, endlessly protesting Parisians are easy to sustain, there lies, at the root of all their idiosyncrasies, a great insecurity.

Many Parisians feel that their language, culture and state-orientated social setup is being threatened by globalisation: Paris not only offers its ‘Anglo-Saxon’ visitors exactly the same range of MacFlurrys as they’d find in the Macdonalds in Scunthorpe town centre, but has also seen the invasion of the Frappucino. Starbucks is becoming increasingly popular. With this (to some) nefarious cultural influence has spread the influence of ‘franglais’. Given that the Parisians love talking to foreigners who speak French – and foster a significant pride in their language - this ‘cultural decline’ is an obvious cause for concern. The economic liberalisation that all this American influence is entailing is placing pressure on the state-orientated and heavily protected French economy. For Parisians used to set working hours and excellent social benefits, their politicians’ (alarmingly widespread) admiration of private sector-orientated New Labour is alarming.

Although small, independent bakeries seem to co-exist quite harmoniously with astonishingly vast out-of-town shopping centres, pessimism had become something of a default position. In addition, the suburban riots of autumn 2004 have thrown up serious questions about what it really means to be French – and why some ethnic groups feel so alienated from the ‘French mainstream’. Unemployment figures weigh perhaps least in the favour of second-generation immigrant youths, many of whom find their job applications rejected on account of an employer’s unofficial discrimination – and who feel themselves caught in an identity crisis between feeling French and aligning themselves with their parents’ culture. Certainly, the ‘melting pot’ model of social integration – one centred above all on the all-uniting importance of ‘being French’ – has done some parts of ‘French’ society no favours at all.

In this turbulent context, the Parisians are naturally preoccupied with politics. Since French education (and culture) is steeped in philosophy, they nurture a love of conversation and debate. The combination of these two fixations has created a culture which likes to talk – and about big issues. Given British politics’ reputation for mind-numbingly platitudinous dullness, this represents one of the major cultural differences between the two countries.

The spiritual life of Paris is difficult to discern since religion in France is, above all, a private affair. The Catholic Church retains a degree of cultural influence – albeit not in the political sphere, on account of the division between church and state. Protestantism, however, remains relatively hidden from view: partly on account of its history of subjection to persecution, it is known (not wholly unjustifiably) for its conservative, introverted mentality. The result in Paris – and, indeed, throughout France in general - is a significant divide between the two churches: it is notoriously difficult to get Protestants and Catholics to work together, except under the auspices of all-inclusive evangelisation initiatives such as the Alpha Course. An inherent anticlericalism and intellectual cynicism (a throwback, perhaps, to the French Revolution of 1789) seems to typify the attitude of a good number of Parisians towards religion. The Church building of the Eglise Reformée du Marais serves as an item of historical and cultural interest, being a popular stopping point for tourists; but any open, ‘public’ form of Christian outreach ‘à l’anglo-saxonne’ might be considered by many French to be both bombastic and intrusive.

However, given the Parisian love of both talking and eating (it is not uncommon to see diners in one of the many restaurants unhurriedly polishing off their main course at 11 at night), there remain plenty of opportunities for spreading the Good News. Alpha, for example, is very successfully tapping into France’s meal-centred mentality.

Is God a leftie?

2007-02-02T06:13:00.000-08:00

When a certain Ms Royal of the French Socialist Party proposed the introduction of ‘Popular juries’ throughout France, all hell broke triumphantly loose among the great and good. At last there was proof positive that the populist snow-white-business-suit-wearing énarque lacked both the historical awareness and political nouse to run the ailing French administration, along with the rest of France in tow. The concept of ‘Popular (or ‘citizens’) juries’ sounds all very worthy, the papers crowed, but – ahem – if you knew your French history, Ségolène, you would know that ‘citizen juries’ used to be just one step down the road towards Madame la Guillotine. The Jacobins, it was gleefully pointed out, had used the similar term to refer to the supposedly people-controlled councils which sent supposed enemies of the revolution to their deaths. Royal’s more thoughtful critics took a slightly different stance. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one of her main rivals for the Socialist presidential candidacy, pointed to the culture of suspicion that this obsession with civil accountability could create. Such populist policies, others contended, made for unrealistic politics.

There’s no doubt that Ségolène Royal is doing everything she can to show that she is the candidate of the people. Visit her website, the promisingly titled ‘désirs de l’avenir’ (Desires of the future), and the first thing you’re invited to do is not to peruse a glossy campaign prospectus (the wholesome mugshots of Royal herself notwithstanding), but instead to ‘participate’ in suggesting ideas and policies. As publicity-conscious as ever, Ségolène has tapped into the blogosphere. It is, of course, politically expedient for her to portray herself as one of the people – especially given that her main rival, Nicholas Sarkozy, still has to get over his unfortunate association with high-pressure industrial cleaners. But populist policies and associational faux pas aside, what Royal is doing is significant. It is good that a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration – the epitome of the out-of-touch political elite that has characterised Jacques Chirac’s term in office – wants to bring politics to the people. And as easy as it is to be cynical, perhaps there’s nothing wrong with trying to breathe new life into the principles of Liberté, égalité and fraternité – if only be way of a populist, potentially naïve gesture on Royal’s part. Could French politics genuinely be making a return to its ideals? And could the onset of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ campaigning styles actually – paradoxically - re-assert the importance of ideological politics, instead of just tempting more political chameleons (which Royal herself is accused of being) out of the woodwork?

The 2007 French presidential election will arguably be the most significant of the Fifth Republic so far. But at this watershed between the privilege-orientated regime chiraquien and the (potentially) more accountable and people-orientated administration of Chirac’s successor, is it time for French Christians to take another look at the relationship between their faith and their political worldview? In other words, is there such thing as a ‘Christian manifesto for France’? And, in a wider context, can God’s Kingdom be established, politically, here on earth?

The theory of French Republicanism embraces some admirable – Christian – principles. As the historian Michael Burleigh argues in his excellent book Earthly Powers, the fathers of the First Republic were strangely influenced, in spite of their vociferous anti-clericalism and utterly tyrannical brutality, by the Christianity that went before them. The ‘political religion’ of Republicanism espoused such values as brotherhood (brotherliness being one of the keystones of Christian community) and equality (the equality of all humans proving to be, in worldly terms, an illusion, yet, before God, a perfect reality). The paternalistic nature of the French social model, in fostering an (imperfect) Civil Society, can be said to reflect the principles of Christian solidarity and community. After all, the state has the responsibility to look after its citizens.

But therein lies the irreconcilability between the theory of French Republicanism and the reality of the Kingdom of God. Totally different concepts of ‘freedom’ underpin the two. The former has a rights-orientated idea of civil liberty. In other words, it sees the idea of ‘liberty’ as the freedom of the individual to behave as an independent entity with the right to his own opinions and his own way of life, on condition that he doesn’t impede the rights of his fellow citizen. Our freedom as Christians is responsibility-based. We have been freed from the shackles of sin – but, as a result, pass out of the hands of one master into those of another. We become adopted children of God and, because of this, assume both the identity and responsibilities that come from being His children. John 1:12 sums up this freedom: ‘to all those who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God’. As children of God, and members of his church, we are responsible for one another: Ezekiel 33 and Matthew 18 (vv 15-20) remind us of this. Within the church, it’s not just a case of us ‘relying on’ and ‘benefiting from’ the state: it’s a case of us actually contributing towards upholding, perpetuating and glorifying God, his Kingdom and his people.

Of course, French (and British and American) citizenship entails obvious civil responsibilities, the payment of income tax being just the most irritating of them all. But these necessarily represent a different form of responsibility. And that is one of the reasons why Christians shouldn’t think that God’s Kingdom must be established, politically, on earth. Western jurisprudence – indeed, Western morality – is based on the principle of ‘contract’. In the same way as hitting someone will probably cause them to retributively hit you back, harming and hence compromising the integrity of the state (being a criminal, in other words) will result in punishment. What results is basically an unspoken civil contract between the state and the individual – and a very important contract at that.

However, the worldly conception of ‘law’ and ‘morality’ – that it is the result of the state’s using the self-interest of the individual to encourage civil obedience – is by no means the same as God’s interpretation. Since we’ve been freed from Old Testament (moral and civil) Law through Christ’s death and resurrection, we’re no longer bound by the constraints of this Law. Christianity is about of relationship of love between the believer and God, and hence between the believer and the rest of God’s human creation: true love isn’t contractual, and so no ‘contract’ is involved. As citizens of God’s kingdom, love is for us the first and last word – as Paul famously affirms in 1 Corinthians 13. But the writers of the New Testament make a clear distinction between the ‘ways of God’ and the ‘ways of the world’. The two are irreconcilable, to such an extent that the ways of the world cannot be forced to conform to any extent to the ways of God: the definition of ‘freedom’ is a case in point.

We have to accept, as Christians, that the Kingdom of Heaven will only be fully established with the advent of the new creation: trying to persuade others to reject the ways of the world and bring a ‘Godly’ social and political system into play might sound like a worthy (and very nice) thing to do – but it’s not possible and it’s not what God wants. Changing something or someone demands as a prerequisite the casting of a value judgement – and since Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 5 ‘What have I to do with judging outsiders [non-believers]?’, it is clear that judging the world, and thus trying to change it, is not biblical.

It’s this self-righteous, ‘I’m-going-to-save-the-world-myself’ attitude that has always been the driving force behind the theocracies of history. As Christians, we know we’ve been freed by the truth – and we know we’ve been told to ‘go…and make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28:19). But this can very easily spill over into an assumption that we’re God’s spokespeople – the people whom he’s chosen to be guardians of his truth on earth. European history is full of the caricatures – Henry VIII, to dredge up just one illustrious name – of those who have seen themselves as just that. Their fixed interpretation of scripture – one often nuanced by ridiculously pedantic takes on the Eucharist, to take just one example – have led to the persecution of anyone who didn’t share this interpretation. After all, when you’re the guardian of God’s one truth, how else are you supposed to show that you alone can show people how to reach God? A monopoly of righteousness emerges.

Henry VIII is, admittedly, a slightly extreme example, and one perhaps not so applicable to modern Western democracy. Today’s situation, though, is somewhat subtler. It’s in the assumption that a country, or a worldly government, can ever be considered to be ‘Christian’, that today’s church faces its real problems. The avenue of so-called ‘value politics’ is a tempting avenue to go down. For example, opposing gay civil marriage – a stance based on the fact that scripture shows homosexuality to be a sin – could be considered to be in everybody’s best interests. After all, gay marriage wasn’t a part of God’s plan for humanity and, because God is good, people would be far better off if they stuck to the scheme God had in mind all along.

This might be an arena in which Christians feel able to put their views across and get ‘Christian’ legislation put in place; but perhaps we, as Christians, need to rethink our value politics. Because Christianity is not a ‘religion’ in the sense that it is not centred on rites, works and dry morality, but instead is centred upon all-trumping importance and value of each individual human in God’s eyes, we need to avoid seeing principles, values – and, above all, morality – as the be-all and end-all of our faith. In a Christian state with a Christian ‘manifesto’, the morality encouraged, or even obliged, of all citizens would soon become greater than the citizens themselves. Jesus reminded the Pharisees in Mark 2:27 that ‘the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’. In other words, the idea that God holds ‘morality’ and ‘living by the law’ in a higher regard than he does his own children is simply false.

Because we are called to love our neighbour, this includes giving him the dignity and self-respect that comes from complete, uninhibited freedom of choice – in terms of values and, much more importantly, in terms of salvation. This is important even if the consequence of the choice we’ve made is life – and the consequence of any other, death. It is therefore not through our rationally demonstrating that sexual immorality, for example, isn’t in humanity’s best interests, but rather through our showing God’s love through our behaviour, words and actions, that God will enter people’s lives. In other words, why are we inexorably trying to make an impression on (and through) ‘value-based’ legislation – why, indeed, are we spending so much time protesting against the ‘invasion’ of secular values – when there’s a far more important job to be done? The same can be said of other ethical issues on which Christians seem to hold one particular view – and everyone else either no view in particular or quite the opposite view, thank you very much. Because Christianity is a relational faith, we are called to deal with people as individuals; not as generalities or homogenous entities. For this reason, there can be no such thing as a Christian state.

A secular state can, however, incorporate aspects of Christian social engagement. Indeed, we’re told to provide for those less fortunate than ourselves: ‘defend the rights of the poor and needy’ exhorts Proverbs 31:9. It goes without saying that there’s a place for the Christian in politics – certainly when it comes out to pointing out the unfortunate flip-sides of Capitalism and Globalisation. Before it was abolished by our Christian friend Henry in 1536, monasticism was the sole provider of any kind of charity and social security in England. Historians point to the exacerbation of economic and social destitution over the following decade, seeing it, to a certain degree, as one consequence of dissolution. The concept of ‘Social Catholicism’ – an expression coined by the German cleric Bishop Köller in the 19th Century – could be seen as (one) forerunner of both Bismarck’s 1880s social legislation, as well as of the introduction of state welfare measures in England in the early 20th Century. Today’s voluntary sector still makes a significant contribution towards maintaining the integrity of communities throughout the UK: British Chancellor Gordon Brown – one of the architects of business-orientated New Labour – has spoken of its importance. In the wake of Thatcherism, the Church constitutes, perhaps, one of the very few real communities left in Britain.

In a technological and (some might say) clinical age of atomisation and an obsession with autonomy and 'personal space', inclusiveness is a testament to love. But just as Jesus advised in Matthew 6: 2 that ‘when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you’, so too does social engagement run the risk of becoming institutionalised, ostentatious, conceited and even – somewhat paradoxically - judgmental. A government influenced by charitable, Christian values is an excellent thing; but that doesn’t mean a government should (or could) be described as ‘Christian’. Jesus’ teachings have inspired many who would be described as ‘leftie’ – but that doesn’t mean that God himself is a leftie.

Despite Christianity’s obvious contribution towards progressive social thinking, secular historians delight in pointing out the hypocritical brutality of the crusades, using it as apparently damning evidence against the case for religion. Sometimes it can seem – all social benefits aside - as if ‘God’ has done the world no favours. But look at the wider picture, and it’s easy to see that ‘God’ isn’t the problem at all. After all, secular religiosity – coming most notoriously to the fore in the forms of Fascism and Communism – has left its indelible mark on modern Western civilisation. Man is, by his very nature, naively religious and has, in his time, been seduced by a political Messiah or two; Jesus, however, refused to play a subversive political game, rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar in a Roman-controlled world not enormously different in principle from the rapidly globalising European Union.

A ‘Christian manifesto’ for France would, of course, never materialise. Any move even to re-establish the Church would meet howls of outrage from all corners of French society…and quite rightly so. But even hypothetically speaking, a ‘Christian manifesto’ would be an awful thing. We are not here to ‘build God’s Temple’ in the heart of Paris, London or Washington: God’s temple is already established in our hearts. Therefore, it’s through us as individuals – and not as states, nations, politicians or governments – that God is building his Kingdom. Ségolène and Nicholas can rest, assured.