HTR(12): Concentrating on the upstream

It was Andrew Breitbart who first opined that politics is downstream of culture, and that it was important for those of a conservative disposition to engage in cultural debate. I would push that further: culture is downstream of religion, and that if a conservative point of view is to make any headway it has to be explicitly religious. Without some anchoring in a religious tradition then the conservative perspective is inevitably washed away. Which means that if the conservative perspective is to be maintained over time then attention has to be paid to the upstream.

As I say often, reality is simply one of the names of God, and good religion involves a correct orientation to reality. (This maps with McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis by the way.) It is a necessary element of the Christian faith-claim that the Christian perspective offers the truest account of reality, that 'all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made'. In other words the Christian faith-claim isn't simply that following the Christian path is the best way for an individual to achieve salvation or joy or nirvana or bliss or anything like that – that is the post-Protestant individualist emphasis – but that in the incarnation of Christ we have received a revelation about the true nature of the world. To understand Christianity more fully is to understand reality more fully, and that also applies in reverse. I am immensely fond of the quotation attributed to Simone Weil: “If it ever comes to a choice between Jesus and truth, we must always choose truth, because disloyalty to truth will always prove in the long run to have been disloyalty to Jesus.”

There are two elements of the Christian understanding of the world that I want to emphasise, that I think are going to be increasingly important in the conflicts to come. The first is about the shortcomings of secular understandings; the second is about scapegoating.

In considering questions of excess immigration, and the cultural challenges that go along with the imposition of destructive multi-culturalist ideology, questions about the nation come to the forefront – hence 'National Conservatism'. I would simply point out here that it is difficult, if not impossible, to defend something that you do not believe exists. In other words if your world-view is fundamentally materialist and secular then there is no intellectual framework to make sense of a nation; a nation is simply a demarcated area of the globe within which there is a monopoly of force exercised by a state over that area. The composition of the population of that area has no character that can be discerned, indeed, to insist that there is such a thing as a national character, and, worse, that such national character might have virtues that need to be defended from vices that destroy such character – this is to identify oneself as unsophisticated and backwards, clinging to bible and guns and so on ('racists, fruitcakes and loonies'). The increasing disconnect between the elites (in Matthew Goodwin's sense) and the general population lies, in my view, with the educated blindness of the elites to that which most people live within. Most people would not be able to give an analytically robust explanation of a nation, yet they see what is being destroyed and they don't like it. The condescension and dismissal of such concerns by the elite is what is most contributing to the anger and disaffection with our democratic process.

Which leads me to the point about scapegoating. When people suffer (and the loss of the nation is experienced as a suffering by those who have not been educated away from such instincts, even setting aside those who directly suffer from the breakdown of law and order) then what follows is either depression, if the situation is felt as hopeless, or anger, when people feel that there is nothing left to lose. The insane rise in immigration in recent years, building upon the radical shift introduced by the Blair government, is stoking up immense ill-will. When this breaks out into a rage, as I expect it to in the next two to three years, then there will be a scapegoating process. My understanding of scapegoating I take from Girard. When there is conflict within a society the solution to such stress is found through the scapegoating process. A person or group is seized upon as the root and origin of this disunity, and the destruction or expulsion of that person or group becomes the means by which a unity is restored. The obvious historical example is 1930s Germany. My worry, as I continue to reiterate, is that the stoked up anger generated by the systematic blindness of our elite will erupt into a scapegoating of the Muslim population of the UK. The consequences will be grim.

Which is why we need an explicitly Christian contribution to this conversation. Not a classic hand-wringing 'we must be nice to the non-British' contribution but a robust 'nations are real and are worth defending' sort of contribution. This is what the Church of England in particular needs to be offering at this time. We need to offer an understanding of our situation that is attuned to what is real, which insists that nations are real things (principalities and powers) and that if we are to avoid horrors then we need to understand the scapegoating process, and learn from Christ how to avoid it, and live within the context of it. If secularism prevails then so will scapegoating, and thence slaughter. The most important thing for the Church of England is to disengage from the materialism that has compromised its witness, and recover a fully 'supernatural' understanding. It's one of the reasons why I am pursuing my research.

Although the National Conservative framework explicitly makes reference to religion, and of the Judeo-Christian sort, my worry is that any approach that places the political situation first, or even an approach which places the cultural situation first, will inevitably try to make religion into an instrument or a tool with which to pursue cultural or political aims. That is how I interpret much US evangelicalism and dominionism for example¹. Christianity is not an object to be manipulated; it is, rather, a process by which we – individually, communally, nationally – become more and more acquainted with and aware of reality.

So as I said to David in the comments – and I suppose this post is an extended answer to his question – I do want to see the conversion of England. The landscape of the next few years is rather dark without it.

1. I love Stanley Hauerwas’ comment, in the US context, to the effect that ‘if you have the American flag in your sanctuary, I have to tell you that your salvation is in doubt’.