Most of us just think about the state – politics, society, etc. We barely think about religion, or, if we do, there is a strident noise of disjunction as gears change and we attempt to think in a different mood. Not politics, but religion. Not state, but church. I find this myself: I mostly think about secular matters. I have had phases of writing about religious subjects, or reading through theological literature, but this has remained somewhat shadowy in my academic writing, and I sometimes find that being reminded of the religious aspect to any problem is to be reminded of the dark side of the moon.
But since the beginning, and until the end, politics and religion will be intertwined. Our civilization might be only the slenderest insertion of an attempt to separate them into the geological timescale: like a thin stripe of comet dust running across the sediment. Almost all ancient societies, and many later societies, simply associated politics and religion, and called the result law or life or ‘the way’. But this is where the Israelites come into history, and into importance: since they originated a sensibility that eventually made secularity possible: they took their religion so seriously they detached it from actual politics – though they retained the hope, also found in Christianity, that religion would find its consummation in a restored politics: either that of the New Jerusalem or that of the Kingdom of God.
It is a significant fact about the historical Israelites. When any other ancient people was defeated in war, they abandoned their gods, whom they blamed for the defeat, and adopted the victorious gods. But the Israelites, when defeated, or conquered, or sent into exile, blamed themselves: and held onto their God. Christian civilization, or Christianitas, as I discover it used to be called, is a civilization in which we pray that God’s will be done. “Thy will be done.”
Christianity never was David Starkey’s ‘English shinto’: “The English worshipping themselves.” Starkey is right about almost everything: politics, law, history. But he is, alas, wrong about that. Christianity never asks us to pray, “Our will be done.”
Anyhow, I have an argument to make.
There is a question that was answered in the negative, in advance, by figures such as Burke, De Maistre, Newman and Manning. This question was: Can man exist without religion? And, more specifically, can the West survive without Christianity? The argument I want to make here is that there is a secular reason why we might suppose that our liberal, secular society is doomed without religion – specifically, its own original religion of Christianity. This is because it is only if it is Christian that it can defend itself. If it is only liberal and secular it will capitulate to its enemies (ironically dying as it strains to refuse to capitulate to the one religion that could save it).
Take a secular society.
I have to admit that I am stealing from one of the great thinkers of the last century, Michael Oakeshott. You have to concentrate a bit to catch the drift, but hopefully it is worthwhile. I am going to refer to a distinction Oakeshott makes in his late work On Human Conduct, which was published in 1975. This is because he sketched an ideal which, it seems to me, is more or less our liberal, peaceful conception of good order.
Oakeshott asks, what is the state?
His answer is that it is a composite of two ideas of association.
The first is that we are associated in terms of law: we observe these laws, and then can enjoy the liberties that these laws permit. This is individualistic. Oakeshott calls this ‘civil association’.
The second is that we are associated in terms of a common good: we have come together to achieve some very specific end. This is collectivist. Oakeshott calls this ‘enterprise association’.
Oakeshott liked the former; he disliked the latter. This is where he is a good classical liberal, or conservative, or whatever you want to call him – he wasn’t keen on these sorts of words. But he attempted to be fair, and theorise both of these ideas together. He suggested that the European, or Western, state is a composite of both. If we simplify his argument a bit, what this means is that we find individual liberties and collective goods mixed up together in state activity. Sometimes the justification for political action is in terms of autonomy and free activity, ‘freedom of speech’, etc. But sometimes the justification is for salus populi: dealing with systematic injustice, making provisions for the coming climate catastrophe, or imposing a basic income – or fighting a war (or imposing two-tier justice). Here, we act together to do something. This is the ping pong of much politics. Except Oakeshott argues that it is not only at a surface level that politics is mixed: the state itself is, in its constitution, an awkward and equivocal, cognitively dissonant, combination of the impetus to allow everyone to live as they want in peace, and the impetus to establish by design and coercion and nudge the greatest good of the greatest number.
Some of us, perhaps most of us, who are aggrieved at the early 21st Century state, who are appalled by COVID-19, Climate, Intersectionality, and the Long March Through the Institutions, would obviously favour Oakeshott’s ideal of ‘civil association’. It is a grand idea. Enough law and order to get us through, decorated by a bit old culture, ‘cultural Christianity’ and whatnot. Live in peace, eccentric English ladies and gentlemen.
But, but, but.
I do not think that civil association can defend itself. Let me remind you. Civil association is an association that exists only in shared acknowledgement of law. It is not association that is designed to do anything. It is peaceful association, not warlike association. Now, no civil association has ever fought a war: it would not be good at it. When the United Kingdom or old England fought wars, it was, a nation under a medieval king, or a modern general: it was an enterprise association. For war is the simplest and starkest of all enterprises: where the common good is defence or conquest or even just a demonstration of will. The Saxon Shore, Bouvines, Agincourt, Poitiers, Blenheim: all were enterprises. They were barely civil. Oakeshott disliked enterprise association because it was not civil. And this is to his credit. But the state, our state, if it wants to defend itself, cannot be civil. It has to engage in an enterprise: the equivalent of a crusade. And it cannot do this unless it understands itself to be in some respects an enterprise association, an association in which we are bound together in terms of wanting to achieve a common good.
What I am saying is that even if our ideal is that of civil association, we cannot defend this idea except in so far as we imagine ourselves to be an enterprise association, willing to fight in defence of that civil association.
England, for want of a better word, will die if it is only a civil association. Why? Because it will be infected, invaded, inseminated with the visions of enterprise derived from other, lesser, civilisations, and also visions of enterprise invented by the bastard children of its own degraded ideology. This is what is going on now. Civil association is being eaten out from within by both foreign uncivil ideas and home uncivil ideas: and this is being presided over by the complacent class of those who feel sufficiently educated and enlightened to survive and fail to recognise the turbulence beneath them in society.
So there has to be an English enterprise association. But it cannot be the English worshipping themselves: for this would be Little England, Crusader Football, White Supremacy stuff, at best. It has to be the English worshipping God, praying for His will, and not theirs, to be done. And this is not Little England: it is cosmopolitan, Catholic in the best sense, for one of the great complications of English history has always been that our civil association has been Little Englander, while our enterprise association has been Christian. The dissonance between the two has not always had good consequences, but they balance each other, and prevent us becoming either emptily globalist or entirely solipsistic.
My suggestion for the sort of Restoration proposed by David Starkey is radical: more radical than his, which is just constitutional and tries to ignore Christianity. I think that unless the English are willing to insist that England is Christian, and that the Church of England is a Christian church, and to make this so, not by force, but by institutional entrenchment and something like financial encouragement (the restoration of tithes, and the restoration of – and I know this will be controversial – tests); then, bit by bit, our secular intellectuals and their instruments will preside over a fading out of our civilization until the last Muslim and the last Feminist cry bloody murder and engage arms.
Christianity is the only safeguard of civil association. In our country, it forged civil association: and the walls of civil association will collapse without it. Watch as the armies of other associations derange the country with their visions of enterprise.
If we want our state to be a civil association, we cannot neglect the enterprise association that is the historic church. We depend on it for the defence of our order – of good order.
The death of God simply will not work. We will have a religion whether we want one or not. If it is not Christianity, it will be a false or much inferior religion: Islam, or something composted out of out of the rotting peel and cabbage leaves of DEI, NHS, Net Zero, COVID-19, MSM, WHO, British Values, etc.
Let me repeat: liberal order, secular civilisation, Oakeshott’s ‘civil association’ is a marvellous historical achievement, but it cannot defend itself. It is fragile: it is indebted to Christian history. Mock that history as barbarous and ignorant, as Hume did, if you like, but beware the consequences. Cut from the root, the flower will wilt.
Or to put it another way, the Christian church is the guardian of the saeculum. After all, it invented it. Throw the church away, and the state will revert to being a simple tyranny, an unmitigated extractive regime. There is not much of a United Kingdom to be had without the Kingdom of God.
James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Perhaps you’re on to something, Professor Alexander.
Somehow brings to mind long-ago end-of-term school assemblies, at which our year turned out to be the last Grammar School intake, as the white heat of socialism merged three separate school sites into one comprehensive Jerusalem, built at the stroke of a Labour Education Secretary’s pen.
For around nine terms, the old Boys’ Grammar soldiered on in isolation, as the next yearly intakes were assigned to the old Secondary Mods as part of the first Five-Year Educational Plan.
So for nine terms the old-school Grammar-School Beak continued the old-school, end-of-term tradition of reading from St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians…
“When I was a child, I thought as a child… As if seeing through a glass darkly… And so abideth these three… Faith, Hope and Charity… But the greatest of these is Charity.”
Followed, if memory serves right, by a rousing chorus of Jerusalem lifting the assembly hall roof off, at a school at which assembled hymn-singing was generally at best patchy.
Meanwhile at home my father was an atheist and my mother a lapsed churchgoer, but the message of doing unto others as you would wish done unto yourself was well-aligned between home and school.
The past is another country, but if nothing else, it lives on inside my head, on occasion permeates how I live, and, for all I know, maybe also on occasion ripples outwards.
I’m not particularly religious despite my farther being a member of the clergy. I suppose I’m comfortable being a cultural Christian.
I’m not religious either. Maybe I am a “cultural Christian” too. I will have to think about what that means. My kneejerk reaction is that it’s a contradiction in terms. You either believe that Christ died for our sins, in which case you’re a Christian, or you don’t, in which case you’re not. But maybe there’s more to it.
Humans do seem to need something, and so do societies and civilisations, to rally around. Race, “blood and soil”, a monarch, a specific set of ideals, a religion of some sort (even wokeism or socialism or climatism or scientism or safetyism).
Jewish people seem quite comfortable with this idea. Most Jewish people I know are secular Jews, as they refer to themselves. But unquestionably Jewish.
Then again they have about 2000 years head start on Christians.
That said, Jewish people are a minuscule proportion of the world population, so it remains questionable as to how much of winning strategy being a secular anything is.
I’d be more impressed if Western Churches were more able to defend themselves against the march through their own institutions. It seems counterintuitive but religions get their strength from the belief of their adherents – and I don’t believe(!) there are enough people who can be convinced to believe any more.
100% agree. My bias – militant Catholic. Church militant and probably born 1000 years late.
Culture is King. When your society worships fake science, does not know a penis from a vagina, believes in UFO’s, non-existing viruses and believes that because a fat face is peering into a small screen it is the apogee of development – it will implode.
Culture is King. This is why nations must exist and persist. No national cultures no freedom. This country was built by, and on, Christianity. Full stop.
I think that unless the English are willing to insist that England is Christian, and that the Church of England is a Christian church, and to make this so, not by force, but by institutional entrenchment and something like financial encouragement…
Christianity does not become a common enterprise by social expediency, but by the conversion of a significant part of the population. Otherwise it is still going to be a mere cultural Christianity, attempted by those who say “I am not a Christian, but I see the value of Christianity…” In other words, it only becomes an “enterprise association” (“εκκλεσια”, “assembly,” or “church” is the word we’re looking for) because it is seen to be true. And if it isn’t seen to be true, then there’s no point in making it our enterprise association, is there?
So the question for everyone is, if Christianity is seen to be so necessary and useful, what is it that stops it being true for “cultural Christians”? Is the refusal to commit to Christ any more than a tired old cultural conditioning by a discredited secularism?
My conclusion: we don’t need “institutional entrenchment” or “financial encouragement,” but revival. Unless Christ died for our sins, and we receive that news gladly, Christianity is nothing.
Good and interesting points. I see the value of Christianity, for sure. But I am not a Christian. Is that a result of “tired old cultural conditioning”? Maybe. I don’t feel conditioned, but I guess most of us are, to a greater or lesser degree. I just cannot get my head around the idea of God and the story of Christ. It’s beyond my ability to process.
Here’s a thought – if Christianity is true you can start anywhere to approach it. I’ve known people who became Christians by years of scientific research, and others who tore a page from a Gideon’s Bible to light a fag in prison.
For example, God is not an idea, but a person. So you could ask him to lead you to truth, and see what happens next.
Or, if evidence is your thing, look at whether today’s scientific knowledge really supports a universe without a governing mind, in the light of cosmic fine-tuning or the waiting-time problem in evolution.
Or after 200 years of destructive biblical criticism, examine whether the New Testament narrative has been debunked, or rather reinforced.
Or if Christianity is so valuable, investigate how it got that way without a rather special origin.
I don’t say all roads lead to Christ, but C. S. Lewis was right to say that, more often than not, it’s not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and not tried.
Your thoughts are much appreciated.
I don’t think science can explain existence. Existence and time and consciousness seem to me to be completely, inherently, intrinsically inexplicable and miraculous to me.
I did read C S Lewis when younger, and found it helpful. Maybe I should revisit him.
Me too. And short on alternative explanations, too. “Chance and an infinite past” makes unwarranted assumptions about the powers of chance, and in any case would necessarily mean we’d never have got to a finite “now.”
“Pan-psychism” is supposed to account for consciousness, without explaining how – and doesn’t explain its existence.
Polytheism’s gods are unexplained products, not creators, of the cosmos – whose universal laws exclude the mythological political conflicts.
And then there’s the fact that everywhere you look it’s just so damned beautiful. It’s as if somebody cares. And that’s before someone shows us John 3:16.
Indeed.
I certainly don’t want or need any kind of explanation – looking for one seems pointless, a waste of time and finding one would be awful (except that I don’t see how one can be found).
I guess I feel a bit like this:
“…Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die…”
Aubade | The Poetry Foundation
Do read the whole poem if you don’t know it. It’s short and easy to read.
I so agree with all your comments, Jon. I especially agree re our world being so beautiful – it all points to our Creator God.
True, though “revival” assumes spiritual life in the first place, which I would not assume. But there is a book which I am told has sold more copies than any other. It needs to be re-read.
Exactly. I value the Professor’s posts highly. I think them amongst the very best things on the site. I look forward to them and am disappointed when there isn’t one. And the posts on the place of Christianity in our world are, I think, amongst his best and most interesting. BUT, in this one, as in all the others, he sidesteps the question of belief. He sidesteps Mr Garvey’s question, ‘Is it true?’ He even sidesteps the easier question, ‘Does it matter whether we think it true or not?’ No one goes to Church to save the State or even Society. No one is or can be religious for the sake of politics. There is and can be no praying ‘Thy will be done’ in order to do mine. And any simulated religion — anything that falls short of actual belief, such belief as, it seems Muslims have — will be found wanting. An England defended by a Christianity maintained by ‘insistence’, ‘institutional entrenchment’ and anything like ‘financial encouragement’ will be as helpless to defend ‘civil association’ as civil association is to defend itself. Mr Garvey and Pilla (a few moments ago) are right: the only recourse is repentance and revival. I say so as someone as incapable of either as, I presume, Professor Alexander is himself.
The problem with a society based on “civilian association” is that it cannot even agree on its values.
This is fundamentally the reason why it is doomed.
Ultimately, it gets to the point where it doesn’t even know how to define a woman.
Sooner or later it tears itself apart. There is no cohesion, only angry focus groups fighting for dominance. Give it three or four generations and it descends into anarchy.
Gordon Bennett, what a bloody fiasco. How predictable was this, though?
”BREAKING: Le Pen and all other defendants have been “sentenced to ineligibility” for democratic elections.
Just like in Romania, the frontrunner in France’s presidential election has been expelled.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1906647772121452827
”Marine Le Pen stands poised to win the 2027 presidential election in France unless the courts disqualify her from running, new polling published just hours before a court hearing to determine her future has shown.
On Sunday, a new Ifop survey for Le Journal du Dimanche showed Le Pen leading in every run-off scenario, making her the undeniable frontrunner and obvious candidate of the right-wing National Rally.
A Parisian court is set to rule Monday on whether Le Pen, accused alongside 26 others in the long-running “parliamentary assistants” case, will be sentenced to a five-year ban from holding public office, with immediate execution even pending appeal.
She is also facing possible prison time and a fine of up to €300,000.”
https://rmx.news/article/le-pen-beats-all-other-presidential-candidates-with-ease-in-final-poll-before-expulsion-court-hearing/
The globalist b’stards obviously saw her as a real threat that needed to be dealt with;
”She was also given a four-year jail sentence, with two years suspended. She is not expected to serve any jail time.
Le Pen, 56, is a three-time presidential contender who had said the next election in 2027 would be her final run for top office.
The ban, which comes into force immediately, ends those hopes unless she successfully appeals before the campaign.”
https://news.sky.com/story/marine-le-pen-barred-from-running-for-office-after-being-found-guilty-in-embezzlement-case-13339142
”For anyone wondering, this was the latest polling for the next French presidential election, published only yesterday.
Le Pen was beating every other candidate at a canter.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1906659324912386097
As in Romania now in France as the World Empire of Fascists moves to keep control. Offhand I can’t name him, but there is young man who is seen as a rising star in RN and could step up in her place and might even benefit from a backlash against the elite in the same way that having a sham conviction to label Donald a ‘felon’ was seen through by the people.
It is rather odd how every political opponent to progressive globalism is turning out to be a nefarious criminal. Thanks goodness we have incorrupt legal institutions to root them out, </sarc>
All well and good but ignores the fact that Christianity failed in Britain long ago. People vote with their feet, and don’t find spiritual sustenance in a set of beliefs based on a book, however inspiring the words may be, and however miraculous things happened 2000 years ago. (and yes, I do believe in the divinity of Jesus, and the miracles)
Singing lovely hymns can give you a lift one day a week, but what about the rest of the time? There is no spiritual METHODOLOGY offered by which one can ascend the spiritual mountain, and truly transform your self from average human to more Christ-like. I’ve seen this time & time again, both durinig my years of Chruch-going and encountering church-goers today: they have very little spiritiual growth, and are just as prone to the negativities of an egocentricc pesonality as the agnostics I rub shoulders with. Some are worse, with their self-righteousness & judgementalism.
No, what the country needs is a source of spiritual nourishment that will enable visible, tangible growth from the egocentric self to a higher state of consciousness, which is why I ended up in a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery, with spiritual giants as my companions.
The secular enterprise association used to be called the nation usually paired with the nation-state. This combination is possibly even more hated by the collective left than the church as the church could be and has been co-opted. That’s what mass immigration from not only foreign but seriously alien cultures is eventually supposed to deal with.
There are already German politicians running around in Germany who routinely claim that the myth that Germany would be the country of the Germans must finally be overcome, as it’s everybody else’s country but ours. During the recent election campaign, there were posters of the Green party demanding literally Unlimited immigration now!
Yes, I agree. The nation and the nation state could work, and that’s why they are under attack.
James do you not miss the obvious point that civil association is the civilised barrier to avoid the enterprise of civil war. A secular society is an imperative because of this threat so ably illustrated by the leathal disagreement between catholic and protestants at the reformation. The disaster now is that given the so called death of god, some idiots think there is no longer room for a significant difference of opinions. A neutral common wealth and common language has been given up by the internationalists ,who are all one. Ready to squash all difference for the sake of harmony or should that be conformity. It does not need Christianity as such it just needs politicians to one again understand that some of these positions are mutually exclusive including against internationalism, and so a civil secular common ground is required to enable them to get along.
Internationalism is not a common wealth to use individually, it is a common benefit at the behest of an elite.
Therefore it is the common appreciation that our secular society needs defending so as to also defends it’s constituent parts which is the true enterprise.
The early churches in the ancient Roman world were organised in the same way as all the other free associations that honeycombed Roman civic society. The Roman state had no control over any of these, from the craft and trade guilds to the clubs for almost any human social activity.
The Apostle Paul had to remind his converts that in coming to a church they had not come to a dining club or a debating club, as some obviously thought they had.
It was from this beginning that the saeculum had its origin. As Paul famously told his converts, they were not there to involve themselves in what today would be called politics.
Yet in the very same breath Paul created the concept of political legitimacy. The ruler – the government – was supposed to be a ‘terror’ to wrongdoers, Paul observed. That was the reason he gave as to why the government should be obeyed. But the unspoken implication in what he said is this: what if the government isn’t a terror to wrongdoers? Where then is its legitimacy?
There is nothing in Paul or any of the other evangelists to indicate that they thought that the purpose of Christianity was, as C S Lewis put it, to act as a ‘short cut to the chemist’s shop’. The faith as a means and the world an end. But by the beginning of the 20th century, the man who was the Bishop of Durham at the time was observing that much of the religion as preached in the churches had largely become social democracy; an extra impetus to social improvement.
Thought-provoking article with which I partially agree, being a strongly believing Christian (trying to follow Jesus Christ). I have paid up a one-off donation simply in order to comment!! I used to subscribe (for a few years) but have cut down dramatically on my extra-curricular giving for very valid and good reasons (money needed elsewhere, not for yours truly). I am interested in James Alexander as we used to know another professor at Bilkent university, who we presume is still there.
In this case, I agree with Jon Garvey’s comment below: it’s no good reverting to being a culturally Christian nation, repentance followed by revival is needed. Revival follows true repentance (seeing ourselves as sinners in need of a saviour). I continue to pray that God sends repentance on this nation.
Without Christianity there is either no standard or another standard to determine what is right or wrong.
If Christianity is thrown away then the concept of right and wrong, by Western standards, is also thrown away.
Without that moral standard then one cannot say that, for example, theft is wrong because maybe according to the moral standard of someone else stealing is ok.
Without a moral standard we cannot say our moral standard is better than someone else’s moral standard.
Also in Christianity we have the concept that everyone is created in the image of God and we are equal.
Without Christianity that idea of equality is thrown away.
Christians could say that slavery was wrong because it did not treat people equally.
Notice that Christians were the ones who started to do away with slavery.
The concept of equality is not in many other religions/ideologies so slavery was not against their moral code.
But, again, you can’t have Christianity for the sake of morality or equality. You can only have it for its own sake. If you try to have it for the sake of something else, what you will have is (at best) the something else, not it. I am not sure where he says it, but T S Eliot somwhere says something like ‘what we can’t have we must do without’. And that, it seems to me, is the truth of it. If you don’t believe Christ is the way, the truth and the life, you must do without Christianity.