Professor Luke Bretherton on the national Conversation
What story do we tell about Great Britain as a nation? And this isn’t simply an academic question. I think it’s a pastoral question you’re all probably all wrestling with in your in your local context. It’s a political question, obviously, but I think it’s also profoundly theological one. It shapes how we pray and bear witness in a time of profound uncertainty. I think for a long time, the dominant public story about Britain and indeed about the modern West more broadly, was what we might call a progressive one. In this story, we move from darkness to enlightenment, from Sacred to secular, from Revelation to reason, from scarcity to abundance. And this was told as a story of unfolding freedom driven by science, technology and rational administration. This progressive story still circulates today among many kind of technocratic elites. My own university is full of them. Often, I think there’s a way of justifying their authority.
But the mood, I think it was, we can all testify, has shifted. We’re living through what can be described as a post progressive moment, a vibe shift that’s most evident on the hard left and on the hard right. It’s a shift driven by the fact that I think for most people, the progressive story is an implausible and bankrupt one out of touch with their experience of life and the world they see around them. If we can think about the new labor slogan, things can only get better, that the rather good 1990s anthem, we’ve discovered that things can actually get a lot worse,and if the progressive story now rings hollow, we’re left with three possible ways of narrating Britain’s past, present and future possibilities.
The first is a story of totalizing shame. Britain appears as nothing more than a kind of hetero patriarchal, racist extractive project. This is a story often told on the left, particularly kind of decolonial left. And while it contains important truths, it’s not the whole truth. It risks reducing our history to a brittle moral register, collapsing complex realities into a Manichean binary of goodies and baddies and foreclosing the possibility of gratitude, repair and renewal.
The second is a story of unadulterated glory. Britain becomes the hero of world history, the nation that brought law, liberty and civilization to others, now fallen from greatness through weakness betrayal or the malign impact of polluting foreigners. This is the make Britain, make Britain great again narrative. It’s idolatrous. It makes the nation a messianic figure that must be redeemed if we are to be saved.
This was the story I think Rome was telling about itself afterwards sacked. If we think back to Augustine’s, the City of God, he’s writing that in response to the fall of Rome, exact by the Goths and a kind of story Rome, the leads were telling about ours, the Christians have corrupted everything. This kind of foreign religion is polluting, made us less virtuous, and our former glories are lost, and we need to restore them. And we can often be tempted, I think, to tell a similar story about Britain in the kind of post imperial period. I think you see this kind of story being told from Enoch Powell onwards, and there are people telling that story today, but I don’t think Christians can tell either of these stories, neither a progressive one, nor a kind of story of total shame, nor a story of kind of lost glory.
For Christians, the gospel of Jesus Christ alone is the greatest story ever told, and all other stories must be heard in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, only the kingdom of God instituted by Christ is the truly Messianic kingdom. To tell a story of Britain as an uncomplicated one of glory without shame is not true, or at least not the whole truth as there are things, or to just tell a story of total shame is not true either.
There are things to value, honor and cherish, but there is also much to be penitent for the story yet to be told, I think, is a Christian story, a story shaped by a theological narrative arc, a story of creation, fall and redemptive possibilities, a story in which God’s providence is at work through a nation’s history, even as that history is shocked through with domination, conquest, blood and tears in this telling, Britain is neither innocent nor uniquely evil. It is a fallen political community in which God has nonetheless been at work, sometimes in spite of a nation’s Act, the nation’s actions, sometimes through them, often in judgment as well as mercy. The task of the church is to tell this story
truthfully, to name what is worthy of honor and gratitude and to identify what requires repentance and repair. I think the national conversation is an opportunity to develop this kind of story as a shared story.
For Christians, this conversation must begin from the premise that our national identity and purpose are founded in neither blood, ie ethnicity, soil ie territory, nor money, economic exchange. Instead, a nation properly understood is founded on politics. Now, what do I mean by politics? By politics, I do not mean ideology, party, competition, rage, tweets, back room deals or debates about policy. I mean something far more fundamental. Politics is the answer to that most basic of human questions, which is, what do I do when I meet a stranger or someone I don’t like or find threatening or his way of life is different or even scandalous to me, there are only four possible answers.
I can kill them. Lots of people do that. There’s the answer. We see that in the news today. I can create a system to dominate them. Or I can make life so unbearable that they I cause them to flee. I cause them to run away. That’s why we’ve got a huge refugee crisis, or the final option is I can do politics. That is to say, I can form, norm and sustain some kind of common life amid asymmetries of power, competing visions of what it means to be human, and my own feelings of fear or aversion without killing, coercing or causing them to flee. I can give a very long, complicated kind of course on political theory and political theology, but those, really, when you boil it down to those, are the only options we have human history in our present moment are saturated with examples of the first three responses. I think faithful Christians should be invested in the fourth for both theological and practical reasons, Christians are to work with others through politics to remake the world as it should be and bear witness to how it will be in Christ. In other words, Christians are to be salt and light. Being salt means identifying and conserving what is good in our society that we receive from those who came before us, tending and cultivating it so it can be handed on to the next generation. Christians are also to be light, which exposes the deeds of darkness and brings understanding.
Being light means identifying what needs changing if we are to move from the world as it is to a more just and generous one, a common life. This vision, though, stands in sharp contrast to four dominant modern accounts of the nation.
The first of these is the nation as ethnos. The idea is that nationhood is founded on some pre political social form, such as ethnicity, shared ancestry, or a single, apolitical and unchanging culture and set of values. To understand a nation as an ethnos demands either integration into that imagined mono culture or excludes those who cannot conform because they lack the right skin color, culture or ancestry. Conceiving the nation as an ethnos does not allow for the participation in contribution to and negotiation by different forms of association and ways of life. Nor can it deal with the reality that every human is made up of competing loyalties, commitments and loves. We need a politics that is porous enough to recognize these realities, and that politics as its heart, is not about uniformity, but about enabling difference in constructive relation, in forming a common life.
Second is a nation as procedural Republic. In this the nation is reduced to a collection of rights bearing individuals governed by neutral rules abstracted from social practice and the lives and loves of the people who live in that place, entirely absent is the need to cultivate either the moral
meaning and purpose of the nation or the character and quality of relations that enable us to fulfill those meanings and purposes. In place of these stand supposedly neutral and rational procedures for adjudicating rival claims, if you want to. A big name philosopher who advocates this kind of position, John Rawls, is the kind of classic example of this. In this vision, the individual stands in direct and unmediated relation to the state and politics as the negotiation of a common life is suppressed in the name of procedure and statecraft.
The third is the nation as a site of recognition. In this account, the nation is understood as a platform for any and every culture to demand recognition of for their way of life, as if a culture was a possession, regardless of the consequences for everyone else. This is the framework I think of bad forms of multiculturalism as the quest for the expression of an essentialized, authentic collective identity that must be validated no questions asked, and without any expectation of contribution or loyalty to the wider political community and its Commonwealth. Lastly, there is the nation as marketplace. In this libertarian vision, the nation is reduced to the competition of ideas and interests, governed by a minimal state its common life, determined not by moral commitments to the welfare of all and participation in transcendent goods, but simply by the aggregation of individual consumer choices, we have not citizens, but consumers. That’s, I think, been a very dominant vision since Thatcher onwards
Against all of these, Britain is best understood as a demos, a people assembled in this land from many places, crafting through politics, a shared arena of just and generous common life through which we can and through which can be realized moral goods on which all are flourishing depends those who fail to contribute to and care for this common life, who operate out of a place of aggrieved entitlement, whether rich or poor, white or black, Christian or of some other creed, need calling out. Those who do contribute and care, who seek the welfare of this earthly city, whatever their station or origin or situation or ideological or religious commitment, need respecting a nation understood as a civic or political realm, or in the old Latin term, a res publica is one based on a shared set of institutions, laws, duties, customs and moral commitments to pursue a distinctive form of peaceable common life. A nation, in this sense, cannot be secured by cultural, religious, ethnic or ideological uniformity. It is made and lost through the quality of its politics, which is to say, it’s made and lost through the quality and character of the relationships between its people. It is constituted through a set of common goods that are hard won and must be tended and tilled in each generation through talking and acting together.
The story of this country is a repeated one of finding political means, often after violent conflict, through which to form a common life, amid competing visions of what it means to be human and asymmetries of power without killing or causing each other to flee or coercing one another, but rather by talking together across lines of difference and division, whether it was the struggle and eventual settlement between Normans and Saxons after 1066 Catholics and Protestants and Jews from the Reformation onwards, monarchists and Republicans from the 17th century onwards, Christians and secularists from the 18th century onwards, and running through the 19th century, often bitterly formed class conflicts, the struggle is always the same. Can we find a common life through talking together rather than killing, coercing and causing to flee the national conversation is just such an opportunity to do the holy work of talking and listening to strangers in a moment when many attempted to see killing, coercing and persecution as the legitimate options for the way ahead.
Let me conclude, I think the church is called to tell a better story, specifically about Britain, neither a story of despair nor one of unadulterated glory, but a penultimate story of grace and disgrace, a story that honors what is good, names what is sinful, and refuses all claims to ultimacy, except that of Christ. But we don’t know how to tell this story without talking to each other across lines of difference and disagreement about what really matters, what we really care. About and what should be loved. I think the national conversation is a two fold opportunity. It’s an opportunity to have a conversation between Christians amongst themselves about what kind of nation we want to live in and how Christianity relates to the nation state. Christians have got to have a conversation about how we think the relationship between Christianity and the nation state should be structured, and I think that’s particularly salient for the Church of England.
But second, it’s also an opportunity to talk with multiple others about what is the character and quality of the common life we can seek together, a common life on which all our flourishing depends, no matter what we believe or where we come from. And I think it’s that two fold opportunity that really led me to say yes to the invitation to be part of the commission, and that includes kind of whole variety people from different faiths and different walks of life and different backgrounds, and try and model, but also kind of discern with others what the shape and character of that common life is amid those who want to want to increasingly tell a story of polarization and exclusion and scapegoating and demonization, and can we find a way of talking together without killing, coercing or causing to flee?
Because I think we see around the world, and I’ve been living in America for the past 13 years, and moved here kind of just over two years ago now, and coming from that experience, seeing that actually the social infrastructure, not just the kind of material infrastructure, but the social infrastructure. Crucially, social trust is wearing very thin, and when it really wears thin, then the legitimacy of killing, coercing and causing to flee become increasing temptations and opportunities.
I think that’s maybe over dramatic, but I really do think that when you face the severe erosion of social trust and multiple factors that led to that, then the most basic account of politics needs to be restated, which is politics is the art of forming a common life without killing, coercing or causing to flee. I think that’s what’s in question at the moment, and I think that’s what the national conversation, in a very kind of mundane, ordinary way, is. That’s the fundamental challenge it’s trying to address.
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