Article
Comment
Nationalism
5 min read

Beware Europe’s political messiahs

As European leaders increasingly co-opt Christianity, George Pitcher asks if they have come to serve or be served?

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

two politician site at a press conference desk and laugh, behind them is a backdrop of the political party's logo.
Jorge Buxadé, a leader of Spain's Vox party, and Giorgia Meloni, Italy's Prime Minister, at a Brothers of Italy press conference.
Vox.

I worry that European Christianity may face an identity crisis. Not in the usual sense of us beginning to forget what we are and, as a consequence, who we are. Rather that the continent’s formative creed may be misappropriated by a gathering global trend towards identity politics, which may seek to conflate and deliberately confuse a messiah with the Christ. 

It’s easily enough done. Indeed, the first disciples did so. The Jewish resistance movement against the Roman oppressors, of which we presume John the Baptist was a leading light, was expecting a new Elijah to lead them to liberation – their messiah. 

What it got was a Nazarene called Jesus. The scales finally fall from the eyes of rock-like fisherman Peter when the Nazarene asks him who the crowds say that he is. Maybe John the Baptist, maybe Elijah, maybe a risen prophet, replies Peter.   

“But who do you say that I am?” asks Jesus of him. In one of the most dramatic verbal responses of the gospel, Peter (I imagine) whispers his answer: “The Christ of God”, though other followers evidently remain confused. The crowds who welcome him triumphantly into Jerusalem hail the “Son of David” and lay palms in his path. And arguably Judas Iscariot anticipates a popular uprising, a Passover insurrection, by arranging his arrest. 

They confuse the Christ with a messiah. The distinction is important today in the conduct of our polity. Because the latter delivers temporal deliverance, the former eternal. A messiah is cultic, the Christ is universal. 

That’s important because populist European politicians can adopt a messianic pose. But they struggle to be Christ-like. Do they come to serve or be served? Let’s just say that our popular political parties are light on foot-washers.   

The messianic leader, the chosen one, anointed by nation rather than by God, is at the heart of Europe’s current identity crises. 

But being messianic remains more than enough for nationalistic leaders, just as it would have been for one whose sole brief was to lead the people of Israel from under the jackboot of Rome two thousand years ago. The messianic leader, the chosen one, anointed by nation rather than by God, is at the heart of Europe’s current identity crises.  

Behold Christian Nationalism. It is cultic of the personality and it has a specific self-interest in co-extending the messiah with the Christ. Jared Stacy wrote excellently here recently that Christian Nationalism “has political potency because it taps into primal identities, theologies, and moralities.” 

Stacy’s article is a tour de force on the subject, connecting Christian Nationalism’s social and historical reality to its current political potency, and I don’t intend to channel it. What I will attempt is to pick up where he leaves off.   

He writes that the movement’s main error seems to be “its move towards supremacy. Jesus’s rejection of political power in the wilderness and his resistance to political power through the Cross are lost in the rising tide of Christian Nationalism.” 

This seems to me to allude to precisely the distinction I wish to make between the servant ministry of the Christ and the political potency of a messiah. To elide the two is the intention of popular nationalists when they claim Christian heritage. And there lies the true danger in this identity crisis. 

What I find so alarming is that it points towards the Church’s role in an emerging rejection of some aspects of liberal democracy in favour of populist nationalism. 

A Financial Times article this month traced the populist Catholic counter-revolution in Europe, which corrals religiously conservative young voters in support of nationalism and conservative family values. And it shows us why messianic Christianity can be so frightening.  

Its central argument, based on a poll in the French religious newspaper La Croix, is that youthful conservative Catholicism is re-emergent “as a political, as well as religious, force” and nor “is the fusion of Catholic identity politics with nativist and ‘sovereigntist’ populism… particular to France.” It notes the electoral success of the Vox party in Spain, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law and Justice party.  

What I find so alarming is that it points towards the Church’s role in an emerging rejection of some aspects of liberal democracy in favour of populist nationalism. And, while I don’t want to be melodramatic about this, I believe that in turn directs us to the darkness of the Church’s role in 20th-century European history. 

We may or may not be familiar with photos of clerics giving the fascist salute, as in Spain in support of General Franco. But it’s been a matter of constant debate since the Second World War whether the Church was an active collaborator with the Nazi regime, an honest dupe or a double agent, appearing to co-operate so that it could subversively defend persecuted Jews. 

It’s dangerous to invoke Hitler at every apparent threat to the liberal democratic federalism of the post-war European experiment. But it’s also valid to note resonances when the Church allies itself with nationalism. And that’s what is frightening. 

The direction of travel of European popular politics, from France to Vox to Brothers of Italy, places Christian witness chillingly into question. And, of course, this isn’t just about Europe. 

Donald Trump attempted to annexe scriptural authority to himself as president by posing outside a church brandishing a copy of the Bible during the Washington DC riots in response to the death of George Floyd at police hands (and knee) in 2020. 

Returning to Stacy’s commentary, he writes:  

“Christians may need to distance themselves from the American Jesus, only then to discern the things they have picked up and called ‘Biblical’ which are merely ideological.” 

Amen to that. A simple start to that might be to quote Terry Jones in Monty Python’s Life of Brian and assert of Trump that “he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.”  

Rather more seriously, we need to recognise, not just from our history, but the warning that the United States offers us today of sub-messianic nationalist leadership. For those of us of faith in Europe, we’ve had more than enough examples of the dangers when the Christ is adopted as a personality cult. 

The most supranational authority to which Christians owe allegiance is not a worldly power. And we lose sight of that identity at our peril.  

Article
Comment
Romance
5 min read

Getting hitched should benefit more than the advantaged

Marriage’s decline impacts outcomes for all.
A bride dressed colourfully stands next to her groom, dressed similarly, as he sits in a wheelchair.
Ellie Cooper on Unsplash.

Of all the dramatic changes to Britain in the last half century, one of the least discussed is the extraordinary decline in marriage.  

The marriage rate has fallen by two-thirds in the last 50 years. It was just above six per cent in 1972 and has now been under two per cent since 2017. 

This remarkable decline has corresponded with a rise in a relatively new relation type: cohabitation. Cohabitation was extremely uncommon before the 1960s, and even by 1986 just 10 per cent of new mothers were cohabitants. It is, however, rapidly becoming the mainstream. Now 35 per cent of babies are born to cohabiting mothers, and the total number of UK cohabiting couples increased from 1.5 to 3.7 million between 1996 and 2022.  

Much of this is due to couples delaying marriage: 84 per cent of religious and 91 per cent of civil marriages are now between couples that already live together, and the average age when first marrying has climbed by 10 years since the early 1970s. But it is also due to many more couples not marrying at all. 

Opinions understandably differ on this social transition away from marriage and towards cohabitation. It is a point of progress worth celebrating that the previous societal shunning of those, especially women, who had children outside of marriage has been left in the past. However, such progress has not been without consequences. Cohabitations are less stable, on average, than marriages. Cohabiting parents are around three times as likely to separate in the first five years of their children’s life as married couples.  

This stability is not simply because wealthier, more highly educated people tend to have stable families and also tend to marry. Studies by World Family Maps and the Marriage Foundation have shown marriage to be a larger factor in family stability than either education or income.  

Nor does the stability come from couples staying together miserably.  Studies undertaken in 2017 and 2024 looked at the outcomes of couples 10 years on from considering their relationships to be ‘on the brink’. In the initial study, while 70 per cent of cohabiting couples had separated in the decade since considering themselves ‘on the brink’, 70 per cent of the married couples had remained together. Perhaps even more crucially, just seven per cent of those married couples that had stayed together were unhappy in their relationship a decade on. The 2024 study found none of the sample of married couples that had stayed together were still unhappy 10 years on. For those that had stayed together, things had improved. 

This family instability that the decline of marriage has caused is also unevenly distributed. Affluent couples – often those most likely to criticise the concept of marriage – are much more likely to marry than disadvantaged ones.  

Looking at socioeconomic groups, seven in ten mothers from the most advantaged group are married, while just a third of those from the two most disadvantaged groups are. The effect is geographic, too. Institute for Fiscal Studies research has found parents having children are more likely to be married if they are living in better educated areas. For the advantaged, it is compassionately affirmational to suggest that every relationship is equal, even though the advantaged themselves choose the most secure option of marriage: a hypocrisy only tolerated due to the potent fear of seeming judgemental. 

The consequence of this is deepening inequality: disadvantaged families are rendered more likely to breakdown, while children from affluent backgrounds are disproportionately likely to enjoy the ‘the two-parent privilege’, the substantial emotional and developmental advantages of growing up in a stable home. Melissa Kearney coined the phrase, and her evidence shows how children grow up, on average, to have better educational outcomes, better emotional and physical wellbeing, and higher incomes if they are raised in two-parent homes. 

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families.

So, why are marriage rates so much higher among wealthier couples than poorer ones, and why is this gap growing? 

We can isolate three reasons in particular, each more solvable than the last.  

Most challenging is the feedback loop effect: people whose parents, role-models, and friends have not married are unlikely to do so themselves. The demographic trend compounds itself.  

Second, and easily addressable if only the will was there, is the public messaging effect: politicians – and to some extent celebrities – have consistently told the public that marriage is unimportant. In 2017, Marriage Foundation research found that it had been a decade since a cabinet member had discussed marriage in a speech. This has hardly changed in the years since. In 2024, the only major party whose manifesto even mentioned marriage was Reform; even then the focus in the relevant section seemed to be less on marriage and more on getting ‘people trapped on benefits back into the workplace’. 

Third is the cost of weddings. A quick flick through top wedding magazines suggests that the average wedding costs upwards of £20,000. Survey evidence from both Marriage Foundation and the Thriving Center of Psychology have found that most young people view weddings as unrealistically expensive. 

This financial problem is solvable: much of the costs relate to venue hire. Unless they are having a religious marriage, a couple will need to find a venue that has gone through the bureaucratic process of becoming an ‘approved premises’. The cheapest of these are register offices which, including all expenses, still cost about £500. 

This is eminently mendable. The Law Commission proposal to reorganise wedding law around the officiant, not the venue, opens the door for a future of more affordable weddings by removing the regulatory barrier. It will also bring the law in line with that of other home nations. 

This proposal will not work by itself, though, it will need to be supported by creativity in wedding planning.  

Wedding costs can be substantially reduced by taking a DIY approach. Food, drinks, and decorations can often be coordinated amongst enthusiastic (and appropriately competent!) guests.  

Booze free weddings are a growing phenomenon, and especially good for weddings with children.  

Such ‘group-effort’ approaches often have a unique feel thanks to the high participation of guests, and people are more likely to remember events that they feel a sense of ownership of, having helped make them happen. 

Alongside this is a recommendation by the Centre for Social Justice. It proposes subsidising the necessary statutory fees for the poorest couples, up to £550 per couple. An inexpensive and hugely beneficial adjustment to improve wedding accessibility for the least fortunate.  

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families; perhaps it is time for all of us to make tying the knot easier.  

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