The language of politics can’t domesticate religion

Political life’s Left-Right structure fails when it tries to co-opt religious perspectives. Graham Tomlin outlines why it misses so much of what makes them interesting.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

an aerial view down in to the parliamentary chamber shows MPs sitting on benches on the left and right hand side

The UK Parliament's House of Commons chamber manifests the left-right divide.

House of Commons Twitter.

The New Statesman recently released their ‘left power list’ – “the 50 most influential people shaping Britain’s progressive politics.” As I read it through, one name caught my eye – Justin Welby. He comes in a comfortable mid-table position at no. 27, behind Gary Lineker and JK Rowling, and ahead of Gordon Brown and Marcus Rashford.

The Archbishop of Canterbury may perhaps be a strange addition to a list of left-leaning figures. Not all his predecessors have been so - his predecessor but two, George Carey, is often seen espousing views from the right. It is not accidental that the present Archbishop has served in times of a Conservative government, while George Carey held the role during the latter years of New Labour. It is perhaps the job of Archbishops to hold the government of the day to account, so perhaps not surprising that Welby is seen as a critic of the Conservatives. If the government of his time had been Labour, perhaps he would be seen very differently.

However, what got me thinking was not so much the identification of the Archbishop as left-leaning but the co-option of the Church’s voice into the wider narrative of the left-right political spectrum. The language of ‘left’ and ‘right’ dates back to the French Revolution, where, in the National Assembly, the supporters of the king sat to the right of the President, and the revolutionaries sat to his left. Subsequent governmental institutions in France continued the seating arrangements and the language became embedded in political discourse far beyond France. Since then the ‘left’ has always been associated with ideas such as freedom, progress, equality and reform. The ‘right’ has valued older institutions of social life such as family, locality, individual responsibility, duty, tradition and so on.

Left and Right... shoe-horns religion into the procrustean bed of a political ideology that cannot do justice to its true nature.

Left and Right is a structure of political life with which we are very familiar. But when it comes to co-opting religious perspectives, it misses so much of what makes them interesting. It has no place for God, for revelation, for prayer, the mystical and the miraculous, the hosts of angels, the language of virtue or the surprising delight of grace. It shoe-horns religion into the procrustean bed of a political ideology that cannot do justice to its true nature. It emasculates it of all that makes it interesting and distinct.

This attempt to domesticate religion has a long pedigree. The Christian Church was born into a world dominated politically by the Roman empire, and religiously by paganism. This new claim that the God behind all things had revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ was definitely awkward, but by and large, pagans were happy to fit it into their view of the world, if only the Christians were happy to regard Jesus as yet one more god alongside the other gods – a private option for those who preferred that kind of god, as opposed to Jupiter, Mercury or Aphrodite. The early Christians however refused to comply. They insisted Jesus was God, not just a god. They resisted their founder being co-opted into the pagan pantheon, or even the Roman imperial regime, refusing by and large to serve in the army if that meant killing their enemies in defiance of Jesus’ command to love them, or offering worship to the gods in civic festivals, even when their contemporaries could not understand the refusal to join in what to them was some harmless ritual to keep the gods happy.

Even more, early Christian thinkers such as Athanasius argued that the coming of Christ into the world was too seismic an intervention to be simply co-opted into existing paradigms. In particular, the Resurrection of Christ was either a gigantic hoax, or an invitation to re-think reality all over again from a new starting point - that humanity’s greatest enemy - death itself – had been defeated once and for all. As the theologian Lesslie Newbigin put it:

“At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact. God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them. According to Athanasius, it provided a new arche, a new starting point for all human understanding of the world. It could not form part of any worldview expect one of which it was the basis.”

Thus, Christianity was bound to transcend the political structures of its time - or any time for that matter. A bold Christianity, true to itself, could not just be co-opted within an alien political or social structure – it was always going to be an awkward bedfellow with the empire.

In more recent years, a number of theologians have made the same point. Philosopher and theologian John Milbank wrote a ground-breaking book in the 1990s, Christianity and Social Theory, where he criticised the whole venture of the Sociology of Religion as domesticating Christian faith into an alien structure of thought, where society was taken as a given, and religious faith explained away by secular theoretical categories. Sociology for him was its own non-neutral theology, a rival discourse to Christianity, ‘a secular policing of the sublime’, domesticating it and reducing it to fit with the narrow categories of sociological theory.

Christianity just refuses to fit into foreign categories that try to tame it

More recently, James Mumford, in his short book Vexed, written with half an eye to the American experience, shows how again Christianity just refuses to fit into foreign categories that try to tame it, and how it consistently blows apart the moral and political packages that both left and right offer us in modern life. So, for example, the deeply Christian notion of the sanctity of life – that human life is sacred, to be respected in all its forms, and cannot be taken away by another human being - leads both to an abhorrence of unwarranted abortion (the American right cheers at this point), yet also to a restriction of the right to carry guns that take life (not so popular among the Republican base.) Conservatives prize family values, yet are happy to allow economic competition to permit zero-hours contracts that make desperate parents vulnerable to shifts in the market that mean they cannot feed their children. Christians might agree with the first, but disagree with the second. Similarly, the left prizes inclusivity, yet at the same time, promotes assisted dying, baulking at extending this inclusivity to the elderly person who would have to make an active choice to go on living, when pressure may mount to leave their money to their offspring and vacate the scene early. Again, the left champions the sexual revolution yet, despite its suspicion of economic liberalism, holds back from a critique of the consumerism of much sexual culture, that values being able to move onto new sexual partners as desire dictates.

So, Mumford argues, Christians may find themselves adopting a strange mix of beliefs and opinions – or perhaps only strange when seen from the perspective of a secular mindset – opposed to unwarranted abortion, yet in favour of gun control; in favour of family life, yet wanting economic intervention to the labour market to ensure proper pay for workers.

The point here is not so much to argue that Christians have a unique political viewpoint that is distinct from left or right, but that Christianity is more than politics. Beneath the surface of Christian political convictions, such as those that come from the Archbishop, lie (or should lie) a whole host of deeper commitments – to God, to the insights that come in prayer, to the most vulnerable in society, to a sense of a deep order and structure to the world that cannot be toyed with by progressive political fantasies, to the reality of Resurrection. None of these quite fit the simple left-right equation. The bishops may or may not be right in their political pronouncements – and there is room for debate on that, but trying to make them fit into the narrow categories of mere politics just doesn’t work. God is too big for that.

Mapmaking our meaning in a modern world

Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another.

Rowan Williams

A hand holds a pen over a map, at the side is closed journal and colour pencils.

Oxana v on Unsplash.

People first began to think about theology not because they were looking for intellectual stimulus or solutions to abstract problems, but because they found themselves living in an unsettling and vastly expanded ‘space’. They were conscious of new dimensions in their connection with each other, new dimensions in coping with their own fear, guilt, despair, a new sense of intimate access to the limitless reality of God. They connected these new experiences with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Roman colonial government, reported by his closest friends as raised from death and present with them and their converts in the communication of divine ‘spirit.’ As we read Christian scripture, we are watching the first generations of Christian believers trying to construct a workable map of this unexpected territory.

When I started writing the assorted pieces that make up the little book on Discovering Christianity (published earlier this year), my hope was above all to convey something of this sense of Christian thinking as a process of mapmaking in a new and bewildering landscape. That’s why one chapter – originally drafted for a Muslim audience – tried to list some of the things that an interested observer might spot in looking from outside at the habits of Christian believers: not first and foremost their spectacular and uniform embodiment of unconditional divine love (if only), but just the sorts of things they said and did, the sort of language used about Jesus, the rituals of induction and belonging. Indeed, if there is one biblical text I had in mind in virtually all the chapters, it is the simple phrase, ‘Come and see’ that Jesus uses in St John’s gospel when he is first followed by those who will become ‘disciples’, literally ‘learners.’

‘Come and see’. When we use language like that in everyday life, we’re encouraging others to share something that has excited or troubled us (or both). It’s not a proposal for solving a problem. It’s not even a recruitment campaign. It’s an invitation to stand where someone else is standing and look from there. In the rich symbolic context of John’s gospel, it’s about sharing Jesus’ ‘point of view’ – which is, as we’re told right at the start of the gospel, a point of view unimaginably close to the heart of eternal life and reality itself.

We can only see in this way when we move away from our ordinary perceptions a bit. Just as we can only learn to swim when we have jumped into the water, so we shan’t learn what faith is all about until we have been prodded by whatever forces around us to take the risk of trusting that (so to speak) the ground is going to hold beneath us if we step forward (I like to speak sometimes about discovering what images, ideas, perspectives and relations are ‘load-bearing’ in our lives).

So part of the invitation is also about telling the stories of those who have taken that kind of risk and what sort of lives they have shaped for themselves in the light of it. There is little point in summoning others just to share my individual set of feelings. But there is perhaps more weight is saying, ‘A lot of people have felt this shape beneath the surface, this grain running through things.’ Which is why – as the book seeks to explain – theology works with the ‘classical’ shared texts that most Christian communities found themselves reading together in the first hundred years after Jesus; and works also with the history of the arguments and diverse perceptions that reading brought into focus.

We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair.

It's not unknown outside theology. We have become so much more interested over the last few decades in how to understand works of art not just in terms of what the artist ‘meant’, but in terms of what the actual work does or makes possible. What world does it create? So we read the Bible, obviously, but we also read the readers of the Bible (think of the Jewish Talmud, with the original text of its classical legal discussions literally surrounded on every page by the arguments that this text has generated). We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair. And so along with reading the Bible and immersing ourselves in the history of what sense others have made of the basic text and story, we also bring to bear the sorts of things that are part of our current conversations in society and culture – the habits of ‘reasoning’ that we have picked up.

There is an important difference between talking about ‘reason’ as a sovereign, detached capacity and talking about ‘reasoning’, the range of processes and practices that carry forward a common life of intelligent learning (and that learning may be at any level of supposed ‘intellectual’ capacity; once more, it’s not about abstractions). Our society these days is fairly comprehensively confused about this: we have a mythological picture of some supremely obvious way of arguing that allows for no final dispute; we call it ‘science’; and then we expect the impossible of it and are disillusioned and sceptical when it can’t give us absolutely certain answers. One of the many ironies of our society is that we are besotted with ‘science’ and at the same time fascinated by the idea that there are many ‘truths’, or else suspicious that apparently objective sources are actually controlled by other interests. Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another’: a long story, but an all-important element in our human discovery.

Bible, tradition, human reasoning – those are the tools we bring to this job of mapmaking. The book is really just a meditation on those words, ‘Come and see’, as the basis of Christian thinking. At the centre of everything is a set of very ambitious claims about what God is like – and what we are like. Part of what we’re invited to ‘come and see’ is ourselves. Once again it’s not unlike what happens in a really good play or film, when we go away conscious that we have seen not just someone else’s story but something fresh about our own selves.

And my greatest hope for the book is that it may prompt someone to look a bit harder, to listen in to how Christians talk – and in that moment find that they recognize what’s being said in some complicated and untidy way. One of the most vivid characters in the gospel I’ve been quoting says of Jesus that he has told her everything she has ever done. I hope that those who are moved to investigate a bit further will come to that same unsettling and exciting point where they see themselves freshly, and the new landscape begins to unfold.

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