When tradition deserves a break

Upsetting a convention caused uproar, so is it right to break with tradition?

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A robed and seated man, in a speaker's chair talks and gesticulates.

The House of Common's Speaker.

Parliament TV.

“Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since a speaker of the Commons stood down from its high chair with dignity and to applause.” Thus wrote Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian this Sunday. Last week the House of Commons erupted. An unedifying lava-spew of recrimination and anger flowed through the corridors of power as the Speaker of the House, The Right Honourable Sir Lindsay Hoyle, broke parliamentary convention to the seeming benefit of the Labour Party. Memories of his predecessors’ playing fast-and-loose with Parliamentary procedure pushed buttons. The SNP’s Gaelic fury founded a flurry of calls for the Speaker to step-down, and it was not until he gave a near-tearful apology that some calm seemed to be restored. Opponents cried foul - ‘how dare he upend the conventions of the House!?’ - while supporters jumped to his aid - ‘he was just trying to protect MPs from further harassment over the Israel-Gaza debate!’ - and everyone was unhappy…

The technicalities of this convention (that multiple amendments are not called upon for voting during an Opposition Day Debate) are less interesting to me than the fact that the convention exists. ‘Convention’ is another word for ‘tradition’. Traditions are important. Our famously ‘unwritten’ Constitution relies heavily on tradition, especially for the smooth running of Parliament. Rather than having the process of legislating and governing micro-managed with procedural minutiae, the Commons operate on the basis of nurturing and conforming to its traditions. In essence, the House of Commons operates on the basis of respect - by respecting the traditions of the House, Parliamentarians grow to respect each other as fellow followers of tradition. Exterior action builds-up interior disposition. Practice influences sentiment.

At least, that’s my romantic take on it. Traditions give some coherence to a society - from the society of elected MPs right through the society of a nation - and allow it to flourish. Traditions bind people together. Traditions unite. You may come from a different part of the country than your neighbour, have different family values, have a different religion or skin-colour or education-level, etc…but you can be united in the traditions you follow. Whether it’s having a roast on a Sunday, going to a Carol Service in December, singing Three Lions in a World Cup year, the traditions you share despite all other differences give you a common cause with those around you.

This is not to say that traditions can’t have a dark side. Some traditions can alienate guests. Some traditions can stifle creativity and innovation. Some traditions can be maintained purely to bamboozle the uninitiated for the benefit of those in the know. In extremis, some traditions can lead to groupthink, to the othering of those who don’t share them, to jingoism and hatred; St Paul wrote that it was the zeal for the traditions of his fathers than led him to persecute the first Christians. Traditions should never be taken for granted or left unexamined. Traditions are roses - beautiful and sweet-smelling, but always in need of pruning. But let the gardener prune carefully - you want some roses left for the garden.

When the scribes and Pharisees try to trick and trap Jesus with impossible thought experiments, they often quote their traditions. Jesus always wins the debate. He wins in the face of their traditionalism. He wins by being a radical. RADICAL! His radicalism is not marked by the abandonment of the concept of tradition, but by deep respect for it. The Sermon on the Mount is probably the most famous speech about the importance of tradition - “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times…But I say to you…” - keeping the traditions of God in the face of the self-serving traditions of men. The scribes and the Pharisees are the White Witch to Jesus’ Aslan: ‘“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.”’

Not every critic last week will have genuinely cared about the traditions of the House of Commons. Many will have mouthed the words but would have happily stood by if the breaking of convention benefited them. Nevertheless, we must take tradition, and it’s breaking, seriously. Traditions nurtures the relationships of MPs. Traditions nurture the relationships of neighbours and fellow citizens. Traditions nurture relationship with God, as the traditional rhythms of religious practice and Church seasons help order prayer and worship. Perhaps we’ll look back on the upturning of this particular Commons tradition and recognise it as the right rejection of an outdated convention…but let's be cautious. Traditions are important. Break them with care.

Column

Culture

Politics

18 April 2024

4 min read

The bullies invoking Jesus as their best buddy

Trump and Putin's desire to be loved, admired and followed.

George Pitcher

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

A fierce looking man walks at the head of a phalanx of suited men.

Trump strides from the White House to St John's Church, 2020.

The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m not at all sure that the parents of a teenager driven to despair, or even suicide, by online trolls, or a woman in a coercive relationship, are likely to see their tormentors as victims, making a cry for help by making the lives of others intolerable.

Bullies, it is said, have invariably been bullied themselves. A popular proverb has it that bullies never prosper, a comforting canard knocked down by some comprehensive research recently from the British Cohort Study that, of 7,000 children born in 1970, it was the nastiest, most aggressive little pieces of work that did best in life by age 46.

Social insecurity may well have driven their cruel treatment of others, but financial security has been their reward. Said one of the study’s authors, there’s ‘a strong link between aggressive behaviour at school and higher earnings later in life’.

What exemplars of that might we find on the international stage? Step forward the erstwhile and very possibly future president of the United States and the great-returner president of Russia.

They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Bullying may be too light a term for what Donald Trump has done to countless women and business associates in his life, what Vladimir Putin has done to Ukraine and other old Soviet satellites, and what both men have done to their nations’ electoral systems.

But I want to make an armchair case for the psychological insecurity of both men. That insecurity presents itself in a rather pathetic (in the literal sense) desire to be loved, to be admired and to be followed by devoted disciples.

And what role model might they come up with for that? Why, of course, they have both invoked Jesus Christ as their best buddy, who is very much on their side politically and who is really a lot like them.

Trump has endorsed excruciating (again, literally) drawings of himself sitting in the dock at court with the Christ and has published his own $60 “Bible” (one remembers the delightful self-publicist Jonathan King launching his fictional memoir, entitled Bible Two).

Putin has claimed that he’s not a little like the Nazarene calling fishermen by the sea of Galilee, as he rallies Russian youth to resist the pernicious culture of the “Satanic” West. He casts himself, along with Jesus, as the defender of “traditional values”, though the conflation of the Christ with cultural tradition is a little awry, but never mind.

There’s pragmatic political ambition in both men for co-opting the Christ to their cause. Trump wants and needs the US Christian Right on his side for re-election. Putin is promoting a rapprochement with Russian religions and already has the Russian Orthodox Church onside for his Ukrainian escapade.

But there’s something else going on here. The armchair psychologist can identify motives at work. Both Putin and Trump want not only attention. They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity

What better figure to associate themselves with than love incarnate? A demi-god aspires to be loved as God loves and is loved. It may replace a familial love that has been missing, or it may more simply be the toxic desire to be loved by those you oppress and by one’s peers – again, the instinct of the bully.

That’s closer to admiration and has vanity at its root. Witness Putin’s faintly ridiculous bared torso astride a horse as a younger man, or Trump’s vainglorious comb-over and orange-tanned skin.

Such a shame that we have no idea how the most famous figure who ever lived, whose legacy is the largest religion on earth, actually looked. Or they might try to look like that. Because, to their minds, emulation would win similar admiration.

Finally, Trump and Putin need to be followed, like bullies need their gang. Never mind that even the most devoted disciples of Christ abandoned him to his fate in his mortal life. There’s something like 2.5 billion declared followers of him today, some two millennia later. That’s some legacy and the kind that would shore up even for deepest of their insecurities.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity. The nature of Christian leadership, at its source, is unreachable. He said himself that we could not follow where he was going, because it’s a form of leadership beyond human scope – self-sacrificial, infinitely humble while also divine.

That leadership was among us and we didn’t recognise it. The leaderships of Trump and Putin, even as they claim Christ-like affinity, carve recognition and to be above us. These are not men who would lay down their power, far less their lives, for their friends.

These are bullies in the playground of politics. We must pray for their souls as we condemn their actions.