Who’d be a bishop in public life? Say anything political, you get accused of being, well, political (in the hiss-at-the-villain sense of that word). Say anything more discursive or emollient, you get accused of preaching vacuities. Say anything about poverty and you get told to put your money where your mouth is. Say anything about power, you get accused of House-of-Lords hypocrisy. Rowan Williams captured this well in the extended opening paragraph of his post-archiepiscopal volume of essays, Faith in the Public Square:
“Every archbishop, whether he likes it or not, faces the expectation that he will be some kind of commentator on the social issues of the day. He is, of course, doomed to fail in the eyes of most people. If he restricts himself to reflections heavily based on the Bible or tradition, what he says will be greeted as platitudinous or irrelevant. If he ventures into more obviously secular territory, he will be told that he has no particular expertise in sociology or economics or international affairs that would justify giving him a hearing. Reference to popular culture prompts disapproving noises about ‘dumbing down’; anything that looks like close academic analysis is of course incomprehensible and self-indulgent elitism. A focus on what many think are the traditional moral concerns of the Church (mostly to do with sexual ethics and family issues, though increasingly including ‘end-of-life’ questions) reinforces the myth that Christians are in only the narrowest range of moral matters; an interest in other ethical questions invites the reproach that he is unwilling to affirm the obvious and sacrosanct principles of revealed faith and failing to Give a Lead.”
All too true, as the 2011 Theos report, Turbulent Priests?, which reviewed and analysed the political activity of the Archbishops of Canterbury in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, showed. All in all, whatever you say, you lose, so you should either shut up or tough it out. “Well”, Williams continued in his subsequent paragraph, “archbishops grow resilient and sometimes even rebellious”. For which we might say a word of thanks.
On Rock or Sand, a book of essays deriving from a series of symposia orchestrated by the Archbishop of York and published last month, was criticised primarily for being in the “too political” camp. The coverage majored on its alleged old school statism, although I did have the pleasure of hearing one media pundit say that the church had hundreds of millions of pounds in its coffers and that it if it was really intent on solving poverty it should perhaps reach into its own pocket. Next to such self-righteous ignorance, the “too political” criticism seems almost reasonable.
It isn’t, however. The thrust of the attack was that the authors were far too willing to turn to the state to solve economic and social problems, a critique that could be weak and silly or more accurate and done with admirable lightness of touch. Either way, it’s a half-truth at best.
There are certainly strains of Cameron’s Coup to be heard at times in the book, with the Archbishop of York, who held the collection’s editorial pen sounding most plangent about the “threat” to the “social compact which the Welfare State represented”. (p. 22) They do not, however, characterise the whole volume which is generally non-partisan in tone. Contributors do reach for the “state lever” quite a bit, and are also sceptical about the market as a solution to what ails us. However, that is because the state does have a role and because the market is not salvific. When even the outgoing editor of the Economist can write in a valedictory leader…
“part of the charge against capitalism was true, and it hurts. No liberal can justify a system in which huge banks’ balance-sheets teetered on tiny amounts of capital. In 2006 too much of finance was gambling, pure and simple; and too much of the bill ended up with taxpayers… Globalisation has indeed brought problems in its wake… A more open society, where global markets increase the rewards for the talented, is fast becoming a less equal one… some of the remedies for inequality involve the state doing more, not less”
… only a fool will deny there is at least an issue to be raised here. Moreover, there are repeated emphases that the “government should do something about this…” response is inadequate: “The temptation to call on government to pass laws to abolish everything that is bad in society is seductive but needs to be resisted…We cannot rely solely on the invisible hand of the market to restore justice…Nor can we rely on hand-outs from government.” (p. 49)
If the book is innocent of knee-jerk statism, nor is it particularly platitudinous. There is inevitably lots of “we need to build a fairer society for everyone” rhetoric which gets pretty wearing after the first ten chapters, but that is a sine qua non for any volume of this nature, whether religious or secular. The bigger question is whether it ever moves away from such bromides and, to a varied degree, it does.
The bulk of the book, chapters 3-9, is sector specific, with an impressive array of specialists – Andrew Sentence, Andrew Adonis, Julia Unwin, and Ruth Fox among them – taking on questions of economy, education, health, ageing, representative democracy, etc. – and coming up with some impressive ideas. Andrew Sentence outlines three key principles – sustainable growth, shared prosperity and responsible business – by which we should shape our economy. Ruth Fox offers five ideas – “less democracy [but] more accountability”, “a more values-based approach to politics”, the need to “defend politics”, to “rejuvenate citizenship education”, and “a more strategic, principled approach to political reform” – through which we might resurrect our faith in representative democracy. Kirsten England puts forward five propositions for framing the health and well-being agenda. In possibly the best chapter of the volume, Philip Mawer outlines four principles – equality, equity, solidarity, and responsibility – that comprise (Christian) value-based politics. Pundits may disagree with some of the above but it is not fair to accuse the contributors of floating over reality on wings of moral exhortation.
So if the volume is not the exercise in warmed-over Marxism or clerical vacuity, is it a success? The answer, I fear, is no or at least only partially. The reason, appropriately enough, lies in its title, or more precisely its foundations.
There are (at least) three cracks in the foundations of the collection that render it unstable. The first is almost inevitable in a volume of this kind, born of the unevenness of the contributions. This is not so much because some contributions are notably stronger than others (although some are) but because there are varying levels of theological depth between them, from Oliver O’Donovan’s ‘Reflections on work’, which is typically thoughtful and sophisticated, to Andrew Adonis on education or Ruth Chester on representative democracy, which are entirely unburdened by any theology at all (which is not to say they are bad essays per se – Chester’s is a masterpiece of concision and clarity – simply not obviously Christian essays). Most hover between these polls, closer to the Adonis end, and devote a few pages to the theological foundations. It’s what you would expect from a collection of this kind and it inevitably lends itself to a certain perfunctory shallowness.
That in itself may be judged an unfair criticism. To damn a short book of short essays for insufficient theological breadth and depth (even as you recognise its achievement in reaching some political specificity) may be to ask too much of it. The problem is that it leaves too many questions begging, in particular the question of what justification is there for adopting this Christian view (assuming it is really authentically Christian) among a people that is only very vaguely and culturally Christian? This is faultline number two and it is set to plague Christian politics, and especially the established church, for years to come.
Let’s be precise. This is not the canard: what right have you to impose your views on us? Anyone who asks that question in circumstances like these doesn’t understand how democracy operates. The archbishops are “imposing” nothing on anyone. And who is “us” anyway? Usually, the critic means, ‘people like me’ or ‘people who hold my view’, but the challenge in 2015 is that we can’t be sure others do hold our view. We are diverse and plural and sometimes antagonistic. And that is the problem.
When I asked at the launch of On Rock or Sand? at Church House whether the book’s many references to and comparisons with William Temple’s Christianity and Social Order were justified – the latter being a book written in a still broadly recognisably Christian culture, made all the more so by the war effort and the unprecedented solidarity that created – the Archbishop of York responded that he firmly believed that there was an ethical sense within everyone and that therefore everyone, whether Christian or not, could get what the book was trying to convey.
There is undoubtedly much to be said for this idea of natural law, but the answer was not satisfactory. Firstly, the book made little reference to natural law, preferring (no doubt for sound reasons) to be scriptural when it was being explicitly Christian. Second, even if you adhere strongly to natural law, there is nothing to say that our in-built ethical compasses translate into the political arena; natural law is not natural politics. And third, if you did believe this, why bother with a Christian critique in the first instance? To be fair, this is more a hairline crack than chasm-like faultline in the book, and it doesn’t swallow any of the individual contributions, but it is a problem that the lack of theological reflection allows its authors to skate over too readily, even as they are undoubtedly aware of its presence (“our greatly secularised society seems to agree on only one, quite un-Christian principle: that it’s every person for themselves”, p. 39).
The final faultline is in the controlling metaphor itself. Put simply, if we are talking about “firm foundations” for Britain’s future, the proper subject is entirely pre-political, not economic, education or health policy but the deep moral and spiritual substructure on which they are built. In other words, while the more ham-fisted criticisms of archiepiscopal politics – “more time pro-Christ and less time anti-Cameron, please” – remain crass, there is a need, which this book largely circumvents, to analyse why it is the (essentially liberal) concept of the human – as fundamentally unencumbered, sovereign, pre-social, malleable, choice-fixated, material (but in the wrong way), and immaterial (but in the wrong way) – that lies at and weakens the foundations of our common life. Again, the problem is undoubtedly felt, most clearly by Justin Welby. “Our economic crisis is not fundamentally an economic problem. We must dig deeper. Our economic crisis is a theological problem.” (p.37) However, although felt it is not dealt with.
Criticise a 258-page collection of essays that calls for a values-based politics for what it is, not what it is not. Fair enough. On that basis, On Rock or Sand is an engaged, engaging, informed, and educative contribution to a genre that is growing (see here and here and here for like reviews) and a debate that is on-going. Criticisms of it, to date, have been rather off-target, motivated, one suspects, by the agenda of the critic rather than that of the book itself. But one can’t help shake off the feeling that for a book about foundations it spends too much attention looking above the surface, better at offering well-crafted building material than excavating and inserting the deep structural underpinnings we need.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
On Rock or Sand? Firm foundations for Britain's future is published by SPCK
Image from wikimedia available in the public domain.
