Christian politics for atheists

My friend, the Rev. Dr Peter Mullen, writes brilliantly about Christianity pervading every pore of the West’s body, this unbeknown to most people.

Even those who’ve never seen the inside of a church, except perhaps as sightseers, and who have no faith in God but much hatred of ‘religion’ (lumping all religions together) still have their instincts, customs, culture and language shaped by the formative creed of our civilisation.

This is a subject for at least a book, better still a whole library. The best one can do in a short article is snip off a fragment of the whole and take a closer look at it, ideally without stepping on Peter’s toes.

One such fragment is politics and the institutions thereof, and this subject may be more elusive than some of the others. After all, Britain apart, all Western states are constitutionally separated from the church.

Britain is different in letter but not in spirit: we do have an established church, but these days it worships at the altar of wokery, not that of Christ the Saviour. It’s there mainly for appearances’ sake, but the appearances aren’t totally meaningless.

Our head of state is divinely anointed, which maintains historical and spiritual continuity, while conferring some residual dignity on governance. This hardly amounts to anything more than lip service to God, but it’s better than no service at all.

Our laws have scriptural antecedents, and even a mere hundred years ago British judges routinely quoted the Bible to justify their rulings. But what about our political institutions?

The point I like to make is that Christianity isn’t only the teaching by Christ but also, even more so, the teaching about Christ. Revelation is a slow-release process, and in his earthly life Jesus only vouchsafed faith to his disciples, leaving them to build it into a religion and ultimately a civilisation.

All the pronouncements made by Jesus and recorded by the evangelists would have taken just over two hours to utter. Yet his ministry probably lasted over three years. Surely Jesus must have said many other things that his disciples either misunderstood or forgot?

My contention is that, when it comes to Western politics, it’s not so much Christ’s commandments as his person that exerted a formative influence. The nature of that person was put down on paper in 451 AD, at the maritime town of Chalcedon.

Jesus, stated the Council of Chalcedon, is fully man and fully God, the second hypostasis of the Trinity. He has two distinct natures united in one person without confusion, change, division, or separation. This union remains an unfathomable mystery, but the influence of Christ’s duality on Western politics is easier to grasp.

The Creeds, both Apostles’ and Nicene, derive their name from the Latin word Credo, “I believe…”, the first word in both. This is a statement of private, individual faith, and it appropriately starts with the singular first-person pronoun.

However, the Lord’s Prayer, the most significant Christian supplication because Jesus himself provided the exact wording, starts with a plural pronoun ‘Our Father’, not ‘My Father’.

Unlike the Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer isn’t individual but collective, emphasising the corporate nature of the faith that turns it into a religion. Thus the two most significant statements of Christianity reflect another aspect of Christ’s duality: all in one, and one in all.

When it came to creating the structural organisation of a Catholic world church, this duality begat the complementary, intertwined concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity.

Subsidiarity means devolving decentralised responsibility to the lowest sensible level. Thus whatever problems arise can be solved by the most local group capable of solving them, which ensures efficiency and preserves local autonomy.

Solidarity, on the other hand, emphasises the shared dignity of all people, encouraging empathy, cooperation and collective responsibility. Higher levels of the Church lay down doctrine, but they only ever intervene when local authorities need help implementing the general principles established by central authority. However, central authority must proceed in the knowledge that its function is to assist local institutions, not to supplant them.

By and large, the Church has been able to preserve this organic blend of the general and particular, corporate and individual, central and local.

Now, during the four centuries between the sack of Rome in 410 AD and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 AD, the Church had to assume a great deal of secular authority. It had to fill the political and administrative vacuum that existed between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the birth of the Carolingian Holy Roman Empire.

Those centuries are commonly called Dark, although many serious thinkers have always disputed that designation. After all, the embryos of many inchoate Western institutions, including political ones, were created during that period.

And, since the Church wielded a great deal of secular power then and managed to keep it for several centuries thereafter, many political institutions of the West incorporated at birth the structural principles of Church organisation – specifically those of subsidiarity and solidarity.

In politics, they were translated into localism and centralism. I’d suggest that the unity of the two, and the potential conflict between them, define our politics today, much as they did in the Middle Ages and every epoch ever since.

The most successful political formations of modernity are those that feature a workable balance between centralism and localism, the secular offshoots of solidarity and subsidiarity. Conversely, the least successful, most corrupt and often evil modern regimes are those in which central governments ride roughshod over local autonomy and authority, ultimately over the individual.

The more local authority the central Western state usurps, the more it distorts the balance of subsidiarity and solidarity – the more decisively it severs its Christian roots and the more readily it embraces evil.

The clash between political conservatism and various forms of socialism, be it oxymoronic ‘democratic’, unvarnished ‘communist’ or fascistic ‘national’, can be ultimately reduced to the struggle between centralism and localism ensuing when they are no longer in organic balance.

This balance lies at the foundation of all modern political systems, including British republican monarchy, French monarchic republicanism and American conflation of the two.

Yet few British, French or American politicians – and even fewer voters – are aware of the debt their politics owes Christianity. Believers among them have forgotten about that link, while the atheists desperately want to do so.

But the link is there, writ large not just in theology or political philosophy, but in history – as it continues to be made every day.