Cheynegate Room, Westminster Abbey, 20.03.12
“This country is a blessed nation. The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts, we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.” [Tony Blair]
People in Britain should "celebrate what makes us a Christian nation" and "reclaim the symbols and emblems of our nation…”He urged Christians to have "robustness" in their national identity as well as their faith. [John Sentamu]
“Christian faith has been central to the emergence of our nation and its development…We have argued that it is necessary to understand where we have come from, to guide us to where we are going, and to bring us back when we wander too far from the path of national destiny.” [Michael Nazir-Ali]
“I’m an Anglican. By blood, by descent, by the way I was brought up, by my schooling and so on. I’m an Anglican, and really therefore I find myself without a church…The only people amongst the senior hierarchy of the Anglican church who are any use at all, are John Sentamu, and Bishop Ali Nazir (sic)... So I’m a Christian without a home.” When asked if he had ever made any kind of Christian commitment, [Griffin] says “I was married in an Anglican church, I regard Christian values as a good thing, in trying to live a decent life and sometimes failing… that’s as far as I think people of my kind of Christian origin do go.” [Nick Griffin]
I have been asked to come and say a few words on ‘responding to the far right’ and on the issue of Christianity, national identity and the idea of the Christian nation. As we see from the quotes above sometimes it is not easy to tell the ‘far right’ from the others when it comes to matters of Christianity and national identity. This is because the language of the ‘Christian nation’, the ‘blessed nation’, the ‘nation with a destiny’ is so easily and so often co-opted by the BNP and others.
Obviously three of the four people quoted are not, and never will be, supporters of the BNP. Yet as much as I like to think of the mental gymnastics required to make Nick Griffin say something nice about Sentamu and Nazir-Ali, I do think it is no accident that he found their mindset so congenial to his cause.
How can they – and we – respond to the far right without being co-opted by the far right? One way, plainly, is to stop using ‘Christian nation’ language altogether. And this is my simple plea to Christians in the public eye today.
In times of stress and challenge – in the face of secularisation or the increasing presence of Islam say – it is tempting to bind the language and mindset of strong national identity to the language and mindset of Christianity. But I think that ‘Christian nation’ language is precisely that – a temptation.
I want to sketch out for you now three ways that I think National Identity rhetoric and the ‘Christian Nation’ are temptations best avoided by Christians.
The first way is that it is a temptation to cultural triumphalism, or, in other words, a temptation to confuse the gift with giver.
Now, by offering a critical assessment of Nazir-Ali I do not want to think of him as a straw man. In fact, he is an eloquent and intelligent writer and speaker. There are far more shrill and thoughtless proponents of ‘Christian nationhood’ out there who are not worth our time. Nazir-Ali is worth our time because (a) he is a thoughtful Christian and (b) the BNP also thinks he is worth their time. But it seems that Nazir Ali (and others) has spent so much time thinking about how Christianity has shaped the nation that he has perhaps failed to see how the nation has shaped Christianity.
Historically, the reality of the ‘Christian nation’ often ends up benefiting the nation more than it does Christianity. Often proponents of the idea that ‘Britain is a Christian Nation’ are also the ones who will complain that when it comes to Christianity, the British population is largely apathetic, ignorant or in angry rejection.
Yet the two go hand in hand. The more Christianity becomes associated with the common culture, the more one will find large swathes of that population who think they already know what Christianity is (if they think about it at all); will think they are already Christians because they are born into the culture (and if so, so what?); or will angrily reject the Christianity they have met in their compulsory GCSE religious studies classes and school assemblies, or the civic religion they encounter in the formalities of parliament or the opening of town council meetings – none of which bears much relevance or resemblance to their lives.
Something strange happens to Christianity when it becomes part of the furniture of a nation – it disappears. This is the phenomenon that the social critic Søren Kierkegaard was talking about when he claimed that Christendom had done away with Christianity. In his 19th c. Denmark Christianity had become so closely connected to the common culture that becoming a Christian was as easy as being born. At the same time there were scores of the population who thought they were Christian because they were Danish. In such a world, the trick was to make becoming a Christian harder, not easier. Hence Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom.
The ever over-quoted C.S. Lewis was less incendiary but no less acute when he described the Christian civilisation he grew up in with its educational system and formal prayers as an inoculation against meeting the real Christ of Christianity. Why would he need to become a Christian? Didn’t he already catch it as a matter of course when he was young and absorb it into his system like a small dose of the measles?
This, of course, is exactly the sort of Christianity that Griffin is affiliating with when he talks of being an Anglican by blood and descent. And, frankly, is he not here expressing sentiments that many, many other British people would express if asked to articulate what Christianity meant to them? The solution to this confusion cannot be an increase in Christian nation rhetoric.
Commentator Stephen Tompkins has said how taking Christianity out of British culture is not like taking raisins out of a fruitcake – it is like taking the chocolate out of a chocolate cake. I think he is right. The fact of the religion’s deep influence on the laws, language, geography and moral customs of this nation is beyond doubt.
Just look at this place (Westminster Abbey) – it is the landmark to which other landmarks in this city point. It is the symbol of Englishness and the English arrangement of Church and State. Whether they like it or not, no one, really, can disagree with the historical and cultural reality of Christianity in this country.
But herein precisely lies the temptation– as long as Christianity is primarily seen as a historical and cultural phenomenon, the essential crisis that Christ poses to individual people and their lives will remain suppressed. As a response to the far right who co-opts Christian culture language then, I would put the possibility of offense.
As long as a christianised population is protected from having to face the short sharp shock that this man is God - or indeed that God is this man - then they cannot be said to have encountered what is essential for Christianity. Christian faith is not about being part of a culture, or speaking English or being a decent member of society. It is much more something like having to face the man who says ‘come unto me and I will give you rest’ and choosing not to be offended.
For example, Christianly the success of this church (Westminster) and those who work here is not measured by how well it acts as a cultural repository for all things British, it is measured by how well it stands as a continual catalyst for people to be faced with the unsettling nature of who Jesus Christ is. The success of Christian culture (and I do think, like chocolate cake, it is a success in many ways) has flowed as a secondary effect from such people who did face the possibility of offence posed by the incarnation and chose not to be offended. By resisting the temptation to cultural triumphalism, we resist the temptation to confuse the gifts with the giver.
A second way one can see trying to hitch Christianity to ‘the nation’ as a temptation is that National Identity rhetoric poses the temptation to replace complex reality with simplistic identity.
Here is a quote from the BNP manifesto: “We want Britain to remain – or return to – the way it has traditionally been. We … have no problem with [ethnic minorities] as long as they remain minorities and do not change nor seek to change the fundamental culture and identity of the indigenous peoples of the British Isles.”
And here is Nick Griffin again: “All the nations of the world need to develop an immunity to the culturally and ethnically genocidal melting pot 'vision' on offer from Hollywood, the global corporate elite and their left-wing Useful Idiots... As with all indigenous peoples, the people of Britain have an absolute right to retain their identity and to be themselves.”
What I wish to highlight here is the absolute certainty that nationalists have that ‘national identity’ is a thing which is easy to identify, easy to lose, and, indeed, relatively easy to preserve if only we had the will.
This assumption is by no means confined to the far right. David Cameron has said that he thinks “a sense of national identity helps foster social cohesion.” “Patriotism,” he says, “transcend politics… its value is [a] unifying, not a divisive force.” For Gordon Brown “A strong sense of being British helps unite and unify us; it builds stronger social cohesion among communities. We know that other countries have a strong sense of national purpose, even a sense of their own destiny. And so should we.”
The language of National Identity holds out the promise of concrete ways to talk about personal identity and a stable place from which to pursue one’s group destiny.
It offers the promise of social cohesion and stability. Nothing is more obvious, or essential, or common sense than one’s national identity, runs the logic, therefore this is a prime base for looking at the world and our collective role in it.
This is attractive to Christians who also like to talk about cohesion, community, order and vision and see them as part of their mission. I have already quoted Nazir-Ali when he argues that the Christian aspect of British Identity is “necessary to understand where we have come from, to guide us to where we are going, and to bring us back when we wander too far from the path of national destiny.” Behind Nazir-Ali’s ‘Christian nation’ lies an ‘Orders of Creation’ theology (evident, for example in his essay ‘Breaking Faith with Britain”).
This is a theology that sees humankind as inhabiting an ordered world. The social forms of human life are said to be patterns set by the Creator – gifts of grace given to creation to provide stability for human identity and endeavours. Nations and national identity are said to be very much part of this created order. The nation is the ordered context into which individuals are born and grow, live and die. The way they discharge their duties to God is shaped by their nation, which gives them a home and a language, a community and a purpose. This theology also has amongst its proponents Martin Luther, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to name but a few, and here today in the UK, Nigel Biggar and Joan and Oliver O’Donovan. So it is not a system of Christian thought to be dismissed lightly.
But I do here suggest a pause for thought. When Christians talk about nations as part of the concentric circles of the created order, they tend to do so without much engagement with the socio-political and historical reality of what a ‘nation’ actually is. One could be forgiven when reading these commentators for thinking that ‘National Identity’ is a brute fact, and that ‘nations’ are a feature of the natural environment, easily distinguishable one from the other.
Nations and their attendant Identities certainly exist. But they do not exist in the way that, say, a mountain or a river exists. Instead, their existence is more like that of a narrative or a story. To follow the sociologist Benedict Anderson’s well-known phrase – nations are acts of “collective imagination”. National Identity is not a simple thing that can be found or lost. Its reality is much more complex than that. It is parts of a conversation that each participant can agree with or disagree with, can adapt or preserve or adopt or invent.
For example, when a Muslim teenager in London sports England colours during a football match she is not losing one discrete identity in favour of another discrete identity (a victim of Griffin’s ‘genocidal melting pot’)– no for her, this is what being British looks like. Likewise, when a white man from Dorset gets into traditional folk music, he is not discovering something called “Englishness” that he can put on whole – instead by his choices he is taking on some aspects of the conversation, rejecting others, and adapting more to his modern life, and this process is his national identity. In turn, the Dorset man and the Muslim teenager will themselves contribute to the collective conversation of what British identity looks like.
Nations and the identities that accompany them are not set in aspic. They are ever shifting and ever changing. During the Great War, for example, men killed and died in the name of nations that their grandparents had never heard of.
The temptation is to hitch a ride with National Identity because National Identity seems to offer stability, social cohesion and purpose. It appears to offer these things because its identification seems simple and straightforward. But the reality is constant, endless uncertainty about what the National Identity is, where it came from and where it is going.
Note the ever tighter and decreasing circles of ‘who counts’, who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ when engaged in nationalistic conversation. Note the genealogies and family histories attempting to delineate exactly who is more ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ (or whatever) than the other. Note the very real discussion of where Scottishness begins and ends in the Border country. Note the surprise, following a genetic test reported in the New Scientist, of the Yorkshiremen who could trace their English surnames back to the mid 14th c. when they were told that they all had West African genes in their family lines. There is no such thing as a discrete national identity which can be preserved unmixed from other nations.
Incidentally, the British are not alone in handwringing about their national identity. Canadians do it. Australians do it. Even the French and the Germans and the Americans do it, and they are usually the ones that our politicians look to wistfully when they talk about ‘other countries’ with a strong sense of themselves. A response to all this handwringing from the far right and others cannot be to retreat to an even more simplistic accounts of nations and their identities. This only perpetuates the problem.
Instead, a response in the face of the temptation to simplistic claims is to recognise the complex reality of what goes in to making a person a person. People’s identities are made up of many strands. The national conversation is only one of these strands. A person’s national identity is only part of who they are. Usually, in day-to-day life, it is not even the most important aspect of who they are. Citizens of modern societies such as Britain have many important factors contributing to their identity that are not exhausted by the national. A Scot can also be an atheist, a woman, an old age pensioner and black. A white Englishman might also be a heterosexual, a father, a feminist, a wheelchair user, and so on. At any one time one of these strands may well be more important than the other when it comes to asking a person what is most important for their identity. Amartya Sen puts it well in his book Identity and Violence: “Given our inescapably plural identities, we have to decide on the relative importance of our different associations and affiliations in any particular context.”
We only do ourselves a disservice when we assume that the ‘national’ strand is the most important aspect of our identity and coordinate our social lives accordingly by reducing what is most important about a person to one - and only one - group that they might belong to. Rather than operating in the abstract with a simplistic account of national identity, Christians would do well to engage with people as they really are, and this includes the ever-changing complexity of what it means to be a human being.
Fortunately, Christians have a word for describing a person in such a way that their individuality is preserved in all its elements without reducing their identity to any one element and without reference to any groups they might belong to. And that word is ‘neighbour’.
This brings me to my third and final suggestion for why I think forging close links with national identity is a temptation to avoid, and that it is because loving the nation often operates as a shortcut to loving the neighbour, thus bypassing what is so distinctive about the Christian duty to love.
But surely loving one’s nation, or having a strong sense of national identity is a way – perhaps the best way, to love our neighbour? The assumption often encountered is that a nation is like a big neighbourhood. Popular literature and comment is filled with examples of conflating the two or claiming the connection. This is attractive to proponents of the ‘Christian nation’ because of course we are supposed to love our neighbours.
Nazir-Ali often talks about Christianity shaping the nation and the love of neighbour in the same breath. In a magazine interview the then Bishop was asked how he would re-write the national anthem if he could. He said what he really wanted to see was an insertion of the love of neighbour and mention of the Good Samaritan. Nazir-Ali, of course, is not alone amongst those who talk about duty to the nation and duty to ‘love thy neighbour’. When he was Prime Minister, Gordon Brown spoke of “the virtue that reinforced neighbourliness … A belief in the duty of one to another is an essential element of nationhood in every country”. With explicit reference to drumming up support for his military adventures in Iraq and beyond, President George Bush said “If you want to serve our country, love your neighbor just like you'd like to be loved yourself.”
The natural temptation for Christians is to conflate being a good neighbour with being a good patriot or having a strong national identity – Sentamu’s “robustness” in national identity and Christian duty.
If I may put it another way, the assumption is that good patriots will make good citizens. I agree that a good neighbour will look like a good citizen. They will be engaged. Empathetic. Aware. They will be ‘joiners’ and not ‘loners’. They will act responsibly for themselves and for those around them. Cohesion, stability, understanding – these are all undoubted civic goods but they are hard work. The rhetoric of national identity and patriotism is often ramped up when public leaders are searching for a shortcut to talk about these things.
Yet what is not so certain is that a strong sense of national identity will necessarily deliver the goods. I have already quoted and critiqued politicians and church leaders who too quickly assume a link between national identity and social cohesion. It is good also to look at places such as the United States of America. Note its strong streak of personal and racial violence, materialistic inequality, libertarian isolationism and fragmented society (as detailed in studies such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone). It is not at all clear that the presence of widespread patriotism amongst the population easily translates into what one might like to call ‘good neighbourliness’. This country, with its aptitude for flag waving and strong national self-identity has not noticeably produced a situation where voter participation, issue awareness and civic engagement levels are much better than in European countries. Countries with a supposed ‘identity crisis’. Indeed, on many of these markers for ‘good citizenship’, the USA comes out worse.
Consider Britain. The undoubted evidence of patriotism in the BNP and other far right parties has done nothing towards fostering the values of ‘good neighbourliness’. To be sure, a sift through the internet comment boards of these websites, as well as our more populist papers, will yield a lot of people very confident in their national identity. What it will not find is much evidence of the social cohesion, empathy and aware civic participation that our public leaders claim patriotism will foster in a good citizen.
If we must trumpet a Christian contribution to culture, then let us trumpet the invention of the neighbour. To quote Kierkegaard again: “No one in paganism loved the neighbour; no one suspected that he existed. Therefore what paganism called love…was preference.” To talk about Christian love for the neighbour as opposed to the ‘pagan’ preference for people who look like me and sound like me is to point out how neighbour love and nation love often run in opposite directions.
A response to people who use strong national identity language and connect it to their ‘love’ for others is to hold the idea of Neighbourhood up against the idea of Nationhood. There is a critique of Nation love inherent in Neighbour love. The subversive element has been there from the start in the story of the Good Samaritan. When the Young Lawyer in Luke 10 asked Jesus his question of how to gain life in all its fullness, Jesus told him he needed to love God and he needed to love his neighbour. The next question the young man asked was not “what does love look like?” Instead he asked a question of how to identify the target of his love “And who is my neighbour?” The answer he got deliberately pit the relationships shared by culture, religion and ethnicity against the relationship of the neighbour. It was not the one who shared the ethnic, cultural or religious affiliations with the poor man who was the neighbour.
My point is simple, but often overlooked, thanks in part to the too easy conflation of ‘nation love’ with ‘neighbour love’ and over familiarity with this, most clichéd of Jesus’ parables. Nationhood is not the neighbourhood write large. Instead the presence of the good neighbour stands as a social critique against the mindset of the good nationalist.
Against the ever decreasing circles of who ‘counts’ as a target of our love (“who is a Person to us”) we can suggest a gestalt shift as to how we view other people. The conversation as to who is a proper member of your nation is endless, unstable and ever-changing. The definition of your neighbour is infinitely simpler. As Kierkegaard points out, all you have to do is open the door and go out and the first person you see is your neighbour. The person whose needs you become aware of is your neighbour.
The category of ‘Neighbour’ includes all that goes in to making the person before you a Person. And that includes their nationality. But what neighbour language does is refuse to identify one strand of a person’s identity as the most important or only strand, and the one which allows us to decide whether they are a Person to us or not.
Will this solve all social problems and lead to an end of ethical political conversations? Of course not. But for Christians it helps to crystallize who, exactly, it is who ‘counts’ for us. And this is a crystallization that will not happen if we are heady with the language of nation.
Luke Bretherton has written: “The three-fold challenge before the churches is how to utterly condemn Islamophobia and neo-fascism, challenge anti-religious rhetorics and intolerance by so-called progressives, and honour but not make an idol of the cultural heritage of Christianity. What is needed is a renewal of a broad-based politics of the common good, one that draws together all faiths and those of no faith; passionate critics and supporters of capitalism who together seek a more just and stable financial system; and radicals and reformers, both of whom are committed to the defence of a common life.”
This, to me, sounds like a description of a Church whose disciples know how to be good citizens. And to this laudable goal I can only recommend the unsettling, creative, realistic and deeply Christian language of the good neighbour. It is the category by which we can describe people without any reference to their groups and without reducing their existence to one, overly simplistic national definition. One cannot be a good neighbour without being a good citizen - engaged, socially coherent, empathetic and aware. On the other hand, one can evidentially be a good patriot without being any of these things.
In conclusion, the appeal to national identity can act as a temptation towards triumphalism. In response to the fog of comfortable Christianised culture, the church can hold out the possibility of offence that Christ poses to everyone who faces him. To the proponents of National Identity who claim it is the primal, obvious and essential fact of life we can respond by reminding them of the complex reality of human identity and the ever-shifting nature of the national narrative. And to those who are tempted to skate over the hard work of being a good citizen by trumping up the patriotic impulse, we can emphasise the challenge that the story of the good neighbour poses to those who would ground duty to others first and foremost in the their national affiliation.
I think the proponents of the Christian Nation are trying to hitch their cart to two horses. The Nationhood horse is bigger, stronger and faster. In a short race it will win every time. But it is also reckless and leads to destruction. The other horse is the Neighbourhood. It is less flashy but it is gentler. It probably won’t get any politician elected or earn much more than eye rolls if encountered in a policy document or newspaper headline - but it will treat each person as the person she really is and not primarily as a member of an abstract group. After all it is not an insignificant detail that Jesus commanded us to love our neighbours, and not our nations.
.jpg)
