The religion of democracy
C. H. Sisson It was asserted by Blackstone that Christianity is part of the laws of England, but it has to be admitted that things have changed since 1765. Nor is it true, as was suggested recently in the correspondence columns of the Spectator (11 July, 1981), that it is 'far Simpler.. .for civil authorities to consider the truth of any religious teaching rather than pretend they are all of equal worth.' The subject is not simple at all. Macchiavelli may be consulted as to some of the difficulties of past practice. In a modern democratic state, it is not the truth that matters, but the number of people who Share any particular beliefs, whether deluded or not. And the suprema lex, whether in despotism or democracy, is the salus reipublicae, the mere continuation of the state, a matter rarely mentioned in decent society, like some other matters, but there all the same.
The practical problem, in England today, is how things should be arranged in a society which is residually Christian and which Still has the church built into its nonrepresentative institutions, but in which the representative institutions, where the effective power lies, are bound to ignore religion except as an element in opinion. As an elernent of opinion, Christianity, in a variety of forms, is still dominant, but there are Jews, Muslims and Hindus to be considered. There is also the vast mass of the Population who now understand that religion no longer confers respectability and Who therefore do not mind what happens to It, as well as the active minority who, following Karl Marx or Voltaire, or some other modern figure, think it should be abolished. All these opinions are equal, as far as our political institutions are concerned; even bishops, in their constitutional capacity, have to take account of this fact. The sovereign is not the sovereign only of Christians, still less only of Anglicans. Indeed while in the 16th century it was said that the religion of the people follows that of the prince, in the 20th century we may take it that the religion of the prince, so far as it means anything constitutionally, will have to follow that of the people. If the whole population of this country were converted to Hinduism, the sovereign would certainly have to be a Hindu. In the present Babel, and the present atmosphere of (at least theoretical) religious tolerance, the natural arrangement is for the Queen to follow the historically appropriate branch of Christianity, as long as she does not make too much of it.
One aspect of the problem which is now commonly overlooked is the primitive role of religion as a means of binding a society together. Societies are bound by what they are bound by, not by what they ought to be bound by, and once there is serious competition between religious conceptions, none of them has a chance of being the binding force. One can understand why the deification of the Roman emperors, so absurd from our point of view, was proposed and finally accepted in a government which had extended itself to cover too many races and religions; and why when Christianity began to look like a winner, there was nothing for it but for the reigning emperor to take it over and make it the imperial religion. No form of this imperial solution is open to us. If there is, or is to be, a common religion, it can only be the religion of democracy, to which everyone more or less gives assent, and if it is not altogether understood by those who profess it, that is something it has in common with other religions. It has profound inadequacies — like the worship of the emperor — but like the worship of the emperor it can be practised side by side with another religion, except by persons of some scrupulosity or too much given to logic.
In a dim way, the Church of England perhaps understands this. But it is in a dim way. The Church has conceived the notion of re-modelling itself in accordance with the more recent religion. An awful matiness is to replace Christian charity. A vulgar expression, designed not to add to the hearer's understanding, but to limit the Church's message to what the hearer already knows, has replaced the traditional language of Anglicanism, and with it both the rigour and the subtlety of its whole historical heritage. The aim evidently is to substitute the religion of democracy for the Christian religion. This naturally will not work, or if it does, people will no longer be Christians, whatever they call themselves. Even if success goes only so far as infiltrating the religion of democracy and attempting to overlay it with Christian meanings — rather as the Church in the early imperial centuries treated various pagan practices, giving them a Christian excuse — that will not work either. The religion of democracy is not a pre-Christian thing into which posterior meanings can be injected, but a post-Christian thing which is made up of Christian-derived elements gone slightly askew; it is a form of heresy, however amiable.
The only possibility is to accept the religion of democracy as the state religion in which Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others can also participate. This is not without its dangers for the state, as the uncivilised form of Christianity — Christianity, that is, before it had received its Roman education — was dangerous. Since the fundamental tenets of the democratic religion cannot be denied one should leave them as they are and content oneself with the de facto accretion of other elements, the most necessary of which is a profound respect for our local institutions and in particular for the government by the Queen in Parliament. Respect for the operations of this system has been eroded by the proliferation of international institutions which have their importance in their place but which are not to be regarded as alternative authorities.
The notion of a national religion, to which newcomers of all kinds can accede and which the native population more or less alienated from Christianity can recognise, is bound to be regarded as rather scandalous, and I do not propose to continue the argument beyond this point at the moment. I will however venture an Anglican comment. It is that the Church of England would in this conception of things, be free to be true to its historical mission as an 'unquestionably loyal' religious body which did not seek to influence governments except by bringing up Christians who would then exercise their own judgment in the affairs of the commonwealth. It would be free also to use the full measure of its riches — not least the Authorised Version and the Book of Common Prayer — to make a critical impact on the blowsy world of the late 20th century, instead of aping the manners of that world as it seeks now to do. As for its traditional politics, they are not merely innocuous, they are manifestly favourable to the well-being of every man, woman and child in the country, whether of immemorial English stock or recently arrived from Central Europe or from Central Africa. Do they not centre — so far as this world is concerned, and this world is the world of politics — on the wish that the sovereign — the Queen in Parliament — should be granted in health and wealth long to live' and that she should be strengthened so as to 'vanquish and overcome all her enemies'? What citizen of the United Kingdom, with the minimum of benevolence towards the country, can wish for less?
This is the last of a series of articles on the relations between Church and State
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