I should confess here that I go to a Church of England Church congregation to receive communion, and so my thoughts here are coming from one within the communion, not from outside of it. Therefore, this is not a sectarian complaint but rather a deep groan of a communicant of the Church of England about how his own Church is so profoundly compromised – and now you know! However, I want to start off by observing that the Church in these Isles predates the Church of England. Further, the Church in England is much bigger than the Church of England. I will give a short history and highlight that the problem of compromise is systemic but not intrinsic to the Church in England. Next, I will highlight the differences between authentic Christianity and Liberalism before finally highlighting what Christians can do to change things around.
The Church first arrived in these islands sometime in the 2nd century and is first commented upon by Tertullian in his work Against the Jews and by Origin in his Sermons on Ezekiel. It seems from archaeological evidence that the Christian faith was brought here as a Roman faith by Roman soldiers and Roman traders, as evidenced by the Notitia Dignitatum. Taking advantage of the Pax Romana and the Roman road network, the church established itself in Roman settlements like Verulamium, Londinium, and Eboracum. By the 4th century, when Christianity was the force to be reckoned with across the empire, we see the emergence of Christian mosaics and other overt expressions of the faith, such as the Chi Rho at St Mary’s Hinton or the Water Newton Treasures, which were liturgical vessels of the eucharist. This showed that Christianity was well-established amongst the Roman Elites of the time.
However, this Church suffered Roman Persecution, as all Christians did, confirmed by the story of St. Alban, who was the first known martyr of these islands. The Council of Arles in AD 314 references Bishops from these Isles, showing that a full episcopal structure was present within the Isles prior to or quickly after the Edict of Milan in AD 313. When in the early to mid-4th century, Emperor Honorius ordered the withdrawal of the legions from the province of Britannia, calling upon the province to ‘look to its own defence.’ The Roman Church (please note – I do not mean the Roman Catholic Church) in the islands quickly collapsed, as did the Roman urbanisation and Roman culture. The Saxon invasion of the 5th century resulted in an independent Celtic Church emerging out in the countryside apart from urban settlement. As the faith indigenized, the Saxon invasion led to the retreat of the Celts, Celtic culture, and Christianity alike, as the new arrivals established Saxon paganism in the land. It is in this milieu the fable of King Arthur is set. Archaeological records for great swathes of England see a disappearance and discontinuity of Christian influence that, in places, become total, like the abandoned Church of Silchester or the Pagan replacing Christian burial practices after AD 410 in Lankhills, Winchester. Christianity survived, of course, in Wales, Cornwall, and Devon, where the Celts managed to hold out from the Pagan Saxon onslaught. The historian John Morris argues, somewhat controversially, in line with the Arthurian legend, that Christianity formed the basis of an emerging Celtic resistance to the Pagan Saxon invasion; however, the main response of the Celtic Church was to begin a missionary enterprise.
There were missions launched by the newly emerged Roman Catholic Church that developed a unique sense of itself from AD 410 onwards, as did the Celtic Church, due to the collapse of the Roman empire in the west. St Patrick, who evangelised the Celts of Ireland, gave birth to a missionary movement rooted in monasticism that led to the foundation of Lindisfarne by St Aidan – who evangelised the Saxons, Iona by Saint Colomba – who evangelised the Picts. These monasteries gave us many of our cultural and literary jewels, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. They were the cradles from which a later identity would emerge. Rome independently sent her own missionary, St Augustine of Rome, to evangelise the ‘angelic’ looking Saxons whose missionary effort led to the conversion of King Aethelberht of Kent. The islands were now split into various Saxon and Celtic domains. Canterbury eventually became the seat of the Roman Catholic Church in the islands, whilst Celtic Christianity was strongest in the Northwest, in places like Northumbria. These two churches, both of whom developed from the fall of the Western empire, began to develop different liturgical practices but had enough in common to recognise one another as Christian communions, despite differences over Easter, Tonsure, and other practices. They agreed to meet at the Synod of Whitby in AD 664 and ‘have it out’ before King Oswiu, who, for astute political reasons and some sound religious reasons, submitted his kingdom to the Church based in Rome. Celtic Christianity was eventually absorbed into the Roman tradition and disappeared, just as the Celts and Celtic culture began to disappear from view, as the more dominant Saxon culture eclipsed it (there are many lessons here for people to think about). The Church became an intrinsic part of the various Heptarchies (the separate Saxon kingdoms). Canterbury became the focus of Christianity within the Heptarchy in the 7th century. The monasteries were not just centres of religious life but centres of learning and kingdom administration, such as at Jarrow and Glastonbury. One here could speak of English Christianity and a Church of Saxons but not of England, as it did not exist yet.
In a replay of history that echoes again in our modern times – a new pagan horde descended on the islands from the north as North Men, or Norsemen, latterly known as Vikings. They began at first to raid and then to settle in the islands, smashing the Saxon kingdoms and forcing them and Christianity into retreat from the 8th century. The Church was forced backward and eradicated as a foreign religious law called the Danelaw established itself across swathes of Northeast and Southeast England. The Church was not without its champions, the greatest of which became King Alfred, latterly acclaimed ‘The Great,’ whose war with the Great Heathen Army culminated in his victory at the Battle of Edington in AD 878. King Gunther of the Danes was forced to accept Baptism, Alfred himself became his godfather as well as overlord, and Danelaw was forced to tolerate Christianity as part of the Treaty of Wedmore. Alfred began a civilisational project of building a new Saxon kingdom more deeply Christianised than before. He wanted an intrinsically Christian kingdom coded into every part of its life. Centred around monarchy and the Church, this model of nationhood was forged from his defence of Christianity and was the foundation of what was to become the Kingdom of England under his grandson Athelstan. After first defeating the Norsemen and then a Pict/Norsemen alliance at the Battle of Brunanburh, Athelstan adopted the title ‘Rex Anglorem,’ meaning ‘King of the English.’ The Saxon Church, therefore, gave birth to England, and it is from AD 937 that we can finally speak of a Church of England, though it was at this time a Roman Catholic Church.
The birth of the Church of England, as we think of it today, was the project of King Henry VIII. Historian G. W. Bernard argued in his work The King’s Reformation that Henry was not a radical reformer but only sought control over Church governance for personal reasons. Specifically, the ‘Great Matter’ of the king was in reference to his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which he believed to be invalid due to Catherine’s prior marriage to his brother Arthur. He came to this conclusion due to the trauma of having no male heirs. Pope Clement VII refused to grant an annulment. Henry, therefore, with Thomas Cromwell, used the Acts of Supremacy in AD 1534 to create a novel Church jurisdiction under the King in England. Thomas Cranmer, who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in AD 1533, a true Reformer, was the one who introduced Reformed doctrines during the Regency of Edward VI and drafted the 42 Articles in AD 1553. This led to the blending of Protestant and Catholic elements – and the creation of a protesting, partially Reformed – but structurally Catholic Church, which latterly understood itself to be a via media between the two opposing spectrums of western Christendom. During the Elizabethan religious settlement (which was brutally and cunningly enforced) fashioned in the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of AD 1559 (which followed a concerted effort to reunite England to Rome under ‘bloody Mary’), this protesting Catholic Church became a fossilised part of the state. This new Church of England was a creation of the state – and from that time onwards and into the present – has always served primarily the nation’s elites. If Alfred forged an England to serve the Church, the Reformation saw a Church forged to serve England (as interpreted by its social elites).
I have told you this story to explain why the Church of England is so utterly slavish to the elites (even when they and their agenda are not Christian) and has always had a propensity to go with the culture. We see this immediately at the birth of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment, a process starting in AD 1685 and finishing arguably in AD 1815, is characterized by rationalism, empiricism, individual liberty, nationalism, and devotion to technological innovation, all of which embody a common motif of a turn to the self and a focus on life in this world. The reorientation towards empiricism and the rationalisation of society, pushed by the self-evident power to affect change through increased mastery over nature – revolutionised the world primarily through the industrial revolution, urbanisation, and a resultant de-mystification of nature. The elites of England were captured by this new way of thinking that prized innovation over tradition and organised all aspects of life around the state – rationally. Old ways of life were stripped away to forge new ones. Thinkers such as John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and Matthew Tindal placed reason in natural theology as primary over reasoning from revelation and tradition to create the new doctrines of the new states emerging from the collapse of Christendom and, consequently, the values that also then emerged. Thus, natural theology properly became the organising authority for society and life; the vision of God this theology could arrive at was more deist than a theist, leading increasingly to an epicurean culture. This saw the emergence and influence of Deism into the Christian matrix of society, which was crucial to the creation and formation of liberal societies in the early modern period. David Hempton, in his work The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century, notes that the Church of England increasingly accommodated Enlightenment rationalism in its thinking, but only up to the point where it threatened established authority, which tells you very clearly of the sentiments permeating the Church of England and what it thought important. There was none-the-less a reactionary response rooted in a more traditional Christianity that engaged polemically and apologetically with this Deist heresy, such as Bishop Joseph and William Law, who attempted to counter the drift towards natural theology and reaffirm in various ways the supremacy of revealed theology and traditional ways of thinking. However, it was a lost battle, as most began to think from within this new liberal matrix. It was quickly internalised and formalised within the Church of England and remains so today.
I tell you this to highlight some of the core differences between liberalism, both in its two principal forms, and authentic, full-fat Christianity. I will split liberalism into two forms, or epochs: classical liberalism, spanning the modern period from AD 1765 to 1960, and progressive liberalism, in the postmodern period from AD 1960 to the present. I will contrast each of these forms with Christianity in its truest sense.
Christianity places your story within the story of the Church and frames your identity theologically as a militant – for the new covenant community – to which you belong – which is the truest definition of the church. Classical liberalism frames your story within the story of the nation-state to which you are said to belong. Each of these kingdoms demands your sacrifice and fealty, which results in no conflict if the nation itself understands itself – as a servant of the blessed Trinity – like in Alfred’s time. It becomes increasingly problematic if a nation Christianises (as the UK has) and sets goals and ambitions that are opposed to the good of the new covenant community, which happened increasingly from the time of Elizabeth onwards, such as the Crimean War, for instance. This can be best understood by thinking, which kingdom are you pursuing? Which kingdom is your concern, the United Kingdom or the Kingdom of Heaven? The Christian must pursue the kingdom of GOD, an ideal that debases this world’s concern but is nonetheless to express fully the reality of this world. Liberalism, from the 1700s onwards, discipled the churches, particularly the National Protestant church. It (not Christ’s teachings) formed the concerns, values, and instincts of the people of Britain. Christians abandoned claims that Christianity should rule the state and its agenda and that instead – the state should pursue its own concerns, even if they contradicted Christianity or the values of the new covenant community, as an end itself, apart from any sense of the Kingdom of GOD! The concept of the Kingdom of Heaven was dually and overly spiritualised as a response to this shift. Christendom was a forgotten idea. Now the Church would accept that faith was a private matter and not the concern of the state, which resulted in the religious tolerance fashioned by the Whig party, influenced by John Locke. Through the Toleration Act of AD 1689, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in AD 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act of AD 1829, equal rights for religious minorities were granted. This resulted in an uncoupling of the pursuit of the Kingdom of GOD, Christian values, and Christian beliefs from the concerns of the state, which gradually drifted further away from them and replaced them with the outworking of liberalism. This is the foundation upon which a later faux multicultural society would be built from the 1950s onwards.
The framework through which decision would be made and the concerns of the state decided were shifted from the process of reasoning from revelation (however understood) to reasoning from nature, and latterly to reasoning from the early values of proto liberalism. The concern for freedom from ‘Christian’ interference by the state became an inherent concern of liberal states. It was established by revolutions in France and the USA, and everywhere else, that, as Liberalism took hold, it became part of their DNA to be ‘anti-Christian politique.’ In England, these same principles worked themselves out more slowly as England managed to avoid the spirit of revolution sweeping the world! The power of the new sciences – in mastering nature and the development of new technologies, opened up new possibilities never before imagined. It had an enchanting effect, resulting in a concern to pursue innovation, capitalise upon it, and focus on improving life in this world, which became a telos in its own right. Society was increasingly rationalised to the function of increasing and maximising productivity in the service of the economy, which was the lifeblood of the power of the state. This was a dramatic shift away from the traditions, rituals, and understandings of life and the world built up through centuries of reflection upon revelation, which had been inculcated into agricultural life. Rationalisation impacted all areas of life, including ethical and moral concerns. The pursuit of happiness replaced the pursuit of holiness; utilitarian concerns replaced virtue in social policy. Morality increasingly became centred on the new god, humanity itself, rather than the GOD of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The pursuit of life, liberty, happiness, civic fraternity, equality, and, above all, freedom (from Christianity) replaced a concern for virtue, holiness, the Kingdom of GOD, and the worship of GOD. The doctrine of human rights, which arose out of a deformity of the doctrine of the Imago Dei, a common doctrine between the moderns and the Christians, shows that liberalism is a deformity of Christianity.
The shift of concern, as highlighted, forced Christianity to be practiced not as state doctrine but as a private individual enterprise, ever subservient to the needs of and never able to challenge the god-like primacy of the state. This position was accepted by many Christians who moulded new forms of Christianity to this reality. Groups like the Methodist movement, Evangelicals, and later Pentecostalism arose in part as a reaction to this modernity and partly as a syncretic adoption of it, with accommodation to personal and private faith, marked primarily by personal piety whilst still asserting scriptural authority and personal conversion through revelation. The sense of self was framed as Christian but accepted given the normativity of the liberal secular state, and worked in those areas permitted by liberal secularism, namely as keeper of civic ritual and charity, and occasionally conscience to the nation. The Roman Catholic Churches attempted to resist these shifts with its society within a society approach that emerged out of Vatican I. It was a social, structural enterprise that was possibly the right idea but was poorly executed by Bishops who did not understand properly how people are formed by society, a liberal society. This resulted in the eventual liberalisation of many of their institutions precisely set up to prevent it due to poor catechism, not seeing the importance of recruiting committed Catholics to the post, and a poorly formed and not different enough attempt to create a Catholic culture.
If the wars of the Reformation were the trauma that gave rise to the Enlightenment’s liberalism and the modern world, then the traumas of the World Wars, back-to-back, gave rise to a new increasing shift from modernity to postmodernity, from classical liberalism to progressive liberalism. This metastasised form of liberalism stripped away any need for a greater meta-narrative and dropped the idea of national identity. Now, life was framed entirely in the journey of the individual self, as an existentialised individual apart from all else! Christianity stands in stark contrast to this idea, as the Christian must have a communal identity in the body of Christ, and their individual story is to be interpreted therein. The people of GOD in the New Covenant is the vessel of our personal journey. Though one can see how – from Christian beliefs and practices like baptism, confession, and pursuit of vocation, the sense of the individual existential journey is present within the Christian faith. In progressive liberalism, it is taken to new extremes.
This stripping away of the individual as an existential subject gives space in our post-modern culture for the Church to advance in fresh ways as we claim Christianity as our full identity and the people of GOD, once again, as our people. This is the faith of the Fathers of the Church. The sense of the people of the Covenant can give rise to a new recovery of an old Christian culture for the Englishmen and other ethnicities in the one Covenant people of GOD. Whereas life is framed in personal modernity of people discovering who they are, one thinks of the proverbial child who has discovered that they, indeed, are a cat in the wrong body (a status that cannot be questioned or subject to scrutiny in post-modern sentiment). Within the Christian faith, by contrast, one discovers who GOD calls them to be through particular, but not unique, vocations for the service of the Kingdom of GOD and the people of GOD: a priest, an evangelist, an industrialist, a father or mother, and so on. Postmodernity has led to the collapse of a culture of hard scientific facts: gender is said to be a construct rather than something intrinsically tied to chromosomes, men are said to be able to menstruate and breastfeed, and the fetus is said not to be alive or human. Hard science has given way to hard feelings and subjectivity to truth in which all are said to have their own, intrinsically, which is to be discovered and shared. All cultures are deemed relative to one another and equally valid. Even those who marry children, practice slavery, and practice female genital mutilation cannot be questioned, as to do so would be racist, which is the new doctrinal heresy. Christianity, by contrast, holds that personal truths are framed and prismed through the life of Jesus Christ. He is the embodiment of all truth, who has formed the universe to contain truth and, as such, holds within it indisputable facts that are there to be discovered. These, once discovered and established, do not care about your feelings. There are certain values built from His truth, which lead to certain unchangeable and superior values, which, if followed, lead to a matrix by which one culture can be judged as superior to another. Human rights are being organised according to a priority of victimhood, as in weighing conflicting rights in which some groups receive special preferences in the law and culture and structures of the state, above that of what is said to be the majority group, which, in England, is said to be the white Christian male. Christians by contrast maintain that the point of life is not to construct the laws of the land to allow for personal fulfilment. However, when subjectively defined, this has led to a destructive epidemic of abortion, divorce, and the erosion of the social fabric. Rather, it should be to cultivate virtue in the life of the subjects – pointed towards GOD as end. The Church of England, whilst at times trying to act as the conscience of the nation, has, with increasing speed, simply accommodated itself to this liberal drift.
What then, can we, the Church of the 21st century do in the wake of these realities, both within the Church of England and as the Church in England? How can we respond to the replacement of our Christian heritage, values, doctrines, customs, and beliefs over the last two and a half centuries? We must begin by recapturing our identity as ‘full fat’ Christians holding to an undiluted Christianity in an unsullied and pure way. This means to see ourselves as the Bible describes us, such as the priests of GOD, the brethren to one another, in a new holy nation, part of a heavenly kingdom whose defining feature is the new Covenant; not ethnicity, language, gender, or class. We must then begin to construct from this identity both a new Christian culture and, most importantly, a Christian political agenda from which a new society can emerge. We can do this best by looking critically into the history of Church and bringing forward aspects of the past, some with revision, some as they are found, into the present and live them out boldly and if necessary, confrontationally with the world around us; and form new practices of the faith – given the modern context, where necessary. These practices (and it really is all about practices and organisation) should be based squarely on Christian doctrine and values that have not been adapted to the modern world but seek to make a world adapted to them. We should express our life as Christians, as a distinct people – emphasising our differences to others, not our similarities, making common cause with all those who call themselves by the name Christian, and not with humanity in general. We must embody confidence in our identity as Christians – shown in a culture of our own a resolute willingness to defend our rights to be Christians; fearlessly and with zeal, inspired by the martyrs of past and present! We should actively pursue a new Christendom and cultivate virtue ethics, a knowledge of Church history, a resoluteness in our Christian identity, a zeal to suffer for Christ, and a Christian politique – as part of what discipleship should look like in our congregations. We should organise our communities accordingly. We must, in short, be committed to the triumph of the Christian Church over all other contenders in society, and the triumph of a new Christendom over other visions of society, and not seek a liberal accommodation with others, but a catholic integration of all. Learning afresh how to build Christian families from first encounter to the birth of the greatest grandchild, is an essential part of this new Christian culture, as families are the recipients of culture and pass them on. This is nothing short of a four-hundred-year project! Christians should always prioritise solidarity with other Christians above all else, and in the face of all enemies to the Church militant. We should accept as a starting point to our 400-year journey that the UK is post Christian, and organise ourselves as a minority community, seeking to activate where we can latent Christian sentiments in the wider population, which may shorten the time to rechristianisation if demographic collapse can be reversed in the general population. We need to consolidate our resources, people, and energies into smaller geographical spaces and, once again, begin to build outwards. I recognise that some denominations cannot easily be reconciled and so I would encourage each denomination to adopt this strategy and may the best denomination win! Discipleship needs to include not just knowledge of doctrines, but also of history, culture, ritual, ethics, values, political agenda, and a sense of a new identity on a mission to transform and change the world around it, generationally. The deliberate capturing of institutions, including the Churches, is a key part of such a strategy, and so we must enter institutions, particularly HR and the seminaries, with missionary purpose, recruiting and backfilling with those who are from amongst us, or at least sympathetic, whilst filtering out our ideological opponents. The Church has been here before and we have overcome twice before. If we can reject liberalism, we can be more than conquerors a third time!
