WHAT DOES HE THINK THE CHURCH WAS DEFENDING?:

Backward Christian Soldiers: Our civilisation is in grave danger. But the threat is not terrorism, eugenics or GM crops. The West’s future is being undermined by leaders whose guiding light is exactly what modern, rational politics was supposed to have blown out long ago: religion (Iain Macwhirter, 07 December 2003, Sunday Herald)

[W]hy does religion remain so influential? Why do Christians, apparently, make such successful politicians? Could it be that having faith gives them some kind of ‘edge’ in the political race – something that gives religious politicians the resilience and fortitude to put up with the rough treatment routinely meted out to people in public life?

Our own moral double standards may have something to do with it. Divorce, adultery, promiscuity and cohabitation are the defining features of modern moral life. Yet somehow, especially in America, we expect our leaders to be immune from it all. It is increasingly difficult for most people to enter public life at all because of the relentless intrusion into their private lives. We require our leaders to be ‘hyper-normal’ – that is, conforming to a stereotype of moral rectitude which has little to do with how we lead our own lives.

But that’s not the only political benefit of God-bothering. There is evidence that faith can be an effective bulwark against stress. When you walk with God, you never walk alone. If you see your life as a realisation on earth of the will of a supreme deity, it makes temporal decision-making that much easier. Suddenly, it’s not just your own responsibility, it’s your calling.

It is also the case that, even in this Godless age, a lot of people still believe in God. Seven in 10 Britons declared themselves to be Christian in the last census. Three out of four adults in Britain say they believe in some sort of deity – a higher power, beyond human comprehension, which influences their lives.

Empty pews may merely indicate that people have become religious in a different way. Certainly, the proliferation of new age cults since the 1960s, from Scientology to the Kabbalah, suggests there is a latent spirituality in many of us – a propensity to the divine – which seeks expression. It may be that voters respond well to someone, like Tony Blair, who has the courage to believe.

This is something left-wing intellectuals find difficult. They tend to be atheist, and are inclined to disparage all faith as superstition. This is why many Labour party members find the PM’s religiosity – as lampooned in Private Eye’s “St Albion’s Parish News” – to be cringe-making. Most on the left believed God expired sometime during the 20th century, under the sustained assault of modernism, materialism and marxism. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the most successful Labour leader in history should be a Christian.

The left’s hostility to the cloth goes back at least to the days of the first world war, when Bishops told soldiers in the trenches that it was God’s will that they fight for king and country. My own grandfather, a church elder, was thrown out of the Kirk during that war for being a pacifist, something that is hard to imagine happening today.

The marxist claim that religion was an essentially reactionary force – “the opium of the masses” – influenced many on the left who were never card-carrying communists. But God has proved to be rather more enduring than Marx. The Church is back stronger than ever in Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, in many former Warsaw Pact countries, such as Poland, the Church was key to the overthrow of communism.

Humanism, which seemed to be the natural successor to religion in the 20th century, has not managed to break Christianity’s monopoly on the spiritual. The Church still seems to hold sway over the ‘rites of passage’ ceremonies – like marriage and funerals. For all the frenetic eclecticism of new age spiritual movements, no single ‘alternative’ religion has emerged to challenge Christianity. The nearest is probably Zen Buddhism, which was brought to the West in the 1950s and 60s by writers like Alan Watts and Christmas Humphries, and has remained the religion of Bohemians ever since.

It takes a willful blindness to write both that Christianity was the key to toppling the humanist rationalist totalitarianisms like Marxist-Communism and that it is Christianity which threatens our civilization. Meanwhile, it's just ignorant to write of Buddhism as if it was a serious alternative in the West, when, in fact, Christianity is replacing Buddhism in the East.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 7, 2003 11:01 AM