A Christian country

I was rather hoping for a bigger explosion from the Prime Minister's Christian country speech. True, there was the odd mad overstatement from some elements, but by and large everyone seems to have shrugged, said 'probably' and moved on. Of course, even the diehard atheist struggles to say convincingly 'we're not Christian at all' on the way to buy some presents for Christmas, before the public holidays for the incarnation and the feast day of the first martyr. And it was for a celebration of the bible, so not entirely a surprise. 

However, I also suspect it's because once they'd read the speech, it was a bit incoherent. Cameron made three points:

• Firstly that the King James bible is one of the monuments of the English language that reverberates through history and literature to the benefit of mankind. As this is obviously true, it is hardly likely to cause a storm of protest. 
• Secondly, that 'biblical,' by which he means 'Christian' thinking has shaped our morals. I'm surprised this hasn't been attacked, but one for later.
• Thirdly, that Britain is a Christian country. Britain isn't a country, England might be, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is. Sadly, no-one cared about that, but they did debate the adjective - badly.

Cameron started it of course, by being vapid. His definition of distinctively Christian characteristics went as follows: 'responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities.' I'm not claiming there is anything unchristian about the list, but they don't seem very distinctive. Promoters of social obligation for example might look to that other excellent institution of the early years of the Christian Era, the Roman Empire and their system of civic society. 

But the opposite is wrong too: Christian values are not universal ones dressed up in vestments; there are things that are pretty distinctive to the Christian heritage. There aren't really any specific universal truths across humanity, only platitudes. For example, let's take the individual: Christianity at its core is a individual religion. Christ is uncompromising about that - he comes 'to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother' (Mt. 10.34). Confucius wants to talk about ancestors (BTW, I discovered while googling for this that the lineal descendant of Confucius is known to the 83rd generation - i.e., now. It's the longest family tree ever); and Buddhism - ever helpful - thinks the self doesn't exist, it's an illusion. This approach becomes fairly critical when one starts debating, say, sexuality or democracy. We could also go outside religion for this, for example, private property: jolly important in the west; made  no sense at all to the native Americans (see Locke).

In the west, there are three big candidates as roots for these values - the Greeks, the Romans, and Christianity (plus the Jews, maybe a half). I'm not sure it's very productive, though quite interesting, to try to identify which caused what. What we have is a amalgam of ancient Graeco-Roman classical civilisation and Christian values, fused together in the fourth century (ish) and cooked up over the following sixteen centuries, with  a smattering of other influences as we go. For most of its life, well into the twentieth century, our heritage has thus been shaped by the church, more or less. It is Christian ideology that has shaped how we think for most of two millennia. It's a great birthright. It's not universal, though it should be (oh yes, another distinctively Christian ideology - ask a Hindu what he thinks of the lands outside India) and we should not pretend it's generated ex nihilo, though if it helps, call it western liberalism, or secularism.

I think we should be calling it Christian and thus we should call the country Christian, because I think we are. I don't think we're very coherent about it; I certainly don't think we're very devout, and there are a lot of things I'd change if I could. But we do look to Christianity to lead on a lot of these things: that's why the country was unimpressed with the conduct of the chapter of St Paul's - they felt their church had failed. We wouldn't have got so bothered about a mosque. Of course a subset of highly educated metropolitan people don't think this, but they're abnormal. And I don't think they realise how abnormal people they (we) are. Here's Dawkins, arguing I think for disestablishment and the abolition of faith schools (slightly oddly, he seems to think we'll be a secular country if we have a separation of church and state - just like America and Turkey). I don't actually mind the abolition of faith schools. What kind of followers of a great God worry about the control of schools in an benign rich society shaped in the image of their faith? However, he doesn't seem to get the cultural point. I mean, he claims to: in that same editorial he says he doesn't want to abolish Christmas and he likes the King James bible, but it all seems a bit tactical. Then he says the correct analogy for Christianity is whether anyone would call a child a monetarist just as they do a Catholic. But the thing it,  it just isn't. One is an intellectual proposition (how do changes in the money supply work?); the other is cultural, and people think about culture without taking a razor to the logic. I suspect he might know this. He doesn't mention nationalism in his list of things that cause problems, because it also takes his argument away. People don't think logically about the country they belong to, they just do: there are English children, there are even British children. People care about their countrymen and their heritage not because they've looked at it logically, but because of the cultural heritage they take from their parents and society. And then they look to certain exemplars to represent it. This means much of the country cares about men kicking or throwing balls around. I'm pretty certain they think very similar things about morality and the church  in England.  

And that, to my mind, makes the UK is a Christian country. The church is looked to for morals by the overwhelming majority of people, even if they don't go or even say they are Christian. It's still the lodestone for that kind of thing. It may not be in the future. The UK may not be a Christian country forever. I very much hope it will be; I'd like it to be more of one now. However, it will always (used in a poetic not logical sense) be one of Christian descent. And every western atheist should applaud that.

A joyous incarnationtide to one and all.