We live in a relentlessly secular society. In some
ways I am glad that we do. I would far prefer to live in a secular society than
a theocratic one. I don’t want laws to be governed by any religion. I don’t
want a government to say to me that I can or I can’t do something because of
religious rules. I believe in freedom of
conscience and the freedom to believe or not to believe. But I think this
freedom should cut both ways. Religion should not attempt to impose its beliefs
on society, but nor should society attempt to impose its beliefs on religion.
Is it possible for a politician in Britain to be a
practicing Christian? Most certainly it is. Theresa May is a Christian. So are
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. There are many others. There are also politicians who
follow other religions. This is generally unproblematic. Why then has there recently been some
controversy over the former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron who resigned because he
thought it was impossible to be both a Christian and lead the Lib Dems?
It may have been because Mr Farron is a more high
profile Christian than other politicians. Theresa May does not often talk about
her faith, nor for that matter did Gordon Brown. It is for them something that
is kept in the background. But Tony Blair did indeed do God. He talked about it
quite a lot. What is the difference between Blair and Farron?
Tony Blair has been a practicing Roman Catholic
officially or unofficially for many years. What would he have said if he had
been interviewed about something controversial like abortion or homosexuality?
Well Tony Blair thinks that the Pope is wrong about homosexuality and that the
Catholic Church is wrong about abortion. As usual he finds a third way.
What about Mr Farron? I don’t know exactly what he
believes, but I’m sure that whatever it is, he really believes it. Mr Farron
believes in Christianity literally. For him the task is to follow the teachings
of Christ. He adapts to Christianity rather than striving to make Christianity
adapt to him. That is the difference. I don’t know the denomination that Mr
Farron follows, but it would not be at all surprising if the version of
Christianity he believes in has traditional teachings about abortion and
homosexuality. For nearly two thousand years every version of Christianity had
the same teaching about these issues. Most still do.
We have in Britain and the West in general gone
through something of a revolution since the 1960s. In 1959 nearly all
Christians and most of the population in general thought that marriage
necessarily involved one man and one woman, that sex outside marriage was
sinful, abortion and homosexuality wrong and that changing sex was impossible.
There might have been a few people that disagreed, but they were uncommon. All
of the churches taught more or less the same things about Christian morality
although there were some disagreements. Christianity in 1959 was still a
fixture in the life of our country. People generally conformed at least
outwardly to Christian morality even if they didn’t themselves believe in
Christianity.
In the past fifty years or so we have started a
social revolution almost without precedent. Until the 1960s nearly everyone
living in Britain would have believed more or less the same things about
traditional Christian morality. We have now reached the stage where
almost no-one still does.
What happened? The Christian rules that governed
society were rather suddenly thrown off. The reason was that for the first time
in history it was possible to have sex without having to worry about having
children. This was the game breaker. Consensual sex between adults ceased to be
a moral issue and became instead simply a matter of inclination and taste. Until
the 1960s a woman who had sex outside marriage risked poverty and having to
bring up a child without help. Consequently marriage remained what it had been
for centuries. It regulated sex and determined sexual morality. But suddenly
there was effective contraception and crucially a welfare state that would take
over the role of the husband if there were any accidents and unforeseen
consequences of following our inclinations. Love became free, but this really
meant that sex became free. Everything was permitted because someone else would
pay the bill.
This relation between men and women changed fundamentally.
It wasn’t necessary anymore for a woman to marry before she had sex. The
connection between sex and having children was broken. What had until recently
followed as a matter of course now became a choice. Pregnancy could easily be
avoided, but even if a woman did have a child without a father, it didn’t
really matter. She would be looked after and the amount she received from the
state rose with each child born outside marriage. Apart from rather briefly at
the very beginning, men became superfluous. Children born outside marriage far
from ruining a woman’s life might instead bring with them a flat, money and
idleness. There was no more disapproval, because sex was no longer a matter of
morality. Women threw off the constraints of human nature. They could follow their
inclination and seek sex in a similar way to men. Not only were men
superfluous, but women had achieved equality with them. Now they were
superfluous to each other.
The sixties was a triumph of inclination. Whatever
felt good ought not to be constrained by an outdated morality made obsolete by
progress. The pill in this way made marriage archaic for it fundamentally
changed what marriage was. Until then marriage had been a societal necessity
and a duty upon those who entered into it. But when sex became a matter of preference
it had no more to do with duty than the preference of brown bread over white. For
this reason promises about matters that were no longer governed by morality
ceased making sense? Tradition kept marriage going, but it no longer constrains
how men and women behave. Divorce is easy and the husband and wife stay in
marriage no longer than their inclination lasts. The “promise” that is made is
part of a ritual, some quaint words from a world that no longer exists. Couples
in effect promise to marry until they feel differently. In reality they don’t
promise at all, for they don’t think that this promise needs to be kept. They
feel no duty to do so. As the amount spent on wedding days increases it has
become ever clearer that all those thousands of pounds are being spent on
precisely nothing. A few words that no-one much listens too and a white dress
that is worn just once. Next time will need a new white dress.
Marriage ceased to be a matter of duty, when it
ceased to be a matter of necessity. It was this that opened the dam. If sex
before marriage was no longer a sin and simply a matter of inclination, then so
too sex after marriage was neither sanctioned by marriage nor made permissible
by it. It wasn’t a matter of morality at all. From this it obviously followed
that everything was permitted. A couple might stay together, but no morality
constrained them to do so. If they felt the inclination to look elsewhere,
no-one would say they ought not. But a promise that is unconstrained by
morality isn’t anything at all. Least of all can it be described as a promise. Many
couples might feel that they are promising for ever, but they are not, they are
simply following their present inclination. What could make them keep their
promise? Who today stays in a marriage
because of duty or because the church teaches that we must? Who thinks that
divorce is morally wrong? Well when something is no longer morally wrong should
we be surprised when there is more of it?
Marriage has become a sham. We think that we are
following in a tradition. Some of us may even mouth the words of the prayer
book. They are quite pretty words about sickness and health and until death do
we part. But we are not at all doing what people used to do when they married,
because they made promises that they thought they had to keep. We don’t. In no
real sense then do we promise at all. A promise that survives only so long as
inclination tells it to is like promising while crossing your fingers. If I
promise only for so long as I feel like keeping the promise it is as if I get
married in a play or a film. It is all pretence. I may repeat the same words as
of old, but now they are only a ritual that used to have meaning but no longer does.
Once one thing becomes permissible it becomes easier
and easier to make something else. Soon enough everything is permissible. Man
becomes the measure of all things. The Church must bend to the will of man and
change to fit in with his inclination. In this way God becomes man not by
coming down to earth, but rather by man breaking down the gates of heaven and installing
himself on the throne there. No wonder everything is permitted, for it is man
himself who decides what he will allow himself to do and he will allow whatever
is his inclination.
All this follows from the triumph of inclination
over morality. It is this above all else that changed after 1959. Whatever had
been a sin up until this point could now be declared not to be a sin. Inclination was now the only virtue and the sinners
were simply those who denied that any particular inclination was virtuous. These
would face the Grand Inquisitor known as Cathy Newman and eventually be forced
to recant and then repent.
The reason for this is that homosexuality is also an
inclination. Why should any morality condemn it? Likewise some men have the
inclination to be women and vice versa. What right does morality have to stop
them? What right does morality have to stop anything? Everything is permitted.
We have now arrived at a state which would have been
unimaginable to someone in 1959. A woman can change into a man and “he” can
then marry a man who has “become” a woman or indeed a woman who has become a
man. At this point we are unconstrained. Even words mean what I want them to
mean. We can marry more or less who we like. But no-one’s promise is to be kept
for any longer than they please to keep it. So really the progress we have made
in extending who may marry is quite illusory. For not only have we abolished
God, we have also abolished marriage. We can’t very well extend it for there is
nothing left to extend. The reason for this is because somewhere along the way
we lost touch with human nature and the reason why we have marriage in the
first place.
Sexual morality and the concept of marriage are not
so much derived from Christianity as from human nature. They existed prior to
Christianity because they are the building blocks of family life and society.
We regulated these things up until 1960 because we had no choice but to do so. Widespread
premarital sex prior to 1960 would have led to large numbers of children with
no-one to look after them. Marriage has been the foundation of society well
before Christianity, because there would have been no society at all without
it. Women needed men to help them bring up children. They could not do so on
their own. It was morality, whether Christian or not, that compelled men to
stay and which regulated their inclination.
We have been meddling in matters that we don’t
really understand, just as much as Mr Oppenheimer did. The consequences are
with us already. The birth-rate has collapsed in Britain and the West in general.
This is fundamentally because we were able to control fertility and make having
children a matter of desire rather than a natural consequence of marriage.
The purpose of marriage from the dawn of history was
to regulate the birth of children. But we in the past fifty or so years have
decided that we know better than the whole of history. Marriage is no longer
about children. We have decided that the foundation of human society is
prejudice. But we forget that if there were no such thing as having children,
if there were only sexual desire that could be fulfilled without consequence
then marriage would never have developed in the first place. We have changed
what is essential about marriage and relegated the birth of children to an
optional extra. But when you change the essence of a thing, you no longer have
the thing in itself, just as a candle that burns to its end ceases to be a
candle, but becomes just a mess of wax.
Because we have been able to regulate fertility we
have been able to pretend that men and women can do exactly the same things in
life. They can, but the consequence of this equality is that women less and
less can become mothers. Our population falls, but because we now depend on the
welfare state to look after everyone no matter how they act so as to fulfil
their inclination, we require an ever increasing flow of population to be
imported from elsewhere. This either leads to depopulation of other European
countries that have the same birth-rate problem as we do, or it leads to
importing people from places with a high birth-rate. Gradually the people of
Europe are in this way replaced by people from outside Europe. Meanwhile people
in Britain complain both about immigration and about any attempts to constrain
their inclinations. They appear unaware that the one is a necessary consequence
of the other.
I do not wish to impose my morality on anyone else.
I do not wish Christianity to force non-Christians to conform to Christianity.
But the following must be recognised.
Tim Farron got into trouble because he thinks
Christianity is true. What follows from believing something to be true?
If I think that the teaching of Christianity is
true, then it is for me to conform to those teachings. If I don’t like
something about what the Church teaches it is for me to change not the Church.
The mistake that the Christian churches in Britain
and elsewhere have been making since 1959 is that they have adapted to the
changes in society rather than the other way round. It is not for the Church to
change, rather it is for society to change.
If the Church simply adapts to society what use is
it? How then can the Church regulate anything or anyone?
For Tony Blair to say that the Pope is wrong and the
Catholic Church mistaken is an act of rebellion against the Church. He is as it
were going up to God and saying, sorry God you are wrong. I Tony Blair am right
about this.
When Jesus met the woman who was about to be stoned
for adultery he said “He who is without sin cast the first stone”. No-one did.
He then said “I don’t condemn you either, go and sin no more.” He did not say
your sin is in fact not a sin. If she had attempted to argue with him, if she
had said, but Jesus I am not a sinner at all, he would have explained, you are
mistaken, how can I forgive you, if you don’t acknowledge that you have done
wrong?
We have got to the stage where to believe in the
standard, traditional teachings of Christianity which almost everyone believed
up until 1959 is to risk being called a bigot. Anyone who says that they think
it is impossible for homosexuals to marry or for people genuinely to change sex
is liable to be condemned.
Christianity is a matter of faith not knowledge. I may believe that I am in possession of the truth, but I cannot know it. For this reason, I do not believe that it is correct for Christians
to impose their views on anyone else. But I also do not believe that society
should attempt to forbid views that are a matter of Christian tradition,
conscience and faith.
Tim Farron held impeccably liberal views about
everything. He did not wish to impose his Christian views on anyone else, but
he wanted to be able to believe what he believed without constraint. It is this
that is now problematic in modern Britain.
We have replaced morality with inclination in
Britain and it has led to the infantilisation of our politics. Politicians can
no longer reason with an electorate who are concerned only with finding new
ways to fulfil their pleasures and their impulses. We have thrown out the
foundation of our society (morality) and the only thing that keeps it intact
(Christianity). We are left with law. But if I can break the law and get away
with it what morality will tell me that I can’t? Where is the foundation of
your morality, where is the bedrock if all is a matter of taste and
inclination.