Whitsun and 'damn the Tories'

What happened to 'I vow to thee my country'

Although the Church of England might once have been the Tory party at prayer, I’m not original in joking that it is now the secular foot soldiers, of a New Model Woke Army, who take the knee at the tasselled prayer cushions. I’m not sure when the Conservatives completely abandoned any will or desire to conserve. It was probably during World War II, with the creation of the youthful Tory Reform Group in 1943 — young conservatives, reading the room (or their tea-leaves) and seeking an accommodation with the progressive agenda of Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act set the seal on the cross-party consensus over the post-war welfare state — a consensus he set in stone as the wingman for successive Eden and Macmillan premierships.

In a way, it doesn’t really matter. Although vilified by the left for advising Margaret Thatcher in her first term, Roger Scruton was always more Tory than Neo-Liberal. There was a persistent tension between the highly urbane, lettered and ‘Entish’ sensibility of Scruton, and the market-materialism and individualism of the Manchester liberals who, at some point in the early 20^th century, seem to have overtaken the party of the squirearchy — presumably when it was on its knees. Anyway, by the time the grocer’s daughter was at the helm, saving Britain (which to be fair, she did), and saying things like ‘there’s no such thing as society’, the tissue of associational and familial hedgerows, dykes, ditches and ponds — Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ — that constituted civil society, was already in deep trouble. Scruton tried to chide Thatcher on the existence of society and to school her on the ‘democracy of the dead’:

‘A partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ [Edmund Burke].

Some may read The Spectator; a few the Salisbury Review; and one or two may have read Burke’s Reflections….. but on the whole, the Tories have been a philistine party of idolaters — probably since about the time that John Henry Newman started to have doubts about the capacity of the Church of England to defend the Shire to whom British men and women vow allegiance, let alone the narrow pathway leading to that ‘other country’.

The worst thing that Mrs.Thatcher ever did, was to liberalize the Sunday trading laws. In one fell swoop, the most powerful Tory government of the century, rode roughshod over the sanctity of family, church, community and tradition.

They created an environment which, for ever after, would ensure that, if not hung-over, young people would be forced to forgo the familiar ritual of church, followed by Sunday lunch, a visit with grandparents, a walk, tea in front of the telly, Songs of Praise and some bucolic vision of the English landscape dressed up as drama — in order to go and work the morning shift at B&Q.

Now I always thought this was a libertarian hiccup — the sort of accident that happens if (like me) you read too much Hayek and not enough Thomas Hardy. It’s true that the English establishment has, since the Reformation, been mounting a two-pronged attack on the interlacing of secular and sacred time, interior religious ecstasy and communal participation, and the liturgical and seasonal cycles. The enclosure movement took an axe to the wonderful patchworked structure of the commons. In doing so, it steadily undermined the residual rhythms of the shared rituals, intertwining simultaneously church and economy, private and shared space, landscapes of nationhood (‘the love that never falters….and lays upon the later, the dearest and the best’) — and also that other ‘country … heard of long ago… [whose] ways [are of] of gentleness, and all her paths are [of] peace’

ASIDE: I love that hymn — and it is a hymn, not to nationalism, but to out capacity for self-sacrifice in communion with each other. There is a hierarchy of value, and our (and indeed their) nation, however wonderful, is second to God’s nation in Christ. Christianity is the first and only true, viable form of internationalism — partly because neither the ethic of the Good Samaritan and the revolutionary universalism of Paul, abrogate nested loyalties of family and place-bound community or nation.

Listen to the second verse

Right up to the Reformation, ordinary people in Catholic England experienced a deep affective and participative engagement with the liturgy, the cycle of fasting and feast days — a taken for granted pattern of involvement that was inseparable from the routines and habits of ordinary life. In The Stripping of the Altars, Eoman Duffy describes the intimate links between an intensifying interior life associated with piety and sometimes ecstatic religious experience, and a constant pattern of innovation and appropriation by the laity, which saw this constantly moving and evocative involvement in the liturgy brought into the sometimes rowdy and bawdy feasting, leisure, music and competition of ordinary life. Thus at Candlemas ‘the annual [lay] procession with candles, far from remaining a secondary symbolic feature, invaded and transformed the scriptural scene’ (p18). The point of these ‘para-liturgucal and dramatic elaborations’ was intense personal contemplation and interiorization:

“Call to your remembrance and Imprinte Inwardly In your hart by holy meditation, the holl processe of the passyon, from the Mandy unto the poynt of crysts death: (19)

This is what Andrew Willard Jones was referring to by the idea of a ‘complete act’ — there was no division between a ‘secular’ and the liturgical/spiritual domains. To use Robert Barron’s phrase, the coinherence of ordinary and liturgical facets of life mirrored the pattern of relation implicit in the Trinity.

Tom Holland

makes the same point in Dominion. The very idea of a separate, secular domain (leisure, economy, politics) was an unconscious, unintended invention of the Reformation. It was not the movement towards interiorization that separated the Reformers, but rather the bureaucratic regulation of the Church and paradoxically the traditionally chaotic forms of lay involvement. The protestant desire for an intensified, unmediated ‘direct’ line to God — a recovery of the purity and charisma of the early Christians — in the end, birthed its opposite: the secular, rationalistic materialism. This relation has been fodder for every first year sociology student since Max Weber published his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — and there is clearly something in it.

So yes — we lost something, but we have been losing it for a long, long time, and on many fronts. Empty churches, celebrity culture, Only Fans girl trying to shag herself to a spiritual death, McDonalds, the loss of our hedgerows — the Shire, has been under attack for centuries, but from the inside. Our orcs and Black Riders can pass as just your average Proudfoot(feet) or Brandybuck — even as they wield their chainsaws.

So back to Thatcher. She decided to make Sundays not at all special. It’s hard to think of a more direct attack on Christendom — a straight up scouring of the shire. And yet it passed without a whimper. Why? Because they’d already got a track record. Whitsun – the Christian holy day of Pentacost — falls on the 7^thSunday after Easter and commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the Apostles (Acts II). And for centuries, the following week — Whitsuntide — was a holiday for medieval serfs involving a lot of feasting and a cessation of agricultural work. Whit Monday remained a public holiday right up until 1971, when the Conservative Government of Ted Heath saw fit to replace it with a secular ‘spring bank holiday’. Oh my…you can just imagine the sub-committee that came up with that. It’s like calling the Burns Night, ‘stuffed sheep-intestine day’.

It doesn’t matter what political stripe, they’re all the same. Presumably if theBritish had been given a vote, they would have kept the same date and re-renamed it Whitty-McWhitFace

With that change we lost an archaic but deeply-rooted liturgical holiday that had accreted all manner of additional shared meanings. Children (and especially poor children) received new clothes. Communities gathered for ‘Whit walks’ — often parades with brass-bands and girls dressed up in white. Fairs or Whitsun Ales, saw Morris dancing and feasts.

In short it was fun, communal and liturgically serious — the sort of thing that is generative of a national imaginary. The sort of thing that Britain desperately needs. And, of course, the Tories got rid of it.

So, when did the Conservatives stop conserving? Probably at the same time that the hierarchy in the Church of England lost its faith in its role as a national church. Perhaps as Matthew Arnold was penning ‘Dover Beach’. As a Catholic, I’m sceptical about that proposition, a ‘national church’ — but to be honest, in this fast spinning and increasingly ugly, modern world, there was, and should be, more that unites than divides Catholics and Anglicans. The turning point for Britain came when the Church of England decided to accept the privatization of religion — the modern distinction between secular society and internal religious experience. This is Charles Taylor’s argument in A Secular Age. If, as Tom Holland points out, it was Protestantism that inadvertently gave us the distinction, then perhaps it is no surprise that the ‘Tory Party at prayer’ bailed on us and failed to stand up for the tissues and organs of civil society. But then, from the party of the enclosure movement, what more should we have expected?