Cults, Martyrs and Good Samaritans

Religion in Contemporary English Political Discourse

James Crossley

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745338286
• eBook ISBN: 9781786803108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

James Crossley holds a mirror up to English politics, examining how Christianity is often used to legitimise ideological positions and parties. From the paternalistic Christianity used to justify ever-intensifiying neoliberalism, to the ethnonationalist and economic protectionist Christianity of Theresa May and Brexit, and encompassing the socialist constructions of Christianity by Jeremy Corbyn and a resurgent Left, Crossley guides us through politics' love affair with Christianity. Drawing on interviews with politicians, leave and remain voters, activists, and revolutionaries, Crossley reveals how religion is linked to positions relating to class, capitalism and foreign policy: obfuscating potential causes of unrest, justifying military intervention and challenging dominant class interests.

1

Religion in English Political Discourse, 1979–2017: A Brief History

Before we look at the ways in which ideas relating to popular understandings of religion were nuanced between 2015 and 2017, it is essential to know what assumptions were previously present in English political discourse. In other words, the ideas, understandings and figures discussed in this chapter will set the scene for the remaining chapters and help us understand from where the ideas distinctive to post-2008 English political discourse emerged. To do this we need to look to the emergence and acceptance of Thatcherite neoliberalism and accompanying constructions associated with religion from the 1960s onward. We will look at how such ideas and assumptions became embedded in mainstream politics and were then modified by Tony Blair and New Labour with socially liberal understandings of religion before the ideological crises inaugurated by the 2007/8 financial crash. This chapter will also cover the ways in which socialist understandings of religion and the Bible were pushed out of parliamentary discourse with the ascendency of neoliberalism, only to return with the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn. Here, I will summarise work that I have carried out in detail elsewhere but now with additional material to reflect the years immediately before the 2017 General Election.¹ This is integral to understanding the rest of this book and it is necessary to do so at some length.

Religion and the rise of Thatcherism

In the late 1960s, the state-interventionist Keynesian consensus began to break down in Western political, economic and cultural discourses as neoliberalism began to emerge as the dominant ideological position from the 1970s onwards and only began to show signs of ideological and economic vulnerability with the 2007/8 crash. While it was understood that the role of the state would be diminished in areas such as welfare and industry, an accompanying neoconservative tendency meant that the state remained significant for military interventions to protect, support and promote neoliberal ideals (e.g., Falklands, Iraq). The Anglicised versions of these major global economic changes were starting to take shape in the 1970s. Thatcher and her circle took advantage of the anxieties of nostalgia, counterculture, radicalism, social liberalism, post-imperialism, consumerism, patriotism and conservatism generated or intensified in the 1960s. From this they moulded what would eventually become known as ‘Thatcherism’, with a stress on economic liberalism, deregulation, entrepreneurialism, the rhetoric of freedom, liberty and personal responsibility. The economic crises of the 1970s helped the Thatcherite Right into power and with a mandate to challenge unions and the role of the public sector, though not before she and her circle had effectively overthrown the Conservative establishment, which by the beginning of the 1970s was relatively settled in the post-war Keynesian consensus. This ideological revolution may have been incubated by the Conservative Party, but it would grow into the dominant (though not unchallenged) position across English parliamentary political discourse in differing forms.

Using her rediscovered Methodism, Thatcher saw the Bible as a key source for emerging Thatcherism, as well as representing the core values of Britain and the West. Her rhetoric involved a nostalgic vision of a Christian Britain lost which, through her radical economic changes, would become part of her rhetoric of a Christian Britain regained, and laid the template for what mainstream, English-based politicians would think that the Bible, Christianity and religion really meant. Thatcher’s understanding of the Bible and Christianity was about authorising notions of individualism, freedom, tolerance, rule of law, and English or British heritage, but with an especially distinctive and influential emphasis on individual wealth creation and charitable giving as a partial alternative to state provision of welfare. Among her many memorable exegetical examples in the context of interviews or speeches connecting the free market with the Bible and Christianity were her claims that ‘no-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well’, ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, when faced with His terrible choice and lonely vigil chose to lay down His life’ (italics in the original), and, using the additional example of 2 Thessalonians 3.10 (‘If a man will not work he shall not eat’): ‘we must work and use our talents to create wealth … Indeed, abundance rather than poverty has a legitimacy which derives from the very nature of Creation.’²

Thatcher, in some ways unusually so for a Conservative of her time, was openly positive about Jews and Judaism. But this was not accidental and was partly pragmatic. For instance, her government were solid supporters of Israel and its role in the Middle East, and her Finchley constituency was around 20 per cent Jewish when she was elected in 1959.³ She argued that Jews and Judaism were also advocates in their own right of Thatcherite economics and her critique of the welfare state. For Thatcher, Jews, Judaism and the Old Testament (as she labelled it) epitomised Thatcherite ideals of individualism, self-help, personal responsibility, entrepreneurism and community support. Judaism could also be incorporated into her political vision for Christianity. ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’ was deemed to be a Western tradition which promoted creativity and individual uniqueness. Though not without some nuance, Thatcher’s understanding of Jews and Christians was that they valued work and human dominance of their environment which she saw reflected in economic progress and living standards in the West.⁴ Nevertheless, the myth of Christian superiority remained; she did not want to equate Judaism and Christianity and insisted that the Old Testament could only be fully understood with the New Testament.⁵

Even if Christianity took pride of place, Thatcher’s understanding of religion was generally presented almost always as having a redeeming feature and in sharp contrast to Marxism and Soviet Communism. If religion and Christianity were about promoting individual creativity then, she argued, Marxism and Communism were all about crushing the individual.⁶ It is worth noting how this distinction was implicitly employed. Terror in the name of religion was, she claimed, carried out only by people who appear, profess, claim, or are not considered to be religious whereas Marxist terrorists really are Marxist to the core:

From the Assassins of the twelfth century through to their successors, the suicide bombers of Hamas, Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad in the twenty-first century, professed Muslims have certainly been involved. But the Tamil extremists … claim to be Hindus. ETA … and the murderous Shining Path guerrillas in Peru are both Marxist. Even where religion appears to be at the core of violence, appearances can deceive. Most Irish Republican terrorists long ago stopped considering themselves – and stopped being treated by the Church – as Catholics.⁷

This was an important distinction for Thatcher because of the philosophical incompatibility of her politics and her Christianity with Marxism and Communism and that in ‘religion’, no matter how it might manifest itself, there was always something which could still be salvaged in terms of individual rights and dignity because of its assumed emphasis on ‘the concept of a unique and eternal human “soul”’.⁸ Thatcher’s logic was that, unlike the collectivist and ultimately violent essence of Marxism, religion is essentially concerned with the individual and is thus always potentially democratic.

What is crucial to understanding the success of Thatcher was the (often unconscious) Thatcherisation of culture which partly helped account for her electoral success. We can see this among groups and individuals who carried cultural, subcultural, and even countercultural capital, and could even be hostile to Thatcherism and Thatcher (and vice versa). To give one prominent example among many: the seemingly ever-popular film Life of Brian which had Brian as a cipher for what Monty Python believed to be the historical figure of Jesus reconstructed from behind the Gospel accounts. Monty Python stood in a long liberal and sometimes radical tradition of presenting a palatable Jesus in contrast to deluded or power-hungry followers or interpreters who were typically code for ‘the church’. The Brian/Jesus who represented cultural values assumed to be normative, or at least decent, was the one who mouthed the serious claim of the film: you are all individuals. But, while this might have been a development of 1960s-style liberalism or even anarchism, this could be reappropriated in a different way and we should remember that this was also a film which lampooned trade unions in the form of different revolutionary groups as bureaucratic pedants who stop things getting done. We should also remember that Brian was not the only one in 1979 proclaiming the importance of individuals while criticising collectivist bureaucracy: this was, after all, the year Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister. Life of Brian entered the scene when Thatcherism was starting to take hold and the ongoing popularity of the film partly shows the popularity of a kind of rhetoric associated with Thatcherism, no matter how uncomfortable or unintentional such an association might be or have been for Monty Python.

Religion, a changing Left, and the rise of New Labour

Looking at the more unexpected carriers of cultural change is important because by the 1990s the Thatcher brand became toxic in electoral terms and John Major’s premiership went from crisis to crisis while Thatcherism itself continued victorious. In parliamentary terms, neoliberalism’s victory came through Tony Blair and New Labour, crucial in both the consolidation of Thatcherism and Thatcher’s understanding of religion. Not only did Blair and the New Labour project accept the basic tenets of Thatcher’s presentation of religion, there was a rethinking of Labour’s connections with radical understandings of Christianity, which had once been prominent among Nonconformist churches and the Catholic Left with historic ties to the Labour movement. To this day, such a tradition has a romantic hold on the Left and has long been a constant point of reference. Repeated themes in this radical tradition included land and wealth redistribution, confronting power and wealth, egalitarianism, anti-clericalism and direct access to God, the importance of conscience, and prophetic critique of power. This often included ‘apocalyptic’ language, particularly with reference to a radical transformation of the social, economic and political order, or, in a darker manner, the idea that The End really is nigh, whether through nuclear war or environmental catastrophe. The more positive understanding of apocalyptic transformation was also part of the development of a particularly English or British tradition of radical and unorthodox interpreters of Christianity (e.g., among many others, Peasants’ Revolt, Wyclif and the Lollards, Gerrard Winstanley, Diggers, William Blake, F.D. Maurice, Chartists, Socialist Sunday Schools) which was often invoked to keep Marx and English/British socialism free from perceived Stalinist contamination. While this was typically understood as a Christian-based tradition, it was sometimes applied to Judaism (e.g., Moses, Marx) and Islam (e.g., Muhammad), with the same pattern of pure radical origins corrupted by later interpreters but kept alive by ‘heretics’. This rhetoric of such radical understandings of religion or religions could be seen in any number of figures from the Labour Party associated with the Left and leftist causes, such as Keir Hardie, Margaret and Rachel MacMillan, Will Crooks, R.H. Tawney, George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, Nye Bevan, Stafford Cripps, Donald Soper, Eric Heffer and Tony Benn. Such understandings were also found among radical movements and figures close to, or well beyond, the Labour Party in the twentieth century, such as Rudolf Rocker and East End Yiddish anarchism, Ethel Mannin, George Orwell, C.L.R. James, the British Marxist historians, Peggy Duff, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, various members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Green Party.⁹

As Thatcherism was in the ascendency, Tony Benn was the established standard bearer for this radical socialist tradition in parliamentary politics. From the early 1970s onwards, Benn was championing a number of major leftist (and, at the time, often unpopular) issues, such as post-1968 feminism, syndicalism, the Miners’ Strike of 1984–85, Irish unification, anti-war(s), unilateral disarmament, and anti-hierarchical radical democratic equality (not least in the Labour Party), as well as continuing his long-standing opposition to racism and the treatment of migrants. For Benn, the Bible and its radical interpreters (particularly the Levellers) were also sources of, and indeed central to, what was deemed to be a particularly English or British form of democratic socialism and industrial workers’ democracy.¹⁰ But by the mid-1990s, Benn was forlornly defending the place of Clause 4 (a commitment to common/ public ownership) in the Labour Party Constitution by claiming that its sentiments went back to the Acts of the Apostles.¹¹ By now the Labour Party had shifted rightwards and, in terms of understandings of Christianity, a significant moment came in a Christian Socialist Movement publication (1993) edited by Christopher Bryant (who would go on to become a New Labour MP), Reclaiming the Ground: Christianity and Socialism. Blair wrote the foreword and, behind the anti-Thatcherite polemics, the then Labour leader, John Smith, tried to bring together ideas about the free market, individualism and the collective good that were not far removed from what Thatcher had been arguing.

By the time Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, the anti-Thatcherite polemics were disappearing as fast as socialist understandings of religion from parliamentary discourse. Crucial to the dislocation of socialist understandings of Christianity were attempts by New Labour to appropriate, rethink and reapply the language of radical Christianity to free-market economics and the War on Terror, even sneaking biblical allusions past the watchful eye of Alastair Campbell who was reluctant to bring God into political debate for pragmatic electoral purposes (i.e., voters do not want God near politics).

Probably the most thoroughgoing example is Blair’s much-publicised Labour Party conference speech shortly after 9/11.¹² Socialist understandings of Christianity had previously been a notable presence in the founding of the National Health Service (NHS) and the development of the welfare state by its most celebrated government under Clement Attlee and featuring major figures of the British Left, most notably Nye Bevan. Rather than ridding Britain of the ‘evil giants’ of ‘want’, ‘squalor’, ‘disease’ and ‘ignorance’, as Labour (following the Beveridge Report) had promised in their 1945 Manifesto, Blair sought to reapply this and other ‘apocalyptic’ or biblical language (e.g., ‘an act of evil’, ‘we were with you at the first. We will stay with you to the last’, ‘the shadow of this evil’, ‘lasting good’, ‘hope amongst all nations’, ‘a new beginning’, ‘justice and prosperity for the poor and dispossessed’, ‘the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor’; cf. for example, Genesis 17; Isaiah 1.16–17; 42.5–7; 49.6–13; Micah 2.1; Psalms 5.4; 23; Proverbs 28.1–28; Mark 13.10; Matthew 5.1–16; 12.21; Luke 6.20–49; Romans 4.18; 2 Thessalonians 3.2; Colossians 1.27; 1 John 5.19; Revelation 6; 22.13). The object of benevolence was now areas that would define his foreign policy, ‘from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan’. Such biblical allusions functioned as a dog whistle to a Labour Party familiar with such language but nervous about supporting the imminent War on Terror. Blair would again repeat related ‘apocalyptic’ language in his career-defining speech on the eve of the Iraq War to justify invasion, again with one eye on a jittery Labour Party.¹³ Just as Labour had transformed Britain after the devastation of the Second World War, North Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan could now expect their own transformations.

The New Labour appropriation o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Religion in English Political Discourse, 1979–2017:A Brief History
• 2 Brexit Means Christmas, Christmas Means Socialism, and a Time for ‘Homosexual Sex’: Shifting Notions of Religion from the Frontbenches
• 3 Muslims, the ‘Perversion of Islam’, and Christian England on the (Far) Right
• 4 Brexit Barrow: Religion in Real Time During a Summer of Political Chaos
• 5 Manufacturing Dissent from the Centre: Cults, Corbyn and the Guardian
• 6 Red Apocalypticism on the Corbynite Left: Martyrdom, Rojava and the Bob Crow Brigade
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index