9 Sept 2024
To be a Christian is to be conservative. At least in some respects. Today I want to remind you of the ways in which you are conservative, in these times which are not propitious for conservatism. So I am wearing this beret, this helmet of salvation, to represent certain values which you hold, though at times they may be overshadowed by others, which are the values of conservatism. I was presented with this beret after completing an arduous physical course, on which every day – like an unpopular contestant on Big Brother – I expected to fail and be asked to leave; but after 5 weeks it was given to me as the qualifying badge to be trained to parachute with the best British infantry regiment. The values which I want to talk about today – the values which dare not call their name (in certain sections of South-West London) – are loyalty, authority and sanctity. Already some of you are mentally pulling on boxing gloves, saying Christ did not come for this. While others are offended because men should not wear hats in church. But – may I just say – that this is not a hat.
When I asked soldiers ‘what is the most important ethical value?’, the answer was usually loyalty. Soldiers will never go against loyalty – it is their strongest virtue. But loyalty is 95% to their friends. A British paratrooper at Arnhem at the end of the second world war, a bridge too far, was asked: what kept him going when his battalion had been largely destroyed, the cause lost, and defeat inevitable; he replied simply: ‘they were my friends’. Soldiers are not indoctrinated or brainwashed. I’ve taken a great number of funerals of men who fought in the Second World War or who did national service afterwards. So many of them, who had spent just a few years in their teens and twenties in service, later found their greatest friendships and purpose in life from those years, even when they’d lived 60 years after. Liberals today who don’t identify particularly with Putney or London or the United Kingdom, don’t understand this. They could live anywhere. Putney voted against Brexit – for progressive or libertarian reasons. But what the liberals, who didn’t see Brexit coming, often missed was loyalty. Our belief in the British, Our support for the British, Our love of country. Britain has a history of empire, of colonialism, of trading in slaves; Many people are ashamed of being British. But we’re also ‘the country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot, David Beckham’s left foot come to that’. What conservatives get that liberals often don’t, is that we belong to a family, to a place, to a language, to a nation, without which we don’t entirely make sense. It’s Russell Crowe in the arena in Gladiator, shouting “as one” to keep his small crew together and pick off the enemy that come against them. We may have many loyalties, perhaps just a few, but they are what anchor us in this world, and without loyalty, we are alone.
Everything in the army is about authority. Everyone goes to Sandhurst and intelligent people hate it there. Why should chaplains and surgeons in their forties listen to drones twenty years younger telling them to polish their waterbottles and dry their sinks before room inspections? And if we’re squeamish about loyalty and the thought of those who claim to be “only following orders”, the twentieth-century has given us a century-long horror of authority. What were the 60s for if not for breaking this evil? But curiously the British particularly love authority. We love the Royal Family. We’re the society most enmeshed in tradition and heritage – we love noblesse oblige, we throw money at the National Trust and without any reason I can fathom, we want Downton Abbey and Bridgerton to exist. We crave authority. We tap dance to social ritual. And authority gives us a place in the world. It creates a sense of order, and it is order that gives meaning. As the Eagles sang:
And freedom? Oh Freedom, well that’s just some people talkin’,Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone.
If loyalty connects us horizontally, authority connects us vertically: It’s the bond that fixes us in a family. It gives us our place within institutions, It connects our employment with our sense of purpose; It establishes behaviour and expectations in law and society, And anyone who’s visited a country where authority is totalitarian, or has collapsed alongside the rule of law, will know the anxiety and fear that result when authority is absent or morally repugnant. But, properly, authority helps you understand where you fit in.
Finally, there’s sanctity. Liberals don’t like the idea of sanctity because it seems superstitious or irrational, or because it’s less practical. But your sanctity instinct is triggered when you think “this shouldn’t happen in church”, When you see a man wearing a hat, Or when you see one of the vicar’s children making a den beneath the altar. And consider how you feel when people act out on war memorials, or if someone burned a union flag, or threw orange confetti on the court at Wimbledon; Some people feel that revulsion when they see someone writing in a book; If you ever watched the show Mad Men, set in 1960, the moment that burned into my mind was Don Draper’s family going for a picnic in a beautiful spot, and walking away leaving all their trash behind. Littering, especially in nature, is a practice that, even for the liberal, approaches what used to be called profane or unholy; And are there not some uses of the body which are simply degrading, as one conservative philosopher put it: “shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder”. I mentioned the consensual cannibal Armin last week. Consent is the ultimate liberal ethic, but there are some things it simply doesn’t cover.
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has suggested that the reason Democrats and Republicans fail to understand each other is these ethical foundations of loyalty, authority and sanctity. All Americans believe in care and fairness, but conservatives feel like their most cherished values are ignored by progressive elites. Haidt has spent time trying to get democrats to speak this wider ethical vocabulary. He also makes the point that loyalty, authority and sanctity, something like an ethical social vision, create moral capital which helps bind communities together. Communities need some sort of flag to rally around, otherwise they really are just a collection of individuals. We’re certain to hear in the next few months how Harris does in speaking to the whole of America. These virtues populate the stories of God. In our Old Testament reading, Joshua consecrates the people before God, appealing to their loyalty and declaring them sacred. He gathers the authority figures and invokes the authority of God: Thus says the Lord. St Paul, likewise is consecrating the people by invoking the whole armour of God, and praying for their sanctity that they may withstand the world, the flesh and the devil. He establishes loyalty, demanding prayer for all the saints and he appeals to his authority as the ambassador of God and for the authority of God against the rulers, authorities and powers of this present darkness.
The central question of the Gospel is on whose authority does Jesus speak. Jesus is unequivocal: ‘No one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.’ He, only, has authority – attested to by Peter ‘Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ And as Jesus has brought the true disciples out into the wilderness, as we have heard over the last 5 weeks it’s for them to discover holiness and to be formed into the people of God, foremost by the Eucharist, the eating of the flesh and blood of Jesus’. Today we’re told that some of them walk away. It’s easier for liberals to walk away; Liberals generally have less attachment to geography and community. They live in cities; there’s another church, another religion around the corner. But if we find in Jesus authority and holiness, and if we value loyalty, we will say with Peter: ‘We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’
We enjoy listening to people who think like us. We prefer to think that Republicans, Trump voters, perhaps even those who voted for Brexit, are idiots or corrupt, entitled or uneducated, racist or selfish. It’s easier to write people off than understand them. But that is a lot of people to write off. Instead, we might be better reflecting on whether in our own values we have any blind spots; If we’re overlooking moral capital that could invigorate our community; If we could not hear at St Margaret’s cultivate a greater sense of fellowship, respect or reverence. Our church and society remain enthralled by culture wars, and it goes without saying that in war everybody loses. So what are the values that will build this church? Is it all inclusivity, care and acceptance? Or is it also duty, commitment and holiness? Our church has people from all angles of the political spectrum. I hope we are taking the time to learn from each other so that we can be wearing not hats, but ‘the whole armour of God’. And make this Church great again. Amen.
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