Christian Nationalism?

The subject of “Christian Nationalism” has been much discussed as of late.  A friend and classmate from my theological studies in Otterburne in the 1990s has been decrying it all over social media.  His assessment of it relies upon the acceptance of a number of axioms that progressives regard as self-evident but which I correctly consider to be bunkum.  Needless to say I do not share his perspective.  My rejection of my friend’s fatally flawed opposition to Christian Nationalism should not be taken as an endorsement of it.  Quite the contrary.  Recently, the administrator of an Anglican social media forum opened a discussion thread on the subject.  This essay is for the most part an expansion of my response.

 

To answer the question of whether or not nationalism can be Christian in any real, orthodox, sense, we need to first determine what nationalism is.  The best way that I know to do this, is by distinguishing nationalism from something much older than nationalism with which it is often confused.  That something is patriotism. 

 

Patriotism belongs to the category of natural affections.  Think of the love that under ordinary circumstances a child feels for his parents and a parent feels for a child.  These are natural affections, loves that unless something happens to impede them, everyone naturally develops.  The love of home, which the late Sir Roger Scruton called oikophilia, is another such natural affection and one that is very similar to patriotism.  Patriotism derives its name from the Greek word πατρίς (πάτρα in some dialects, such as Homeric Ionic) and its Latin cognate patria, both of which mean “native land” or more literally, since they are themselves derived from the word for father, “fatherland.”  Patriotism is the affection, attachment, and love that one feels for one’s homeland, one’s country, as naturally as one loves one’s parents and offspring.

 

Patriotism, like all natural affections, has been regarded as good and virtuous from time immemorial.  To illustrate, consider the thirtieth verse of the first book of Homer’s epic Iliad which is the verse in which the word πάτρα appears for the first time in Homer.  This appears in the portion of the poem where Homer is providing the background story to the wrath of Achilles which brought all sorts of nastiness upon the Greeks from his breech with Agamemnon until their reconciliation after the death of Patrocles at the hands of Hector which is the main theme of the epic.  Chryses, the priest of Apollo, has come to the Greek encampment to buy the freedom of his daughter whom Agamemnon holds as a war prize.  His graceful address and his offer of an extremely generous ransom has won over all the other Greeks but infuriated Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Argos and general leader of the Greek expedition against Troy.  Agamemnon responds with an extremely rude and ill-tempered speech in which he orders Chryses away from the encampment and the ships, warning him that if he catches him there again the symbols of his priestly office will not protect him.  Then, to add insult to injury, he adds in verses twenty-nine and thirty the following:

 

τὴν δ᾽ ἐγὼ οὐ λύσω: πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν

ἡμετέρῳ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ ἐν Ἄργεϊ τηλόθι πάτρης

 

This means “but your (daughter) I will not release, until old age finds her also, in our house in Argos far from her fatherland.”  The insult extends into the next verse where it gets much cruder and Agamemnon’s speech into the verse after that but we have arrived at the point. 

 

The words τηλόθι πάτρης, “far from her fatherland” are intended as a particularly cruel twist of the knife here.  Obviously, Agamemnon was going out of his way to say that he will do the exact opposite of what Chryses had requested, but in stressing the distance of his palace from the girl’s homeland he was also saying that he will inflict upon her what he and all the Greeks were themselves suffering at that point in time.  The Iliad is set in the last year of the ten year siege of Troy.  The Greeks had been τηλόθι πάτρης themselves for a long time and were feeling the effects of it, as Agamemnon’s speech as a whole and the bitter strife that would soon thereafter divide him from Achilles demonstrate.

 

Homer’s ability to communicate this in this way rests upon the common understanding between him, his hearers, and his readers down through the generations, that one’s πάτρα is to be loved and cherished and that to be far from it is misery.  

 

So again, patriotism is a natural affection, a feeling of love akin to love for one’s family and home.  This has many implications.  One, is that patriotism has nothing to do with how you think your country compares to other countries.  Patriotism may incline you towards thinking that your country is the best in the world but it is never based on thinking this.  The patriot loves his country because she is his and not because he thinks her to be better than such and such other countries.  Patriotism has nothing to do with whether or not one’s country is “great.”  While children often go through a “my dad can beat up your dad” phase they ordinarily grow out of it.  Someone who persists in talking this way into adulthood does not demonstrate a healthy filial affection but rather a case of arrested development.  The same applies to love of country.

 

From this implication, we can infer further that patriotism is not naturally bellicose.  Since love of country, like love of family and home is natural to humanity, and since it is not based on concepts like “greatness” that measure one’s country against others, it is not threatened by other people loving their other countries nor does it impel one to threaten others.  Patriotism is a great motivation to fight defensively in war, that is to protect one’s country, but it is no motivation to wage aggressive war against others.

 

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century lexicographer, famously said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” (1)  James Boswell, his biographer, from whom we have the account of this and Dr. Johnson’s other table-talk, immediately after recording it explained “But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” (2)  The conversation took place in 1775 in the midst of the controversy that would lead to the American Declaration of Independence the following year.  The year previous, Dr. Johnson had expressed his thoughts on the American rebels-to-be and their gripes in a pamphlet entitled The Patriot.  There is little doubt as to who the scoundrels were to whom Dr. Johnson referred.

 

Although Boswell put it in terms of real versus pretend, patriotism, and this was not a wrong way of describing it, from the standpoint of hindsight it could be said that what had occurred was the emergence of a new thing which was not patriotism as we have described it but which had not yet been given a name of its own and so for a time it shared the name of the age old love of country.   Did Dr. Johnson himself see that there were now two things sharing one name?  In his Dictionary he defined patriotism as “Love of one’s country; zeal for one’s country.”  Most likely he meant this as a single definition, certainly in The Patriot he spoke in Boswell’s terms of real versus pretend, but it is interesting that the two phrases from his definition could be taken as defining the two different “patriotisms” of the time.  Zeal is not the same thing as love.

 

The American Revolution was a war cast from the mold of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.  So was its antecedent, the Puritan rebellion against Charles I, but Crowell et al., had wrapped themselves in the hypocritical piety of their legalistic Calvinism.  The propagandists of the American Revolution such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine (“the infidel Paine”) whose minds were steeped in the skepticism and deism of eighteenth century philosophy had no such recourse and so justified their actions by appealing to the ideals of “Enlightenment” liberalism, a philosophy born out of explicit rejection of the Christian faith of the civilization of the age that preceded the Modern.  Since such justifications had little popular appeal in a day in which the Age’s retreat from Christianity was still in its early years – past infancy, not quite in adolescence yet – their cloak when taking their ideals public was patriotism.  It was not the age-old natural affection patriotism but the new thing that had not yet come into its name but was still borrowing the name of the old patriotism and so rightly decried as a pretender by Dr. Johnson and Boswell.  The term that would become its name was around - Johann Gottfried von Herder had used it in a treatise in 1772 – but had not yet become attached to the thing.  In the French Revolution, born out of the same false ideals as the American and in which the bloody fruit of those ideals was much more naked, opening the eyes of Dr. Johnson’s friend Edmund Burke to the nature of these “armed doctrines”, the name and the thing would find each other.  That name is nationalism.

 

The name nationalism is obviously derived from the word nation.  The word nation comes ultimately from the Latin verb nascor “be born” through its third principal part natus sum, “have been born” (3).  Natio, the noun derived from this verb could mean the act of birth but it also mean a tribe, kin group, or people united by a common birth or line of descent.  It carried this second meaning but not the first into Modern tongues like English where it became nation.  Here we see an indication of a divergence from patriotism.  Patriotism is love directed towards one’s country – a place.  Nationalism is – something, we will consider what momentarily – directed towards one’s people group.

 

This difference should not be exaggerated. The closest natural affection to patriotism is the love of home.  This too is a love of place.  Home, however, is the place where your family is.  Love of family and love of home cannot be separated and similarly patriotism is not a love of the land considered abstractly apart from the people and institutions and way of life. 

 

That having been said, the history of nationalism shows that this difference is important.  If patriotism is the love of home writ large, as in Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” account of it, nationalism is tribalism writ large.  While there is something to be said for the group loyalty of tribalism, that aspects of it need to be suppressed for there to be the rule of law and order necessary for civilization is the fundamental message of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  It is also the reason for various provisions of the Mosaic Law, most obviously the refuge cities.  This is good reason to be wary of something that is basically tribalism but with the tribe the size of a Modern nation.

 

The history of nationalism demonstrates that it does not belong to the same class or category, natural affections, as patriotism.  From the beginning nationalism has been characterized by a belligerence towards others.  In the American Revolution, when it was still going under the name it borrowed from true patriotism, the belligerence was directed towards the larger society, the British Empire, of which it had been a part.  In the French Revolution, the violence initially directed against the society’s own traditional institutions and upper classes quickly turned on anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Revolution and its leaders and as this “Reign of Terror” started, Revolutionary France declared war on its neighbours who had militarized their borders in an effort to contain the revolution.  While the Reign of Terror ended with the arrest of Robespierre and the dawn of the Thermidor Reaction in July 1794 neither the wars nor the nationalism impelling them ceased with it and a general who had won his initial fame in those wars would before the eighteenth century ended launch the first of the serious of conquests which along with his simultaneous rise to power in the civil government would twice make him Emperor of France.  Among Napoleon’s generals, at least according to a play from the 1830s, (4) was a man named Nicolas Chauvin who refused to give up Napoleon’s imperial cause even after it was clearly over and Napoleon dead, and whose name became synonymous with an imperialistic nationalism that sees other peoples as existing only to be crushed, conquered and subdued by one’s own (although from the second wave of feminism in the middle of the twentieth century it has come to be more commonly used for males with enough self-respect not to buy into feminism’s lies but not enough sense to be subtle about it).  

 

A century after Napoleon’s death an Austrian-born German nationalist would become the leader of a small German socialist party to whose name he would attach the German word for nationalist.  As leader of the National Socialists, he began his rise to power by exploiting Germany’s grievances over the loss of World War I and promised to restore Germany to her glory by building a Reich that would last a thousand years.  Shortly after having won the office of Chancellor in 1933, he secured himself in that office by declaring a state of emergency after an arson in the Reichstag (German parliament building) and using the emergency powers this granted him to transform his office into that of a dictator and Germany into a single-party totalitarian state that resembled nothing so much as the Soviet Union which the Bolsheviks had created in Russia.  Hitler remilitarized Germany then began seizing territory such as his country of birth, Austria, which had historically been German-speaking but never part of the Germany that Otto von Bismarck had forged under the Prussian House of Hohenzollern (at the time she was the centre of her own empire under the Hapsburgs), by bullying and threats and exploiting the fact that the other powers were desperate to avoid the outbreak of a second war.  Then, having made a pact with the Soviet Union to divide Poland between themselves, he invaded that country, launching World War II in which he, like Napoleon before him, conquered most of Europe, before repeating Napoleon’s fatal mistake of trying to seize Russia.

 

Hitler’s nationalism was particularly belligerent against other peoples because it was wed to his belief that the races of humanity were locked into a Darwinian struggle for existence that was a zero-sum game (5) in which there could be only one winner.  While this was unique to National Socialism, in its three centuries nationalism in general has consistently demonstrated a hostile attitude towards other nations that is far removed from the irenic love of country that is true patriotism.  One final detail about Hitler deserves mention here.  On 19 March, 1945 as the Red Army was rapidly approaching Berlin while the American commander disgracefully held back the Western Allies, a little over a month and one week before he and his bride ended their lives in his bunker, Hitler issued the “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory” decree, ordering the destruction of the civil infrastructure of Germany.   Fortunately for the Germans, Albert Speer made sure this insane “Nero Decree” was not carried out.  Hitler had ordered the Germans to reduce their own country to the stone age in order to spite the Russians, but by this point in time he was convinced that the Russians had won the Darwinian struggle and that the Germans, having failed him, had lost and were not worthy to survive.  A nationalist could come to this horrid conclusion.  A patriot never could.

This is because patriotism has nothing to do with how one’s country and her people compare to other countries and other people.  It is a love that comes naturally.  Nationalism is concerned with how big and strong and powerful and great its country is and if its country fails the nationalist can easily turn on it as Hitler turned on Germany at the end.  Nationalism is not a love, a natural affection at all.  It is an ideology, a zealous commitment to the idea of one’s country as the greatest and best.  The nationalist will demand that his country be made great again.  Love, however, “envieth not…vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” (6) The patriot loves his country as she is and if he is a Christian patriot will be far more concerned with his country’s goodness than her greatness.

 

Nationalism then is an artificial substitute for the natural love of country that is patriotism, a substitute that could only have been produced in the Modern Age.  This is because it is the product of the Modern idea of democracy.  The emphasis in the previous sentence is on the word Modern.  Modern democracy is not the same thing as the democracy of ancient Athens.   Nor is it the democracy that is an aspect or element of the traditional institution of parliament that developed long before the Modern Age, although it has grafted itself onto that democracy and corrupted it.  Modern democracy is an idea that comes from Modern liberal philosophy, which philosophy was thought up by Modern men thinking Satan’s thoughts after him. 

 

We have already touched on this in discussing the American Revolution and the origins of nationalism.  Satan became Satan by rebelling against the Sovereign King of all His Creation, God.  He was so full of himself, so proud of his own beauty and other fine qualities – gifts God had given him – that he thought he ought to rule the universe instead of God.  Modern man looked around at Christendom, the Christian civilization into which he had been born, and thought that he could think up a better way of organizing things that would eliminate most or all of human suffering, and rebelled against the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Christendom.  The semi-Pelagianism that had crept into the Western Church towards the end of the Middle Ages which the Reformation in its theological reforms sought to correct was perhaps the initial impetus for this kind of hubristic thinking, although the Calvinists, the most Augustinian of the Protestants at least in their own conceit, were the first of the Modern rebels.  Pelagianism was the early heresy that rejected Original Sin.  A firm grasp on Original Sin is a preventative for thinking that humanity can achieve its own salvation by political means.  In the Fall, man lost the Paradise in which he had been placed at his creation.  Paradise awaits man, redeemed by God through Jesus Christ, after the Second Coming.  In between, as we struggle against our own sinful tendencies, there will be no elimination of the suffering that is born out of our fallen sinfulness but which, having been borne by Christ Himself to the cross, is the path down which we are called to follow Him.  This does not mean that we are not to try to alleviate the suffering of others, to the contrary, just as He healed the sick and made the lame to walk and gave the blind their sight, so we are commanded to do good to others. (7)  It means that we are not to think that by doing so, much less by outsourcing this work to the government, we can eliminate suffering and create a Paradise in this life.

 

The Modern idea of democracy, again as distinct from the ancient idea of democracy and the democracy that developed historically as part of our traditional parliamentary system, comes directly from liberalism’s belief that it can create an earthly Paradise and that it is justified in following Satan’s example of rebellion in order to do so.   The constituted authorities, the king and the Church, should have eliminated human suffering and made a Paradise.  That they didn’t do so means they need to be torn down and replaced with government by the people in whom sovereignty will now be vested.  That is the idea of Modern democracy, although liberals rarely put it so starkly, and it is utterly Satanic. It is also the idea that had to be thought first, before that artificial inferior substitute for patriotism, nationalism, could arise.  The sovereign people of Modern democracy is the nation of nationalism.

 

Nationalism then, in its historic sense, belongs to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christianity and so can hardly be called Christian.  There is a question, of course, as to whether what those who call themselves Christian Nationalists today mean by nationalism is nationalism in its historic sense.  Just as the first nationalists called themselves patriots so there have been those who have used the word nationalism to mean something closer to patriotism.  From what I have seen of self-designated Christian Nationalists this is not the case with them although that doesn’t immediately translate into their nationalism being the historical type either.  They have taken up the label of nationalist in reaction against the post-World War II movement towards re-orienting everything to an international or global scale with which they associate the increased secularism of the era.

 

While I am in complete agreement with their opposition to secularism and also detest the general way in which the world has been re-organizing itself since World War II, I do think that the Christian Nationalists have overlooked a number of things in coming to their position.  Secularism, while it has gotten much worse in the post-World War II era, is not the product of that era.  The first secular country was the United States of America (8) and the second was the French Republic formed in the French Revolution.   Secularism was joined at birth to nationalism. 

 

Also overlooked is a fact pertaining to progressive liberalism’s aggressive push after World War II to dissolve national identities, or at least those of the civilization formerly known as Christendom, both by submerging them in larger identities and breaking them down through large scale immigration.   While this is on the surface obviously an overreaction to Hitler, on a deeper level, one of which the progressive liberals themselves are almost certainly not consciously aware, an attempt to fill a void created by Modern liberalism.

 

In Christendom – Christian civilization – allegiance was not directed inwards, towards the people as a group, but upwards, ultimately to God in Heaven, but along the way to the sovereign, the king, in the civil sphere, and to the Catholic – universal – Church in the religious sphere, which spheres while distinct, overlapped.   

 

The king in Christendom, whether he reigned over a single realm or a vast empire, was what he is in the New Testament – God’s minister, to whom Christians are commanded to submit and to honour (1 Pet. 2:13, 17) and for whom they are commanded to offer supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks (1 Tim. 2:1-3). (9)  As God’s minister, he represented in the civil sphere that was his realm, the universal government of the King of Kings, which is a much higher sense of representational government than that of representational democracy. 

 

The Church was called Catholic for a number of reasons, the one of which that is germane in this context being that she transcended the boundaries of realm, empire, and nation and was a universal institution that was one wherever she was found.  In every kingdom and empire, she had One Lord in the sense of a divine Master higher than any earthly authority.  No matter where she was she confessed One Faith in the words of the ancient Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  Anyone from any country anywhere in the world could join her through her One Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  While this concept did not disappear in the sixteenth century Reformation at the beginning of the Modern Age, neither did it pass through that period unscathed, especially in external practice.  On both sides of the Reformation divide, other things came to took precedence over the aforementioned matters in which the unity and Catholicity of the Church are to be found. (10)  A tremendous blow was dealt to the external unity of the Church and in the separation that followed, between the followers of the papacy and the Protestants, between the Lutherans and the Reformed, and between all of the above and the myriad of smaller separatist groups, each communion developed an inward gaze in which its own identity and distinct doctrines were regarded, in practice at least, as more important than the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.

 

Mercifully, the office and institution of king survived the Modern Age in several countries, including my own, and forces aligned against the Catholic Church will, as Christ has promised, never prevail.  The position of both king and Church was weakened from what it was in Christendom, however, by the spread of the now ubiquitous notion of popular sovereignty and the fracturing of the Church into denominationalism which both involved a re-orienting of the gaze away from that which is higher, upward, and beyond, internally towards self, albeit in these examples the self of the group rather than of the individual person, the inward focus on which was also developing at the same time, all of these in accordance with the general shift from the theocentric outlook of Christendom to the Modern anthropocentric one.  It is that which pulls us out of ourselves and directs us to that which is higher and beyond ourselves that civilizes us, however, and this general inward reorientation of outlook of the Modern Age, by weakening these upward influences has created a vacuum into which different types of civilization-threatening barbarism enter.  The extreme nationalism of the World War II era was one such barbarism.  After the war, progressive liberals, realizing the need for a higher allegiance but, being progressive liberals, unwilling to turn to God, king, and Church, attempted to create various artificial substitutes in international, regional, and even world-level associations, organizations, and quasi-governmental bodies, but the soulless, toxic, bureaucratism that accompanied these at every level proved this to be but another form of barbarism.

 

So-called Christian Nationalism is a response to this other type of barbarism.  Unfortunately, it is no solution because it is enmeshed itself in the Modern way of thinking that produced the problem.  This is evident, not merely in its embrace of nationalism, the Modern artificial substitute for natural patriotism.  It is also evident in the kind of Christianity that it weds to nationalism.  While not all Christian Nationalists are evangelicals the form of Christianity that went into making Christian Nationalism is evangelicalism, not as Dr. Luther and the Reformers used this word nor as it was historically used in the Church of England nor as it is used in Europe today, but evangelicalism in a distinctly North American sense of the word, which evangelicalism, for all that it has to commend itself, has a very unhealthy tendency to confuse Christianity with Americanism.  Americanism, however, is a variant of liberalism, the ideology that drives the Modern Age’s movement away from God and Christianity. 

 

Nationalism, we observed earlier, is tribalism writ large, and tribalism is very much an apt description of Christian Nationalism’s approach to the various social, moral, and cultural problems that have arisen in our countries due to the transformation of Christendom into secular, liberal, Western Civilization over the course of the Modern Age.  That approach is to treat these as battlegrounds in a power struggle between groups, with our group, Christians, on the one side and some other group or groups on the other side, and to regard the government as an instrument (and an instrument in battle is called a weapon) with which to defeat the other group.

 

Interestingly, this way of looking at things has certain things in common with the thinking of the progressive liberals who abhor Christian Nationalism.  Progressive liberals as well, and all the more so the more the progressive takes dominance over the liberal in their thinking, tend to see everything in terms of power struggles between groups.   For Christians, however, this way of looking at things ought to be anathema.  Eph. 6:12 tells us that our struggle in this world is not against other people, but against the spiritual powers of darkness in this world.  Moreover, in this the Christian Nationalist approach bears more than a passing resemblance to the error at the heart of all progressive thinking, the belief in a political salvation.  Indeed, I would say that the resemblance to progressive salvation-through-political-means is far deeper than whatever surface similarity there may be between the Christian Nationalist idea of the role of government and the classical Tory view, of necessity more reactionary than conservative in the current political climate, that in my view is the closest thing there is to a translation of orthodox Christianity into the language of civil politics.  Where Christian Nationalism and Toryism bear a superficial resemblance is that we both reject the liberal notion of the separation of Church and State.  This liberal idea, the root from which all forms of secularism sprang, began as an argument for limiting the powers of the State but inevitably became an argument for limiting the influence of the Church while exponentially expanding that of the State.  Classical Toryism rejected this idea as an assault on the order of Christendom in which the king and the Church had distinct roles, distinct tasks to do, distinct spheres in which to do those tasks, and distinct powers with which to do them.  The king was not the instrument of the Church, he was to do his job rather than the Church’s. The Church was not the instrument of the king, she was to do her job rather than the king’s.  If both did their jobs well, it would work for the good of the other, because ultimately their roles, tasks, spheres, and powers came from God and were complementary.  Christian Nationalism, by contrast, which, incorporates liberalism through the Americanism it blends with its Christianity, rejects liberalism’s separation of Church and State, not in favour of the old order but of one in which the State is the instrument of the Church.

 

This has further diminished the Christianity of a movement, the Christianity of which was already diminished by being blended with Americanism.  The attitude that is visibly on display in the movement looks a lot more like hubris than humility.  Apart from being the very opposite of Christ’s own example and what He enjoins upon His followers and apart from being utterly unappealing and ugly in itself, this is counterproductive if we regard one of the challenges that Modern liberal secularism has created to be the re-evangelism of our civilization.  Look back to the early centuries of the Church when, facing the hostility of both the culture of the pagan Roman Empire and of those Jews who did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the early Christians first set about the task of evangelizing the ancient world.  They did so, not by political activism and organization, but by imitating Christ’s example and obeying His command to take up their cross in humility and follow Him to the point of martyrdom.

 

In Canada as in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth Realms, I have said often in the last few years that we are fortunate to have as our hereditary Sovereign a man who chose to modify his coronation service so that being welcomed into Westminster Abbey with the words “Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings” he responded with “In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve.”  I have noted the huge contrast between this and the attitude of the egomaniacal narcissist around which the MAGA cult, which overlaps Christian Nationalism to a large degree, especially in the United States, is centred.  Last week, as Western Christians celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and as Eastern Christians on the Julian calendar entered their Holy Week in preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection, and as the aforementioned Yankee narcissist thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with a threat to destroy an entire civilization in war, (11) many infected with the Christian Nationalism we have been discussing attacked His Majesty in a most unchristian manner.  As the king himself was observing the Sacred Triduum from the Maundy Thursday service at St. Asaph Cathedral in Wales to the celebration of Easter in the traditional Matins service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, these “Christian” Nationalists attacked him for not recording a video Easter message.   The words “not recording a video” are the operative words here.  He did issue an Easter greeting on the social media platform formerly known as twitter.  He wished Christians around the Commonwealth a “Happy Easter” and gave the simple but powerful message “He is risen!”

 

The controversy was entirely manufactured on the part of His Majesty’s “Christian” critics. Although he recorded a video for Easter last year, it has not become an established royal tradition for the monarch to do so as it has to record one for Christmas.  The king’s critics complained that he had sent a message to Muslims wishing them a happy Ramadan and accused him of everything from abandoning his role as Defender of the Faith to being a crypto-Muslim.  Anybody who took the time to compare – in good faith, mind you – what the king said to his Muslim subjects and what he said at Easter this year and last, would recognize that the fundamental difference between a greeting addressed to Muslims and a Christian message such as “The abiding message of Easter is that God so loved the world — the whole world — that He sent His Son to live among us to show us how to love one another, and to lay down His own life for others in a love that proved stronger than death” from last year’s video or this year’s more simple “He is risen” shows the utter stupidity of these accusations and conspiracy theories.

 

Through all this His Majesty has shown a far better understanding of how a Christian king ought to act towards his subjects of another religion than how these “Christians” have shown of the honour and submission Christianity requires of us towards our temporal king regardless of his personal religion.  The title “Defender of the Faith” was originally conferred on the king for writing a treatise defending the seven sacraments against the criticisms of Dr. Luther in his Babylonian Captivity.  Within the same reign, it was redefined to mean one who defended the Church in his realm against foreign claims of jurisdiction, including that of the foreign power that had bestowed the title in the first place.  Over the course of the century that followed it came to include the defence of the reforms made to that Church in subsequent reigns.  Today, His Majesty’s critics think that it should be given a tribalistic interpretation that has little if any connection to its historical development and which is fundamentally at odds with the basic nature and duty of the office of king, to reign over his realm from a position above partisanship representing law and justice for all.  Whatever corrections from the standpoint of orthodox theology, His Majesty’s views of the relationship between Christianity and other religions might be better off for, they are far preferable to those of the critics who interpret any remarks about Islam that are not bellicose and condemnatory as “promotion” or “preference.” (12)

While not all of these critics would identify as Christian Nationalists they are generally people who have allowed the Christian Nationalist perspective to influence their thinking just as Christian Nationalism has allowed the fundamentally anti-Christian Modern ideologies that it has embraced to warp its version of Christianity.  Followers of Christ should avoid such a movement.  We should love our countries as patriots, honour, pray for, and submit to our earthly king if we are fortunate enough to have one as Scripture enjoins, place the orthodox faith of the Creeds of the early centuries when the Church was undivided ahead of sectarian emphases on lesser matters that pit Christian against Christian and Christians against everyone else in “struggles against flesh and blood”, and take up our cross and follow our Lord’s example of humility rather than hubris.

 

(1)  It is usually misquoted with the definite rather than indefinite article.

(2)   James Boswell, Life of Johnson, April 7, 1775.

(3)   This is a deponent verb – it doesn’t have the regular active voice forms, and has only three principal parts, the third being what would be the fourth in a regular verb (the perfect passive participle).

(4)   Charles-Theodore and Jean-Hippolyte Cogniard, The Tricolour Cockade, 1831.  Whether Chauvin existed or was a fiction created by the Cogniards is a matter of dispute.

(5)   In game theory a zero-sum game is one in which the gains of the one player equally match the losses of the other player so that together they cancel each other out to produce the net sum of zero.

(6)   1 Cor. 13:4.

(7)   Compare the works which Isaiah prophesied that Christ would do Is. 61:1-3 with those for which Christ said He would reward His sheep in Matt. 25:34-40.

(8)   Progressive liberals in my country, Canada, both amuse and disgust me when they say foolish things about secularism distinguishing us from the United States.  Secularism is the American tradition, not ours.

(9)   These instructions from SS Peter and Paul, were not written to Christians living under a Christian king, the king in question was the Roman Caesar and specifically Nero whose reign encompassed the period in which the Apostles were writing. 

(10)                       On the one side, they doubled down on their insistence that the papacy was given universal jurisdiction over the Church that had previously played a role in dividing the Eastern Church from the Western Church.  By declaring the Church to be absent where the jurisdiction of the pope is not acknowledged, they elevated the papacy above the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.  On the other side, the doctrines that would later be somewhat inaccurately summarized as the Five Solas, were similarly elevated.

(11)                       This man, who regained his office as head of the New Rome and its beastly empire in a campaign that saw him take a gunshot to the head, drop to the ground as if it had taken him out, then, since it had only grazed his ear, bounce back up fighting (Rev. 13:3), has since outdone this by posting a blasphemous picture of himself as if he were Jesus on the Eastern Pascha (Easter) of the Julian calendar.  This was done in the midst of a controversy between himself and the current Roman Patriarch over the pope’s opposition to his war in Iran.

(12)                       His Majesty’s critics have circulated a meme quoting a speech he gave as Prince of Wales in 1993.  The meme is rather mendacious as it implies the words are recent.  The quotation, “More than this, Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost” should be read in the context of the entire speech entitled “Islam and the West”.  In that context, it is about the pre-Modern holistic – he used the word “integrated” - view of Creation.  In the same speech, and shortly thereafter, he said “At the core of Christianity, there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings.”  Note how he said the West “gradually lost this integrated vision of the world”.  It was “with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution”, in other words, the very anthropocentric view of the world succeeding the theocentric view of pre-Modern Christian civilization that I have criticised as liberalism repeatedly in the text of this essay. 

 

While some might not like the way he treats the pre-Modern integrated view of Creation as common to all religions, I would point out that Christianity’s claims to uniqueness have never rested on this point, but upon God’s having visited His Creation in a unique manner by becoming Man in the Incarnation, and upon His having accomplished the salvation of the world from human sin through His having died for us and rose again, none of which is questioned or even the matter at hand here.  That all religions contain truth, is in fact, the teaching of orthodox Christianity.  This is because religions are derived from natural revelation (the kind St. Paul talks about in the first chapter of Romans).  Christianity’s claims to uniqueness pertain to special revelation, the historical special revelation of the Gospel. 

 

St. Justin Martyr in the second century argued that the Divine Logos, which in the preamble to St. John’s Gospel is identified with God and specifically the Person of the Trinity Who became incarnate as Jesus Christ, had planted seeds of Himself throughout the nations prior to His Incarnation, that these had born fruit as philosophy, and that to the extent the ancient philosophers followed the Logos they could be regarded as Christian.  The opposite view, that pre-Christian philosophy contained nothing of value to Christianity could also be found if inconsistently practiced, most notably in Tertullian, but it is difficult to read the New Testament in the original Greek and side with Tertullian. 

 

Where I would respectfully disagree with the speech, which remember was given over thirty years ago, is that, while his overall argument that no one group has a monopoly on either truth or extremism is substantially accurate, the idea of holy war is, in my opinion, more integral to the essential theology of Islam than most other religions.  His Majesty did say, at the beginning of those remarks, that he was not an expert on the subject, however, and I would point out that those who are so quick today to jump on anything positive said in the direction of Islam usually do so for reasons that are less rooted in the differences between Christianity and Islam than they are in the United States’ post-Cold War conflict with the Islamic world.  This conflict arose in part out of the United States’ arrogant belief that she could do whatever she wanted anywhere in the world with impunity, in part out of the United States’ being the spearhead of Modern, materialistic, liberalism, in part out of her having armed and trained the more militant factions of Islam to use against the Soviets in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War, and in part by much of Christianity in the United States having been deformed by heretical notions, such as the idea that the religion which shares a common pre-Gospel history with Christianity but which is explicitly built on the rejection of Jesus as the Christ, the Middle-Eastern state constructed by adherents of which religion has a vested interest in destabilizing the countries mostly populated by Muslims in the region, is owed some type of allegiance by Christians.

New Year, Old Tory

The twenty-fifth year of the third millennium went by rapidly and once again we find ourselves on the Kalends of January.  In 45 BC, Julius Caesar having revised the Roman calendar to approximate the solar year, the Kalends of January became New Year’s Day for the first time.  It was not regarded as such in Christendom for much of the Medieval period until in 1582 AD Gregory XIII corrected the Julian calendar with the one that has born his name ever since in the West.  This ultimately had the effect of restoring the status of 1 January as New Year’s Day although, unsurprisingly when you consider that at the time Gregory was correcting the calendar he was also conspiring against Elizabeth I, Lady Day on 25 March remained the civil New Year’s Day in the realms of the British Sovereign until the change was made legal and official in 1751.  On the Church Kalendar, of course, 1 January, the Octave Day of Christmas, has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.

 

Each year on this date I write an essay giving an overview of where I stand in my political and religious convictions.  This is something that I borrowed, with a few modifications, from the late Charley Reese, who was a long-time op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly column syndicated by King Features. Reese recommended the practice of a yearly “full disclosure” column to other writers although other than myself the only writer I know of to have picked up the practice is Baptist preacher Chuck Baldwin. 

 

In the preface to his For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays in Style and Order the poet and critic T. S. Eliot described his general point of view as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”  I have frequently made use of these words of Eliot, in which I find an echo and an update of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition of a “tory” in his Dictionary, as an outline for explaining my own views.  This is because each of these things – classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – is an expression in its own realm of culture, politics, and religion, of the same attitude of belief in order, respect and reverence for tradition, history and prescription, skepticism towards and wariness of novelty and innovation, and outright antagonism towards the prejudice in favour of the fashionable, up-to-date, and modern common to all forms of progressivism, and this attitude has been mine by instinct my entire life. 

 

The late Sir Roger Scruton said that conservatism is more an instinct than an idea and I fully agree although I prefer to call myself a “Tory” or a “reactionary” rather than a “conservative.”  I would be fine with the word “conservative” if it was understood to mean what Scruton meant by it.  His book The Meaning of Conservatism was first published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher premiership in the United Kingdom and the Reagan presidency in the United States to explain what conservatism really is and that it is not the ideology of the market and individualism that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took it to be.  In this continent, at least, his message fell on deaf ears and “conservatism” has largely been used as a synonym for Thatcherism/Reaganism since the 1980s, although in the last decade, due to the political career of the current occupant of the White House, it has taken on the new meaning of populist-nationalism in the United States.  This is not, in my opinion, an improvement, for while I am against many of the things Krasnov the Orange purports to be against – wokeness, narcotics, a soft, weak, and indulgent approach to violent crime, national character changing mass immigration, and other things like this – I am no fan of populism and nationalism.  Populism is the instrument of demagoguery and nationalism, unlike patriotism, which is the instinctual and virtuous love of country that ordinarily is the natural extension of love for family and home (think of Edmund Burke’s famous remark about the “little platoons”), is an ideology that makes an idol out of the nation.  It is worth observing here that the most prescient warning ever written against the existential threat that a liberal attitude towards mass immigration poses to the civilization formerly known as Christendom, the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, was not written by a Trump-style populist-nationalist but by the late Jean Raspail, a (Roman) Catholic royalist like the late John Lukacs and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose writings informed my thoughts on the matter of populism and nationalism and whose example inspired me to wear as a badge of honour that favourite label of opprobrium of the progressive left, “reactionary.”  What makes the replacement of Thatcherism/Reaganism with populist-nationalism even worse is that the MAGA movement has degenerated into a dangerous leader cult centred around an egotist with a messiah complex.   No, Thatcherism/Reaganism was much to be preferred over this, just as Scruton’s “sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” is to be preferred over Thatcherism/Reaganism.

 

While I would like to say that what Americans, conservative or otherwise, do is their business and none of mine, unfortunately what goes on down there affects us up here.  I am a Canadian.  Many, after saying that, would add “a proud Canadian” but since I don’t like using the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins in a positive sense, I will say “a patriotic Canadian” instead, in the sense of “patriotic” explained in the previous paragraph.  I was born in rural Manitoba, raised on a farm between the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, Manitoba, and have lived in Winnipeg ever since.  As a patriotic citizen of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full title and name of this Commonwealth Realm, I am also a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III, as I was of his mother, our Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Elizabeth II before him.  Since I am a few months away from completing my fiftieth year, I grew up in the period which began when everyone who considered himself a conservative in Canada would have said Amen, or some secular equivalent, to the sentiment just expressed but which saw the rise of a “neo-conservatism” that looked to American “conservatism” – which is really classical liberalism – rather than British Toryism, as its guiding light.

 

When I was eight years old, Brian Mulroney led the old Conservative Party, to which the unfortunate modifier “Progressive” had become attached, to an historical landslide victory.  Four years later he would win another majority government but this would be the last time the old Conservatives won a Dominion Election.  The previous year, the Reform Party of Canada had been formed and in 1993 most of the traditional Conservative voters west of Upper Canada switched to the Reform Party.  I was in my senior year in high school at the time and not yet old enough to vote but early in my college years at Providence I took out a membership in the Reform Party.  Under Brian Mulroney, I felt, as did so many others, the Conservatives had ceased to be the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and in this I believe my assessment was right at the time. 

 

What I had not yet come to see, was that the Reform Party was not a step back from the direction in which Mulroney had been leading the party, but a huge leap forward down the same path.  The Reform Party maintained that the Mulroney Conservatives had gone astray by being less than sufficiently supportive of free market capitalism and by being too prone to compromise with liberalism on social issues such abortion.  Indeed, the Reform Party’s avowed social conservatism was its biggest drawing factor for me.  In Canada in the 1980s a significant shift towards liberal attitudes and positions on social, moral, cultural, and religious matters had begun, two to three decades after a similar shift had begun in the United States.  This shift has been ongoing in both countries ever since and the primary driving force in it, at least as far as popular attitudes goes, is the American popular entertainment industry.  While Mulroney had the misfortune of being prime minister at the time this shift was becoming disturbingly noticeable he could not fairly be blamed for it.  As far as government involvement in the shift goes, the biggest contributions were the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, an imitation of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, both introduced by the Liberals in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.  It was the Charter, introduced at the very end of the Trudeau premiership, which empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the way the American Supreme Court had been acting since the 1950s.  In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck the existing laws against abortion from the Criminal Code in Morgentaler v. The Queen.  Mulroney failed to get new Charter-Compliant abortion restrictions passed but he was also the last prime minister to try.  I am not trying to defend Mulroney, of whom I had grown as tired as everyone else by the early 1990s, so much as to make the point that on the issues that attracted me to it, the Reform Party was mostly empty talk.   In reality, of course, Mulroney’s single biggest defection from Macdonald Conservatism was his signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  The Reform Party, with its look-to-America neo-conservatism, wished to move even further in this direction, which was, ironically enough, a move in the direction of the founding platform and philosophy of the Liberal Party.  Or perhaps it is not that ironic.  Reform was the name of the movement in the pre-Confederation to Confederation era, that became the Liberal Party.

 

As my five years in Otterburne drew to a close, the old Conservatives and the Reform realized that their competition would keep the Liberals perpetually in power and a “Unite the Right” movement arose which after a first partially successful attempt finally merged the two parties into the current Conservative Party early in the new millennium.   My membership ran out shortly before the final merger took place and I let it expire without renewing it.  The result of the merger, I correctly anticipated, would not be the restoration of the party of Macdonald and Diefenbaker, but would be more likely to combine the elements I liked the least in the two parent parties.  This marked the end of my getting involved in the partisan aspect of politics, at least as far as the positive side of joining and promoting a party goes – I have no intention of ever letting up on bashing the Liberals and the New Democrats – and eleven years ago, after Stephen Harper with the support of Captain Airhead decided that the privacy of Canadians needed to be defenestrated in the name of importing America’s War on Terror into Canada, I declared my intention to follow the example that I had long admired of Evelyn Waugh, who stopped voting around World War II “on grounds of conscientious objection”, because the Conservatives had failed to turn the clock back even a second in all the years he had voted for them and if he continued to do so he would be “morally inculpated in their follies” and would have “made submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election if they lost” and declared that except in a case where a moral or religious matter is at stake, he would no longer presume to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers.  In practice, however, some circumstance, such as in one instance a friend and colleague running as the Christian Heritage candidate in my riding, has always come up to thwart this intention.

 

I have explained why I am not a “Big-C Conservative”, that is, a partisan of the Conservative Party.  While the customary expression in Canada for those who are to the right in their political philosophy but not partisans of the Conservative Party per se is “small-c conservative”, as I already said in the fourth paragraph of this essay my preference is for the term “Tory.”  Since this term is used in Canada for Big-C Conservatives in the same way Grit is used for Big-L Liberals, I need to clarify that I am using it to allude to the predecessor of the Conservative Party.  In Britain, the supporters of the king and of the established reformed Church of England in the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century were called Cavaliers and Royalists and after the Restoration of the monarchy and the Church those who continued to fight for their cause in Parliament rather than with the sword came to be called Tories.  Tory, therefore, has long struck me as being the most appropriate terms for someone who, like myself, for whom that sentiment or instinct in favour of the good things that are easily destroyed but hard to create that Scruton called conservatism, takes the form of those three more precise words from T. S. Eliot. 

 

Since I have already stated that I am a loyal subject of His Majesty I will start with the “royalist in politics.”  I have been this by instinct my entire life.  The institution of royal monarchy represents tradition, continuity, the weight of prescription, authority as opposed to power, and what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” which is the only kind of democracy worthy of the accolades with which the baser type is showered in progressive thought.  Unlike the grassroots, bottom-up, democracy of populism which exerts a downward, levelling, force on a society, royal monarchy is an elevating influence and the virtues it inspires among the subject-citizens of the realm(s) over which it reigns are the older and better virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty rather than the mere commercial virtues inspired by classical liberalism and republicanism.  A president, or whatever term is used for an elected head-of-state, cannot properly do the task for which he was elected, being the representative of the whole of his country, for, as is evident among our neighbours to the south, eventually “he’s my president, although I didn’t vote for him” is replaced with “not my president” which in turn devolves into the civil war like partisanship that has been on display since at least 2008 and has been growing with intensity with each successive president ever since.  A king, by contrast, can not only do this task since he does not owe his office to popular and therefore partisan election, but the much more important task of representing within his realm(s), the government of the universe as a whole.  While this is how I articulate my royalism today, I have felt it by instinct my whole life, and it gets stronger with each passing year.  I am very grateful to be in a country whose hereditary head-of-state entered his Coronation service declaring that in the name of the King of Kings and after His example, he came not to be served but to serve, rather than in the country that choose for its own head of state a boorish and belligerent narcissist who crawled forth from sludge that backed up from the toilets in hell and whose cult of followers are so delusional that some of them have blurred the huge difference between him and the King of Kings.

 

T. S. Eliot called himself a “classicist in literature”, but here I would substitute the term “culture” for “literature.”   Culture, in the broader sense of the term, refers to everything that human societies pass down through instruction, training, and education rather than genetically through biological reproduction, everything that we make and do, the participation in which shapes and defines who we are as societies.  In this sense of the word, we speak of cultures in the plural and of specific cultures.  It is a concept closely related to that of tradition and the two can be either used interchangeably or distinguished by saying that tradition is the method – the handing over or passing down from generation to generation – and culture the content.  Classicism has reference, however, primarily to the term in a narrower sense.

 

Culture in this narrower sense is difficult to define but I would describe it as that, within culture in the broader sense, which, like the institution of royal monarchy as discussed above exerts an elevating influence on the larger culture and on society and civilization, at least when it is doing what it is supposed to do.   All human activities that must be learned and especially those that involve the making of something are broadly called arts.  Within this larger category, we distinguish a smaller by the addition of the definite article, and one of the uses of the word art in the singular with neither definite nor indefinite article is to designate that something that sets apart “the arts” from “arts” in general.  “Art”, however, is even harder to define than “culture.” “The arts”, of which literature is one, can be regarded as either building blocks of the higher culture or the medium by which it is transmitted. 

 

Classicism takes its name from classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greco-Roman civilization, although it is well to remember Stephen Leacock’s wise observation that Greek and Latin are “a starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages.”   In its most general sense, it is the approach to high culture and the arts that stresses external standards that are objective and universal.   The classicist recognizes that the arts are governed by rules, although classicism need not imply a rigorous legalism.  Classicism, for example, would not censure Shakespeare for not strictly adhering to Aristotle’s three unities (time, place, action), although it would perhaps say that he earned the right to set these aside when warranted by having first mastered them.  A century ago it was generally thought of as the polar opposite of romanticism, the highly individualistic approach that stresses inner inspiration.  Today, cultural and artistic subjectivism has been taken to extremes much further than romanticism proper was ever willing to go.  Today, for example, it is not uncommon to find “art” produced in explicit repudiation of Beauty, which classicism and romanticism both recognized as the end to which art aspires.

 

Classicism is the expression with regards to culture, of the same Tory instinct as royalism, but of all the expressions of the Tory instinct, it is the least instinctual.  This is just what we ought to expect considering that culture itself is something that has to be instilled and learned – etymologically it means “that which has been cultivated.”  Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) famously said that culture was “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” and while, as with Eliot, I would extend the concept beyond literature to include, for example, getting to know the music of Haydn and Mozart as well as the writings of Homer and Plato, I think that this explains quite well what culture looks like when applied to the soul of the individual person.  We each, to put it bluntly, are born into this world as barbarians and the proper goal of education is neither to indoctrinate us into the latest progressive claptrap, as the more fashionable academic institutions have all seemed to think for the last sixty or seventy years, nor, contra those who are “conservative” rather than Tory, to fit us to earn our living as cogs in the machine that is the modern economy, but to civilize us by exposing us to this higher culture. 

 

If high culture is the getting to know “the best which has been thought and said in the world” this means that the best can be distinguished from that which is not the best, from that which is  merely the better or the good, as well as from that which is bad, worse or the worst. Such a distinction requires the external, objective, universal standards that classicism stresses. While this can mean something quite technical, like the aforementioned unities of Aristotle in the dramatic arts, in the more general sense the measuring stick is that of the goods inherent in the structure of the universe.  A classicism informed, as it ought to be, by philosophy in its highest form which is theology, with special reference to the branches of metaphysics and aesthetics, would say that the best, not only in literature but the other arts, is that which looks to and teaches us to strive for Beauty, Goodness and Truth.  When the arts do this, the higher culture they comprise elevates the broader culture because while the natural tendency of culture in the more general sense is to focus on us and our identity as societies and a civilization, this lifts us out of our focus on ourselves and directs us to goods that are outside ourselves, fixed, and universal. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are called transcendentals because they are the properties of Being itself, and while we participate in being as created beings, He in Whose infinite simplicity Being and Essence are one and the same, as the best theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have explained, is God.  The best classicism, therefore, would say that the ultimate purpose of higher culture is to point us to God, which is why T. S. Eliot wrote two books arguing that religion is the heart and soul of culture.  The reason so much of the art culture of the last century has been so horridly rotten is because it has deliberately turned its back on this its ultimate purpose.

 

While this creates an opening for turning to “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, before doing so I wish to personalize my remark about classicism being the least instinctual of the three expressions of the Tory instinct.  My royalism has been life-long and religiously, as I will shortly discuss, I have been maturing towards Anglo-Catholicism since my first moment of orthodox Christian faith, but the classicism I articulated above is the result of years of reading on a subject my serious interest in which came much later in life.  It did, however, have its beginnings in that same Tory instinct.  My late maternal grandmother was a nurse by profession and a painter by passion.  My visits to her in my youth would frequently involve a painting session and a discussion of art.  Grandma specialized in painting landscapes, usually in watercolour.  Watercolour was definitely not my forte, and what I painted is best described as caricature.  Sometimes it involved cartoon depictions of politicians, but almost always it was done in a style spoofing Modern Art.  My knowledge of Modern Art was not very extensive at the time, and Picasso was usually who I had in mind.  I instinctually recognized his work as garbage made for a market of those with too much money and not enough brains and who showed it by behaving exactly like the courtiers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  This, I would later learn, was exactly how Picasso saw his own work, just as I would learn that Modern Art contained much that was worse than Picasso, although not nearly as bad as what is to be found in the art designated “Postmodern.”.  Grandma had a collection of art books, and when she and I would discuss them, she would disparage her own paintings, in which the countryside we both knew was recognizable, as not being real “art.”  The basis of this distinction was her idea that “art” is what depicts what the artist sees internally rather than what he and anyone around him can see with his actual eyes. While I did not know enough at the time to recognize this as a fashionable idea derived from romanticism, I did instinctually, regard it as utter bunkum.  As with my instinctual negative assessment of Picasso and Modern Art, my opinion has not really changed although then it was little more than the prejudice of someone who had barely taken the first step from natural barbarism towards civilized taste, whereas now it is an opinion that is slightly more informed after years of trying, with whatever degree of success, to get to know Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” and of reflecting on the insights of those such as Eliot, Sir Roger Scruton, and T. E. Hulme, who grounded his argument for the external rules and order of classicism on man’s limitations due to Original Sin.

 

This brings us back to “Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In previous years I have often started with this to emphasize the foundational aspect of orthodox Christianity but this year I have opted to leave the most important for last.  In my extended family, my relatives are generally either United Church – the United Church of Canada, that is, the product of the unlikely union of the Presbyterians and Methodists – or Anglican in their affiliation, with degrees of attendance varying from never darkening the door to being there every Sunday.   When I was a kid, for example, my mother fairly regularly attended the United Church in Oak River, and my paternal grandmother who lived in Rivers received the Anglican Journal with the Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon.   In my childhood, both Churches were becoming increasingly plagued by liberalism in its theological sense.  This is the idea that the teachings of Christianity, at least as they were historically and traditionally understood, have been rendered, in full or in part, unbelievable by Modern “discoveries”, and so must be discarded or re-imagined in order to preserve the real “essence” of Christianity which for liberals, is usually its ethical or moral teachings, or more accurately whatever ethical or moral ideas progressivism subscribes to at the given moment, which the theological liberal deludes herself into thinking is what Jesus really meant. Theological liberalism admits of degrees and so can vary from being otherwise orthodox but rejecting the infallible authority of the Bible to basically being an atheist and completely disbelieving the Creed in its entirety but without having the decency to leave the Church.  I held this liberalism in contempt from the moment I first became aware of it which was long before I came to faith myself.  That was the old Tory instinct kicking in.

 

Therefore, when I came to faith in Jesus Christ in an evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, it was with a disposition towards orthodoxy – the truths that Christians have historically and traditionally believed and confessed – but with a suspicion of the institutional Churches that had allowed themselves to succumb to liberalism.  Accordingly, my initial expression of Christian orthodoxy was in the form of fundamentalism.  Over the course of the following decades of theological study, both formal such as in my five years at Providence and informal, my eyes were opened to the fact that the popular evangelical notion that the “real” Church is not a visible society but a convenient way of referring to all Christians in the aggregate simply doesn’t fit the way the Bible speaks of the Church and that therefore one cannot really have orthodoxy in the fullest sense without the institutional Church.  This, combined with a deepening appreciation for the Church Fathers’ work in setting the boundaries of the Apostolic and orthodox faith and defining and opposing heresy and for the ancient Creeds as the basic confessions of those truths that are de fide, along with a developing love for liturgy both for its being ancient and traditional and so the means by which the Christians of today share in the worship of the faithful of preceding ages and for its being fully participatory in a way that a streamlined service centred on the sermon (in which all but the speaker are passive), helped my orthodoxy mature into an Anglo-Catholicism.  I joined an orthodox Anglican parish about a decade into the new millennium, where I was confirmed and where I continue to worship to this day.

 

My Anglo-Catholicism, is much more the Anglo-Catholicism of the Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus than that of say Darwell Stone or Dom Gregory Dix, which is not to disparage these men from whose writings I have learned much.  The difference is basically that the older kind of Anglo-Catholicism did not repudiate the Reformation and Protestantism but looked, like the English Reformers to the primitive belief and practices of the first millennium and especially its first half as the measuring stick of Catholicity rather than post-Tridentine Rome.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics I acknowledge all seven Sacraments acknowledged by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, I also acknowledge that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are Gospel Sacraments in a way that distinguishes them from the others, they are visible modes of the Gospel.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics, I acknowledge all seven of the pre-Schism ecumenical councils recognized by both Rome and the East and would go so far as to say that the theological argument of the Second Council of Nicaea is the conclusion logically required by the orthodox Christology of the first six ecumenical councils, I also understand and respect, despite my loathing of iconoclasm as boorish and philistine, the reasons why the Protestant Reformers thought the veneration of icons had been taken way too far.

 

My arrival at orthodox, Protestant, Anglo-Catholicism is not a repudiation of the steps in my Christian journey that brought me here. 

 

When I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half after my conversion this did not involve the sacrilege of denying a previous, valid, baptism because it was my first and only baptism.  Being baptized in this way meant that I received baptism by immersion, and while the mode is not essential, it was definitely the preferred mode in the earliest centuries, remains the ordinary mode even for infant baptism in all pre-Reformation Churches other than Rome and, although in practice the exceptions are the rule, is the prescribed mode in the Book of Common Prayer.  Ironically, I would not have received baptism in the mode the Book of Common Prayer prescribes, had I been baptized by an Anglican priest as an infant. 

 

While I no longer believe separatism to be the appropriate way for the orthodox to combat liberalism, I remain very much committed to the position so well-articulated by J. Gresham Machen, that liberalism is a different religion from Christianity.  It is not, therefore, that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist so much as that my understanding of the fundamentals has expanded from the five, identified in the heat of conflict a century ago, to twelve, the twelve articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the standards of orthodoxy for basically two millennia.  I remain committed to the infallibility of the canonical Scriptures, and very much remain convinced that the Authorized Bible – the official Anglican translation – is the best English translation and will remain the best English translation not because it cannot be improved upon in theory but because in reality, to improve on the translation would require translators who were at least the equal of the Jacobean scholars and to get these we would need to get rid of the technological distractions of the present day and return to training people in the classical languages from ages four and five.   We would also have to return to textual scholarship based on faith principles – that the true text is to be found in use in God’s Church – rather than rationalist principles – that a manuscript unused and unknown to most of the Church for most of two thousand years might have the better reading, whereas textual scholarship is generally heading in the opposite direction.  What I would add to this today is that the Authorized Bible is incomplete without the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books from the LXX which should be restored to the place between the Testaments in which they were found in the original 1611 edition. 

 

Although my journey into the English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church did not involve a period in the Lutheran church it did involve a lot of reading of Lutheran theologians, especially from the Missouri Synod – C. F. W. Walther, Francis Pieper, Pieper’s epitomist John Theodore Mueller, Robert Preus, Kurt Marquart, Herman Otten, John M. Drickamer – and my understanding of the doctrine of salvation, especially where it intersects with my understanding of the Sacraments, is largely Lutheran.  Salvation was objectively accomplished for all by the Saviour on the Cross and is given to man freely as a gift.  It is proclaimed to all in the Gospel of which the Church’s two-fold ministry of Word and Sacrament are both modes, at least with regards to the Gospel Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The Gospel, in both modes, is the resistible means through which God gives us the grace of salvation, faith is the hand into which He places it and with which we receive it.  The grace that sanctifies us – works in us to make us conform to the righteousness and holiness of Christ internally – is always given with the grace that justifies us – clears us of the guilt of sin and gives us the legal standing of righteousness before God, but sanctification is always based on justification, not the other way around, sanctification being, therefore God making us into what we already are because of Jesus Christ.  Our faith and hope – faith is the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1) – rests on Who Jesus is and what He has done for us in the events of the Gospel, His death and resurrection, rather than on what He is doing in us, and it is through such faith resting on what He has done for us outside ourselves that He accomplishes what He is working in us..  I do not agree, however, with the Lutherans and Reformed, that the Gospel was recovered in the sixteenth century after being lost by the Church.  Justification by faith alone is not the Gospel.  To say that justification by faith alone is the Gospel is to say that our message of Good News to the world is “you only have to believe.”  To say that, however, would be actual Antinomianism, as opposed to the kind with which legalists frequently charge Christians who see God’s grace as freer than they themselves see it. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, fully God and fully man, died for us and rose again.  It is confessed in each of the ancient Creeds and permeates the liturgies of all the ancient Churches, and so was never lost by the Church, although had been buried under a lot of accumulated excess baggage by the Roman branch of the Church by the sixteenth century.  Justification by faith alone is part – a part, not the whole - of the extended theological explanation of why the Gospel is Good News.   It is the claim that justification by faith alone is the Gospel and that the Church lost the Gospel, rather than the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, that has produced the sectarian separatism and the revivals of such ancient heresies as Arianism and Nestorianism that have plagued post-Reformation Protestantism.

 

These positions will no doubt seem out of step with the direction in which our civilization is heading and the spirit and fashions of the present day but that is rather the point since they are expressions of an instinctual Toryism that looks to ancient and timeless truths rather than the rapidly changing opinions of the current day.  I would not trade that Toryism for a “conservatism” with roots no deeper than individualistic market liberalism and my resolution for this New Year, as for every New Year, is to grow even more out of step with the times and more rooted in those ancient truths.

 

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!