Canada’s Greatest Need

 

It is 1 July, the anniversary of the day in 1867 on which the British North America Act came into effect establishing the Confederation of the provinces of Canada – the single province into which Upper and Lower Canada had been united in 1841, now split into two provinces again - New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia into the Dominion of Canada.   Between 1867 and 1905, the provinces of Manitoba, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta would be added to Confederation, with Newfoundland joining in 1949.   Also part of Canada since 1870 are the territories, originally all the Northwest Territories, with Yukon becoming a distinct territory in 1898 and Nunavut much more recently in 1999.   Until 1982 the anniversary of our country was celebrated as Dominion Day, because it was the day Canada became a Dominion – a term our Fathers of Confederation chose themselves, out of the Bible, as a substitute for their original choice of title “Kingdom” - and which became the designation within the British Empire of a country under the reign of the shared monarch which governed herself through her own Parliament.   When the British Empire evolved into the British Commonwealth the term Commonwealth Realm took on the same meaning within the new arrangement but Canada is still designated a Dominion in what was renamed the "Constitution Act, 1867" in the same year that the holiday was renamed.   Although the change of the name of the founding document was accomplished legally – unlike the change in the name of the holiday which was snuck through Parliament on a hot summer’s Friday with less than a quorum present – traditionalists such as myself still call it the British North America Act, just as we continue to celebrate today as Dominion Day.

 

This year for Dominion Day we shall be looking at our country’s greatest need, something that while it would not make all of the problems that afflict Canada – social, economic, cultural, moral, political, etc. – go away, would provide a large degree of relief in many if not all of these areas.   No, I do not mean a change in our federal premiership for while undoubtedly the present Prime Minister has contributed significantly to making all of our problems worse for the last eight years, there is no guarantee that his successor and replacement would be much or any better.   Our greatest need is for something much deeper than that.  It is for spiritual and religious revival.

 

In North America the word “revival” has had certain associations since the eighteenth century.   Itinerant open-air preaching of the type John Wesley and George Whitefield specialized in, threats of hell-fire and damnation like in the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, all-week camp meetings, tents and the sawdust trail, coming forward to confess Christ and shake the hand of sensationalist and theatrical ball-player turned evangelist Billy Sunday, “I see that hand”, the uncompromising morality and theology of Bob Jones Sr., and most recently Billy Graham and “Just as I Am”.   All of these associations are the outward trappings of a kind of revival that centred around the conversion of either outright unbelievers or those whose Christianity had been merely nominal or formal to an active personal faith in Jesus Christ.   When used in this sense, revival so overlaps evangelism that the distinction between the two is in danger of being lost.   The two, however, are not the same and the difference is an important one.

 

Revival comes from the verb revive which literally means to live again or to bring back to life although we generally use it in the sense of restoring consciousness or energy rather than resurrection.   While passing from spiritual death to new life in Jesus Christ certainly fits the literal definition the concept of revival, which is derived from the Old Testament, is of the restoring to new life of God’s people rather than of individuals.   In the Old Testament, the idea of God’s people as a specific nation, Israel, and the idea of God’s people as a spiritual assembly, the Congregation of the Lord, were to a great degree interchangeable.   This is not the case in the New Testament, in which God’s people are the Church, a spiritual assembly drawn from every kindred, tribe, and nation in which the wall between Israel and the Gentiles has been broken down.   The New Testament is the substance, the Old is the shadow, and so on this side of the Cross and Empty Tomb, revival is primarily the revival of the Church rather than the national societies in which the Church is found.   Paradoxically, however, since the Church is a multi-national society, when revival comes to the Church in a particular national community, the nation experiences a renewal or awakening to some degree as well.

 

When I say, therefore, that revival is Canada’s greatest need, I mean that our country’s greatest need is for the Church to undergo a spiritual reawakening here that will spill over into a renewal of our general society.

 

A genuine spiritual awakening of the Church does not have to outwardly resemble the revivals of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.   Historically, revivals of this type have been more associated with American expressions of Christianity than with those in Canada although an examination of revivals in the two countries reveals that differences in regional culture are just as important as differences in natural culture in determining the shape of revival.  In the early eighteenth century, before the American and Loyalist traditions broke from each other, with the Loyalist merging with the French Canadian tradition to become the national tradition of the Dominion of Canada, the revival known historically as the Great Awakening took place in both the colonies of New England which would become the core of Yankee culture and in what would become the Maritime Provinces.     In New England the Great Awakening proved to be less a revival of Christianity – the Churches in which it occurred would apostasize into deism, liberalism, and Unitarianism in less than a century – than of Puritanism, the schismatic, extremist, form of Calvinism that spawned that trio of Modern Age evils, liberalism, Americanism and Communism.   This was not the case with the same revival in the Maritimes which remained Loyal.  The difference was, perhaps, due to the less stringently Calvinist character of the revival in the Maritimes.     The Wesleyan revival in England is often credited with having had the opposite effect of the Puritan revival in New England and sparing the United Kingdom from experiencing the sort of bloody, Puritan-inspired, proto-Communist revolution that introduced murderous totalitarian republicanism to France in the late eighteenth century.  In North America, however, in pre-Confederation days, the United States sponsored Methodist revivalist meetings in English Canada for the purpose of generating class strife and undermining the Loyalist establishment.   This undoubtedly added significantly to the suspicion of revivalism already held by the more traditional expressions of Canadian Christianity – French Roman Catholicism, English Anglicanism, and Scottish Presbyterianism – on the grounds that it was unbalanced and placed too much weigh on personal experience.   These suspicions were hardly unfounded.   While John Wesley and George Whitefield had laid an orthodox foundation for the revival movement in the eighteenth century, their influence was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by that of Charles G. Finney, a converted lawyer whose anything-but-orthodox theology resembled the early Church heresy of Pelagianism and who taught a rationalistic, mechanical, doctrine of revival in which it was the automatic outcome of following a prescribed method or technique, prompting B. B. Warfield to harshly, but not inaccurately, say of his theology that “God might be eliminated from it entirely without changing its essential character”.

That notwithstanding, the North American evangelistic style of revival is not entirely foreign to Canada.   The best known distinctive Canadian revival of this sort is likely the one that began in Saskatoon in October of 1971 when Bill McLeod, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist, invited twin evangelists Ralph and Lou Sutra to hold a week and a half of meetings.   By the end of the week the crowds coming to the meetings had swelled to the point that they surpassed the capacity of the Baptist building, were moved to a larger Anglican Church, then to the larger yet Christian and Missionary Alliance building, before the Saskatoon Centennial Auditorium with a capacity of over 2000 had to be rented.   The week and a half, of course, had to be repeatedly extended and in the end went for seven weeks in total.   The revival spread from Saskatoon to the Saskatchewan provincial capital of Regina, then here to Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba which was McLeod’s home town, eventually spreading across the prairies and into British Columbia.   The story of this revival was told at book length by Kurt E. Koch in Revival Fires in Canada (1973), then again by Saskatoon-born Erwin Lutzer in Flames of Freedom (1976).  Note that this revival began in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, spread east to the prairie province of Manitoba, and made it to the west coast but was largely a prairie phenomenon.   This further illustrates what was said previously about regional cultural differences being as important as national ones.   It does not mean that the prairie provinces are more “American” than the rest of Canada – as a lifelong Manitoban and a lifelong Loyalist Tory, I would very much resent such a suggestion.   The prairies, however, and the American Midwest, share elements of a regional culture that may explain why revivals of this particular form are more common in these regions than elsewhere in both countries.

 

The last century also saw a new branch spring from the roots of the older revivalism.  Pentecostalism was born from the Holiness movement, the branch of Wesleyanism that stressed the most unfortunate false doctrine of perfection in this life, in the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles that began in 1906.   This was a different type of revival that in one very limited sense was closer to the Scriptural concept of revival.   That sense is that it was primarily something that occurred among those who already professed Christian faith, rather than the mass evangelism of the unconverted.   The Holiness movement already taught the idea of a “second blessing” in which the Holy Ghost comes upon a Christian after conversion and eradicates the sin nature.  Pentecostalism modified this concept of a “second blessing” into one in which the Holy Ghost comes upon the individual Christian and bestows upon him the sign-and-wonder working power exercised by the Apostles in the early days of the Church, this “second blessing” – “third blessing” at first, because the original Pentecostals were still Holiness believers – manifesting itself in the gift of tongues and being identical in Pentecostal thought, albeit not in orthodox truth, with baptism of the Holy Ghost.    Since the Pentecostal movement split into multiple schisms pretty much from its inception some of which revived not Christianity but ancient heresies like Sabellianism, those of us who are skeptical towards identifying this as a genuine revival might be pardoned for so being.  The Pentecostal movement developed into a denomination – or rather class of denominations – of its own.  Later in the twentieth century the distinctive doctrines of Pentecostalism and, more relevantly the associated concept of revival, was borrowed by the Charismatic movement that at first was distinguished from Pentecostalism primarily by its taking place in other, more traditional and mainstream, denominations of Christianity.  Eventually it too produced new denominations and out of one of these, John Wimber’s Vineyard Movement which began as a schism from Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, itself a schism from the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal sect founded by the American celebrity female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, a string of revivals of the Pentecostal/Charismatic type broke out in the mid-1990s.   One of the first of these, and the one which attracted such international attention that its name is sometimes used synonymously with this entire wave of revival, took place in the provincial capital of Upper Canada.   This was the “Toronto Blessing” that began in what was then called the Toronto Airport Vineyard in January of 1994.   These revivals proved controversial among Christians, even more so than previous versions of this phenomenon.  Hank Hanegraaff, director of the Christian Research Institute took the position that rather than being genuine movements of God they did more harm than good, a position he argued at book length in his 1997 The Counterfeit Revival.   James A. Beverley, a professor at Tyndale Seminary, took a more nuanced approach in his Holy Laughter and the Toronto Blessing: An Investigative Report (1995).   As for myself, I was in my last semester in high school when the Toronto Blessing started and by the time I started my theological studies in the fall of the same year it was spreading.   Here in Winnipeg the phenomenon was dubbed “Prairie Fire” and it was very much the talk of the campus at the time.   I was a skeptic then and am a skeptic now.   I do not mean that I question those who say they experienced God and grew closer to Him through this.   What I mean is that when I compare how revival supposedly manifested itself in the 1990s – laughing, barking like a dog, collapsing, shaking – with how it manifested itself in Saskatoon in 1971 – people coming to faith in Jesus Christ, confessing their sins to the very large congregation and asking for forgiveness, confessing their crimes to the police, abandoning divorce proceedings and restoring their marriages – my impression of what happened in the ‘90s is best expressed in the words of Canadian country and western superstar Shania Twain, “that don’t impress me much”.

 

Which brings me back to the point that led in to this discussion and comparison of these well-known Canadian examples of evangelical and Charismatic revivals.   The genuine spiritual awakening within the Christian Churches that is our country’s greatest need will if it comes not be limited to although it may include these evangelical types of revival.   In Lower Canada, the decline into its lamentable present condition of secularism, welfare-socialism, and a language-based nationalism that is needlessly hostile to the unity of the country and the interests of other Canadians was directly tied to the decline of Roman Catholicism in the province into a surface nominalism, both declines culminating in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s.   Revival there would be more likely to take the form of a mass return of the province’s Roman Catholics to the authority, beliefs, ethical teachings and traditions of their Church.   It would be something along the lines of them all becoming SSPX Latin Mass types, probably sedevacantists too, and finally demanding and obtaining the excommunication of the Trudeau family if not demanding that the Trudeaus be turned over to the Holy Office or Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or whatever name the Inquisition now goes under with the request that it go Medieval on their derrieres.  

 

The two largest Protestant denominations in Canada are according to the latest statistics still the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada.   These are what have become of the two main Canadian Christian traditions other than French Roman Catholicism from before Confederation.   The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 by the strange wedding of Presbyterianism with Methodism.   Until 1955 Canadian Anglicanism was still formally part of the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, but in 1955 the Church’s ecclesiastical provinces in the Dominion of Canada were federated into the Anglican Church of Canada  in a process that rather resembled how the country was formed in Confederation.   That these are still the largest denominations other than the Roman Catholic Church may seem surprising to those familiar with the work in the sociology of religion done by the University of Lethbridge’s Reginald W. Bibby.   In a number of books, including Fragmented Gods (1987) and Unknown Gods (1993), Bibby has analyzed the decline of religion in Canada and one of his observations has been that Churches that remain conservative or orthodox retain their membership and even grow better than those that embrace liberalism.   Yet liberalism has so permeated the United Church that there is not much of anything else left and it has heavily infiltrated the Anglican Church as well although not quite to the same extent yet.   Part of the explanation, no doubt, is the gap between what people identify as their religion on surveys and their actual active involvement in the Church.   The vast majority of my relatives are either United Church or Anglican in affiliation but this does not mean that you will find most of them in the pew regularly or in some cases ever.   In one of Sir Kingsley Amis’ novels he says of a character that he always filled in the blank on forms for religion with “C of E” to indicate the Church whose door he never darkened and whose services he never attended.  This gap is much larger for the United Church and Anglican Church than for denominations in which liberalism is not such a problem.   Another part of the explanation is that conservative or orthodox Churches are divided over a large number of denominations no one of which is as large as the United or Anglican.

 

Liberalism in this context means a Church’s accommodation of her beliefs and teachings to ideas that spring from rationalist presuppositions that it is popularly but mistakenly assumed have been confirmed by science or some other form of Modern inquiry, the idea that science and Modern inquiry in general have the potential to confirm such presuppositions being itself a mistaken assumption.   It varies in extent and degree with the most severe being the kind that regards the supernatural or miraculous as primitive superstitious ideas that have been debunked by Modern technique and so rejects all the tenets of the Christian faith confessed in the ancient Creeds or reinterprets them in such a way that to confess them with the new interpretation would be to confess unbelief rather than faith.   It is a thought poison that kills Churches and the larger societies in which those Churches are found.   Since this is the disease killing the two Churches representing the Christian traditions other than the Roman Catholic that have played the most significant roles in our country’s history, the revival we need is a revival that brings these Churches back to life with an uncompromisingly orthodox adherence to and proclamation of essential Christian Truth against Modern and rationalistic ideas.

 

In the 1830s, the Church of England underwent a revival led by men seeking precisely this, to combat the encroaching influence of rationalism, Modernism, and liberalism.   This revival was very influential in pre-Confederation Canadian Anglicanism.   It began with a sermon entitled “National Apostasy” preached by the Rev. John Keble against the Reform Act from the University Pulpit at St. Mary’s, Oxford on 14 July, 1833.   It was spread through a series of “Tracts for the Times” published from 1833 to 1841.   The leaders of this revival, such as Keble, Edward B. Pousey, and John Henry Newman were associated with Oxford University.   Accordingly, the revival is known as “The Oxford Movement” or alternately the Tractarian Movement after the publications.   The Movement promoted primitive – in the positive sense of belonging to the early centuries of Christianity – orthodox Christianity, the practice of reading the Scriptures while sitting at the feet of the Fathers (1), frequent – and by this they meant daily not weekly – participation in Holy Communion, practical holiness, a renewed recognition of the authority established in the Church by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and that this and not that bestowed by the state is the Church’s true authority and establishment, and worshipping God liturgically in the “beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9).   Calvinists saw all this as a betrayal of the Reformation and were, unfortunately, given plenty of ammunition for making this accusation by Newman’s crossing the Tiber and receiving a cardinal’s cap.   They missed the point, as Calvinists usually do.   It was not the heritage of the Reformation, at least the English Reformation, that the Tractarians fought against but rationalism, liberalism, and Modernism, and they believed that the best way to combat these things was to renew their Church’s connection with the pre-Modern heritage and tradition of the entire Church.  

 

In Canada, the Right Reverend John Strachan who was consecrated the first Bishop of Toronto in 1839, while the Oxford Movement revival was underway, and who died the year of Confederation after a long career in which he arguably did more than any other single person to shape the form of Upper Canadian Anglicanism, was a man very much in sympathy with the Oxford Movement and expressed as much in his correspondence with John Henry Newman although strangely, considering his admirable and fierce opposition to Americanism, it was the Right Reverend John Henry Hobart, Episcopal Bishop of New York who had first influenced him in this direction before the Oxford Movement even began (Hobart died in 1830).   The Oxford Movement’s influence in Upper Canadian Anglicanism did not end with Bishop Strachan’s death but continued to spread.  John Charles Roper, who had studied in Keble College – founded in 1870 and named after John Keble – at Oxford, became the Professor of Divinity at Trinity College, the last of the many schools Bishop Strachan had founded, in 1886 and in this capacity promoted the vision of the Oxford Movement as he did as rector of the parish of St. Thomas.   He would later be consecrated Bishop of British Columbia before being translated to the See of Ottawa where he would serve for a quarter of a century and would become the Metropolitan Archbishop over the Ecclesiastical Province.   So yes, the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Catholic Revival, was very influential in the development of the Anglican Church of Canada and this influence can still be seen in the architecture, vestments, and practice of regular Communion even in parishes that would not wish to identify with the Oxford Movement.

 

The problem is that just as the sawdust trail, camp meetings, etc. were merely the outward trappings of the North American evangelistic revivals and not the inner essence which was the preaching of the Gospel and conversion of unbelievers, so the forms, rituals, etc. were the outward trappings of the Anglican Catholic Revival and not the inner essence, which was the renewal of the Church’s spiritual connection with the ancient, pre-Schism, Church to renew her to stand against the errors of Modernity.   I say this not to disparage these outward trappings – smells and bells are far more to my taste and liking than making “worship” as indistinguishable from a nightclub as possible, but because our  Anglican Church of Canada, I am afraid, has not been near as faithful to the inner essence of the Oxford Revival as it has to the outward trappings.   This is why our Church is in desperate need of the same kind of revival as is needed by the United Church – a revival of belief in the truths of Christianity as confessed in the ancient Creeds and taught by the Church Fathers rather than some watered down and explained away with rationalistic gibber gabber version of the same, and a revival of the courage to proclaim these truths, to proclaim Christ Crucified, in an uncompromising manner, rather than to preach social justice, recycling, cutting carbon emissions, the racist idea that racism is the worst of evils and that all whites are guilty of it and everybody else is the victim of it, gender ideology and the whole alphabet people agenda, and all the other garbage that apostate ministers fill their sermons with when they won’t preach Christ.  

 

Churches that preach every sort of liberal and left-wing clap trap imaginable but not Christ bleed members and die.  Their message does not meet the basic needs of the souls of men, it does not touch the human heart, and it does not have the blessing of the Holy Ghost.   When Churches commit suicide in this way, the larger society becomes increasingly secular.  When this happens, the country’s civil religion, for lack of a better expression, can become similarly corrupted, and a healthy patriotic respect for national traditions, institutions, and history be eroded and replaced with a cult of national self-loathing, endless apologies for the actions of our founders and past leaders as judged by the standards of today rather than their day, a disgusting violation of both the fifth and the ninth commandments in which our ancestors who are no longer around to defend themselves are defamed with an ugly lie in which the humanitarian educational efforts of the Churches and State are portrayed as “genocide”, and this sort of thing.

 

This is why a revival of sound, orthodox, Christianity in our Churches is what Canada needs the most.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

 

(1)   This wording is not original with me.   Hans Boersma used a variation of it in a recent article, I have encountered other variations of it in the writings of Ron Dart, and I am fairly certain elsewhere, although exactly where eludes me at the moment.

 

Contra Spiritum Saeculi

It is the first of January, the Octave Day of Christmas which is the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord and also New Years Day. This means that it is once again time for my annual “full disclosure” essay, a tradition I have borrowed from one of my favourite opinion columnists, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. In this essay I talk about myself and outline my basic convictions such as underlie all my writings.

I am a male Canadian, who grew up on a farm in Western Manitoba, studied theology for five years after high school, and has lived and worked in Winnipeg, the provincial capital ever since.

I am a life-long Canadian patriot. I say patriot rather than nationalist, because a patriot is someone who feels towards his country, its traditions and institutions, and people the same kind of affection he feels towards his home and family, whereas a nationalist is a zealot for an ideal vision of what his country ought to be, which may or may not have any anything to do with his country as it is and historically has been, and who may do terrible damage to his country in the name of that ideal. In Canada, the Liberal Party identifies itself as the party of Canadian nationalism, and their nationalism is the toxic cancer that has been killing the country I love for over half a century. My Canada is the Dominion of Canada, a British country built on a foundation of Loyalism, governed by a British parliamentary monarchy, with the British Common Law and all its prescriptive rights and freedoms and, in the English-speaking part of the country, British culture as adapted to the northern part of North America. The vestiges of this Canada lingered on in the farms, villages, and small towns of the rural area in which I grew up and while some of the responsibility for the erosion of this Canada belongs to Americanization, the Liberal Party deliberately targeted the old Canada for disappearance with its nationalism project. Renny Whiteoak, the hero of Mazo de la Roche’s epic Canadian Jalna saga, expressed his and his creator’s contempt for this project by dismissing all the talk of nationality with the question of what exactly was wrong with being a colony anyway. While the Dominion of Canada had been much more than a colony since Confederation in 1867, what de la Roche was getting at through her mouthpiece Renny, was that there was nothing wrong with Canada as she was before the Liberal nationalist project, a sentiment I certainly share as I share her cynical contempt for a project that had as its aim the rejection and replacement of everything that had traditionally and historically been Canada.

I prefer the word Tory over the word conservative to describe my convictions. Both words can refer to the members and supporters of the Conservative Party but this is not what I mean when I apply either word to myself. Conservative, when used today in North America in a sense other than the partisan, suggests an old-fashioned liberal – someone who believes in individual rights and liberties, limited government by elected representatives, low taxes and free markets. While this older kind of liberalism has its good points, unlike today’s liberalism of egalitarian social engineering, wealth redistribution, and soft totalitarianism masked with a smiling face and compassionate words, which has no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, I mean something more than this when I call myself a conservative.

I use the word Tory in Samuel Johnson and T. S. Eliot’s sense of the term – someone who is a royalist, a high churchman, and a classicist.

We live in a depraved age and it is in keeping with the degenerate spirit of the times that democracy, the rule of the people, is now ubiquitously thought of as being synonymous with freedom and legitimate government. Monarchy is regarded by those who think this way as an outdated and archaic holdover from the past that, if its survival is to be tolerated, must be confined to a merely ceremonial role. As someone who has been a royalist for as long as I can remember, I can see all of this for the malarkey it is. Democratically elected governments intrude into every corner and aspect of their citizens lives in ways kings and queens never dreamed of doing and historically people have been much freer under royal rule than under the dominion of a government which being of the people can do whatever it likes to the people, for it is the people doing it to themselves. Furthermore, democracy places power in the hands of those who can be trusted with it the least – ambitious, power-seeking, politicians. The only way to make government by elected politicians tolerable to those under it is by placing those politicians in the humbling position of being servants or ministers of a royal master, which is why monarchy is even more important in an era of democracy than ever before. Politicians can govern only as representatives of whose who elected them – those who live and can vote in the present day. It is kings and queens, whose position does not depend on popular election but is rooted in tradition, prescription and historical continuity, who represent the whole of their society, including past and future generations and so, it is monarchy and not democracy, that makes all the other elements of government legitimate. As usual, the spirit of the age gets everything completely backwards.

I grew up in a family that, when it attended church, attended the United Church, but had an evangelical “born again” conversion experience when I was fifteen, and was baptized as a teenager in a Baptist church. I was later confirmed an Anglican. When I say that I am a high churchman I mean this in the original sense of that expression, someone who believes in the Church as an organized institution, its institutional authority, and the importance of its organic and organizational continuity with the Church founded by Jesus Christ through His Apostles. In this too, my convictions run contrary to the spirit of our age, which values a vague and undefined spirituality but despises organized religion.

Which is not to say that there is nothing valid in the condemnation and criticism of the institutional Church one often hears. Fundamentalists frequently accuse the ecclesiastical leadership of the mainstream churches of abandoning the theological and moral truths that Christianity has taught for two thousand years and more often than not these accusations are correct. To give up on and withdraw from the institutional Church, however, in the fundamentalist manner, is to depart from the truth in another way, by falling into sectarianism and Donatism. There are many contemporary trends in the Church I deplore. The unbelief, masquerading as theology under the name liberalism, which rejects or reinterprets beyond recognition any traditional Christian doctrines that the liberal considers himself too enlightened to believe in today and replaces them with progressive political, social, and environmental activism is one of these. The abandonment of reverence and a sense of the sacred and a holy for a familiarity that comes close to blasphemy in much of the “personal relationship with Jesus” kind of evangelicalism is another. I would insist, however, that these are problems to be confronted and dealt with in the Church, rather than reasons to withdraw from it.

I derive this view of the institutional Church, from both an anthropological argument, that religion as an institution is fundamental to all true community, and, more importantly, the theological argument, that Jesus Christ Himself founded the Church as an institution which, collectively indwelt by the Holy Spirit, would continue His Incarnational Presence on earth as His Body after His Ascension, and which He promised the gates of hell would never prevail against.

I am a Protestant high churchman, like those prior to the Oxford Movement of the 1830s such as Dr. Johnson, and as such I do not regret the Reformation, with its necessary clarification of the Pauline doctrines of grace and justification and its recover of the position of highest authority for the Holy Scriptures as the Word of God, but I do lament the tendencies that later developed in Protestantism of making the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures a private and personal matter between the individual believer and God, contrary to the inspired words of St. Peter, to make the talk where someone gives his interpretation of the Scriptures the central element of communal worship rather than the sacrament of Holy Communion, to neglect the writings whose canonicity was less firmly established than the sixty-six books recognized by all Protestants but which were nevertheless read as Holy Scriptures throughout the Church from the first century onward, and to neglect a fifteen hundred year tradition of Scriptural interpretation, from the Church Fathers through the medieval doctors, apart from which no man can hope to understand the Holy Scriptures, the sources of the truth into which Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would guide His disciples, for that promise was made to the Church collectively, and not to the individual believer.

In classicism, as in royalism and high churchmanship, I set myself against the Zeitgeist. By classicism, I mean the idea that music, literature, and the visual arts exist with beauty as their end, and that beauty like truth and goodness is not whatever we decide it to be, but rather has real existence in itself as part of the established order of things as they are, and that therefore there are non-subjective standards whereby music, literature, and the visual arts can be and ought to be judged. This is not a very popular idea today, especially among artists and, counter-intuitive as this might seem, among art critics. This is because the opposite of classicism, romanticism, which is the belief that an inner well within the artist is the source of all true art and that the artist must follow his inner light rather than external, established order, came to dominate the arts in the nineteenth century, and was taken to the nth degree in the modernism and postmodernism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In identifying with classicism, therefore, I am not merely expressing a preference for Titian and Poussin, Haydn and Mozart, Dante and Shakespeare over Picasso, Schoenberg and Maya Angelou, I am saying that there is something fundamentally wrong and depraved with the latter.

In going, as a Tory, against the spirit of our forward thinking age in all of these things – royalism, high church traditional Christianity, and classicism – I am a reactionary, a term which is used as a label of abuse by those who believe in the false doctrine of progress, i.e., the doctrine that man has an infinite capacity to reshape and improve the world so as to create Paradise for himself on earth, but which I wear as a badge of honour, a habit I picked up from one of my favourite historical writers, John Lukacs.

As a reactionary, a man of the right – indeed, the far right in the truest sense of that expression, one which does not include Hitlerism which, properly understood, was an ideology of the left – I see most contemporary trends as being for the worse rather than the better. This is most evident in the realm of morality where all the old commandments and taboos, which served constructive social and civil purposes are being jettisoned in favour of a set of petty, banal, obnoxious, and increasingly ridiculous rules, designed to micromanage our personal relationships and communications with others so as to prevent us from hurting the feelings of a growing list of groups of people whose feelings are officially protected.

All of this nonsense comes from the idea of equality, one of the chief demons of the age. In the United States, right-liberals, i.e., conservatives, and left-liberals or progressives, argue over “equality of opportunity”, favoured by the former, versus “equality of outcome”, favoured by the latter. In the Tory tradition of Dr. Johnson and Evelyn Waugh, I reject both concepts, and all forms of the idea of equality, as a sick, evil, and depraved perversion of true justice. Justice, being rooted in the order of things as they are, is, like that order, hierarchical rather than egalitarian. I hope that it is not arrogant boasting to word it this way, but I have more sense than to believe in the equality of individuals, much less such drivel as the equality of classes, the sexes, religions, cultures, and the races, either as a description of the way things are or of the way things ought to be made to be. One does not have to subscribe to some crackpot ideology about how one’s own race or sex is superior to the others – which, by the way, is a fair description of the nominally egalitarian feminist and black advocacy movements – to recognize the folly of egalitarianism. Few things get my dander up more than the way these stupid and patently false ideas are shoved down all our throats by educators, clergyman, the media both news and entertainment – not that there is much of a difference anymore – and the government. None of these really believe this nonsense, however much they might lie to themselves and others, as is evidenced by the way they will not allow anyone to disagree with them but seek to utterly ruin the lives, careers, and reputations of anyone who in even the mildest way points out that their emperor has no clothes.

The only other absurd notion as protected against the observation of reality as egalitarianism is liberal individualism taken to its ultimate extreme in which reality itself is declared to be for each of us what we decide it to be for ourselves. If Bruce Jenner decides he is a woman, who are you or I to disagree? All the rest of us are expected to agree that he is a woman, just as if we were living out George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in which the inhabitants of Oceania, at war with one rival power one day, declare that they have always been at war with the other the next.

That this new morality represents some kind of quantum leap forward in human enlightenment is a proposition that no truly sane and intelligent person could entertain for a second. Give me back the old Victorian morality, I say.

It is a time-honoured New Years tradition to make resolutions of self-improvement on this day and so I make it my resolution for 2016, to grow even more out of step with the times in which we live, and I encourage all of you to do the same.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen!

The Apostle of High Culture

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famous senator, orator, and philosopher of the Roman Republic, in its last days before the rise of the dynasty of the Caesars, in his Tusculan Disputations, compared the education of the mind to the cultivation of the field. In response to the objection that bad lives on the part of philosophers discredit their philosophy, Cicero wrote:

[I]t is not every mind which has been properly cultivated that produces fruit; and, to go on with the comparison, as a field, although it may be naturally fruitful, cannot produce a crop without dressing, so neither can the mind without education; such is the weakness of either without the other. Whereas philosophy is the culture of the mind: this it is which plucks up vices by the roots; prepares the mind for the receiving of seeds; commits them to it, or, as I may say, sows them, in the hope that, when come to maturity, they may produce a plentiful harvest. (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Book II: “On Bearing Pain”, translation by C. D. Yonge)

There is an interesting parallel between this passage and the parable Jesus told of the sower and the seed. In Jesus’ parable, a man sowed good seed in different types of soil with results which varied in accordance with the soil. The seed, Jesus explained, was the Word of God, and the soil was the hearts and minds of men. In Cicero’s illustration, philosophy is to the mind, what cultivation is to a field. Both illustrations make the point that the quality of the soil affects the quality of the harvest, i.e., that the quality of the heart or mind, determines how fruitful the seed of the Word in the one case, or the cultivation of philosophy in the other, will be. Without making this point, Cicero’s illustration could not have served the purpose for which he gave it. Cicero also, however, stresses the flip-side, that no matter how good the soil – the mind - , it will not produce a good crop without the cultivation of education and philosophy.

In addition to the points Cicero intentionally made, this passage also illustrates the origins of the concept of “culture”. “Culture” is, of course, etymologically derived from the same Latin root as the verb “cultivate”. The word “agriculture” is created by the addition of this word, meaning “to till” or “to plough” and by extension “to prepare” to the Latin word for field. We have come to apply the word culture to a wide variety of activities which make up our way of life. This use of the word culture would appear to have begun as a metaphorical application of the idea of “cultivating” the human mind, heart, soul, or spirit similar to Cicero’s.

There are variations to how we use the word “culture” in reference to human beings. Anthropologists and sociologists use it to refer to religious beliefs and practices, languages, folklore, customs and habits, and everything about a particular people’s manner of living which gives that people a distinct identity. We can see the root meaning of culture in this when we think about how these things, which are passed on from one generation to the next, cultivate or prepare people for life within a particular society.

There is another way in which we use the word culture in which the idea of cultivating our mind and character is even more apparent. We sometimes speak of a person with sophisticated and refined tastes as “having culture” or, when someone goes to a Shakespearean play, symphony, art gallery or opera, say that they are “getting culture”. When we use these expressions we are referring to what is called “high culture”. The idea of high culture, is that of a society’s greatest cultural achievements which mark that society as being truly civilized. It is supposed to have a civilizing effect upon the minds, character, and manners of those it influences, much like that which Cicero claimed for philosophy.

The concept of high culture came under heavy attack in the 20th Century. Relativist critics have challenged its claims to superiority over popular or mass culture, and weight has been given to their challenge by the growing popularity of democratic and egalitarian ideals. The fraudulent nature of much that was passed off as high art, music and literature in the avant garde era of the early 20th Century and even more so in the post-modern era of the late 20th Century, has not helped the case for high culture.

That case was brilliantly made, however, in the 19th Century, by poet and critic Matthew Arnold. In the 1860’s he wrote a series of essays which were published serially, then compiled into a volume entitled Culture and Anarchy, to which he added a lengthy preface. In this preface Arnold stated that the purpose of the essay was to “recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties” after which he gave a now famous definition of culture:

Culture being 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, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

By “total perfection”, Arnold does not appear to have meant absolute flawlessness so much as well-roundedness, balance, and harmonious integration. To demonstrate the nature of the perfection he believed culture strives after, he borrowed the phrase “sweetness and light” from an allegory by Dean Swift. In that allegory, a spider was arguing with a honeybee about which of the two of them produced superior work. This took place within the context of a satire about the 18th Century argument between French intellectuals over whether the writings of classical authors or modern authors were superior. In Swift’s satire, “The Battle of the Books”, the books themselves come to life and go to war with each other, and it is a volume of Aesop’s fables which finds the spider and the bee and settles their argument in the bee’s favour by saying that the bee fills his hive with “honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.”

If the contributions of the ancients appeared to be the “sweetness and light” of the honeybee in comparison with the web of venom and dirt spun by the spider of modern thought to Jonathan Swift in the 18th Century, the comparison must have seen that much more apt to Matthew Arnold in the 19th Century. Arnold lived and wrote in the Victorian era when the industrialism of Manchester was reshaping Britain after its own image before his very eyes. He saw the new industrialism as having begotten a “faith in machinery”, which exaggerated the importance of machinery and treated it “as if it had a value in and for itself” and he regarded this misplaced faith as “our besetting danger”. He recognized that the “movement towards wealth and industrialism” which spawned this faith was necessary “in order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the society of the future” but warned that the material well-being of future generations was being purchased at the price of the spiritual well-being of the present generation. In these warnings, Arnold anticipated Jacques Ellul’s critique of “the technological society” by almost a century.

Arnold introduced his essay by referring to remarks by “that fine speaker and famous Liberal” John Bright, who had dismissed culture as “a smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin”. At the end of his introduction, he said that “like Mr. Bright” and others, he was a liberal but one “tempered by experience, reflection and renouncement” and “above all , a believer in culture”. Culture and Anarchism is a criticism of liberalism – 19th Century classical Victorian liberalism – from within, which it is important to keep in mind if we want to understand how the various threads of the critique tie together. It is the agenda of 19th Century liberalism – ecclesiastical disestablishmentarianism, individualism or “doing as one likes”, and industrialism, which are criticized as the source of “our present difficulties”, but from someone who accepts liberalism’s basic principles.

Thus, when the move to disestablish the Irish church “not by the power of reason and justice, but by the power of the antipathy of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to establishments” is discussed, Arnold’s criticism is in many ways the mirror image of that of his godfather, John Keble almost forty years previously. Keble, an Anglican vicar, had responded to a move by Parliament to eliminate several dioceses in Ireland, with a fiery sermon against “the National Apostasy”. This sermon was credited as the beginning of the Oxford Movement by John Henry Newman, who led that movement until he left the Church of England to join the Church of Rome. The Oxford Movement was a spiritual revival within the High Church branch of the Church of England, which in response to the growth of philosophical, religious and political liberalism, sought to refocus the Church on her spiritual establishment, as a branch of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, Church” by Christ and His Apostles. One of the fiercest opponents of the Oxford movement had been Arnold’s father, the latitudinarian and liberal headmaster of Rugby School. Arnold shared his father’s Broad Church position and his rejection of the miraculous and supernatural, and so when he criticized the Puritans, Nonconformists, and the disestablishment movement within the Church of England it was for different reasons than Keble and Newman. These groups, he argued, tend to promote provincialism, whereas ecclesiastical establishments tend to produce the kind of total view of things which he called culture.

This provincial attitude, like Puritan and Nonconformist faith and industrial capitalism, tended to be associated with the middle classes, and Arnold dubbed these “Philistines”. This term, taken from the name of the enemies of the Israelites in the Old Testament, was already being used in Europe to refer to people who had no appreciation for culture. The Philistine, Arnold wrote, is “the enemy of the children of light” and this label which “gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children” is particularly appropriate to the middle class because they “not only do not pursue sweetness and light” but “prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea meetings, and addresses…which makes up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched”.

If we think about the kind of person who judges the status of others solely or primarily upon their level of income, who only understands the value of education in the utilitarian sense of it being a means towards getting a good, well-paying job, and who dismisses books, art, and all other cultural products which do not provide cheap amusement or contribute towards career advancement as useless, you will have a pretty good picture of what Arnold meant. It is not a flattering picture of the middle class, but Arnold was no easier on any other class. The aristocracy he dubbed “Barbarians”, after the people who overthrew Roman civilization and argued that their culture was merely external and did not touch the heart. The industrial labour class he called “the Populace”, and while this is the least blatantly insulting of these labels, the anarchy referred to in the title of the volume consists largely of this class “marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes”.

By treating these classes in this way, Arnold made the point that culture is not the property of any one class while simultaneously arguing that active hostility to culture is characteristic of one particular class – the Philistine middle class.

In his preface, which, remember, was written after the body of the text had already been written and published serially, Arnold remarks that the “strongest and most vital part of the English Philistinism was the Puritan and Hebraising middle-class” and says that “its Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality”. Hebraism, in the fourth of the essays in Culture and Anarchy is contrasted with Hellenism as one of two great forces shaping human history, both with the “final aim” of “man’s perfection or salvation”. They differ in that “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience”. This essay is one which no orthodox Christian could possibly agree with because he associates the idea of “seeing things as they really are” with the rejection of the supernatural and because Christianity itself is obviously a Hebraising force. Arnold acknowledged that Christianity is a form of Hebraism but distinguished it from Puritan Hebraism. Early Christianity, he said, was a Hebraism which replaced the Hellenism of Greco-Roman culture, but it did so at a time when Hellenism was naturally waning and Hebraism naturally waxing in the mainstream of Western history. Conversely, Puritanism was a Hebraism which checked the “central current of the world’s progress” when the Hellenism of the “Renescence” (1) was that mainstream.

While this reads like a case of special pleading that allows Arnold to condemn Hebraism in Puritanism while praising it in early Christianity the distinction is actually important to his argument, because it is precisely this matter of being “not in contact with the main current of national life” which he identifies as the source of provincialism among the Nonconformists.

Arnold’s association of “the main current of national life”, i.e., what we would call “the mainstream” today with the balanced, harmonious, and “total” or “whole” worldview which he argues that culture imparts, is both a strength and a weakness of his book. Sectarianism and separatism have long gone hand in glove with a tendency to exaggerate the importance of minor and peripheral matters to the point where major and central matters are eclipsed or even lost. Thus Arnold’s linking of Nonconformity, Dissent and disestablishmentarianism to provincialism and Philistinism has much merit. What if, however, the mainstream is itself diverted into the wrong channel? Arnold’s basic acceptance of the liberal concept of progress appears to have been a hindrance to his giving this question the serious thought which it deserves.

That this was a weakness in his argument is all to clear today when we realize just how appalled Arnold would be if he could return to the 21st Century and see where the mainstream has led us since his day. The Greek and Latin classics, which he and Dean Swift associated with “sweetness and light”, have lost the central place they once held in the curriculum to be replaced with subjects considered to be more appropriate for a world where industry and machinery dominate. Philistines are now mass-producing “culture” which resembles the “dirt and poison” of the spider more than it does the “sweetness and light” of the honeybee and have made it difficult for people to escape their web, even in the privacy of their own homes.

Throughout his book, Arnold struggled with the undesirable consequences of the liberalism he had inherited from his father. Liberalism in all of its manifestations, was an attempt to cling on to everything good which had been passed down from the classical and Christian eras while embracing the philosophy of the “Enlightenment” which was killing those good things off at the root. Religious liberalism sought to cling on to Christian ethics while rejecting the basic message of Christianity that the all-powerful, miracle-performing, Creator God, came down and dwelt among us as a man, and redeemed us to Himself through the shedding of His own blood, then rose from the grave to offer us new and everlasting life. Political liberalism sought to find a rational defense for the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen which arose out of a constitution and common law that had evolved over centuries in a kingdom influenced by Roman law and Christianity which would maintain those rights and liberties once everything that had given birth to them had been lost. The very idea of “progress” is an attempt to keep the Christian hope of the Kingdom of God alive, for people who no longer believe in God, and who reject the authority of God the king.

Each of these attempts proved to be a colossal failure in the 20th Century. Religious liberals found that Christian ethics could no longer be maintained without Christian doctrine and so found themselves preaching a watered down, subtance free morality, to dwindling congregations. Political liberals threw away the prescriptive rights and liberties of Englishmen in favour of the soft tyranny of the nanny state. The doctrine of progress has led to the kingdom of hell rather than the kingdom of heaven on earth.

None of this, of course, was evident in the 19th Century. Matthew Arnold deserves much credit for seeing as many problems as he did. His concept of a wholistic, integrated culture in which beauty and truth, sweetness and light, are given their proper due, remains an admirable ideal, albeit one the high culture of the 20th Century has fallen rather short of. This is not Matthew Arnold's fault, however, and the fact that the difference remains noticeable to anyone should be attributed to his abiding influence on cultural critics up to this day.

(1) i.e., the Renaissance. This term was new at the time, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy having just been published 9 years earlier, the English translation not yet having appeared. Arnold correctly predicted that the term was “destined to become of more common use amongst us as the movement which it denotes comes, as it will come, increasingly to interest us”. His Anglicized spelling of the word did not, however, catch on.