A battle for the political soul: populism and Christian identity | Joseph Robertson
“Hence we may overthrow the error of those who think to form the moral character of others by speaking well and doing ill; forgetting that the hands of Jacob were more persuasive with his father than his words, though his hands deceived and his voice spake truth.” ~ (Dante - ‘De Monarchia’).
It is evidentially true in the current hierarchy of Western politics, that to be popular wields more power than to be truthful. Although the world seems ever more polarised between the altars of Populism and Globalism, we would do well to be wary of simplistically assigning popularity to two broad churches of consensus. Rather than rhetoric of ‘left’ and ‘right’, or ‘globalist’ and ‘nationalist’, political identity no longer focuses purely on basic economic and social values but descends into a fractal of human perspective, as people try to find a quantifying limit to acceptance, tolerance and association with those who think differently.
Simply put, no longer is the divide in voting tendencies so important as the overlap, as each side of the argument struggles to accept their shifting positions on the political spectrum. The following quote from the 2002 American Psychologist (the academic journal of the American Psychological Association) is of striking significance in today’s melting pot of subjective identity; “Diversity of identity will only grow as globalization results in increasingly complex bicultural, multicultural, and hybrid identities…”. It is striking because, although perhaps axiomatic, it succinctly presents us with the root of today’s culture war.
Andrés Velasco, Dean of the School of Public Policy at LSE argues against the narrative of populism rising from an incendiary reaction to austerity and bad economic policies. He argues rather that culture, values and identity play a key role in populist swings; that people would rather see something of themselves in their leaders, than simply to focus on economic pros and cons. It is perhaps ironic then, that while the rise of identity politics is predominantly associated with a left-leaning, socialistic and humanistic viewpoint, identity is just as important to the opposite school of thought, albeit in a very different way.
In the past, identity could be broken down to the level of the individual, the family, the community and the nation, in definable ‘building blocks’. Increasingly identity is stretched to mean the individual as part of a larger supralocal commune, harping back to Irving Janis’s 1972 study, ‘Victims of Groupthink’, where he expounded the theory of individuals foregoing their own beliefs to conform to a consensus.
With artificial constructs such as non-binary genders, grammatically absurd ‘pronouns’ sprouting in the biographies of online intellectuals and the groupthink effect of common causes (such as Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion), we see individuals draw closer to ideologies that do not necessarily affect them directly, in order to gain social credibility. This consensus is different from the natural in-crowd mentality that has been ever present in social psychology and moves to a far more sinister, homogenised version of identity. It whips individuals to strip themselves of personal non-conformities, by qualifying objections as a ‘lack of acceptance’ and replacing the idea of personal opinion with a pseudo-gospel of tolerance.
The forum of debate is replaced with an arena of pressure, wherein to preserve social credibility, the individual must lose their inhibitions in order to be accepted by the greater commune. Conversely, in a way that might seem at first glance antithetical, the individual is asked to explore an identity of both circumstance and imagination, in which any number of possibilities arise. From gender theory, to a dizzying number of sexual and cultural identities, to ethnicity, background and even fashion choices, the individual’s identity is broken down into subsets that far reduce Boethius’s ‘persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia’ (‘the person is an individual substance of a rational nature’), to a series of rude and often ambiguous classifications.
The building blocks of ‘traditional’ identity can be very simply attributed to Western civilisation’s development around a central worldview: Christianity. Widely accepted as the foundation for the liberties enjoyed today, Christianity was the central religion of Europe until at least the onset of the French Revolution in 1789. Thereafter, infiltrated and usurped by humanism and later by Marxist principles, it began its slow decline. Yet it should be noted that despite shifts to new schools of thought, Christian values still retained their grip over social structure, by and large.
Compare that slow decline in faith of a few hundred years, to the first quarter of the 21st century (by which time, sped up by the technological boom, most of its cultural grip had been decimated). In the first 10 years of the new millennium, the number of Christians in the UK fell by approximately 10,000 per week. A more recent opinion survey displayed that 52% of Britons now identify as non-religious. This attitude was further accentuated by a report which discovered that a paltry 21% of young adult (16-29 years old) Britons would identify as Christian.
With Christianity’s rapid disappearance from our social fabric, after its having occupied a central position for the last 2000 years, we should be fairly unsurprised that another set of social values would inevitably fill the void that was left by the mass exodus from this worldview. It is also very natural that a new form of identity has begun to fill its place.
It is necessary to perceive that the cultural damage is institutional. An oft-quoted survey from 2016, conducted by the Adam Smith Institute, found 8 out of 10 university lecturers to hold left-leaning (read Marxist) worldviews. Myriad surveys on media bias reveal the press’s overtly left-leaning movement in recent years and a general lack of impartiality recently culminated in a social-media-led movement to defund the BBC.
Those kinds of statistics are not something new but rather evidence that individuals in positions of media and educational authority, having now received their cake (the rejection of Christian values), will very much want to eat it too. It would be easy to conclude that no amount of Christo-sympathetic populism, when confronted with a cultural struggle of such epic proportions, can hold a real mandate from a clear-cut majority (bearing in mind that overlap between both sides of the political spectrum) to once again institutionalise Christianity with every value it enshrines. Can populism then, at the very least, provide a back door for such a cultural revolution?
To answer this more succinctly, we have to look at the structure of Christianity itself. Polycarp, one of the earliest of the Church fathers, extols the Philippians in an epistle to grow “in faith and truth and in all gentleness and in all freedom from anger and forbearance and steadfastness and patient endurance and purity”. There is something to such a plea that appeals to our very core and very essence in a penetrating demand for intellectual honesty. Regardless of a personal relationship with Christ, if we are to consider a return to Christian values as a positive course of action, we must first, as Jordan Peterson likes to remind us, tidy our own bedroom.
Applying this to politics, in a return to the first and last line of the opening paragraph of this article, the biggest battle is to temper popularity to the rule of absolute truth and to not be afraid in defining a clear boundary with fortitude. With absolute certainty, we can attribute such a massive fall away from the Christian religion as being due to an erosion in the unchangeable truth at its core. It is a truth that appeals to believer and non-believer alike. It is the appeal to honesty.
Chesterton once said; “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.” and Christianity passes that test with unflappable good-humour. We might next test proponents of identity politics with the same yardstick and despite best efforts, they will surely be found wanting, biting back with a churlish snarl. Lastly we should apply it to populism. We will find that the humour is there but clouded with the pollution of sarcasm.
The Christo-sympathetic individual’s biggest struggle is not to win the day with populism but to win over populism with a return to honesty. Maybe, by refusing to negotiate, refusing to find the ‘overlap’ between one school of thought and another, the electorate can start to see the popularity in truth, that led most of the early Christian world to convert to a faith which unabashedly challenged them to be intellectually honest.
The institutions are lost for the time being. Thus, the battle to win the culture war depends not on how many people in the political overlap Christianity can please but how many it can convince.
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