by Carl R Trueman, First Things
While the U.S. was reeling from the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its aftermath, across the Atlantic another event of significance to the conservative political world took place: The Conservative member of Parliament Danny Kruger defected to the Reform party. He is not the first to do so, but as Michael Gove, former cabinet minister and now editor of The Spectator, commented, earlier defectors were either “shop-soiled, eccentric, or unknown.” Kruger, by contrast, is a highflier, a man of impeccable reputation and one of the most constructive and careful Christian voices in politics anywhere in the world. His speech to the House of Commons (which hardly any of his colleagues had the good manners to attend) stands as a graceful and thought-provoking contribution to discussion of our cultural challenges from a Christian perspective.
I had the pleasure of engaging with Kruger in London some years ago, at a discussion on expressive individualism. I came away with the impression of a man who was well-read, thoughtful, and worried about the deeper impulses driving those things in our societies that are undermining our very coherence as communities. He is a man who looks for underlying causes and is not mesmerized by mere symptoms or whatever grabs the immediate imagination of the activist classes.
In 2023, he published Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation, a philosophically-grounded manifesto for conservative thought and action. What Kruger does in this book is important: He responds to our current cultural problems by developing a robust understanding of what it means to be human, something that for him (as for many of us) has a deep religious component. For society to thrive, we need people who are virtuous, people who love virtue, people who practice virtue. We need people, in other words, who understand what it means to be made in God’s image. This is at the heart of Kruger’s Christian humanism, and presumably central to his disillusionment with the Tories whose vision of humanity now often includes radical dehumanizing views of abortion and euthanasia.
The future of Danny Kruger will be fascinating, for his chosen calling—electoral politics—is itself enmeshed with realities that militate against his Christian humanist vision. We live in an age of social media, and it is evident that success at the polls depends to a significant degree on the ability to harness that. This is not the era of cogent arguments made with grace and learning but of online posts, short and snappy videos, smart-aleck one-liners. As with Donald Trump, Nigel Farage’s own success has rested to a significant degree upon his facility with such as a means of galvanizing his supporters.