Why bishops shouldn’t stay out of politics

Oct 22, 2020 by

by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:

Christianity is not just a narrow little hobby for the soul, but a vision of the whole world.

In 1096, after William the Conqueror had successfully invaded England, he moved against the north and the incumbent bishops. “And so the English groaned aloud for their lost liberty,” wrote the medieval chronicler and Benedictine monk Orderic Vitalis: “and plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed”.

For centuries, right up until the time of the Stuarts, the “Norman yoke” became a byword for the heteronomous imposition of power, the earliest expression of what we might now call Euroscepticism. For both radicals and conservatives alike, the “Harrying of the North” and the ousting of bishops amounted to a destruction of the established order. So Boris beware — history may not repeat, but it rhymes. And a conservative ought to be more alert to the dangers of the present moment.

I discovered relatively late in life that I am a natural conservative. As someone who grew up under Margaret Thatcher, I now forgive my younger self for never having spotted that. Thatcher wasn’t a conservative at all, she was a free market liberal who would shove aside all that stood in the way of market forces. No wonder I was confused.

I suppose natural conservatives gave her a break because, in the age of the Cold War, anyone who resisted communism with her vim and vigour was requisitioned to the cause. But nonetheless, she sailed under false colours. And so, growing up under Thatcher, I thought conservatism meant a kind of fundamentalist commitment to market forces; that the market was right, come what may. And I hated it. I hated the way Conservatives seemed to believe that humanity existed to serve the market, not the market to service the needs of humanity. I hated the destruction of traditional communities — mining communities, especially — that was taken to be the inevitable by-product of economic progress. I hated the reduction of every moral issue to the question of money, as if that were the only significant unit of moral exchange.

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