After Angela: why Christian Democracy still works

Feeling somewhat labelled, George Pitcher unpacks why Christian Democracy still appeals to him, even in the UK, and explores its philosophical roots in the breathless thought of Jacques Maritain.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A politician stands a labelled lectern speaking and gesticulating with a hand.

Angel Merkel, addresses her political party.

When I’m accused of being a “leftie” in the predominantly Conservative area of East Sussex in which we live – though there are signs of automatic Tory support fragmenting – I usually reply that actually I’m a Christian Democrat.

At one level, this is a case of simple literal determinism: I’m a Christian and a democrat. Tick. But Christian Democracy is more complicated than that – not least because its continental European iteration was built on the re-building of a pan-national concord after the Second World War and the establishment of the European Union, a narrative from which the UK has largely excluded itself.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was a paragon of this ideology, growing out of the re-unification of Germany that began in 1989. It’s unlikely that her political ideology would have prospered in Britain.

The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

It’s that ideology that appeals to me. Essentially, Christian Democracy is rooted in an attempt, since the 19th century, to reconcile Catholic social teaching with democracy and capitalism (tick, again). In that context, it combines left-wing economics with social conservatism.

I awoke with a start some years ago with the realisation that I’m socially conservative. My divergence from my socially liberal friends had been so gradual as to be imperceptible. But here I stand, I can do no other.

I oppose assisted suicide – a liberal standard – not, as I’m accused, because of some vague commitment to the sanctity of life but because I believe there’s extreme moral jeopardy in the state endorsing in its legislature that some lives are not worth living. I believe that same-sex unions should be blessed in Church (and I have done so), but I also believe that’s a definitional difference from marriage as celebrated in church.

The hard right uses woke as a term of abuse when all it really means to many of us is being "awake" or "quite nice". By this ascription, for instance, someone who holds that refugees should be treated with dignity can be described as woke. But I also believe that a male cannot become a woman – and be recognised by the state as such – simply by declaring that he is so. Nor do I think that history can be judged by contemporary mmores,and I find cancel culture abhorrent. That makes me anti-woke in some circles.

By these criteria, I’m socially conservative. So be it. The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

As for a social economy, I believe in a state big enough to provide free health care at the point of delivery, education as a right and not a privilege and a welfare state robust enough to support the marginalised and vulnerable – in scriptural terms, “the poor”. Again, that’s Christian Democracy, at least as Merkel might understand it.

But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied.

All of which will guide my vote this year’s general election. There won’t be a CDU on the ballot paper and, even if there were, our ridiculous first-past-the-post electoral system mocks our democracy. When the Liberal Democrats struggle to maintain a toehold in parliament, despite being a widely credible alternative in many Tory seats, what chance for a more esoteric political initiative?

An argument may be mounted that with the Church of England established in law, 26 bishops sitting in the legislature of the House of Lords as a consequence, and the head of state as the Church’s supreme governor, Christian Democracy is already pretty well served in the UK.

Wisely, British Christian Democrats have endeavoured over the past three decades and more to be a movement within politics, rather than a political party (though no disrespect is intended here to the Christian People’s Alliance). This is Christian Democracy as an idea, rather than a voting option.

For this idea to have traction, it needs a political ideology, which may or may not be along the lines of the one I’ve adumbrated. But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied. So it may be as well to look to a contemporary historical leader of thought.

The nearest thing that European Christian Democrats have to a uniting figure is the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who died in 1973. To read Maritain at length is to leave one breathless with anticipation for what could be.

An albeit dangerous summation of Maritain is that he calls the West to a “New Christendom” that defines the state not by Christian faith, but attempts to define our faith through a secular prism, to make it active in the public square.

I particularly like the way this is described by American theologian William T, Cavanagh: “[T]his means in effect that there is trash to be picked up, businesses to be run, wars to be fought. These things are not our ultimate end, but neither are they simply cut loose from any spiritual significance.”

If we’re able to unpack that sense of purpose, then just maybe we can approach an election with this unifying political slogan: Vote Christian Democrat.

Article

Culture

Mental Health

Music

25 October 2024

5 min read

Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.