Ultra-processed politics fails to satisfy

No-hope manifestos, full of ugly policies, leave us craving something better.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

Three piles of ready-meals sit on a shelf. One stack is blue, the next yellow and the third red.

Party food.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

There are now less than two weeks to go before polling day, and the nation appears to have simultaneously reached the highest fever pitch of emotion and the absolute nadir of political scruple. The Tory campaign has been comically, awfully inept - announcements in the rain, D-Day, gambling fraud. The Labour campaign has been an odd blend of quasi-Confucian aphorisms (‘Stability is Change’…what is that!?) and a blank refusal to give much detail on any future plans and actions - almost offensive from a party that seems guaranteed to win a majority that would give it little resistance. The Lib Dem campaign has resembled a Centre Parks holiday, and I’m here for it!

The recent Question Time of political leaders perfectly encapsulated the grim reality of this election campaign. The anger towards Rishi Sunak was palpable, and his pathological inability to not be defensive and snippy shone through. A total lack of any emotion was shown towards Kier Starmer (a void that again was filled with more anger towards Rishi Sunak), and his militantly practiced refusal to actually say anything of substance. Ed Davey was quite charming actually; but not enough to make the whole viewing process anything but depressing.

Yet…

This is our situation, and we must deal with it. This is OUR election, and WE MUST engage with it. Alastair Campbell - one half of the most listened to political podcast in the UK - regularly calls for compulsory voting. The ad campaign reminding people (especially young people) to register to vote has been incessant. Even the Archbishop of York has written an open letter in the Sunday Express encouraging everyone to register and to exercise their democratic duty. Why? What for? I find the entire cadre unappealing to the point of being odious. Reading the manifestos I was struck by two realisations: the space between so many of the policies was miniscule, and they were so bloody ‘ugly’.

I don’t mean ugly like the loveless, jingoistic, cruel ramblings of Reform. The two main parties have produced manifestos that inspire no hope. They equate the fullness and completeness of the human social condition to the subtle movements of financial resources from one area to another. They are each proposing a almost identical economic foundation, with a few nods to the fact that ‘society’ and ‘human relations’ exist, like a Potemkin village designed to impress the visiting dignitary, ‘the voter’. Not only do they read like they were written by someone who cannot think five, maybe ten, years ahead; they read like they were written by someone who has a cold indifference to the transcendental concepts of ‘TRUTH’, ‘BEAUTY’, ‘GOOD’. The whole tenor of our political culture and conversation is the same three riffs on post-modern liberalism, played with dexterity and enthusiasm of a corpse.

If you feel passionately about your community, and you know the issues, and you have a candidate you believe in, vote. If none of this applies, don’t worry, and don’t let anyone shame you.

And yet I MUST vote? What for? Why must I be shamed into preforming the perfunctory routine of soul-destroying civic duty? Why must I be bullied into giving the correct sacrifice to the great and terrible God of ‘DEMOCRACY’ in the vain hope that this vicious, nihilistic titan of bureaucratic ineptitude might yet again bless the polis with five more years of alienation and sublimated resentment.

The Christian message, the Gospel, is not antithetical to politics. The Gospel of Christ is about one’s whole life - body, spirit, soul, relationships, friends, family, enemies, strangers, work, play, sickness, death - and so it cannot be divorced from politics, because as people who live in a society we must encounter the ‘political’ every day. However, the Kingdom of God is a Kingdom and not a Republic. Jesus does not answer the devious questions of the Pharisees with a markedly uninformative screed on updating tax legislation, he says to ‘Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ He speaks to the people about radical charity, freedom from worry and stress about today, about a community of absolute loving relationship where everyone is a mother, and sister, and brother to everyone else.

I am called - just like I believe all people, as beloved creatures who’s end is being united with God in all eternity - to keep my eyes on the horizon of the absolute, the beautiful and peaceful Kingdom of Christ which is not for this world. This does not mean apathy towards politics or even to the current election. It does, however, mean that I cannot and will not be persuaded that finding this pathetic display of ineptitude, silence, exaggeration, and unpleasant divisiveness which we call a campaign, anything other than a waste of my time and energy. If you feel passionately about your community, and you know the issues, and you have a candidate you believe in, vote. If none of this applies, don’t worry, and don’t let anyone shame you. The Kingdom of God will not be built by the winner of the General Election. It will be built by Christ working through the love and relationships that form a community of charity and service…and you can’t legislate for that.

Explainer

Belief

Culture

22 August 2024

7 min read

The questions that nobody can escape

Seeking answers about beginning, meaning, and of the end, explain why religion refuses to disappear.

Silvianne and Barnabas Aspray

Silvianne and Barnabas are theologians.

An arm and hand stretch out in front of some, a narrow street is the background.

Andrik Langfield on Unsplash.

In the twentieth century many people thought that religion was on the way out. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, it was broadly assumed that “religion would disappear and be replaced solely by secular, scientiﬁc rationalism.” But few people now believe this anymore. Fukuyama himself has changed his mind and says that the disappearance of religion “is not going to happen.” But why is religion refusing to disappear?

A core reason for the persistence of faith is that there are questions that everyone asks at one point or another that lead in the direction of religion. Religion, or faith, addresses questions that nobody can escape: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does it all come from? Is there meaning to this life? And what happens after death? Faith traditions are experts in such ultimate questions. Consider the following examples.

These questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are the questions that religion deals with.

When people experience the beginning of life, they are often caught up in wonder. How can it be that a whole new person is growing inside a woman? Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the great critic of Christianity, who famously declared that “God was dead”, also wrote, “Is there a more sacred state than pregnancy?” There is something deeply moving around the beginning of life. Many who become parents, or in some way experience the beginning of life, are led to wonder: isn’t something more than just biology happening here, something deeper? A new life, a whole new person – and our love for that new person – where does all of that come from?

Another group of questions that most people will face at some point in their lives revolves around meaning. What’s the point of growing up, a teenager might ask? What’s the point of my work, we may ask later on. Especially when we face frustrations, failures, challenges we might wonder what difference we are making to the world. Would anyone miss me if I was not here? Will anyone remember me if I die?

Finally, we all at some point come in contact with death. Even if we are spared the pain of friends dying young, it is the natural course of the world that our grandparents and our parents will one day die. What do we do in the face of such loss? It is hard not to ask: Where is my loved one now? And is there hope of seeing them again one day?

These are the kinds of questions that nobody can entirely avoid in their lives: they never fail to arise and press themselves upon our consciousness. Yet these questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are precisely the questions that religion deals with. And here lies one important answer to why faith won’t just go away: Because scientific rationalism cannot really address them.

Faith offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them.

To be sure, secular scientific rationalism does offer some answers as to how life begins – we know the biology of it all astonishingly well. And yet, biology is not everything, and in fact, it is not the biological aspects of it all that touch us. The wonder, the hope, the love that we experience when we are faced with the beginning of life is more than what can be rationally or scientifically accounted for.

Similarly, scientific rationalism is not well equipped to answer questions of meaning. Science is great at answering how something works or how it should be done, but why-questions fall into a different category. Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer “42” - which is a reference to the comic sci-fi series “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and we intuitively understand that this answer is nonsensical. It is funny precisely because it is nonsensical.

And again, around the end of life: Scientific rationalism cannot and will not, based on its methods and approaches, say anything about the afterlife.

So, the questions of beginning, meaning and end cannot be answered solely by scientific rationalism. And yet they come up in all of our lives. Right here lies an important reason why faith has not gone away. Faith deals with just these questions. It is good at dealing with them – they are the core domain of faith.

Faith offers answers to questions of beginning, meaning and end, but just as importantly, it offers a community in which such questions can be addressed and discussed. It offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them, perhaps showing them ways in which they can find answers. Different faiths and different expressions of faiths do this very differently: organised religions do it differently to loose association of the “spiritual but not religious”, but in all cases, it is faith – broadly understood – that addresses and deals with the questions that niggle away and are not otherwise addressed. Faith won’t disappear, because faith’s questions won’t disappear.

But why does this need saying? Is it not obvious that religion is about ultimate questions that concern everyone?

The problem is that modern Western life is full of opportunities to distract us from these questions. We are wealthy, comfortable, bombarded with entertainment, and often very busy with careers and children as well. All these things help us to repress the deeper questions about the origin and purpose of our existence.

Many people treat the question of life’s meaning like a school or University essay that they can procrastinate from indefinitely: “One day I’d like to figure it out: what it’s all for and where it’s all going: but today there’s another episode on Netflix, Instagram to browse, or tennis on the TV.” The entertainment industry offers alluring enticements to money, sex, fame or success. Wealth is particularly useful because it helps us get what we want, when we want it, and prevents us from facing the harsher realities of life. Making ourselves busy is easy, and we can leave ourselves no time for deep reflection on the bigger questions. All of this adds up to what we might call the “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

The “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

But the problem is that even ordinary everyday life is lived according to (at least provisional) answers to those big questions. Every daily decision we make displays our values, what we think matters. If we work late instead of coming home to play with the children – if we fly to New Zealand for a vacation, or buy beef, massively increasing our carbon footprint and contributing to climate change – we are making choices that have an impact on the planet. All our choices are based on values which reveal our beliefs about what makes life worth living and what we want out of life. You cannot be an agnostic. Your life displays belief in one thing or another. Consider one stark example. A pregnant teenage girl simply cannot be agnostic about abortion for very long. She has only two options: abort, or give birth. The choice she makes will be a practical consequence of her beliefs and value judgments. There is no agnosticism, no “not answering” the question.

Like every religious tradition, Christianity calls us to live lives that are rooted in things of ultimate and lasting value, rather than superficial or self-centred concerns. It challenges us to fight against the narcotic of everyday life by constantly drawing our attention back to the things that most matter. Through worship, Bible reading, and prayer, it incessantly asks us those vital questions: Is it really about making money? Is it about getting promoted? What are our ultimate values and how do we show them in our lives? The real power of secularism is not that it offers alternative answers to these questions but that it distracts from the question. All we need to do is un-distract.

Christianity is not just a set of easy answers to these questions. It is a way, a journey towards the truth. To be a Christian means to belong to a community that trusts what Jesus has revealed about our life’s origin, meaning and end. In that community there are some implicit answers to get us started. We live in the belief that life is meaningful, that selfishness and personal pleasure are not the most important thing. There’s plenty of room for debate and discussion, but let’s at least start talking about the things that matter.