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.

Column

Books

Comment

Faith

15 August 2024

4 min read

Faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing

Sarah Perry’s comments suggest a reawakening of concern for its observation.

George Pitcher

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

A woman being interviewed gestures with a hand in front of her

Sarah Perry.

Waterstones.

If there’s one thing anyone who has ever written a novel can’t stand, it’s having to congratulate a successful novelist. So, it’s through gritted teeth that I warmly welcome the words of Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent) that religious faith is ceasing to be a subject of embarrassment in published fiction.

It’s about time. Perry told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that, for her latest book Enlightenment, she was asked to put in more theology: “I assumed that everybody knew what the doctrine of predestination meant.” Bless.

The cause of my pathetic envy as I applaud her is that I had my first (and, to date, only) novel published in 2017, to almost universal disinterest. I like to tell people that it was well received – all three people who actually read it said they enjoyed it and only one of them was a family member. It actually did a bit better than that, but you get my drift.

It was an unashamedly religious psychological thriller, titled A Dark Nativity. Brace position, here comes a one-sentence synopsis: The narrator, Reverend Natalie Cross, is a frustrated former aid worker who undertakes a mission to Israel, is kidnapped and held hostage, murders her way to freedom, discovers she was the victim of an Anglo-American plot, wreaks her terrible revenge and (spoiler alert!) gives birth to a son of uncertain paternity.

See what I did there? As well as the latter-day Nativity resonance, thematically I was interested in what redemption looks like in Israel and Palestine. I know, I know – but even I thought it would be distasteful to try to cash in on what’s happened there since.

Enough of the plug for a seven-year-old novel. My point is that its religious themes actively militated against it at the time. Novels addressing Christian faith (or any other kind) occupied a particular publishing niche – a harsher word might be ghetto. To try to break out of it was pointless. The great Christian novelist Penelope Wilcock told me (very kindly) that my book was too religious for the secular market and too secular for religious readers.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation.

The restricted area to which religion was confined had its stylistic rules. There was the cathedral close romp, which authors such as Catherine Fox had made their own. The vicarly whodunnit (lately updated by Reverend Richard Coles). Magic realism with its daemons and Philip Pullmans. And anything, in the wake of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, involving ancient plots that might make a movie, with hooded figures walking in slo-mo through cloisters.

Vicars had to be evil or silly. I may be both those things at times, but I’d like to think there is other stuff going on here for cultural exploration. My narrator, Nat Cross, was driven, often funny and more than a little mad. So like a lot of Anglican clergy.

If she’s right – and I very much hope she is – it’s why what Perry has to say is so hopeful. Because it begins to suggest that religious faith is slowly beginning to be accepted back into polite society. Whisper it softly, it might even become a cultural norm. If Richard Dawkins can describe himself as a “cultural Christian” and the historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, can claim that Christianity is the entire foundation of western civilisation, then there is everything to play for. And, indeed, write for.

It’s not as if cathedral frolics and the revelation of Jesus’s wife in Leonardo’s Last Supper was anything other than a fictional diversion of post-modernism. Religion and specifically Christianity had been a staple of the novel in English.

I hesitate to mention their names in the same column as the authors above (including me, most obviously), but Graham Greene’s exposition of Catholic guilt in The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s of the impossibility of moral reformation in Brideshead Revisited are probably the best religious novels of the twentieth century.

Further back towards the birth of the English novel, the Reverend Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is perhaps the most tragic portrait of a clergyman who is neither evil nor silly. He stand as a warning from history to today’s Church of England.

And it’s to that, the established Church, that Perry’s remarks ultimately turn our attention. We’re told that there has been a five per cent spike in church attendance recently, but that of itself isn’t sufficient to suggest a renaissance in our religious culture. Our arts and culture will only ever really reflect what we care about.

Perry’s observation that faith is no longer a dirty word in publishing might yet suggest a reawakening of serious concern for its observation. If so, that’s good news for the religious, as well as for religious authors. And I might just get a sequel out of it.