Article

Character

Comment

Politics

9 July 2024

6 min read

Why the Prime Minister should swear this new oath

A proposed new constitutional instrument is a hopeful recognition of the human condition.

Yaroslav Walker

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

Keir Starmer stands in the House of Commons and recites an oath from a card held up in front of him.

Starmer swears allegiance to King Charles III, September 2022.

Thank the Almighty, the General Election is over! We have a Prime Minister. We have another cadre of MPs, some old hands and many Young Turks, all ready for the excitement of Parliamentary procedural intrigue and (hopefully) hungry to exercise their power for the betterment of their constituents. As a nation, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. We have emerged, blinking, into the sunlight of what I can only hope is five years of a milder political climate.

What happens next?

Well, today, every MP, new or old, will swear the Oath of Allegiance to King Charles III. This is not optional. Anyone refusing to do so cannot exercise their rights as an MP and will not receive their salary. Ultimately, the refuseniks can have the reality of their election voided. The wording of the oath excels in comprehensive brevity:

I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.

The Monarch is anointed as the protector of the realm, always seeking what is best for Great Britain, and so to swear an oath to be faithful to the Monarch is to swear to seek the best for their realm. It is all perfectly simple and logical.

But is it enough?

It would seem that swearing fealty to the Crown is no longer enough. Now the PM must specifically swear not to lie to the Sovereign and the nation.

Some would argue not. Our political life has been marked by controversy for as long as I have been old enough to be politically aware. MPs expenses, the coalition Government, the Brexit referendum, parliamentary gridlock, Downing Street lockdown parties…Liz Truss! It’s all been like a circus, except all the animals are dead, the clowns just sit around screaming and crying, and the tent burns down. Trust in our political establishment could hardly be lower. Perhaps in light of this, a couple of constitutional scholars have mooted the idea of an extra oath - one for the Prime Minister.

Professor Andrew Blick, of King’s College, London, and Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield have written an open letter, on behalf of The Constitution Society, inviting the new Prime Minister to swear an additional oath specifically for their office.

The oath is intended to act as a confidence booster - an extra promise that the most powerful MP in the land will abide by the conventions of our constitution: Cabinet Government, The Ministerial Code, Civil Service Impartiality, etc. In an effort to restrain the darker impulses of the PM, the oath would also mean swearing to uphold the seven Nolan Principles: Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty, Leadership. It would seem that swearing fealty to the Crown is no longer enough. Now the PM must specifically swear not to lie to the Sovereign and the nation.

In a moment of unattractive despair, I can’t help but let out a depressed sigh.

Yet, I also have hope. This new constitutional instrument would, on the surface, be a morose admission of defeat. We can no longer assume honesty in those who wield the most power and influence. Look deeper and you see a fascinating, and hopeful, recognition of the political (and human!) condition.

The very act of swearing an oath is itself a virtue. It is an act that puts one face to face with absolute truth, goodness, and beauty.

I find this new oath fascinating, and rather cheering, in spite of all my previous electoral gloom, because it clearly speaks to the human need for the transcendent and the eternal. So often our politics seems to be mired in the drudgery of the immediate: will the economy grow in the next quarter, will NHS waiting lists diminish by the end of the calendar year, will the crime stats be favourable any time soon. We rarely hear of any ‘vision’ for our country the looks to the horizon - not even the decade, let alone the voyage into the forever. Yet this oath does just that!

It does so in two ways.

Firstly, by seeking to enshrine the Nolan principles, it recognises the distinction between ‘values’ and ‘virtues’. Values have the veneer of the absolute but are far too easily jettisoned when necessity dictates. Commitment to a value is good, but is in constant competition with other values: openness battles the need for state-secrecy, honesty’s sword is often broken in the face of obfuscation’s onslaught, etc. The holding of values is a static thing, which can wilt and die in the burning heat of reality. A virtue, on the other hand, is something which must be constantly practiced and nurtured. A virtue always looks to its ideal form - a universal perfection of honesty or selflessness. Swearing an oath to uphold the Nolan Principles means committing to operating by them every day, and so allowing them to grow in the individual, becoming easier and easier to live by until the practitioner of virtue struggles NOT to operate in their eternal light.

Secondly, the very act of swearing an oath is itself a virtue. It is an act that puts one face to face with absolute truth, goodness, and beauty. The act of making an oath recognises that our lives and deeds are not simply contingent moments in the pitiless march of time, but that they resound in the halls of eternity.

I think this is why Jesus warns people against swearing oaths in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. When reading this warning in the light of the serious, radical, and even hyperbolic speech that comes before, it is clear that Jesus doesn’t want us to avoid making promises, but that he realises just how bad we are at keeping them. Swearing an oath (invoking eternity, the absolute, the divine!) means that when we break our oaths we diminish ourselves in the face of God.

“Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”

This is not a command to avoid promises and promise keeping, but a radical call to live one’s life always in the light of eternity, so that even the simple ‘yes’ is the truest oath one can make.

We need leaders - political and otherwise - who can offer the human soul something more than simply an uninspiring roadmap for five years of moderate economic improvement. We need leaders who can inspire the nation with a vision of eternity. We need leaders who point us to that horizon of the absolute where we do not see individual good acts warring against the forces of apathy and indifference, but see the Good itself illuminating our every moment with hope and joy.

Perhaps an oath - an admission that there is meaning beyond our momentary finitude - is the best way to inject a bit more universality and meaning into a political system that has left this author feeling quite so cold so far.

I shall pray for our new Prime Minister, and for all our new MPs. I shall hold them before the face of God who is beyond all immediate concerns and pray that they may have the vision of our eternal destiny ever in their minds and in their hearts. I shall earnestly intercede that they recognise that their oaths are not simply a formula of words, but a positive spur to lead us into a future that never ceases to grown brighter and brighter with the light of our eternal destiny.

Article

Character

Creed

Romance

23 April 2024

6 min read

‘Marriage is martyrdom', seriously?

Arguing relationship requires sacrifice ignites a sleepy tutorial.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Quizzical-looking students look across a tutorial to others.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

It is late afternoon on a rainy Monday. My students mooch through the door, filling up the seats in our overheated, clinically modern tutorial room. They are a particularly young class this term – nearly all teenagers still. The setting feels entirely the wrong for poring over texts that are thousands of years old, texts written by some of the earliest Christians, now displayed on flashy laptops and smartphones.

The first excerpt is short – part of a hand scribbled note by Ignatius of Antioch. He wrote it even as he was marched to his execution at the hands of the Romans.

Suffer me, my brethren; hinder me not from living, do not wish me to die… Suffer me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I shall be a human being.

Ignatius shows no fear despite facing his impending martyrdom, I explain, because he goes to his death as one who was utterly convinced by the hope of resurrection. To him, death was life, and life was death.

From the mixture of expressions on the faces around the room, I can easily tell which members of the class have attended Professor Behr’s lectures on this week’s material, and which members of the class have attended only to their mattresses and duvets. (‘Twas ever thus with undergraduates.) “Let’s look at Professor Behr’s own chapter on the subject,” I suggest, adding with a certain emphasis, “It was your required reading for this tutorial.”

Reading Ignatius, along with some other texts from this period, Behr summarises the argument as follows: earthly life is a transitory thing, and driven by the fear of death, it becomes all too easy to focus on and hang on to this fleeting life. However, the Christian hope is that the self-sacrificing death of Christ, who gave up his life in the service of others, has transformed the reality of death. Death is no longer just the end of this life but the beginning of another one – a better, eternal life. And this, for each Christian, becomes the impetus to pursue one’s own journey towards self-sacrifice, towards laying down one’s earthly life for another, following in the example of Christ, just as Ignatius wished to do. Behr writes:

“Through Christ’s having ‘changed the use of death’ we are able to change the ground of our existence from necessity and mortality to freedom and self-sacrificial love…”

I glance around the room. A few students seem mildly interested, some others are gazing at their screens, scrolling. Perhaps their curiosity has been piqued by the chapter that they are meant to have already read? More likely they have zoned out and are flicking through TikTok. One guy at the back stares glumly out of the window, mouth half open, the one next to him is dismantling a ballpoint pen.

“Any thoughts?” I ask the room. Every pair of eyes is on me, and I know that there are thoughts – the silence is thick with them.

A few moments later, however, and all their eyes are on me. Why? Because in the second part of his chapter, Behr takes this argument of self-sacrifice, of death to life, and uses it as a lens through which to examine the specific human phenomenon of marriage. I read out a few well-chosen excerpts – juicy ones that include the words “eros”, “sexuality” and even “ecstasy” – and it is no surprise that a room full of drowsy teenagers becomes somewhat more alert.

It is through the natural human desire to be united with another person, argues Behr, that we are truly drawn out of ourselves, and by doing so we learn to give out of our own lives for the sake of the life of another. To commit one’s life and one’s body to another in marriage is the epitome of dying to self, even a kind of martyrdom. And, if marriage leads to parenthood, then the opportunity to live a life of self-sacrifice only increases. However hard it might be, those who are married, parenting, or both are driven by love to place the lives of their spouses and children before their own.

“Any thoughts?” I ask the room. Every pair of eyes is on me, and I know that there are thoughts – the silence is thick with them. But who will be brave? Patiently I stare them down. Eventually someone cracks, and a hand creeps up into the air.

“Yes, go ahead…” I encourage.

“Well… I think you should never be in a relationship where you have to do that!”

“OK.” We’re off. “Never have to do what, exactly?”

“Like, be expected to give up your life for someone else. Like, it’s your life. No one else has a right to ask for you to sacrifice yourself.”

The conversation went on from there, the class getting more and more animated, a polemic against the idea that marriage, or just long-term relationships in general, should involve the sacrifice of one’s ‘self’. A spouse, they insisted, should be someone who affirms and celebrates everything that you are, and who supports you in whatever dreams or ambitions that you want chase. And children? Well, they should only be brought into the equation to fulfil your dreams, not to limit them. Marriage is many things, but it should not be a sacrifice, less still a martyrdom.

Well, let us not be too hard on the optimism of youth. The optimism that imagines marriage and family life will be something that gives, and gives, and will never take anything away. How can they know – those who have never been awake at 3am with a projectile-vomiting toddler, and those who have never had to calmly negotiate over where all the money goes? It is the optimism of those who have never had to pass up on a job or an opportunity because it doesn’t fit in with the spouses’ promotion or the kids’ schooling. These, and a thousand other moments of self-sacrifice: the gritty realities of a daily choice to stick in a marriage (or any kind of long term relationship) and make it work.

This is a much slower kind of martyrdom, a decision made not once but daily, in a society where such decisions are frequently undone.

But is this gritty reality a giving up of life, or an embracing of it? Perhaps, like Ignatius, in this kind of death to self we actually find life. In a committed union, we carefully place our lives in the service of another, not because they expect us to, but because out of love we choose to. This is done, of course, in trust that the other person will do the same in return. There is no suggestion, either here or in Behr’s chapter, that someone should stay in a union where that placing of oneself is being merely used and abused. But where two people find a true mutuality in that laying down of self, well, love has funny way of making limits feel like a kind of freedom after all.

“Hinder me not from living…” writes Ignatius, as he is marched to his certain death. His eyes were filled with the image of new self, a better self, that would come to him all at once and suddenly through the laying down of his life for what he believed in. With a faith so strong, this may have been an easy kind of martyrdom – a decision made once, which could not, by him, be undone. But let us also hinder not those who choose to unite their lives to another. This is a much slower kind of martyrdom, a decision made not once but daily, in a society where such decisions are frequently undone. One day some of these young people will feel the call to this kind of death, and that in this death there is life. Hinder them not to die.