In the past decade it has been discovered that at the moment of conception, at our very beginning, in a phase intrinsic to the formation of the first single cell from which we grow, there occurs an eruption of metallic ions in a brilliant flash of light, or ‘zinc spark’, as embryologists have called it. As with so many things in life, how we respond to this knowledge depends on how we choose to look at it. To those to whom the unborn child is ‘just a clump of cells’, this flash of light will be just a flash of light. But to the thoughtful, humble observer, this zinc spark is a signal, a signal that calls to us and invites us to consider its meaning. What we conclude may carry certain implications and charge us with certain responsibilities. But if the signal betokens a reality, and if it matters to us that we live in accordance with reality, then we should be keen to make an accurate interpretation of that signal.
I for one believe that the meaning of the signal is so clear that if I had been seeking merely to fabricate embryological phenomena for the sake of pro-life propaganda, I would have rejected the idea of a ‘zinc spark’ as too obvious, too miraculous, too unequivocal a witness to our humanity. But there it is: the vindication in empirical and impartial observation of the consistent Christian teaching of the ages. Of course even these beginnings are often fragile, and in the hands of God, but in so far as these matters are entrusted to us, the sign is clear: the life of the unborn child is not ours to take.
The ends of our lives can, it is true, be more blurred and complicated, but, for the centuries in which Britain’s moral aspirations were Christian in name and nature, the idea of a ‘natural death’ was broadly accepted: that there comes a point at which the soul (the same as once was ignited in a wink of zinc) subsides into embers too cool to revive, and that even if it is sometimes hard for us to tell quite when the soul has departed from the body, this moment is beyond our say-so. For as long as the Christian faith held gentle sway in these islands, and for all our shortcomings, we knew of our responsibility for each other for the whole duration between these two moments. That belief has, for the present, it seems, come definitively to an end in Britain, given that a fortnight ago, in a single week, the House of Commons made two decisions that fundamentally undermine this principle, both at the beginning of life, and at its end.
The law’s been passed and I am lying low
Hoping to hide from those who think they are
Kindly, compassionate. My step is slow.
I hurry. Will the executioner
Be watching how I go?
Others about me clearly feel the same.
The deafest one pretends that she can hear.
The blindest hides her white stick while the lame
Attempt to stride. Life has become so dear.
from ‘Euthanasia’ by Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001)
The voting through of these Bills, to say nothing of the immaturity and haste of the debates preceding them, has as far as I am concerned brought disgrace on our country. We are now going downhill distressingly quickly. I want to climb to the rooftops and bellow that I had no part in it; I long to carve into clean stone a testament to my bitter opposition and set it into a wall or a crypt, to be found by such of our descendants as we allow to be born. This Bill represents the direct opposite of the Britain that I consider myself to have inherited and which, in my small corner, I am trying to sustain. I am filled with grief at the prospect of the suffering these Bills will cause if they become law, and, yes, with anger at the short-sightedness and shallow thought of our elected representatives. The shame of Britain, her giggling and smirking as she brings herself low, burns me and torments me.
And yet I do not condemn our Parliamentarians outright. There were many who offered principled and articulate opposition to the Bill. And even those who voted Yes generally did so with perfectly human instincts, albeit woefully incomplete and ill-formed. They may have spoken of dignity and freedom and compassion, but I think they were motivated mainly by fear: the fear of dependency, the fear of being depended upon, the fear of suffering, the fear of watching others suffer. All quite understandable feelings: but by their vote our elected representative have sought to place the sovereign will in the driving-seat in the hope that we can each outrun these things, to allow us to take whichever exit we choose off the motorway of life, rather than to remain all together in the same carriage bound for the same terminus. (They also fear having to cede their right of way over the new lives joining us off the slip-roads.) All human beings know these fears, and they are not trivial. But the pagan solution adopted by our MPs reveals that they simply do not know ‘the perfect love that casts out fear’. They do not know the true meaning of the word compassion, which is literally ‘to suffer with’, to share the burden of suffering, and to strengthen a bond of intimacy and brotherly love with another person, and thereby to defeat the fear and loneliness that is often a sharper sting than the suffering itself. They do not know that Christianity, and indeed the natural law that undergirds all the world’s nobler traditions of wisdom, offers this vital rejoinder to our sorrows: that our humanity is deeper even than our will and our desires, that it is not diminished one jot by suffering, by pain, by weakness, by imminent death. It proclaims that our dignity transcends our indignities. Indeed, our dignity is often found precisely in our response to suffering.
Britain now feels less like Britain than I can ever remember, and not only because of the stifling weather. My mood is much as it was after the news of Ireland’s repealing of her Eighth Amendment: three parts dismay to one part hope. There is the grief at the wrong decision, and horror at another advance of the Dictatorship of Relativism, building and pressing down like this towering heat. Then there is resignation, for none of this really comes as a surprise after so many years of secularisation. But there is also a suspicion that the Culture of Death has again overplayed its hand — that the victory was too blatant, too hasty, too enthusiastically crowed over, and that, in its very cheapness, the very ease with which it has been achieved, it has sown the seeds of its own defeat. This article by Sebastian Milbank suggests as much of the Assisted Suicide debate:
Watch the debate. Search the faces and the gestures, listen closely to the words that were spoken. Look beyond the specific arguments, and feel the pulse of feeling, sentiment and motivation racing underneath. The constant back-patting about the good-natured quality of the discussion, the strength and sincerity of feelings, the pure and decent motives of MPs, and cries of “parliament at its best” are not merely the self-congratulations they appear. It is the collective nervous tic of guilty men and women […] This almost unseemly urgency buzzed at the edges of today’s vote. Those in favour continually stressed that doing nothing was worse than doing something, that the “status quo” was untenable. The bill was ideological displacement activity; a release valve for the neuroses of a governing class waking up to a country in crisis, and a public sector on the brink of collapse.
Again, many courageous Parliamentarians have fought honourably against the Assisted Suicide Bill, and their words will remain in Hansard until their final vindication. Also, many will have seen how the Catholic Church has offered some of the strongest opposition. But the abortion Bill, meanwhile, was the result of a hijack, an ambush, and rushed through before we could do anything about it. We may still pray that the Bills are heavily amended, and ideally defeated in the House of Lords. If not, then we light another long, slow-burning candle in our hearts for their ultimate repealing. But regardless of what happens, all the while, at the moment of every human conception, the zinc spark will continue to send its signal, a gentle but insistent reproach to those who do not believe in life, and a quiet encouragement to those who do.
And so we come once again to the fireside of the year, where the strange and lovely truth of Christmas draws us to homely things. As the years go by, and I find myself less and less at home in the time and place given to me, I cross the threshold of this feast with ever greater relief.
It is not easy to live in, this age of deceptive appearances. Behind the superficial glass and the liquid crystal screens our sorrows are undiminished. The Britain in which, for the first time in fifteen centuries, a minority of people now profess to be Christians, is no happier for its loss of faith. The old ways we tore to pieces are giving way not to the promised utopia, but to a new, sullen, disenchanted, resentful existence. Not only are things going wrong, but we struggle to agree about what has gone wrong, let alone how to make things better. Identity politics have captured many formerly trusted institutions and done great damage to their reputations, as well as confusing or upsetting many well-meaning people. And our response to the general economic strain is not, in general, an effort to build up solidarity and courage, or to provide an alternative to rapaciousness and greed, but renewed howling against our forebears and the foundations of our society. That old, gentle Britain to which we owe so much, and for which I still stand, has become our scapegoat.
This is now a Britain in which many shared things are no longer well-made or looked after; in which even those trying to do well seem unable to overcome the shoulder-shrugging culture around them. Wherever we go, any expectations of high standards seem to be frustrated. Thoroughfares and public spaces are tatty and uncared for; lifts and escalators are broken or vandalised. Or things will not be as they first appear. The Internet, for instance is full of false promises: websites will co-operate for a moment before the sentence you were reading disappears behind a salvo of pop-ups about cookie settings or newsletter subscriptions. A special offer will turn out to entail endless and spurious terms and conditions. Sorry, all our operatives are busy at the moment. Sorry, this desk is unstaffed. Sorry, this machine is out of order.
It is a Britain in which language itself is often used insincerely, too often more for the purposes of manipulation than anything else. Euphemisms and weasel words and empty slogans are so prevalent that it is a constant effort to pare speech of them, to speak or write plainly and truthfully. We often feel patronised and tricked and taken advantage of.
It is a Britain in which people of good will increasingly bear the brunt of the selfishness of those of ill-will; in which those in positions of responsibility are often unable to exercise their offices with principle and clarity; in which those who shout loudest tend to get their way. Only amongst a few is there even a sense of embarrassment at our irreverence, our arrogance, our squandering of our inheritance. It is a Britain which, I now see, is indeed mortal.
It is an old and noble nation forgetting her honour, and learning anew the barbarism that the old faith once kept at bay. There are grave misdeeds and acts of calculatedly barbaric violence at home and abroad, an ebbing away of civility and common decency, and the unabated undermining of marriage and the family and of the Christian vision of the dignity of the human person.
But amidst all this, even as the darkness presses in, another voice, another kind of language. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields… Words which, strange as they are to the ear, are not evasive, do not deceive; which have that unmistakable ring of truth:
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
They are words which contradict all the smirking arrogance and squalid tragedies of our time, but not as we would have supposed or dared to have hoped. Something different is going on: something strange and also sweet… Something so strange and sweet as the call of our true and longed-for home.
The darkness presses in on us, often as intensely as it pressed in on the Roman province of Judaea and on Bethlehem; pressed right down on the stable-roof and sought entry. But from within that stable it was repelled and defied, as it is repelled and defied tonight, and for ever, by light — by the one Light which, as we have often been told, the darkness cannot overpower. And our liberation is both more cosmic and more intimate than instant deliverance from hard times or a faithless epoch could ever have been: we are freed from the very foes that blight us most: sin and death.
This year is the 110th anniversary of one of my favourite Christmas poems: Noel: Christmas Eve 1913, by Robert Bridges. Gerald Finzi set it to music in his Christmas cantata In Terra Pax (see above) though for the third stanza he substituted the verses quoted above, from the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel.
Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913
Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
A frosty Christmas Eve
when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone
where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village
in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me
peals of bells a-ringing:
The constellated sounds
ran sprinking on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above
with stars was spangled o’er.
Then sped my thoughts to keep
that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels
or the bright stars singing.
Now blessed be the tow’rs
that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer
unto God for our souls:
Blessed be their founders
(said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ
in the belfries to-night
With arms lifted to clutch
the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above
and the mad romping din.
But to me heard afar
it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting
as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly
to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me
by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured
as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect
of th’ eternal silence.
Wishing all readers a very merry and restful Christmas.
Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads. These are troubled, unreal, topsy-turvy times, and even leaving aside, if we can, the war in Ukraine, where the horrors of the 1940s have come howling back into our continent; even if we concentrate on our own society and culture, there is a widespread sense that the world has gone mad, and is going steadily madder.
The first thing is not to follow it: we must not panic and go mad ourselves. There are at least two false paths to be avoided — to give in and simply go along with the world’s insistent lunacies, or to allow ourselves to be goaded into an opposite, contrarian madness. Both are easier than we think, even for honest and well-intentioned people. Not for nothing do we speak of sanity as the state of being ‘well-balanced’, as a kind of equilibrium which has to be maintained, and which by implication it is more than possible to lose. And such a balanced mind can indeed be hard to maintain, or to be sure of having maintained, especially if all around are losing theirs.
How, then, do we keep ourselves steady? There is some considerable strength to be drawn simply from calm observation of the situation at hand. With the right bearings we can, in all humility, taking into account our own flaws and follies, still have the confidence to point out the world’s madnesses, and to be sure that they are indeed the world’s, and not ours. We can say that women and men, though radically equal in dignity, are also different from each other in certain essential ways, and that the blurring of such distinctions carries great risks, including to that same equal dignity. We can say that an undue preoccupation with racial and ethnic characteristics, even with the ostensible goal of eradicating unjust prejudice, will actually do more harm than good to race relations. We can say that the freedom of adults must not take precedence over the flourishing of children. We can say that political causes do not make good religions. And so on. It helps simply to be able to say these things, to reassure ourselves that we at least have kept our heads.
All the same, the situation we find ourselves describing may still be a grave one. We churchgoers, for instance, are trying not to find particularly daunting the displacement, by means of a potent blend of secularist, materialist and progressivist ideologies, of the Christian imagination of Europe: a process which has been going on for several centuries but which seems in our times to be ascending to a new climax. Now because we are churchgoers we know too, of course, that this is nothing new. The forces of chaos — and human beings in general — have been in rebellion against God and good sense since time immemorial. We saw it yesterday, on Good Friday, which I find more shocking with every passing year. The silent treachery of Judas, the queasy pragmatism of Pilate before the hissing Sanhedrin, the spittle-flecked blood-thirst of the mindless mob, Peter’s three (three!) denials, the exquisite ingenuity of the malevolence of the soldiers, the agony beyond agony of the road to Golgotha and the anguish of the Mother who stood beside it, the skull-stark desolation of the Cross itself, and then the final, unthinkable horror actually coming to pass: ‘He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’ We were not there, and yet in truth we are there all the time. For we know what this is all about: we have all heard of such things, or witnessed them, or indeed committed them; it is the history of the world. Yes, we know all this. And yet, since the forces of rebellion take different forms in different times and places, it is possible to make observations about the particular circumstances of different ages; and in our own day, it seems to me, the various threats to the Church add up to something that is without precedent in history.
In part this is because these threats are not usually overtly violent: they are often invisible or intangible as well as appearing sophisticated and civilised, and therefore more insidious, disorienting and difficult to oppose. So, for instance, here in Britain we have, in only a century or so, and with scarcely any controversy, transformed ourselves from an at least outwardly Christian civilisation into a largely secular-progressive one. Perhaps because the trend itself has remained constant for most of our lifetimes we might not realise how great a shock this is, but we should not underestimate its effect: even taking into account the atheism and scepticism already widespread in the British establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it amounts to a swift and drastic revolution, and one by which we have made serious alterations to the moral and ethical foundations and fabric of our society. Partly it came about by the sheer cost of the the two world wars, whose shattering violence left intangible things as well as tangible beyond straightforward repair: social solidarity, love of country, standards of decency, trust in institutions. Then since the war we have had the Revolution of the Self, a phenomenon that Ed West has gone so far as to call a second Reformation, and whose general coarsening and cheapening influence successfully ushered in a radical transformation of our understanding of family, morality, culture and of truth itself. The attack was deep, determined and aimed more or less directly at Christian morality. Wise and brave people sounded warnings to no avail.
In recent years, though, something else has begun to happen. Partly it is something we might have been expecting: some kind of counter-reaction to that Revolution of the Self, as the sheer magnitude of the cost of its false promises became clear. Something along these lines has now indeed begun to materialise, but it not the sort of thing we might have hoped for. Angry beyond coherence, it rails indiscriminately against more or less anything that is inherited from the past, so that, instead of vindication for the Church, we now, to our horror, find ourselves actually lumped in with the Sixties revolutionaries, as if we straightforwardly share the blame for the problems they caused. Never mind that it is the Church that has, say, warned most strongly and consistently against the myth of ‘free love’: no, the traditional Christian understanding of marriage is still considered as grave a threat to the fulfilment of women as the post-Sixties status quo. Likewise, in the renewed focus on the wounds left by the slave trade, there is scant acknowledgement of the Christian motivations of the abolitionists, still less a willingness to make the distinction between the teaching of a religion and the decision by some nations and individuals at times to disregard this teaching. We might also have hoped for any counter-revolution to have a cleansing, refreshing effect on our culture and language, and to restore some of the old care and courtesy in self-expression, but what has happened instead is that new and arbitrary speech-codes have been drawn up, so that we are terribly nervous about words like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘unborn baby’, while the public conversation in general remains as casually crass and foul-mouthed as ever — and they accuse us of using hurtful language. It is all deeply unfair and demoralising.
A hostile culture is by no means an unprecedented proposition for the Church. But what seems different in our own time — what makes our mission a New Evangelisation — is precisely this complexity, this many-layeredness of the hostility of the twenty-first-century West towards the Church to which it owes so much. We are not dealing with straightforward persecution, but a sulky, cynical, irreverent, suspicious, yet also strangely gullible society. Meanwhile it often feels as if the Church has no traction, no way on it; that we lack the language and credibility to address the world (though this is partly our own fault as well). The words of the Gospel, however rich and life-giving they may sound within our sanctuaries, can seem to ring hollow or trite in the stale atmosphere outside.
In the face of all this, our feelings, too, are complex. We might be fearful of being wrong-footed by our culture’s many self-contradictions, never mind embarrassed by its vulgarity and narcissism. We know we need a new kind of courage, and a great deal of it. All this understandably makes us hesitant about what to do next.
There is often, too, a sense of not only being attacked but tormented and goaded. To use the famous phrase of Benedict XVI (to whom Happy Birthday, for he turns ninety-five today!), thesteadily consolidating ‘dictatorship of relativism’ — which, as he put it so presciently, ‘does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’ — has brought about some maddening, bewildering situations. For instance, we are witnessing simultaneously this aforementioned obsession with fundamentally unimportant distinctions regarding ethnicity, yet also the vehement rejection of essential and crucial distinctions between the sexes. To take another example, the long revolution against marriage has not demolished it straightforwardly, as one might have feared in the Sixties, but instead captured and refashioned it in a new image by means of sleight of hand and word games. For the meaning of such a fundamental word to change underneath our feet, for it to be stripped of its transcendent, cosmic significance and shrunk to something beholden to human whim, is almost more dismaying than plain iconoclasm would have been. It was not enough for marriage to be destroyed; it had to be disfigured and then destroyed. It is not enough for abortion to be permitted as a necessary evil or last resort; it must now be championed as a positive good and a civil right. It is not enough that the Church should be defeated — the Church must be humiliated and then defeated. Truth must be twisted and then toppled. Christ must not only be crucified; He must be mocked and crucified.
This being Holy Saturday, these words are necessarily sombre. I know that, amid all these woes, opportunities for good are emerging all the time — such as the fact that most ordinary people, whether believers or not, remain reassuringly normal and sane; or the youth and vitality of the pro-life movement — and also that, every minute of every day, we have the unwavering assurance of Providence that all manner of thing shall, in the end, be well. But even if all evil is ultimately in retreat — even if any advancing menace or host can only hope for a Pyrrhic victory, and a temporary one at that — this Triduum gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the dreadful strength that evil can and does wield. Evil is frightening; it roars and ambushes and twists the knife and goads us even as it wounds us.
But however many bearings we feel we are losing, we always have the faith and the saints and the True North of the Mass. For alongside the long history of human power and human misery is the other, parallel, unsung history, forgotten by the chronicles but every bit as true: the history of all the Masses said every day, all the prayers uttered, as well as all the words and deeds of kindness and courage done by people of good will. It is by this compass, always present, never erring, that we keep ourselves sane and rooted. Let it be recorded, not on this ephemeral blog but in hearts and minds now and in years to come, that even in these unreal years there were those who still believed in the eternal verities, who still cared about the inheritance of their forefathers; who cherished such things and passed them to their descendants in the confident hope that evil shall in the end be outlasted, outweighed and outdone by good. If we do this, then we shall have kept our heads; if we keep our heads, then that will be half the battle won; and a half-won battle is one we can hope to win outright. Let us keep heart too, then, as well as our heads, so that generations to come will enjoy heart’s ease and happiness in a gentler culture, a fairer society, and a world closer than our own to the will of its Creator.
The too-seldom-heard setting by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) of Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, sung here by the choristers of Grimsby Parish Church, directed by Andrew Cantrill, and with the organ played by David Leigh. I have a soft spot for ingenuous Victorian Evangelical hymns like these, and the fine balance they strike between sentimentality and starkness.
All cultures need their mythologies, and all mythologies their villains: an old truth, but one as true of Progressive Modern Britain as of any other society, any other civilisation. Today, as in any other age, a whole cast of antagonists are kept ready to be invoked against any criticism or challenge, avatars of the forces of backwardness to be loathed and jeered. Most are nameless caricatures: the beak-nosed mother superior, the grim-jawed sergeant-major, the hawk-eyed headmaster, and so on. But one character does have a name, a name immediately recognisable to many of the elders of our culture, and viscerally hated by them. To utter the dread syllables ‘Mary Whitehouse’, if one dares, is to summon an unmistakeable image into the progressivist mind: a reviled great-aunt, perhaps even a witch, lips pursed with disapproval, eyes blinking indignantly behind horn-rimmed glasses, preening her blue-rinse hair and sallying forth against all the fun and games of the Swinging Sixties. This too is a caricature, and one quite as shallow as any of the others, but one equally necessary to the progressive cosmology. Somebody had to be found to play that role, and Mrs. Whitehouse fit the bill. And it was imperative to the Great Myth that she and all she stood for had to be defeated: vanquished emphatically, and seen to be vanquished.
Mary Whitehouse (1910–2001). Picture from Mediawatch U. K., successor of the N.V.A.L.A.)
But the real Mary Whitehouse, who died twenty years ago yesterday (November 23rd), was no mere caricature. She was an astute and brave woman, probably one of the most courageous British women of the twentieth century. She knew what she was about, and her firm principles and faith led her clear-sightedly to choose a path that was often hard and lonely but which she knew to be right and just. Today the campaign she fought may seem entirely lost — all around us reigns the ‘disbelief, doubt and dirt’ that she opposed — but the justice of her position has been vindicated by the passing years: vindicated, and one day will be seen to be vindicated.
Mass media is today so ubiquitous that we scarcely ever think about its fundamental mechanisms. What is actually happening when we turn on the TV, when we allow a broadcaster’s signal into our homes? A tacit trust is established between those transmitting and those receiving. Viewers and listeners lend the broadcaster their ears and eyes, trusting it for a time to provide better company than they can muster amongst themselves. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then the BBC — promising to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, as it has since its foundation in 1922 — is being invited over the drawbridge to serve as seer, sage and minstrel. This is, long though we have forgotten it, a solemn trust indeed. It is the trust of hospitality, the mutual courtesy of guest and host.
In its early decades under the chairmanship of Lord John Reith (1889–1971), and above all during the Second World War, the BBC generally understood and fulfilled this duty. When in peacetime the Television Service was resumed, similarly high standards were maintained for over a decade. However, as the fore-tremors of the social revolution of the 1960s gathered strength, certain elements within the BBC, pushing first a little bit, and then further and further, discovered that the Corporation’s unwritten contract with its viewers could in fact be stretched, and stretched, and ultimately breached, with no consequence to itself. After all, a householder could not really round on the television set in the corner and tell it, as one could an impertinent guest, “I will not have that under my roof!” It all went one way. Moreover, television, once installed in a home, could not really be got rid of — not least because in those days, far more than now, it was experienced communally: both on the scale of the household, with families typically tuning in together, and of the nation, since the whole country shared the same two or three channels. Thus the BBC discovered that it could say whatever it liked in front of the masters and mistresses of millions of houses at just the moment when it was cementing itself into place as the chief channel of national conversation.
Accordingly the BBC, or at least revolutionary elements within it, laid intangible siege to millions of houses, against all those little castles flying the flag of Old Britain — gentle traditional Britain underlain by the Christian faith — precisely in order to undermine its decency, its restraint and its quiet respectability, the more easily to usher in the great liberalisation of social customs and moral standards that has now transformed our society. By no means was this necessarily the work of some dark complot or conspiracy: it is enough to understand it simply as the predictable consequence of the gaining of access by a concentration of people with a certain political and moral outlook to the technological means by which to make that outlook mainstream — means which also happened to constitute the most powerful form of propaganda ever devised. The siege against the ordinary British household continues unabated to this day, but so successful has it been that in most places we scarcely notice, let alone discuss or debate, what the BBC and other broadcasters have persuaded us to tolerate.
Mary Whitehouse touched a nerve from the very start, then, because she was really the first ordinary viewer to stand up for herself, the first to call the BBC to account for this abuse of trust. But it is worth pointing out that her concern arose initially not from her own viewing, but from the effects she had observed particular programmes to have had on young people, specifically the girls in her care as a secondary schoolmistress in Madeley in Shropshire. In her 1967 memoir ‘Cleaning-Up TV’ she recounts how conversations with her fourth-form pupils (i.e. aged fifteen or sixteen) had revealed upset and confusion arising from televised dramas or panel discussions. One among several examples was a drama including close-up shots of ‘the screams and agony’ of a woman in labour, which understandably caused them anxiety about the idea of marriage and motherhood. ‘In one fell swoop,’ Whitehouse said, ‘all that I had been telling them about how wonderful and challenging an experience it was to give birth to a child had been wiped out.’ (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 15.)Though confident that her pupils would recover in time, she still thought it a needless setback and an intrusion at a sensitive time in their lives. She considered that the new trends in television were making them feel less free, less happy, less hopeful about the future — that then, as now, the Progressive Revolution favoured the ease of adults over the welfare of the young.
This concern for young people is one of the most important things to understand about Mary Whitehouse. It was perhaps her main motivation. Far from blaming the young for the new social trends, she made it quite clear that it was her own generation that was principally at fault:
Sometimes if I am feeling tired or dispirited I think back to those youngsters [in Shropshire]. In their heart of hearts they want to regain so many of the things we older people have discarded in our attempts to keep ‘with it’. They say they will bring up their children differently: they will have walks together in the country, they will be thrifty, they will discipline their children, they will teach them to say their prayers. Will they when the time comes? […] I don’t know the answer but I do know there was something genuine and wistful about they way they spoke and I believe that this is the real spirit of youth before it is sullied, and pressurised by the wrong values of the society that we have built around them.
Mary Whitehouse, Cleaning-Up TV (London: Blandford Press, 1967), p. 14.
And again, in a later chapter:
When as sometimes happens I am shouted down or laughed at by students it helps to remember that those really responsible for the present permissive trend in our society are my own generation. […] In our anxiety not to be thought square […] we have, by and large, created a candy-floss society in which the young can find little of hard substance on which to cut teeth of conviction. The passion for the so-called ‘Open’ approach to everything, which discards all established values, has betrayed our young people into the hands of manipulators who exploit their immaturity and aimlessness for their own ends. (p. 39)
From her perspective, the Permissive Revolution was not so much being driven from below, by a spontaneous uprising of Baby Boomers, as being orchestrated by the cultural elites from above.
Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, photographed by Godfrey Argent, 25 April 1968. National Portrait Gallery, Photographs Collection NPG x16892, ref. mw119795. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence 3.0.
In the summer of 1963, Whitehouse travelled to London to take her concerns directly to the BBC and the Independent Television Authority, the fore-runner of ITV. At the BBC she was, she said, received ‘courteously and sympathetically’ by the Director-General’s Chief Assistant, Harman Grisewood, who seemed to her ‘deeply and genuinely concerned’. ‘How “up from the country” I was,’ she was later to say. For the person she did not meet on that occasion was Grisewood’s superior, the extraordinary figure of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (1910–1987), who served as the BBC’s Director-General during the crucial years 1960–1969 (and who incidentally was also the brother of the novelist Graham Greene.) When Mary Whitehouse spoke of her own generation’s responsibility for the Permissive Revolution it was probably him that she had most in mind. Both were born in the same year — a remarkable fact pointed out by Louise Perry — and yet whereas Whitehouse sought to defend the values and faith of Old Britain, Greene was at the forefront of the push for the New Morality. His ambition, he said, was to —
[…] open the windows and dissipate the ivory tower stuffiness which still clung to some parts of the BBC […] I wanted to encourage enterprise and the taking of risks. I wanted to make the BBC a place where talent of all sorts, however unconventional, was recognised and nurtured.
Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, ‘The Third Floor Front’, quoted in Robin Carmody, ‘Sir Hugh Carleton Greene’, web article published by the Transdiffusion Organisation, retrieved 23 November 2021 from https://www.transdiffusion.org/2002/01/01/hugh.
These words, set down in 1969, could have been written last week: this is fluent Newspeak from a near-Edwardian. Almost in itself it explains the broadcasting of the gritty ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ which were so to dismay Whitehouse in late 1963, along with the ‘satire boom’ of 1964. And there is much to ponder in the fact that Greene had come to hold that position at all. BBC Directors-General do not come from nowhere: other people, somewhere, had thought him the man for the job.
The kitchen-sink dramas — with their unflinching portrayal of social issues and in many cases uncritical depictions of extra-marital relations and even abortion — were followed, in 1964, by the news that the Government was willing to renew the BBC’s Charter for a further twelve years. The Corporation had set its course, and with Charter in hand its way seemed clear. So Mrs. Whitehouse, together with her ‘old friend’ Norah Buckland, wife of the Rector of Longton in Stoke-on-Trent, decided to organise a petition, calling on the BBC for a ‘radical change of policy’ and programmes ‘which build character instead of destroying it, which encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the heart of our family and national life’ (p. 24). Ringing up the news desk of a local newspaper in order to spread word of the campaign was to have momentous consequences. ‘Before the day was out a reporter had found his way to my home and in response to his questioning we had agreed that we would be holding a public meeting, and what was more that we would hold it in the Birmingham Town Hall’ (p. 24).
This impulsive decision caused Whitehouse and Buckland no little nervousness in the months that followed. But they need not have worried, at least not so far as attendance was concerned. The petition took off like wildfire, and thousands of people were soon putting their names to it: men and women alike, of all different ages, in all kinds of occupations and living in all parts of the country. (There is a particular pang in reading of a ‘significant trend’ of letters ‘from men who had positions of great responsibility during the war and who are now dismayed and amazed at the decline in the spirit of our people’.) By the day of the meeting, the 5th May, 1964, 120,000 signatures had been collected — these were brought together and placed on the platform in the Town Hall — and a number of public figures had added their voices to the cause.
It was at this meeting in Birmingham that one of the main battle-fronts of the 1960s was at last drawn up in plain sight. Several factors combined to catapult the occasion into the national news, and thereby the national consciousness. The first was an unexpected last-minute request from the BBC to televise the meeting, a request to which Whitehouse agreed — only to find, shortly after proceedings began, that the audience had been infiltrated:
Dotted about the hall, closely in touch with one another through pre-arranged signals and immediately next to the television cameras was a group of bearded toughs who had come to break up the meeting and steal the limelight in the press and television. At a given signal one of them rushed across the stage to try and grab the microphone and questions were thrown at him from his colleagues in the hall […] This interruption was not just a case of a few hoodlums acting the fool. It was an organised affair. My colleagues who were making a tape-recording of the meeting for our own use observed that BBC staff with microphones were stationed at frequent intervals around the hall in spite of their promise not to do so. (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 36.)
Things did not all go the troublemakers’ way, however, as this enjoyable paragraph records:
A group of young Catholics, incensed by the publicity being given to this tiny group who had no support from the body of the meeting, made the camera men furious by turning the spotlight off the interrupters! A row of nuns joined in the slow handclap which rose from the body of the hall (to drown the shouting of the interrupters) and the thick soles of their shoes made a great contribution to the beating of feet on the floor. (p. 36).
The result was, of course, a sensation, and one on the strength of which the Clean-Up TV Campaign swelled into a national movement. Mary Whitehouse found herself cast as its figurehead — and thus as her opponents’ arch-nemesis.
What was the response of the BBC to all this? Negligible. It refused to meet with members of the campaign, even as the number of signatures reached nearly half a million. There was not the slightest moderation of its programming. Its only direct response would have been better not made at all: to mock Whitehouse very obviously and with astonishing cruelty in the satire programme Swizzlewick, even alluding to a quite unrelated incident involving her husband (a road accident which had caused him a nervous breakdown, whereby he had come round a bend in his car and run over a suicidal man lying down in the road). But perhaps it is the reaction of Hugh Greene himself, as the campaign gathered strength and numbers, that is most remarkable and most telling. Quite simply, he was open in his hatred of Mrs. Whitehouse and all she stood for. According to Mary Kenny, Whitehouse ‘was banned from entering Broadcasting House; indeed her name could not even be mentioned on the air without prior reference to senior management.’ He had an obscene Medusa-like portrait of her hung in his office. She had been allocated her irrevocable place in the Progressive Mythology.
From all this behaviour — of the Town Hall troublemakers, of the BBC satirists and of the Director-General — one sees a pattern emerging. One sees that Mary Whitehouse was not, as is almost invariably implied, an over-sensitive and hysterical maiden-auntish figure, forever clutching her pearls and grasping her smelling-salts. No, she was quite in possession of her faculties. It was her opponents, the progressive revolutionaries, who time and again revealed themselves to be lacking in reason and scornful of fair argument. Some commentators in our own time, such as the comedian Andrew Doyle, have likened the aggressive activists of our own time to Mrs. Whitehouse, the accusation being that both she and they seek to suppress freedom of speech. But this is terribly unfair to her. It must be stated emphatically: she was fundamentally in favour of the free exchange of ideas. ‘Properly handled[,] every subject is admissible,’ she said in Cleaning-Up TV (p. 151). Although she certainly had decided views of her own on many matters, she was willing and well-equipped to defend them against rational objection in the public forum — on television, on radio, in print and in university debating societies — and needed no convincing of the media’s important role in facilitating genuine debate.
Mary Whitehouse (L) with the singer Judy Mackenzie at the Festival of Light Rally in London's Trafalgar Square, 25th September, 1971
Furthermore, Mary Whitehouse’s methods were entirely civilised: petitions, public meetings, newsletter campaigns and telephone calls, with occasional recourse to the law as available to all British subjects. Again it was the ugly stratagems of her opponents that sound only too familiar to us today: the disruption of gatherings, the shouting down of speakers, the assault on reputation by personal accusation and slander. They objected not to her manner or language but to the very expression of her ideas, and moved not to defeat her in argument but to intimidate her into silence, a tactic that we have seen from the progressive sides of umpteen social and moral debates ever since. Mary Whitehouse, for decades the recipient of hate-mail and death-threats, and the object to this day of highly vindictive and peculiarly and savagely personal mockery and satire, was no pioneer of our modern ‘cancel culture’: really, she was its first target. Then, as now, a vocal and aggressive minority pursued its cause to the bitter end, showing no mercy in battle and giving no quarter in victory. The strength of this movement was considerable then, and culturally speaking is almost total now — but it is one and the same radical progressivism.
Mary Whitehouse’s understanding of freedom of speech was a nuanced and considered one. She did not oppose the expression of any particular idea in itself, but she was against improper manners of expression. In other words, she believed that there are right and wrong times and places, as well as tones and attitudes, for the discussion of sensitive or controversial matters. ‘Family viewing time’ in particular she considered sacrosanct: to keep certain subjects for after the watershed was not a suppression of speech, but a channelling of it, a disciplining, for the sake of the peace of mind of younger viewers. But she was not against the tackling of serious issues, as is evident from this candid and courageous paragraph:
What about a play […] about women who are determined to see through a pregnancy whatever the difficulties. I am not talking through my hat, as I gave birth, when our first child was seventeen months old, to twin boys following a very difficult pregnancy. It was suggested that my babies should be medically aborted since X-rays showed that they were likely to be delicate. I declined the offer. The babies did not live, but I have never regretted the decision we made. They remain part of our family and I am grateful for what they gave to me of courage and maturity. Countless women are making the same kind of decision all the time. This seems to me wonderful dramatic material as well as true reality. If only such ideas were acceptable. But they are not. (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 168.)
Her views did align with those of today’s radical progressivists in one respect — and to this extent they too are quite right. She understood that words matter. In a television interview of 1973 with the writer Jill Tweedie, the conversation turned to the subject of swearing. “What can be actually damaging, actually harmful to children, about words?” Jill Tweedie asks. “Words are the means by which we express ourselves, by which to a great extent our culture is judged,” Whitehouse replies, “We have to help the young to grow through the rebellious crudities of adolescence and find more subtle, more beautiful, more tender ways of expressing what they feel.” “But is there any harm,” Tweedie insists, “any active harm in certain words?” “Yes, certainly,” says Whitehouse, “because it’s the degradation of your culture; it’s the degradation of the whole quality of the way you communicate with one another and the way you live. I think it [swearing] is a very harmful thing.” Not least as a Christian believer, a member of a religion of the Word, she understood that speech is not trivial. Words are actions in so far as they influence other people’s thoughts and feelings and character, and to this extent at the very least they really do change reality. Freedom of speech notwithstanding, we have a duty to mind what we say and how.
Jill Tweedie interviews Mary Whitehouse on Thames TV, 20 February 1973
Mary Whitehouse understood another distinction that seems never to be made in our present fraught debate over freedom of speech: the difference between necessary offence and gratuitous offence. The former is something that we risk giving in any discussion of a controversial matter, and that parties in a debate must set aside, or rise above, for the sake of the common pursuit of truth. The latter, however, is offence caused for its own sake, for the sheer thrill of causing outrage or upset. And it is this second kind of offence that the BBC, from the Sixties onwards, has too often given to its family audiences.
The BBC has not appeared in a favourable light in this article, but it should not be forgotten that Mary Whitehouse, after the initial opening salvo of her manifesto, was always careful to ‘give appreciation to the many people working in the BBC whose programmes were first class in every respect’ (p. 20). Such appreciation is as important now as it was then. But in spite of these individually excellent programmes, and the BBC’s still-matchless ability to rise to great occasions when it knows the world is watching, it seems beyond doubt that of the two schools of broadcasting, John Reith’s and Hugh Greene’s, it is the latter that has prevailed when it comes to everyday programming. (Just consider how jarringly the brash idents elbow aside the end of the Queen’s Christmas address every year). Figures such as Robin Aitken have argued that, since almost all of the people in charge of BBC programming share a particular world-view, this world-view inevitably influences the flavour of its output, and thereby undermines its claims to impartiality. In the past five years especially, there has been a growing and increasingly overt politicisation of much BBC output, and we seem to be back in late 1963, when, as Mary Whitehouse put it, ‘it looked exactly as if our much-respected BBC had launched into a trial of strength with its viewers and was determined to answer criticism by producing programmes even more likely to affront the good taste of the country.’ (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 20).
In our own time, which is proving to be a kind of second 1960s, Mary Whitehouse has much to teach us. The battle-lines may have shifted since her time, but the combatants and stakes are much the same: aggressive radical secular progressivism versus such fortresses as are left of Christian and traditionally-minded Britain. Mary Whitehouse was from the beginning ecumenical in her approach, and saw that Christian churches (to which we may now add many of our cousins in other religions) had to stand together for the sake of the common good. This is perhaps why, broad-church Anglican though she was, she rather remarkably ended her book by quoting at length from Pope Paul VI — to the point of giving him the last word.
We urgently need her sort of courage today: the courage, when scoffed or cackled at, when condescended to or dismissed out of hand, or when sworn at or slandered, not to back down; the courage to stand our ground even when the ground itself seems to be giving way under our feet. Her only weakness, in so far as the weakness was hers, was a tactical one: many of her methods would have worked far more effectively had Britain still been the fair-minded country she believed it to be, and only failed because not enough people stood with her. We need the strength of faith with which she defied ridicule and scorn for the sake of a kingdom not of this world. ‘But for her,’ Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, ‘the total demolition of all Christian decencies and values in this country would have taken place virtually without a word of public protest.’ [1]
Mary Whitehouse, film director Michael Winner and a studio audience debate violence in film and television. Hosted by Sarah Kennedy and broadcast on Thames TV on the 10th September, 1985.
And so, with one gentleman in a Thames TV studio who, having supported her arguments in a TV debate in 1985, praised her solitary courage in defiance of a largely hostile audience, I say, ‘Three Cheers to Mrs. Whitehouse’. May her soul rest in peace.
[1] Sandra Salmans, ‘British Woman Carries On Crusade Against Sex and Violence in the Media’, Sarasota Herald-Tribune (NY Times News Service), 7 April 1977, p. 53.
The eastern outskirts of the city of Worcester, seen from the top of the Cathedral tower, 30th November 2019.
And so an unhappy country braces itself to go to the polls, and I record my thoughts so that I will know how I felt before the result turns out to be whatever the result turns out to be.
In many ways, our present difficulties are simply the result of things working properly. A government lacking a big majority, such as we have had ever since the European Union referendum, cannot do very much, even if it is not splintered by disagreement within its own ranks, as this one has been. If it is frustrating for many that Britain’s departure from the European Union is proving less than graceful, not all the reasons for this are bad reasons. Some are simply the results of the encumbrances we accept as the price of democracy.
This may also be the case with the strange episode of the Supreme Court which, as I understand it and record here for future reference, went like this. At the end of August, Boris Johnson, faced with the challenge of persuading a pro-Remain Parliament to approve a Brexit Bill by a deadline of 31st October, sought to prorogue or suspend Parliament for a number of weeks. By all appearances this was done for no reason other than to short-circuit the opposition: to scupper any stratagems of Remainers by simply pulling the plug on them. A private individual (the pro-Remain businesswoman Gina Miller) then appealed to the courts in the hope that they would declare this tactic unlawful. In response, the courts first had to work out whether or not they had any say in the matter at all: the Scottish High Court decided not, but the Supreme Court, to which Ms. Miller appealed next, took the opposite view. The prorogation of Parliament was thus found indeed to be a matter for the courts, and the Government’s actions were indeed found to be unlawful. Parliament was duly recalled and business resumed.
That was a moment at which everything felt too close and too momentous to gain a proper perspective and make up my mind what was going on; I couldn’t really tell how significant these developments were. But was this, too, simply everything working properly? In some ways the ruling of the Supreme Court looked like a restraint on power, something I would be inclined to favour. Certainly, there was the sensation of a system being put to the test by the impetuosity and imprudence of a bull in a china shop, and holding firm. It seemed not unduly alarming that some sort of mechanism should swing into action and restrain the Prime Minister. Yet I remain unsure of our reasons for having a Supreme Court in the first place, and worry that it is just as likely that such a body might equally have taken power for itself. Some commentators have been of this opinion. (But what do I, a mere peasant, know of such constitutional technicalities?!)
But really, our problems are far deeper than can be resolved by any mere general election. Our crisis is not only political, but also spiritual. What I hope for in Britain, a renewed culture, is simply not on offer at this election. Indeed, no political party alone could offer it. Meanwhile, as things stand, many people find themselves angry and unhappy without really knowing why. The offerings on the menu at this election will hardly make them less so. Can a serious churchgoer vote for any of these parties in good conscience? Do any of them have at the forefront of their concerns the downtrodden, the marginalised, the unborn, the elderly, refugees? The security of families, the happiness of children? Do any of them seriously mean to serve the common good? I know that there are many good and hard-working candidates sincerely hoping to do the best for their constituencies, but the top links of the parties, the forgers of policies, all seem to be in thrall to the dictatorship of relativism, and unfriendly to the Christian Church. How can I vote for such parties? I suppose we were told to expect nothing less. But, just to take one example, it is disillusioning to see the Liberal Democrats and Labour Party, almost as a footnote but with a kind of forensic spite, pledge to abolish the Marriage Tax Allowance: a petty, partisan thing to do, to single out this particular policy for abolition, trampling on tradition just for the sake of it. (The other parties are little better.) And all while millions of people suffer the purposelessness and alienation that some sort of encouragement to marriage might just — who knows? — help to dispel. A new survey has revealed that British teenagers are among the least likely to believe that their lives have meaning or purpose, marriage rates are collapsing, and so many people suffer from loneliness that a ministerial position has been created to deal with it. (At least the need has been noticed). But these problems present too great a portfolio for any minister.
I say that our problems are deeper than any General Election could solve, but not that they cannot be solved at all. There are great numbers of ordinary people with sensible heads on their shoulders, keeping things going, quietly maintaining the social fabric of the world. I realised recently that the cleaner of the office where I work, who is unfailingly cheery and good-humoured, never mentions politics or complains about politicians, in spite of the hardships of her job. Even among my own generation, of which I am sometimes tempted to despair, it would do me good to remember that there are huge numbers of quiet people who think carefully and sensibly and wisely, and act accordingly. The amazing thing is that many of them are my friends. Heed not the words of the loud, but the deeds of the quiet.
But the surest answer to our problems, though rather drowned out this year by all this electoral flurry, is quietly hoped for all through Advent. When tomorrow is all over, we will have perhaps a fortnight left of Advent’s sweet suspense.
Happy Whitsun! This is the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit burst into the Upper Room, ambushing the disciples cowering there with tongues of fire and a rushing wind — and set the Church off on its great adventure. We in Britain celebrate it rather feebly these days. Eleanor Parker, author of one of the best blogs on the Internet, ‘A Clerk of Oxford’, has an article on the ‘lost holiday’ of Whitsuntide. It was, as she puts it, ‘the time for fairs, Morris dancing, games, ale-drinking, school and church processions, weddings, wandering into the countryside, and generally having a good time’. It is only very recently that this has faded away. The Clerk gives a link to a newsreel film of Manchester’s grand Whit Monday procession in 1927. It is almost unbearably evocative of that vanished solemn world of cast-iron, and trams, and Corporations. The white clothes of thousands of children are startling amid the huge soot-blackened hulks of mighty civic buildings — a sight that is now impossible and even unthinkable, though, thankfully, the Mancunian Whit Walks continue to this day. Even in the early 1950s, Philip Larkin could still observe, in one of his finest and best-known poems, the tradition of Whitsun weddings. Did he guess how completely the sight he was recording was about to fade away? Was it he, as much as anyone, who was ‘out on the end of an event / Waving goodbye / To something that survived it?’ For look at what has happened to Whitsun since then. The holiday has had all its character and flavour rationalised and secularised out of it. Where once,seven weeks after the moveable feast of Easter, we had Whitsuntide, with its fire and wind and its brass bands and ale,we now have merely a bureaucratically static day off, the ‘Late May Bank Holiday’ — yawn. It is better than no holiday at all, I hasten to stress — but it seems so dull and flat, and it has lost us our bearings, the flavour of our season and our bond with the past. It has occurred to me recently that the Thing, whatever it is we should call it — hardly a Spirit — the materialistic, individualistic, over-liberal, progressive secularism of our day, will founder in the end mainly because of its own sheer dullness. We have done a pretty good job of disenchanting life. What now? The exhilaration of life lived only for the moment and for the self, day after day, with only earth-bound hopes and the vaguest beacons of transcendent meaning, can only last so long. We cannot distract ourselves for ever from the question that never goes away: what will fill the chasm of longing within us? We know that the world of the performance appraisal, and the retail park, and the ready meal, is ultimately an insult to the dignity and depth of the human being, a dignity and a depth which cannot be ignored or privatised without consequence. We have lost the words and the gestures by which we once articulated the magnitude of birth or marriage or death, and compassed moments of particular joy or suffering. Where are our feasts and seasons to illuminate the year, the occasions for majesty or solemnity, our resonant poetry and song, or a deep spirit of togetherness that does not rely on an opponent or scapegoat for its strength? Where is our hope for eternal life?We will soon recognise, with alarm, how truncated is our sense of history, how disenchanted our sense of place, how stifled our hunger after wonder, and how hollow the inheritance bequeathed to us by the spirit of secularism: boring art, boring ideas, bored lives. Secularism will fail because it is boring.
And secularism will run out of steam, too, because of its fundamental pessimism about the human person. This may seem a strange thing to say about a tide of thought with so much to say about self-esteem and self-fulfilment. But I am sure it is true. For instance, the idea that our lives can mean whatever we decide, though it sounds good at first, conceals a cold indifference, for it leaves us perfectly free to decide that it means little or nothing at all, and, since many of us sometimes need encouragement to find and pursue real meaning, it leaves huge numbers of people open to the clutches of nihilism. And, more broadly, many currents of thought that have become prominent in Britain, especially since the 1960s, have relied on pessimistic, often cynical arguments. We all know how they run: the answer to difficulties in marriage is divorce; the answer to crisis pregnancies is abortion; the answer to terminal illness is euthanasia. The idea of quality of life is turned to ill-use, to the evaluation that some lives are not worth living. St. John Paul II’s phrase ‘culture of death’ was not too strong an expression. It can’t last for ever, and indeed it isn’t lasting. Even in the last century, C.S. Lewis observed the difficulty that our culture has in aspiring to high ideals. He lamented that people seem unable to recognise that ‘when B is better than C, A may be even better than B’, or that people prefer ‘thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better and best, or bad, worse and worst’ (‘Mere Christianity’, Collins, 2012, p.108). So many people think that the Church, if it speaks against B, is condemning people to C, whereas it is really hoping for A for us all. It is an irony that, even as it aspires to utopia, and even as it criticises the Christian doctrine of original sin, the secular world nevertheless seems to have resigned itself to the inevitability of certain evils. The recent introduction of so-called ‘no-fault divorce’ into law has given us yet another chance to see this habit of thought at work. The advocates of that idea argue that what they called ‘amicable divorce’ is preferable to an ‘acrimonious divorce’, as if anybody would suggest that conflict should be aggravated where it could be lessened. But they take it entirely for granted that divorce is simply a fact of life, like illness or bad weather. But what if — one might ask — what if we tried to avoid divorce as much as possible; indeed, altogether? We have free will, and we can use it to keep promises just as much as to break them. What if we encouraged husbands and wives to stick together in moments of difficulty? Is this not why they once made their vows? Should we not help them towards heroic reconciliation, with the help of family, friends or counsellors, anything that it takes? Those in favour of the new law might scoff that this assertion is simply childish naïvety. But is it rather childlike innocence, which is something quite different — and, what is more, since it is children who tend to suffer most from divorce, is it so misplaced? Contrary to the egregious posters that appeared all over railway stations a few months ago, advertising a divorce app — with a phonily jolly message from a fictional Mr. and Mrs. Foster who have decided that ‘things really haven’t worked out and we’re calling it quits’ — ‘amicable divorce’ is a contradiction in terms. The sundering of vows causes great suffering to all concerned; nobody arrives at that point unscathed by grief, and divorce carries no promise that things will not worsen (it is divorce, not marriage, that weaponises children). By asserting that such things are commonplace, and should be the foundation of rights and laws, secularism belies its fundamental pessimism and hopelessness. Meanwhile, though, the Church asks, quietly, and with that ingenuousness that will save the world: what if a vow actually means a vow? What if chaos need not necessarily have the final word? I say all this not to pass judgement on those who go through divorce, especially in today’s climate, but to give an example of the ways in which secularism abandons people in difficulty. The Thing seems very adept at working out the lesser of evils, but pretty hopeless at aspiring to the greatest good. It has worsened that startling lack of moral verticality that C. S. Lewis observed; a kind of Brutalist shoulder-shrugging style of ethics which lowers the ceiling of human love and self-giving, and which often assumes that heroism is unrealistic, that sainthood is fantastical, and that we can afford simply to give up too easily. The result of all this is that we all settle for too little from ourselves and from each other. So, one implication is that men don’t hold themselves to high enough standards of manners and speech; women therefore don’t believe men are capable of high standards and so don’t dare to expect them; and so both settle for less and less, and end up demoralised. (Meanwhile, in the spheres of education or career, people often expect far too much of themselves, making all kinds of sacrifices for things which do not, in the end, determine their dignity). And is there another reason why we settle for too little: that we do not believe in mercy? Do we fear that to aspire to high standards in our lives is to set ourselves up for a fall from which we will never recover? How swiftly this idea leads to cynicism and nihilism — and again it is because there are questions which secularism doesn’t know how to begin to answer. The Thing seems all-powerful just at the moment. It has claimed the media, the mainstream and the momentum. Worse, it holds considerable sway over the language, manners and customs of ordinary people. But it will have to last another nineteen centuries if it is to outlast the Church and since, in the end, it is reductive, and boring, and it sells us short, and tells us that we are less than we are, that we are merely granules of egos, zooming about directionlessly until we are extinguished, I would not bet on its staying the course. It is too cynical to understand heroism; too superficial to comprehend beauty; to shallow to nourish friendship. Birth is beyond its understanding; death defeats it. Our dignity cannot stand this for ever. Ultimately, too, the culture of death must die. Secularism may not necessarily fail violently or dramatically, but when it does fail, as fail it will, the Church will still be there, with hope and pageantry intact, along with the year’s colourful wheel of feasts and seasons, the tongues of fire and the rushing wind. We know that life matters beyond what we see, however hard we try to deny it; we know it has a meaning too deep for words and thought, and we sense the immortality of our souls. Religion, properly practised, lends life the dignity that befits it, and the paradox is that this makes us joyful and light-hearted in spite of our suffering. We will keep the feast of Whitsun as of old, and sanity will prevail.
