The Prayer Book and the Culture Wars

Not just for "Little Englanders”…

Only in my mid-twenties did I realise that I had been brought up to believe in some strange things. I was inculcated throughout my youth with outlandish and undemonstrable doctrines, dogmatically asserted by authority figures and reinforced by the approval of my peers. Anyone bold enough to venture criticism or a rival position was quickly ridiculed into a silence which would last. Rebels soon learnt to comply.

We were taught to take for granted, for example, that only material things can really be said to exist; that knowledge of these can be gained only from the senses; that those senses are reliable conduits of data to the mind; and yet that the thoughts which comprise the mind, being non-physical, are in some wise less “real” than the matter they represent. We were taught to believe only to believe in what can be empirically proven, despite the obvious paradox in that entirely empirically unprovable assertion. And on that unsound basis, we were taught to regard the self as essentially an atomised subject independent from the rest of the world, upon which the formative social influences of, say, Church, family or nation were not constituent elements, but regrettable external impositions. The sensing self was sovereign: such was our unspoken creed.

I was, thankfully, liberated from such irrational superstition when I took the “red pill” in my mid-twenties and was baptised, after an interesting detour via Japanese Buddhism. But that leaves me all the more stupefied at the way this old dogma has spread to almost universal adherence among the young of the world’s more technologically advanced nations. I say “old,” because although it has only really burgeoned in the last three centuries, philosophies bearing some similarity to it were proposed in ancient times and convincingly dismissed. There were ancient advocates of materialism: not in the modern consumerist sense of a craving for material goods, but the philosophical position that existence is confined to material things. The Stoics are perhaps the most famous, though their definition of “material” does not quite map onto our modern ones, and includes both soul and God; perhaps the Hedonists and Atomists come closer to what has become the modern European default. And yet, their positions came under a sustained critical assault from Plato and his followers for centuries, including even Aristotle and his heirs. Certainly, the idea of a universe devoid of soul and spiritual realities was never remotely mainstream, even in Western Europe.

But why make Western Europe our philosophical focal point, anyway? Despite noble reminders from the likes of Peter Frankopan and Gerard Russell, we still seem oblivious to two facts which might at least make us shift uncomfortably on our laurels. First, until the early modern era, Europe was something of a sideshow in the theatre of world empires, spared by the Moors only because of the Mongols, and by the Mongols only because our pickings were not rich enough to be worth the trouble. Second, and surely this is obvious, whatever our own intellectual and literary heritage owes to Greece, it owes at least as much to ancient religions of the Middle East.

School textbooks neatly divide the world’s religions and their concomitant philosophies into Western and Eastern, presumably for ease of teaching, which I suspect is in practice a stronger criterion for inclusion in textbooks than, say, truth. Christianity is put in the “Western” category: a questionable editorial decision, given that Christianity had spread as far as China by the time Augustine reached Canterbury. Even more questionable, since the Judaism in which Christianity is grounded has shared roots with Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian and eventually Greek religion and philosophy, which itself enjoyed a certain interplay with Indian Hindu and Buddhist thought. The so-called “Nestorian” Christians of the conveniently forgotten East were in philosophical dialogue with Buddhists and Taoists. And even the mediaeval philosophy of the Christian West was possible only thanks to the mediation of Arabic-speaking Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars in the Islamic world, who preserved and elaborated on ancient Greek texts which would otherwise have been lost. The “Western” thought of S Thomas Aquinas would be nothing like what it is without that rather more easterly mediation. The identification of Christianity as a “Western” religion is a pedagogical fiction. It is interconnected with religious and philosophical traditions all over the world, a point I am at pains to make in my new book, The Lost Way to the Good.

Do those other traditions subscribe to the materialist dogma of Western modernity? Of course not. And note that we are not talking here about the modern’s Stone Age bogeyman of some macho lightning god to be placated by ignorant savages fearful of agricultural disaster, but a panoply of scholarly traditions, tested by reasoned argument and sustained over millennia: rather longer than twenty minutes on Wikipedia. Yet I was more or less taught in school, and am still preached at by the popular press and entertainment media, that the minority position of Western materialism is the default worldview, and the rest is not worth serious consideration. Popular films and TV series are instrumental in this. Fantasy, sci-fi and even period dramas insist that everyone reasonable has always thought like us. Whether they wear togas, elf ears or space suits, everyone’s basically a 21st century North American.

So, for all the cries for decolonisation in the West, there seems to be a serious blindspot: the failure to recognise the materialist dogma of the modern social liberal as just one, local, and until recently insignificant philosophy. A philosophy which even now does not enjoy the support of that majority of humankind who are poor in technology, and whose cultures and philosophies are therefore deemed fit to deride or to ignore. They could not be expected to know any better, but soon enough, when we conquer them by trade, television and internet pornography, they will give up on their backward and regressive views. They will wear the same clothes as us, watch the same Netflix series as us, listen to the same pop music as us, think the same thoughts as us. All that will be left to differentiate them from anyone else is their delicious cuisine, which of course, we will relish. But that will be the limit of permitted diversity. Move on! No “imperialism” to see here.

Except: there is, isn’t there? The jackboots of a new order are stamping not only over the traditions of other nations, but our own – which has far more in common with those supposedly “foreign” philosophies than it has with Anglo-Saxon atheist materialism. So it should be no surprise at all to find that the proponents of the new order are enemies of the Prayer Book, enemies of parish churches, and enemies of the monarchy. These are all repositories of memories which they wish to extinguish. Those memories connect us with the wider collective memory of the world’s ancient philosophical traditions.

You may wonder where in the Prayer Book one might find such connections. Almost everywhere, in fact. They are there in the doctrines of the Creeds, particularly the Athanasian Creed, which gives a far more sophisticated doctrine of God than the proverbial bearded dictator in the sky, one big “being” among his lesser vassals. They are there in the collects, most of which are translations of ancient Latin sources, some expressing the Christian faith in clearly Platonic terms. They are there in the lectionaries, in that the Prayer Book insists that we read Holy Scripture richly, widely and daily, certainly not restricting ourselves to a weekly dose at Sunday Holy Communion. This should be the basis for serious, lifelong study of the Bible and its historical and philosophical context. Connections are there in the canticles of the Te Deum and Benedicite, both of which praise God for his self-revelation in the common fabric of Creation itself. These in turn, along with several of the Psalms, bring out the connection between the concentration of divine grace in the Prayer Book’s two sacraments with the fainter, but still real, sacramental presence of God throughout all of His creation. Our Prayer Book connects us with the rhythms of that creation by the observation of fasts, feasts and days of rogation in due season. A life guided by divine provenance through the Prayer Book does not cut us off from the world, still less from the non-Christians within it, but reestablishes the interconnection of creation which moderns are so determined to sever.

Like the Trotskyites who made the post offices their first target, the new cultural guerillas know that their revolution relies on cutting off contact with the outside world – and our ancient institutions are the deepest connection we have. All too often dismissed as the reactionary obsessions of “little Englanders,” the parish church and our Prayer Book are rather the local repositories of a wider and deeper wisdom than the narrowed mind of the materialist can hope to comprehend. Blinkered to their own shackles, they grasp at fleeting shadows of liberty, not realising that the real thing is readily at hand; and so unaccustomed are they to its light, that when they see it, tragically, they try to destroy it.

There is hope, but I fear that with a few episcopal exceptions, we will not find much of it in the Church of England hierarchy right now. There is more overseas, where the Prayer Book is being championed by Evangelical Anglicans, mostly outside communion with Canterbury. The recent imprimatur given to the 1662 daily office by Rome in the new Ordinariate breviary is also prompting interest among mostly younger Anglo-Catholic clergy worldwide. It seems that the stomachs of those who do not fall into either of those camps have mostly grown too weak for the BCP’s rich diet. It will be up to members of parishes and schools to feed them up gradually, spoonful by spoonful: a collect here, an occasional Evensong there, “trial runs” of services, “options” for baptisms and weddings, infiltrating the parish book club with related reading, using the Catechism for Confirmation classes.

But first, there is some preparatio evangelica to be done. We need to point out that the modern Western mindset, so antithetical to the spiritual, is in world historical terms the exception, rather than the norm. We need to demonstrate to people drawn to what they see as more sophisticated Eastern spirituality that Christianity is as much Eastern as it is Western, and that we do not believe in the tyrannical “supreme being” they think we do. We need to show that far from making us isolationists, our love of our national religious heritage connects us with the great spiritual traditions of the world, which secular modernity wants to trample into conformity with its own image.

The Prayer Book can help us to undermine the bitter culture wars raging in the Anglosphere. We need not cloister ourselves away in closed communities to preserve our tradition for fear that it may be thrown over the Bristol harbour wall. Cranmer meant the Prayer Book to bring the prayerful study of Scripture previously enjoyed only by monks and clergy to the wider world. It has the potential to offer people stripped of all communal identity something which can reunite us not against the rest of the world, but with it. The tradition which underpins the Prayer Book offers greater solidarity between people and with the rest of the natural environment, and is more rationally defensible, than the materialist dogma which which moderns have replaced it in the consciousness of the people. It’s time to abandon the newfangled fiction that only matter is real, and return to such invisible realities as trust and loyalty without which, in the end, matter does not matter at all. The communities of family, parish and nation are the historic vehicles of those invisible realities with the Prayer Book, in England, as the liturgical repository which binds them. The Church, alas, continues to jettison all these things just at the moment when they have never been more needed. Resistance and recovery will have to be local.