If there’s a consensus about anything in British politics today, it’s that politics has gone wrong somehow. After an election in which the victorious party earned the lowest vote share of any winning party in British history, we have seen unspeakably violent crime, unrest in the streets, further economic stagnation and an ongoing collapse in support for the two major governing parties of the twentieth century. There is a pervasive sense of ennui, of intractability about contemporary politics. Of course, everyone has their favoured analysis of the root cause of these problems – the rise of populism driven by social media or an out of touch globalist elite, and many more but I want to suggest that at the heart of the crisis of modern British politics, and indeed the crisis of the Western-led global order as a whole is the loss of the spiritual sense.
What is the Spiritual Sense?
Now what is the spiritual sense and what does it have to do with politics? In theology, the spiritual sense is usually discussed in terms of hermeneutics, the art and practice of reading Scripture. As one of its most influential practitioners, Origen of Alexandria defined it, the spiritual sense had to do with ‘vital doctrines of God and His only-begotten Son’. This was crucial for the early church’s reception of the Gospel: they came to the conviction that the stories of the Old Testament were not just historical account of the development of an ancient near-eastern tribe, but were stories that pointed to invisible, transcendent, spiritual realities, and fundamentally to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, the spiritual sense has become something of a point of debate within academic hermeneutics but at its root it depends on just two things. First, that while words exist purely as signs (signs that refer to things), things can also serve as signs for other things. Smoke is a sign of fire, a ring a sign of marriage. This means that to understand a passage of Scripture involves not only knowing what thing the words on the page signify but also what that thing itself signifies. For instance, the words of Ex 12:46 ‘Do not break any of its bones’ refers to, or signifies, the Passover lamb, but because the Passover lamb is itself a sign, a sign of the true lamb of God offered for the sins of the world, the Apostle John is perfectly correct in applying it to the crucified Christ which is itself a sign of the eternal, perfect, love of God.
This notion is not restricted to those things referred to in the pages of Scripture. In Augustine’s thought, it is elevated to a metaphysical principle. For Augustine, everything ultimately is either a sign or a thing and really there is only one thing, the infinite divine essence of the Father, Son and Spirit. Everything else, all of creation, therefore, is a sign pointing to that supreme reality.1Augustine, Teaching Christianity, ed. by John E. Rotelle, trans. by Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY, 2007), 1.2. In making this claim, Augustine is expanding on the teaching of the Apostle Paul who teaches in Romans 1 that through visible things invisible things can be seen, namely the nature and power of God.
So, the spiritual sense depends upon the ability for material things to signify immaterial things, for visible things to be the sign of invisible things. But the second thing that is required for the spiritual sense to be understood is the human capacity to see and understand that significance. Just as a painter’s brushwork and use of light on the page requires the faculty of sight in the viewer, so also the spiritual sense requires a faculty of following visible signs to their invisible significance. We can speak therefore of the spiritual sense of the human being, just as we speak of the sense of sight or hearing or touch.
For Augustine, the ability to see how visible things signify the invisible is not merely a kind of exegetical technique but a marker of spiritual health. Speaking of those who ‘fail to refer what is signified in this proper sense to the signification of something else’, that is who fail to exercise the spiritual sense, he concludes, ‘This precisely, is the wretched slavery of the spirit, treating signs as things, and thus being unable to lift up the eyes of the mind above bodily creatures, to drink in the eternal light.’2Augustine, Teaching Christianity, 3.5. The ability to see the invisible signified in the visible is diagnostic tool to measure spiritual health. For the Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht, it is essential to Christian discipleship, ‘Our mind,’ he says, ‘even in earthly things should be heavenly, that is, it should perceive in earthly things, heavenly things and meditate upon them…in the natural sun, the Sun of righteousness; in earthly food, spiritual food.’3Peter van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, ed. by Joel R. Beeke, trans. by Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids, 2018), 3:156.
For van Mastricht, and the Christian tradition as a whole, the exercise of our spiritual sense is just as fundamental to human existence as exercising our sense of sight or hearing – more so in fact.
British Politics and the Demise of the Spiritual Sense
The thesis I would like to advance is that the fundamental problem with British politics is that we have fundamentally lost this spiritual sense in our politics. British politics is now fundamentally material and can only discuss and debate material aspects of human existence, unable to recognise that those aspects point beyond themselves to a greater, immaterial, context. The famous line of Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carville about the 1992 Presidental election, ‘It’s the economy stupid’, is truer now than it was then. British political discourse has become focussed on what can be contained in a spreadsheet or on a graph. It has become ethically utilitarian and assesses utility purely in quantitive rather than qualitative terms – that is, anything that can be reduced to numbers. This is the language of almost all political parties except for the most marginal. Politics has become entirely cut off from what we might call the transcendent, the spiritual and the immaterial. Raising questions of transcendent moral value, the final purpose of humanity and, even worse, the Lordship of risen and ascended Jesus Christ seems gauche at best and subversive at worst.
Some might object that this simply is the business of politics, that politics by its nature is concerned with the material and the secular and therefore the focus on pragmatic questions and utilitarian calculation is to be expected simply as the nature of the political task. But, this is not the case. It is less than 100 years ago that the House of Commons voted down the 1928 revision of the Book of Common Prayer and, in 1936, that a King had to abdicate because of his desire to marry a divorcee. My point is not celebrate those occurrences but merely to point out that they are rather recent examples of political life in this country debating and discussing spiritual and moral matters. And of course, the entire history of these islands is one in which spiritual matters, things discerned by the spiritual sense, have been central, at least rhetorically, in political affairs. It is actually the contemporary state of affairs that is the historical outlier. There is nothing inherent in politics that prevents it attending to the material and mundane in the light of the eternal realities that they signify.
What form does the loss of spiritual sense take in this country? It is not the form that it took in the old Eastern bloc, with regimes that were aggressively atheistic. Rather, our loss of spiritual sense has come in the form of a kind of liberal logic, what we might call secular liberalism. The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘secular’ are highly contested and I want to make it clear that they can be used in many ways, some better, some worse. But nevertheless, the term ‘secular liberalism’ seems apt for the approach to politics that argues that the British state must avoid placing any constraint on the freedom of the individual to believe in whatever they want to believe, and therefore the state and its organs must be scrupulously neutral in regard to claims to absolute reality. And while this distinction with the materialist regimes of the old Eastern Bloc does have significance in the way that our present political structures treat religious believers compared to the USSR, in fundamental terms, the result is the same – an exclusion of the spiritual sense from the public square. After all, the man who cannot tell the optician what the letters on the eye chart are because he cannot see them and the man who cannot tell the optician what the letters are because he has philosophical objections to presuming to adjudicate between the myriad of valid perspectives on what the letters on this particular eye chart might be, are effectively in the same situation – unable to see.
Because our present form of liberalism views any public commitment to a fixed idea of spiritual reality as an illegitimate constraint on the human person, it restricts its vision to material constraints like poverty, disease and so forth. And so liberalism generates a pragmatic, technical, utilitarian politics that brackets out any debate about ultimate meaning, human purpose or the existence of transcendent realities that might be above and beyond the material and tangible. Ironically this approach flows from a commitment to what appears to be a transcendent value, the freedom of the individual, a concept which is after all immaterial. But just as for the man who cannot see past the end of his nose, his nose seems to fill the whole world, so the world of the secular liberal is filled by the only immaterial substance he can discern, himself. Thus, any public recognition of transcendence above and beyond the human self is excluded.
This form of liberalism, secular liberalism, has therefore been accompanied by the rise of managerialism as the major paradigm of governance. In the world of industry, control has shifted from individual owners to a cadre of managers who are able to administer the complex systems that can cope with the conditions of mass and scale distinctive to modernity. What started in business has now spread across virtually all aspects of civic life so that anyone who works in education, healthcare or has had a child, knows the way in which bureaucracy and administration has become almost ubiquitous. Managerialism and secular liberalism are mutually reinforcing since managerialism is an approach to human affairs that believes that solutions are found not in discerning final ends but in the application of efficient processes and techniques. Managerialism, therefore, replaces virtue with compliance, wisdom with process and generates systems that can whir away perpetually with little or no consideration of whether they actually serve to increase human welfare at any level. Since managerialism diffuses responsibility across a system, moral questions, judging whether an act was right or wrong are constantly deferred and replaced by the question of whether the proper procedure was followed.
What managerialism and secular liberalism share is the belief that the question of final causes, of the transcendent, of the ultimate, can be bracketed out in favour of the practical and the utilitarian. They, as it were, voluntarily blindfold themselves in regard to the spiritual, refusing to acknowledge that the things they deal with have any significance beyond themselves. And this paradigm has become completely dominant in British politics so that the spiritual is rarely, if ever, invoked.
It is important to note that this dominance has not been achieved under only one particular party or leader. It is true that someone like Tony Blair, with his McKinsey-run 10 Delivery Unit, was almost an avatar of this kind of approach, but the real expansion of this mindset came earlier under the ministry of Margaret Thatcher. While Mrs Thatcher undoubtedly had some kind of religious faith herself, having been brought up in a Methodist household, her government was one that was in fact relentlessly utilitarian. Her final term in particular saw the growth of the quango, the mechanism by which real power was put in the hands of managers rather than politicians, and the effect of her time in power was to subject every aspect of the British state to a kind of economic calculus. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the 1987 reforms of the city of London which have had huge social and cultural consequences for us as a nation. Likewise, while, through the 2010 Equality Act, the government led by Gordon Brown made secular liberalism the de jure operating principle of the British state, the implementation and subsequent transformative effects of the Act has happened under fourteen years of Conservative government. Both, or really all, major political parties lack a spiritual sense, an ability to discern the immaterial significance of material things. And while contemporary political rhetoric is often highly moralistic, it lacks any ability to connect that moralistic language to any kind of coherent framework that would offer a fixed standard for the morality.
The Political Crisis and the Absence of the Spiritual Sense
However, by now, even on its own terms, this approach is no longer working. The sense of crisis I mentioned at the beginning of this article is caused by the fact that this myopic focus on material things is beginning to cause serious political and social problems, even measured in purely material terms. To mention only a couple of examples: No one is unaware of the problem that debt poses to public and private finances. We are the most indebted generation in history. But why? Why has debt become such a problem? Well, fundamentally debt is created when you spend in the present money that you will only obtain in the future. Debt is a function of what economists call time-preference and we have moved from being a low time-preference society to a high time-preference society. That is, we lack what has long been regarded as an important virtue, the species of courage called patience. But there is no material means to create patience. Patience is a virtue of the soul. And so, without addressing the immaterial reality of our souls our nation will remain trapped in the material slavery of indebtedness.
Second, there is the vast expense and economic impact of family breakdown, the huge resources that need to be spent dealing with the consequences of children brought up outside stable homes. Stable families are important for more than merely material reasons, but the breakdown of the family has significant material consequences. Nevertheless, maintaining a family is not a purely material matter. Now, it might be good if the government took away material disincentives to stable families, but rates of family formation were far higher when standards of living were much lower. What will keep a father with his family or a wife with her husband are questions of the soul and those are questions for which secular liberalism and materialism have no answer.
The loss of the spiritual sense, then, leaves us not only unable to relate the immaterial aspects of reality, it inhibits our ability to manage material things as well. This is because material and immaterial reality do not live in hermetically sealed boxes; they are distinguishable but not separable. Just as failing to see the Passover lamb as a signifying Christ means to misunderstand the lamb, so seeing every other material thing as simply a thing means to fundamentally misunderstand reality. And as Jesus says, ‘If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.’ That is a good description of the current political situation. It is not clear whether the phrase of Gregory of Nazianzus’ – ‘Crude bodily ideas from crude bodily people’ – will be anyone’s slogan at a future election but it could work equally well for any contemporary party.4Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. by Frederick Williams and Lionel R. Wickham (Crestwood, 2002), 29.13.
How to respond?
So, what is to be done? How should Christians, those who do believe in immaterial reality, respond to this political situation? In recent years, we have seen in Kate Forbes, and before her Tim Farron, two leading politicians with a belief in the immaterial and the transcendent. Without wishing to elide the differences between the two, both of them have taken the approach of taking secular liberalism at its word and saying, ‘since no viewpoint is excluded by secular liberalism, my Christian beliefs should be no barrier to my participation in frontline politics.’ Now, Kate Forbes and Tim Farron, for all the political disagreements one might have with them, are clearly sincere and admirable people and one cannot help but have a fraternal affection for them. But the problem with that strategy is twofold.
First, it ignores the fact that secular liberalism cannot be consistent with its own terms: it must exclude viewpoints, and the viewpoints that it excludes are ones that are threats to its own hegemony. And, quite rightly, those that benefit from and enforce that hegemony see Christianity, which has soaked over many centuries into the soil of these islands, as a very potent threat to it. Secular liberalism is not the neutral referee of differing perspectives it purports to be, and just as Augustine’s spiritual sense was able to discern the malevolent human and spiritual agency behind the imperial cult of Rome, so our spiritual sense should enable us to discern the true nature of secular liberalism and the interests it serves.
The second problem is that, while the presence of Christian believers in politics on secular liberalism’s terms may have certain beneficial and ameliorative effects on the system, it cannot address the root problem, which is the absence of any spiritual sense. Adopting this posture cannot confront the fact that human beings have souls and that, therefore, they have needs that lie beyond and above the material and economic; it cannot advocate the idea that human freedom is not the unfettered capacity to indulge every desire, it cannot argue that there are transcendent standards of truth and justice and goodness above and beyond human individuals and societies to which they must give an account. And this is fundamental because, as C.S. Lewis puts it in the Abolition of Man, ‘A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.’5C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York, 1947), 46. Secular liberalism, and its refusal to see the significance of the things it manages and governs, has rested the legitimacy of the entire political system on thin air. And therefore, any Christian politics that wishes to serve the people and maintain the integrity of the body politic must attend to restoring our political system to the foundations it had for centuries – the perception of the invisible through the visible, the notion that the things of this earth take their place in an order that stretches far above and beyond them but to which they point and participate.
Any Christian approach to politics, then, must begin with the necessity of the spiritual sense. To do otherwise would be like finding a blind guide and his blind follower in a pit and start enquiring whether they were wearing the correct footwear. The task for Christian politics is to conceive of a politics that accounts for the immaterial and the transcendent, a politics that begins with and is founded on the human soul rather than the suppression of the human soul. This is the only kind of politics that can begin to govern our nation wisely, for it is the only kind of politics that understands the people it governs. Such a politics would be able to affirm the reality of a moral order that stands above it and beyond it, and also the source and the executive of that moral order, the risen and ascended Jesus Christ.
The idea of that kind of public square, where spiritual realities are accepted and acknowledged as foundational, may seem far-fetched, outlandish even. Certainly, it is a distant prospect from where we stand now. But had anyone stood up in the debate on the 1928 prayer book and offered the House of Commons a description of the political conditions 100 years hence, they would have found it hard to be heard above the laughter their words would have produced. And yet, four years later, in 1932 Aldous Huxley in Brave New World was able to write what reads today as a remarkably prescient description of the world we now live in. So also for us: there is nothing to prevent us engaging in the work of imagining what a politics that had regain its powers of spiritual perception would look like. This is especially necessary because the ground in this area has been so thorough salted by the propaganda for secular liberalism. Any indication that transcendent truth or spiritual reality might play a part in contemporary politics is greeted by the familiar litany of all the worst crimes of the church’s many centuries. The content of these tropes have become so old and shop-worn –that even the Spanish Inquisition has become predictable – but nevertheless they need to be overcome, if only in our own minds. And that task begins by rejecting the objections to removing secular liberalism that have lodged themselves deep in our psyche. The objection that it is only secular liberalism prevents tyranny and bloodshed – when in fact secular liberalism is a form of tyranny because it presumes to govern without reference to any power higher than itself. The objection that reintroducing the spiritual sense to politics is utopian – when in fact utopian politics is the denial of the spiritual sense, because it confuses the sign, earthly kingdoms and earthly politics, for the thing itself, the heavenly kingdom where all human longings are met. The objection that a spiritual public square requires a majority of the population to be Christian – when in fact the public acknowledgement of spiritual reality no more requires a Christian majority than the public acknowledgement and celebration of sexual perversity required a majority of the population to be sexually perverse.
We must understand, therefore, that reintroducing the spiritual sense to British politics is both beneficial and necessary. This will require, of course, that Christians, individually and as churches, exercise the spiritual sense ourselves, that we begin to correctly relate material, mundane realities to transcendent and spiritual ones. This will, of course, affect how we read the Scriptures, how we worship, and all aspects of life; but it will be expressed most fully when we are called on to suffer, for it is in suffering that our ability to discern the priority of the immaterial is tested. I cannot outline the organisation, the tactics and strategies necessary to defeat the hegemony of secular liberalism, but doing so today is no more distant a prospect than the evangelisation of the world was on the day of Pentecost or the Christianisation of Britain was when Augustine landed on the shores of Kent. And the theological truths that underpinned those efforts, the sovereignty of God, the truth of God’s word and the victorious power of the risen and ascended Christ are just as true now as they were then. There is, therefore, no absurdity or futility in praying, working, organising and hoping for the return of the spiritual sense to British politics.
The spiritual sense, then, is the ability to perceive the significance of things, the way that material and earthly realities are in fact signs of the spiritual and heavenly. The promise of a return of the spiritual sense to British politics is that British politics may once more be a sign. A sign that imperfectly yet truly signifies the coming kingdom, and in so doing participates in its nature and virtues. A politics that in its laws and judgements points to the true justice of the Man appointed to judge both the quick and the dead, a politics that in its equity and harmony points beyond itself to the peace that reign when the Prince of Peace returns. A politics possessed with spiritual sense will always have the modesty to know that it is not the final resting place for the human heart but will know that it can give assistance to pilgrims as a signpost to their destination. Today, someone in Britain who wishes to turn and follow Christ must do so in the headwind of cultural assumptions, economic pressures and legal obstacles placed in the path of whole-hearted obedience. This need not be the case. It is the product of a politics that has lost its powers of spiritual discernment. But the British public square can be, as it once was, something that points, however imperfectly, beyond itself to an eternal city. This can happen if those that hold power in our nation once again recognise things as signs and humble themselves beneath the eternal glory that is signified by them. We must pray that Jesus Christ, who restored the eyes of the blind on earth, may open the spiritual eyes of those who govern that they may once again, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, know whose servant they are.
