An Unholy Mess

Ben Wildsmith

As we enter Holy Week, the politicisation of religion has never seemed more unsettling.

The unravelling of the postwar consensus has brought with it a reaction against the perceived passivity of Christianity in Britain, alongside renewed hostility by some towards Islam and Judaism.

In my memory, I was born in 1972, religion has been largely sidelined as a political force in the UK. Parties of the left and right both avoided explicit religiosity, mirroring the decline in active participation that we’ve seen in traditional Christianity at large.

With some exceptions, Rowan Williams and David Jenkins spring to mind, even the Anglican bishops have been coy about exercising their constitutional role in our governance.

In an era of pronounced individualism, religious faith had an air of collectivism and conformity that seemed out of step with the desire to mimic consumer choice in our approach to decision-making. It was as if the money lenders had entered the church and overturned the altar.

This mirrored the retreat of trades unionism, which similarly came to be seen as a compromise of individual will in a country operating on the conceit that we had all been rendered sovereign by the grace of home ownership and shares in British Gas.

If the Enlightenment had suggested we could forge our own relationships with the Almighty, the new thinking was that we needn’t bother with any agreed concept of spirituality at all. Chapels were converted into second homes, churches became supermarkets, and the opinions of bishops disdained as an impertinence.

Politicians, meanwhile, increasingly mimicked marketeers rather than preachers or philosophers. The malleability of Tony Blair, who changed his religion in middle age, appeared of the moment and suggested that the fundamentals of a politician’s belief were as biddable as the ingredients of a chocolate bar. New, improved Labour, now with 50% less Socialism!

Which brings us to the curious re-emergence of overt religiosity that we are seeing now. The annual ‘They’re cancelling Christmas!’ nonsense that we endure every winter, just after the tawdry exploitation of Remembrance Day by performative warmongers, has been extended to Easter.

This week saw a social media storm over a photo of discounted Easter Eggs in Morrisons. An account called ‘British Patriot’ on X shared the picture, claiming that the eggs were on sale because consumers were boycotting them. This, the story went, was because Cadbury’s had removed ‘Happy Easter’ from the packaging as sop to ‘woke’ philosophy and fear of giving offence to Muslims.

When it was pointed out that the angle of the picture obscured the top of the boxes, where ‘Happy Easter’ was clearly printed, thousands of spiritually enraged posters remained unplacated.

The greeting should be on the front of the pagan-inspired confectionary product, to properly honour the resurrection, apparently.

Photographic evidence of eggs from the 1980s, which all had the same placement, further proof that they are always discounted two weeks before Easter, and the revelation of an actual boycott of Cadbury’s over the replacement of milk in their recipe with palm oil, did nothing to shake people’s conviction that blasphemy had been committed.

I, initially, had no more idea whether a real religious boycott was occurring than I, or you, do about who is winning the war in Iran. It’s down to who you trust.

Objective truth

There’s something to say here about how objective truth is being obscured by manipulation of images and the algorithmic delivery of information by online platforms, but that’s a different sermon, sorry column.

In this queasy uncertainty, however, sits a void that is inviting to bad actors. Our long journey from having the Word translated from Latin for us by priests to information overload has turned in on itself.

The great promise of the Enlightenment – individual inquiry – has buckled under the sheer volume of information with which we must contend.

When William Tyndale was being tied to the stake, he likely did not consider that translating the Bible into English would lead to your Uncle Dave ‘doing his own research’ into vaccine efficacy on YouTube, but he wouldn’t listen, would he? Quod erat demonstrandum.

There has emerged a mutant strain of performative Christianity that demands no church, liturgy, nor scripture. Appending ‘Christ is King’ to a social media profile is indicative of one belief only – that Islam is unwelcome in the bearer’s vicinity.

The disproportionate fear of Muslims, who comprise 6% of the UK population, is shockingly overt in our political discourse. Where once they were disparaged from a liberal perspective, as conservative and repressive, now their detractors seem driven by envy at the spiritual certainty and social cohesion of Muslim communities.

‘Rigged’

Muslims, we’re told, ‘rigged’ the Gorton & Denton by election because they inexplicably blocked the overtly anti-Islamic Reform UK candidate by voting in concert for the Greens. That is contrary to the individual sanctity of democracy, the story goes, so, in response, newly minted Christ-is-Kingers must vote in concert for Reform UK.

On the left, you don’t have to look far before finding people convinced that the actions of the Israeli government are a function of Judaism. Instead of concluding that the genocide in Gaza is an offence against its perpetrators’ faith, they seek to revive the old lies.

Even avowed secularists are beginning to wear the robes of spiritual superiority.

In Swansea, the fascistic Voice of Wales is performatively erecting crosses and displaying them on social media, as the spiritual dimension of the ‘raise the colours’ flagging movement.

This unsatisfying, hollow clunk of meaningless theatre is emblematic of a society that has nowhere to gather any more, no place to celebrate or grieve together, nothing around which to cohere save for the venom of exclusionary rhetoric.

The unholy mess in which we find ourselves now demands that we find a way of communal expression that is nourishing rather than destructive.

Mutual respect

Our shared spaces, cultural inheritance, and mutual respect must be paramount in political decision-making if our society is to recover from a malaise that has persisted for decades. Too often, these fundamentals have been dismissed on the debit side of a balance sheet, as market forces have supplanted every other philosophical approach to life.

‘Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is error, truth; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope’, as one Margaret Hilda Thatcher once intoned on the steps of Downing Street.

How’s that working out?