Naming the powers – Christians and the

challenge to our culture

Why is our economy in trouble?
Our economy is in trouble because our culture is in trouble. Our
culture is in trouble because it has adopted a dramatically reduced
account of the human person. It has adopted this reduced account
of the person because it does not care to hear the Christian gospel
which tells us that man is made for love and freedom in relationship
with God and his fellow human beings. Because it does not care to
hear about this love, our culture is no longer confident of the value
and significance of human beings. Our economic crisis reflects a
crisis of cultural confidence that reflects a crisis of faith. Man is not
convinced that he has a future, and this loss of confidence has
eroded his long-term perspective and stalling our economy. Let us
take a look at some of the connections between gospel, culture and
economy that are at the root of our economic situation.

1. Gospel and man in the image of God

It is the responsibility of Christians to set out the very high view of
man represented by the gospel. The Christian faith enables us to say
distinct and necessary things about our culture and our political and
economic life that are enabled by this high view of man. The gospel
tells us that we are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’, and
that the God-like characteristic of freedom is a fundamental truth of
all human beings. The greatest account of human dignity is found in
the bible. As a result of the long relationship of European culture to
the Christian faith, elements of this human dignity are reflected in
the assumptions of many cultures and global institutions. But this
high view of man, to which freedom is essential, has its source in the
Christian faith and nowhere else.

Every society is dependent on the practices of self-control,

responsibility and self-sacrifice by its people. Any form of
discipleship and discipline that forms people for the service of the
common good is itself good. Any society benefits from the presence
of a community that offers such discipleship. Christians are discipled
people. Christians know that they are accountable to God, and this
makes them ready to be answerable also to their fellow Christians,
and then to their society. Christian discipleship is good for any
society because it articulates this high view of the human beings in
which we are accountable and responsible to one another.

2. A reduced account of human being

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In the last few decades British society has neglected the large and
complex concept of the person that is represented by the Christian
account of the human being. Our culture has lost sight of the
wholeness and integrity of the human person. It regards the person
in terms of what they are owed, but not of what they owe, and so in
terms of rights rather than of responsibilities. We can no longer see
why at any fundamental level we owe anything to anybody. This
culture assumes that we are billiard balls that bounce off each other,
unaffected by any encounter. It has given up pursuit of the virtues
and self-control, given up talking about our obligations, and talked
instead about our rights. Previous generations thought about
persons in terms of both giving and taking. This generation now
thinks only in terms of taking, and it is unable to say who is
supposed to give what it is intending to take. But it is not enough
simply to be given freedom: we also have to receive it and practise it, for
only so will it truly be ours.

3. Reluctance to take on the disciplines by which we can

grow
If we want to learn how to grow we undergo a course of formation.
We do so for any particular skill that we desire, and we may do so
for life generally. We can take on a course of formation in the hope
that it will enable us to develop as persons. We can commit
ourselves to become a more rounded and mature person. A course
of formation can enable us to develop the self-control by which we
can exchange immediate desires for longer-term desires, and so
learn grow into greater freedom and greater responsibility. If we
want to learn, we submit ourselves to the disciplines by which we
can do so.

But our culture has given up the expectation that we will want to
develop as persons. It assume that persons need no formation. We
assume that no one can teach us anything about being human. We
no longer admit that freedom or love is not only given but also has
to be learned.

When it was in touch with the Christian faith and discipleship, our
culture and moral system was understood as a form of education by
which we could, if we wished, grow as persons. Now we now are left
uncomprehendingly holding only the fragments of a moral system
and culture. With our much diminished account of the person we do
not know why or how we may grow, as persons. With this much
diminished account, all public debate is solely in terms of the will
and desires of the individual and that individual’s power to gain
what he desires. We have found it convenient to regard the market
and state as mechanisms that supplies satisfaction of our desires,

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and does so without input from us and without any suggestion that
we learn how to control our desires for ourselves. It suits us to
believe that we do not have to grow as individual persons, and thus
do not have to undergo any form of nurture and discipline, for we
believe, growing is not something individuals need to do. The growth
of individual persons has been replaced by the growth of the
economy. The economy must grow, so that we do not have to. Here
Christians have to respond that the economy can only grow when
we ourselves grow, and we may grow as we receive the disciplines
that derive ultimately from the grace of God.

4. Flight from responsibility and self-government

In the much-reduced contemporary definition, a person is
understood in terms of the will of the individual. We do not expect
that the individual will attempt to control his or her will by the aid of
their reason and memory. We have ceased to be self-controlled self-
governed persons.

Freedom and responsibility are onerous. We have all been giving

away our own powers. By not exercising our own self-control, we
have been giving away the means of self-control by which we can be
public persons and citizens. We have allowed the market to push
into the private sphere of family and household, abandoned the
vocation of ‘citizen’ and in its place adopted the lesser status of
‘consumer’.

Since we do not consider ourselves to be self-subsistent persons

who exercise self-control, we do not bear our own individual losses.
We demand that others compensate us for our failure to make
provision for ourselves. We ask the government to bail us out, and
so we have got into the habit of making unrestrained demands on
government. As a result we have asked government to compensate
for the powers that we ourselves have refused to exercise.
Government compensates for our own loss of self-government and
replaces that self-government. As a result the state has grown
beyond its mandate, while we have given up the freedom and
responsibility that are essential to our own dignity. Here Christians
may respond that self-control enables us to grow into the freedom
intended for us, and we may decide not to call on the state to
underwrite all our public relationships.

5. The Christian as self-giver

In the large Christian account of the person, a person is free to give
him- or herself away, irrevocably, to one other person in that public
covenant that we know as marriage. A man and woman give
themselves to one another, finally. They do so once, and they

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sustain that gift of themselves to one another, day after day, for life.
Their freedom to do this is crucial to their dignity, and it is the basis
of all the other covenants of which any society consists. The man
and woman who sustain such a covenant together also provide the
best foundation on which to bring up the children who may arrive as
the result of their union.
There is a relationship between marriage and public confidence and
morale and the readiness of a society bear children, and to bring
them up, protecting them from the pressures of market and state, so
that they are motivated to bear their own children.

A society has to honour marriages because they are the means by

which children arrive, and brought up to maturity and so are the
means by which society itself is reproduced. Any society does not
give that honour, that refuses to concede that there is difference
between a marriage and any form of liaison does not give men and
women the motivation to dedicate themselves to the children.
Where there is no public acknowledge of child-bears, the practice of
child-bearing dwindles and that society is in trouble. So from the
concept of self-giving, and public affirmation of the chief covenant
which safeguards self-giving, we have arrived at the issue
demography. An economy grows when a population grows. No one
has ever experienced a healthy economy in a declining population.

6. We have not allowed the private household to do enough

Decades of legislation has taken away the public character of
marriage, and turned marriage into the expression of the private
sentiments of two individuals, without public consequence. We have
allowed the market to push into the private sphere of family and
household, and provide services for us so that we do not have to
perform them for one another.

We have given up the self-restraint that makes it possible for us to

make provision for the future, and so to act on behalf of future
generations. We draw the future forward by spending what we have
not yet earned. We are cashing up and paying ourselves now the
capital which our children will have to earn. We are not passing on to
our children the ideas of national and cross-generational solidarity
which would motivate them to create this capital. We have become
prejudiced against labour, and have given up the industry and
agriculture which preserves the skills and virtues which motivate
and sustain the rest of the (service) economy. We seem unable to
curb our consumption of natural resources .

7. De-motivation and demography

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We have de-motivated people with the result that they are deterred
from marriage and child-bearing. We are experiencing a decline in
fertility. The British birth rate (1.7) is below replacement level (2.1).
Our falling population is disguised, temporarily, by longer life-spans.
We are compensating for this drop in population by immigration,
particularly from those societies which, with more traditional
concept of family, are prepared to bear children, but are we
confident enough to pass on to those children the virtues by which
this culture will survive?

8. We have asked the economy to do too much

The economy is in trouble because we have asked the market to do
too much. We expect too many of our inter-personal relationship to
take the form of economic relationships. We want our inter-personal
encounters to receive explicit, immediate recognition and reward,
and so be monetised transactions.

The market expands because we individually succumb to the

temptation to demand payment in this explicit monetised form, and
others demand the same of us. We grant one another no credit and
are not content to receive those less explicit forms that we know as
‘honour’. As we insist on exercising an excessive proportion of our
relationships through the idiom of money, we enforce this monetised
economy on one another. Other than the Church, the Christian
economy of self-giving and self-government opened to us through
baptism in Christ, there is no community strong enough to resist the
expansion of the single monetised economy. The best favour that
Christians can do the economy, is therefore to think and act as
Christians, setting out the form of generous and discipled life given
to us by the grace of God.

9. Expansive state
The state attempts to compensate for the failure of marriage and
break-up of the family. It has attempted to turn our personal
emotional burdens into public financial and fiscal burdens. The huge
fiscal consequence of this agenda de-motivates the economy as a
whole. A welfare system that attempts to replace marriage will
bankrupt the state, so that it will no longer be there for those who
do need it.

The state has grown beyond its mandate. It has become too large
and unable to acknowledge its own proper limits. It has become
ideological and directs its effort to eliminating the cultural traditions
by which we acknowledge any countervailing power to the state.
The unlimited state and market are the result of our reluctance to
govern ourselves, and our readiness to give away our own integrity.

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We have allowed government to compensate for our individual loss
of self-government. The state is becoming a self-perpetuating entity
that proposes to replace the public contribution of self-subsistent
persons.

The government has become ideological and consequently become

expansive. An increasing proportion of the national product is spent
on its equality agenda, by which the state wants to abolish all
natural and given distinctions, particularly of sex. It is waging an
undeclared campaign against human biology, against our cultural
gender distinctions and on the covenant of marriage and child-
bearing that are built upon them. The equality of persons achieved
through the equalisation of classes of persons is a secular
redemption, a kingdom of God established by the legislation, by
which we bring our redemption under our own control.

At the same time, the state directs its effort (which is to say, our
effort) to making sex a more dominant feature of our identity. Its
spending is orientated to making us more sexualised. Our children
are encouraged to see potential partners solely in terms of sexual
attractiveness, and seek their own self-fulfilment through a process
that involves passing in and out of sexual relationships as that
attraction comes and goes. They are taught that one life-long love
relationship is not to be preferred to a series of short-term
relationships. The assumption is that the individual person
experiences love as a series of episodes, and the only constant
presence that gives unity to their lives is that of the state.

9. Healthy culture and free speech

The health of an economy depends on the confidence of a society,
which in turn depends on a healthy culture. Its culture is that
society’s means of encouraging the growth of individual persons.
When a society is healthy and confident there is robust public
debate, which involves the public expression of disagreement.
Healthy public debates refer to the reasons that previous
generations have given for their various ways of life, and which now
make up the resources of our tradition. The society which shows a
general ignorance, or antipathy to, or revulsion from that tradition, is
not confident about itself. Lack of confidence in the resources of our
culture result in the separation of economy from culture, with the
result that we tell one another that ‘It’s the economy, Stupid’, by
which we reduce all public debate to the government’s duty to raise
our standard of living. Christians may respond by saying that our
traditions enable us to live well, offer alternative accounts of
flourishing, and become confident enough to serve and bring up
another generation without constant recourse to market or state.

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We have to ask our media to encourage public speech by promoting
the debates in which cultures can be examined and compared for
their contribution to the common good. We must ask our media
public discussion of the contribution of the cultures of our various
immigrant populations, so we ask whether any of these threaten
others. By adopting a self-censorship that avoids ‘offence’ (in
widening but never explicit definition), we are failing to give public
examination to different ways of life, abandoning the forms of
discipleship which form us as persons and citizens, and losing our
tradition of public speech. Free speech is threatened only if
Christians stop speaking freely, regardless of the consequences. It is
lost only if Christians are faithless and afraid.

10. Cradle to grave

Over the last few generations the state has expanded to take on
more of what were previously our own responsibilities. By doing so it
has relieved us of the need to pray to God. We do not pray because
we know that the state has already made provision for our every
need. It knows what we want and the means of their satisfaction
even before we do. Since the state is obliged by its own legislation
to give us what we need, we never have any reason to be thankful.

Market and state attempt to preserves us from issues of life and

death. They hide from us the prospect of our death. When our
welfare state pours its resources into keeping us alive in our last
years and in particular our last weeks, it is because we have
licensed it to distract us from the essential business at hand, and
which only we can conduct, which is to make our peace with the
world before we leave it. The welfare state has reduced death from a
public event, the moment in which the individual is able to speak
honestly to those he is about to leave, to an event determined by
the functions of a body, an event that would be entirely private
apart from decisions about drugs and the sudden intervention of
surgical and resuscitation teams. These last years and weeks are for
the purpose of asking forgiveness from our family and neighbours.
We may forgive them and receive forgiveness from them. By
showing them how to die, showing them how to live. We can pray for
more life, of course, if we have a firm idea of what to do with it; we
may ask to live on because have to nurse someone else, children or
any member of the family who is disabled, or so that we can hand
the care of our dependents on to someone who is ready for that
responsibility.

The flight from life means that there is no public recognition of the
public and long-term effect of every death. There is no

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acknowledgement that abortion shatters not one, but several, lives
because it destroys the confidence to sustain relationships. A
proportion of the population is carrying a secret self-hate. This casts
a pall over our society as a whole and makes it more difficult for
everyone to aspire for relationships that last and which produce
children who will be confident to bring up children in their turn.

11. The Church and contemporary idols

Does change seem relentless and inevitable? Does the rate of
change seem to be increasing? Does it then seem that Christians,
opposing change, are fruitlessly opposing the future and want to ‘go
back’ to the past? But the relentless pace of change is precisely the
claim of modernity. Modernity is a flight from the past and in a panic
about of future. Christians have to say that all this change is illusory,
that some practices, such as marriage and child-bearing, are
fundamental and the and the virtues that support those practices
are therefore fundamental too. The society that does not cultivate
those practices and virtues will not continue. The ‘modern’ crisis is
not a crisis for the Church, but a crisis of modernity and a crisis for
modernity. If ‘modern’ people give up on these practices, they will
have no children and their society will vanish in a couple of
generations. Modernity is a form of hysteria and unreason; it is an
absence of the patience and forbearance that enables anticipation
and joy. It is all a disbelief in the future, that is disbelief that we have
any future that we will succeed and continue or that the human race
is worth continuing. It is a loss of history and identity that results in
a foreshortening of horizon and loss of confidence and stability.

Christians may serve their society best by putting a little distance

between themselves and the market, and between themselves and
the state. They have to act as a countervailing power, and show the
world that it is possible to resist, to defer and wait. Christian say that
the market is good, and that its good functioning depends on the
active participation of many independent agents. A market is ‘free’
to the extent that these agents make good judgments, on the basis
of good knowledge, about the goods and services on offer. A good
market clears; there is transparency; it is not captured by sectional
interests. Christians say that the market has a vital role in valuing
the products of human work. But they also insist that the market
cannot provide for us those things which we should provide for
ourselves within our own households, and that it cannot substitute
for our own judgment. The market that attempts to treat us solely as
individuals, rather than as covenanted members of household and
society (as married couples, and as parents and children) may be
destructive of social capital.

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In the same way, Christians suggest that the state is constituted by
the sum of the public service of citizens. Christians insist that there
are limits to what the state can do for us, and what it can demand
of us. When the state steps beyond the mandate, spelled out by our
national political tradition, it is no longer good. Such a state must be
opposed, and Christians must point to the judgment of God that is
the backstop which preserves the distinction between state and
society, and so preserves the freedom of the individual person.

The state has no mandate to push its way into the formation of our
families, our culture and our imaginative life. It is not mandated to
take our decisions away from us, so that we are never obliged to
take our own decisions about which cultural, or charitable initiatives
to support. The state may not tell us that we may only serve if we
consent never to give our (Christian) reasons for our (Christian)
public and charitable service. Everyone is free to ask Christians to
keep their views to themselves. But they are not right to direct the
resources of the state to enforce silence on them. The state may not
silence the Church: the harder it tries the more it hastens its own
fall. Our refusal to take up everything that the state offers is some
small but necessary sign that Christians can give that the state is
limited, and that we all come under the judgment of God when it
ceases to respect those limits.

The faith and discipleship of Christians impacts on the society in

which Christians are present. A society cannot do without such a
discipleship. Christian discipleship creates a community of persons
who are self-governed, and whose generosity extends into forms of
public service and public speech. The prior loyalty of Christians to
the God of the gospel, which means that their loyalty to society and
state are subsequent, makes them better citizens than those who
know only loyalty to themselves or to the state. As a result of its
discipleship, the Christian community has a sense of purpose, hope
and confidence that spreads to the surrounding community and
makes for a more confident public square and free society. The
presence of Christians in a society is good for all that society’s non-
Christians. The reluctance of any society to hear from its Christians
betrays only a deep unhappiness that Christians must name as such.

12. In view of these crises, how shall we pray?

We may start by giving thanks to God. Christians give thanks for the
long faithfulness of God to this nation and so for many generations
of Christian witnesses who have formed the culture of this society.
We must name these witnesses and teach their stories. We may give
thanks for their suffering, and give thanks that we may continue this
witness and that we may be asked to do so in the same costly way.

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We may share their experience of conflict and persecution, and give
thanks for it.

Then we may ask, and beg, the Lord God not to abandon us. We
remind God of his faithfulness. We ask him to cut out from us all sin
and rebellion, and to identify those ways in which we are blocking
the gospel and preventing our society from glimpsing his glory and
turning to him. We repent, at length and in public, with a renewed
litany. We offer to bear the cost of this witness, and so to sacrifice
ourselves for the sake of his witness and the future of this nation
that depends on it. We pray for the nation, saying in our prayers
what the nation cannot say for itself, but relies on us to say for it. In
the ‘person’ of the nation we confess our sins, name the powers that
we have surrendered ourselves to and we repent and beg God's
forgiveness.

We may discover that the Lord may take us through these various
crises in order to rescue us from the results of our long risk-aversion.
We may discover reasons to welcome these crises, and we must
pray that we turn out to be faithful and worthy of the trust given to
us. We pray for grace to sustain marriages, bring up children and
build a common national life. We may pray for a long-term trans-
generational perspective, so that we can see that this generation of
the Church may lay down its present comfort and security in order
that new generations of Christians may be born to the Church, and
the witness of God to this nation continue. We must pray that the
Church does not become divided as it discovers how to be faithful in
its witness. We encourage every Christian to explain how we should
all learn the whole discipleship that will preserve the holiness and
unity of Christian witness.

If there is large-scale stagnation, unemployment, inflation or even

sovereign default it will be painful, and our political leaders and
policy-makers may not have the moral resources to lead. But this
crisis may bring down the edifice of the unrestrained, expansionist
state that has turned us into idle people and a sclerotic society. It
may be the prompting we need to serve one another directly again,
and without immediate concern for reward. The coming crisis may
bring the cultural and political correction that we need and so bring
about the renewal of this culture and nation.

But again we must ask, why have we adopted a reduced account of

the human person? Why have we suffered this loss of cultural
confidence, and consequent demographic and economic changes?
The only ‘answer’ that can be given is that we have sinned. There is
never any reason, any good reason, for sin. Sin is the

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unaccountable. We can only say that our culture has suffered a
decline because it has not been renewed by Christians. Christians
have not encouraged emphatically enough, and have not spoken
clearly or warned strongly enough. Christians have failed to set out
the wonder of the dignity of man. We have lowered our voices, and
with the urgency that it requires, they are guilty. We Christians must
repent. But we can repent. We can confess our sin, which involves
setting out some of these theological and cultural phenomena, and
we can do so with gladness, in confidence that the Lord God hears
us and will release us.

We are not offering policies; we are offering questions. We invite

world to judge itself, as we Christians judge ourselves as God has
gracefully commanded. The best thing we can do for our culture and
economy is to be Christian. Then our culture may recover the large
concept of person as self-restrained, self-giving and self-sacrificing,
initiator and citizen. It may be stirred to re-build a culture of love and
self-respect. But whether it does or not, Christians must simply
remain faithful. We will use our lives to prepare our children to
grieve and pray and remember us and to look forward to the
redemption of the world.

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