“I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.” So said the novelist Hilary Mantel in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2012. Ms Mantel was raised Catholic but has never practised in adulthood, citing as her reasons unpleasant experiences with nuns and priests during an unhappy childhood. Her bestselling Wolf Hall trilogy, which explores the career of Henry VIII’s right-hand man Thomas Cromwell, is laced with suspicion of the Church.
The relationship between Christianity and respectability – “the quality of being socially acceptable”, as one online dictionary has it – is an interesting one. For a very long time in Britain, church attendance – Protestant church attendance, at any rate – was a badge of propriety, a social requirement for people who wished to establish their bona fides as a decent member of society.
Beginning about the point of the middle of the last century, and accelerating in the last few decades, the desire to be respectable has changed. The “high-status” opinions and attitudes are no longer socially conservative ones. The way to gain the approval of your peers, and of wider society, is not to snub the divorcee down the road or to throw your gay son out of the house, but to loudly disavow any attachment to “judgmentalism” or old-fashioned morality.
This new form of the respectability mindset has taken hold in churches just as firmly as the old one ever did. It is now commonplace to see clergy jumping on all sorts of passing bandwagons, publicly demonstrating their adherence to positions which are popular among the people among whom they socialise and with whom they went to university. One example of this was in May last year, when government adviser Dominic Cummings was accused of violating lockdown laws. Numerous CofE bishops on Twitter, including David Walker of Manchester, waded into the controversy with all guns blazing against the government: an extraordinary display of political partiality. Earlier last year, the CofE said it would make a huge effort to become carbon neutral, which seems like a curious prioritisation of time and energy. These forms of interventions may not be entirely a conscious seeking of worldly approval, but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that there is an element of that involved.
The generation who will take the reins of power in ten or twenty years’ time – my generation – are largely formed in a culture where the moral commitments of Christianity are regarded as socially damaging.
It seems now that even this new form of respectability-seeking may no longer be enough to guarantee good treatment of Christians by those in power. We saw this with Tim Farron, the former Liberal Democrat leader and Evangelical Christian. Farron faced strong criticism from within his party after a 2015 Channel 4 News interview, in which we said that “we are all sinners” in response to a question about whether he thought gay relationships were sinful. This was widely seen as meaning that he did believe gay relationships were sinful. His strong pro-gay rights voting record apparently mattered not a jot; the problem was his private beliefs.
Catholics, of course, are in a slightly different position. In a sense, we haven’t really been respectable in England since the sixteenth century. There were serious anti-Catholic riots in London as recently as the late 1700s. Despite the restoration of most Catholic civic rights in the early nineteenth century, there was, and arguably still is, a feeling that Catholicism is something alien and perhaps even hostile, both among Protestant Christians and liberal atheists who associate Catholicism with anti-rational absolutism. This feeling manifests even in our time – the portrayal of Catholic Spain in the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and the TV series Gunpowder (2017) could be taken straight out of the sixteenth century anti-Catholic propaganda Foxe’s Book Of Martyrs.
Catholics, of course, are in a slightly different position. In a sense, we haven’t really been respectable in England since the sixteenth century.
That’s not to say we haven’t enjoyed a brief period of respectability, in our own way. Recently, there have been serious observant Catholics in high office, such as Ruth Kelly, Iain Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Some minor members of the Royal Family, like the Duchess of Kent and her son Lord Nicholas Windsor, have converted. Catholic artists like the writers Evelyn Waugh and the composer James Macmillan have achieved prominence and influence. Furthermore, our bishops have had the ear of politicians.
But I think this period may be coming to an end. The generation who will take the reins of power in ten or twenty years’ time – my generation – are largely formed in a culture where the moral commitments of Christianity are regarded as socially damaging. They know next to nothing about the faith, far removed as they are from any personal experience of its practitioners. Theirs is not the gentle, sceptical, regretful atheism that became common after the world wars, but a fierce and intolerant creed that damns those that hold conservative values. Our feeble attempts to seek respectability will cut no ice with them, and we need to think about how the faith can survive their rule.
Niall Gooch is a regular contributor to Chapter House. He also writes for UnHerd.
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