This is an excerpt of a talk given by Jenny Sinclair, Founder & Director of Together for the Common Good, at Southwell Minster, Nottingham. You can link to the full text at the end of the article.
A country is like a body. If one part is wounded and angry, it is not wise to ignore it, and if it is repressed, the whole body grows sick.
I don’t say this to provoke guilt or fear. I say it because we avoid uncomfortable truths at our peril. Facing reality is in all our interests.
I’ve been asked to speak about Christianity, politics and the common good. You may expect a winsome talk on togetherness and community, a call to disagree well, perhaps, or to support local welfare projects.
Well — not exactly.
Some of what I want to say may challenge you, so let me warn you now. I believe we are in the midst of a deep unravelling.
And a vision of the common good offered without an honest diagnosis risks becoming part of the delusion it is meant to cure.
Where I’m coming from
Let me tell you a little about where I’m coming from.
I grew up in an Anglican household. My father was David Sheppard, Bishop of Liverpool. His partnership with the Catholic Archbishop, Derek Worlock, and other church leaders became well known through the instability and unemployment of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The language of church, justice and politics was the soundtrack of my childhood.
But I was a rebel, much more interested in Liverpool’s music scene. In my early twenties, while I was estranged from the church, my father was at the height of his mission. In 1983 he published Bias to the Poor, in 1984 he gave the Dimbleby Lecture, The Other Britain, and in 1985 he was one of the driving forces behind the C of E report Faith in the City.
In my mid-twenties I had a conversion experience, to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I was received into the Catholic Church.
Failings on left and right
Later, in 2011, I sensed that something was going badly wrong in our country: the politics of left and right were both failing, and the churches didn’t seem to be able to respond adequately. Out of that, by God’s grace, came Together for the Common Good, a small charity working across the Christian traditions for spiritual and civic renewal.
My lens is Catholic social thought, which I regard as the most coherent theological frame we have for reading the world. It is rooted in Scripture and trains us to look at what is happening to the human being, across the whole of life: family, work, capital and labour, the state, local institutions, war and peace.
It is non-partisan, both radical and conservative. It is also incompatible with the identity politics that has lately hijacked the language of social justice.
The neo-liberal revolution
My diagnosis is that over the last half century we have lived through a revolution. In its modern political form it began around 1979 under Thatcher and Reagan. It was deepened by the Blair government, and continued by governments of both parties since.
Some have named it neoliberalism, usually understood as a purely economic phenomenon: markets, privatisation, deregulation. But it was far more than that.
It was a philosophy with economic and social outworkings, on the right and the left, reaching deep into our families, our neighbourhoods, our institutions, our sense of who we are.
Because its true nature was never grasped, most of us didn’t notice how much was changing. It became the sea in which we swim.
Hyper-liberalism
Its animating idea is an extreme strain of liberalism: best described as hyper-liberalism.
Let me be fair: in its moderate form, liberalism has done real good, in civil rights, in protecting the individual against discrimination.
But at its core, hyper-liberalism holds a particular idea of freedom: freedom from constraint. Taken to its logical conclusion, that becomes freedom from family, from religion, from place, country and borders, from history. Then from God.
In the end, freedom even from human nature – and from reality itself. And a culture that seeks freedom from reality will, in the end, be unable to recognise it.
Misunderstanding humanity
The trouble is that this rests on a false anthropology – a mistaken idea of what a human being is. Its picture is the “unencumbered self”: the autonomous individual, isolated and self-authoring, a bundle of preferences and rights competing in a marketplace. It is a desiccated, soulless idea of the person.
The Christian story begins somewhere completely different.
We are made in the image of a God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, an eternal communion of persons. A creature made in his image cannot, at root, be a solitary actor. We become fully ourselves only in relationship with one another and with God.
As Catherine of Siena put it, God deliberately did not give everything to any one person, “so that we may be constrained to practise charity towards one another.”
Political blind-spots
Politically, hyper-liberalism produced a blind spot on both sides.
The Right correctly blames our moral unravelling on excessive liberalism, but gives the neoliberal economy a free pass.
The Left correctly blames inequality on that economy, but embraces unlimited self-actualisation and calls it “progressive”.
Both were captured by versions of the same dogma, and the result was a consensus we can call progressive globalisation. It offshored our industries and called the wreckage “progress”.
It required the free movement of capital and labour, and a low-wage model to go with it. Whole communities were told that their rootedness, their loyalty and their skills were obstacles to be overcome.
That is a politics of abandonment – a breach of the common good. And a philosophy that works against the grain of who we really are carries the seeds of its own undoing, and it is unravelling now, all around us.
Read the rest of Jenny’s talk: Christianity, Politics and the Common Good
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