Faith, hope and charity
Frank Field
CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL SERVICE IN MODERN BRITAIN: THE DISINHERITED SPIRIT by Frank Prochaska OUP, £35, pp. 216, ISBN 0199287929 ✆ £28 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The issues raised here could not be more important to the future of British democracy. Frank Prochaska records the pivotal role of Christian societies in the growth of British democracy. Somewhat more contentiously he sees the attack on these bodies which coincided with the growth in state welfare as a cause of the decline in Christian affiliation. Prochaska then turns to a central concern of writers like Alex de Tocqueville on whether political freedom can long survive the rapid decline of religious associations. The subliminal message is that state welfare is not only responsible for a dependency culture but is undermining democracy itself. Wow.
Each part of this thrilling analysis should disturb the dreary complacency now engulfing the debate on the future of British democracy. Free speech is increasingly defined as if it were a one-way street flowing against the poor old Brits, but free speech was not a concept brought down perfectly developed from a political Mount Sinai. It was the product of hard work and, in particular, the establishment of a countless number of voluntary and largely Christian organisations possessing a common culture which built a thriving civil society. Here was the crucible in which free speech was formed.
It was in these societies that members learnt mutual respect, how to conduct debate, to compromise when making politi cal decisions, all of which resulted in developing a particular character ideal for citizenship. The vote was finally conceded in Britain because the old political elite accepted that, by operating a voluntary-based welfare state, the disenfranchised showed that they were already democrats running democratic institutions.
More contentious is Prochaska’s thesis that it was the extent of state welfare that helped bring about the decline of Christianity because, as the subtitle of the book declares, the spirit to do good was disinherited. This assertion will no doubt lead to much academic work as to whether state welfare stepped in because the voluntary impulse began to stumble or whether more structural forces were at work turning Europe’s most decentralised welfare system into one of which Stalin could have been proud.
Where Prochaska’s argument is unquestionably right is in the transformation of English religion from faith to works by the Evangelical Revival. One wag remarked that the Church of England survived because it knew how much religion the English would take, which was not very much. The joke misses the point. The English recommitted themselves to Christianity because it became a way of life lived out within the family and then the wider community through a whole myriad of voluntary welfare bodies. Here is another country largely unrecognised by today’s politicians.
When the voluntary Christian sector vibrantly dominated the scene, commentators like de Tocqueville questioned whether democracy could survive its demise. Ironically, as these organisations succumbed to state domination, such questioning, which becomes ever more urgent, is absent from today’s debate. This opens up a crude division between the vast majority of commentators who think that we British have democracy as part of our DNA, and those of us who believe that the democratic spirit and its underpinning by a positive idea of citizenship have to be worked at and remade each generation.
Prochaska is too well read not to know that England is still a nation of clubs and of joiners. But he is right to highlight how working people and others were building up a voluntary system of collective welfare before the big boots of the state came crashing on to the scene. It was through these organisations that Christianity was expressed and it was through these organisations too that individuals learned to honour the self-respect of other people which is the font of the democratic spirit.
Societies can decline over decades and survive without replenishing their social capital. But, as we are becoming aware, showing respect to others is not confined to an isolated exercise at the ballot box once every four years, but has to be lived out during each of those 1,400 or so days between elections by people who live in close proximity to and with each other.
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