THE sight of Sandi Toksvig in a chasuble celebrating the marriage of Björn from Abba to his latest wife caused me to wonder what the Church of England is for. If all that’s required to recognise a marriage is uplifting platitudes delivered from inside wonderful embroidery, no wonder the Church can’t compete.
Perhaps the country churches threatened with closure should simply hang up a set of vestments in the porch with an honesty box for any celeb who wants to make use of them. After all, humanists are always scrupulous about acknowledging their debts to Christianity.
It is, of course, possible that the Church has other functions, but no one seems clear about what they are.
IF HUMANISM is a sort of Anglican afterlife, even more dependent on a particular ordering of society than the Church of England was, what are we to make of American progressivism, a sort of anti-Christian nationalism, forever horrified to catch a glimpse in the mirror of its evil twin, Christian nationalism, a term that carries to the American Left all the terror and horror that “woke” has for the Right?
Both factions take for granted that the United States is intended to be a light unto the nations, although they would point the light in diametrically opposite directions.
The latest edition of the magazine Mother Jones has a long exposé of a group that it calls the TheoBros, They don’t actually exist as an organised movement, but it is a sound journalistic principle that you must name your enemies before you can shame them. “These often bearded thirty- and forty-somethings have suits that actually fit,” Kiera Butler writes. “They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers.
“Many . . . don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.”
Butler has found an entertaining monster in Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old who turned from the Jesus People to a form of Calvinism in the late 1980s. In his version, husbands should vote on behalf of their entire families, although single mothers would also have a vote. He has written that “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as in the slave states of the US before the civil war.
Yet he has appeared on a platform with three Republican senators and J. D. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential candidate.
PERHAPS the explanation is to be found in Simon Kuper’s brief piece for the Financial Times on the South African roots of some of the richest and so most influential figures on the American Right, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk among them.
Kuper is one of the shrewdest commentators on the cultural aspects of politics, and, though he did not himself grow up in South Africa, he has relatives there, whom his family used to visit during the apartheid years. “We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories.
“Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was.
“The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites. Trump’s recent claim about ‘American girls being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage criminal aliens’ preyed on similar white fears.”
Thiel wrote in 1995 that “There are almost no real racists . . . in America’s younger generation.” But, three decades later, Kuper observes, Thiel and his fellow white South African emigrants are “backing a white Republican ticket that peddles made-up stories about Black immigrants from Haiti eating pets. The opposing Democrats are fielding a Black presidential candidate for the third time in five elections. The racial aspect of politics is almost as plain as it was in South Africa.”
I read this, and remembered Ayaan Hirsi Ali closing her remarks at a recent book launch with the news that European civilisation was threatened by “Islamism and wokeism”. It might seem that these are ideologies entirely opposed to one another, but, in Hirsi Ali’s world-view, they work together. “Wokeism” weakens the will to resist Islamism. Only by resisting both, she believes, can Europe save its Christian soul.
We are going to hear these tunes in many different arrangements in the coming years.