Oh God, Our Help In Ages Past

Although I ferociously defend the place of Christianity in our national life, I do have misgivings about the role of the churches in Remembrance Sunday events, going back as those do to the War without which there would have been neither any Nazi Germany nor any Soviet Union, and encompassing as they do the War during which moral standards collapsed, after which came the Baby Boom, and the conclusion of which saw the handover of ancient Christian lands to a militantly atheistic tyranny.

During the First World War especially, the very considerable number of conscientious objectors was disproportionately motivated by Christianity of an unusual seriousness. The strong participation of the Free Churches, and perhaps above all of the Methodists, seems particularly odd, considering that no mention is ever, ever made of those who held fast to the Nonconformist pacifist tradition of Lloyd George himself during what was then the very recent Boer War, but who nevertheless did sterling, invaluable work as medical orderlies and other things.

Pope Benedict XV called for peace through a return to pre-1914 borders, which would have precluded both Hitler and Stalin. But Catholics never mention this, just as we never mention that there would have been no 1916 Rising, and thus no Irish Civil War. Ulster Protestants and their allies in Scotland, on the Conservative Evangelical wing of the Church of England, and elsewhere seem untroubled by the conflict that made possible the partition of Ireland, with its loss to the United Kingdom of much of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and Church of Ireland bourgeoisie, of a not inconsiderable section of Ulster Presbyterianism, and of the Protestant working class in Cork. Anglo-Catholic Socialist opposition is forgotten, even though it tied in very well then, and ties in very well now, with the position of the Papacy from and to which overtures are being made. And so one could go on.

Quakerism, Primitive Methodism, and both the "Western Use" (Tridentinising, yet often Communist) and "English Use" (Mediaeval reconstructionist, yet association with which was one of the reasons given by the Communist Party of Great Britain for the expulsion of the Trotskyists) schools of Anglo-Catholicism were founded by and for people profoundly unsatisfied by the standard civic religion of the English, to which Catholics have not belonged since the Reformation. All four were notable among opponents of the First World War, the Quakers entirely so, and all to that extent in agreement with the Pope. And all but the Quakers, as a body rather than as individuals, were totally committed to the doctrinal and moral essentials of classical, historic, mainstream Christianity, and to the Augustinian patrimony of the West, making both the Marxist and, from the Twenties onwards, Fascist tendencies within Anglo-Catholicism all the more tragic.

Because, of course, that orthodoxy can never be reduced to, though it must certainly form the constantly corrective basis of, the civic religion of the English or anyone else. It is the most radical force in Western civilisation - literally so, since it constantly calls back that civilisation to its roots in and as the Biblical-Classical synthesis in Christ and His Church. Indeed, it is the most radical force in the world. Or it is nothing. And it was certainly something during the First World War. Truly a lesson for our own times.

Does anyone know of a monument to, for example, the Friends' [Quaker] Ambulance Brigade, or the Friends' War Victims' Relief Committee? There really ought to be one. Unveiled by the Queen. Perhaps in 2014? Or is that too long to wait?