Saturday 17 April 2010

The Protestant Anglophone Tradition

In another forum, I have been told that my "Christian Democratic" views are alien to this thing. Well, looking at those English-speaking countries (a small minority of the total) presumably meant by my interlocutor, I can see only three explicitly Protestant political movements of any note.

One is in Northern Ireland, and the other two are in the United States, where one of them is white and the other is black. None of them is socially liberal, to say the least. All three are in favour of public spending generous to the point of lavishness, provided that it is on their own respective constituencies; if the price of this is the same for certain others, who are very often Catholics, then that price is paid, if not gladly, then at least in full. All three simply presuppose the capacity of the several layers of government to do both economically populist and socially conservative things, identifying that as axiomatically the whole point of governmental institutions.

It was ever thus. Those very Protestant Tories, Shaftesbury and Wilberforce, used the full force of the State to stamp out abuses of the poor at home and slavery abroad, both of which are now well on the way back in this secularised age. Victorian Nonconformists used the Liberal Party to fight against opium dens and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, both of which have now returned in full. Temperance Methodists built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme.

Economic and social libertarianism is not the Protestant Anglophone tradition, and ought not to present itself as such.

2 comments:

  1. Good point. If I am not mistaken, a good number of Continental Christian Democrats looked to the British Labour Party for inspiration. Alas, even the Continental Christian Democrats these days are not what they used to be.

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  2. Not an inspiration, exactly. But there was certainly a community of interest between them and many Labour figures back when the Labour Party was still the Labour Party, which was always said to "owe more to Methodism than to Marx". Or, as some of us would have it, nothing to Marx. That movement also had a strong Catholic tendency.

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