Upside Down?

On education, drugs and a number of other issues, Melanie Phillips is a vitally important voice. Making it all the more unfortunate when (as when Polly Toynbee spoils her work on social justice and economic inequality by issuing some rant against religion, monarchy or both) she goes off on one, as she has now been doing regularly for a number of years, and as she does at length in The World Turned Upside Down.

However, I would like to draw attention to three features of that book. One is that much of it could almost have been written by the more Romantic sort of Catholic paleocon, or Anglo-Catholic paleocon of yesteryear. She seems to believe in the importance, indeed the centrality, of a Judeo-Christian tradition which does not in fact exist. Much of what she writes, almost boilerplate stuff about the historical and cultural importance of Christianity, is simply not true, as a matter of fact, of Judaism, the role of which in Western civilisation, though in many ways no less significant, is quite, quite different.

The second, not unconnected to the first, is that her enthusiasm for Intelligent Design exhibits a strikingly un-Judaic interest in pure theology, which the rabbis have overwhelmingly regarded as not so much the wrong answers as the wrong questions. Not that I have much time for Intelligent Design, a warmed-up Deism devised by scientists and lawyers who are too arrogant to ask the sort of clergy who are appointed to parishes or congregations containing lots of scientists and lawyers.

And the third is her increasingly famous or infamous attribution of everything on the neoconservative hate list to anti-Semitism. Now, this blog is no great fan of several of those things, either. But environmentalism is a product of anti-Semitism? Come on! However, just as we see the wildfire spread of Islam among Afro-Caribbean young men and among deep-thinking middle-class girls, as well as the sixty thousand and more Muslims already classified as White British, might we also see conversion of neoconservatives to some sort of Judaism, on the grounds that everything against which they define themselves is really anti-Semitic, and that "the philosophical, theological and ethical resources of Judaism", or some similar form of words, provide the necessary weapons against those things?

I say "some sort of Judaism", because Phillips is a member of a Reform synagogue, has not been above ridiculing Steven Rose's Orthodox upbringing on The Moral Maze, and, as set out above, has theological and related historical interests that are not much to do with historic Judaism at all. I may be wrong, but I very much doubt that she keeps kosher, at least outside her home, or that she uses no electrical appliance between sunset on Friday and sunset on Saturday. Those who declared themselves Jews in order to provide a spiritual or ritual framework for their neoconservatism are most unlikely to trouble the Orthodox, or indeed to be troubled by them. But they and the average Reform rabbi or congregant are hardly each other's obvious best fits, either.

So, where will they go? Will we be seeing new, Phillipsian synagogues springing up? Contrary to what is often assumed or asserted, that sort of entrepreneurial, bottom-up, and in a purely non-pejorative sense eccentric religious experiment is very, very much a recurring feature of this country's history. We are due a few more. This could very well be one of them.