Among those who tick the White British box, regular churchgoing is negligible, and religious belief is now confined to a declining minority. Like the Soviet Union, the present reign will last about 70 years. But vanishingly few people who came of age in the last days of the Soviet Union did so as third generation atheists.
In these last days of the present reign, coming of age as a third generation atheist is the norm in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, the three Realms where the monarch remains Defender of the Faith. It is especially prevalent among those whose background is such that in Britain they would or do tick the White British box. The same is also true in Australia, where the monarch as Defender of the Faith lingered on until 1973.
That provides some context to such "culture war" as Britain might be having. The statues of slave traders are a failure in their own terms. If any broad body of people had known whom they depicted, then they would have come down a long time ago.
In an attempt to capitalise on their demolition, Boris Johnson has had to invent an entirely fictional threat to the statue in Parliament Square of one of the only two historical figures of whom his target audience had ever heard. By their salutes, that audience, such as it was, turned out to be made up of fans of the other one.
Beyond that, one side of this culture war is made up of small bands of self-styled protectors of statues of literary figures and what have you, again against absolutely no threat whatever. They are not marching for the hobbyhorses of certain Fleet Street columnists, most of whom do not themselves believe in private what they make a very good living from peddling in print. In this age of collapsing circulation, never ask where that living comes from.
That is the big difference between them and their counterparts on The Guardian, who are spectacularly wrong but who do at least believe what they are writing. On social and cultural matters, rather than on economic or foreign policy, right-wing commentators almost never believe a word of it, let alone live it out.
On the economic and foreign policy questions, there is of course no meaningful difference between them and something like the neoliberal and neoconservative Guardian. That has the circulation of a small provincial newspaper, which I suppose is how it might accurately be described these days. Again, then, never ask who is paying the salaries and the expenses.
But I digress. In their military surplus hats, since it is too terrifying to contemplate the possibility that the Defence of this Realm might ever in fact have been entrusted to such persons, the culture warriors are not fighting for any social or cultural policy that American or Continental conservatives might recognise. Since Britain had already left the EU by then, their ideal Britain is the one that existed on the day before the lockdown came into effect.
In social or cultural terms, American or Continental conservative objectives are exactly what they have charged themselves with defeating, initially in the form of Islam, and increasingly also in the form of the black churches. African Christianity is a rapidly emerging force in Britain, by no means only in the Pentecostal churches, although those are also growing exponentially.
An attempt to identify even with the name of the Reform Party of Canada would be wholly misplaced, since the proposed new party would have nothing like the Canadian's deep Evangelical Protestant roots. In fact, it would be be actively hostile to such politics. Any such potential British constituency would be far more likely to be found in and around Black Lives Matter.
In Britain, even white Evangelicals far more commonly look for authority to Asian, Latin American and, especially, African leaders, some of whom are Anglican archbishops, rather than to the leaders of white American Evangelicalism. In Britain, white Evangelicals were prominent in Jubilee 2000, and in the demonstrations against the Iraq War. They have remained a clear presence in the movements that have succeeded those.
In Britain, white Evangelicals have the strongest possible sense of identification with William Wilberforce and the struggle against the slave trade, as well as with the Victorian campaigns for factory reform, against child labour, and so on. There is nothing remotely comparable to the slightest sense of identification with the Confederacy, which is no small part of why white American Evangelical leaders have only limited influence in Britain, where white Evangelicals would say that their greatest temporal achievement was that they brought down slavery.
In Britain, predominantly white and predominantly black Evangelical communities routinely interact and overlap in ways that are still exceedingly rare in the United States, with everything that follows from that interaction. And in Britain, Evangelicals are a significant constituency within and across the older Protestant denominations that are still able to command a certain, if greatly reduced, level of cultural and political access.
Then there is Eastern Europeanisation, the Asianisation, the Latin Americanisation, and especially the Africanisation, of the Catholic Church here in the United Kingdom, where She is the single largest church in all four parts. That process is still young. But it is already evident, and it will become more so.
As will the shift in younger priests towards a robustly orthodox theology that has the radical economic and political consequences for which liberal theology has never been able provide an adequate basis. Those priests take a lot from the conservative and traditionalist movements in Catholic America. But they also know what to leave.
It is against the potential policy implications of such trends that the culture warriors are taking to the streets, insofar as they are. This is a culture war, of sorts. But it is not one that the Americans who coined the phrase would recognise. Quite the reverse, in fact.
If there is a similarity, then it is the fact that the liberal elite in politics and the media is despised equally, viscerally and ferociously by both sides. And since the fall of Jeremy Corbyn, no one in Britain any longer bothers with the American pretence that the liberal elite includes anything much less than the whole of national politics and the whole of the national media.
In these last days of the present reign, coming of age as a third generation atheist is the norm in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, the three Realms where the monarch remains Defender of the Faith. It is especially prevalent among those whose background is such that in Britain they would or do tick the White British box. The same is also true in Australia, where the monarch as Defender of the Faith lingered on until 1973.
That provides some context to such "culture war" as Britain might be having. The statues of slave traders are a failure in their own terms. If any broad body of people had known whom they depicted, then they would have come down a long time ago.
In an attempt to capitalise on their demolition, Boris Johnson has had to invent an entirely fictional threat to the statue in Parliament Square of one of the only two historical figures of whom his target audience had ever heard. By their salutes, that audience, such as it was, turned out to be made up of fans of the other one.
Beyond that, one side of this culture war is made up of small bands of self-styled protectors of statues of literary figures and what have you, again against absolutely no threat whatever. They are not marching for the hobbyhorses of certain Fleet Street columnists, most of whom do not themselves believe in private what they make a very good living from peddling in print. In this age of collapsing circulation, never ask where that living comes from.
That is the big difference between them and their counterparts on The Guardian, who are spectacularly wrong but who do at least believe what they are writing. On social and cultural matters, rather than on economic or foreign policy, right-wing commentators almost never believe a word of it, let alone live it out.
On the economic and foreign policy questions, there is of course no meaningful difference between them and something like the neoliberal and neoconservative Guardian. That has the circulation of a small provincial newspaper, which I suppose is how it might accurately be described these days. Again, then, never ask who is paying the salaries and the expenses.
But I digress. In their military surplus hats, since it is too terrifying to contemplate the possibility that the Defence of this Realm might ever in fact have been entrusted to such persons, the culture warriors are not fighting for any social or cultural policy that American or Continental conservatives might recognise. Since Britain had already left the EU by then, their ideal Britain is the one that existed on the day before the lockdown came into effect.
In social or cultural terms, American or Continental conservative objectives are exactly what they have charged themselves with defeating, initially in the form of Islam, and increasingly also in the form of the black churches. African Christianity is a rapidly emerging force in Britain, by no means only in the Pentecostal churches, although those are also growing exponentially.
An attempt to identify even with the name of the Reform Party of Canada would be wholly misplaced, since the proposed new party would have nothing like the Canadian's deep Evangelical Protestant roots. In fact, it would be be actively hostile to such politics. Any such potential British constituency would be far more likely to be found in and around Black Lives Matter.
In Britain, even white Evangelicals far more commonly look for authority to Asian, Latin American and, especially, African leaders, some of whom are Anglican archbishops, rather than to the leaders of white American Evangelicalism. In Britain, white Evangelicals were prominent in Jubilee 2000, and in the demonstrations against the Iraq War. They have remained a clear presence in the movements that have succeeded those.
In Britain, white Evangelicals have the strongest possible sense of identification with William Wilberforce and the struggle against the slave trade, as well as with the Victorian campaigns for factory reform, against child labour, and so on. There is nothing remotely comparable to the slightest sense of identification with the Confederacy, which is no small part of why white American Evangelical leaders have only limited influence in Britain, where white Evangelicals would say that their greatest temporal achievement was that they brought down slavery.
In Britain, predominantly white and predominantly black Evangelical communities routinely interact and overlap in ways that are still exceedingly rare in the United States, with everything that follows from that interaction. And in Britain, Evangelicals are a significant constituency within and across the older Protestant denominations that are still able to command a certain, if greatly reduced, level of cultural and political access.
Then there is Eastern Europeanisation, the Asianisation, the Latin Americanisation, and especially the Africanisation, of the Catholic Church here in the United Kingdom, where She is the single largest church in all four parts. That process is still young. But it is already evident, and it will become more so.
As will the shift in younger priests towards a robustly orthodox theology that has the radical economic and political consequences for which liberal theology has never been able provide an adequate basis. Those priests take a lot from the conservative and traditionalist movements in Catholic America. But they also know what to leave.
It is against the potential policy implications of such trends that the culture warriors are taking to the streets, insofar as they are. This is a culture war, of sorts. But it is not one that the Americans who coined the phrase would recognise. Quite the reverse, in fact.
If there is a similarity, then it is the fact that the liberal elite in politics and the media is despised equally, viscerally and ferociously by both sides. And since the fall of Jeremy Corbyn, no one in Britain any longer bothers with the American pretence that the liberal elite includes anything much less than the whole of national politics and the whole of the national media.
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