We live within a covenant within a covenant. The covenant of Western liberalism arose, and could only have arisen, within the covenant that is Christianity. We have lived within the political and moral culture that is the product of Christianity for two or more centuries. We have got used it. So used to it that we have forgotten that there is a world outside it. For a long time it has been inconceivable to modern liberal thought that this liberalism might weaken, and have to fight for its life, and even come to an end and be replaced by other political cultures that are not liberal. It found it even harder to imagine that other cultures could see it but not wish to join it and become absorbed by it, that they could be repulsed by it, and fight it with the venom of someone fighting for his life, and that they could win and succeed in destroying this liberal political culture, and that they could do so quite easily because it was already quite hollow. For a long time, inside the tent of modern political culture, all has been temperate. No one now living has fought for his life, and no one wonders if he would fight and could fight if some fiercer culture suddenly appeared to make him do so.
Within our modern liberal culture there is another less liberal ‘culture’, recently expanded to fill much of the space so that we are nearly all trapped within it. This is the ‘culture’ of those who want to suppress Christian political culture. They attempt to suppress it by accentuating one aspect, and one set of tools, taken from Christianity, and direct it against all those other aspects and tools which constituted this Christian, and liberal, political culture. The ideologists of this newly totalitarian ‘liberalism’ temper their self-hatred by turning some of it on you. They decide that you are as hateful as they themselves, and the more they despise you the less hateful they find themselves. They employ tools that have evolved within the Christian political tradition against that tradition. They have set about demolishing the building they are squatting. No one dares ask where and how they intend to live when they have reduced our building to rubble, but it is clear that we will all be out in the open air, a much fiercer environment than we have ever met. Our anti-liberal liberals have reduced liberal culture to a set of rules, so that what was voluntary and consensual becomes imposed and homogenous. They turn what was a common mutual responsiveness into a series of commands issued by leaders to followers. And through media, and syllabuses in schools and universities, they suppress that those Christian-shaped habits and traditions, removing our memory of a culture that refused to bow to them.
The tent of late modern political culture that we have all shared has turned into the tent of the denial of Christian culture, and therefore of the dissolution and loss of this shared political culture. Nevertheless the political culture that remains does so only because it is the continuation of this excoriated Christian culture. The worship of the Church is the pump that creates the flow that maintains the pressure within the flapping tent of our common political culture. It sustains modern liberal culture even though that liberal culture has turned against it, and is now so taken up by hate that it is consuming itself. The balloon of our shared political life is deflating. Our political liberalism is failing. The conditions that sustained it are disappearing. When we regard ourselves as one people, we were united by a mysterious identity that we knew was not created but simply inherited by the present generation. But who is motivated to act for the public good of this divided and self-hating people now?
Why is this? Only because this political culture refuses to be renewed by the source that created it and until recently sustained it. Our liberal political culture has become an oxygen tent without oxygen. The populations of the West seem to become entombed within the place in which such life and freedom had been possible. It has turned into very opposite of what it once was. Long ago the atmosphere inside soured. Now there is only anoxia and suffocation for the populations whose mental life is trapped within the tent.
The source of modern political liberalism is the Christian public life and culture that comes from Christian public worship. Our political culture is not bound to die. It could at any time take a gasp of oxygen, revive, get up and throw off the parasites that in its weakness have attached themselves to it. ‘Take up your bed and walk,’ the Lord told the paralysed man. Now you can pick up your begging mat and leave your pitch forever, for you are free to go wherever you want. How is this possible? What has happened to this man? Simply, the Lord has arrived. The breath and spirit of the Lord enters the man, raises him to his feet so breaking the paralysis. The Word of the Lord is pure oxygen. Through the song and expirations of the worshipping Christian community this oxygen fills the paralysed body of our society and propels it to its feet. Christian faith and thanksgiving reanimates and restores us, so that our social and political functionality return, along with our ability to take each other seriously enough to live together in a commonwealth. But the Christian community must sing and worship in defiance of the powers and of the fears by which those powers hold whole peoples in bondage, and that community must lift up its voice and maintain its public presence against the whole fury of the dying culture around us.
