In advance of next week's Papal visit, reflections from Burke's Corner on how Catholic social teaching is reshaping British politics
Media coverage ahead of the forthcoming papal visit has been depressingly predictable. Secular Britain. Abuse scandals. Lack of interest. Celibacy. Beyond the banality of a headline-driven media, however,
Madeleine Bunting has drawn attention to how Catholic social teaching is reshaping British political thought in challenging ways:
Curiously, this tradition is feeding into British politics more directly than ever before – both the Red Tory Philip Blond and Labour's favourite new speechwriter Maurice Glasman acknowledge its influence.
Both Left and Right are being reshaped by thinkers influenced by the Anglican and Roman Catholic tradition of Catholic social thought. Blond has emerged from the mainly Anglican theological school of
Radical Orthodoxy, which has provided a rigorous critique of both neo-liberalism and statism emphasising subsidiarity and intermediary institutions. Blond, who has
readily acknowledged the influence of Catholic social thought, recently addressed
the Rimini conference, an influential gathering sponsored by the Roman Catholic lay movement 'Communion and Liberation'.
The father of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, theologian
John Milbank, has summarised the political sympathies of those associated with it:
Some within Radical Orthodoxy may follow Phillip Blond in his espousal of new British form of "Red Toryism". Others ... will follow my own brand of "Blue Socialism" - socialism with a Burkean tinge.
Which brings us to
Maurice Glasman, Director of the Faith and Citizenship Programme and senior lecturer in political theory in London Metropolitian University. Glasman has given definition to
'Blue Labour'. Just as Red Toryism has provided a critique of the Thatcherite legacy, so too Glasman's Blue Labour
critiques the statism and secularism of the Left:
You need faith communities, unions, families, local people with long-term relationships with each other, trying to live their lives without being commodified ... But for the Left the minute you mention family and faith, you are automatically considered to be reactionary.
And he has been explicit about the
role for faith traditions in shaping a post-liberal politics:
The pluralist constitution of cities means that they have to agree on common action but if that is so then the definition of the political agenda will challenge the prevailing liberalism of national citizenship. Issues of pornography and prostitution, faith schools and drugs, living wages and family values could move into the heart of urban politics. Communities of faith could yet redeem the lost promise of citizenship by pursuing the good of the community of fate to which we all, by necessity, belong.
When you place Glasman alongside Blond, you have the intellectual and philosophical framework to indeed reshape British politics. As
Milbank states:
What we have here is an attempt to work out in practice a Communitarian politics, but one which fully includes the economic dimension. A Communitarian versus Libertarian polarity is starting to disturb the dominance of the Left-versus-Right polarity at the heart of British politics.
Delivering the Left from its adoration of the State and social libertarianism, the Right from its idolatry of the Market and its economic libertarianism, Benedict, the Red Tories and Blue Labour hold the potential to reshape British politics in pursuit of the good society.
Originally posted on the communitarian conservative and postliberal Anglican blog Burke's Corner.