CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIBERALISM

OMETIMES IT IS helpful to look back at the journey we have been travelling in this country. One pattern emerging is that, just as the Conservatives of the 1980s embraced economic liberalism, so the Labour Government of the last few years has allowed the cultural and social liberalism of the 1960s finally to flourish. Meanwhile Labour, under Tony Blair, has embraced economic liberalism and the Conservatives, under David Cameron, are now busily embracing social liberalism. No wonder life is presently difficult for the Liberal Democrats: apart from anything else, the larger parties have raided their pantry. In the Foreword to February's edition of the monthly magazine Prospect, the editor, David Goodhart, offers an intriguing analysis of where we are. 'Just as all the mainstream parties adopt social liberalism', he writes, 'the national agenda is focusing on duty, community and stability as a counterweight to that liberalism: the "respect" legislation, school discipline, ID cards, ident ity and Britishness'. A recent edition of The Observer (29th January), illustrating the new unease with liberty and licence, led with a story about women wanting the abortion laws to be tightened up.

The Church, as always, gets mixed up with the prevailing culture. We have duly developed our own Thatcherite tendencies: parishes increasingly will have to pay up or shut down; ordinands and clergy increasingly have to 'get on their bikes' as they look for work. Always a bit behind, we are still busy with the agenda of the 1960s: 'the decade', as Goodhart says, ' that sharply eroded authority and constraint, abolished capital punishment, introduced child-centred education, saw the headlong decline of organised religion, legislated for gender and race equality, legalised gay sex, and made divorce easier'. The bits of the Church that are growing have moved ahead of all this: 'duty, community and stability', 'respect', 'discipline' and 'identity' are exactly what the more demanding and thriving congregations expect of their members.

The lessons for us are surely clear. First, national agendas are not an unfolding manifesto for the Kingdom of God: there is good and bad in cultural and social liberalism; there is good and bad in economic liberalism; there is good and bad in 'duty, community and stability', 'respect', 'discipline' and 'identity'. Second, we need to keep up: so many of the Church's preoccupations are simply out of date. Third, we 'traditionalists' are not conservatives - let alone conservationists - but radicals. To put it briefly (and perhaps entirely obscurely!) our model of the Church, like that of Pope Benedict, is Augustinian. The Church of tomorrow will be sleeker and smaller; more committed, more orthodox; keener to be the leaven than the lump; truly a 'peculiar people' (I Peter 2: 9 Authorised Version) with a 'peculiar' lifestyle.

May God bless us as we seek to serve God amidst - and despite - the culture (indeed cultures) within which we live.

+ Andrew Ebbsfleet



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