Harvest Thanksgiving in a (post)secular age

Two thirds (67%) of respondents say that there is still value in children participating in Christian Harvest Festivals today, including approaching two thirds (63%) of respondents from other faiths, and nearly three fifths (57%) of those who do not associate with a religion.

Only just over a tenth of those polled (13%) see no value in participation.

The commentary is from a recent Church of England statement on an opinion poll examining the attitudes of parents regarding their children participating in Christian Harvest Festival services. The continued resonance of Harvest Festival is an example of the considerable nuance that is necessary in describing British society as 'secular'. It also highlights the curious dislike for Harvest that can be found amongst particular types of Anglican clerics, a discomfort with agrarian imagery, and with the cohesive communities associated this imagery. Evangelicals, Anglo-catholics, and liberals can all alike be dismissive of the folk piety of Harvest Thanksgiving, regarding it as distracting from more 'prophetic' understandings of the Church.

Why does Harvest Festival continue to resonate? Part of the reason may be that the folk piety associated with it points to a social and communal vision recognised as more compelling and attractive than the current social order and its discontents. In an article discussing the future of the UK Labour Party, Blue Labour thinker Paul Embery has stated:

Labour will only win again when it offers a programme that combines its entirely laudable policies for a fairer economy alongside a social agenda that recognises the sense of cultural fragmentation and deracination brought about by globalisation, and seeks to build in its place a new, post-liberal politics of communitarianism. In short, it needs to marry its economic radicalism with a return to the politics of belonging.

Economic radicalism and the politics of belonging: both can be seen in Harvest Festival. It is the very agrarian traditionalism of Harvest Thanksgiving which contributes to an implicit, perhaps often overlooked, economic radicalism. The practice of Harvest Thanksgiving cannot sit easily beside the casual acceptance of poverty, wage slavery, or the concentration of ownership amongst the few. The hardy yeoman farmer of Harvest imagery is, then, an icon of Distributism, standing in stark - radical - contrast to the contemporary economic order described by Red Tory Phillip Blond:

This type of free market ... has effectively stripped the poor of capital, converted them into a new serfdom and gradually increased the number of that class by debt and low wages.

As for the politics of belonging, almost certainly the communitarianism of Harvest Thanksgiving contributes to the festival's popularity. 'We' give thanks for the shared, common blessing of harvest, amidst a social and cultural context in which a sense of 'we' has both been lost and yet also yearned after. Harvest Festival offers a glimpse of a response to what John Milbank has described as "the need to forge a common life amidst an atomised society whose foundations are fragmented", and does so through a celebration of common dependence and common blessing.

And all of this is brought together in the parish church, where place, community, and commons are manifested within the economy of gift and blessing, grace and gratitude. Thus understood, it is not then too difficult to grasp why Harvest Festival can have such resonance in what is perceived to be a secular society: it is resonant precisely because it embodies a vision of human flourishing desired by but absent from a society shaped by economic and cultural norms hostile to a moral economy and the experience of place and belonging.

There is a familiar story here. Traditional Anglican practices which can have a significant contemporary resonance, responding to contemporary desires for a more compelling and attractive account of human flourishing than that offered by our prevailing social and economic order, are too easily and often disregarded within the Church in the search for something deemed more relevant, yet utterly lacking in popular resonance (the abstraction that is 'Creation Season' being a rather painful example of this). Harvest Thanksgiving should be confidently and meaningfully celebrated, with a recognition that its radical traditionalism/traditional radicalism can embody a social teaching to answer our present cultural discontents.

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