Accession Day and political theology in the postliberal era

... it was a vote against all that liberalism has wrought and all that liberalism has brought: a world of rampant social, economic, and cultural insecurity.

This is how Red Tory thinker Phillip Blond has summarised recent years in UK politics, beginning with the Brexit referendum and leading to December's general election.  The liberal order of Free Market and Autonomous Individual has made a cultural desert and called it peace.  This has provoked a search for solidarity, evident in the politics of Left and Right over the last decade.  While the desire for solidarity is affirmed in the classical Christian political theology of Augustine, Thomas, and Hooker,  it is also recognised that solidarity within the polity can be a disordered love. This means that the current political and cultural context also carries with it the potential of grave spiritual dangers.  The empty banality of the liberal order can, in other words, be replaced by fouler, darker visions.

Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

Blond, therefore, warns that those of us desiring "a postliberal order" must ensure "that it is not founded in the sectarianism of race, place, or class". What is required is an account of what George Grant called "denser loyalties", offering a vision of polity, allegiance and solidarity not defined by the dark discourse of the ideologies of Far Left and Far Right.

I write this on Accession Day, the yearly commemoration of Her Majesty the Queen ascending to the Throne on this day in 1952.  A Form of Prayer for the day, containing propers for Mattins, Evensong and Holy Communion, plus a service of prayer and thanksgiving to be elsewhere on the day, is found in the CofE's BCP 1662 (also used in the CinW), the CofI's BCP 1926, and the Scottish Prayer Book 1929.  The Canadian BCP 1962 also provides propers for Accession Day.

To celebrate Accession Day is to proclaim a rich political theology, a vision of the realm and its common good embodied in the monarch, recognised as gift of grace, as vocation, as an ordering of the polity away from "unhappy divisions ... hatred and prejudice", and towards "godly union and concord" (words from 'A Prayer for Unity' used on this day).  As John Milbank has said, "the legitimacy of the civil realm is still officially dependent upon the anointing of the monarch".  The monarch, in other words, is a sign of how the polity is called by the Triune God to be a community of solidarity.  'A Prayer for Unity' beautifully illustrates this by setting before us the Church's call to unity as the unity in which the polity is also called to participate:

Take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatsoever else may hinder us from godly union and concord: that, as there is but one Body, and one Spirit, and one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.

To quote again from Milbank:

a realm ... still in theory gathered together only because of the gathering of humanity as such in love.  And this universal gathering can ... only be variously realized in specific places.

This is also given expression in how the Prayer Book liturgies pray for the monarch at each Mattins and Evensong, and in the Prayer for the Church Militant at Holy Communion.  The simple petition, each morning and evening, O Lord, save the Queen, points to our common life in the polity - embodied in the monarch - flowing from and called to return to God.  (The Prayer Book tradition offers a similar political theology for those polities which are republics.)

In other words, at a time of great cultural upheaval in seeking after a thicker account of solidarity than the exhausted liberal order can envisage, classical Anglican liturgy contains a rich political theology, particularly evident in the celebration of Accession Day.  What is more, it is a political theology that can address the post-liberal dilemma outlined by Blond, the need for solidarity without the sectarianism of race, place, or class.  It gives an account of allegiance, of gift and vocation within the polity, that provides a foundation for solidarity contra 'blood and soil' nationalism or class war.

The irony - perhaps even tragedy - is that at this time of cultural searching the contemporary liturgies most widely used by Anglicans in this realm and in Canada have largely abandoned such prayer for the monarch and the vision of the polity caught up within it.  What is striking about most contemporary Anglican liturgies is that they do not contain a political vision - meaning, then, that they appear to collude with the passing liberal order while also failing to provide a meaningful alternative to darker visions of solidarity.

Perhaps this should not be surprising.  Contemporary liturgies, after all, have been written in the liberal era, inevitably reflecting its assumptions.  With the liberal order exhausted, its failures exposed, such liturgies are incapable of pointing us to the classical Christian political theology of Augustine, Thomas, and Hooker, the political theology which shaped the Prayer Book tradition, the political theology which can offer an account of solidarity for a post-liberal era.  It is the liturgies of the Prayer Book tradition, then, which are most relevant and resonant at a time such as this.