Habits and culture of allegiance: the case for a contemporary High Church political theology
These words from the Catechism (of 1662, retained in the Church of Ireland BCP 1926 and 2004) - words which are too embarrassing for many contemporary Anglican catechisms - came to mind when reading Reformed theologian Alastair Roberts's recent post 'Wisdom and Folly in Christian Responses to Coronavirus'. Outlining "a number of fundamental principles of a Christian account of wisdom", Roberts entitles one of these principles 'The wise honour and submit to authorities':
If we lacked such authorities, our capacity to act in terms of wisdom would be greatly curtailed. When each man does what is right in his own eyes, he can only act with any degree of wisdom within the horizons of his own sight. However, in a society with good authorities, it is much easier to order people’s actions towards wise and good ends. And everyone can be freer as a result. Reliable food safety laws, for instance, free me to eat my meal with a measure of confidence that would not be possible in a society without effective and wise authorities supervising such matters for their citizens.
The wise recognize the limits of their own vision and the importance of submission to authorities that can extend the scope of reality to which their actions are well-ordered.
What happens when the authorities are unwise or foolish?
... even when faced with deeply imperfect authorities, the wise recognize the importance of submission. Such submission need not require agreement or unquestioning compliance. There are submissive ways to raise questions and concerns, to appeal to authorities, or to negotiate with them. Such submissive interaction with authorities will also tend to bring the true character of the authorities into clearer focus. The wise desire to understand the reasons for the obligations laid upon them by authority, but they are humble enough not to require such reasons for recognizing the legitimacy of the authority and their need to submit to it. The loss of authority over us, and the rise of a situation where everyone does what is right in their own eyes, is ripe for folly.
The use of 'submission' will, of course, raise heckles for being a throwback to a hopelessly out-dated political theology, entirely inappropriate for a liberal, democratic age.
Except that the liberal, democratic age is fraying, unable to articulate a meaningful account of government beyond soulless technocracy. Heightened partisanship, the dynamics of social media, the credence given to conspiracy theories, and declining levels of trust in political institutions further expose the weaknesses of the liberal order and the disordering of the polity and thus of our common life.
It is because the liberal order has abandoned - and often sought to undermine - the very cultural allegiances and habits which sustained it. As George Grant brilliantly highlighted in English-Speaking Justice, contractual liberalism was, over centuries, dependent upon "that moral sustenance" provided by the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish traditions. The liberal order's dependence on these "older sources" has meant that its increasingly intense critique and rejection of them leaves that order without a substantive understanding of justice - and without any account of allegiance.
Which brings us back to the Catechism defining the call to love of neighbour to include the duty "To honour and obey the Queen, and all that are put in authority under her: To submit myself to all my governors". Or, in the words of the Catechism in the PECUSA BCP 1789 (less than a decade after the end of the Revolutionary War), "To honor and obey the civil authority". Roberts's quotation from Oliver O'Donovan's The Ways of Judgment illustrates how this serves the common good:
Where authority is, freedom is; and where authority is lost, freedom is lost ... To be under authority is to be freer than to be independent.
In a further section not quoted by Roberts, O'Donovan continues:
Faced by some government official who behaves discourteously and issues foolish instructions, only a reflective belief engendered by civic virtue will instruct us to see his office as a service of the common good. Undisciplined responses oscillate between two poles: ogling fascination with political leadership on the one hand, angry resentment on the other.
These words give a rather good description of the contemporary unravelling of the liberal order, as "ogling fascination with political leadership" and "angry resentment" confront one another and inevitably oscillate in heated Twitter exchanges.
Against this, is the Catechism's call - rooted in Scripture and Christian teaching across the centuries - for submission to the civil authority in order to serve the common good. This brings me to a particular Anglican form of this call, the High Church tradition's political theology often associated with the terms 'passive obedience and non-resistance'. Rather than being a political theology abandoned in 1688, J.C.D. Clark has shown that it continued to be the defining feature of a vibrant and popular High Church political theology throughout the 18th century, rebutting Locke's mythical state of nature and his contractual theorising. To give one rather famous example of this teaching, Jonathan Boucher's 1775 sermon 'On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance' declared:
it is our duty not to disturb and destroy the peace of the community, by becoming refractory and rebellious subjects, and resisting the ordinances of God ... It is by being included within the pale of civil polity and government that [the individual] takes his rank in society as a free man ... liberty is not the setting at nought and despising established laws - much less the making of our own wills the rule of our actions, or the actions of others - and not bearing (whilst yet we dictate to others) the being dictated to, even by the laws of the land; but it is the being governed by law ... The more carefully well-devised restraints of law are enacted, and the more rigorously they are executed in any country, the greater degree of civil liberty does that country enjoy.
Against both "ogling fascination with political leadership" and "angry resentment", here is an account of allegiance and civic virtue which seeks the peace of the polity and promotes the commonweal. Nor is it servile. As Boucher states, "it is your duty to instruct your members [of representative assemblies] to take all the constitutional means in their power to obtain redress", which therefore ensures that robust political debate occurs. Such debate, however, is underwritten by allegiance to the constitutional order - passive obedience and non-resistance - ensuring that our common life is not overwhelmed by disorder, fear, and conflict. This is an outworking of the call - the duty - to love our neighbour.
The commitment of classical Anglicanism to the peace and well-being of the commonwealth and its ordered liberty has a pronounced contemporary significance. In a discontented, embittered era, with a crumbling liberal order, incapable of providing a meaningful account of why we should share a common life bound by a common allegiance, there is a profound need for a culture of civic virtue which promotes the habits of allegiance in service of the common good, for love of neighbour. Here is the relevance of that Old High Church political theology, restated for this age. It would, no doubt, rather surprise a Reformed theologian like Roberts that his thinking is here invoked in support of a retrieval of High Church political theology but - because of a shared recognition of the teaching of Scripture and a common Augustinian framework - there are key similarities. This being so, we can use Roberts's words to show our need for the habits and culture of allegiance, habits and culture which High Church political theology particularly nurtured and promoted:
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