Roger Scruton’s Church

In Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England, philosopher Roger Scruton sets out to defend the Anglican Church as a necessary fixture in English life. In this task he certainly succeeds, but along the way he grapples with many questions of faith that make one question if the Church is anything more than a cultural fixture, and if therefore it can truly speak truth to power in effecting positive social change.

Scruton defends not only a religion, and sometimes not even a religion, but a way of life. He speaks of “that peculiar Anglican dignity, which is the dignity of a people who can never witness a ceremony without thinking of the mess that will need clearing up afterwards.”

England, Scruton believes, “is a Christian country, regardless of whether it also a country of Christians.” The history, rites, institutions, and religious symbolism engraved in the very buildings all speak to this. It is quite literally written in stone. In one passage, Scruton humorously explains the necessity of accepting this fact because “Rites of passage are important… To think that politics can be conducted without reference to them, or that institutions that endorse them can be left to look after themselves, is to live in cloud-cuckoo land.”

The modern world has not been kind to the Church, and Scruton laments the harassment of Christians who wish to wear crucifixes to their place of work and the changes in worldviews that result in the reduction of marriage from sacrament to contract. The greatest problem with the modern world, he says, is “the loss of the habit of repentance.”

The answer for Scruton seems to lie in the peculiar form of “sacramental religion” that the Church of England has historically provided. It is a religion that through ritual and mystery consecrates the ordinary life of ordinary people. “A sacramental church,” he says, “is a place where people come to encounter God, to stand in his presence, and to look with renewed awe on the troubling fact of their own existence, and on the need to be in everyday life what they perforce must be in Church.”

Achieving this significance requires a respect for tradition that even the Church has lost. The declining number of Churches that perform Evensong, what Scruton calls “that most beautiful of Anglican services,” and the rise of revisions in the Prayer Book and new Bible translations are all exemplary of the Church losing a sense of other-worldliness. He reasons that “those who see the controversy over the Prayer Book as ‘merely aesthetic’ are right – except that the word ‘merely’ misrepresents what is finally at stake. We seek beauty for our own lives because we know that beautiful things are meaningful.” In one of my favorite lines, Scruton declares that “to describe the  new services as ‘alternatives’ to Cranmer is like describing Eastenders as an ‘alternative’ to Shakespeare, or Lady Gaga as an ‘alternative’ to Bach.”

It would seem that Scruton longs for the days when the Church of England was actually a distinctly Christian Church that is a meaningful part of English daily life. He is suspicious of the American Episcopalian Church’s mission to “move with the times, regardless of whether the times have much interest in moving with the Church.” However, there are passages in the work that appear contradictory to this conclusion, and would seem to undermine the mission of the Church

The philosopher is most famously known for his work as a conservative political thinker in the tradition of Edmund Burke and T.S. Eliot. However, unlike those men, whose Christianity brought them to conclude that civil society is good and necessary, it seems that Scruton’s belief in civil society has brought him to conclude that the Church is good and necessary.

According to Scruton, “any church must have two dominant duties: to inspire religious sentiment, and also to contain it.” A question that then arises, and one which Scruton himself notes, is whether the Church has proved so successful in the latter that it eliminates the existence of former. To illustrate this problem he points to the examples of John Wesley and John Henry Newman, who he calls the greatest apostles of Christ that the Church of England has produced, yet admits the Church was incapable of containing either of them.

The duty to constrain religion arises from the belief that nothing is more important to civil society than civil peace. Scruton traces this belief to Thomas Hobbes, who concluded that religion could prove a danger to civil peace, and that it therefore must be constrained by civil government. Scruton goes to on to confess that “Like Hobbes I remain attached to the idea of civil government and believe it to be superior in every way to the rule of priests.”

He further confesses that “The English know in their hearts that faith is in large part a human invention.” This view is given legitimacy by the Church’s very history, which, as Scruton points out, was born in controversy and has continued in such through the years. Indeed, the Church has often found itself on the wrong side of many issues. For a prominent example of this one need only think back to the mid-twentieth century, when the Church was largely sympathetic to communism while the atheist George Orwell stood as England’s greatest critic of the heresy.

For an orthodox Anglican, this brings into question the legitimacy of a Church that has so often been so wrong. Scruton’s explanation that such a religion is no more hypocritical than bad manners and is necessary for the nation state to call upon the loyalty of its citizens seems unsatisfactory. In all this, he seems to forget the words of his mentor, T.S. Eliot: “worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial.”

Scruton’s struggle is not without sympathy. The Christian knows it is his duty to embrace reality and that civil society, and therefore government, are necessary goods. This leads Christians to oppose the utopianism that springs from either end of the political spectrum. Scruton’s belief that society is a good to preserve is a wholly Christian one, but it can only be maintained by acknowledging the supremacy of the spiritual order which we are called to imitate in the temporal order. Without such recognition, we inevitably slide into a utilitarianism where the Church is merely a means to an end.

Scruton’s posture to the Church gives credence to the worst criticism of Burkeanism: that it is atheistic. G.K. Chesterton and Leo Strauss are the most famous proponents of the view that Burkeanism inevitably leads to the evolutionary view that society is supreme and always suited to its place in time and history. This is of course, a view Burke himself would and did deny, as evidenced by his belief that “Religion, to have any force on man’s understandings, indeed to exist at all, must be supposed paramount to laws, and independent for its substance on any human institution. Else it would be the absurdest thing in the world; an acknowledged cheat.”

Roger Scruton is the world’s preeminent conservative political thinker. I will continue to look to him for guidance and wisdom on such matters and will strongly recommend others do the same. However, in Our Church, Scruton confirms he is first and foremost a political philosopher who is concerned with the matters of this world. He has provided us with an often touching personal testimony and an insightful look into the history and mind of the English character. The work offers much advice that the modern world is desperately in need of hearing from the Church.

None of this criticism should cast doubt on Scruton’s personal faith. His work contains many beautiful lines that could only be penned by someone who is a  seeker of truth. He closes the work with the following paragraph:

“In the world in which we live, Christians are a marginalized and persecuted sect. It is an offence against political correctness to speak out for the Christian faith, just as it is an offence to declare one’s love of England and its inherited ways. But Christians are better fitted to endure this than most religious believers. Their model is a man who was ‘despised and rejected’, and although they are commanded to love their neighbor, they also know the person who commanded this was crucified long ago.”

It is doubtful, however, that a Church devoted to civil-peace above all else will follow the example of their Model. Such a Church is unlikely to produce Saints like Thomas Becket or Thomas More. It is even questionable if it can maintain that typical Anglican and stoic attitude that says to the world “You may go where you like. I shall not be moved.” As an Anglican who is well aware of his Church’s faults and who wears a pendant of St. More around his neck, that is a fact I greatly lament.