Christian consensus on social teaching

The bishops of the Church of England are entirely right to say that the general election campaign this year lacks any sense of vision for the future of Britain. Their pre-election statement entitled “Who is my Neighbour?” exposes the moral bankruptcy of modern politics and pleads for something better and more noble, to reverse the trend of cynicism and selfish individualism, and restore a sense of engagement, community and public service.

At least from the Conservative side, their intervention has not been well received. It is striking how remarks that would have seemed platitudinous 30 years ago are now regarded as provocative. But one thing is very different from what the established Church was saying in the 1980s. Then, its social doctrine was largely derived from Archbishop William Temple, an architect, though he did not live to see it, of the postwar consensus. “Who is my Neighbour?”, on the other hand, is infused with ideas originating in Catholic Social Teaching. This document marks the arrival of an official Anglican social doctrine that is fully congruent with, and largely inspired by, such papal encyclicals as Caritas in Veritate of 2009. Human dignity and the common good are at its heart; solidarity and subsidiarity are in the air it breathes.

For example “Who is My Neighbour?” picks two critical moments from recent political history as being Clement Attlee’s election victory in 1945 and Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979. The first represented the idea that it was the intervention of the state that could bring about national salvation; the second, the idea that salvation lay in free-market forces. Either way, it has not worked out. The bishops observe that we have begun to resemble the Britain deplored by the Victorian Conservative leader, Disraeli: “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.” It is hardly surprising the Tories are uncomfortable with the bishops’ message.

This binary choice between state and market is a false one, the bishops say, not least because it leaves out civil society, which is where communities become more humane and individuals more virtuous. Or as Caritas in Veritate puts it, “The exclusively binary model of market-plus-state is corrosive of society …” These ideas are all now part of a new broad Christian consensus. This is indeed an important moment, at least as significant as the publication of “The Common Good” document by the Catholic bishops in 1996.

A text of just over 11,000 words cannot dot every “i” and cross every “t” and it is necessarily light on policy. But policies follow from the vision: they do not create it. And the principles of a good, just and fair society that the text sets out are themselves that vision.

This is where the document is more devastatingly a critique of Labour’s approach to the election. It should have been doing in opposition what the Anglican bishops have done now. It seems to have forgotten, as the Authorised Version tersely puts it (Proverbs 29: 18): “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”