Pray for the Christian heart of Europe
Pizza Express, Café Rouge, La Tasca. In this countr y we love European food but we don’t seem to like Europeans telling us what to do. At least, that’s how it sounds if you listen to the Prime Minister’s speech on the European Union last week.
We’re happy to drink French wine, sunbathe on Spanish beaches and try to cook the Italian way, but when it comes to European directives, we’re British to the core.
How the tables have turned for our main political parties.
Forty years ago it was Labour under Harold Wilson that had a divided Party over Europe and now it’s the Conservatives. While Euro-sceptic Margaret Thatcher never put our membership of the EU to a referendum, David Cameron feels the need to do just that.
Redefining our relationship with Europe comes just a few months after the Coalition announced a referendum in Scotland on whether to dissolve the Union with England and Wales. Just when marriage and identity are under the microscope like never been before, so is the identity of our nation.
What’s going on? Can more than 500 million people draw themselves together into ‘an ever-closer union’? Will it be possible to find enough shared identity and belief to bind us together? According to our politicians, not very much.
In the way that the EU has evolved over 60 years, the driving force has been to never repeat again the horrors of a European war. That’s a pretty strong driver and nobody wants to go back to conflict again.
However, as the decades pass and the EU widens to encompass 27 countries, there needs to be greater cohesive glue even than the memory of the Second World War. Knowing what we are against is a good thing, but it only takes us so far. What is the EU actually for?
Much the same question is at the heart of whether Scotland should go it alone as an independent state. Why stay together?
Surprisingly, the British Isles has retained a considerable amount of its ethnic identity over hundreds of years. The peoples called ‘the English’, or Anglos, occupied the south-east corner of these islands as far back as the early sixth century. Those who called themselves Britons populated the rest of the country, up to the Scottish Borders and the land of the Picts.
Even today it is possible to observe differences between those living in South East England and others in the north and west. For example, in all the celebrations for the Queen’s jubilee the unreported story was that the North of England was noticeably less enthusiastic in flag waving than the south. Many see the Royal Family as ‘southerners’. The north/south divide is nothing new.
The United Kingdom has faced the same challenge as the European Union, what binds us together?
For the UK it has not been a common geography, language, ethic gene pool, physical build or monarch that has upheld the Union. And, in any case, these appear to be weak in the face of calls by a sizable proportion of Scots today for full separation.
No, it is faith that has united us, the Christian religion. And as this wanes so does our shared history, our common identity and our aligned values and beliefs. In some, basic and essential way, we have been living in the heritage of Christian experience that has unified us in spite of our differences.
The architects of Europe make their work so much harder by diminishing or denying the shared Christian faith of its peoples. This has been little short of rewriting history to remove the legacy of the church in a way that our forebears would hardly recognise.
Of course we can understand why. The excesses of over-zealous Christians attacking each other in bloody wars has played right into the hands of those who would airbrush Christianity from our shared story. But a secular Europe is ill-equipped to unify the various ethnicities that fan out across the length and breadth of the Continent.
In David Cameron’s historic speech last week he held out the prospect of him campaigning heart and soul for a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum. The reference to the spiritual reality of the soul sits uncomfortably with the secularised way Europe talks about itself today.
Yet the biggest irony is this. If only Christianity and our shared history of faith were brought fully into the debate before us, the case for Europe could be put even more forcefully. And there would be less pressure to define our Union merely in secular terms of monetary and political union.
Seen though the lens of historic Christian teaching on the ‘common good’, debates about Europe could take on a much deeper and richer character; less about working time directives and more about the bonds of faith that stretch back for centuries.
So let’s raise a glass of French wine as we sit by a Spanish beach and eat our Italian pizza, because a lot more unites than many would believe.
No, it is faith that has united us, the Christian religion