I want to make the argument that, not only do religious people have a right to engage in the political process but that, without religious people involved in politics, without the religious dimension being accepted as legitimate, the political process itself breaks down and inevitably corrupts. I want to make that argument by talking about ‘the transcendent’.

So what is ‘the transcendent’? Well, for my purposes here, I want to describe it simply as ‘that to which we are accountable’. In Christian terms, obviously, it is God, but the core understanding is in common across the different religious traditions. In all of them there is a sense that there is a higher authority than any person’s own particular judgement, and that the path of spiritual growth, of personal maturity, lies in learning to conform the individual will to that transcendence.

Where there is no such accountability – where there is no such sense of the transcendent – then there are no external brakes or restraints on the exercise of individual will. The political conversation devolves into a simple struggle for power, and whoever swings the biggest gun wins. This, it seems to me, accurately describes our existing political arrangements. We suffer from being governed by a class that, collectively, does not acknowledge any wider accountability. That is clearly not the case on an individual level – there are many religious people who exercise political authority – rather, it is a point about the cultural assumptions that dominate the political discourse as a whole. To bring this out dramatically, we only need to consider Alastair Campbell’s infamous ‘we don’t do God’ comment. We don’t do God; we don’t do the transcendent.

Why does there need to be such accountability? Surely I am not not arguing that those who accept the transcendent are somehow ‘better’ or ‘more virtuous’ than those who don’t? At an individual level, no. This is a red herring. Any one individual person may be more or less ethical and righteous, capable of acting honourably and without fear or favour. It is perfectly possible for the language of the transcendent to become empty, a way of disguising all sorts of internal horrors. Jesus said of the Pharisees that they were whitewashed tombs – the language of the transcendent was there, but the internal character that such language was supposed to reflect was markedly absent.

What I am wanting to focus on is the nature of the broader culture within which individuals operate. I believe that one sort of culture – one which acknowledges a role for the transcendent – allows for a different sort of political discourse, and a better sort, than one that does not. Take the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. People of good will can disagree on the merits of that particular decision, but was our dialogue helped or hindered by the absence of ‘doing God’? After all, the salient feature of our foreign policy environment since 9/11 is surely that we need to find a way to engage with and overcome those who ‘do God’ in a particularly virulent fashion. Is it possible to work out a way of engaging with Islamist terror without having a conversation about how and why such religious based terrorism is wrong? And can it be done without coming up with some alternative sense of the transcendent to set against that of the terrorists? I don’t believe so. After all, a specific part of the Islamist critique of our society, which they see as corrupt, soft and decadent, is precisely this loss of any sense of the transcendent, any sense that there is a higher authority than our own choices. They see this as a weakness, and they are emboldened by it.

What a sense of the transcendent allows for is the cultivation of a proper humility within our political culture, a sense that ‘we might be very wrong about this’. This is what seems to me to be most lacking. Our political culture seems to run on a tacit acceptance that the political contest is simply about different varieties of bureaucratic managerialism – a ‘we will run the business better than that lot’ sort of argument. So the political debates become ones about marginal efficiency, and the capacity to raise our long term growth rate by half a percentage point. The environment in which we now live – where there are existential questions for our nation to address, including the challenge of Islamist terrorism, the financial bankruptcy of our institutions, the exhaustion of natural resources – these are not challenges that can be met by managerialism!

Why is humility important? Humility is not self-abasement, it is not about being “ever so ‘umble”. It is about having a true recognition of our place in the world, of our own position and capacity – no more and no less. The language links with that of ‘humus’, that is, the earth. Those who are humble are earthed, they are well grounded in reality. In other words, those who are humble have, by definition, a more accurate understanding of the way that the world works. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. They are, therefore, as a direct consequence, better able to make good decisions, decisions that are more likely to have the intended effect. Those who lack humility are those who are misled about their place in the world; they therefore have a distorted understanding of reality; and they therefore make decisions accordingly.

A political culture which lacks a sense of the transcendent, therefore, lacks this capacity for humility. It will inevitably over-reach itself. It will believe that it has a greater capacity for influencing events than is the truth, and this will lead to increasingly dire consequences. For examples of this, simply read our devilish press. The political actors within such a system do what is right in their own eyes, and the nihilist zombies lead the lemmings over the cliff. Yes, lots of mixed metaphors there, but I’m sure you get the gist.

The revelations about government snooping and spying on our lives raise the question of how far we are entitled to have a private life, which the state is forced to respect and which it cannot breach with impunity. I believe that privacy is a foundational freedom. What do I mean by that?

Let me quote from the European Declaration of Human Rights, Article 8, which comes in two parts. Part one states “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” So, where this respect is denied – as, for example, when the government monitors all of our e-mail traffic – then our legitimate human rights have been undermined. Of course, the real meat of arguments about privacy come when different rights start to conflict with each other, and this is why there is a more substantial second part to Article 8, which states “There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” So, in terms of the Declaration, the right to privacy is balanced against the various needs which a state might have for preventing crime, terrorism and so on.

However, notice that the second part includes a clause about ‘morals’. In terms of the case law, it has been established that homosexuality, for example, is a protected freedom because the actions of two consenting adults in private do not have a sufficient impact upon the wider society as to justify a curtailment of their right to privacy. The question is how far the state’s legitimate concern in preventing terrorist acts justifies the establishment of a surveillance state.

Another relevant example relates to home schooling, that is, when a particular family decides to pursue the education of their children through means other than that provided by the state. This is, of course, the predominant mode of education throughout history, up until the last one hundred years or so, but in our present society it is customary for education to be provided centrally. In the United Kingdom it is legal for parents to choose to educate their children in their own homes, and this seems consistent with the fundamental right to a private family life that Article 8 enshrines. Yet in Germany such a choice is illegal, and the state actively breaks up the families which seek to pursue such an independent path. The grounds given for such action in Germany are that certain teachings are illegal – a legacy of Germany’s own twentieth century experience – yet that seems remarkably flimsy justification for the destruction of home and family life.

If we consider the nature of what it is that the state is wishing to monitor through the establishment of the various surveillance networks on the internet the key element for me is simply that it is about the monitoring of words. That is, all the activity that takes place on the internet is more or less intellectual – it is a forum for the sharing of ideas, of free speech, of open communication. That sharing may well include things which are inherently dangerous, such as the recipes for making certain sorts of bombs, but there are no actual bombs blown up in an e-mail.

For the state to justify the invasion of privacy that has taken place, therefore, it has to argue that the existence of certain sorts of words are sufficiently important, that they matter ‘extremely’. As a religious observer, I can’t help but think that this is a tremendously Protestant attitude. After all, it is in countries that have a predominantly Protestant culture that the written word is given such importance. It was through the understanding of words that salvation was found; Holy Writ was the vehicle for eternal life. In countries with a less Protestant emphasis there is a far greater concern with actual actions, not simply the discussion of actions. Words do not matter so much. It is not an accident, of course, that this new emphasis coincided with the introduction of new technology, a technology that gave the written word much greater prominence.

This, I believe, is the direction that our culture is travelling in, as it traverses our own post-Christian environment. I believe that in our own lives we are placing less emphasis upon particular words and far more upon how people’s choices and attitudes show in actual behaviour. It is less important what people believe, it is more important what they do. In our present case, too, new technology is having an impact, and the internet is allowing for a much greater exchange of ideas and – when it works – a fuller mutual understanding and acceptance of difference.

In this conflict between the state and the various whistleblowers, therefore, it seems to me that the state is trying to preserve a particular understanding of what matters, and it is sacrificing our privacy on a Protestant altar. In just the same way as Luther was able to use new technology to dismantle the power held by an oppressive and corrupt institution, so too are the Assanges and Snowdens using our contemporary new technology to expose the corruption at the heart of our own arrangements. The overmighty state is reaching in to our private lives – our family lives and correspondence – and not only does it have no no right to do so, it cannot hope to achieve the aims that it intends. Nobody expects the English Inquisition. It is acting from an obsolete script, and it cannot but fail. Let us hope that it doesn’t cause too much suffering in its death throes.

Courier article.

Once upon a time, there was a gifted writer who told a story entitled ‘The Dream of a Thousand Cats’. In this story, we learn that in the deep history of time life on earth was remarkably different. Cats were the dominant species; humans were merely their playthings. The conceit of the story is that slowly, the humans began to talk and dream of a different world – a world where they would be free of the tyrannical oppression of the cats, where they would be in charge. One day, enough human beings dreamed the same dream – and when they woke, from the dream, they discovered that the world had been changed. It had become what we would recognise today – where humans are dominant and cats are merely pets. The story itself is told from the perspective of a cat who has learned the truth, and who has dedicated his life to telling all other cats the same tale. If only a thousand cats would dream the same dream, they could once more rule the planet! But of course, as soon as that criterion is mentioned, any cat-owner will see why humans are safe from feline revolution…

Our imaginations are vastly more powerful than the official narrative of our society leads us to accept. The imagination is good for children – all those fairy tales! And it’s good for entertainment – all those wonderful movies! But when it comes to the serious business of life, imagination just gets in the way. Those with imagination are seen as lacking in common sense, as being woolly-thinkers lacking a concrete connection to reality. Yet – ponder for a moment; look around you, wherever you are, and ask yourself what things that you see were not first conceived in the imagination of another human being? One obvious exception would be living creatures; another exception would be the sky – but what else? Every building, every street, every object in a house – all were first dreamed up by the imagination of one person or another.

The imagination is yet more powerful, for the simple reason that all of our understandings of the world resolve down to a level of story. Even the “hardest” of scientific facts take their place within a particular narrative – whether that be a narrative of the Big Bang or the narrative of evolution or something else. We are a story-making species, and it is the imagination that gives birth to the stories that structure our lives. The imagination determines the colour of the glasses that we wear, and through which we see the world. So it is not simply the objects in our world that are born in our imaginations, but the meaning that all those objects have, and the meaning of all our experiences besides. Put simply, the story that we tell about something or someone determines how that something or someone is understood – and therefore, what sort of activities and changes and lives might be possible.

This is why, in the Bible, the first and foremost task of the prophets – those people driven by the Spirit of God to engage directly with the political authorities of their time and place, from Moses to Jesus – was to engage people’s imaginations. This would often be done through something called ‘prophetic drama’, which was an acting out of a scene or a parable which engaged people’s imaginations. Jesus casting out the money-changers in the Temple is the most famous example, but there are many others. What the prophet first had to do was enable the people to dream; principally to dream that ‘it doesn’t have to be that way’. Always and in every case, it was the response of the political authorities to scorn such imagination, to repress and ridicule it, and, often, simply to terrorise and silence the dreamers. Yet, in just the same way that a ‘war on terror’ can never be won – for how is it possible to make war upon an abstract noun? So too is it impossible to eradicate a dream, once it has got into the bloodstream of a society.

This is what I believe we as a nation and a society have to talk about in the context of a referendum about our EU membership. What sort of a people are we? What is our dream of who we are? A previously dominant dream was one of Empire, but what is to take its place? Who are we? I can’t help but feel it was a reaction to loss of Empire – to the breaking of a dream – that led to a loss of national self-confidence, and which in turn led to our engagement in the structures of European Union. It was if the guiding story was – we are a fading nation, we are not strong enough to make our own way in the world any more, let us join in with our neighbours and seek safety and prosperity through their strength. That particular story – a story perhaps most closely associated with the anarchic 1970s – is not one that holds true for us any more. My own sense is that our ‘national story’ is much more effectively told through something like the wonderful 2012 olympic ceremony – we are not the Imperial people that we used to be but, actually, it’s good to be British.

I believe that this sort of story-examination applies on an individual basis too – we literally become who we imagine ourselves to be (obviously, there is such a thing as delusion; that’s not what I’m referring to). In other words, if we imagine ourselves as not worthy, we actually become less worthy – we defeat ourselves before we have ever stepped into the arena. This is the realm of faith – this is the realm of what Christians call ‘spiritual warfare’, which is the struggle between the voice that says we are weak and worthless and wicked, and the voice which much more quietly and more persistently says ‘you are loved’. It is when we allow that latter voice to dominate the story that we tell ourselves about who we are that we are enabled to work creatively and imaginatively to heal and restore our broken world.