Vision Circle

Post-National Religion

The Archbishop of Canterbury gives us a great deal to think about.

The idea that's being increasingly canvassed is that we are witnessing the end of the nation state, and that the nation state is being replaced in the economically developed world by what some call the 'market state'. This new form of political administration has in some ways crept up on us, and we need to do some hard thinking about how it has happened and what changes are involved for the whole idea of being a citizen - not to mention the whole idea of being a politician too. And if the analysis I want to offer is right, and these changes are indeed irreversible, we need to look at what kind of vacuum is left in our social imagination as a result.

I see that Stephenson's meme is finally taking hold in centers of authority. The Archbishop is my kind of clergyman in more than one way and I’m pleased to see that he gets it. He gets it in a rather unique way, but that depends on his reading of this Bobbitt fellow, whom I don't know. In either case I’m with him on the primary merits of his case, which is my reading of the current asymmetric war on terror. The nation state (and for my denser ideological colleagues) the nanny state, is on its way out the door. As market forces take over and they decentralize power and globalize standards via the disintermediary forces of global telecom and pervasive computing. This leaves a significant gap in the social forces and traditions long associated with government as exemplified by the great society. Who fills that gap? Religion. But not the kind of bible-thumping idiocy involved in creating the republican's big tent. I'm talking about smart religion.

So the problem of the market state looks rather like this. By pushing politics towards a consumerist model, with the state as the guarantor of ‘purchasing power’, it raises short-term expectations. By raising short-term expectations, it invites instability, reactive administration, rule by opinion poll and pressure. To facilitate some of its goals and to avoid chaos, government inevitably relies more on centralised managerial authority. So there will be a dangerous tension between excessive government and the paralysis that can result from trying to respond adequately to consumer demand. To put it in another way, government and culture drift apart: government abandons the attempt to give shape to society.

But check this out, and I think this is the key which shows that certain sects of Christianity may be ahead of the curve with respect to dealing with the decentralized world. That is because this market state preserves

..a vision that has nothing to say about shared humanity and the hard labour of creating and keeping going a shared world of values. Being provocative again, I’d want to say that a proper use of tradition makes us more not less critical and independent in society. The great revolt against traditional authority in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a necessary moment, because tradition was understood as the way in which the past dominated the present - or at least how some people’s version of the past seeks to limit what’s possible now.

And finally, without an explicit nod to GWBush’s state legitimation of Christian charity under the guise of 'faith-based initiatives', our archbishop remarks

The market state is much in love with partnership as a model of public action, and the possibilities of partnership with religious communities are many. To point to the importance of religious communities as, for example, partners in statutory education is not to license unbridled superstition and indoctrination but to invite - to challenge – religious communities to find a way of bringing their beliefs into practical contact with public questions, to identify exactly what difference faith commitments make to the educational process.

Lovely.