Monday 27 May 2013

The Predicament of the Conservative Liberal

Michael Gove seems to have made the easy and common transition from the conservative-liberal wing of the Church of Scotland to the conservative-liberal wing of the Church of England. The reverse is rarer, but only because there are far fewer English people in Scotland than there are Scots people in England. It is by no means unheard of, and it is no more difficult.

However, most of the conservative liberals in either body, among others, have not yet arrived at Gove's desire to redefine marriage in order to include same-sex couples. He has been nothing if not a pioneer of that position, arguing for it in The Times and on The Moral Maze all the way back in the days when the Labour Government of the day was restating the traditional objections from the Despatch Box. Mind you, that need not necessarily be all that long ago; Gordon Brown was expounding that view to interviewers in the run-up to the 2010 General Election. But Gove was expounding the contrary view 10 years and more before that.

(The Labour abstention rate at Third Reading was well up on that at Second Reading, even if nine former abstainers, including Brown, did vote in favour, as did three previous opponents. Two abstainers switched to voting against, and seven opponents, all known to be strongly of that view, were among the very fair few who stayed away. Those who still share Gove's girlish infatuation with Tony Blair have, by all accounts, been busy with menace and malice in several Constituency Labour Parties. The 14 Labour votes against and the seven opponents turned abstainers make for heavily left-wing and very heavily Old Labour lists, while the nine abstainers who switched to voting in favour are also far from a Blairite lot. Pressure has been applied.)

Where, though, are those who cannot accept the Church of Scotland's changed stance to go? The Free Church of Scotland does not ordain women, and it maintains forms of worship not seen in the most of the Church of Scotland for many decades. It is committed to Textus Receptus. It has little in the way of a Lowland culture, and no country, not even any of the others in these Islands, is more unbridgeable a gap between two cultures than exists in Scotland.

The same or similar problems would, and perhaps will, present themselves to those who had up to then been happy in, say, the Methodist Church of Great Britain, or the United Reformed Church, or the Presbyterian Church of Wales. Or, indeed, the Church of England, or the Church in Wales. Other bodies of similar heritage, but uncompromised and uncompromising on this issue, do exist. The problem is that they are no more compromised or compromising on anything else about which anyone might have been, in living memory or well before that.

Where are conservative liberals to go? Not to existing conservative formations, religious, political, or anything else. Those have been around for years, for decades, for centuries. They are not what conservative liberals are used to, or think that they are used to. Therefore, they are not what conservative liberals are looking for.

The writer who sells herself to American customers as their foremost British voice, and who may in fact be so, has most emphatically not arrived at the Goveite view of the definition of marriage, yet is an active member, having apparently been born into it, of one of the three religious denominations that are campaigning most vigorously for that view to be given legislative effect. She continues to deny that she is a supporter of the Conservative Party, and by no means only because of what that party has become under David Cameron.

It seems odd, in view of the circles in which he moved and moves, that Douglas Murray was never confronted with and by the definitive Christian answers to the claim that if there could be a New Testament, then there could be an Even Newer Testament in the form of the Qur'an. Those arguments have been around since the seventh century, against an assertion made in order to convert people to Islam, and only very recently to Murray's still quite new-found atheism. But he seems still to believe in religion, just not in God.

Which would seem to make him ripe for conversion to a Judaism willing to accommodate his socio-politicised homosexuality. Such as that to which Melanie Phillips adheres institutionally. Except that she is not so accommodating, she has a most un-Judaic interest in pure theology (well, when you have few or no ritual laws to consider instead...), and she sounds more and more like a paleoconservative in her strident defence of a "Western civilisation" about which neoconservatives have been extremely sceptical precisely because they shared the ethno-cultural background of which she is so proud. On The Moral Maze, though, she once referred to Steven Rose's Orthodox upbringing as "just embarrassing".

They are a very complicated lot, the conservative liberals.

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