How the Church lost its flock over Brexit - UnHerd

How the Church lost its flock over Brexit - UnHerd

Anglican pastor Giles Fraser writes about "a gathering of 60 or so church leaders of various denominations... at Lambeth Palace to discuss the way forward for the churches after Brexit."

"The most interesting thing that I took away from the day, listening especially to German Christians, was how the EU became, for them, a sort of project of atonement for the consequences of German nationalism - that the shame of Nazism led them to reject any starry-eyed or romantic conception of the nation and to replace it by what Professor Heinrich Bedford-Strohm from the University of Bamberg called a 'nationalism of rules'.

"In other words, that a particular people might be united not by the dangerous emotionalism of flag waving but by a decidedly unemotional common bureaucracy that could be rolled out to embrace different nations, united under a set of administrative rules and procedures. One German academic there spoke of the need for the UK to be 'integrated into the European cultural synthesis'. I shuddered and thought of the Borg in Star Trek, a hive mind where all cultural distinctiveness will be assimilated. Forget subsidiarity. 'Resistance is futile,' say the Borg.

"As Brits, our reaction to the Second World War was inevitably entirely different from that of the Germans. We didn't experience the humiliation of our nationalism, but quite the opposite: its overwhelming endorsement. For it was precisely through the sort of communal solidarity and fellow feeling that nationalism provides that we summoned the strength to stand against Nazism and help defeat it.

"The massive outpouring of feeling and relief at the end of the war, the 'never surrender' attitude, the solidarity forged by the Blitz, those familiar images of thousands of demobilised soldiers waving the union flag in Piccadilly, all that and more is why it is inevitable that the Germans and the British are going to have entirely different approaches to the moral valence of the nation state....

"...the whole point of a family, a church and a nation is that they accept people uncritically - and not on the basis of how clever they are, how mobile, how rich or how solution focused. This is indeed the love that asks no question. You belong to the group and are valued by it simply because you are a member of it. The family, the church and the nation are spaces where all are welcomed and esteemed irrespective of class, talent or ethnicity. This is the moral case for the nation state."