Liberal modernity and the three Fs

There is nothing post-liberal, or pre-modern, about faith, flag and family

The rise of populism across the Western world is easier to characterise in negative terms than in positive ones. It seems to represent a rejection of the post-Cold War liberal consensus: of the primacy of the free market, of a technocratic focus on ‘what works’ without much consideration of what we mean by ‘works’ and for whom, and of an assumption that change is always to be embraced and diversity always celebrated.

Nevertheless, the populist moment also seems to involve the reassertion of more traditional values. A number of politicians and commentators have sought to sum up the positive content of ‘post-liberalism’ in the unfortunate phrase, ‘faith, flag and family’. I say unfortunate firstly because – let’s get this out of the way – it just sounds fascist. Doesn’t it? Of course there’s nothing actually fascist about any of the three Fs or indeed those who put them together. But still. Maybe it’s just that alliteration makes me think of Heinrich Himmler and the SS.

In any case, it’s a terrible slogan, perhaps more importantly because – unlike, say ‘Take back control’ or even ‘Make America great again’ – it’s not something any normal person would say outside of a speech, and a stuffy one at that. Nevertheless, the three Fs are conceptually rich, and worth taking seriously in their own terms if not as an alliterative battery.

‘Bless my homeland forever…’ The Sound of Music 1965

The first thing to note is that all three are, at least as we tend to conceive them today, the products of liberal modernity. Faith as a matter for individual conscience, the flag as the symbol of a sovereign nation of free citizens or subjects and the nuclear family as a relatively autonomous unit have been established as norms only in the past couple of hundred years, starting in Europe and America and spreading with capitalism.

If the three Fs are at odds with liberalism in its more contemporary sense, that indicates an even more recent rupture. So, if we are going to talk about post-liberalism, we need to be clear about what we are leaving behind, and in favour of what. I don’t think anyone is proposing a return to a pre-modern understanding of any of the three Fs. (Faith is the most complicated, but I’ll come back to that.) The ‘liberalism’ of liberal modernity is not seriously in question, at least not by those who invoke the three Fs.

There is clear dissatisfaction with what liberalism has become in recent decades, and this extends as far back as the 1960s in the case of the family, though in my reading it’s the normalisation of divorce – rather than homosexuality, for example – that is most regretted, especially when young children are involved. There is little appetite for legal restrictions even there, as opposed to a cultural shift of some kind. If the phrase ‘family values’ sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, maybe that’s the problem. So let’s consider the three Fs in reverse order.

Family

When we talk about family values, we are talking about ‘the family’, not ‘my family’. There is no virtue in putting your own family first at the expense of all other considerations, such as the rule of law or basic human decency (including concern for other people’s families). In societies without a functioning ‘liberal’ state, nepotism and kin-based patronage are just the way things are done, and to demur is to sacrifice your own family’s interests for your principles. The problem there is not an excess of family values, but the prevalence of tribalism or clannishness.

If liberal states pass ‘family-friendly’ laws, they are violating one conception of liberalism in order to encourage a way of life deemed more compatible with liberalism more broadly understood. That is traditionally (ie, in the tradition of liberal modernity) taken to be the nuclear family, through which parents take responsibility for rearing their children into adults who can take responsibility for themselves.

Of course, there is still a role for the extended family, which may have been unduly diminished in recent decades, but this must surely be to support the nuclear family, and not to trap it in a web of obligations. This ideal also does not preclude a welfare safety net, but it does mean welfare dependency is a real danger and not necessarily a moral panic.

The subtlety of modern family values is well captured in the case of family businesses. We generally approve of family-run shops, restaurants and other small businesses. And we don’t see anything wrong with a roofer choosing to employ his son-in-law (or even his daughter!) ahead of other candidates. The business is an extension of the family. Things are very different in the case of public officials, who are entrusted with putting the public interest ahead of any private ones. Even in the private sector, when businesses reach a certain scale, nepotism is frowned on as holding back an enterprise that has outgrown any one family.

In other words, part of the virtue of the modern family is to know its own limits. CS Lewis puts this in a way that will be offensive to contemporary sensibilities, but might yet have a grain of truth to it: ‘The relations of the family to the outer world—what might be called its foreign policy—must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. […] He has the last word in order to protect people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.’ (Mere Christianity, 1952)

Bracing stuff. Nevertheless, that ‘family patriotism’ is both justified and necessary. And, duly qualified, it is surely what people mean when they invoke family as something of value. It also brings us neatly to our next F.

Flag

Patriotism means love of one’s country, not because it is objectively better than other countries, but simply because it is one’s country. A British patriot might well sing the praises of his country’s culture, traditions and even cuisine. But ask him if, had he been born in France, he would have moved to Britain to enjoy its superior way of life, and he’ll laugh it off. He’s glad he’s not French, but that’s not what he means. He knows very well there’s a Frenchman over the Channel who’s glad he’s not British and who’s laughing off the same challenge. They both know what they mean.

Politicians have an unfortunate tendency to talk about ‘British values’ as if fairness, decency and a sense of fair play were foreign to the French, the Danes and the Japanese. No nation is really defined by its values, not even the USA, which is often described as a creedal nation. Americans, like any other people, are defined by a particular history, geography and culture, albeit one more ethnically mixed than most. Their flag evokes John Wayne films, ‘football’ in helmets and apple pie as much as the separation of powers and freedom of speech.

Of course, there are such things as Western values, but these are not the property of any particular nation, or indeed of the West. Western civilisation underpins much of the modern world, but if it got there in the form of empire, it put down roots in the form of sovereign nations. The flags of those nations do not represent abstract values but particular human societies, whose members share many values with people just about everywhere, even as they disagree among themselves about others. That’s why, ideally, national flags are apolitical, a symbol of shared identity that transcends differences. ‘Ideally’ because, of course, they do sometimes take on political connotations, particularly in countries with separatist currents or otherwise complicated histories. (Admittedly, that’s a lot of countries.)

Nevertheless, when people speak of ‘flag’ as something to value, they are implicitly endorsing an allegiance to the nation as such, as one among many nations, but the one that happens to be ours. As with the family, it is an allegiance based on identity rather than affinity. Nobody chooses their nationality, not really. Even those who migrate hardly pick their destination out of a catalogue: they go where there is opportunity for them of one kind or another. If love is involved, it is usually for one person rather than several million. Any national feeling comes later.

In the end, though, patriotism is indeed about affections rather than values. In the age of empires, the flag was perhaps called upon to represent something greater than the nation; in the case of Britain, that is one of those historical complications. By contrast, free and sovereign modern nations, like modern families, must know and love their place. To reassert the sovereignty of the nation, far from betraying nostalgia for empire, is to push back against the quasi-imperial pretensions of transnational institutions and corporations.

Faith

Faith is different. Unlike flag and family, it is not – or not ultimately – a given identity. We might be born into a particular faith or none, but in liberal modern societies, we are free to choose our own religious affiliation according to our own convictions. Indeed, it is our very freedom of religion that keeps faith from overstepping its bounds, since no one may impose their beliefs on others and faith-based favouritism is prohibited except in explicitly religious contexts.

People often observe that the whole idea of ‘religion’ is a Western idea superimposed on other traditions, as if that’s a bad thing. The idea that religion occupies a separate sphere is indeed a legacy of Christianity. It is there in Christ’s ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's’. And historically, it was worked out through the medieval struggle between the church and secular powers and then the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The great achievement of liberal modernity is the norm that we no longer fight over religion, any ‘religion’. That it took centuries of fighting to get to that norm should not detract from its importance.

The conflict in Northern Ireland was never really about religion, but it certainly divided society along religious lines. And the slogan, ‘faith, flag and family’ would no doubt have resonated with those who advocated, ‘A Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’. Nevertheless, anyone endorsing sectarian identity politics today – such as the oxymoronic ‘Christian nationalism’ – is not serious either about faith in general or Christianity in particular.

The religious freedom achieved, albeit imperfectly, in liberal modernity is what gives genuine faith a fighting chance amid the tumult of secular as well as religious dogmas. I would go so far as to say it is better for Christianity than was pre-modern Christendom with its inquisitions and religious wars. (Admittedly, the cathedrals were better.)

Nevertheless, the inclusion of faith in the three Fs does indicate another dimension of dissatisfaction with what liberalism has become. If the problem is not the privileging of the individual conscience over religious conformity, it is surely the marginalisation of that conscience when it involves religious expression. It is not necessarily that religious freedom is curbed – after all, religious freedom includes the right to roll your eyes at religious sentiment – but that the irrelevance of religion is taken for granted in so much of public life.

A Michael Hanby suggests, our prevailing secular ideology is no longer just indifferent to faith, but assumes, ‘a total interpretation of reality that systematically excludes the apprehension of God from our operative notions of being, nature, knowledge, and truth’. It is worth emphasising that this is not because modern science has ‘disproved’ the existence of God. The assumption that non-naturalistic accounts of reality are of no value – however rich their legacy throughout history – is no more than an assumption.

Nevertheless, it is this conception of reality that steamrollered arguments for treating churches as an essential service during lockdown, for example. People can believe in God in their own heads, but it hardly even had to be stated that when public health is at stake, it’s time to put silly notions aside.

Why? Why? Why?

Here the parallels between faith, flag and family are clearer. It is the perception of contempt that inspires the defiant sloganisation of all three. The attempted marginalisation of flag and family continues to generate more heat, however, because those things retain far more popular assent than faith does. The idea that citizens should enjoy rights in their own country that are not extended to every human being is still common sense, even if increasingly frowned on in progressive circles. So too is the idea that historical norms around sex and marriage, even if not for everyone, are a reasonable guide to the good life. And, not unrelatedly, that biological sex matters.

According to the ruling conception of reality, these assumptions are ultimately groundless even if they remain part of the political furniture. Why should being born in a particular place give you more rights than someone else who might be more productive, or at least more deserving of sympathy? Why is monogamy any better than polyamory, and why does it matter who changes where? Why? Why? Why?

To answer those questions in terms of outcomes, however convincingly, is to give up the greater part of the fight. It is like arguing over the existence of God. And, while some religious conservatives insist they can prove the existence of God and that the rest follows ineluctably, I think they are missing the point. You cannot argue for a given without putting its givenness further in question.

Faith might be deepened by intellectual reflection, but it does not ultimately rest on the strength of ideas. The same goes for the foundations of civilisation: the raw human bonds that were domesticated, but never abolished, by liberal modernity.

If the slogan ‘faith, flag and family’ has a reactionary ring, it is not because it invokes values that are hopelessly lost, but because it engages on a political level with ideas that are really pre-political. Contrary to the impression given, faith, flag and family are not the fossilised remnants of an ancien regime, but the pillars of liberal modernity itself. Yes, even faith, in the sense that it is the Christian understanding of human personhood that underpins democracy and individual rights.

Whether that understanding of human personhood can long outlive the widespread practice of Christianity is beyond the scope of this essay. It surely could not survive if the ruling ideology were to become as widespread as Christianity once was. But it isn’t. It is the ruling ideology only in the sense that it prevails in institutions like the civil service, corporate HR and the universities. It is not popular. The wider culture might not be religious, but its very scepticism extends beyond traditional pieties to cast doubt on the secular ones that emerge from those institutions.

More than that, most of us continue to hold to moral intuitions that, while not based on any religious belief, are certainly ‘faith-based’ in the disparaging sense sometimes used by dogmatic secularists. That is why the religious freedom bequeathed by liberal modernity remains vital, and must be upheld in the face of ‘liberal’ orthodoxies. Ultimately, though, that freedom rests not a commitment to procedural neutrality, but on our determination to live by our beliefs, religious or otherwise. In that sense, faith does not so much know its place as stand its ground. Like that unwitting progenitor of liberal modernity, Martin Luther, it can do no other.