Of the Church’s contributions to the life of society since the last War, the document “Putting Asunder” is a good example. It was meant to give the wise advice of the C.of E. to the secular world on marriage and divorce. I analyse it at length in my book, Man’s Relationship with God, and describe it as a shambles of imprecise thinking. Unfortunately its proposals were incorporated into legislation, leading to divorce virtually at will; and the result, in my opinion, has been a social disaster from which it will take us generations to recover. I would have thought it was obvious that an era of 2000 years has ended. Although the Church can still offer devout souls great consolation, its political efforts have been both malicious and ineffective. We have to begin again; and as most clergy seem incapable of original thought, perhaps we should seek inspiration elsewhere.
There was a brighter side to the Middle Ages. At its best the Medieval world provided the common man with a vision of the world created by God. The function of this vision was well described by Wolfgang Pauli in a conversation one evening about science and religion, at the Solway Conference for atomic physicists in 1927. Such a vision provides a spiritual framework within the grasp of the simplest member of the community, which he can feel embraces the whole wisdom of his community, and which is therefore able to guide his daily conduct. (An account of the conversation can be found in Heisenberg’s Physics and Beyond, Chapter 7). In colloquial terms, every character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has the religious patter on the tip of his tongue; in contrast to today, those who go to church have the rudiments of religion; but those who do not, know nothing about it at all.
But as Pauli prophesied at that conference 90 years ago, once the parables and symbols of religion have lost their persuasive force for ordinary people, the old values will collapse like a house of cards, and unimaginable horrors will take their place. And that is exactly what is happening today. It may take one or 2 years to train a soldier, and 2 or 3 years to train a sailor, but it takes 300 years to create a naval tradition. And my guess is that it takes much longer than that, to create the tradition in a population to be law-abiding. And if politicians are so foolish as to pass laws which nobody respects, and tax worth-while institutions out of existence, and judges fail to sentence crime properly, then the law-abiding community will not see the point of continuing to be, and will cease to be, law-abiding. You have lost something priceless, and you will not get it back again by a change of government. It will take hundreds of years to get it back; and a country may resort to tyranny to enforce Law and Order in the meantime.
Let us at least recognise that society needs religion, in the same way that men need women (and women need men). Every religion recognises the difference between right and wrong. They may have different views on what is right, and what is wrong; but at least they agree on the difference, and nobody else does that – for long. The great virtue of the minor prophets of the Old Testament is that they preached that God was a God of Righteousness, who hated iniquity. They may sound blood-thirsty; but their God was a God of the whole world, not just of the Jewish people; and He hated iniquity particularly among His own people. It was a sterling message. But it does not answer the question which religion is to prevail, and where? Islam may be the religion for the Middle East. But what about the indigenous Christian culture of England?