Thoughts on Brexit Day

This is one of the hardest days of my life. 

Brexit Day feels like a kind of dying. Born as I was of mixed parentage, to a native German mother married to a British father, I belong as much to continental Europe as I do to England. I am equally at home on both sides of the English Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea. From my earliest memories, Europe formed me, shaped me, made me aware. When this country chose to join the European Community in 1973, I had a sense of homecoming. I believed I saw the hand of God in this.

So to walk away from the European Union as a member state is a source of real grief. It’s not simply turning our back on one of the greatest projects of peace and reconciliation the world has ever seen. It’s not only giving up the economic, research and cultural benefits our belonging has brought us, the security and influence that come from pooling our sovereignty. Nor is it merely (!) collaborating in the pursuit of justice and human rights, and taking action together to address the climate emergency. Though all these things matter very much to all who care about the future of our world.

No, for me it’s very much a sentient, intangible, and I need to say, spiritual, matter. It’s to do with my personal history as well as our national history. My father was a Londoner, an Anglican by origin, while my mother an assimilated Jewess from the Rhineland who fled the Nazis and found refuge in this country. You’ll see why the idea of a Common European Home, a family of peoples and nations bound together for the sake of the common good, exerts such a powerful hold on my imagination. That Brexit should be happening in the week of Holocaust Memorial Day makes our departure feel especially poignant. 

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But what of today?

Brexit is perhaps the biggest rite of passage our nation is experiencing in our lifetimes, at least for those of us born since the last war. Which makes it a rite of passage for all of us who are citizens of the UK, and all who are citizens of EU27 countries who are living among us. (And, let’s not forget, for millions of people across the EU who care about Britain, love us British, and wanted us to stay.) 

Anthropologists warn us that we take risks when we cross thresholds. They are liminal places where landscapes shift, and roles and relationships change. At times of transition we can become disorientated. Questions are put to us about our direction of travel, emotions are heightened. We can find ourselves sad at the thought of what we are leaving behind, afraid of what lies ahead, perplexed, angry, longing to have reached the other side and find our feet on solid ground again. Every crossing over is a kind of bereavement - like my recent retirement or my mother’s death soon afterwards. We are never the same on the other side. 

This goes a long way towards explaining why our national psyche has felt so turbulent recently, why feelings of people on both sides of the Brexit debate have run high. We are still in this liminal phase. It’s too early to say how our international relations, domestic politics, trading arrangements and societal networks will settle down after this convulsion. And for some, their personal relationships too. Whatever we are destined to become, Britain will not be the same after Brexit. None of us will.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know why I believe Brexit could damage Britain irreparably. What will be lost could well, probably will, outweigh the gains. So I admit I’m despondent about how our country is going to fare during the rest of my lifetime. Yet we should have the best aspirations for our country that we can. I argued in a recent blog that Brexit could be good for us if it taught us to take a more realistic view of ourselves as a nation. I said we need to lay aside exceptionalism as if we were “special”, and learn to understand our place in the world as no longer a great imperial superpower but as an ordinary, middle-ranking country like scores of others. There’s no question of putting the “Great” back into Britain. Of all the unlovely slogans associated with Brexit, that self-aggrandising myth of pride is the most poisonous. I believe we badly need to learn the grace of humility. And that, of course, is a profoundly spiritual task. 

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And with humility goes the desire “not to be served but to serve” and to love our neighbour as ourselves. We don’t have any choice about this if we are serious about Christianity. How we look after the neediest people in our midst, be they of our race and faith and nationality or some other, is the acid test of our faith. How we care about peoples beyond our own shores is the plumb line against which our humanity is to be measured. To me, the EU was - still is - one of the noblest projects ever devised on our continent to put the virtues of love of neighbour and service of the other into practice in our relationships as nations. It grieves me more than I can say that Britain has chosen to walk away from these covenants of mutual self-giving. 

So it’s all the more important that after Brexit, we resist the temptation of isolation and throw ourselves all the more energetically into being a good neighbour to all the nations alongside which we live on this increasingly fraught, congested planet. Are we capable of this? Do we have a strong enough collective desire for it, the spiritual, moral will? Or will self-interest win out in the end? I really don’t know. I’m fearful if I’m honest. Nothing I’ve heard in the last three years is reassuring me that Britain will be a better, kinder, more principled country after Brexit than it was before. 

I wish I could be hopeful. But today fills me with anxiety and foreboding. It has sapped what belief I had that our nation, inspired by our history, our instinct for law, justice and common sense, our traditions of courage, fairness and hospitality, could through a great act of the imagination rise above our self-serving agenda and look beyond ourselves in some new, life-changing way. This protracted debate could have been an opportunity for us to engage seriously with questions of identity, nationhood and our collective self-understanding as a people facing a choice between alternative destinies. Instead of which we locked ourselves into the strident rhetoric endlessly rehearsed during the referendum campaign, “What’s best for Britain? Take back control! Britain first!” When what we should have been asking is, “What does Britain have to give so that we may all work together for the good of our continent and our world?”

In fact, “what’s best for Britain” is whatever will make for our truest flourishing as the nations and peoples of the United Kingdom. And flourishing means a lot more than the economy, trade and the cost of living. I’m depressed on this 31st day of January that we never succeeded in putting at the heart of the Brexit agenda, who are we as a nation? What does it mean to be a Good Britain, if not a Great Britain? How can we become a more humane society? How can we be a better neighbour to the nations of our continent and beyond? How can we collaborate more effectively in facing the perils confronting our world?  These questions are not only the agenda of practical politics. They belong to the collective human soul. And therefore, they are questions of ultimate concern. What’s best for Britain is what matters most to God.

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I ask myself more personal questions too, today.

I began by saying that Brexit felt like a kind of dying, a severing of what I’d experienced as a positive, benign, life-affirming relationship. When politicians speak of our divorce from the EU, they are invoking a powerful metaphor. There are good divorces and painful ones, divorces of velvet and of barbed wire. We must hope that ours will be one of the kinder ones. But I every divorce involves hurt, the recognition that a relationship of loyalty, good will and trust has died or is in the process of doing so. That’s how I’m experiencing it right now. Don’t tell me I might feel differently tomorrow or in a month or two when the dust has settled. Today is all I have to go on. The dust makes it hard to see. 

The image that’s been in my mind ever since the referendum result has been that of exile. I’m well aware that for many, Brexit feels like the opposite of that, a homecoming, a resurrection even. Again, I can only reach into my heart and speak of what I find there. Desolation may seem a dramatic word. But it accurately describes what its literal meaning expresses, which is the sense of being alone, solus. Mystical theologians played on the way that word sounds as though it belonged to the vocabulary of the solum or soil. You could say that desolation is the forlorn experience of being severed from your native soil, just as consolation is to be reconnected, joined back, to it. When the Jewish exiles by the waters of Babylon cried out, “how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137), their lament was called out of the bleakest desolation, disconnection and disorientation they had ever known as they reimagined their existence on unknown soil.

I’m not saying that most of us will experience an exile as painful as that, though for UK citizens living in the EU and EU27 citizens living in the UK, the consequences of Brexit may well be bitter indeed. But for me at any rate, today does invoke an echo of that Psalm as I find myself amputated against my will from so much that I loved and valued. The Hebrews were severed from all that had given their lives shape and meaning - their land, their temple, their institutions, their monarchy, their homes. Without these givens, they had to renegotiate life on a new set of terms. It’s clear from the prophets that it was a bewildering experience. After today I shall have to renegotiate life without the constants of my European Union citizenship. And especially the sentient environment that has been part of life simply because of my being a citizen of an EU member state. It’s hard to describe when it’s as pervasive as the air I breathe. But maybe you recognise that sense of connection to my own continent through the hard-won bonds of peace and friendship and everything else this time of gifts has brought.

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I said earlier that I wish I could be hopeful. Abraham, the scriptures tell me, “hoped against hope”. The exiles would indeed learn to find hope again, one day. But it took time. The psalm of lament would be their bitter cry for many days to come. They would need to learn the hard way not to trust voices that made easy speeches about an imminent brighter future against the evidence of history and the instincts of their own spirits. It’s too soon for me to speak of hope today. I need to be as present as I can to this disappointment, this journey of exile, try to find what meaning in it that I can. I won’t pretend it’s going to be easy. As I’ve said, this is one of the hardest days of my life.

But I want as a Christian citizen to do what I can to serve the common good. I may be at odds with what Britain has become as a result of Brexit, but it is still the country of my birth and upbringing. I owe it my love and loyalty. I want to do what’s in my power to help heal our divided nation and recover a sense of common purpose. Yet in just the same way I shall never stop thinking of myself as a European, a citizen of the continent that has so shaped my personal history and my understanding of what it means to be me. I owe love and loyalty to Europe too. Not least because by lifting my sights beyond my own nation’s shores, the EU taught me how to take the first steps towards becoming a citizen of the world, a child of God’s worldwide human family. 

I’m done raging against this “dying of the light”. So I ask myself, is some transformation possible? Could this exile that I do not want to contemplate, this parting of friends, become a grace-filled pilgrimage in time? Who knows? Only by setting out will I begin to glimpse what this journey could become. I dare not call it hope just now. But if I can’t find hope at this moment, can I perhaps hope to have hope again one day? For the nation I mean, and for the world, as well as for myself? On Sunday, the First Sunday after Brexit, the church celebrates Candlemas. We light candles to honour the Holy Child who came into the world as a light for all the nations, who makes us glad because God is among us. This Kindly Light will teach me to walk this unfamiliar landscape and travel safely across it.

“Hope to have hope.” I can live with that for now. One step enough for me. 

Which Way Will It Go? The Fears of a Remainer

Just over a week to go and I admit it: I am despondent about the Referendum. I wish I could feel more confident that the UK will vote to stay on the path of togetherness, integration and community-mindedness as a leading member of the European Union. I wish I could believe that British people are too sensible to fall for the nostalgic but dangerous illusion that we can go it alone in the modern world. I wish I could believe that if nothing else persuaded us, at least enlightened self-interest would prompt us into voting Remain.

However, I have a real fear of what we shall wake up to on the morning of St John the Baptist's Day. "We are 10 days away from making a terrible mistake" writes Matthew d'Ancona in The Guardian. He is right. We are walking on the edge of a cliff. Just a gentle nudge in the wrong direction will be enough to send us over. It could be thanks to the laughing buffoonery of a blond politician, the fluent syllogisms of a lawyer attired in a robe of high office, or the sweet reasonableness of a quiet man who never raises his voice. Just turn and look at the view, they entice us. Get a little closer so you can peer over the edge and take in how sublime the prospect is. Go on. See for yourself. It's beautiful. It's noble. It's to be desired. It's where your destiny lies. Surely it's worth the leap into the lovely fresh, clean, infinitely spacious air!

You'll have picked up the allusions to the Garden of Eden and the gospel story of Jesus in the wilderness. My point is that temptation, or "testing" to put it more accurately, rarely comes as a binary choice to do the wrong thing as opposed to what is self-evidently right. In both those biblical narratives, discerning right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse was a matter of considerable subtlety. That bears out our human experience of making choices. It's usually pretty hard, and what is obvious with hindsight is often opaque at the time. We always wish it could be simpler. 

How much more difficult it is when it comes to collective political decisions. How do we really know what's for the good when it comes to putting a cross in one of those two boxes in a few days' time? Richard Dawkins, with whom I don't always agree, said recently that he was appalled to be given the responsibility of making this decision about the EU. He said in effect: I am a professional in my field. I don't expect the public to have the grasp of the immense complexities of biological science. Why should the Government expect me, a lay citizen, to understand the immense complexities of political science? That's what we elect MPs for. How on earth can I cast my vote for or against the EU on the basis of real knowledge and understanding?

Yet that's precisely what most of us think we do know. The lack of self-doubt in the increasingly shrill rhetoric of this campaign is breathtaking. (For all I know, I may have contributed to it myself.) I've tried to listen to and learn from the arguments of serious Brexiters I respect like Giles Fraser, Gisela Stuart and Frank Field. I've been listening to IDS on the radio and he sounds plausible. But I've never seriously wavered in my belief that we should stay in the European Union. It's gone beyond the marshalling of facts and the logic of arguments. It feels more like an article of faith, just as my being British and belonging to the political union we call the United Kingdom does. And yes, my Christian Faith does have a lot to do with it, as well as my personal history and identity. I've written about all these things in a score of earlier blogs on this site. 

But if that's how it feels to me, that's also how it will feel to millions of other people on both sides of the debate. There is a quasi-religious fervour that permeates a lot of the discourse at the moment. I can see that it's dangerous for any of us to be intoxicated by our own arguments, whether we are conviction Europhiles or conviction Brexiters. I want humbly to say that I hope I could be persuaded that I'm wrong. Oliver Cromwell's words often haunt me in this as in other dilemmas I face: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you could be mistaken".  

The social psychology of decision-making comes into things of course. The views we hold have a lot to do with the company we keep. What do our families, friends, work colleagues, organisations we belong to, say about it? Or the newspapers we read, or our social media contacts? So yes, I'm comforted that all the Primates of all four British Anglican provinces have declared for Remain, so that while the churches themselves have maintained a neutral stance, their leaders have made their personal positions clear. The same goes for the vast majority of economists, health professionals, academics, educators, scientists, artists.... The list goes on and on. It could be group-think on a massive scale. But if I have learned to trust these voices in other departments of life, why would I not trust them now? 

That's all very well. I've no doubt at all that the intellectual argument has been won by Remain. The case for EU membership rests on many different premises, all of them by now stress-tested ad nauseam. But they are not winning the Referendum - that's clear too. I'd expected StrongerIn to be well ahead in the opinion polls by now. But that's not happening. If anything, the trend is in the other direction. You'd have thought the electorate would have seen through the falsehoods, discredited numbers, political naïveté, thinly disguised racism (let's kindly call it xenophobia for now) and sheer illogic demonstrated by some of the loudest Brexit campaigners. 

Which says to me: our relationship with the EU is not going to be decided by cogent argument and unassailable facts. It's much more a matter of visceral feeling, of an unacknowledged atavistic national attitude that has long sought the light of day. In the UK's collective unconscious, the "idea" of Europe is not a powerfully motivating factor as it is in some other countries. I'm one of those who thinks of myself as "European" and would gladly say so on formal application forms if it were an option. But I'm in a minority. It's nationhood that is seen as the primary claim on our loyalty. And given Leavers' worries about sovereignty, immigration, security and patrolling our borders, it may just lose us the Referendum.

Nil desperandum! There is still time for the tide to change. The public mood can still shift. But while we hope and pray for the best, we must prepare for the worst. If we Remainers have to face our own Project Fear on the day after the Referendum, let us at least plan to maintain an outward-looking global perspective and help our nation not to lose its historic identity in a narrow and ultimately fatal insularity. Come what may, we shall continue to be good Europeans. We shall help build societies where we are kind to strangers and embrace people who are different from us. We shall do all we can to save our planet for our children's children. We shall go on showing solidarity with the poor and the needy, and seeking the welfare not just of our own selves but of all humanity. 

This is what it means to love our neighbour. It's why we believed in the European Union in the first place. It's why I shall vote Remain with all the conviction I can muster.

A Christian Vision for Europe: learning from the past

As background for the EU referendum, I've been reading about the vision for the reconstruction of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War.
 
What's striking is the prominent role of Christian thinkers in the debate. On the European mainland, politicians like Robert Schuman laid out plans advocating a new order in which it would be impossible for European nations to engage in the destructive warfare that had had such a calamitous effect not only for Europe but the entire world. As a courageous fighter in the French resistance, he had seen this at first hand. What is less well-known nowadays is his deep religious faith, informed by his detailed knowledge of, among other Christian philosophers, St Thomas Aquinas. It was Catholic social teaching that motivated his vision for a more peaceable Europe, particularly its emphasis on the quest for justice and the common good. In this he was not alone.
 
The Schuman Declaration was published on 9 May 1950, less than a month after I was born. (That date is now kept as Europe Day, and I hope we shall see the EU flag flying on public buildings then.) The plan advocated as a starting point a single economic market that would bring together Europe's vast coal and steel industries. Common economic goals, would, he believed, would not only greatly reduce the risks of conflict but would lead to other shared endeavours that would transform the economic, social and political face of the continent not least in reconciling its nations and healing centuries-old divisions.

Schumann believed that individual nation states were not best placed to judge what was in the interests of the common good. A nation's priorities would inevitably always be the welfare of its own citizens. There is nothing wrong with self-interest if it is enlightened: Aquinas followed Augustine in discussing very carefully what it meant to command, as Judaism and Christianity do, that we should love our neighbours "as ourselves". But Schuman, along with other Christian democrats, believed that a much larger vision of life together was needed for the safety and flourishing of the continent. Only a supra-national enterprise in which the reconciled peoples of Europe collaborated closely could ever deliver this.

UK church leaders and politicians watched these developments closely. Prominent among the Church of England bishops was George Bell who welcomed Schuman's visionary plan. In a debate in the House of Lords, Bell expressed the hope that Britain would bring to the new Europe the distinctive gifts it had to offer: its long experience of stable democratic government, its global "reach" as a people whose empire extended across the world, and its warm friendship with the United States. Andrew Chandler quotes him in his new biography of Bell: The preservation of national sovereignty as its own end was, he said, "not itself a Christian principle. The partial fusion of sovereignty is in accordance with Christian principles if it is in pursuit of noble ends and justice and peace".  

Those words seem strikingly modern. The idea of "pooled sovereignty" as a way of exercising a nation's power and influence has been much discussed during the EU campaign. During the recent visit of US President Barack Obama we have heard a great deal about Anglo-American friendship, prized by almost everyone on both sides of the debate. But what motivated Bell and those who thought like him was a Christian vision of society, a dream inspired by the gospel for the future of the human race. They were not simply concerned with pragmatic politics.

I am sure he owed this to his close contacts with prophetic German Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller during the terrible years of Nazi rule. He saw a national church fatally embroiled in national self-interest, blindly colluding with tyranny and persecution. What he learned from Bonheoffer and Niemöller was that Christianity is bigger than any nation state. If it is to be true to its Lord, its scope must never be less than humanity itself, for it was the world to which, out of love, God sent his Son. And therefore (he said, aware that he was speaking as a bishop of the Church "of England") the very idea of a "national" church was in an important theological way, a contradiction. Unless a national church saw itself as a vital member of the world church, and led its people to think of their nationality as subsumed under their Christian and human identity, it would deny the universality of the gospel.

We need an historical perspective if we are to debate our EU membership intelligently. As has famously been said, if we ignore the lessons of the past we shall find ourselves committing them all over again. It's especially important that we Christians who engage in the debate understand where we have come from. I'm not sure that the churches are saying nearly enough about the clear Christian motivation of the EU's founding fathers. Indeed, I'm not sure that the churches are saying nearly enough about this entire debate. And that would have greatly puzzled the church leaders of the 1940s and 1950s.

History, like patriotism, is not enough. We need to frame the debate in contemporary terms, not those of a past age. The dilemmas that face the European Union today are different from those of half a century ago, and vastly more complex. But that's why those who speak for religious faith should be more vocal, not less. It's true that bishops and church leaders are not experts in global politics, the economy, trade, security, governance and many of the other matters that are defining the debate. But that was true in 1950 too. Religion should speak about what it knows, and tread tentatively where it lacks technical knowledge. But Christianity knows a great deal about aspiring to a nobler vision of human community, about social justice, solidarity with the poor and needy, seeking the common good, and above all, about being a society that transcends all human limitations and frontiers. It knows about those things because it has lived them for two thousand years.

This is why the church today must heed the lessons of the past, and summon up the courage not only to think itself into a universal frame of mind but to speak about it. Perhaps the church needs to reboot its imagination so that like those visionary Christian prophets of the postwar era, it speaks compellingly once again into the politics of the day in pursuit of a reconciled human family. Its distinctive contribution to the EU referendum could be to remind us of the universal Christian principles that lay behind the founding of the European project. Their propounders, the parents of the European Union, are no longer with us. But "they being dead, yet speak".