stand itself as a creative minority that has a
heritage of values that are not things of the
past, but a very living and relevant reality’.
It’s a novel claim: that monks are modern,
not outdated relics of a medieval past. But
Father Martin Bernhard, a young American
Benedictine in Norcia, stakes it with confi-
dence. ‘People say, “Oh, you’re just trying
to turn back the clock,”’ he told me. ‘That
makes no sense. If you’re doing something
right now, it means you’re doing it right now.
It’s new, and it’s alive! And that’s a very pow-
erful thing.’
Y
es, but in the contemporary world, it
also means being different. In order
to be faithfully Christian now and for
the foreseeable future, believers will have to
become more like Orthodox Jews and Mus-
lims in the way they live out their religion.
They will have to recognise themselves as
outsiders, and cease to care about conform-
ing to the norms of secular society. They will
have to live with far more spiritual discipline
regarding prayer, worship, study, work, and
asceticism, radically re-ordering their lives
around the faith. This will look somewhat
different depending on their particular tra-
dition — Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox
— but it will have to be taken on with rigour.
Some Christians will have to cut ties. Ear-
lier this year, the Revd Dr Gavin Ashenden
left the Church of England having previ-
ously been a chaplain to the Queen. ‘I’m not
sure I see much point in a church that just
wants to be accepted as a sort of not-too-irri-
tating chaplain to a secular and hedonistic
culture, which is what it seems to be becom-
ing,’ he said.
The last straw for Ashenden was the
Church’s milksop reaction to a Quran read-
ing at St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow — a
recitation that explicitly said that Jesus
was not the son of God. Europe and the
UK face a tremendous threat from radical
Islam. Whatever else might be said of radi-
cal Islam, one cannot deny that its follow-
ers know what they believe, and are not
ashamed of it.
But wait, comes the protest. Secular
democracy has served the West pretty well.
We are doing better in many measures of
social health and wellbeing than we have in
decades. What’s the problem?
It’s a fair point. What many don’t under-
stand is the extent to which secular liberalism
has fed off Christian teachings and virtues.
The Enlightenment secularised Christian
teachings about the sanctity of life and the
dignity of the individual human person. But
it could not come up with a stable ground-
ing for those teachings in reason alone. For
a long time, the West has been coasting on
the residue of its Christian faith. But without
basing our morality in transcendent values,
how will we recognise threats to our human-
ity in the future (from, say, genetic manipula-
tion), much less resist them?
Jonathan Sacks, formerly the chief rabbi,
has called on Christians to learn from Jewish
people how to be a creative minority in the
contemporary world.
‘You can be a minority, living in a country
whose religion, culture, and legal system are
not your own, and yet sustain your identity,
live your faith and contribute to the com-
mon good,’ he said. ‘It isn’t easy. It demands
a complex finessing of identities. It involves a
willingness to live in a state of cognitive dis-
sonance. It isn’t for the faint-hearted.’
He also argues that Jews and Christians
in Britain face two common enemies. On
one side, a militant secularism that wishes
to eliminate religion entirely. And on the
other, a fanatical form of Islam that seeks
a barbaric theocracy. It is a strange paradox
and characteristic of our time: Christians
will have to turn to modern Orthodox Jews,
such as Lord Sacks, to learn how to live more
faithfully as Christians.
The kind of faith that survives catastro-
phe is one that can perceive victory even in
apparent defeat. This is the message of the
Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people. It is themessage of Christianity: the Saviour’s death
is not the final word. It is the message that
the believing Christian remnant in the West
can make incarnate in their daily lives, in
concrete and sacrificial ways.
This is no grim, white-knuckle counsel.
Not to anyone who has met the Tipi Loschi,
a merry confederacy of Italian Catholic fam-
ilies living in San Benedetto del Tronto, a
small city on the Adriatic coast. They are
counter-culturally orthodox in their Catholi-
cism, but not angry. They draw inspiration
from two English Catholics they regard as
heroes: G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien.
The community school is called Scuola Lib-
era G.K. Chesterton, and the Tipi Loschi
fancy themselves as ‘hobbits in the shire’.
These are Christians who are not deceived
about the long odds facing Christianity in the
West. They are filled with light, hope and joy.
I asked Marco Sermarini, the middle-aged
lawyer who heads the group, to divulge their
secret. ‘We invented nothing,’ he said. ‘We
are only rediscovering a tradition that was
locked away inside an old box. We had for-
gotten.’
If a small flock of Italians perched on a
cliff overlooking the Adriatic can rummage
through the old curiosity shop of western
Christianity and found a local Christian
community on the writings of St Benedict,
Chesterton, and Tolkien, who’s to say that
the dusty crates in Christian Britain’s treas-
ury don’t contain the seeds of that faith’s
resurrection? As Chesterton wrote in The
Everlasting Man: ‘Christianity has died many
times and risen again; for it had a god who
knew the way out of the grave.’Matthew Parris’s response ‘Give Me the
Anglican Option’ is on p.Fox-Light
Waking out of sleep paralysis
with a back-from-the-brink gulp for breath
and a sudden aversion to bed, I leap
to my feet and hurl the window open.There is the garden in black and white,
moon-stencilled with shadows; I think of
Erasmus Darwin and his lunar friends
trotting over their lit landscapes to meet.This is fox-light: illumination
for foxes to go marauding by,
a s in t he days before t hey were urba n,
and in the days before that: before towns.— Fleur Adcock