Is social conservatism essential for a strong society?

The more you look at the actual sociological data (rather than the dominant ideological clap-trap) the more it seems that social conservatism is the essential glue needed for that strong, stable society we crave for. Maybe Harinam & Henderson are selective in their data for this article but it makes a compelling case.

Go to church.

But why do some areas exhibit higher rates of upward mobility than others? For Carney, social capital is the key. Places with more civic activity, regardless of income, have more upward mobility. In fact, Chetty, calculating an area’s “social capital” score, found a strong correlation between civic activity and upward mobility, with religiosity (e.g. going to church) leading the way. Both white working-class and black inner-city neighbourhoods lack the civic institutions that allow for upward mobility. Furthermore, research suggests that a 15% increase in the proportion of people who think others are trustworthy raises income per person by 1%.

Take personal responsibility and follow the 'success sequence'- "graduate from high school, work full-time, and not have children outside of marriage"

According to Haskins and Sawhill, individuals in families that adhered to the success sequence had a 98 percent chance of escaping poverty. By contrast, 76 percent of those that did not adhere to any of these norms were poor. In a 2003 analysis of census data, the authors demonstrated that had the poor followed the success sequence, the U.S. poverty rate would have fallen by more than 70 percent.

Support the family and marriage

Whereas 8 percent of children born to married parents end up in poverty as adults, 27 percent of children born to unmarried parents live as impoverished adults. According to a study by social scientists Robert Lerman, Joseph Price, and Brad Wilcox, “Youths who grow up with both biological parents earn more income, work more hours each week, and are more likely to be married themselves as adults, compared to children raised in single-parent families.”

The authors report that not only does controlling for family make-up pretty much eliminate differences between races but that the single best thing to reduce social pathologies like depression, alcoholism, suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence is to cut the rates of child abuse. And child abuse is dramatically higher where children are born outside marriage.

It's one article and I'm sure there's plenty to question but it matches the work on child and young people of Robert Putnam as well as robust evidence on how social stability benefits the less well off far more than it does us well-connected middle-class folk. What is very clear, however, is that the collapse in traditional families sits right at the heart of the problems we see in inner-city communities. And it's no surprise that, for these communities, the people who look to escape a world of poverty, violence and drugs turn to the stability of the church as pretty much the sole wholesome thing on offer.

I am mixed on the matter of social conservatism given its association with anti-gay messages and a traditional, essentially subservient role for women. But the argument here is compelling - finishing school, getting a job and keeping a job, getting married and staying married is still the best route out of poverty. Our social policies should, therefore, focus on supporting these outcomes - well-funded schools with good discipline and a focus on outcomes, real support for people in work aimed at keeping them in work and a substantive and genuine commitment to reward marriage.

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Mandates (and how the Archbishop is talking nonsense again)

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has been talking - in the context of the gay marriage debate - whether the government has a "mandate" for this proposed regulation:

“The basis of the mandate for changing the state’s understanding of marriage given the lack of any commitment in the election manifestos of the main parties has been one of the many issues raised in those discussions.” 

Which rather begs an important question. Or rather indicates Dr Williams to be displaying a degree of constitutional ignorance that doesn't become his standing. True, it is commonplace for people engaging in debate to suggest that a government doesn't have a "mandate" for something. But this is just blather - there's an acceptance that proposals based on manifesto promises aren't nobbled by the House of Lords but nowhere in all this does it say that the government is limited in its actions by the contents of a manifesto published before an election.

The government has every right to propose changes to the law regardless of whether the matter being considered (gay marriage in this case) was or wasn't within a political party's election manifesto. And I'm pretty sure that Dr Williams knows this to be so, which makes his statement merely political roustabout rather than a serious constitutional point.

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Are we really a Christian country?

Barely a week passes without the words appearing somewhere, uttered by a politician or, more likely, by an ageing Anglican clergyman...

“...Britain is a Christian country!”

This cry – used down the ages to exclude Jews and, more recently, to marginalise Muslims – may have been true once but I do not believe that we can make that claim any more. But first to understand the claim.

In one respect the argument is about numbers – two-thirds of the population express their identity as Christian so we are, ipso facto, a Christian nation. We still grant a privileged position to representatives of the protestant hierarchy – not just seats in the House of Lords but an almost divine right to airtime wherein to pontificate about the issues of the day.

And these bishops are listened to, just as the local vicar gets a hearing that you as just a bloke in the village won’t get. The established church as an institution also exercises power through its secular role as one of the nation’s two or three biggest landowners. Wherever we look we see evidence of the worldly presence of the church and every day we hear that church express its worldly power.

However, like other institutions (the political parties spring to mind), the church is all fur coat and no knickers. Those self-identifying Christians are little better than agnostics – only about 5% of the population turn out to the established church’s weekly offering. This is little different to that rather more secular religion- association football.

These grand, purple-robed men (and maybe women in a year or so) are sustained by a vast property holding not by the support of the populace. Indeed the public’s general view of religion is to mutter something about “good men” and then shrug. Our religion has declined to the symbols and sounds of a forgotten faith – we sing carols, get the vicar to conduct rites of passage and pay no attention at all to the message.

Our Christianity is hard to distinguish from believing in fairies, ghosts or boggarts. That hard-nosed faith founded in the idea of grace and personal salvation has been replaced by a mushy set of superstitions.

 “Maybe there’s a god and we were told something about Jesus at school. I like those hymns. Did I tell you about the clairvoyant I went to at the pub?”

I do not make these observations in some sort of skeptical rapture – the skeptics like Dawkins are ghastly and ignorant in their denial of metaphysics. I wish simply to point out that we are an agnostic place, we like the comfort blanket of the church (especially when it’s a beautiful piece of gothic splendour or Norman survival) but we do not see that the church offers us anything beyond that comfort.

So while I have no beef with faith schools and see the obsessing about creation that typifies atheist debate as largely an irrelevance, I do not think that we’re a Christian country. I don’t believe that Christians deserve any special treatment – any more than I believe that so-called “faith leaders” should be afforded a special place or privileged access to power.

We should be gently moving the Church of England towards the retirement home. Not some drastic, painful and purposeless disestablishment but a gradual recognition that priests have no more rights to influence than publicans.  Religion will never go away – as Gordon Dickson observed in the Dorsai trilogy, part of man’s psyche is a preference for certainty, order and the direction of a god. But as someone once said, the work of the state is no business of god’s:

“And Jesus answering, said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's: and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.” (Mark 12:17)

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Welcome to The Church of Public Health, spiritual home to the New Puritan

A while ago I wrote a piece entitled “The new Puritans” in which I drew parallels between the assault on the pleasures of the ordinary man and the dour, stolid faith of the Puritans:

Just as did the Long Parliament, today's New Puritans propose to use the power and authority of the state to control pleasures of which they disapprove.

The smoking ban, calls for restrictions of alcohol, the attacks on video games, films and magazines for portraying terrible and lustful images, and a terrible contradiction in our attitude towards and treatment of children. These are the signs that these New Puritans are winning the battle – and it all seems so reasonable, doesn’t it?

And the driver for this new puritan ethic is the cost to society – smoking we’re told “costs the NHS” billions, complex costing are prepared demonstrating just how much our boozing is destroying the economy and now we are regaled with the terrible costs of eating the wrong sort of food:

Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, said parents had to be made aware of the "hidden risks" of poor diet for their children. "Fatty liver disease is becoming a very common chronic liver disorder in Western countries and causes serious ill-health. In addition, many cases of fatty liver disease are linked to being obese. We all need to be aware that fat is not only stored on our body surface, but in and around our internal organs too."

Welcome my friends to the Church of Public Health, the high priests of which have only your interests at heart in their quest to reduce the risks of modern living – cigarette smoke, alcohol, transfats, sugar, salt and Ronald McDonald. To understand the core articles of this church’s faith we can turn to its scriptures – lovingly provided for us by the Faculty of Public Health:

Public health is about improving and protecting the health of groups of people (or 'populations') rather than treating individual patients. It is concerned with 'the bigger picture'. Public health professionals must take action to promote healthy lifestyles, prevent disease, protect and improve general health and healthcare services for their local 'population' – which could be a rural community, an entire city or even the global population.

And the Faculty’s Manifesto includes:

A minimum price per unit of 50p for alcohol
No “junk-food” advertising in pre-watershed television
A ban on smoking in cars with children
Compulsory front-of-packet labelling for all prepared foods
Banning transfats
Presumed consent for organ donation

These proposals are supported by some of the dodgiest arguments (but remember this is a Church so acceptance of the argument is a matter of faith in the expert not in the revelation of truth). Over recent years the Church of Public Health has captured our National Health Service to the point where clinical investment choices are being directed not by proper processes of diagnosis and appraisal but by the Church’s obsessions – smoking, drinking and diet.

And the guardians of truth – our media – do not question or challenge the statements of the Church of Public Health and its priests. They appear regularly on the radio and television, in the pages of the newspapers and in a host of specialist magazines and what they say, their supposed evidence, is never challenged. If these priests say alcohol consumption is rising (when it’s not) no interviewer ever questions that statement. When the acolytes of the Church say that smoking costs the NHS billions, no-one points out how much smokers save by dying early or how much revenue they contribute to the exchequer. And when the discussion turns to excess weight, no broadcaster ever asks why we don’t talk more of personal responsibility rather than blame an advertising clown all the time.

I do not think that I will succeed – I feel as a lone voice in the wilderness. But I have had enough of this Church’s mission – a mission that has wholly corrupted the idea of public health, which treats us as recalcitrant children unable to make our own decisions about our own health. So I shall over the coming weeks look in turn at all the tenets of the Public Health – the New Puritan – faith, at smoking, at drinking, at diet and at our attitude to children and young people. Hopefully, this small heresy of mine will get some readers, will turn a few folk away from the New Puritans and will encourage others to question the lies of Priests of the Church of Public Health.

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