AN INTERESTING example of the blindness of the secular press: The New European has relaunched itself as The New World. It is the voice of the outrage felt by the decent liberal middle classes who believed until the Brexit referendum that they ran the country. Although The New European started in the summer of 2016 as an angry pop-up that was meant to last for only four weeks, it has kept going as a weekly, now profitable, and with 35,000 paying readers.
The publisher and founder, Matt Kelly, has an article in the latest number, full of justified boosterism, to explain why it is changing its name. “If TNE [The New European] was born out of Brexit, The New World is born out of something bigger: the global unravelling. . .
“Brexit was the beginning . . . of a story that is now truly global — and grotesquely interconnected. From Washington to Budapest, New Delhi to Nairobi, Kyiv to El Salvador, what’s happening isn’t a fluke — it’s a pattern. . . Clinging to the belief that the pendulum will naturally swing back of its own accord is delusional.”
Nothing to argue with there; in fact, you might ask what took them so long to notice. Now, Mr Kelly writes, they are going to double down on their political analysis, their philosophy coverage, their science (by the excellent Philip Ball), technology, and “the rise of China, the challenge of changing demographics”.
But religion, which is not mentioned in Mr Kelly’s article, is, apparently, not going to be important in this new world. It an extraordinarily myopic decision, which cannot entirely be blamed on the Church of England. Quite a lot of it can, though — since the past 30 years’ coverage of religion in the British press has been largely concerned with poisonous synodical squabbles wrapped in waffle; the Church is no longer even Larkin’s “motheaten musical brocade”, but a patch of stinking bladderwrack left to dry by the receding tide of history long ago.
The other magazines of the Left have largely outgrown the limitations of that vision. The New Statesman and the London Review of Books both carry intelligent and sympathetic essays that have nothing to do with church politics. They take much more seriously, if only by implication, the consequences of the death of progress. They no longer hope that we can outgrow original sin.
This need not be a recipe for despair. But it does require us to pay serious attention to religious beliefs and practices, which are, above all, the ways in which people have reconciled themselves to the cruelties of fate. This can become only more important as hopes of a benevolent future fade.
If The New World means to shepherd its readers into a future in which almost everyone takes for granted that the past was better (and not just the time before the referendum), then it needs to teach them to understand faith without condescension.
This won’t be easy. Condescension is one of the most valued gifts that a newspaper can offer its readers. At the very least, they want to feel superior to those who don’t read their paper, website, Substack, or whatever; and, I suppose, we all want to encourage that. But they should not be encouraged to condescend to anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in the news.
Nor can any liberal or progressive magazine hope to duck the religious explanation for the collapse of the liberal order. This goes back to the claim that liberal societies are dependent on some of the qualities that they reprehend. They cannot sustain themselves without instinctive loyalties, or on the sole basis of contracts freely entered into by consenting adults.
The belief that they could arose from the shattering consequences of totalitarian regimes in Europe, whether Nazi or Soviet; but the people who believed this were themselves profoundly shaped by the values of their own illiberal upbringings.
These have faded through successive generations. I think that Angela Merkel, a child of East Germany, recognised this when she said, during the backlash against Syrian refugees, that we would learn now whether the lessons of the Second World War had been learned by subsequent generations. In her terms, they had not.
There is a religious argument, largely put at the moment by American conservatives, which says that these lessons could not be learned by a generation brought up under liberalism. If there is a counter to that, as the remains of the progressive movement must believe, then this, too, will have to be religious. If The New World does not recognise that, it must remain trapped in the Old one.
