Whatever Happened to Tradition? by Tim Stanley, reviewed by Iain Macwhirter

Bloomsbury, £20

Review by Iain Macwhirter

Books that ask questions in their titles invite flippant answers. I'm tempted to say that what happened to tradition is that it got stuck in the past. People who talk about it often yearn for the moral certainty of a time when homosexuality was illegal, sex was confined to marriage, women knew their place and people generally deferred to their social superiors.

Tim Stanley, a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, is a reactionary. But he's an interesting one because he is relatively young, used to be a Marxist and stood as a Labour candidate in the 2005 general election. He is now a born-again Catholic and wholly signed up to the mysteries of faith, which he says “gave me something to live for other than myself”.

For Tim Stanley, tradition is synonymous with religion, and he fears for our future now that we are rapidly becoming a post-Christian society. The tide of faith has gone out so far, he warns, that it may never come back again. This will leave us in a kind of rationalist hell – a state of querulous uncertainty and confusion, lacking social order.

“The liberal Westerner is lost,” he says, “in a permanent state of juvenile existential crisis ... wandering without progressing, searching without finding.” If that sounds a bit like Pete Townshend's The Seeker, he'd probably agree.

Now, I call myself a humanist and incapable of believing in God. But I have been fascinated – and appalled – by religion ever since, as a teenager, I thumbed through my grandfather's dusty black bible with its tiny text and weird stories. Moses and David smiting their enemies unto the last goat. Lot getting drunk and raping his daughters after his wife turned to salt. What did it all mean?

So, I was interested to read Stanley's account of his discovery of faith. He writes in a modern idiom, but don't be fooled: he really means it. He has no time for religious people who doubt the existence of God, and is contemptuous of “hip” ministers who disown biblical doctrine. His is not the woke religion you hear on Thought for the Day.

The Enlightenment, he regards as a mistake because then we started thinking that morality, and the great issues of existence, can be discovered through reason and debate. Whose reason; whose debate? He thinks that without divine revelation, morality becomes politics: whoever has the power decides what is moral and what is not.

“If we lose the tradition of religion,” he asserts, “then we will enter a phase of history like the 1930s, where there is no golden rule.” Humanists reply that we do not need religion for the golden rule: to do unto others as we would have them do to us. For Stanley, morality is laid down by God and interpreted by the church. But whose god and whose church?

There are many faiths, many traditions – a number of which are explored in this book. Take the Yazidis of Iraq, who don't eat lettuce or wear blue and, by tradition, when they hear the word “Satan” theoretically have to kill the person saying it and then themselves for hearing it. Why would traditions like that offer any guide to moral behaviour?

Many traditional practices once promoted by the church, like antisemitism or persecution of homosexuals, have been dispensed with for very good reason: because they are irrational and cruel. Stanley devotes an entire chapter to circumcision, without asking whether it is morally acceptable to mutilate the genitals of male and female children. He discusses it entirely in the context of a tradition, a “covenant” between God and man.

Similarly, he appears to accept the Catholic church's traditional opposition to contraception on the grounds that God told us to “go forth and multiply” and who are we to quibble. But that is also to endorse a patriarchal view of women as essentially baby factories. Stanley rather approves of the church “sticking to its guns” on patriarchy because it is honouring tradition against the corrosive effects of liberal individualism, which leads to selfishness, narcissism and anomie.

Tim Stanley doesn't much like cancel culture, identity politics and statue-toppling, though he doesn't entirely condemn it either. He applauds a new strand of social conservatism amongst Millennials with their “puritanical” attitudes to sexual morality on campus. “We could interpret political correctness,” he says, “as the restitution of good manners.”

He is almost Corbynite in his denunciation of capitalism as wasteful, divisive and anti-social. He quotes Keir Hardie extensively along with Morris, Ruskin and Carlyle on the iniquities of industrial capitalism. Thatcherite worship of the market was an aberration, he believes, a departure from the ethical conservatism of Burke and Disraeli who saw tradition, underpinned by faith, as the glue that held society together and prevented a capitalist war of all against all.

Like Tom Holland in his book Dominion, Stanley regards socialism as a continuation of New Testament morality by political means, and little to do with Marxist materialism. Modern environmentalism too he sees as essentially Christian in its veneration of nature and man's place in it. Conserving the planet for the next generation, he regards as intrinsically conservative.

Stanley doesn't say this, but you almost see Boris Johnson's big-state, environmental Toryism as an attempt to reconnect with a deeper Conservative tradition that pre-dates Thatcherism. It is hard to picture our philandering PM as an agent of moral revival, but God does work in mysterious ways.

Religion starts where politics ends: when we confront death and the mystery of existence. Stanley writes movingly about discussing mortality with his atheist father on his deathbed. To illustrate mystery, he tells a story: how he accompanied the relics of a dead saint into Barlinnie Prison in 2019 to a graceful reception by inmates.

“To stand in a room of men who have done terrible things and feel, through Christian fellowship, not just equality but brotherhood, and not just brotherhood but a duty to love these men as if they were my own sons – I cannot imagine anything but religion that would produce such an effect.”

Put like that, I almost get it. Religion reaches the parts other modes of thought cannot. But you have to have faith to experience its mystique. That requires, not just a suspension of disbelief, but a mind closed to rational critique of religion. And like it or not, as Steven Pinker says, in our age, “reason is non-negotiable”.