Catching Up With St George

Four Ironies about St George and why that's classic Englishness

Next week, it’s St George’s Day, that faintly embarrassing day where English people try not to feel too proud of themselves or their country. Which isn’t even a country. Only a large part of a Kingdom. Queendom. Here are some words I wrote about that day a few years ago, and, with a few little updates, I think they still apply.

St Patrick’s Day is a cheerful, boozy affair, full of Guinness and good will. St David’s Day is a jolly day too, with its curious blend of daffodils, leeks and red dragons. St Andrew’s Day seems to have been usurped by Rabbie Burns and Hogmanay. Fair enough. But the Scots have their day. Two, in fact.

But what about the English? How should they celebrate their national day? Obvious traditions would be gathering around Nelson’s Column – or makeshift versions of the same in town squares up and down the land – singing ‘Jerusalem’ by Blake and then ‘Vindaloo’ by Fat Les before someone reads out Henry V’s Agincourt speech, a claim is made on behalf of the Crown for the French throne and the Tricolour is solemnly set on fire. (Come on, would it kill the French to at least hand back Calais?) Then it’s all down to the local pub to watch a big-screen football match in which England lose to Germany on penalties.

Instead the English are far more comfortable playing it down, and worrying about whether flying a St George flag will cause offence. The flag makes some uncomfortable as it has those ‘Eng-er-land’ nationalistic overtones. But then, isn’t that what you’d want on your national day? Apparently not.

The problem is that St George’s flag has other associations: that of a crusading knight.

All of this is beautifully riddled with irony upon irony which is convenient given that quietly appreciating irony is a popular English pastime. One irony, though, is that irony is now used to denote something that technically isn’t irony. But we digress. There is irony all over the St George’s Flag/Englishness debate.

Irony One

England has produced a number of fine Christian men who would make more suitable Patron saints than St George – who is not even English. Should George have to re-apply for his own job, he might not even get an interview. Aquinas and Anselm who would surely be on the shortlist (with Edward the Confessor and Thomas Becket on the long list).

Irony Two

England has been a Protestant country for nearly five hundred years so we don’t really do canonisation and saints. In the Protestant denomination, all Christians are considered saints, since this is how the New Testament most commonly uses the term. So all English Christians could lay claim to being an English saint. This would fit well with the times. Just as Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2006 was ‘You’, what better way for a self-obsessed, narcissistic population to celebrate itself than by making ‘Everyone’ a patron saint of England 2.0? Wow, just typing that makes me feel slightly unwell.

Irony Three

St George famously slew a dragon. Dragons, it hardly needs saying, no longer exist, except in their Komodo form. Maybe they did back in St George’s day. It’s interesting that every culture all over the world have remarkable similar dragons in their folklore, but that’s one for another time. Irony Three Subsection One is that the dragon is the symbol of the Welsh, so right away the English have a saint who is crassly offensive to neighbouring inhabitants of their own island.

Irony Four

St George’s flag has associations with crusaders. Crusades were, of course, launched against the Turks and St George was probably Turkish. How fitting that England has a patron saint who is primarily in conflict with himself.

So can we fly the flag of St George for a day without being considered a White Van Man? What is a Christian response to this dilemma, given that Christians are citizens of heaven – where there will be people of every nation, tribe and tongue?

What’s the real issue here? It’s the same issue that’s behind why at every sporting contest the Scots will support anyone against the English. The English have traditionally been the dominant power within Britain, asserting themselves over the Welsh, the Scots and particularly the Irish, sometimes with shameful brutality. What’s more, the English, as the dominant power within Britain, have flexed their muscles all over the world. Less than a hundred years ago, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s land and population; 458 million were under the Union Jack – which, at the centre, has a St George’s Cross.

How we respond to this dilemma rather depends on your attitude to power. And St George is a brilliant example of how Christians should behave in positions of power. He was a (Turkish) Roman soldier, probably a tribune, and as such must have felt unstoppable. But he was a Christian. And when an edict came that all Christians in the army should offer a sacrifice to pagan Gods, he didn’t hold onto that power. He gave it up and was executed. Does that sound like anyone else? (Hint: His name begins with ‘J’.) The flag of St George may be associated with intolerant military strength but there is also a wonderful blood-red, cross-shaped streak of Christian humility. So there’s that.

Happy St George’s Day.

A version of article - along with many others like it - can be found in James Cary's slightly dated first book Death by Civilisation available from Darton, Longman & Todd (2013) in Paperback and for Kindle

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The Left thinks the Right is evil.

But the Right does not think the Left is evil.

The Right tends to think the Left is stupid.

Wanna know why? Read on.

From a Great Haidt

The book I’ve recommended more than any other (apart from my own) in recent years is The Righteous Mindby Jonathan Haidt (pronounced ‘Height’).

I got a whiff of the book a couple of years ago after it was published in 2012, but I didn’t get round to reading it until 2017 (Because people don’t like to read, right?)

I mention it a lot on Facebook threads when people are continually talking past each other because the book has huge explanatory power. It is about how we form our political views and end up sharply disagreeing with each other. Using his own research and drawing on the research of others, Haidt puts forward a very convincing thesis that dispassionate moral reasoning is not the way in which we formulate our moral or political views. He argues that we react to moral situations with gut feelings, and then, when pressed, use moral reasoning to justify that decision. Not only does this ring true in my experience, he presents compelling evidence to, erm, rationalise his gut feeling on this.

So far, quite interesting. But it gets better. How can we explain our instincts on moral or ethical questions? What makes us rush to the judgments we like to think are based on facts or sound philosophy? In examining this question, Haidt has stumbled on something that explains one of the most tiresome political frustrations of our age, which is:

The Left thinks the Right is evil. The Right does not think the Left is evil, but that it’s stupid.

What You Hold Sacred

Haidt has some helpful insights into the way in which people form their political opinions. Those on the Left tend to base their views on perfectly decent criteria, mostly a desire for equality and empathy for those who are suffering. Those on the Right, however, consider these criteria, but balance them with other ones, like the realm of the sacred and the good of the existing community (rather than some speculative utopia).

For example, Haidt points out that conservatives tend to see things that the Left sees as self-evidently positive, like the welfare state and feminism, as threats to personal responsibility and the importance of the family. Despite being a leftist himself, Haidt can see how the Right takes the broader view and how the Left mistakes that for moral deficiency or lack of empathy.

Based on those last two or three paragraphs, you might already be shouting at your screen or scrolling down to the comments section, which is understandable. You’re reacting emotionally, which is what we all do. But the book is carefully nuanced and well argued. If anything he takes a little too long over it. It’s probably 60-80 pages too long, and I confess I skimmed most of the material on the role of evolutionary biology because I’ve never found that stuff very compelling, but that just proves that Haidt is right. But The Righteous Mind is worth every penny for the first hundred pages and the last thirty.

To his credit, Haidt is refreshingly open about his own politics, those of academia and the students participating in many experiments. These disproportionately bright and liberal students are highly unrepresentative of the population as a whole and skew the test results accordingly. Haidt also talks about having confronted his own leftist biases and moving towards the centre.

Here’s the Kicker

But there is an unacknowledged irony that for all of his fair-mindedness and self-awareness, Haidt just cannot bring himself to say anything positive about Republicans. When he talks about the Right, he always specifies that he is positive about certain aspects of conservatism, and is at pains to point out that he is not praising or endorsing anything to do with the GOP. Presumably, he has already enraged his fellow Left-leaning academics enough with the very idea of searching for balance and considering other points of view. The overall effect of this to me, at least, demonstrates that even those with the greatest insights into political opinions succumb to the prejudice of party politics. Typical Democrat. (See what I did there?)

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is published in the UK by Penguin. And can be purchased here.

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Popcorn Parenting is back for Season 3, and as you’d expect, Nate Morgan Locke and I kick off the season with a chat about Toy Story 3.

If you’re a podcast fan and need some extra listening, I recently interviewed Rico Tice for the Keswick Convention Podcast and we had a really interesting chat about evangelism and being kind to our neighbours.

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