TS Eliot and the Idea of a Christian Society

In this series, The Spectator will profile conservative intellectuals whose contributions to political thought are often ignored. Each essay will focus on the ideas, values, and sentiments of one particular individual, beginning with TS Eliot and continuing with other exemplars of the conservative tradition, such as Edmund Burke and John Adams.

In 1940 the great modernist poet TS Eliot engaged with a tradition of conservative thought with the idea of a Christian Society, an essay calling for a revival of Christian culture to protect ideals such as “liberty” and “democracy” from fascism and communism.

TS Eliot’s idea of a Christian Society begins with an outline of the three possible organizing principles of society economic, political, and spiritual. According to TS Eliot, all societies have historically incorporated all three elements, but each society always tends to emphasize one of them over the others. TS Eliot says that only a society founded on a spiritual order can avoid a descent into the twin manifestations of “paganism”—fascism and communism. m

TS Eliot anchors his thesis on one critical insight into the insidious nature of liberalism “That Liberalism may be a tendency toward something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature.” Liberalism degenerates into its opposite because it negates social custom, morality, institutions, tradition, and authority – it stripes the individual of the “moral drapery of life” and unleashes him into a soulless society of atomized individuals. Such is the tendency of liberalism because, in TS Eliot’s phrase, “it is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point-away from rather than toward something definite.” This starting point is the formulation of a set of rights which delineate a sphere of individual autonomy not to be eclipsed by the government, which possesses no rights of its own. Liberalism negates the government and “liberates” the individual, but, in the words of W. H. Auden liberalism is “at a loss to know how to handle him, for the only thing liberalism knows to offer is more freedom.” Emancipating individuals from institutional restraint only incarcerates them in the moral wasteland that Eliot so dreaded. In the end, it is this outbreak of moral chaos and cultural anarchy that propels liberalism toward its opposite by creating the need for an “artificial, mechanized . . . control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”

TS Eliot’s dissection of liberalism does not address one possible objection -why cannot liberalism operate in conjunction with the self-regulating virtue that characterized the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill? In other words, why is the individual incapable of exercising his liberty within the restraints of his own self-imposed morality? The answer comes from Plato’s Republic “In fact, excessive action in one direction usually sets up a reaction in the opposite direction. This happens in seasons, in plants, in bodies, and last, but not least, in constitutions.” Liberalism qualifies as an excessive movement in one direction-freedom-without a counterbalancing force such as the family or church-and such is the depravity of human nature that the individual is incapable of unilaterally producing these constraints himself. (Plato himself envisioned the dangers inherent in freedom-”Extreme freedom cannot be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery, whether for a private individual or for a city’)

After briefly confirming that democracy, like liberalism, is an empty ideal that also needs to be reinforced with positive content, TS Eliot identifies Christianity as the source of this “positive content.” He presents this “idea of a Christian society” as the alternative to an ephemeral “neutral” society based on hollow political idealism and anemic economic reductionism. For TS Eliot this Christian society consists of three parts. The first constituent is the “Christian community,” which refers to the broadest possible segment of society which adheres to the essentials of Christian morality but does not necessarily hold to Christian theological beliefs. The second element constitutes what Eliot ambiguously calls the “Christian state,” which he defines not as the amalgamation of church and state, but instead as the type of government that is most compatible with a Christian culture -in other words a government in which leeal and political decisions are informed by the morality extracted from Christianity – one can think of the emerging issue of genetic engineering as an example of an issue which can only be resolved by appeals to religious instruction. The third element TS Eliot calls the “Christian community” which contains the small subset of believers who actually profess faith in God. Finally, TS Eliot focuses on the Church as the institution which provides the theological infrastructure for ethics.

The end result is a society in which a positive set of values are introduced as the companion of an enlightened liberty, endowing society with a purpose and positive direction “It would be a society in which the natural end of man-virtue and well-being in community-is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end-beautitude-for those who have the eyes to see it.”

TS Eliot concludes his essay with a dramatic pronouncement on need for the integration of Christianity into society with pristine clarity As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from religion it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term “democracy,” as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike – it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

These lines demonstrate the comprehensiveness of Eliot’s thinking. Christianity is more than just a rule book which makes life livable, it is that which also gives purpose and meaning to life. For a “people without religion will in the end find that it has nothing to live for. It was this conviction that society required a vision that ultimately inspired The Idea of a Christian Society. For TS Eliot confessed that he was acting out of his concern that in the beginnings of the second world war, the British has not been able to “match conviction with conviction” against their enemies. TS Eliot voiced these concerns in an era in which the great contest was against totalitarianism. In this new century, the ideological polarization that characterized the 20th century has yielded to older cultural animosities which have produced the “clash of civilizations,” yet TS Eliot’s connection of religion to the survival of society is even more relevant as we find ourselves in a life or death struggle with radical Islam. Will we be able to match conviction for conviction and save ourselves from the death of the west?