Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.
On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler. It was an ill-tempered encounter. Wesley believed that God communicated directly with individuals, invested his promises and purposes in them personally, and charged them with missions to reveal and explain the divine will. Butler, famous for his rationalism, reacted with cold indignation. ‘Sir,’ he told Wesley, ‘the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’
The Bishop spoke for England. We do not ‘do’ God – not even the 49 per cent of us who actually believe in God. We are of course hardly immune to evangelical enthusiasms: they often flare up among us and the Wesley brothers caused a conflagration. But they trigger a strong rejection. Nor do we greatly like, or like for long, moral crusades. The result of this innate national scepticism is that the proclaiming of moral zeal, or calls for a moral revival, induce in millions an unmistakable queasiness.
I feel the same queasiness about last week’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference, whose organisers insist that faith and politics do not mix, yet whose language was steeped in moral fundamentalism and peppered with references to ‘Judaeo-Christian’ values. To this in a moment.
The alloy of scepticism and suspicion towards spiritual and moral certainty runs very, very deep among us. ‘Things have come to a pretty pass,’ remarked Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, ‘when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.’
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