Credit : Attila Husejnow / Getty Images
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/mary-100x100.jpeg)
Today’s hottest property: young fogeys. Blue Labour hailed Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory as a rebellion by the country’s “culturally conservative” silent majority. A new conservative magazine seems to appear every week. We have even seen a youth movement for the revival of socially conservative values popping up in that bastion of modern double liberalism, the Conservative Party.
What do they all want? At the more wonkish end of the debate, the argument is broadly that the political push throughout the twentieth century for ever greater social and economic freedom has brought many benefits, but that these have been unevenly distributed and are now reaching the point of diminishing returns.
The pursuit of ever greater freedom and individualism, this strand of thought argues, has delivered rising wealth while hollowing out working-class communities; liberated some women while forcing others to work a double shift and abandon the young and old in substandard care, and provided an infinitude of consumer choice but at the cost of mounting ecological damage. Under the sign of radical individualism, the new communitarians argue, we are all becoming more solitary and self-absorbed. Even charitable giving seems to be in unstoppable decline.
But what, in practice, are the new social conservatives seeking to conserve? Calls for a revival of cultural conservatism, many in the name of Christian values, seem often on closer examination oddly insubstantial. In 2017, UKIP’s leader-for-that-week Stephen Crowther said that the UK is a Christian country, “and we intend to stay that way”.
Yet for Crowther, being a Christian country does not seem to impose any obligation to actually be Christian, but he says, simply “reflects the Judeo-Christian classical and enlightenment origins on which our laws, our social systems and our cultural norms have been built over two millennia.”
Elsewhere in Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn describes his brand of authoritarian, identity-oriented politics as “Christian democracy”. Only a minority of Hungarians go to church every week – only 12% attends church regularly, although around three in four identity as Catholic or Protestant — but the identifier “Christian” has nonetheless become central to Orbàn’s politics.
Much as Crowther did, the Orbàn-supporting Bishop of Szeged, László Kiss-Rigó, bridges this gap with a vague, cultural definition of what actually constitutes a Christian: “In Europe, even an atheist is a Christian”, he said. It turns out that being “Christian” is less about prayer or doctrine than values, for as he puts it: “We are very happy that there are a few politicians like Orbán and Trump who really represent those values which we Christians believe to be important.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe