A Christian Renewal? What Brexit Means for Traditionalists
by Stephen Turley
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/06/christian-renewal-brexit-means-traditionalists.htmlsnip
While a number of scholars and commentators have interpreted the Brexit as indicative of the wave of nationalism that is sweeping Europe and much of the world, many have missed the significance of this wave for a resurgent conservative traditionalism in the West.
It is most certainly the case that the world is going through a radical realignment along nationalist and provincialist lines. From Bosnia to Chechnya, Rwanda and Barundi, from South Sudan to Scotland, populations have been turning increasingly inward for civic and cultural identity.
But within these balkanizing tendencies is a process called re-traditionalization. Because globalization challenges the traditions and customs, the religions and languages of local cultures, its processes tend to be resisted with a counter-cultural blowback. In the face of threats to localized identity markers, people assert their religiosity, kinship, and national symbols as mechanisms of resistance against globalizing dynamics.
Few nations exemplify this connection between a resurgent nationalism and a revived religious tradition than the Russian Federation. There has been a self-conscious distancing from globalism by Russia, drawing inspiration instead from the ideals of a neo-Byzantium, what U.S. Naval War College professor John R. Schindler calls a “Third Rome” ideology, which involves “a powerful admixture of Orthodoxy, ethnic mysticism, and Slavophile tendencies that has deep resonance in Russian history.”[1] From this admixture, Russia has emerged, in the words of a recent essay, as “Europe’s most God-believing nation.”[2]
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It is true that British national allegiances have yet to exemplify anything remotely akin to a Christian revival; indeed, church attendance in the UK has long been on the decline. Nevertheless, there seems to be a decline to this decline. Most people in the UK still think of themselves as Christian, and immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe, Catholic Poles in particular, have made Britain more, not less, religious.[4] There has been an increase in evangelical church attendance,[5] all the while Islamic birthrates in the UK are dropping to under three children per woman.[6] All this suggests that the Christian tradition remains a significant factor within British cultural identity and will only increase in the coming years if nationalist trends continue.
(Closes with....)
A renewed Christian Europe may not be so far away.
exc
