Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

A Red(neck) Tory

 The Kalends of January  is upon us once again.  Kalends, from which our word calendar is derived, was the day of the new moon and hence the first day of the month, for the ancient Romans like the ancient Hebrews followed a calendar in which the months lined up with the lunar cycles they represent.  We have gotten off that so the first of the calendar month no longer always lines up with the beginning of the lunar cycle.  The Kalends of January is a significant day in the Church Kalendar because as Hippolytus of Rome wrote in the second century, our Saviour was born eight days before.  Yes, the 25th of December was the acknowledged birthday of our Lord from far earlier in Church history than Modern gainsayers would have you believe and can in fact be deduced from St. Luke’s Gospel.  The eighth day after the birth of an ancient Israelite male was, in accordance with the Abrahamic Covenant, the day he was circumcised and so the Kalends of January has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.  Far more recently it became New Year’s Day on the civil calendar.

This is the day each year when, in accordance with a custom I picked up from Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, I write about myself and where I stand.  I very much miss Reese’s column, and for those who are unfamiliar with him, archives of his last few years can be found on Lew Rockwell’s website.  If you are interested in his earlier columns and can get your hands on copies at least two collections were published as books, Great Gods of the Potomac and Common Sense for the Eighties.

Lets start with the basics.  I am a Canadian.  I was born a Canadian and I will die a Canadian.  Donald the Orange can take his obnoxious rhetoric about the “51st state” and insert it into a place that is proverbially bereft of sunshine.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada all my life.  I am a loyal subject of King Charles III as I was a loyal subject of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory before him.  I grew up in rural southwestern Manitoba, on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, did my first five years of higher education at what is now Providence University College in Otterbourne, about a half hour south of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, to which I then moved where I have lived and worked for a quarter of a century since.  

I often use T. S. Eliot’s famous description of himself as a “royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and classicist in literature” to summarize my own political-religious convictions and what I mean when I call myself a Tory. Tory is usually used to indicate a Conservative Party supporter.  I don’t apply it to myself in this partisan sense and seldom use the word conservative even in the small-c sense anymore as that term has been co-opted for people whose political ideals of democracy and capitalism come from nineteenth century liberalism, although twisted beyond what an actual nineteenth century liberal would recognize as his own, and whose main political thought seems to be that the United States should be imposing democracy and capitalism in their evolving meanings on the world with bullets and bombs and boots on the grounds.  When I say I am a Tory, I don’t mean anything like that, but rather that my convictions are those of Eliot’s triad.

Before saying a bit more about these things, I should explain the adjective in the title.  In Canada, traditional Tories like the economist and humourist Stephen Leacock, the philosopher George Grant, and the historian Donald Creighton,  basically the people who Charles Taylor wrote about in Radical Tories, have sometimes been called “Red” due to their criticisms of capitalism having been perceived as indicating a sympathy with socialism.  This perception is based on a false dichotomy, that capitalism and socialism are each the only option to the other.  In Grant’s case he sometimes said things that suggested he accepted this dichotomy. I don’t.  Nor do I have any sympathy for socialism which I utterly detest.  I have said before and will say again, that socialism is essentially the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, practiced under the pretense of the greatest of the Theological Virtues, Charity or Christian Love.  I put  “Red” in the title of this essay to indicate that it is Leacock, Grant, Creighton, Eugene Forsey et al., who represent the tradition of Toryism that I claim as my own rather than the neoconservatives who think that this tradition  should be replaced by what is called “conservatism” in the United States (see previous paragraph).  The “neck” is added to indicate that I don’t have any sympathy with socialism  nor with anything else that could be called progressive and leftist, but rather hold the anti-progressive attitude often associated with the word “redneck.”  Think of the lyrics to Charlie Daniel’s “Simple Man” for a picture of what that means.

As a Tory I am no republican big or little r but a “royalist in politics” as Eliot put it.  The entire universe is the kingdom of its Creator, God, the King of Kings.  The most basic unit of social organization, the family, traditionally reflects the order of the universe.  The husband-father is king, wife-mother is queen, and the children are subjects.  That is the way the family works best, despite all attempts by “experts” in the social pseudosciences, the progressive brainwashers who have taken over the schools, and the seditious anti-family revolutionaries who dominate the entertainment media to depict this model as disfunctional and fascist and to try and sell us on alternative models.  The state traditionally reflected the order of the universe as well, and like the family, it functions best when it continues to do so, under the reign of a king.  The totalitarian movements of the last century hated kings.  Every Communist country was a republic and so was Nazi Germany.  By contrast, “Freedom”, as the title of a Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing that I would like to see back in print and in the hands of all my countrymen says “Wears a Crown”.  I respect Parliament, precisely because it is an ancient institution that is a traditional part of a king’s government and not because it conforms to the Modern ideal or idol of democracy.

Turning to  “Anglo-Catholic in religion,” the first thing I should say is that while Anglo-Catholicism does accurately denote what my theology has matured into, it does not mean that I think that the English Reformation was a mistake that should be forgotten or undone.  I think that the things which the Anglican Church shares with not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Eastern Orthodox and all the ancient Churches, especially the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, but also the episcopal polity, the priestly ministry, and Sacramental worship are more important than the things that identify us with the Lutherans, Reformed, and other Protestants.   This does not mean that I think the latter to be unimportant, quite the contrary.  When it comes to the two most important things the Reformers fought for, the supremacy of the Scriptures and the freeness of the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel, I am firmly a Protestant.  I have come to see, however, the importance of qualifying these with Catholic truths.  We must indeed hold the Scriptures supeme as the infallible written Word of God (with the Authorized Bible as published in 1611 with the deuterocanon included between the Testaments as the definitive English Bible)but as Hans Boersma and Ron Dart have frequently reminded us the way to listen to them is at the feet of the Church Fathers.  The Gospel does indeed proclaim a salvation that is freely given in Jesus Christ to all who receive it by faith, but the Gospel is the message of Jesus Christ, His death for us and His Resurrection, confessed in faith in each of the ancient Creeds and not the doctrine of justification which, important as it is, is a doctrine about the Gospel, rather than the Gospel itself, and while faith is the appointed means whereby we receive the saving grace of God, the ordinary means by which that saving grace is brought to us that we may so receive it is the Church’s two-fold Gospel ministry of proclaimed Word and administered Sacrament.  I can very much do without most other things associated with Protestantism, especially the iconoclasm and the inclination to write off the Church prior to the Reformation.

I was raised culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter and I was made aquainted with the stories of the Bible if not their theological significance.  My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my father’s family had been affiliated with the Anglican Church in Bradwardine which closed around the time I was born.  My paternal grandmother, received the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon and I would read these whenever I visited her in Rivers.  It was through reading  Christian books from the library that I became aware of the significance of the events celebrated at Christmas and Easter.  In Bethleham, the Son of God, Who with His Father and the Holy Ghost was and is and ever shall be, God, was born as a baby boy, having become man by uniting a true human nature to His eternal Person.  He did so, that He might save mankind from the bondage to the devil, sin, and death into which we had fallen in the infancy of our race by dying on the Cross for us, the innocent Lamb of God Who “taketh away the sin of the world” and rising again from the grave triumphant over His enemies and ours.  The summer before I entered high school I became a Christian in the sense of a believer who trusts and confesses Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

At the time I had a rather low view of the Church as an institution.  Liberalism, in the religious sense of minimizing, explaining away, or outright rejecting such basic Christian truths as the deity and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to accomodate Modern notions, had made heavy inroads into the Anglican Church and all but completely taken over the United  which at somepoint around that time had elected an openly atheist moderator.  I had nothing but contempt for religious liberalism before becoming a believer and  had even less respect for it after.   For the first fifteen years of my walk as an active believer I attended non-conformist, mostly Baptist, evangelical and fundamentalist services, and thought that such things as church government were adiophora and the only thing about the organized  Church that mattered was the faithfulness of the sermon to the truths of the Christian faith.

When I joined and was confirmed in the Anglican Church, this was not because I had come to tolerate religious liberalism.  I remain firmly of the conviction that liberalism is not a defective form of Christianity but an entirely different religion altogether as J. Greshem Machen demonstrated in his Christianity and Liberalism a century ago.  Nor was it because the Anglican Church had expunged liberalism which sadly she has not, but because I had come to see that my earlier attitude towards  the institution of the Church was neither Scriptural nor supported by history.

Church government, I had come to see, is not adiophora.  The episcopal polity is not only the polity of the Roman Catholic Church, but of all ancient Churches that predate the Reformation, and furthermore, is clearly present in the Scriptures as the polity established by the Apostles themselves, the first bishops in the sense later attached to the word.  Nor was the soundness of the sermon the only thing that mattered.  Until the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Eucharist had been the central focal point of the service, at least as important as the sermon, and this was true not just of Rome but of all the ancient Churches.  

As for the soundness of what was preached and taught, I had come to appreciate that the best and fullest summary of the truths essential to the Christian faith was not the minimalist list of “five fundamentals” drawn up in controversy with liberals in the early twentieth century, or the Protestant confessions which are too narrow doctrinal statements to be considered the basic faith, but the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene confessed by all the ancient Churches.  When I joined the  Anglican Church I joined a parish where I knew the teaching and preaching to be sound, but  I joined the Anglican Church because she had come out of the Reformatation with her episcopal polity and its Apostolic Succession intact, confessed the ancient and Catholic Creeds as her basic faith, and had recovered the centrality of the Eucharist.  This is how I would say that I am “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, although such things as the Coverdale Psalter sung to Anglican plainchant, crucifer led processionals and recessionals, clergy and choir in vestments, and candles and bells and incense all strike me as more appropriate to coming before a holy God than “praise and worship” songs in which the most used words are “me” “myself” and “I”, which sentiment is what is more commonly associated with Anglo-Catholicism today. 

I would probably replace “literature” with “culture” in Eliot’s “classicist in literature.”    Classicism is the position that man’s creativity as expressed in arts, literature and culture was given him to serve a higher good, that rules govern the exercise of that creativity and the achievement of the good of culture depends on those rules,  and the output is therefore susceptible to objective and not merely subjective evaluation. Classicism, of course, requires that there be such things as classics in works of art. literature and music.  That which is “classic” is regarded by those with Modern, progressive, forward-looking ideas as “old”, but this is because in the shallow following of fad-and-fashion that passes for thinking amongst them they cannot distinguish between what is old and what is timeless.  Timelessness is the distinguishing quality of a classic and that is true in music, the visual arts, architecture and the stage as well as literature proper.  Of course it is the passing of time that in most cases reveals a work to have this quality and most often when a new work is instantly proclaimed a classic it is simply a publicity gimmick into which little to no thought has been placed into the meaning of the word.  Still, it is not impossible to recognize a work that will prove to be enduring when it is new.  If care, skill, and knowledge of the craft or art have gone into the making of it these are good indicators.  Better indicators are that the message in the book, song, painting or what have you is addressed to more than just those of the present moment, although it may make reference to the present moment as a medium for conveying the message.  War, for example, is an enduring theme because its danger is ever present even in times of peace.  A work may speak only to a specific war, in which case it will become dated and bound to its own period.  It can, however, by addressing the reality of an immediate conflict speak beyond it to the enduring theme.  The poem “In Flanders’ Field” was written in World War I and this is the war of which it immediately speaks but the truths it speaks are enduring and when the poem is recited every Remembrance Day we understand the words to apply to the fallen of all past conflicts.  The best indicator is when the work says something important about the transcendentals, the qualities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth that the thoughtful and reflective have held important in societies and civilizations in all places and all times because they are the ends of created being, and about God in Whom these must ultimately be sought if man is to fulfil the end for which he is created.  Note that the views expressed in this paragraph are not a judgement of popular culture from the standpoint of highbrow culture.  Picasso’s paintings and Schoenberg’s music are highbrow but utterly devoid of aesthetic value, whereas popular culture, which is not to be  confused with “pop” culture the distinguishing characterstic of which is that it is factory produced for mass consumption, contains much that is good and has produced many classics.   The truths asserted in this paragraph apply to popular culture as well as to highbrow culture.  

These are the essence of my Toryism.  In the case of royalism I have been a royalist all my life, at first instinctually, later in a more informed manner.  I arrived at Anglocatholicism through a long spiritual journey that started with an evangelical acceptance of Jesus Christ combined with a fundamentalist rejection of liberalism in religion, and while it may not seem obvious to others to me it is evident that the destination was set from the beginning for the acceptance of Christ implies acceptance of His Church and to fully reject religious liberalism one must reject its seeds in all reforms of the sixteenth century except those that were absolutely necessary.  As for classicism, I can say that I have instinctually loathed the opposite of it all my life, having despised non-metrical verse, avant garde art, atonal music and the like from the moment I first encountered it, although active pursuit of the higher and elevating in culture came later, after much resistance of those who encouraged  me in that direction, and in part out of sheer cussedness such as when having encountered Mark Twain’s remark that “everyone wants to have read the classics but nobody wants to read them” I responded with “Sez you, Sam Clemens” and set out to read them.

Clearly my Toryism is not what calls  itself “conservatism” these days.  I am closest to today’s conservatives when it comes to what they are against.  I oppose abortion and what is now called “Medical Assistance in Dying” because they are murder (as opposed to killing in self-defence, in defence of others and property, capital punishment, and for one’s country in war, which are not).  That, however, may be something I have more in common with the conservatives of yesterday than those of today. I detest the courts turning violent offenders out onto the streets almost the moment they are arrested and making the public provide a supposedly safe supply of hard narcotics to drug addicts in the idea that this will reduce the harm they inflict upon themselves.  Ending “catch and release” is not enough, however, over a century’s worth of progressive reforms to the idea of criminal justice needs to be undone and we need to get back to thinking of criminal justice in terms of making the offender pay his debt to society rather than helping the offender recover from the illness of crime.  As for drug policy, we need to fish or cut bait as the polite version of the saying goes.  Either go back to trusting people to make their own self-medication choices or eliminate the supply of illegal narcotics in a real, rather than half-ass, war on drugs.  Either approach would be a vast improvement to the public not-for-profit drug dealing that is the harms reduction model.

 I oppose illegal immigration, but unlike most conservatives go further and say that legal immigration is in need of serious reform as well, and the problems are not merely those of the last ten or twenty years or so, but go back to the sixties.   I think that the late French Catholic, monarchist Jean Raspail hit the nail on the head in his novel The Camp of the Saints which depicted post-World War II liberalism as leading the civilization formerly known as Christendom to an existential crisis in its enthusiastic preference of “the other” at the expense of its own as reflected in its enthusiastic embrace of immigrants and refugees in numbers too large to be absorbed without endangering the continuity of the civilization.  The point is not that racial or cultural “otherness” is an insurmountable roadblock to someone’s becoming a true member of the community, society, country, and civilization they move to, that it is not is also illustrated in Raspail’s book.  As Enoch Powell put it “it is a matter of numbers.”

I detest radical feminism, the racial hatred of white people that goes under the name of “anti-racism”, the Year Zero attempts to erase the past that go under the names of “anti-imperialism” and “anti-colonialism,” the movement that in the name of “rights” is now demanding in the most totalitarian way possible that everybody not merely tolerate, not merely accept, but practically worship everyone who is other than cisgender and heterosexual and which insists that everyone pretend that someone who thinks he is a gender other than his biological sex, whether an actual gender or a make believe one, is what he says he is, and basically everything that the word “wokeness” has come to denote.  Where I would differ from conservatives is that their opposition to wokeness does not go much further or deeper than criticizing it for deviating from 1950’s and 1960’s, American liberalism.  My rejection of the vile race hatred of Ibraham X. Kendi does not mean that I am about to start pretending that Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint rather than a charlatan.   I  cannot stand the kind of idiot who in the name of feminism tells a neighbouring country that they should have voted otherwise in their last election because they owed it to the other candidate because she is a woman.  This is not because I think feminism to be a good thing of which he is a false representative.  Each successive wave of “feminism” has gotten crazier and crazier, because its real enemy from the first wave onward has not been the conspiracy of all men to oppress all women that has only ever existed in the fevered brains of those attached to this delusional movement but the reality of human nature that some people are men, others are women, that men and women are different, that these differences are not trivial but fundamental, “vive la différence” as the French say, and that trying to prevent this difference from expressing itself in social organization will inevitably increase rather than decrease the misery and unhappiness of both sexes.  “The personal is the political” was the motto of its second wave, a chilling statement that to these harridans there is no aspect of life that should escape the power of the state to remold it to their wishes.  For the best takes on feminism I refer you to Stephen Leacock’s “The Woman Question” and to Dr. Johnson’s observation  that “nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given her very little.”

I am much further from “conservatives” when it comes to the things they are for.  I explained above the things that I as a Tory am for and these things, royal monarchy, Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in its reformed Anglican expression, and classicism are all deep-rooted and ancient.  The things that “conservatives” say they are for are all Modern with roots no deeper than liberalism.  They are constantly changing because liberalism is constantly changing and to be a “conservative” today means little more than to be a defender of yesterday’s liberalism against the changes proposed by today’s. 

The most consistent things today’s “conservatives” are for are capitalism and technological progress. With regards to technological progress while there have been undeniable benefits to developing newer and fancier tools that can do increasingly more things for us there are obvious detriments as well.  That we have given ourselves the ability to destroy ourselves and our world stands out.  Having technology do for us what we should be doing for ourselves is another downside that is becoming an increasing problem as technology advances into the AI stage.  Thinking is not something we should be outsourcing to machines.  The earlier stage in which computers took over the task of doing all calculations in economic transactions had the result that when the computers were down many of the people manning the tills in stores were unable to do the simple math required to make change.  A repeat  of that with other cognitive functions is most undesirable.   I regard the idea that we will eventually solve all our problems by technological advancement with the utmost skepticism.  The Scriptures say that idolaters, those who worship the works of their hands come to resemble their false gods (Psalm 135:18).  Faith in technological progress is a form of idolatry and it inevitably makes men and their societies resemble machines.  

Technological progress is an inseparable part of capitalism.  Capitalism is often confused with economic freedom but the two are not the same.  Economic freedom is a simple concept and a basic good that is far to be preferred to the universal slavery that is socialism, whereas capitalism is a complex system that developed by removing traditional restrictions on usury, applying technological progress to the production of industrial goods, and expanding international trade.  I talked about the downside to technological progress in the previous paragraph.  That large-scale international trade has its disadvantages as well as its advantages (comparative and absolute, in economic jargon) is obvious and until the 1980s, the element of liberal economic theory that conservatives rejected was that such trade should be unrestricted.  American conservatives have of late abandoned the free trade fetish they picked up in that decade.  Canadian conservatives would be wise to follow suit as the disadvantage of being too dependent upon trade with one’s neighbour has become glaringly obvious.  Nevermind that the threat of crippling tariffs is attached to demands that we fix problems that we ought to be fixing any way, we should not be so dependent upon trade with the United States that its incoming leader can bully us around like that.  Add David Orchard’s The Fight for Canada to the mandatory reading list.  As for usury, it undergirds and runs through the entire capitalist system, which is why that system is incompatible with a sound currency.  Sound money, is money that retains its purchasing power so that people can use it to save for the future, a quality that requires that the currency represents actual wealth, that is, real goods already produced.  Usury, however, turns a country’s monetary system into a Ponzi scheme where the currency is backed by debt, wealth that has not yet been produced.  Since usury, like technological progress and international trade, is an essential element of capitalism, capitalism cannot escape this outcome.

Capitalism has been accused of evils of which it is not guilty, such as lowering the standard of living of workers (it raised it) and impoverishing the third world (the incompetent kleptocratic governments brought in by the decolonization and anti-imperialism that leftists love so much did that) but there are plenty of evils of which it can be justly accused. These include the uprooting of families, the decimation of rural communities, the disappearance of the family farm, urbanization and the accompanying evils of increased crime and erosion of trust and social capital that go along with it, the uglification of the countryside which is the real evil that those who claim to care for the earth and the environment ought to be fighting rather than the bogeyman of climate change, the reorganization of society so as to operate like an extended business rather than an extended family, a culture of throwing away and replacing rather than preserving and passing on, and dozens of others of a similar nature to these.  That socialism is an utterly unacceptable evil and economic freedom a good I have always held and always will maintain but this will not stop me from decrying these evils of which capitalism has been the engine and which conservatives, if they stopped for a second to think about what their chosen label implies, ought to realize that they should oppose too. 

The matter that probably best illustrates how I am closest to conservatives in what they oppose and furthest from them in what they are for is education.  Conservatives are opposed to the way schools from the earliest grades to universities have become indoctrination camps for pushing hatred of white people, hatred of Christianity, and hatred of Western countries and their history onto children and for exposing them to sexuality, and especially its more perverse forms, way too early.  I oppose this too.  Most conservatives promote STEM-centred education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  That these fields are immune to being turned into vessels for wokeness has of late been proven false, but were that not the case I would dissent from the idea of STEM-centric education because it is based on the idea that the purpose of education is to train children to be more successful cogs in the capitalist machine.  The purpose of education is to civilize children, for we are all essentially born savages and barbarians, so that they might be fit to be free subjects of the king and citizens of the state and for this there is no better education than the kind that starts with the basic trivium (grammar – Latin, Greek and first language, logic, and rhetoric), and builds on these with the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).  See Dorothy L. Sayers’ “The Lost Tools of Learning.”  Along with these, the seven classical liberal arts, history should be taught in a way that neither demonizes the builders of civilization and its institutions like “Woke” history, nor interprets the past as one long march towards liberal democracy in the present day like what Herbert Butterfield dubbed “the Whig Interpretation of History” but as John Lukacks’ “remembered past” that contains the good and the bad, in which the builders of civilization are presented as they were, a mixture of both, and leaves us free to honour them for their accomplishments and the legacy they have bequeathed us and simply because it is the debt we owe to those who have gone before us, without conscripting them posthumously into the service of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.”  It is best if this is taught in a religious context, preferably with the Church in charge of education rather than the government. — Gerry T. Neal

Happy New Year

God Save the King!