On Saturday, The Iona Institute held its annual youth conference. The theme was ‘Whatever Happened to Tradition?‘, the title of a recent book by historian, writer, and columnist with The Daily Telegraph, Tim Stanley.

Tim was the keynote speaker on the day and addressed a packed house on the theme of his  book, but also more broadly on the value and beauty of tradition.

His talk addressed current attacks on tradition, what tradition really is, why we need it, signs of revival, and why cultural Christianity is not the answer to the depletion of our social and moral capital, only real Christian belief is.

You can read the full text of his talk before. We will post other talks from the day as they become available.

‘The beauty and value of tradition’

A talk by historian, writer and journalist, Tim Stanley

Thank you for inviting me today to talk about my book. I’m not just going to recycle its contents: that would be lazy on my part and cheap on yours, because it would mean you don’t have to buy it. Rather I’m going to explain my central argument – that tradition is both beautiful and useful – and reflect on how well it’s held up three years since publication. A lot has happened in that time, including pandemic and war.

I believe that everything I was worried about has got a lot worse… but also that the things I hoped for are starting to bear fruit. We are turning the tide.

It is always a pleasure to come to Dublin. Like most Englishmen, I like to pretend I’m Irish myself. If my grandfather had found time in his busy schedule to marry by grandmother, my surname would be O’Donogue and in 2010 I applied for a job teaching history at University College, Dublin – which I’m sure we’ll all agree is infinitely better than Trinity. I was offered the job and declined, because I wanted to finish writing a biography of the American conservative Pat Buchanan.

I often think about what would’ve happened if I’d said yes. Living in Dublin’s fair city I’d have witnessed the transformation of Ireland in a remarkably short space of time: the decline of two party politics; the financialisation of the economy; the final collapse of church authority; the legalisation of gay marriage  and abortion by referenda; and a staggering rate of immigration such that today, by some estimates, one in five people were born abroad.

Ireland has swept away all that made it different, and all that remains is its sense of exceptionalism. The new Ireland is like the rest of the world, only more so.

The deconstruction of tradition

Everything that has happened across the West has happened here, faster, more radically, and dropping from a greater height – because, until five minutes ago, you were the very cliche of a conservative social order. To the English – and I say this with genuine affection – you were Craggy island, a country where you no visitor could refuse a cup of tea and they take the roads in when it rains.

Now if you think that’s a patronising view of Irish tradition, then I’m not alone in holding it. Last month, the Educational Company of Ireland – Edco for short – was forced to pull a section of one of its school textbooks that was so progressive it tipped over into racism.

On one page, it showed a cartoon of family A: four, white, red-haired yokels in Arran jumpers who say they eat “potatoes, bacon and cabbage every day”, only holiday in Ireland and play Irish musical instruments. “We get told off if we mix with people of a different religion,” read the caption, “as they would be a bad influence.”

On the opposite page, Family B, pictured holidaying in Italy, their faces every colour in the artist’s pallet. Their favourite foods are “curry, pizza and Asian”, they love “reggae and hip hop”, ski in France and volunteer in Syria – a detail that in England would trigger a police investigation. The textbook asked: “Which family is the more inclusive? Which family [would] you choose to belong to?”

The first problem with this is you can’t choose your family, but the fantasy that maybe you can – that we are each born as a blank canvass upon which any character can be drawn – is a key dogma of modern liberalism. You can choose your identity, your nationality, even your gender.

The textbook also suggested, falsely, that character is a matter of binary political choice, coded between progress and reaction. In the real world, of course, the travelling family will have a home to which they are fiercely loyal. The children in the red-haired family will learn foreign languages and interact with outsiders via social media.

Edco got around this by hinting at child abuse: the daughter of the farmers, we learn, wants to teach yoga, but has been told she mustn’t because “it is not a proper job and she must stick to what she knows.”

Edco’s textbook oozed contempt for Irish tradition and for the people who are loyal to it, inviting children to abandon their past and limited present for an unbounded world of travel and adventure – all in keeping with the wider project to build a new Ireland. But Edco’s biggest mistake was to assume that, forced to choose between these two biographies, we would all plump for Family B. I wouldn’t.

Family A does something useful, they grow food, plus their commitment to the past gives their lives stability and certainty: they know what they are. By contrast Family B, are perpetual tourists: pictured in the textbook standing in front of the coliseum yet taking a picture of themselves – always travelling, never arriving, uncommitted to one fixed, rooted and historical identity. Such a life is exciting and educational: I’ve lived it and profited from it. But there are consequences.

As I said, things have happened since I published my book on tradition and one of the most profound occurred at my workplace. One day, a colleague asked me this question: they said, “Tim, how do you believe?” Not “What should I believe?” Or “which church should I join?” Or “what’s the difference between Catholicism or Protestantism” No, they said how do you believe, as in “how does one go about experiencing religion?”

It’s significant that this person is about ten years younger than me. I grew up in a Britain in which church attendance was on the wane but religion was still in the mix. If you got married, it was usually in a church; had babies, got them baptised.

Today, that’s all falling away. Roughly 37 per cent of Britons now say they don’t believe in God, which rises to more than 50 per cent of people in their 20s. Covid accelerated an already sharp decline in church attendance.

An interesting example: the new cohort of MPs elected in July is the most irreligious in history. How do we know? Because when you swear an oath as an MP, you can choose whether or not to do so on a holy book – and this year, 40 per cent chose not to do it, including half the Labour cabinet and the prime minister. At the same time, the range of holy books one can swear on has grown significantly, to include Korans, Buddhist scriptures and even a copy of the book on Mormon. I’ve been trying to find an MP willing, for a laugh, to do it on a copy of ‘Dianetics’ by L Ron Hubbard.

In short, in modern Britain there are more religions than ever but fewer believers than ever.
How do we explain rising non-belief? Not education, not rebelliousness, not broken homes, it’s down to parenting. According to the ‘Explaining Atheism’ project, based at Queens Belfast, this phenomenon is observable across the West and “the key factor is the extent to which one is socialised to be a theist”.

I infer that we’re seeing the fruits of the Boomer approach to religion, the consequences of the culture of autonomy and choice. Whether the parents were religious or not, they held back from inculturating – or, as they’d put it, “indoctrinating” – their children in their faith tradition.

Thus the tradition was not passed on and, within one generation, it effectively vanished. The result for many in Gen Z is that religion is hard to engage with because it’s like visiting a foreign country and not knowing the lingo.

Catholics have this fantasy that since Vatican II, our liturgy has become simpler and intelligible – yet it remains a total mystery to anyone who doesn’t know when to stand or sit, to genuflect or the right, hideous tune to the Gloria. You might just as well conduct Catholic services in Latin as English, which at least would mean you’d get the same liturgical experience in London as in Manila or Lesotho.

But there is a hidden advantage to GenZ being raised without a religion. It means they’ve got no baggage. Old people often come to faith thinking it’s repressive or based on lies. Younger agnostics are more likely to see it as appealing precisely because it is unusual: exotic, mysterious, authoritative, providing an answer to the big questions.

I asked my friend from the office why they wanted to believe, and they went straight to their kids: I want my young children to grow up with moral laws and a wider cultural vocabulary.

I compare this to teaching your child to play the violin. A tiny number will stick with it; the vast majority give it up, thank goodness. But they can always read music, and might return to the craft at a later date. This is why I wanted to write a book about tradition. Not because I want to force others to live like me, which was dare I say the attitude of old Ireland, but because I want to invite people to live with curiosity and conscience. To explore the enchanted world that existed before modernity.

What is tradition?

So what is my thesis? What is tradition?

Put simply, a tradition is a practice that is handed down from one generation to the next. In principle, argued the Catholic theologian Josef Pieper, we try to keep as much of what we’ve inherited as possible, remaining faithful to its design. But traditions evolve and adapt. The British monarchy, so as to survive, compromised with democracy – yet the King remains the King, even if he can’t cut off your head.

An authentic tradition does three things. One, it ties the individual to the collective. When you or I submit to a tradition, we acknowledge we are part of something bigger and a product of history.
Second, it teaches us “social knowledge”, the invisible architecture of everyday life that helps us interact and get along. This can range from moral teaching – “please don’t kill me” – to etiquette such as “please shake my hand”.

Third, tradition affects our relationship to the phenomenon of time. In modern society we see time as linear, one thing after another, experience and move on. Traditional societies always have one foot in the past, and the past is frequently acknowledged in the present. The most dramatic example of this is the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation. Christ lived 2,000 years ago, but for us he also lives in every Mass, the Last Supper and sacrifice at Calvary not just commemorated but physically re-enacted through the Eucharist, bending time itself.

When we participate in this history play, we make ourselves part of a community rich in social knowledge: music, art, liturgical dialogue. We know that when you enter a church, you cross yourself. That when you receive the eucharist, you kneel and take it on the tongue, or at least you ought to.

Via tradition, the best of what has happened in the past is memorialised in the present so that we can pass it on to others in the future.

Now I think there’s something beautiful, almost magical, about this contract between the generations – but it’s also useful, because it helps us to navigate life.

A prime example is death. Death always comes as a shock. The average human being simply doesn’t have the capacity to handle it alone.

Religious tradition also teaches us how to prepare for death – ours and other people’s – and what to do after its happened. Funeral rites give the dead person their due. They give us a chance to mourn, and language with which to articulate feelings that are typically hard to express. Moreover, they give the grieving something to do – directing attention away from ourselves, outwards to the deceased and to our fellow mourners.

It is choreographed catharsis. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said, and it’s odd if you think about it, “that was a lovely funeral.” Or stranger still: “I really enjoyed that.”

Contrast this with the sterility of the humanist funeral – short and prosaic – concluded with the dread words “it’s what she would’ve wanted.” Yes, 80 years of life celebrated with some doggerel poetry and a plate of ham sandwiches. It’s typically what the family would’ve wanted – minimal fuss and cost – and not what any of us really need.

It’s funny. We live in the most psychoanalysed, therapeutic age, yet we still struggle to understand each other or ourselves. In fact, we often behave in complete contradiction of the basic rules of therapy.

The anti-tradition West

Consider the phenomenon of Western self-hate. If a therapist said to an individual, you are a bigot, you invented your history, everything in your house you stole, and you need to apologise even for things you didn’t do – that therapist would be struck off. Yet this objectively insane approach is applied to entire nations. In the UK, we’ve gone so far as to tell the patient that he doesn’t really exist, that the Anglo-Saxons are a figment of the imagination.

The Western tradition has a lot going for it, including democracy, the rule of law and a comparatively tolerant faith. But at the same time, as I argue in the book, the Western tradition is its own worst enemy – because it has a tradition of being anti-tradition. Its innovativeness, technological and intellectual, contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Ideas matter. In the medieval era, the West put God at the centre of its universe: the point of philosophy was to understand him, of science to comprehend his world.

The Reformation and then the Enlightenment challenged this way of thinking. The Protestants wanted to get back to the early Church, stripped of what it regarded as the accumulated baggage of Rome. The Enlightenment wanted to see the world and man as they really are, stripped of accumulated prejudice and misunderstanding. Morality would be produced by reason, not indoctrination backed by the threat of Hell. Virtue is its own reward.

Under the influence of Karl Marx, man became materialist; under Darwin, an upright monkey; under Freud, psychological and introspective. Tom Holland argues in his hugely influential book ‘Dominion’ that the revolutionary quality of western culture is not a detour from Christianity but actually a dimension of it: after all, Christ upended tables and set brother against brother.

Rationalism vs human nature

One of my favourite enlightenment characters is the 18th century anarchist and proto-utilitarian William Godwin – a wonderful example of the radicalism of his age, its absurdity, its capacity for self-harm.

Godwin was born in Cambridgeshire, England in 1756. He was probably the most influential radical pamphleteer of the 1790s, agitating in defence of the French Revolution – the scourge of the elite, the anti-Edmund Burke. He was for all the fashionable causes: republicanism, atheism, women’s rights. He was against everything established: religion, aristocracy and, most curiously, marriage. Yes, the western left used to be not just against institutions but against the manner of living they endorsed, including patriotism, gratitude, promises and what Godwin called “domestic affections”.

The latter was his undoing. Godwin met a feminist called Mary Wollstonecraft, and fell in love. She got pregnant. In order to legitimise the child, they got married – exposing Godwin as a hypocrite. He never got over the shame of living a conventional life. Mary died in childbirth; poor Godwin, his sales plummeting, increasingly relied upon the charity of others. One of his admirers was a young Percy Blythe Shelley, who moved in with the Godwin family and, as night follows day, eloped with his daughter. Godwin was surprised and furious at someone living life exactly as he had instructed.

At the age of 77, living in dire penury, he was bailed out by a fan – no less than the prime minster of England, Lord Grey. Grey gave him a pension and put him in charge of fire safety in Westminster, a job that ought to have been easy. The one night Godwin popped out to the theatre, abandoning his post, Parliament caught fire and burnt down. He died in 1836.

Godwin’s philosophy, which as I say was wildly popular in its day, could be summarised by one his favourite allegories: he said, imagine if your house caught fire and trapped within it were one servant and one intellectual – and you can only save one of them. In such a scenario, he said, it is your moral duty to recuse the intellectual – even if the brother is your servant. Why? Because it is irrational to prefer a family member over another human being, and the intellectual is of higher value to society than the servant.

We can raise two objections to Godwin’s law. First, it is bizarre to assume that an intellectual is more useful than a servant, when in reality someone who can cook and clean is of far greater value than someone who knows the ins and outs of Plato’s Republic. It’s a classic example of the elitism of the egalitarian Left.

Second, the notion that a human being might choose a stranger over their own brother is, on some deep level, disgusting. Revolting. Inhuman. Left-wing utopian projects fail because they go against the grain of human nature and demand loyalty to cold abstractions.

Tradition persists over these intellectual fantasies because it is rooted in the familiar, the immediate – even biology. The traditional family, of mum, dad with direct responsibility for their children, persists because it natural. We have evolved, or been designed by God, to bear special responsibility for those to whom we are related. Domestic affection is neither a prison nor a romantic whimsy, it is the bonds of co-responsibility that should, ideally, cause parents to raise their children with love and children, in turn, to care for them in their dotage. It is a constitution, or a social contract, made flesh.

Now, even the most radical liberal must concede that the individual cannot physically protect themselves against all harm and they cannot teach themselves the virtues necessary to maintain social order. And herein lies a thorny paradox of modernity. Emmanuel Kant, the godfather of the enlightenment, set out to prove that one could reason one’s way to being moral – that God wasn’t necessary to discern the right or wrong thing to do.

But as soon as he’d proven this, Kant felt obliged to invent a divine force that would uphold these moral laws – the judge – or else they were would be meaningless. The Enlightenment smashed up the biblical God and, seeing a vacuum, replaced him with a thousand little golden calves: the historical dialectic, the law of nature, money, the welfare state. If man is a material being, focused not on God but on himself, then the primary goal of social organisation is to protect him from harm – and thus the most important element of the British state is its National Health Service.

The Covid lockdown wasn’t a glimpse of the future. It was the terminus of modernity: the individual, sitting at home, surfing the web, putting their life on hold to protect themselves and the health service.

Signs of life

But we must not despair at this state of affairs. To despair is unChristian, a sin in fact. It is also ahistorical. In the course of researching this book, I was struck by the number of occasions in which the West has appeared on the brink of moral collapse only to come roaring back. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.

In the aftermath of Covid, Britain experienced two events that reminded us who we were and who we still are. The Queen died and the King was coronated. It was often pointed out, by clever columnists, that putting the queen’s coffin on display in Westminster Hall is a relatively new custom begun a century earlier by Edward VII – but it’s actually a revival of the Medieval practice of displaying an effigy of the dead monarch, so that common people could see what they looked like.
The coronated monarch is elevated above us; in death, they are returned to us; and like the Doubting Thomas poking a finger in Christ’s wound, we want to see them to believe them. As a journalist, I was allowed into Westminster Hall in 2022 to watch the extraordinary, long line shuffle past the old queen’s body – and what I saw was nothing less than a Medieval pilgrimage. There were candles and silence. Phones were banned. As people shuffled past, they spontaneously – instinctively, bowed, curtsied or even crossed themselves.

GK Chesterton, who lived through a similar display of mass grief for George V in 1936, wrote that this folk ritualism was vastly superior to saying a few words – how could words ever meet the moment? – and observed that he subject “may not be an exceptional person but at least he understands what is meant by an exceptional occasion.”

A few months later I attended another exceptional occasion: the coronation of Charles III in Westminster abbey. I watched it all from a seat behind a pillar.

The ceremony proved that, yes, the British do exist, that we do have a history and a culture. Again there were clever-types who pointed out that much of the pageantry is Victorian in origin – which in England apparently counts as nouveau – or that it was archaic in an age of austerity to have such Ruritanian ritual. But the essential elements of the coronation date back to the Medieval era, and the principles are lifted from the Old Testament.

The coronee, stripped, anointed, crowned, clothed is transformed bodily into the new monarch – nothing less than a sacramental act. Just as the Anglo-Saxon monarch swore to protect the Church, so this gradually became a solemn oath, evolving into a pledge to cause “law and justice, in mercy, to be executed”. In short, as the King was presented, we acknowledged our loyalty to him on the understanding that he would loyal to us.

Members of Parliament might not realise it, but our democracy did not pop out of the oven ready baked, it evolved, and its story is essentially religious. Why is Parliament where it is? Edward the Confessor settled his court there in order to be opposite the building site of Westminster Abbey. Why is it called Westminster? Because it’s the western minster. The origin of parliaments is thought to be the abbey chapter house, where monks would sit in the round and debate the running of their order. Why do our parliamentarians sit opposite each other? Because they were originally seated in the choir stalls of St Stephen’s Chapel. This burnt down, thank you Mr Godwin, and was rebuilt in the gothic style. Finally, why do MPs bow when they enter and leave the commons? One theory its they are bowing towards where the altar would have been.

Tradition blesses the constitution and elevates it. The coronation of Charles III was, in form, largely unchanged from 1953, when the contemporary Left found popular enthusiasm for Elizabeth II just as bizarre. To account for it, Edward Shils and Michael Young wrote a provocative essay in which they argued that it awakened the “vague religiosity” of the British people as stage-managed by the Church of England, that its meaning was intuited rather than didactically explained; a case of showing rather than telling. It became an “occasion for the affirmation of the moral values by which the society lives. It was an act of national communion and an intensive contact with the sacred.”
This is what I witnessed in 2022. What the coronation of a monarch demonstrated is that the instinct for transcendence is there; the potential for a revived tradition exists.

I guess one caveat, is that I couldn’t be sure if I was witnessing a revival or a re-enactment. See, what’s the point of a church ceremony if the bishops attending hardly believe in God? What’s the point of crowning a monarch head of the church if they don’t believe in the supremacy of Protestantism? What’s the value of a monarchy at all, if its members don’t believe in aristocratic duty – if they’re inclined, when the going gets tough, to bugger off to California and make documentaries?

If we are to restore, we must have style and substance.

To give an example of what can go wrong, there has been a great effort in Wales to revive the Welsh language, including a rule that road signs must be bilingual. In 2008, Swansea Council erected a sign that read “No entry for heavy goods vehicles”: the English was sent off to head office for translation, an email came back in Welsh and the bureaucrats stuck what they read on the sign.

A few weeks later, Welsh-speaking drivers starting ringing in to point out that the sign in fact read “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Signs of public pushback

There are signs in politics of the beginnings of a counter-revolution, that the issues I touched upon in this book are finding common currency. Referenda play a big role, probably because, by their very nature, they go over the head of Godwin’s intellectuals to ask the public what they think. Brexit in Britain in 2016. The rejection of the indigenous Australian constitutional reform in 2023. And in Ireland, in 2024, the defeat of an attempt to take motherhood out of the constitution. The pushback against transgender rights demonstrates where the limits of liberal progress are set. Now society is post-Christian, they no longer know what the bible says. But when it comes to questions of biology, when people are forced to contradict what their own body tells them, that’s when they draw a line in the sand. That and anything that harms kids.

When I came to sell this book, I was completely ignored by the press: only one newspaper reviewed it, the Telegraph, which just happens to be my employer. But I was interviewed in countless podcasts – part of a flourishing online counter culture.

The name Jordan Peterson is probably familiar to you. His lifestyle conservatism – the argument that change comes from the individual, not the state, and that we have to fix ourselves before we fix others – has expanded into a matrix of ideas and influence that connects Elon Musk to JD Vance to Georgia Meloni to Javier Milei. Just as in the 1970s, conservatives were connected by a revived interest in market economics, so today it feels as if the global Right is singing from the same hymn sheet on cultural questions. Accompanied in some instances by a choir of famous converts to the Catholic Church. Candace Owens. Shia LeBouef. Add in the influence of Rod Dehrer or Donald Trump tweeting a prayer to the Archangel Michael, and one might argue that traditionalist, pre-Reformation religion has not enjoyed this degree of visibility in public life since the 1950s.

As for mainstream politics, I don’t know enough about Irish politics to comment on the role of tradition here, but in the UK, the question of identity has begun to trump even the quest for economic growth. Mass migration was sold to us for decades as being good for the economy. New evidence suggests it’s not – that it puts pressure on services and drains welfare – but parties are calling for limits on it whatever its benefits on the grounds that an open border dilutes national identity and stokes division.

Labour wants limits. The Tories want limits. And Nigel Farage of Reform famously said that if becoming poorer is the price of lower migration, he’ll take it.

Real Christianity, not cultural Christianity

That said, I am concerned about motivation. Politicians talk a lot about protecting the Christian nature of western society, but if none of us are going to church, what does that mean? If they mean Christianity as heritage, then preserving an unbelieved faith is akin to embalming a corpse. If you mean Christian as a synonym for “native born” then, ironically, that’s quite an unchristian attitude. Our faith is univeralisalist; there is no east or west. The Jewish claim that their god was the god of all mankind was unusual; Jesus taking on the whole world’s sins took the revolution one stage further. And isn’t it an obvious dimension of Christianity to welcome refugees? According to the Book of Matthew, the blessed are those who feed the hungry, water the thirsty, clothe the naked, tend to the sick and visit those in prions. It would be perverse if in the course of seeking to protect Christian civilisation, we turned away migrants because they are strangers.

It’s striking how many prominent defenders of Christian civilisation do not go to church. I won’t name names, but these are men and women who, I suspect, see Christianity as beautiful and useful… but not necessarily true. And this is the point I wish to conclude on, that tradition is beautiful and useful because it is true – because it articulates reality, of an order designed by a creator.

If you are an atheist then tradition is ultimately artifice. Of value, but a performance nonetheless – one that probably helps keep us from killing each other. But if you believe in a God-ordered universe, then tradition is a means of interpreting that universe and navigating it, and of reconciling man to his true nature, his true purpose, which is love. Thank you.

Tim Stanley is a columnist with the Daily Telegraph. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with a PhD in 2007. He is the author of three books on American history. He often appears as a commentator on TV and radio. His latest book is ‘Whatever Happened To Tradition?’