No Future in the Past

‘Now we can return to our glorious past,’ so said Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a successful candidate for the nationalist Reform UK party after yesterday’s local government elections. Jenkyns is a former Tory MP and now the new Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire in the North East of England. Precisely what this glorious past Reform UK is talking about it not clear. The party website and many of their public speeches seem always to spend the majority of time talking about the failure of the other two parties. Reform UK believes in the ‘Great’ in Great Britain and its supporters claim to offer a way of retrieving it. They major on securing ‘Britain’s future as a free, proud and independent sovereign nation.’ Precisely which aspects of ‘our glorious past’ Dame Andrea and her colleagues have in mind is less obvious.

We believe that Brits have plenty of reasons to be proud of the country’s heritage...but recent research into the darker recesses of our colonial activities and the bases of our national wealth have nuanced the picture of our proud history that we were taught at school, a picture of some legacies of which to be less than proud. Like all imperial powers, the British history of political oppression, economic exploitation and social inequality does not appear in Reform UK’s picture of the past. Indeed in their opposition to immigration and what they caricature as ‘woke’ values of diversity, equity and inclusion they tend rather to be perpetuating some of these evils.

This one-eyed nostalgia is not confined to Reform UK or the US's Make America Great Again's policy. When a group of older people get together it’s not at all unusual, and, we must admit, very tempting, to hark back to the past – to the swinging sixties, to the good old days before, as someone said to us this week, ‘the world went mad’. We hear it sometimes in our own church and others – people who are sure that if we were only to think and behave as we used to, the world would be a better place. It’s a choice which will be facing the cardinals when they sit in conclave to choose the new Pope. Those who play 'Papal Bingo' listing the ‘favourites to be new Pope tend to classify them in terms of those who look back and those who look forward.

All of which brings us once again to Conclave the film based on the book by Robert Harris which deals among other things with the question of whether the church needs to look to the past or the future. In the film which we watched last week Bellini, one of the fictional cardinals says, ‘The church is not the past it is what we do next.’ It’s a sentiment that can apply to churches and countries – and, of course to individuals.

It is a question of nostalgia over imagination, of security over against risk. The word ‘nostalgia’ derives from Greek roots for the words ‘return’ and ‘pain’. Separation  from ‘home’ causes pain and it is what politicians and prelates and pensioners  all claim to experience  - the loss of the intangible country that ‘we’ have known and loved. ‘We’ are in pain until you return to your imagined home – in some fantasy golden age.

It is a choice which faces us all in some way or another though not on the grand scale of politicians and popes! The older you get, the more difficult it gets to choose the future over the past. It’s easier to idealise the past with comfortable fictions which may have been our support in the past years. But as the cleric said, ‘It’s what we do next that counts’ and that includes how we look at our past. It calls for a kind of honesty to examine those stories to which we have retreated for many years. Our future is in the future – and it’s what we do next that counts!