Christ is King! Restoring a Covenental Politics

Maurice Glasman

Speaking at this year’s WeBelieve Festival, Maurice Glasman reflected on exile, gratitude, covenant and the Christian inheritance of England. An Orthodox Jew deeply shaped by Catholic Social Teaching, he argued that amid profound cultural and political change, the restoration of the Church’s public vocation is essential to renewing civic peace, solidarity and the common good.

---

I am standing here at this WeBelieve Convocation on the Jewish fast of Tisha B'Av. It is the anniversary of destruction of the first and second temple, the day of the expulsion from Spain, of Kristallnacht.

Last night I sat on the floor of a Chasidic synagogue whispering the words of the Book of Lamentations by candlelight. No one spoke or looked at each other as we silently shuffled out into a balmy moonless night. On this day my people, the Children of Israel, lost our home, our King, our Temple and our Priests. This is when exile began, and today is the anniversary of what that means.

So we fast and we read the Book of Lamentations and we absorb the reality of loss.

We know the meaning of crucifixion. A painful public execution in front of a hostile crowd. We know what it means to die for the sins of others, and also for our own. Both Jews and Christians believe in the resurrection, the difference is that Jews don’t think it’s happened yet. The blood is not redeemed from the land. We remain fallen, animated by longing and cleaving to life. All of us. In exile. Yearning for love in a world full of sin.

And on this day we are reminded of loss, irretrievable and painful; of something missing, of something lost. All that the Jews had left was God and the Torah, the Bible. And the destruction of the Second Temple, about forty years after the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, was a huge rupture. The Covenant was based on the idea that we would live God’s word and we would receive safe sanctuary in the Land of Israel. But we had lost it. The conclusion of the Rabbis was that it was not God who had broken his Covenant but us and it led Jeremiah to say, ‘seek the peace of the City for in its peace you shall find peace.’ Keep the Sabbath day, honour your father and mother, don’t kill or steal, trust and love the one God, that was the Covenant and it remained eternal. The Orthodox response was not vengeance but repentance. Ever ancient, ever new.

Glory be to God.

Pope Gregory the First argued that the primary virtue is Gratitude. I agree.

I am obliged to express my gratitude to the Catholic Church for the gift of Rerum Novarum and the Encyclicals which have shaped my ethics, my politics and my life. I will always be faithful and grateful. Catholic Social Thought is now embedded in my soul. I see the world through its eyes.

Gratitude too to Jenny Sinclair and Father John Armitage. Your faithful friendship gives me an intimation of grace. In the case of Father John, it doesn’t last long.

And of central importance to this talk, gratitude to my country, England. I owe my life to its existence and I have thought a lot about how this Kingdom came to be. I became intrigued by the Ancient Constitution and the balance between the King, Parliament, Common Law and the Church. How the balance of interests rather than the separation of powers worked through the centuries, how virtue and venality could exist in mutually sustaining ways, how liberty and democracy could both grow within it. And it was the distinctiveness of what I now call the English Church that drew my attention. The Ecclesiastical polity was the original polity. Our country remains a Covenantal country, still governed by inherited institutions through the generations, endowed with Sovereign authority. The Church did not simply create the skeleton, it gave us a soul.

It is for these reasons that the feeling that overwhelmed me last September when I was told of the murder of Melvin Cravitz by a man called Jihad in Synagogue on Yom Kippur was that of desecration, a sense that something holy had been violated, that a covenantal promise had been broken. This was not only about the murder of a Jew but the violation of civic peace as a common good. The latter was a civilisational achievement led and shaped by the English Church over a millennium. No Jew had been killed for being a Jew since our readmission in 1655. England is quite unique in this.

I realised that my freedom and safety were secured by the life and teaching of Jesus Christ as embodied in my country by the English church. And the same was true for Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and atheists. That we all found refuge in the loving arms of Jesus. The participation of all people in our self-government, with our liberty and security secured, was His sublime gift to us.

And this was unique to our country. Here in England the church door was the gate of asylum from the mob. The ancient constitution proved far more robust than written ones.

I am as little a messianist as I am a revolutionary. We are doomed to live in this world and whether it is good or bad is shaped by the institutions and politics we have.

There is no messianic or revolutionary get-out clause. It is simply true to say that our political inheritance was shaped and formed by the Church and that this is a great blessing. The renunciation of civic violence was central and this is what is meant by “The Kingdom”. I long for the restoration of the Church to its rightful place in the polity.

The English Church is a glory of our nation. It gave us charity, law and government. The old parish maps are still how we imagine our country. The parish, the village, the town, the city, the county, the kingdom. Who cares for Medway, Merseyside and the combined authorities? They are administrative units that command no loyalty or affection.

What is missing, most of all in our public conversation at this time is the strength and clarity of the English Church but the Church of England has become a ghost, haunting its own churches.

I spoke at some length last year about the change of era we see around us, which I call the Era of Restoration. One aspect of that is that it will be an era of faith and the Church of England is the only tradition that is mute. The estrangement of the Church from its people is one critical source of the volatile instability we endure. The “graffiti art” installation at Canterbury Cathedral last October felt like a renunciation of vocation, an abdication of responsibility; a desecration. Murder in the Cathedral was a political killing, ordered by the king. The blood was on his hands. In this case, however, the desecration is self-ordained, it reads like a suicide note. If T.S. Eliot were alive I would urge him to write Suicide in the Cathedral.

They could have done an installation of T.S. Eliot’s poems. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “do not ask ‘what is it?’ Let us go and make our visit”. Or The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month”. Or Journey of the Magi: “A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year”. The Sabbath, Easter and Christmas boldly illuminating the walls of our most ancient cathedral for all to see. Beautiful, mystical and mundane, these poems are the highest modern expression of the magical glory of our language. But that is not the installation the Church wanted. In our most holy site of Christianity they wilfully desecrated the space.

It always ends this way. Bad art, bad culture, bad faith. Diversity before solidarity, process before action, choice before tradition — and its energy is only really found in acts of desecration. I now trust the Catholic Church to lead more wisely.

The Catholic Church understands balance, sin, courage and patience. It retains a sense of the sacredness of civic peace.

Our King prayed with the Pope for the first time for 600 years. The Common Good is a relentless reconciliation of estranged interests. Aristotle and Aquinas both understood that diversity was a natural condition but solidarity was a state of grace. The old is the new.

Progressives know nothing of redemption and vocation, sin and resurrection, grief and grace, of the common good and the Kingdom. Least of all this blessed kingdom in which we live. A desiccated technical managerialism does not speak to this political moment. A progressive illness leads only to death.

It is not to me incidental that we now have our first Catholic Prime Minister since Cardinal Wolsey. Boris Johnson should be more compared to Henry the 8th and Tony Blair came too late. It is a sign of life, someone who articulates his politics as about place, the dignity of work and solidarity is a far cry from the human rights zealotry we talked about last year. What is required is strong leadership and clarity from the English Catholic Church based on the tradition established by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and taken to new heights by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus.

That is why I believe, as a Jew, and an Orthodox one, that in politics, Christ is King, that in honouring God we honour his creation, incarnated; that the attributes God gave to himself when he spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai are the very condition of good politics. Mercy, grace, kindness and truth.

That is why secular republics fail. It is not only that they yearn for a king but they reject the very idea of tradition and nobility that is essential for virtue. Republics are graceless. Ever ancient, ever new. And that is also why the restoration of the body of Christ into the body politic of our nation is a vital aspect of our revival.

I give thanks to the English church for its wisdom, its grace and its truth and pray for its restoration.

And I am grateful to the Prince of Peace who guided its way.

---

Lord Maurice Glasman is a Labour life peer in the House of Lords and founder of the Blue Labour movement. He has been a key figure in the battle for the soul of the Labour Party, challenging the leadership to return to its founding principles. Alongside his academic and political work, he is the Director of the Common Good Foundation and has for many years been involved in authentic community organising, most recently in Grimsby. He is the author of Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good.

This talk was hosted by Jenny Sinclair, Director of Together for the Common Good, for the WeBelieve Festival, at St Mary’s Oscott, Birmingham on 24 July 2026. The talk and Q&A were recorded and the video will be posted here when available.

You may also like A Politics of Restoration - an extended conversation with Lord Glasman - episode 70 of the Leaving Egypt podcast, with co-hosts Jenny Sinclair and Al Roxburgh.

---