Our leaders must obey the spirit not just the letter of the Law
The great gospel commandments offer a way to do politics, writes George Pitcher. But don't hold your breath...
“I fought the law and the law won” sang The Clash, happily, in 1979. Equally happily, it’s a refrain that the leaders of our English-speaking western democracies have had cause to hum in recent times.
Former POTUS and psychotherapy case-study Donald Trump fought American law to dispute President Joe Biden’s election victory. And the law won. Similarly, our very own premier with a silly haircut, Boris Johnson, has taken on the British constitution for his own ends. And the law won.
These were instances of the US and UK legislatures showing strength in depth. Trump claimed fraudulent illegality on the part of his political opponents, without evidence. Johnson was found simply to have acted unlawfully when he prorogued parliament (and therefore misled the head of state, our Queen). Similar shirt-button popping girth they may share, but neither of them is bigger than the law.
Their shared contempt for it, however, is apparent. Laws are evidently irritating little things that get in the way of their barrelling vanities and ambitions. Things like trying to fix election results and ignoring the lockdown laws that the rest of us have to observe are things that Great Men do, at least in the fantasies of these World Kings.
But the law as drafted by parliament and interpreted by the judiciary is one matter. The Law with a capital L is something with which Johnson and Trump will have even less of a passing acquaintance. Because the Law is about cultural values, the ethics of virtue, character and conscience – the intuitive sense of what is right and wrong.
Cultural superstructure
The Law has perhaps its most visible iteration in the societies of the ancient Hebrew peoples. The Law of Moses wasn’t just a load of dietary observances, rules about the Sabbath and God-given commandments, such as not to covet one’s neighbour’s ass, but an entire cultural superstructure that defined the lives of its adherents.
Halakha, the oral and scriptural tradition of the Jews, in exile and in diaspora, is translated as “Law”, but more literally means “the Way” - the way of behaving in life, or the way of walking through it. In the hands and under the enforcement of the Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, the authorities of the Temple, the Law became strictures that defined Jewishness.
It was these strictures that the insurgent Jesus movement challenged, with a “new covenant” to replace that which had made the Jews God’s chosen people. This might have been expected to be – and indeed was often interpreted as – an overthrowing of the Law of the Temple authorities, just as its author overturned the tables of the merchants that desecrated that Temple.
But, surprisingly for many who followed the new Halakha, the new “Way” - which, incidentally, offers additional weight of meaning to the description of the one who is “the way, the truth and the life” - a new Law was not to emerge from an insurrection.
Summary of the Law
Rather, the gospel made the more intricate claim that it was going to “fulfil” rather than “destroy the Law”. To this end, the liturgies of the Christian Churches carry what we call a Summary of the Law, elicited from the gospels, but actually drawing on laws expounded in the Hebrew bible in the legal books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength… and your neighbour as yourself.
This is vital in so far as western legislatures are built on the principles of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It is, quite simply, a call and command to conscience and commitment to serve others after a manner, in what is often called the “Golden Rule” and one that is far from confined to the Christian faith, which reflects how we would wish to be treated ourselves.
So that’s the Law – one that the apostle Paul relentlessly unpacks in his epistles to the nascent first-century churches of the Mediterranean. As for this small island off the north-west coast of Europe, we should expect to be able to hold our politicians to it – to observe not just the letter of the law, but also the spirit of the Law.
Our Church of England is, after all, established in law, with our head of state, the Queen, its supreme governor. It follows that she can expect her prime minister not to mislead her (some might use a stronger verb) when he wants to circumvent parliament, just to “get Brexit done”, or indeed break international law by reneging on a deal with the EU.
Nor should his home secretary, under the Law, be permitted simply to turn small boats containing migrants around in the Channel in the pretence that it is all someone else’s problem. Because that is not to love one’s neighbour – whether defined as a desperate refugee or as the French – as oneself.
One should not perhaps expect politicians of today to observe such commandments, “on which hang all the law and the prophets”. But we might at least acknowledge whose Law they are breaking.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest