On hearing the first Reith Lecture on “Moral Revolution” by Rutger Bregman
BBC Reith Lectures 2025 – Moral Revolution
Rutger Bregman
This morning I listened to the first of Rutger Bregman’s Reith Lectures (link above) and I was immediately struck by how it resonated with something I noticed back in July 2012 after revisiting a book published in 1953 called “Christianity and the New Situation” written by the Unitarian minister and editor of The Inquirer (the national, British Unitarian magazine).
On first reading it, thirteen years ago, it was the following passage that particularly struck me:
“Within this new situation [i.e. that in 1953] a certain relationship has been established between the Christian and the non-Christian [Lee clearly means by this ‘secular’ or ‘non-religious’] societies; each profoundly interpenetrates the other. The world, in the sense we have used the term, is no longer an evil form of life to be conquered by the Church; it is a movement of the spirit, established in its own right, with which the Church has to establish neighbourly relations — in the real sense of the word ‘neighbourly’. The division between the two societies is not markedly a moral one. It would be hard to choose in practice between the two forms of life. The practising Christian and the practising non-Christian are not markedly different from one another. This is almost admitted for the Church now makes no drastic attack upon the non-Christian society and shows no evidence of seizing the values of that society and transforming them into what presumably should be a separate and obvious Christian standard” (p. 10).
Reading this in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crisis (really a crime), the thing I immediately noticed in 2013 was that two large British (really multinational) banks deeply implicated in the crime, Barclays and Lloyds, were founded by religious men — Barclays by Quakers, and Lloyds by a Quaker and a Unitarian. The point is that, at their foundation, these banks had a liberal Christian, religious, moral foundation of some kind. Now, by 1953 — when Lee was writing his book — that foundation had gone, and these banks were clearly non-Christian/secular institutions. But Lee believed this did not mean that a markedly moral change had occurred within them because there wasn’t going to be a markedly great moral difference between the banks’ Quaker and Unitarian liberal Christian founders and the current non-(illiberal) Christian owners and executives.
Well, the events that transpired in 2008, revealed how wrong Lee was and how morally and ethically hollow these institutions and their owners and executives had become, and how this had led to the development and normalisation of a culture of greed and corruption. Absolutely no memory of Jesus’ teachings regarding the need for honesty and care for the poor and vulnerable was left in play . . .
Like too many optimistic post-World War Two liberal Christians (and liberals in general), Lee thought that the secular world, which included businesses like banks, were going to play an equal part with religion in what he called “a movement of the spirit” (p.27), and that a “new form of dialectic” would somehow be “established in modern life that may be as profound as any other in shaping the future of Western man.”
Well, that profound dialectic between business and the spirit didn’t occur, did it! Instead, the banks, having dispensed with any spiritual grounding, were no longer guided by a dialectic with the spirit, but instead by a profound dialectic with an ever-increasing number of self-serving ultra-rich individuals and corporations.
Now I don’t want to (and can’t) pretend that if banks like Barclays and Lloyds had remained rooted in their Quaker and Unitarian liberal Christian values, all would now be sweetness and light, and we’d all be living in some Utopian sunlit uplands. But I think it is clear that once they, and we, lost any kind of moral and spiritual centre something truly awful did happen to our banks, and our liberal democratic societies as a whole.
And so, here I am again at Rutger Bregman’s Reith Lecture series called “Moral Revolution.” We clearly need such a revolution. Whether Bregman will provide ways to unfold this revolution that will strike me, and you, as possible and desirable, is another matter entirely. But he’s clearly asking the right questions and thinking about the right kinds of things, and we should certainly take time to listen to him, think carefully about what he says, and then find ways to set the revolution in motion in our own lives and communities.
BBC Reith Lectures 2025 – Moral Revolution
Rutger Bregman
It is this need for a moral revolution that lies behind two recent pieces written for the Cambridge Unitarian Church, where I am the minister, that look at how business and morality/spirituality might go together . . .
What would a free-religious company look like?
What is called “profit” disappears without a trace . . .
—o0o—
A sad and disturbing postscript written at 16:55 on the same day as the original post
I have just read the following article in The Guardian. It reveals quite clearly just how bad things are getting in this age . . .
And here’s Bregman explaining it himself:
https://x.com/rcbregman/status/1993246411291603301
And here’s Bregman being interviewed by James O’Brian on the 27th November:
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