Concerning Fr. Edmund Campion

The pastor, a man just past 40, stood in the dock as the judge read the sentence against him and his fellow defendants:

You must go to the place from whence you came, there to remain until ye shall be drawn through the open city of London upon hurdles to the place of execution, and there be hanged and let down alive, and your privy parts cut off, and your entrails taken out and burnt in your sight; then your heads to be cut off and your bodies divided into four parts, to be disposed of at Her Majesty’s pleasure. And God have mercy on your souls.

The pastor, upon hearing these words, began to pray the Te Deum, the famous Christian prayer associated with Sts Ambrose and Augustine. In English it begins, “We praise thee oh God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.” And so the man was led away praying. It was not long after that the sentence read out to him by the judge was carried out, and so this pastor died a Christian martyr.

Stories of this sort are not uncommon in Christian history. Indeed, there is an echo of it in the accounts we have in Acts of St Paul and his friends responding to the cruel persecutions visited on them by Roman politicians.

The scene above, of course, is not from the Roman world: The language of the judge gives that much away, as does the nature of the punishment. What is being described is the medieval execution method of being “hung, drawn, and quartered.” Contemporary readers will likely recognize it from its depiction at the end of the popular 1990s movie Braveheart. As it happens, this particular prisoner was not quite executed in that fashion–he was hung long enough that he died from the hanging and was not alive as his body was disemboweled and segmented. A small mercy, I suppose.

But here is the part that so disturbs me: It is clear already from what I have said that this particular martyr is being executed by his fellow Christians. But the man in view here is not, as in so many of the Protestant accounts of martyrdom at the hands of bloody Catholics that I read in my younger days, a Protestant minister. He is a Catholic priest: The above is an account of the trial and martyrdom of Fr. Edmund Campion, one of the 40 martyrs acknowledged by the Roman church who were executed under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, sometimes called “Bloody Bess” by Roman Catholics in a gruesome parallel to Protestant references to her sister Queen Mary as “Bloody Mary.”

There were reasons these things happened, of course: about 25 years after Campion’s death a group of Catholic terrorists hatched a plan to blow up Parliament while it was in session, thereby killing most of the British government all in one stroke and thus creating an opportunity for a Catholic monarch to return to England. When you consider the stakes of the Reformation at this time, particularly as it related to political authority, you can understand how these things happened.

That said, it is one thing to understand how an event came to happen. It is quite another to suggest that such an event had to happen. There is something repulsive and horrifying in this scene and in the treatment of Campion by his fellow believers, especially when one factors in that even the charge of treason didn’t stick to Campion given that he willingly acknowledged Queen Elizabeth as his rightful queen on multiple occasions, including times when he was under oath. Indeed, such an acknowledgement was one of the last things Campion said in this life. If he had been lying about his views previously and secretly viewed Elizabeth as illegitimate, surely one would expect him to recant those earlier lies once he no longer could profit from them? Yet he never did. Moreover, Campion said, rightly I think, that the only way to support his execution was to toss aside the Christian legacy that had shaped the British isles for centuries. At his trial he said,

In condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors, all our ancient bishops and kings, all that was once the glory of England—the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter.

Clearly a sharp dispute over ecclesial authority remained between Campion and his nation’s established church. But did that clash inherently need to result in coercive violence being visited on one side of that dispute? Most in the 16th century thought yes. Campion seemingly thought otherwise, in as much as he was distinguishing between the political authority of Queen Elizabeth and ecclesial authority of the Bishop of Rome and felt that one could coherently and with integrity submit to both. Who was right? This is a question we should consider again today, I think, not because I think Fr. Campion’s accusers were correct, but because the reasons they were incorrect are being forgotten.

I want to begin, because this is a Christian journal, by considering the Christian merits of the arguments over religious toleration. I want to begin by considering what is in many ways the simplest question concerning religious tolerance, which concerns the status of one expression of Christianity in a country predominantly shaped and defined by a different expression of Christianity. In this example, Christians actually do have real political power and the only difference to navigate is intra-Christian dispute–the status of other religions is not around to complicate matters. So if we can establish that wildly different expressions of Christianity should be tolerated in a Christian society, then we will have actually established a great deal already in as much as we’ll have defined some elements of properly Christian statecraft and some necessity for a right to religious liberty. Those principles should then guide us as we think about similar questions in situations such as that facing us now in which we do not have a Christian society, Christians mostly lack real political power, and in which we must navigate differences not only between Christians but between Christians and other belief systems about the supernatural, meaning, and human purpose.

We will start with this. Consider Christ’s prayer in John 17—and the conditions he attaches to that prayer. He says quite plainly in his last prayer of which we have record before his death that the love between Christians is, as Francis Schaeffer called it, “the final apologetic” proving that he was sent by God the Father to rescue and redeem. Given the gravity of such a prayer, it seems to me that one of the key tests for any Christian political theology is whether that theology would authorize one group of Christians to coercively punish another Christian group over theological differences. If the answer is yes, then that political theology seems to flatly go against Christ’s quite strong words in John about Christian love.

Judged by this standard, there is some sense in which all of the early modern political visions of both the Roman church and the magisterial Protestant fall short. This is, perhaps, not altogether surprising given how new the challenge of an institutionally fragmented Christendom was–it is perhaps to be expected that the problem would prove greater than the early solutions put forward by most Christians of the day. Even so, to take seriously Jesus’s words that the love between Christians is the proof of his divinity is, I think, to recognize how deficient early modern Christian political theology often was in this respect. Indeed, there is some sense in which I think the most ecumenically minded thinkers of that era recognized this failure.

To take the example of the thinker from this era I return to most frequently, it is jarring to realize that Martin Bucer banished the Anabaptist preacher Michael Sattler from Strasbourg, which played a key role in his eventual capture, trial, and execution less than a year later by Catholics in Austria, and that Bucer eulogized Satler after hearing of his martyrdom. Indeed, Bucer himself referred to Sattler as a “martyr for Christ” upon hearing the news of his death. At risk of over-simplification, if your political theology causes you to play a pivotal role in the martyrdom of another Christian, it would seem something is broken in your political theology.

To make such a strong claim about the sources of early Protestant thought as well as those of early modern Roman thought is inherently, to offer an endorsement of some sort of what some would call “liberalism.” Minimally it is to endorse a more modest vision of the government’s authority and a more restrained vision of the church’s authority, such that the government is not authorized to coercively punish a person over matters theological, as Bucer’s Strasbourg did (at Bucer’s guidance) when they banished Sattler. Further, to endorse liberalism in this specific way is inherently to go against the grain of much recent theo-political discourse amongst popular Christian intellectuals in America of both the Integralist and Christian Nationalist variety.

Yet, intriguingly, to cut against these trends in the American context actually puts one in closer fellowship with some of our brothers and sisters in the church outside the United States. Indeed, endorsing a specifically Christian vision of political liberalism puts one rather in lock step with the small revival happening amongst the intellectual class in the United Kingdom today.

In the UK, the general move one sees playing out is that spiritually frustrated writers are crashing against the contradictions of our moment, which they take to be a moment defined by a bizarre combination of moral anarchy and mechanistic social engineering. The outcome is a political system that is unyielding to the needs of human persons and the ascent of a range of technologies and social norms that lead to cruelty and chaos. Beholding all this, they protest on multiple levels.

Thinkers like Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw remind us that people are creatures, not machines. Louise Perry, Freya India, and Mary Harrington rightly insist that people have spiritual and emotional needs that can’t be ignored in the quest for materialist pleasure, which is often the only good that a machine society knows how to recognize. Finally, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Tom Holland, and Glen Scrivener argue that because people are creatures and because we have these soft needs that are essential to flourishing, it follows that we need a type of liberal political method that is able to preserve a public square that has regard for human dignity, the need for human belonging, and the integrity of the human creature. In short, all these thinkers behold a social order that they regard as inhumane, cruel, and soul-killing and their response, on the level of social order at least, is “we need liberalism back.”

The United States is quite different. Whereas the thinkers identified above from the UK regard liberalism as a desirable antidote to the challenges of the moment, many right-wing American Christians find it easier to repudiate liberalism as being part of the problem. The heart of the issue seems to be something like this: In the aftermath of World War II, Americans rightly recognized that both Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union were rival political visions when compared to American liberalism. The name given to both systems, wildly different though they were, was “totalitarian.”

In contrast to these political ideologies that sought to form very specific sorts of nations by appealing to existential human longings, the vision for American liberalism became more negative. Whereas fascism and communism sought to mold people and nations into specific moral and communal shapes, American liberalism sought to preserve a space of maximal choice and personal opportunity. Communism and fascism told citizens what they ought to be and what their nation was becoming. American liberalism rejected any such endeavors as intolerable violations of the rights of free Americans. Totalitarian states told you what kind of person to be as part of your belonging to the state. But American liberalism let you be yourself and didn’t try to impose identities onto you.

The trouble with this is that man cannot live by choice alone. Eventually we desire a form of life that gives us a sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging—and such a form of life by its very nature must be communal. But the form of American liberalism defined in the aftermath of World War II struggled to reckon with this reality, dominated as it was by the fear of becoming totalitarian, like its great mid-century rivals. And that brings us to the present.

The system of American liberalism promised comfort, cheap goods, and easy amusements. But that wasn’t enough to build an existentially satisfying life. And now many Americans are searching for an alternative that will offer that–and they think such an alternative can only be found if one first rejects “liberalism.” This is wrong, of course, but their error is understandable when one considers the trajectory of American liberalism after 1945. But it is a mistake–and a serious one–nonetheless.

And this brings me back to Fr. Campion and the persecution of English Catholics under the monarch Catholics still sometimes refer to as “Bloody Bess.”

We are told by many today, Catholic Integralists and Protestant Christian Nationalists alike, that “liberalism” has led us to this place of civilizational torpor and that breaking free and regaining our vitality as a people will require a reaching back into a previous, pre-liberal era that was not procedural and bloodless in the way we ourselves have become. You can, of course, find similar thoughts outside the church: What is the revival of neo-pagan vitalism on the right, for example, but an attempt to follow Nietzsche into the forgotten past, reclaiming Dionyseian hedonism against the stultifying alternatives of the classical world, to say nothing of the Christian world? Indeed, I rather suspect that the moral vision of the Christian Nationalists and Integralists has far more in common with that of the neo-pagan right than it does traditional Christianity, which is perhaps why you find them sometimes sounding so similar.

The difficulty here is that when each of these various groups begins trying to define their constructive vision of public life, it’s a vision that leads to scenes like the one involving Fr. Campion. The Protestant Christian Nationalists have at this point established themselves as plainly anti-Semitic and even anti-Catholic. The Catholic Integralists hold that the Roman church possesses coercive authority over all baptized Christians—which, at least in theory, means that in their ideal system the inquisition could hold trials and coercively punish baptized Protestant believers who are not living in submission to the bishop of Rome.

What these supposedly thicker, constructive visions of political life amount to is the licensing of shocking cruelty visited on innocent parties because their beliefs mark them as outsiders relative to the state’s vision of its desired political society.

This is the unhappy junction to which American politics have come–a choosing between a choice-maximization liberalism that offers no moral guidance, no sense of belonging, nothing to aspire to (except getting rich, I suppose) set against all these illiberal political visions that tell you what the good life is, offer you a sense of belonging (if you’ll bend the knee, of course), and actually deliver cruelty.

The alternative to this, an alternative that avoids the torture and execution of men like Fr. Campion and that at least has within itself the possibility of avoiding the cruelty hardwired into these other models, is the liberalism currently being rediscovered in the UK. It is a morally dense liberalism, and dense on several levels.

First, its density comes from its recognition that these questions of ultimate meaning and belonging and purpose both matter and can only be addressed imperfectly and incompletely by public authorities.

Second, its density comes from its recognition that actually cultivating the virtues that allow one to flourish in liberal society one is also cultivating virtues conducive toward our final ends too. After all, what is patient endurance of one’s neighbor but an application of the call to love one’s neighbor? Indeed, is it not patient endurance that often creates the conditions under which transformation and growth is possible? Growth in this sort of tolerance is growth in patience and in love, two core concerns of Christian discipleship. The dense Christian liberalism being rediscovered now across the pond recognizes the imperfections of our creaturely existence in this world while also recognizing the wonderful and exciting opportunities before us in this life to grow in our capacity for love, generosity, kindness, patience, and much else besides. The imperfect arena of public life affords us a space not for agonistic struggle, but principled debate, patient endurance, and occasionally surprising cooperation with our neighbors as we pursue commonly shared goods.

The problem with these rival political systems set against American liberalism, then, was not that they were constructive and therefore “totalitarian” but that they were perfectionistic. To put it in Augustinian terms,

For though (our prayers that God lead us not into temptation) exercise authority, the vices do not submit without a struggle. For however well one maintains the conflict, and however thoroughly he has subdued these enemies, there steals in some evil thing, which, if it does not find ready expression in act, slips out by the lips, or insinuates itself into the thought; and therefore his peace is not full so long as he is at war with his vices. For it is a doubtful conflict he wages with those that resist, and his victory over those that are defeated is not secure, but full of anxiety and effort. Amidst these temptations, therefore, of all which it has been summarily said in the divine oracles, Is not human life upon earth a temptation?

What Augustine describes in this passage from Book XIX of the City of God applies not only to the individual, but to our communal endeavors as well, in as much as those endeavors are fraught with the same perils. But the proper lesson to learn from this fallibility that pervades our creaturely and political lives is not to simply refuse to engage questions of belonging and meaning altogether. That is the wrong answer arrived at by the cold war liberals. 

The answer, rather, is to pursue those transcendent goods with prudence, constraint, and love, recognizing that any attempts at perfection will only fail and, quite often, produce cruelty as we become more and more desperate to lay hold of our hoped for utopia. Better to just exclude utopia from the start, because we have a proper doctrine of sin, and then get on with living wisely in our non-utopian realities. 

This, then, is why the notion of liberal rights–free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and all the rest–matter so much. It is not because they preserve a kind of negatively construed void in which lost and lonely individuals try to scrounge out satisfaction through superficial amusements because this sort of life is, however sad, preferable to “totalitarianism.” It is, rather, because the postures of patient endurance of our neighbor, seeking to preserve their ability to pursue the good by preserving their ability to act meaningfully (and without coercion), are themselves ways of pursuing transcendent goods. This is so because these practices are themselves a form of neighborly love which we can practice this side of Christ’s return. The postures, values, and virtues of liberalism, practiced and cultivated over a lifetime, are postures, values, and virtues that help us to grow to look more like Our Lord. For, after all, we worship a God who is patient and long-suffering, not desiring that any should perish.

Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.