Runners, Guns, and Bobbies

There’s a show on Acorn, City of Vice, that presents the establishment and early development of the first police force in London, the Bow Street Runners, sanctioned by Parliament and sponsored in 1749 by my favorite 18th century novelist, Henry Fielding, who gave up on writing in order to become a magistrate in Westminster. In one of the shows Fielding is trying to convince one of the parliamentary leaders, the Duke of Newcastle, that a police force was essential to the safety of everyone in the city. Newcastle’s first response is that a police force runs counter to the tradition of freedom among the British.

 

The same argument makes the Second Amendment an absolute basis for the tradition of freedom among the Americans. And so just as from Newcastle’s point of view, freedom from police control is worth the death, theft, and mayhem endured by citizens of London, so too, as Charlie Kirk said, the unrestrained ownership of firearms is worth the deaths of random people in the streets, schools, churches, synagogues, stadia, theaters, nightclubs, etc. etc. of the US. The Bow Street Runners ultimately receive permission to organize, however, according to the show because Fielding arranges for some of his supporters, disguised as thieves and murderers, to assault Newcastle as he is leaving his preferred whorehouse. The good duke is so frightened by his experience that, within days, he compels Parliament to fund the Runners.

 

The lesson I learned from the show is that 18th century British aristocrats have a great deal more sense than 21st century American politicians. Survey after survey shows that the citizenry of the US supports the idea of gun laws, in particular gun laws that restrict the sale and ownership of assault weapons. But despite all the deaths by gunfire that the country suffers, assaults that include attempts on the lives of the politicians themselves, the Congress of the United States refuses to constrain, if that’s what it is, the “freedom” of Americans by passing any such law.

 

Once upon a time the US did have an assault weapons ban. From 1994 to 2004 the ban resulted in a drop from 19 to 4 deaths from mass shootings by such weapons. When the ban ended the numbers rose, from the 4 in 2004 to 79 in 2019. Similar results no doubt came from the institution of the Bow Street Runners. The difference, though, is that British folk decided that it made a lot of sense to have a police force. It was not for another 80 years, in 1829, that Sir Robert Peele organized the various competing police and watch forces in London and founded the Metropolitan Police, the Bobbies. But there was no doubt that, despite Newcastle’s fear, the freedom of the British public was not infringed by the police. Oddly enough, neither was the freedom of the American public from 1994 to 2004.

"Christian" Nationalism

In the first book of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Lilliput,” published in 1726, Jonathan Swift details the great controversy that agitated the peace and quiet of the inhabitants of that tiny land. The controverted issue is deeply important to the adherents of either side of the question. It involved the breaking of eggs. As Swift ways, “the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end.” Because of an accidental injury suffered by the current emperor’s grandfather as he broke his egg in that “primitive” way, that grandfather’s father, the then-emperor, issued a command for “all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.” The imperial edict led to resistance from the “Big-enders” so powerful that “there have been six rebellions raised on that account.” Serious rebellions indeed, since in their violence “one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.” Naturally the emperor of Blefuscu, Lilliput’s inveterate enemy, took advantage of the unrest. He received the Lilliputian exiles, using them to foment more unrest in Lilliput. The result? “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”

 

For folks with some sense of history it doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand what Swift was mocking with the Big-Endian controversy. For some two hundred and fifty years before the publication of Gulliver’s Travels Europe had been awash in blood as a result of questions not too distant from those that agitated the Lilliputians. During divine services, was the bread and wine transubstantiated into the actual flesh and blood of Christ, as Catholics and the Orthodox held? Or was there only a sort of spiritual shadow of flesh and blood, a consubstantiation of the bread and wine, as Martin Luther had it? Or were the Baptists right that there was no real or imagined magic involved at all, and the ceremony was simply a memorial of what the Gospels said happened way back when?

 

Alas the failure of historical memory is a well-known disease in America, where there’s no dismissal more trenchant that to say that something is history. In any case, there seem to be a number of Americans who are all for declaring the US a “Christian nation.” What they mean by that remains something of a mystery. What variety of “Christian” do they have in mind? I suspect that they haven’t given much thought to the confessional sense of “Christian.” I suspect they mean a nation where people, especially white heterosexual people, go around reading the Ten Commandments on every street corner, behave “modestly,” and scorn anyone who doesn’t adhere to “family values.” Even at that very basic level, however, there are confessional differences that they need to consider. Which version of the Ten Commandments should sprout on those street corners? Does “modestly” mean that women should be chaste, silent, and obedient? Do “family values” assign all power to men who command it over their chaste, silent, and obedient women? Is the condition of being born again the ultimate goal? Or are works as well as faith required? And how does one judge the spiritual condition of anyone?

 

Given the sorts of differences that “Christianity” as a plain vanilla term obscures, I think it might be very important for those “Christian” nationalists to pay attention to the history of explicitly “Christian” states. Even before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the doors of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517 Europe suffered from religious wars. Wikipedia lists forty-seven wars waged in the name of religion, from the Hussite Wars in Bohemia to the War in the Cevennes in France. I’m not counting the War of the Spanish Succession because, religious overtones though that war had, its major focus was dynastic. So too the French Revolution, whose anticlericalism was an important but subordinate aspect of the war.

 

The poor eleven thousand Lilliputians who died in the Big-Endian controversy are a pale shadow of the hecatombs of European dead in those wars. How many people died in them? The total is hard to figure, but again Wikipedia estimates anywhere from seven to eighteen million people over the two centuries or so centuries of “Christian” fervor.

 

The so-called “Puritans”—they were really separatists, not Puritans—who travelled to the New World to establish that much-celebrated city on the hill in the Massachusetts Bay Colony did so specifically to escape the deadly persecution of another “Christian” sect, the Anglicans. Of course, as soon as those “Puritans” became established over on the west side of the Atlantic, they returned the favor, fatally persecuting Quakers, for instance, as well as Baptists. There’s nothing quite like the assurance that God loves you and hates your neighbor to fuel persecution and slaughter.

 

A third of the way into the 18^th century, and things had more or less quieted down when it came to wars motivated by religious differences. Clearly That’s not to say that toleration reigned supreme, but rather that the lines of religious division had merged with the political landscape of European nations. Denmark was Lutheran, France was Catholic. England was Anglican, Spain was Catholic. And there, in its mountain fastness, was good old Calvinist Switzerland, cheek by jowl with the various Catholic Italian states.

 

That did not mean that religious differences were tolerated within those countries. Certainly Swift knew very well that the Irish, among whom he resided, were screwed by their Protestant overlords. Indeed, English law prohibited Catholics from holding office well into the nineteenth century. To this day, English monarchs are prohibited from being or becoming Catholics. The same sorts of limitations applied in almost every nation state, varying only according to the official religion practiced in the region. It wasn’t active persecution, necessarily, but a constant infringement of people’s liberty and prerogatives much like what applied—applies, I should say, to people of color in the US.

 

I suspect that none of this is of interest to the “Christian nationalists” who plague the US at this point. Their interest is not religious but sociopolitical. They want to conquer, to reestablish the white supremacy that existed when “America was great,” back before all the progressive movements of the twentieth century took place. Perhaps a return to the ante-bellum condition of the first half of the nineteenth century would be even better.

It’s not Christianity that these folks want. It is dominion.