The Orange Order

I recently received a direct message on X from a young Northern Irish lady who asked me the following: 

 "Sir Timothy, you have often spoken of your Ulster birth, your attachment to the Protestant faith, and your devotion to the traditional teachings of the Church of England. May I ask, therefore, why you have never joined the Orange Order? Is it because of its political associations, its reputation for sectarianism, or the suggestion that it has Masonic connections? Surely, for a man of your convictions, the Order's defence of Protestantism ought to make it a natural home. Or do you have reservations about the Order itself?" 

In all honesty, it is a perfectly fair question, and one which deserves a more considered answer than the raising of an eyebrow, the adjustment of one's cuffs, and the customary observation that life is already burdened with more societies than any sensible man can reasonably attend. 

 I was born in Carrickfergus, in the north of Ireland, and I have never felt any inclination to conceal the fact. Ulster is not merely a geographical expression in my private history; it is a part of my inheritance, with all the memories, loyalties, affections, and historical complexities that such an inheritance entails. One does not cease to belong to the place of one's birth merely because one has travelled, acquired books, developed opinions, or discovered that the world is considerably larger than the map upon which one first learned to locate it. Nor have I ever been ashamed of being a Protestant. Indeed, I have always regarded the English Reformation as a matter of considerable theological and historical importance, and I remain attached to the old formularies of the Church of England: the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Ordinal. I have a particular affection for the language of the Prayer Book, which possesses the rare quality of being both beautifully fashioned and theologically serious without feeling obliged to advertise either accomplishment. One might reasonably suppose, therefore, that I should have found a natural home in the Orange Order. I understand the historical circumstances in which it arose, the importance which its members attach to the Protestant inheritance, and the place it has occupied in the social and political life of Ulster. I do not regard these matters as trifling, nor would I presume to dismiss the convictions of those who have devoted themselves to the Institution. Nevertheless, I have never joined it.

The explanation is neither particularly mysterious nor, I hope, offensive.

I have simply never considered membership necessary to the expression of my religious convictions. I am an Anglican because I believe in the faith as I have received and understood it, not because I require an additional institutional allegiance to certify the fact. My Protestantism is a matter of conscience; my Anglicanism is a matter of ecclesiastical identity; and my Ulster birth is a fact of geography and biography. These three things may coexist perfectly well without requiring me to enrol in every organisation with which one or another of them has historically been associated. There is, moreover, a distinction which I have always considered worth preserving: the distinction between defending a religious tradition and identifying oneself with every organisation that undertakes to defend it. The two activities are not necessarily incompatible, but neither are they identical. A man may defend the authority of Scripture, uphold the doctrines of the Reformation, cherish the Prayer Book, and remain faithful to the historic Church without becoming a member of a Protestant fraternity. Equally, a man may join such a fraternity from sincere conviction without thereby becoming a more faithful Christian than his neighbour who declines to do so. I have never been persuaded that the sincerity of one's faith can be measured by the number of associations whose membership certificates one is able to display.

My reservations, insofar as I have any, concern the broader question of religious identity and communal allegiance. Ulster's history is not a simple tale, and it would be a discourtesy to its people to pretend otherwise. Its religious divisions have been shaped by centuries of political conflict, competing national aspirations, genuine theological disagreements, inherited grievances, and loyalties which have sometimes outlived the circumstances that originally gave rise to them. I have no intention of resolving that history in a paragraph, still less of pretending that one can understand it by distributing praise and blame with the impartiality of a clerk balancing his ledger. But I do believe that the Christian must exercise a certain vigilance whenever religious conviction becomes inseparable from political identity. The danger is not that a Christian should care about the history of his people. On the contrary, gratitude for one's inheritance is a perfectly respectable virtue. The danger arises when the defence of that inheritance begins to be treated as a sufficient definition of one's Christian duty, or when loyalty to a community is permitted to determine in advance the moral standing of everyone outside it. The Gospel makes demands upon us which are not always convenient to our inherited sympathies. It commands us to love our neighbours, to forgive our enemies, and to examine our own conduct with at least as much seriousness as we examine the conduct of those with whom we disagree. These obligations are not suspended at the border of a political tradition, nor do they become less binding when the people on the other side of a religious divide have behaved badly. This does not mean that theological differences are unimportant. I should be the last person to suggest that all doctrines are interchangeable, that the differences between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism are imaginary, or that historical controversies can be settled by declaring everyone equally right. Such a conclusion would be intellectually lazy and theologically incoherent. Christian charity does not require the abandonment of conviction; it requires that conviction be exercised without malice. I can disagree with a Roman Catholic about the authority of the Pope, the nature of the Church, or the interpretation of Scripture without regarding him as an enemy by definition. I can defend the Thirty-Nine Articles without supposing that every person who rejects them must therefore be personally unworthy of my respect. There is, after all, a difference between believing a proposition to be false and believing the person who holds it to be beyond the reach of Christian charity. It is a difference which our age, despite its prodigious production of moral declarations, has not always found easy to maintain.

The question of Freemasonry introduces another consideration.

The Orange Order is not simply a branch of Freemasonry, nor should the two institutions be treated as though they were interchangeable. There are, however, historical similarities in their fraternal organisation, terminology, ceremonial forms, and use of lodges. Historians have discussed the influence of Masonic models upon aspects of early Orange organisation, although similarity and historical influence do not establish institutional identity. I would therefore be reluctant to repeat the assertion, sometimes made rather confidently, that the Orange Order is itself a Masonic organisation. That would require a more precise argument than the observation that both institutions have lodges, ceremonies, and distinctive forms of regalia. Nor would I wish to make an accusation merely because it suited an argument I had already decided to win. The pursuit of truth is not improved by exaggeration, even when the exaggeration happens to be directed at an institution of which one is suspicious. Nevertheless, I have my own reservations about certain forms of fraternal obligation and ritual, and I would want to understand their nature before committing myself to them. As an Anglican, I am conscious that questions concerning oaths, religious language, and the obligations assumed by members of a society can have theological significance. Whether a particular practice is acceptable must be considered on its own merits; it cannot be settled merely by attaching the word Masonic to it, as though that adjective were a complete theological argument. I do not, therefore, claim that the Orange Order is unacceptable to every Christian, nor do I presume to judge the conscience of every man who joins it. I can only say that I have never found sufficient reason to enter it myself. My religious allegiance is already substantial enough. The Church of England has provided me with a liturgy, a calendar, a body of doctrine, and a long inheritance of prayer and worship. It has given me words with which to confess my sins, to intercede for others, to commemorate the dead, and to approach the mysteries of the Christian faith. I have never felt that this inheritance was deficient merely because it did not require me to join an additional fraternity. If anything, I have sometimes suspected that the modern appetite for multiplying affiliations arises from a certain anxiety about belonging. We seem increasingly determined to establish who we are by identifying the societies, causes, parties, movements, and communities to which we belong. We assemble our identities as though we were compiling a philatelic album, carefully filling each empty space with the appropriate emblem. But a human soul is not a collection of membership badges. I have spent a considerable portion of my life studying words, symbols, and the histories of things which other people have sometimes dismissed as insignificant.

Stamps, runes, old books, ecclesiastical formularies, and the curious survivals of ancient custom have all taught me something about the manner in which human beings preserve their past. They have also taught me that a symbol may acquire meanings beyond those originally intended, and that an institution may come to represent something rather different to different generations of its members. It is therefore possible to respect the historical significance of the Orange Order without regarding membership as a religious obligation. It is possible to understand why a man might join it without supposing that every Protestant ought to follow him. And it is possible to remain attached to Ulster without allowing one's birthplace to prescribe the whole course of one's conscience. I should add, lest my position be misunderstood, that I have no desire to cultivate an artificial neutrality. I am not ashamed of my convictions, and I have no wish to dissolve the particularities of my inheritance into some vague and fashionable sentiment in which every historical distinction is regarded as an inconvenience. I believe that the Christian faith makes definite claims upon the intellect and the conscience. I believe that traditions deserve to be understood before they are discarded, and that the past should not be judged solely by the moral vocabulary of the present. But I also believe that loyalty is most honourable when it remains voluntary, and that conviction is most credible when it does not require constant public demonstration. Perhaps this is where my answer finally rests. I have never felt that I needed to prove my Protestantism by joining the Orange Order, any more than I need to prove my affection for cricket by joining every cricket club in the British Isles. One may love the game, understand its traditions, defend its peculiar virtues, and still decline the invitation to sit on another committee. The comparison is not entirely frivolous. Cricket has taught me that the rules of a game are important precisely because they permit a contest to take place without requiring the participants to hate one another. There are occasions when tempers rise, when an appeal is disputed, and when a batsman departs with a degree of reluctance which suggests that he has mistaken the pavilion for a court of final appeal. Yet the game survives because its principles are larger than the immediate passions of those who play it. Religious and political life are, of course, more serious matters than cricket. But I sometimes wonder whether we might profit from remembering that a disagreement need not become a declaration of enmity, and that loyalty to one's own side does not require the denial of every virtue in another. So, if you ask whether I am an Ulsterman, I shall answer in the affirmative. If you ask whether I am a Protestant, I shall answer without hesitation. If you ask whether I am an Anglican of the old persuasion, I shall probably begin discussing the Prayer Book before you have finished your tea. But if you ask whether I am an Orangeman, I must disappoint you. I am not. I remain, instead, a man who wishes to preserve his religious inheritance without confusing it with every political or fraternal expression that has grown up around it; a man who would rather examine an institution carefully than condemn it carelessly; and a man who believes that his neighbour's conscience is not his property to regulate.

There are enough divisions in the world without my manufacturing additional ones for the sake of a more easily understood biography.

And if, after all this, you still consider me insufficiently straightforward, I can offer you one final consolation.

My personal motto has never been PROUD TO BE UNAMBIGUOUS. It is, as you may know, PROUD TO BE CONFUSED.

I have found the distinction surprisingly useful.