George Orwell is of course primarily known for 1984 and Animal Farm as critiques from a social democratic perspective of Stalinism. While they are his most popular works, they are often his least insightful. Where he is at his best, is his ability to describe the British mindset of the interwar era. "Notes on Nationalism" is the very best when it comes to a description of anglo psychological types that have come to their full flowering today. However its relevance is to church matters is minimal and will be left to another post, but for a brief discussion on a single paragraph.
His other major work, "The Road to Wigan Pier" contains a discussion of the "condition-of-England-question" during the Depression, calling for the need for some kind of socialism, and is followed by a discussion of the reasons why doctrinare socialism had such small impact among English speakers of the era.
Orwell often drew a comparison between Political Catholicism and Socialism, for the effect that it had on the minds of the middle-class convert, so much detached from the working-class socialist or Irishman.
"One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the 'educated' are completely orthodox. The most immediately striking thing about the English Roman Catholics--I don't mean the real Catholics, I mean the converts: Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn et hoc genus--is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they are Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting from it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man. But the really interesting thing about these people is the way in which they have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest details of life are involved. Even the liquids you drink, apparently, can be orthodox or heretical; hence the campaigns of Chesterton, 'Beachcomber', etc., against tea and in favour of beer. According to Chesterton, tea-drinking' is 'pagan', while beer-drinking is 'Christian', and coffee is 'the puritan's opium'. It is unfortunate for this theory that Catholics abound in the 'Temperance' movement and the greatest tea-boozers in the world are the Catholic Irish." -- Road to Wigan Pier, Chapter 11.
The above is apposite in discussing our modern trads.
Orwell also chronicles how this emerges from familiarity's contempt. One might become disilusioned with the faith that they know well, but rather than resulting in the loss of national feeling or religion, the feelings are transferred in a kind of absurd way to something alien. Ideally alien enough to provide intellectual pleasure in simply knowing about it (the "weeaboo" phenomenon). But this distance inevitably results in pontificating (in total ignorance) about the greatness of Byzantine or Latin peoples for their religion.
"Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent – though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one – was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealization of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it – as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine – had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad....
The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so."