The religious influence in politics – Missionary positions – Christianity is playing a part in Conservative thinking, and may soon do the same for Labour
An interesting piece from The Economist
BRITISH secularists deplore their country’s established church and the national broadcaster’s religious programming. But there can hardly be a more comfortable home for an atheist. Fewer people profess a belief in God than in America and even much of post-modern Europe. Church attendance has dropped sharply since the war. So irreverent are Britons in matters spiritual that 390,000 of them gave their religion as “Jedi” in the last census, making the science-fiction warrior cult the fourth-largest faith in the land.
Most satisfyingly for the non-believer, politicians live in terror of being seen as righteous. Tony Blair was reticent about his Christianity while in office in order to avoid being thought a “nutter”. To the extent that Gordon Brown has played up his personal brand as an ascetic son of the manse, it has only amplified his aura of unelectable otherness. David Cameron, the Conservative leader who is likely to replace him as prime minister next year, recently stressed the doubting nature of his Anglicanism. Out-and-proud atheists abound in Westminster.
Yet it would be a mistake to infer from this that religion has no intellectual purchase on British politics. Faith certainly informs some of the Tories’ current thinking. Mr Cameron’s “compassionate conservatism”—with its professed zeal for fighting poverty and reviving civil society—is not merely evocative of Christian ideals in a nebulous sense. It is, to an often underrated degree, driven by Christian individuals and organisations.
Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Cameron’s predecessor-but-one and a fervent Catholic, is the party’s main advocate of fighting worklessness and family breakdown through reform of the welfare system. He is likely to feature in a Cameron government. His Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) is now the most influential think-tank on the right. Many of its senior figures are Christians, including its director, Philippa Stroud, a former charity worker and now a Tory parliamentary candidate. On November 26th Mr Cameron spoke at the launch of ResPublica, a think-tank run by Philip Blond, a former theologian whose communitarian conservatism has also grabbed the Tory leader’s attention.
Intimacy with true believers carries risks. The liberal voters Mr Cameron lured back to his party by flaunting his metropolitanism are the most likely to be put off by any hint of censoriousness. (The Tories recently had to deny that their plans to allow almost anyone to set up state schools would give rise to creationist teaching.) There is also scope for splits in the party’s higher reaches, where people of little or no faith dominate. Questions such as whether to recognise marriage in the tax system are already somewhat divisive (Mr Cameron is keener than his liberal shadow chancellor, George Osborne).
Tags: Christianity, Politics