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That old standard, the religious belief of senior politicians, has been getting some attention recently (see Thursday’s Newsnight piece beginning at 33 minutes here).
Reports point out that Theresa May is a professing Christian, as is Andrea Leadsom, Minister of State for Energy, who has now withdrawn from the Conservative Party leadership race, and Stephen Crabb, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions who withdrew from the race after the first round. In another blast from the past, John Humphreys ‘did a Jeremy’, on Tony Blair during an interview on Radio 4 yesterday, asking him if he ever prayed for forgiveness over Iraq. This follows the incessant hint-dropping around Sadiq Khan's mayoral campaign.
In part, this comes from an entirely understandable desire to know what makes our leaders tick – it’s one of the reasons why we’ve been running our ‘Mighty and the Almighty’ series. But it also implies that religious belief is something odd that requires an extra level of investigation, explanation and justification, especially to the extent that the religious people are more likely to hold insufficiently progressive views. This time last year Tim Farron was being monstered for daring to abstain on a vote on the same sex marriage bill (heretofore to be known as the Test and Corporation Act 2013). The stronger and more serious religious belief is, the more problematic it is seen to be.
We clearly still need to rebut some of the oft-repeated complaints about even genuine – as opposed to affected-for-political-purposes – religious belief amongst our politicians.
First, Christians in public life are not imbalanced and narrow in their selection of issues. Guardian columnist Zoe Williams still suggests that the religious are obsessed with sex. Since pretty much everyone seems to be obsessed with sex these days, I find this a rather ironic complaint, but that’s by the by. In the last couple of years, I would say the main areas of activity have been poverty and welfare reform and asylum and immigration. Any even-handed analysis of the public interventions of churches over the general election period – for example – would find them to be by and large a sex-free zone.
Historically, Christian politicians and Christian campaigning has always been engaged on a large range of subject areas. I can’t remember a time when this wasn’t a case. It’s a cliché and a generalisation, but UK Christians are often socially conservative and economically progressive (for a more detailed analysis see our Voting and Values report). There’s no reason to suggest that the political views of religious politicians are any less complicated and varied. The truth is that people often only take interest in someone's religious beliefs when a politician does or says with which they violently disagree.
Second, the idea that the religious are engaged in some kind of collective putsch, ready to force an increasingly disbelieving public down a religious path is simply not supported by the evidence. The bogeyman of the religious right often invoked when setting up these debates, but it just doesn’t hold. As our religious right report points out, there are neither the electoral conditions, nor is there a political vehicle, nor even the desire for this in the UK. A moderate Anglican establishment, historical religious diversity and the political breadth of different denominations' attachments means that religion in the UK, if no less public, is by theology, history and necessity, more cosmopolitan. Equally, individual religious politicians are well aware that many people do not share their beliefs, and that the realm of temporal politics is on of negotiation and compromise in search of common goods.
Third, and finally, if there was a time when Christian political action looked like middle-class moralising or hypocritical finger-wagging, detached from real life, then that time has surely passed. Churches and other religious communities serve their neighbours and their neighbourhoods, often in quite remarkably self-sacrificial ways (if you missed it, take a minute to read this). For all its past and potential abuses, it’s getting harder to view such public faith with a blanket cynicism.
We can and should interrogate Christian political leaders about their views, as with non-religious ones. In an increasingly disbelieving society the religious beliefs of future politicians will remain a matter of public interest, in that it may become more unusual, but there’s a fine line between public interest and suspicion. Let’s keep it on the right side of the line.
Paul Bickley is the Director of Political Programme for Theos | @mrbickley
Image from the UK Home Office via flickr under Creative Commons 2.0
