Appearing in a debate at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last year, I was asked a straight question about Christian activity within party politics. The chair quoted a line from the postscript of my book on the influence of the Bible on British politics – “The real threat to Christian politics lies not in its tendency to fixate on a particular position but its inability to do so” – and then turned to me and said, “What you seem to be saying is that you want to see more political unity among Christians.”
This wasn’t quite what I had been getting at. The following line in the book reads – “…the danger is that the Bible can be made to prove just about anything” – and my point was that without coherent theological foundations for their political engagement, Christians are liable to be pulled by circumstance in every conceivable direction. However, I thought better of trying to convey this in a short answer (at least one that didn’t simply sound evasive) so I replied in the affirmative.
The audience or, rather, a part of it, took the proverbial sharp intake of breath, an intake that sounded alarmingly like a hiss. In my naivety, it took me a few minutes to work out why. I had, it seems, just advocated the establishment of a US-style religious right, in which Christians are corralled into the (extreme) wing of a particular party from where they could bully and harry political processes for their own conservative (ugh) ends.
I tried, later in the debate, to point out that that hadn’t been what I was advocating but I don’t believe I succeeded. Clearly my debating naivety showed: don’t answer a straight question with a straight answer.
It was an awkward but instructive moment, revealing to me the – what is it? antipathy? fear? ignorance? – which informs much British public attitudes to the question of Christianity and party politics.
Martin Steven’s book on the subject is a balanced and well-researched contribution to a field that is painfully free of intelligent contributions. An academic work from an academic author, the book has a number of key contentions. The most fundamental (and least surprising) is that religion has been largely ignored by social scientists when it comes to British politics and, in particular, British party politics. “The absence of conflict or division in relation to religion on mainland Britain should not be equated with an absence of significance,” Steven notes early on.
This is surely true and uncontroversial. More interestingly, he poses the question: “is Christianity good for British representative democracy?” Steven’s focus is on British politics but he places his work in a wider context that is critical in as far as it reveals how – ignorant? fearful? – domestic discourse on the subject is.
Europe has had a longstanding tradition of Christian political parties, the Christian Democratic tradition, which was successful, indeed dominant, in the period after the Second World War. Christian Democratic parties were ascendant in Italy, West Germany, Belgium, and Austria as those nations helped rebuild the continent. They remain live today, particularly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, though in a much attenuated form. In a similar fashion, the Nordic tradition of tax-funding social action via Lutheran churches remains strong. And, as if this weren’t enough, fourteen EU member states retain some form of formal link between Church and State. Western Europe does, of course, have a long tradition of evicting Christianity from mainstream politics, but the history of that particular kind of secularism does not mean that the mature and largely-functioning democracies of Western Europe are free of Christian influence, contact or ties.
The US, of course, is famously different. The only country in the world with complete separate of religion and state (SRAS), it is also (probably) the only Western one in which it would be unthinkable to elect an atheist president. America is an example of how a nation and its politics can be both completely secular and thoroughly religious. It is also an example, as Steven writes, of a developed country in which “religion is not viewed as being a threat to democracy, or in conflict with democracy, as it has been at various junctures in Western Europe – [but] rather… [as] synonymous with democracy.” Research, most recently Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace, supports this. In Steven’s words, “if someone goes to their local church, they are also more likely to vote, identify with a party, be involved in charitable work and generally engage with wider American society.” Christianity and a healthy (as opposed to simply structural) democracy go hand in hand in the US.
All of which makes Britain something of a strange case. It has a fully-functioning (though hardly healthy) democracy; two differently-established churches; no tradition of SRAS; no Christian Democratic political tradition; and no established or widely-held view as to whether Christianity is good or bad for representative democracy.
No surprise, therefore, that Steven approvingly quotes Shmuel Eisenstadt’s concept of “multiple modernities”, the idea that neither the part-secularised model of continental Europe nor the Christian-secular model of the US, nor the generally confused and confusing model of the UK presents a “deterministic path [that] other modernising societies are destined to follow… The relationship of the state to religious institutions in established democracies takes such a variety of forms that it is impossible to speak of one general pattern.”
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Steven’s book splits into three parts. The first looks at the electoral context, and the presence of Christian groups within each of the three mainstream parties; the second at the Christian “lobby”, specifically the Churches of England (the activity of the bishops in House of Lords) and Scotland (its annual social justice reports and its involvement in homelessness and social care); and the third on ‘religious issues’, which unfortunately is limited only to abortion, euthanasia, and equalities.
It is not without fault. The author mentions his “total lack of theological credentials”, which shows in confused sentences like “social justice… while it has nothing to do with religion, it is very much linked to ‘loving thy neighbour’.”
He can be hopelessly wide of the mark – “the average British subject (citizen) does not care too much whether there is a royal family or not” – and sometimes just plain wrong: “Evangelical Christians place much more emphasis on individual personal salvation than on good acts or social work,” he writes. “When they become well off financially, they believe they have been rewarded for their good lives by God, and they deserve to keep their wealth and spend it.” This is a highly partial and partisan view of British evangelicalism, and not worthy of a scholarly book.
Nor, thankfully, is it typical of the book. Steven is usually alert to the particularities of which he writes and rightly laments the lack of subtlety that marks much political science in this area (religion is all too often “merged with other variables, such an ethnicity or moral values”). He also draws on a good range of the available data, including the British Election Study (BES), British Social Attitude Survey (BSAS), and other ad-hoc research surveys (including one of Theos’), as well as a series of personal interviews.
He is fair and without an obvious axe to grind. He writes at length on the influence of Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches, as well as that of Christian lobby groups, but does not imagine that they are as influential as some Christians (and many secularists) think. He quotes research which shows that the UK lies at the bottom of the pile in terms of the influence of religion in advanced industrial Western politics (though I find this hard to believe compared with, say, France or Sweden), and writes “in modern, twenty-first century Britain, it would be patently wrong to try to argue that social policy in the area of life issues has been successfully influenced by the more conservative wing of the Christian church.”
That recognised, he does not imagine there is no significant ecclesiastical influence on politics. Indeed, his whole thesis is that the powers that be pay attention to Christian voices and institutions because it is rational for them to do so. The number of people in church on a Sunday remains vast, certainly compared with other forms of associational activity today, and the churches’ range of social action is far too longstanding, widespread and important to ignore. The Church of England is close enough to, and sufficiently trusted by, those in power to receive particular attention. And “the consistently biggest irritant to the insider networks of Westminster is the Catholic Church, and its interests in life issues.” The truth about the influence of Christianity on contemporary British political life is, thus, complex and not amenable to the slogans and soundbites that cloud this subject in public discourse.
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So, what (party) political form does British Christianity actually take? And is it good for representative democracy? Steven doesn’t seek to answer these questions systematically but two areas of his study stand out as relevant to them.
The first is the question of how Christians vote (on which subject see also Ben Clements’ article for BRIN). Putting aside the question of how the different denominations are defined (I assume it is by self-designation, a rather blunt measure, but Steven is not 100% clear on this matter), the historic links remain strong. Steven shows how Britain never developed a Christian party (of the Christian Democrat tradition) because it had three.
The Church of England was once known as the Tory party at prayer. The record of bishops over recent decades shows that this association is far from necessarily the case today. Nevertheless, BES data demonstrate that Anglicans are still more likely to vote Conservative than members of other denominations (especially Catholic voters and, since the 1980s, Church of Scotland members).
By contrast, the Labour party has long been favoured by Catholics (in marked contrast to most of the rest of Europe) and by people in Kirk pew – at least until recent years when the Scottish National Party made a play for their vote that has met with much success. Finally, the age-old connection between Methodism and, to a lesser extent, other nonconformist denominations, and Liberalism remains strong. (The irreligious, by way of aside, tend to vote anything except Tory, and are particularly partial to the Liberals).
In addition to this, each major party has its own Christian Group – the Conservative Christian Fellowship, Christian Socialist Movement and Liberal Democrat Christian Forum – which is active among the rank and file. (Steven makes the nice observation of these that each epithet is well suited to – the caricature of – each party, “fellowship” being relational and un-ideological, “movement” progressive and organised, “forum” neutral and discursive.)
What conclusion can we draw from this? One, perhaps, might be that Christians are unable to fixate on a particular (party) political position. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a huge question beyond the scope of this essay, and will depend on whether such Christian disunity is down to a lack of theological reflection (leaving them exposed to pressure from whips, media, events, etc) or lots of theological reflection (leaving them persuaded that this particular party at this particular moment offers a political vision closest to that gleaned from scripture and tradition).
A second conclusion is quite clearly that, whether or not it is right that Christians should be politically disunited, in Britain today they are. Steven makes much of the alleged “Alpha vote”, a conviction that evangelicalism, growing (or, at least, not declining) in Britain today is more naturally inclined towards Conservatism and concludes that “we are left with the Conservative Party to act as the main vessel for Christian policy proposals in the modern UK party system.”
This is too big and too rapid a conclusion to reach on the evidence available, and while it is certainly true that there are evangelicals who are prominent within the Conservative Party, and that there is growing media conviction that a “Religious Right” is emerging in the UK (a subject that will be explored in detail in a Theos report later this year), the equation is not simple, and may not even be accurate. However much some might like to imagine Christian political activity as of a particular (right-wing) kind, it clearly is not.
But if Christianity is not actually bad for British representative democracy, if it doesn’t throw its weight unduly behind one particular party or policy agenda, is it actually good?
Steven is unwilling to come out clearly on this issue. Indeed, he explicitly refuses to say whether Christianity is good for representative democracy, saying that this would be to make a normative claim that was beyond the book’s remit. That noted, it is clear in which direction he gestures.
First, there is the matter of voting turnout. “If people are religious they are more likely to vote – consistently shown for over 25 years – bucking the trend of voter apathy.” Apparently, it makes little difference whether you are an occasional or regular churchgoer; the difference is between the religious and irreligious, the former being more committed to the democratic progress.
Second, there is the issue of party identification. Here Christians, again, buck the trend, being “substantially more likely to identify with a party than non-Christians.”
Some reservation is called for here. Both voter turnout and party identification, not to mention attitudes to civic duty, are tied up with other demographic and social factors, such as age and income level, and it is far from clear which, if any of these factors, is driving these trends.
Nonetheless, the emerging picture is at least indicative. In Steven’s words, “Christians are an extremely reliable source of democratic engagement – and linked to that, wider social capital”, a fact that is especially valuable to those interested in the future of Britain’s beleaguered political parties. “In the midst of tough times for parties, with falling membership and identification levels, Christians are a welcome source of civic trust to all of their membership and activist registers.”
The overwhelming impression from Christianity and Party Politics: Keeping the Faith is that we need more research in this area. In particular, it is one thing to note the correlations between parties and denominations, but it is quite another to say that this amounts to causation. Peter Pulzer once remarked that “class is the basis of British political parties; all else is embellishment and detail.” Does that remain so? Was denomination merely a cipher for class? Is it still?
Work is being done on this, including that by Ben Clements of Leicester University, who is writing a monograph (and Theos report) on religion and political choice in Britain. We have, as yet, too few dots to draw a detailed or fully-convincing conclusion regarding the relationship of Christianity and party politics in contemporary Britain. That which Steven does offer us, however, points in the direction of the US where “religion is seen as a resource (the means by which to resolve secular as well as religious dilemmas).” Some in Britain think that today. Others protest (too?) loudly. We shall find out.
Nick Spencer
Christianity and Party Politics: Keeping the Faith by Martin H.M. Steven is published by Routledge (2011)
