David Cameron’s Easter message was inevitably going to court controversy.
In part, this is because he has form for raising eyebrows in some of his claims about Christianity. During the Easter reception at Downing Street last year he claimed Jesus as the originator of the Big Society – a concept that has waned within Conservative rhetoric, but which was resurrected in the Anglican bishops’ letter to the laity in February.
This year, Cameron used an Easter message to reassert that “the values of the Christian faith are the values on which our nation was built.” In an interview with Premier Christianity, he argued that “Easter is all about remembering the importance of change, responsibility, and doing the right thing for the good of our children.” The “values of Easter and the Christian religion” are “compassion, forgiveness, kindness, hard work and responsibility”.
For some commentators, this was yet another conflation of Christianity and Big Society Toryism, designed to bolster Conservative credentials among the electorate faithful. For those on the left, the Prime Minister’s rhetoric of concern for the poor was a far cry from the reality of Coalition policies: the real Jesus would label Cameron hypocrite.
The Guardian wondered what place “hard work and responsibility” had for the criminals crucified alongside Jesus. It insisted that “the vague and fluffy list of virtues” are not distinctively Christian, but that the heart of Christianity is far more radical than this. “It was the extraordinary idea that people have worth in themselves, regardless of their usefulness to others… an idea that Mr Cameron’s government has defined itself against.” The Spectator noted that Cameron had carefully stuck to “stuff about turning the other cheek, rather than the things about God doing stuff”. This was a “sanitised” Christianity, designed to appeal to as many voters as possible without apparently saying very much at all.
Cameron’s silence on God, Jesus, the crucifixion and Resurrection attracted particular derision from some quarters. Writing in the Catholic Herald, Madeleine Teahan accused Cameron of being “scared of proclaiming his Christianity”. A “Cameron rendition of Abba’s I Believe in Angels, would have contained more theological conviction”. Ruth Gledhill in Christianity Today suggested that it may be better if politicians “just leave religion to the bishops, and get on with the small but important matter of politics”. For some, then, Cameron ‘doing God’ was simply Cameron doing ethics. If he wanted to speak about Christianity and his faith, he should do so properly, rather than avoiding the essence of the religion out of political expediency.
But aside from the theological question about whether Cameron got Christianity ‘wrong’, there is another issue with the Easter message – the context in which it emerged. Cameron insisted in the Premier Christianity interview that the Coalition’s policies should not be dismissed as “amoral” – a reaction against recent interventions by Anglican bishops which have criticised some of the government’s policies. The issue is that February’s episcopal letter was leaked and then spun by the Tories to make it sound like a full–on, lefty–loving, Miliband–backing anti–Coalition attack when it quite clearly was not. Some of the responses to that document were shameful, and are not likely to have prepared a welcome audience for Cameron’s own theological intervention.
Politicians should be able to speak freely about their faith, or lack of it, and to put forth their own conceptions of faith and belief. They won’t get an easy ride (and nor would they expect one) but they should at least get a respectful and honest reception, which represents their interventions accurately and treats them as worthy of serious engagement. But the quid pro quo is that the same respect is extended to religious interventions in politics. So far this year the signs of this have not been good.
Simon Perfect is a research intern at Theos
Image from wikimedia.org by World Economic Forum, available in the public domain.
