Nick Spencer reflects on a busy week of doing faith in public life. 21/04/2022.

OK, will people just stop it please? Theos is only a small organisation and there are only so many hours in the day.

I can forgive the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is his job, after all. Having said that, his Easter sermon last week was unusually strong in its condemnation of the government’s new asylum policy. It was bound to set more than just the usual hares running.

I find it harder to forgive Boris Johnson, whose alleged smear of the archbishop before backbench MPs a couple of days later kept the story going. And then there was the response from a Church of England spokesman. ‘Unusually forthright,’ I think captures it.

The front pages were covered with religion and politics stories. The inside pages entertained commentary, from the highly thoughtful, such as David Aaronovitch’s piece in The Times, to the, er, less thoughtful. Radio schedules have been packed with talking heads.

But, as they say, when Bagpuss starts doing religion, all his friends start doing religion too.

Steve Baker MP, the former Brexit minister, who does God very seriously, said to Johnson on Tuesday that “justice leading into mercy relies on a very old–fashioned concept, and that is repentance”, before asking “what assurance can he give us that nothing of this kind will ever happen again?” A couple of days later, he went on to call for the Prime Minister’s resignation in “a speech dense with biblical allusion”.

Then Alastair Campbell, former chief spokesman for Tony Blair, who does not do God very seriously, joined in, quoting Luke’s gospel because (in his words) “these loathsome Tories are now using the Bible in their letters explaining to constituents why they do not think there should be any investigation.”

If all this wasn’t enough, Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron clashed in their televised debate last night on religion and secularism. Oh, and the (devout) Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison got into trouble for an inappropriate use of the word “blessed”.

People, please, come on! Be reasonable. Or at least let us know in advance if you all intend to get all theopolitical at the same time. We are busy too here, you know.

And now this is the bit when I change gear and say something profound, and philosophically penetrating. Or maybe not. After all buses come in threes and a few biblically–armed political cage fights do not a religious revival make.

Except that – sorry, I can’t resist it – politics is the art of living together, and asks us to reflect on who we are and what we value. Humans are ineradicably moral and spiritual beings, not in the sense that we are naturally good or necessarily religious, but simply because our thoughts and words and deeds are inextricably caught in a web of deep ethical and philosophical reasoning. We want to be good (or at very least to be seen to be good). We want to be able to say why. We like to have some cogent defence of what goodness is. We need to be able to say on what, or whose, authority we say or do these things.

All of which means that however much we incline towards populism or majoritarianism or plebiscitary democracy, or however ‘secular’ we think we are, our politics will always gravitate to the religious, because, as Philip Larkin once wrote, “we will forever be surprising/ A hunger in [ourselves] to be more serious.”

If only there was some kind of think tank to reflect on all these things. If only there was more time in the day.

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