Newly released book 'The Mighty And The Almighty' featured in Economist article on the faith of Theresa May

HOW far does Theresa May resemble Margaret Thatcher? As is pointed out by a new book on political leaders and faith, “both were Oxford-educated, both were/are renowned for their appetite for hard work and both were/are practising Christians.”

But the book, “The Mighty and the Almighty”, produced by Theos, a think-tank, also insists that the religious backgrounds of those two Conservative prime ministers were very different. In fact, “their Christianity divides [them] at least as much as it unites them.”

The Thatcher-May comparison is one of the most interesting features of an edited volume which dissects the religious lives of 24 present or recent heads of government, ranging from the Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan to Ireland’s Mary McAleese.

Both Mrs May and the late Lady Thatcher were brought up in intensely Christian environments: the current prime minister as an Anglican vicar’s daughter and her predecessor as the offspring of a Methodist preacher who brought the family to church up to four times on a Sunday.

Without ever rebelling openly, the young Margaret Roberts, born in 1925, found the mandatory piety a bit too intensive at times. As her political and social fortunes rose, after marrying the wealthy and religion-less Denis Thatcher, she opted for more conventional Anglican worship, while insisting that there was no huge difference with her childhood Methodism. 

But she retained a streak of passionate, contentious Christian belief, one that stressed individual responsibility and the idea that human beings face hard dilemmas. Addressing the Church of Scotland in 1988 she listed among her deepest beliefs the idea that “our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, when faced with his terrible choice and lonely vigil, chose to lay down his life [so] that our sins may be forgiven.”

What Mrs May puts forward, by contrast, is a non-divisive, all-embracing kind of religion, characteristic of an established church which is used to being a comforting background presence in the lives of people with little or no religious practice.

In her Easter message last Sunday, she appealed to a nostalgic vision of England where the Anglican vicar and his church are somehow the joint possession of the whole community, regardless of what faith if any they profess.

This Easter I think of those values that we share, values that I learnt in my own childhood, growing up in a vicarage. Values of compassion, community, citizenship. The sense of obligation we have to one another. These are values we all hold in common, and values that are visibly lived out everyday by Christians, as well as by people of other faiths or none.

As the book notes, Mrs May’s childhood reminiscences generally stress that her clerical father, Hubert Frasier, was there to help everybody. He believed in serving the whole community, whatever they believed about religion or politics. As she once said, he was the local vicar and it wasn’t right for him to set out what his politics were, because he should be appealing to and working with everyone in his parish.

One symptom of Mrs May’s cautious attitude to faith is the fact that she seems more comfortable speaking of her father’s religion than her own. Nick Spencer, editor of the new book and author of the chapter on her, points out that a similar tone was once adopted by Gordon Brown, a Labour prime minister whose father was a Presbyterian minister.  

In a way, Mrs May’s vision of religious Britain is similar to the vision that she has put forward, a bit implausibly, of political and civic Britain: a place where decent people want to rub along and work together with a common purpose (in this case, managing Brexit) with no hindrance from pesky purveyors of rancour.

One might, at a pinch, argue that these rose-tinted images are a necessary dose of balm, like an old black-and-white film about village fetes and cucumber sandwiches. Perhaps they will be well received in some quarters for that very reason. But as a statement of fact about modern Britain, they are hard to square with any sort of reality. In certain ways, Lady Thatcher’s brand of religion, like it or loathe it, was more crunchy and real.

Article by Erasmus, read the original at The Economist

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