Society
Stay away from my God, you posturing politicians!
Published 06 November 2000
We're all atheists now, the Archbishop of Canterbury tells us. Perhaps this is true of the man and woman on the street - the ones who have turned churches up and down the country into empty and bankrupt husks and who cannot name the Ten Commandments - but in politics, we've never had so many God-botherers. Remember the conference season? Bournemouth and Brighton resounded with the kind of holy-roller foot-stomping and hallelujahs that you expect at a big-tent revival meeting. Few could muster the evangelical fervour of Ann Widdecombe, whose moral authoritarianism finds no match outside the wild-eyed Old Testament prophets and their jeremiads; but Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Michael Portillo, in their different ways, gave good impersonations of gospel choristers belting out their undying love for their brethren.
Forgiveness, caring, sharing and an inclusive society - the new buzzwords and catch-phrases convey politicians in the mould of the Good Samaritan, rather than the Iron Lady. Tony Blair is forever attending Mass at the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, and on 1 November, William Hague met with religious leaders of every domination.
But if the voters are so secular, why are the Westminster lot suddenly rushing to put God in their midst?
For one thing, our politicians are desperately seeking a core belief. The left has jettisoned socialism because it proved a vote loser throughout the 1980s and early 1990s; the right has discarded brute capitalism because it proved such a turn-off in 1997. Now, the two camps are frantically trying to scrounge some residual values and the code of conduct that they vaguely remember learning in the course of the Christian education that was once common to us all. It is a value system that has the merit of sounding original - indeed, positively radical - with its talk of the last coming first, the poor inheriting kingdoms, and all of us being equal in His eyes and made in His image. Thank God! Here is something to hang their loose talk on, something that passes for a vision.
Past manifestos, lies in interviews, private lives that make a nonsense of public pronouncements - our politicians have been exposed as weaklings capable only of turning this way and that, weather-vane-like, according to the latest poll. What they need is down-to-your-toes conviction, and the mantle of unshakeable authority that comes with it. And so Tony, William and co are turning to the unassailable, the unquestionable Almighty, in the hope that, if they subscribe to some of His tenets - in a kind of a la carte, pick'n'mix way - some of His authority will rub off on them.
At a time when our traditional allegiances are being questioned and regrouped through devolution, multi-ethnic immigration and the crumbling of families, our sense of identity is under threat. Politicians realise this, and worry: when Middle Englanders feel vulnerable, they no longer grit their teeth and put a brave face on things as they once did. They take to the streets, as Scargill's miners did, grumbling about incompetent governments. In religion, then, new Labour and the Conservatives think they have got a perfectly cohesive identikit image that they can palm off on the populace. Armed with this, the poor lost souls who feel that the party they were born to has become discredited will once again enjoy membership in a community. They will know where they stand, who they are and what their purpose in life is.
It sounds like a marriage made in heaven, then. And yet faith, like political vision, cannot be imposed from above. To pay lip-service to its tenets as a vote-grabbing exercise not only smacks of imposture, it is doomed to failure. Atheists will find the Gospel no more palatable doled out by a man in a suit than by one in a cassock; and as for the few of us who still believe, the new Christians strike us as foolish ideological hijackers.
Leave our God alone, gentlemen: you don't know what you are playing with.
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