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Called Faith Freedom and Politics: Christians in Public Life, the event will bring together a coalition of many of the biggest Christian organisations in the country, with representatives of all the main traditions, to sign up to a Declaration of Christian Conscience. This will be, it is hoped, a metaphorical public planting of the Christian standard which can in future be used as a yardstick to measure where our politicians stand on moral issues. In a year which has seen doctrinaire progressives back legislation extending abortion rights and allowing for assisted suicide, it is a first step in a battle to turn the tide. The ambition is nothing less than to change the tenor of our politics altogether; to bring Christians into the political equation so that they matter in the way they do across the Atlantic.
Among the many differences between ourselves and our American cousins is the role that religion plays in politics. In America it is virtually obligatory for any politician aspiring to high office to embrace religion publicly; no US president has ever declared themselves atheist – even if we might harbour doubts about their sincerity. Jimmy Carter was undoubtedly a sincere believer, but Bill Clinton? Ronald Reagan? Donald Trump? Pope Francis famously quipped, ‘Who am I to judge?’, but some scepticism is surely in order.
Britain is very different. Sir Keir Starmer is an atheist and not the first Labour Prime Minister to be so: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee and James Callaghan were also non-believers. There have been Tory and Liberal atheist Prime Ministers too: Neville Chamberlain and David Lloyd George had no religious belief. So does it matter if our leaders are God-fearing or godless? Should it matter to us as Catholic voters? Or should we take the view that our national politics are firmly secular and voting should be detached from faith? I think it matters greatly and, furthermore, I believe that banishing religion from the public square has done great damage both to politics and national life.
What we have ended up with in the UK is a political culture in which religion is the truth that dare not speak its name. It was Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s PR consigliere, who most pithily expressed this; an interviewer had started to quiz Blair about his faith, at which point Campbell stepped in saying, ‘We don’t do God’; sadly we never got to hear what Blair might have answered. Since then, the religious beliefs of our leaders have been off the table: have you recently, or indeed ever, heard one of our leaders questioned seriously about their beliefs?
Sometimes, it is true, politicians known to be religious are subjected to hostile interrogation – the ex-Lib Dem leader Tim Farron was harried over his belief that gay sex was inherently sinful and it probably cost him his job – but mainstream political coverage steers well clear of religion; it has been relegated to the private realm. The media itself bears responsibility for this: many journalists are woefully ignorant of religious matters and are often hostile to them.
This omertà about religion has consequences; whether or not we believe that some American politicians are hypocrites, the very fact that religious belief plays an important role in political life has put moral issues centre stage. Take abortion and the pro-life movement. Donald Trump is no one’s idea of a man of faith; his venality, his divorces, his treatment of women make him a dismal role model. However, what will always stand him in credit with many of his Christian voters is the way he followed through on his promises in his first term. His appointment to the US Supreme Court of judges who were explicitly socially conservative changed its balance of opinion and led directly to the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade – the 1973 ruling which guaranteed federal protection of the right to abortion.
Subsequently, abortion came under the jurisdiction of individual states, many of which have now restricted its availability; in Texas alone it is reckoned ten thousand children have now been born who would otherwise have been killed. Across the whole country that figure might have reached two hundred thousand. There, in a nutshell, is the evidence of why we need vigorous debate about moral issues returned to the forefront of our own politics; because if, as in the US, voters can be motivated to vote with their conscience, real, positive change for the better can be achieved. But how can that be done in our own polity unless Christian voters are marshalled to bring pressure on politicians whose own moral stance is barely ever interrogated?
A writer in The Guardian recently gave heartfelt thanks for the fact that in Britain abortion has never become a major political issue: she felt that this had guaranteed that the issue remains one of ‘a woman’s right to choose’. From the standpoint of progressives she is right to offer thanks; there has been no real debate about abortion in Parliament since the original legislation was passed in 1967. Instead, there has been a consensus, embraced by all the main parties, that abortion is a done deal. The liberal-left, in its long campaign to overturn all those assumptions in common law which were fundamentally rooted in Britain’s Christian past, has been very cunning in its strategising. Once the Abortion Act was passed, the liberals pocketed the gain and moved on to the next campaign target. Which is how, this year, we eventually got to the obscenely callous ‘Assisted Dying’ bill with all its potentially disastrous outcomes.
The main mover behind the forthcoming conference has been Mgr Michael Nazir-Ali, former Anglican bishop of Rochester. A group he started called New Humanum (a kind of think tank to which I have been a contributor for some years) has been in charge of organisation. This initiative started from the view that the de-Christianisation of the UK over the past seven decades has been a calamity; public morality has been undermined with the disastrous results we see all around us. The breakdown in stable family life, the epidemic of mental health issues, the sense of anomie and purposelessness that afflicts so many can be traced back to a deliberate and wilful dismantling of the old, serviceable Christian morality. That morality calls for individual self-restraint and a public culture based on respect for the dignity of the individual.
The Declaration of Conscience which will issue from this conference will, we hope, be a rallying call for Christian voters who want our politics to move away from its preoccupation with the merely material towards one which takes seriously the moral health of the nation. We shall challenge party leaders to agree with it, or not; that way everyone will be able to judge clearly where they stand. I invite you to join us on the 20th.
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