Two statements underpinned a speech earlier this week by Sayeeda
Warsi, Minister for Faith.There was her claim that "faith is back at the heart of Government" and the implication that this is something for which we should be thankful, because "more often than not, people who do God do good".
Both claims are highly questionable.
Similarly, her suggestion that the previous Labour
administration was unusually "secular" is not supported by any great
weight of evidence.
Baroness Warsi is, of course, relying on Alastair
Campbell's famous remark that "we don't do God" to prove her case that
Labour allowed atheism to seep along Whitehall's corridors.
What
that argument overlooks is that Campbell was spokesman for one of the
most profoundly religious prime ministers of modern times.
Tony Blair
did not go to church for form's state: he went because he believed in
prayer.
Once freed from the restraints of office, he became a Roman
Catholic, launched a Faith Foundation and on one occasion declared:
"I've always been more interested in religion than in politics."
There
is no reason to doubt that he meant it. Campbell's much-quoted sound
bite was delivered to dispel a suspicion that the Prime Minister was
going to claim God as a patron of New Labour.
And anyone
who thinks that secularism entered 10 Downing Street might do well to
dig up the speech that Gordon Brown made at St Paul's Cathedral in March
2009, calling all the world's leading religions in aid of this appeal
that "markets need morals".
By contrast, we now have a Deputy Prime
Minister, Nick Clegg, who – when asked – classifies himself as an
atheist.
Lady Warsi has a few shreds of evidence to
support her claim that God has been welcomed back into Whitehall, all
very thin.
Government ministers have been exhorting local councils not
to abandon the practice of holding prayers at the start of council
meetings, and the Government has defended a British Airways
employee's right to wear a small crucifix while at work.
But both those
controversies arose from changing beliefs and legal rulings: they were
nothing to do with the preceding Labour government.
Another
piece of evidence proffered by Lady Warsi is that Michael Gove's free
schools policy has enabled more faith schools to come into existence –
true, but is a by-product of his programmes, not their central purpose.
Gove has said he wants a higher standard of religious education in
schools, but has not added RE to the core curriculum, as some religious
believers wished that he would.
A favourite habit of
Conservative ministers making a weak case is to claim that what they are
saying is what Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill would have liked
to hear.
The Baroness invoked them both.
Margaret Thatcher was
indisputably religious and would sometimes use biblical allusions in
defence of her policies.
Winston Churchill spent the greater part of his
career combating the godless creeds of Nazism and Communism, but there
is scant evidence that he thought religion should govern domestic
policy.
There are, also, a vast number of exceptions to
Lady Warsi's generalisation that those who "do God do good".
Osama bin
Laden, the Taliban, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and the
perpetrators of the 11 September atrocities all claimed in their
different ways to be doing God's work.
When Bloody Mary had Protestants
burned alive, or Oliver Cromwell drowned Ireland in Catholic blood,
they, too, were "doing God".
Since 1688, British
political leaders have for the most kept religion and politics apart –
and for that may the Lord make us truly thankful.