July 08 +James Doing God

So I was intrigued to come across Tony Blair's justification of his press secretary's famous comment in a recent speech on ‘Faith and Globalisation'.

Blair pointed out that in our culture, admitting to some sort of faith "leads to a whole series of suppositions". First: "You may be considered weird. Normal people aren't supposed to ‘do God'." That's certainly how it is for many young people today. Their peers - and sometimes, according to one confirmation candidate, even their parents - assume that they have become freaky or grown two heads. It also applies to adults. How strange that in less than two generations, what was considered normal has become abnormal - and the notion of sanity has been turned on its head.

Second, "There is an assumption that before you take a decision you engage in some slightly cultish interaction with your religion." Blair cites issues such as health reform and nuclear power. For most of us, decisions aren't quite so far reaching - but we all know how it feels to be regarded as reason-lite in decision-making about jobs or homes or schools when some kind of guidance is involved. In particular people assume that we have lost the plot entirely if a personal decision includes a substantial measure of self-sacrifice.

Third: "You want to impose your religious faith on others". This means not only our faith - but also all the values and moral standards that go with it, most of which are deeply threatening to any society in which greed is good and self comes first. Perhaps one of the reasons why rabidly anti-Christian books by Dawkins and Hitchens have sold so well is because they provide an excuse for not taking Christianity - with its deeply counter-cultural implications - seriously. Of course, part of the parody lies in the word ‘impose'. God doesn't ‘impose' and nor should we. But, like him, we should always be prepared to encourage, share and challenge.

Fourth: "You are pretending to be better than the next person." That is indeed a common objection, and like most of the others it betrays a complete misunderstanding of what the Christian faith is all about. Christians are Christians because they know they are not better than other people, and need God's forgiveness for the past and his help for the future.

Finally, and worst of all: "That you are somehow Messianically trying to co-opt God to bestow a divine legitimacy on your politics." For ‘politics' we could read ‘world-view' or ‘truth-claim'. Post-modernists don't like anything that sounds remotely absolute. It offends their own absolutist belief that all truth is relative. What's more, as Blair observes, "underlying it all is the notion that religion is divisive, irrational and harmful".

No wonder Alastair Campbell thought it was "a packet of trouble" for the Prime Minister to talk about his faith. Ordinary morals can sympathise. But if, as Blair remarks in the same speech, faith is "the focal point of belief in your life" and "there is no conceivable way that it wouldn't affect your politics", how can one's faith be privatised (in any walk of life, not just politics) without compromising one's integrity as a whole human being?

Christians have been misunderstood and misrepresented throughout history. Fortunately, that hasn't stopped them "doing God" - and I hope it never will.

James Newcome, Bishop of Penrith