Why governments need to Do God

A new review has a positive answer to the question should governments ‘do God’. Bex Chapman assesses the Bloom Review and its recommendations.

Bex Chapman

Bex is a freelance journalist and consultant who writes about culture, the church, and both government and governance.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak leans forward out a lounge chair while the Archbishop of Canterbury talks and gestures while sitting on a sofa.

The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak meets with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in 10 Downing Street.

Number 10, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell once notoriously interrupted a journalist interviewing his boss, the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, to prevent him speaking about his faith, saying ‘We don’t do God’.

But we know that many of our politicians do indeed ‘do God’; Gordon Brown was famously a son of the manse, who promised to lead a government with a ‘moral compass’. David Cameron declared that his Christianity existed, albeit that it ‘comes and goes’ like the Magic FM reception in the Chilterns, while Theresa May, also the child of a clergyman, described how her faith in God made her convinced she was ‘doing the right thing’ as Prime Minister.

And Boris Johnson, originally baptised as a Roman Catholic as a baby, went Anglican while at Eton, and then re-crossed the Tiber to become Britain’s first Catholic Prime Minister. Before he left office, he commissioned an independent review to look at how the government should engage with faith groups. Four years later, based on conversations with over 20,000 people, ‘Does government do God?’ has been published. Has the government now admitted it does in fact do God? Or at least, that it would like to?

The review is clear that faith makes a massive contribution to the life of our country. It examines the role of people of faith and places of worship in many areas of society - education, prisons and the probation service, the UK Armed Forces. It does not shy away from showing us that alongside those of real faith seeking to serve their communities there are those who abuse what they call ‘faith’ for their own ends; it looks at faith-based extremism, financial and social exploitation, and forced marriage. Review author Colin Bloom was clear that the issue of forced and coercive marriages should be a top priority for the government, calling it a ‘burning injustice’ that must not be consigned to what he called the government’s ‘too difficult box’.

Public servants currently receive training on the protected characteristics, but Bloom describes faith as ‘the Cinderella protected characteristic’.

He recommends faith literacy in the public sector be improved as it is key to allowing the government to tackle these issues. Public servants currently receive training on the protected characteristics, but Bloom describes faith as ‘the Cinderella protected characteristic’. His report suggests that faith literacy is low across not just across the public sector, but across the country, including the media. Religious literacy training and a new Independent Faith Champion are just two of the 22 recommendations of the review, that go right across government, which government will consider and respond to in due course. At a briefing on the review, Bloom noted that there had been many previous reports with similar recommendations, but that these had not been followed through, adding ‘I just wish that either this Government, or whatever comes next, will be the Prince Charming that will take this Cinderella to the ball’.

So why does government need to be more aware of, and more willing to engage with, people with faith? This report’s key message is that faith is an ‘overriding force for good’. One respondent told the review:

‘Imagine if churches and other places of worship removed their time, money, creativity and energy from public life… What would happen to the army of volunteer chaplains in prisons, universities and hospitals?’.

From over 21,000 responses, the majority of people who contributed to the review research were clear that faith and religion are beneficial for society. Over half of respondents gave faith and religion a 10 out of 10 rating for contribution to society, and over 84 per cent scored the social contribution as positive.

The priest and psychologist Henri Nouwen spoke about how, for Christians, action is a grateful response that flows from our awareness of God’s presence in this world. Jesus’s whole ministry was a great act of thanksgiving to his heavenly Father. Nouwen observed that:

‘Teresa of Avila built convents as if she would never get tired; Martin Luther King, Jr., preached, planned, and organized with an unquenchable zeal; and Mother Teresa of Calcutta is fearlessly hastening the coming of the Lord with her care for the poorest of the poor’.

There are thousands of examples of how faith has motivated people to change the world around them for the better. The Bloom review cites the Mildmay Mission Hospital in London as just one example. Established as a Christian response to the cholera outbreak in the 1860s, it became one of the world’s leading centres in care for people living with HIV and AIDS and continues to be ‘an organisation that derives inspiration from its faith-based values’.

Faith that changes lives is not just something from the past. The recent census showed us that there are still more people in the UK who have a faith than not. The religious landscape of the UK may have changed hugely since Alastair Campbell declared that ‘We don’t do God’. It is now far more diverse, arguably now even more exciting. Faith still makes a difference, changes lives, builds communities. Mr Bloom concludes that ‘without faith, places of worship and people of faith, this country would be poorer, blander, and less dynamic’. Faith, he says, is a force for good that government should do more to understand. The government should indeed do God. And this review and its recommendations suggest there is lots of room for improvement in just how they do it.

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15 October 2024

6 min read

The elegies that fail the forgotten places

Storytelling’s not about giving people a voice, it's about listening to what they’re singing.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A book's front cover beside a portrait of the author, JD Vance

J.D. Vance book promotion, 2017.

Does it matter who tells the story of a place? It’s a question I’ve sat with as a writer, a community worker, and as someone who returned to my native West Country after a long time away. My departure and return to this place brought with it a sharper awareness of the labels this rural region could invite; of the way its people could be portrayed; of how easily they can be reduced to a one-dimensional stereotype that fosters little understanding.

And I am both reducer and reduced. I am a proud Devonian, rooted in soil thick with my ancestors, whilst also craving the culture and variety of elsewhere. My story of life in this place is complex. It’s a story that’s mine to tell, and not representative of anyone else from here – just as the people I’ve worked with in communities here and across sub-Saharan Africa taught me too: this person is not this place. This story is not this people.

Stories matter – stories told; stories hidden. They shape our identity, our opinions, our possibilities. John Steinbeck wrote that:

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice…”

Stories told reflect stories carried, like light refracted through a prism. A story’s colours tell us something about who tells the story and how they see the world. Which is one reason perhaps that JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis came under scrutiny, especially since he was named Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in the forthcoming US election.

Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of Vance’s white working-class family, from his grandparents in the Appalachia region of Kentucky to his own coming of age in Middletown, Ohio. Vance raises questions about how local people, including his own family, are responsible for their own misfortunes, including poverty and addiction. His book came out in 2016, at just the right time to give many Americans an insight into why so many people like Vance’s relatives and past neighbours had voted for Donald Trump. It was painted as the voice of a forgotten community, and it became a bestseller, admired by some for its portrayal of Appalachian culture by someone from the inside. But reading people who know the places he talks of, it becomes clear that the book is “rife with stereotypes and classic Republican talking points peddled under the guise of lived experience,” as one commentator said.

Sarah Smarsh, author of books including Bone on Bone: Essays in America by a Daughter of the Working Class, said in a Guardian piece published in 2016,

“that the media industry ignored my home for so long and left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.”

A Bitter Southerner article responding to Hillbilly Elegy said that generalisation means that “…complexity gets simplified, the edges get rounded out[…]Appalachia has been written about and photographed in such a compelling (if fabricated) way that the descriptions of passersby took on more weight than the lived experiences of the people being described. What remains is a concept of a place that is both wildly romantic in its natural beauty and backward enough to justify the destruction of that very nature.”

We live in divided times, but often I find it hard to discern real division versus the media-created story of division. Theirs is a story that gets things wrong. Smarsh reflects how “countless images of working-class progressives…are rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll. This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America…” This is why it matters that we hear stories that do not fit that paradigm. A many-voiced 2019 publication Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy offered some of those stories in response to Vance’s painting of Appalachia.

Vance thought he could write the story of a 13-state region, but many Appalachians were unhappy about him becoming their spokesperson, especially when he seemed to blame the poor for their poverty. Appalachian Reckoning is a graceful counter to this: not silencing Vance’s own story but offering many more views and stories from Appalachia. Its co-editor Meredith McCarroll said she wanted to “complicate any singular view simply by including multiple ones. I wanted to create a chorus of voices, “each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,” to borrow from Walt Whitman’s view of place.” The publication offers cultural nuance, emotional connection, and a “context for some of the claims Vance makes in his book when it moves beyond memoir, and to pass the mic to a wider range of writers, poets, photographers, activists, and artists who make Appalachia a place far too complex to capture and far too dynamic to die.”

This approach feels important now, in the world as is it, with a media that often overlooks nuance, and with a culture that has become so visual that the way things are styled and framed and presented to us online can often be quite different to the reality. It is important to know the difference, and stories can help us discern that.

This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear.

There are stories that are easy to peddle and easy to buy into. In charity work, I saw how the story of the benevolent professional outsider could shape things, leaving little room for local stories and experience. In politics I saw how the story of opposition got in the way of all the people getting on with the everyday work of restoring and caring for their communities across lines of difference. We can, unknowingly, make a place and a people shrink or even disappear with the stories we carry or amplify, or ignore.

Stories wielded unwisely can shrink faith as well as people and places. The Jesus who I did not grow up with but came to know slowly as an adult is a Jesus of nuance, compassion, and deep listening. He would not, I think, recognise the brand of Christianity that can be used to justify particular politics. That religion and politics have in places become so intertwined is perhaps a reflection of the reduction of the vastness of the Bible and the many diverse voices it contains into one story that serves a particular group of people. Jesus again and again subverted what empire and hierarchy and tradition expected of him. He invited people into his story over and over, curious about their own story but never using it as a reason to include or exclude.

When I think about who tells the story of a place – or of a people, a time, a faith – I see that really, there is never one story anyway. There is a chorus of voices, each a little different, each part of a vast harmony that – if we have the ears and heart to hear it – sings a song of challenge and joy, of despair and illumination. Former US president Woodrow Wilson said, “the ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people”. Storytelling is not about giving people a voice – something I heard a lot in charity work. It is about listening to what they’re already singing. This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear, of biased framing and selective storytelling. It can sing us back to ourselves, helping us see each other. And isn’t that what softens hearts, isn’t that why we tell stories? Author Kazuo said in his Nobel acceptance speech that “stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” Stories are not tools of manipulation or power, but pathways to encounter, to relationship, to understanding. They are, perhaps, the only way through divided times.