Article

Comment

Politics

27 April 2023

4 min read

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.

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

18 September 2024

5 min read

US election: the primal stories trumping facts

Projections and polls cannot capture the power of stories shaping identity.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

a map depicts US states coloured red and blue.

538 election prediction map.

ABC News.

Washington D.C. — Election throes in America are intensifying while citizens prepare to cast their votes. The last week alone has been something like a whirlwind, not to mention the entire campaign itself.

Last week, Americans tuned into the first and possibly final Presidential debate between Trump and Harris. On the heels of the debate came a flurry of propaganda leveled by JD Vance (and promoted by Trump) against Haitian migrant communities in Ohio. These claims resulted in bomb threats and school closures.

And to wrap up the week, a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in nearly as many months. Trump and his campaign, quicker and more direct that the first attempt, quickly cast the blame towards Democrats, specifically for what they see as violent rhetoric in describing Trump as a “threat to democracy.” Trump meanwhile continues to campaign on threats and claims of election fraud, refusing to signal he’d accept the certified results of the election in the event he loses.

That’s just another week in an unpredictable American presidential election.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle.

And life goes on. For now, in this time, in my small corner of American life, I find there is this mixture of exhausted apathy and existential rage. In view of the spectacle, there’s a general exasperation of “what will happen next?” But more personally, dispersed on social media, is the existential zeal and dread—“we” have to defeat “them!”

The danger of this mixture is twofold. Just as odd as it is potent. It is also combustible. And just as it can lay dormant; it can also be summoned by a mere spark.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle with predictions and projections. Some offer prayer.

I listen in on conservative Christian talk radio. Prayers offered on air for God to intervene. What follows is a litany of slogans— “secure our borders” and “defend life” and “the economy” — and of course prayers for the salvation of those who think differently.

Then, there’s more daring outrage merchants with deep pockets. Those who try to shift the election through nefarious means. Like the case of Tenet Media, a media network of right-wing American podcasters who were recently indicted by the Justice Department for receiving Russian funds through fronted companies.

It seems to me that the heart of the matter in the midst of this election, deeper than policy and beyond the spectacle, is that none of us are entirely sure what reality another person inhabits.

A new study published last week found that most registered Republicans (at 67 per cent) trust the Trump campaign as their primary source for election information. Trump’s word, for nearly three quarters of his party, is given more authority than government certification, media-based news, or local news.

This raises the possibility that, in 50-some-odd days, if Trump refuses to concede, if he repeats claims of election fraud, his base seems ready and willing to believe it.

Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning.

Alongside the debates about policy, the propaganda that stokes division and dehumanizes migrant communities, is a deeper crisis of source authority. Of not just “facts” but truth, of meaning, of reality.

The study revealed that most Americans signal they tend to trust information that comes from “data” and “facts.” But oddly enough, nothing about that statement seems to accord with the on the ground reality of America’s social fabric.

We should know by now: facts have never been enough.

100 years ago, as novelist Rebecca West reflected on the chaotic series of events that sparked World War I, she admitted, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many.”

What seems “real” for many Americans is not (and perhaps has never been) rooted entirely in the all-powerful “fact.” Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning. These stories are primal. They’re the kind which create identities and bind communities. They are rich in meaning and so prove entirely immune to fact-checking operations. Source authority has no power apart from primal stories. And though projections and polls tend to focus on the data, they cannot capture the power of stories which create identity and contain community. This is the stuff the vote is made of, too.

This past week, JD Vance defended his propaganda in the form of conspiracy theories of Haitian migrants eating pets by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”

Ends-justifies-means has always been ascendant in politics. Nobody is arguing that MAGA invented political expediency. But this election is careening towards deep waters which we would do well to avoid.

“Propaganda is a means to an end,” said Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1934 before an audience at Nuremberg, “…it provides the background music...[it] miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people.”

I do not know what the next 50 days will hold. I remain deeply concerned that the word of Trump aspires to assume an authority which sees democracy as a meddling imposition in one man’s destiny. But I do know that none of this is fated. As Augustine observed during the throes of Rome’s collapse: “Bad times! Hard times!” this is what they are saying. But let us live well and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.

May it be so.