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.

Column

Comment

General Election 24

Morality

Politics

2 July 2024

4 min read

Make it a morally decisive election

This week we’re making more than a political decision.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A AI generaed montage shows two politicans back to back surrounded by like, share and angry icons.

The divide

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

I still treasure my copy of the New Statesman from almost exactly 13 years ago, which was guest edited by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. I’ve kept it partly because I organised the edition and deputy edited it on his behalf. And partly because it cost me my job as public affairs chief at Lambeth Palace after it provoked predictable Conservative backbench fury for his alleged meddling in politics.

Digging it out now, there are some surprises from near that beginning of the 14 years of Conservative rule that’s expected to come to its end this week. The first is how mild mannered is the archbishop’s leader comment that cause so much trouble. In the years since, politics has become brasher and blunter, more facile and reductive.

The second surprise is the fuss it caused at the time. Williams is politely critical of politics across the board and there’s a plus ca change moment when he wonders “what the left’s big idea currently is… we are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently”.

And he could be talking about now as he concludes by hoping for a “democracy going beyond populism and majoritarianism… capable of real argument about shared needs and hopes and real generosity; any takers?”

A magazine cover lists articles on one side and an image of half a face on the other.

That final question may get its answer this week. But at this distance, the furore that Williams caused in government takes on a different perspective. We can see, partly as a consequence of what’s happened latterly, that he wasn’t really mounting a political argument at all. His was a moral case, a prophetic voice calling out how the government, any government, “needs to hear just how much plain fear there is.”

That fear hasn’t abated 13 years after that article. It has built around a faltering economy, an island mentality inflamed by the perceived threat of migration and a sense that a political elite has abandoned its people.

Political policies alone aren’t going to salve this pain. The response to it needs to be as much a moral as political one, as caught by the headline I wrote above Williams’ piece all those years ago: “The government needs to know how afraid people are.”

The government in power for the past 14 years has chosen not to address, or has ignored, or has been incapable of addressing the morality of our societal decay, favouring instead a search for eye-catching policies and initiatives that it has hoped, admittedly with some success until now, would also be vote-catching.

That it has now run out of road has as much to do with its moral as its political failure. When Williams published that piece, we were talking about the Big Society, the prime minister was on a mission to save the planet and urged us to “hug a hoodie.” Such moral imperatives seem very distant now and a moral degeneration in government has tracked the downward slide of the governing party in the opinion polls.

So we’re not asked just to make a political decision this week. We’re making a profoundly moral one.

We haven’t had a prime minister for whom morality was a governing principle since David Cameron laid claim to one (perhaps disingenuously) in his early days, before being led by his chancellor, George Osborne, into enforced economic “austerity” with surely one of the most cynical assurances of modern times that “we’re all in this together.”

Brexit did for Cameron and his successor Theresa May. She, I believe, is guided in public life by a personal morality, rooted in her Anglo-Catholic clergyman father, but by now there was no room for all that. Her “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, with vans telling them to go home, was a moral low point which then found its hideous nadir in the Windrush scandal, with elderly people who had lived here all their lives threatened with deportation.

Boris Johnson thought that he could make a political virtue of his immorality, a demonic possession that made him believe that he’d be loved for it. So he fiddled while Covid burned, partying in Number 10 while those who had voted for him were denied access by his rules to their dying relatives.

I wrote in the Guardian that he wouldn’t be able to hide his immorality in Number 10 when he became leader and was sadly proved more right than I could have known. Liz Truss is said to be on an autistic spectrum, which is the kindest way to explain her mini-budget that offered tax-breaks for the wealthiest in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis for the rest of us.

Rishi Sunak is widely said to be a decent man, but it's too late. This government had already rotted from the head – witness the spivs in its ranks hoping to make a fast buck out of the date of the general election.

So we’re not asked just to make a political decision this week. We’re making a profoundly moral one. It’s time to turn the fear that the archbishop observed into moral indignation.

It’s not really about who we want in government. It’s what we need, morally, to expel from it.