David Cameron should try some Easter charity
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Version 0 of 1. Easter, with its daffodils, chocolate eggs and bunnies, has long been as much about the rebirth of spring as the glory of the risen Christ, a pagan as well as a religious rite. This year, the secular and the sacred are more than ever tangled up in our contemporary confusion about where we've come from, why we're here and where we're going. A recent YouGov survey, commissioned by the Bible Society, found that 28% of our children think the fable of the tortoise and the hare is part of the Easter story, while almost a third appear to be totally ignorant of the resurrection. In the words of Monty Python: "Blessed are the cheesemakers." In Britain, such confusion is part of a pattern all too familiar to many parish priests: hymns and pop songs hopelessly muddled up; wedding and funeral congregations unversed in the Lord's Prayer; plus the discreet hypocrisies surrounding same-sex marriage. It's perhaps hardly surprising that, in the UK, the man and woman in the street don't have much time for the Almighty. Another recent poll, from WIN/Gallup International, finds that Britons are among the most sceptical in the world about the positive value of religious faith. Barely a third of us, apparently, believe that religion plays a good role in everyday life, compared with the global average of 59%. All of which makes David Cameron's surprising belief (expressed in the Church Times) that Britain should be more evangelical about its Christian faith seem more than a little quixotic. Where Tony Blair, wisely, let it be known that he didn't "do God", this Tory prime minister seems to want to put Him back into frontbench politics. With rare and untypical conviction, Cameron now speaks about the "healing power" of religion and insists that Christianity can transform the "spiritual, physical and moral" state of the nation. To your average secular Briton, of any party, this flurry of evangelical sentiment must look like a severe, and puzzling, case of looking on the bright side of faith, the one thing we Britons instinctively distrust. As long ago as 1662 – and surprisingly little has changed – the Book of Common Prayer articulated the national attitude to organised belief. "It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England," said its preface, "to keep the mean between the two extremes of too much stiffness and too much easiness." Quite so. This, surely, is the crux: the church in Britain has always presented two contrasting faces to society. First, for more than a thousand years, it was loosely associated with the establishment. Ever since the Normans imported their own cadre of French bishops, our governors have used the pulpit as a place from which to lecture the common people about our shortcomings. To this, as godless groundlings, our response has ranged from the frankly indifferent to the vociferously bored. Second, the Church of England has often contradicted its own pomp and privilege by offering a face of sincere and selfless humanity, humbly giving voice to the poor, outcast and dispossessed. This derives naturally from its quotidian link to a timeless cycle of life (baptisms, weddings and funerals), as well as its historic role in the national struggle to legitimise the vernacular, culminating in the King James Bible of 1611, a national treasure still venerated by thousands who never come within a chasuble's throw of the Anglican liturgy. For centuries, then, the church has officiated in the antechambers of power while simultaneously representing a hugely credible alternative body of popular opinion, a thorn in the side of authority and the establishment. Our current old Etonian archbishop, Justin Welby, perfectly embodies this resilient contradiction. He renewed the Church of England's claim to relevance by defusing the explosive issue of women bishops and launched an attack on loan sharks and payday lending. Denouncing bankers in the House of Lords upgraded Mammon to the church's hottest contemporary issue. Under Welby, the church has begun to articulate a clear and unequivocal message about the evils of capitalism and the coalition's unconscionable cuts. It has also focused on social welfare programmes that, arguably, should be making a natural fit with the so-called big society. This, according to the prime minister, was "invented" by Jesus "2,000 years ago". However, in supporting excellent charities such as the Trussell Trust, the church has merely enraged the Department for Work and Pensions with claims that almost a million people have resorted to emergency supplies from food banks in the past year. The coalition has struggled to find its feet. The Trussell Trust's figures were at first dismissed as "misleading and emotionally manipulative". But then Cameron, speaking from the pulpit, remarked: "I sometimes feel not enough is made of our efforts to tackle poverty." The prime minister's evangelical démarche suggests that, in an irreligious society, confused by seismic financial, political and cultural change, Welby has played the church's secular card very well. Like Pope Francis, in another socio-spiritual arena, the new archbishop of Canterbury has had a good first year, running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. This deep ambiguity, though intrinsic to the Church of England, is not cynical, however, and illustrates the sometimes baffling complexity of British life. It is rooted in exceedingly potent ideas and language: the sonorous Christian message of the Bible, which brings us back to the prime minister's Eastertide rendezvous with the Gospels. In the past, Cameron has cheekily borrowed from Boris Johnson, likening his faith to tuning into Magic FM in the Cotswolds ("It sort of comes and goes"). Similarly, he could now be challenged with light-fingered appropriation of nifty religious sentiments that may appeal to Ukip voters. If, however, he deploys the language of Christianity as a soundbite for short-term political advantage, he may be in for a nasty shock. Even in a robustly secular society, wary of competing faiths but powerfully attracted to atheism, whose children confuse Aesop with the evangelists, the basic message of the Bible remains popular. "Love thy neighbour" and its powerful corollaries express ideas about community that many British voters take very seriously indeed. David Cameron might be well advised to put his money where his mouth is. He could, for instance, do worse than instruct his work and pensions minister to call off his attack dogs. What better time than Easter to resurrect some one-nation Conservatism? |