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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Death & life

10 September 2024

4 min read

A covering of feathers for the terrors of the night

How to struggle with the burden of other people's suffering.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

Evie S. on Unsplash.

It’s one of the sad facts of life: that many of us at some point will see our parents get old and fade away. Sigh. It doesn’t matter how well prepared you are or how much you’ve thought about it before hand, the reality of a fragile mum or an exhausted dad can break your heart.

I’ve talked to my parents about this for years here and there. We’ve done lots of joking about seeing them off with a pink pill in the sherry, or ‘it’ll be a pillow for you Pa, if you’re too annoying’ – type thing. But when they left after Sunday lunch a couple of weeks ago, I had to clutch my husband. He lost his own mother last year… we’re still fluttering around the gap she’s left in our family. And now there’s my beloved olds too, looking diminished and moth eaten and moving at crepuscular speed. Ask Dad how he is these days, and he says ‘Old, dear’, and won’t elaborate further.

I can cope with this when it’s in short bursts. Visiting them for lunch or taking them out on a trip is OK and manageable, and there is still joy in family occasions. Mum’s birthday was full of love, even though she took all afternoon to open her cards and became hopelessly confused about who’d given her what.

But staying with them… that’s hard. Seeing the dust thick over the spare room; worrying about just how long that bowl of leftovers has been in the fridge. I whip about as unobtrusively as I can, scrubbing the bottom of the washing up bowl or putting their jerseys in a wash. I don’t want to be annoying – they won’t accept help and I’m not going to push – but it makes me sad. In particular I hate that my mum is in constant pain from crumbling bones, and that dementia has stolen her mind. Also, that as a consequence, Dad is irritable with her; he who has always adored her so much.

I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain.

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Since childhood, I have struggled with the burden of other people’s suffering. I sometimes wonder if I’m exaggerating when I think about how much I mind, but I don’t think I am. I can only manage if I’m really ready for it. With my counselling clients that takes the form of very firm boundaries, regular supervision, colleagues to talk to etc… but with family it’s much harder. It’s just your own naked, soft-bodied self-shrinking from all the nettles and thorns – like a hermit crab without a shell.

So when I went down to Mum and Dad’s this time, I felt the need to prepare. ‘Put on the armour of light,’ St Paul says, which sounds just the thing. I hardly slept last time, tossing and wriggling through small-hour horrors with my neck hurting and a feeling of tears not being far away. What to arm myself with though?

The answer came in the form of an ancient poem - Psalm 91. I was listening to a Premier Radio presenter who is a pastor – a big, tattooed fellow with rings in his nose and lip – and he said it was his main defence when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. So, I looked it up, and I loved it. It was all about how the Lord will cover you with his wings and keep you safe from the terrors that visit in the night and the pestilence that stalks by day, or words to that effect.

Malcolm Guite (a poet and priest whose writing I love) says you have to treat Psalm 91 with care: it was the one Satan tempted Christ within the wilderness, challenging him to throw himself from the temple roof and God would send his angels to catch him (as it says in the psalm). It’s not to be taken literally, this psalm: you can’t deliberately put yourself in harm’s way and expect to be immune because you’re a Christian, like some of the vehement anti-vaxxers around the world who think faith alone will protect them from lethal diseases. But the message is that if you put your trust in God, he won’t let you be damaged in any important or lasting way by the evils of the world.

I memorised as much of it as I could. And then when I woke in the night – inevitably – with the dread hovering over me, I kept thinking, ‘The Lord will cover thee with his feathers’. I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain and muddliness and Dad’s frustration and my own fear. They were like malevolent ghosts drifting through the dark, menacing and cruel. But Mum and Dad and I, our actual selves, were curled up safely, warm and hidden with the great wings over us.

And eventually, I was able to go back to sleep.