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.

Explainer

Art

Culture

Identity

2 August 2024

5 min read

Controversial art: can the critic love their neighbour?

What to do when confronted with contentious culture.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Two people run though a darkened art gallery towards a body lying amongst photography paraphanalia

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code.

Sony Pictures.

In the wake of the controversy over the Olympic opening ceremony, based as it was on a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Christians as to what was being portrayed, you may be perplexed or confused by the different ways Christians respond to controversial art or media portrayals that are perceived to be an attack on core Christian beliefs. If that is you, here are some thoughts as to why it is that Christians react in a range of different ways.

Our responses are always underpinned by depth of relationship with and commitment to Jesus, the one who has turned our lives upside down and filled us with his Spirit. Our sense of what it is that Jesus has done for us and what it is that relationship with Jesus means to us is the determinative factor affecting our response when we perceive the One we love and who loves us to have been maligned or mocked.

For some, we feel a need to stand with or defend Jesus whenever we perceive that he is under attack, and we have seen that instinctive response apparent in reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony. However, instinctive emotive responses run the risk of pre-empting more reasoned or reflective responses. That has certainly been the case here, as what many Christians perceived to have been a parody of the Last Supper was not actually that at all. Instead, the sequence was a portrayal of the feast of Dionysius, so had nothing to do with the Last Supper at all.

Christians, as here, are often too quick to make allegations of blasphemy without actually understanding what is being portrayed. I have, unfortunately, seen many similar examples within my lifetime. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinemas, while Christian organisations, like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse, lobbied for those films to be banned.

God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

However, interestingly, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets, churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

The protests against such films often did not tally with the content of the films themselves and displayed a lack of understanding of them, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, a former Dean of King’s College London, has said of Life of Brian, “those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were ‘embarrassingly’ ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message”. Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced that stereotype.

As a result, the Church had to learn again that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites and the like that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised, making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. These created a conversation with the wider community that was far more constructive than the kind of knee-jerk reactions we have seen to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Some of these knee-jerk reactions derive from a sense, in the West, that the dominant place Christianity used to have in society has been eroded leading some to think that our values and beliefs are under threat. This reveals an underlying insecurity which it is surprising to find in those who believe that God is all-powerful and in control of human history. God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

Indeed, the reverse is the case, as, in Jesus, God deliberately entered human history to experience human life in all its facets, including real mockery and suffering, to show that such experiences are not defining and can be transcended through love and sacrifice. Such a God does not require those who follow to become defensive themselves when the path of mockery is actually the path to resurrection and renewal.

Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life.

So, what might a more constructive and productive response to controversies entail? Taking time to reflect and to understand what it is we are experiencing would be a much better place to start. The Olympic opening ceremony was a celebration of French culture, which highlighted images from the Louvre in particular. Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is in Italy and does not include a blue Dionysius. With some reflection and investigation, that would quickly have become apparent. Similarly, the scene to which Christians objected in The Last Temptation of Christ was just what it said on the tin, the last temptation Jesus faced. It was a temptation that he rejected, and the film was all the more powerful as a depiction of the incarnation as a result.

Then, we can see that what the Christ who embraced human life through the incarnation calls us to is a charitable hermeneutic (how we interpret), when it comes to receiving, understanding and commenting on the culture around us. Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.

With the beautiful secret of a charitable hermeneutic, we might, perhaps, look again at the Olympic opening ceremony and appreciate the intent of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, when he said that religious subversion had never been his intention: “We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.”