“We don’t do God”: A call for faith to inspire politics

It has become popular in recent years to divorce faith and politics, and to treat them as if they are separate domains that don’t have any bearing on one another. When the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair attempted to talk about his Christian faith in an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair, his communications manager Alistair Campbell immediately stopped the interviewer’s questions. ‘We don’t do God’, was Campbell’s now famous retort. However, I believe that the attempt to separate faith and politics is not only unhelpful and unrealistic, but can also ultimately be dangerous and have grave consequences.

While there are certainly examples of where faith has been, and is still being, misused in the political sphere, this should certainly not mask the amazing social and political reform that has been inspired by faith. It could even be argued that the majority of great political reformers down the centuries have been motivated by faith, and many have even used religious language to express their views. In the UK, we have had a long tradition of faith inspiring political and social action – not least William Wilberforce’s stand against slavery in the eighteenth century, the faith-based leadership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1970s, and the profound Christian influence on the main political parties down the centuries. As former Prime Minister Harold Wilson put it, even the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism. The picture is the same worldwide, with faith motivating individuals (like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Mikhail Gorbachov, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu) to bravely challenge corruption and prejudice.

It is, of course, not surprising that so many people are inspired through their faith to engage either directly or indirectly in the political sphere. In the Christian tradition, the Bible brims full of social justice, peace, equality, and freedom. As Desmond Tutu once famously stated: “When people say that the Bible and politics don’t mix, I ask them which Bible they are reading”. In all his tireless campaigning, in South Africa and beyond, Tutu has always maintained that poverty, sexism, homophobia, and racism are not merely political problems, they are spiritual and moral issues. “The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person,” he asserted. “When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, ‘Now is that political or social?’ He said, ‘I feed you’. Because the good news to a hungry person is bread”.

Jesus’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’ has especially inspired countless political leaders, not least Gandhi (“when your country and mine shall get together on the teachings laid down by Christ in this Sermon on the Mount, we shall have solved the problems not only of our countries but those of the whole world”) and Barack Obama (“a passage so radical that it’s doubtful that our Defence Department would survive its application”). Yet Jesus’s social and political influence went far beyond one sermon.  Jesus’ very presence, along with his teachings in general, were regarded as such a threat to the political powers of Rome and Jerusalem that they conspired to rid themselves of this first-century Palestinian rebel rouser.

If Jesus was concerned with engaging practically and compassionately with society and the world around us, surely it is only natural that Christians allow their relationship with him to do likewise. Barack Obama, for example, was not raised in a religious household, but he was moved to his baptism as an adult precisely because he saw in faith a vehicle for social change.  In his autobiography he talks about politics leading him to faith and faith leading him to politics. On the one hand, it was his work as a community organiser for churches in Chicago that led him to be drawn towards a political life. The pastors and other Christians who worked with the unemployed, drug addicted, and poverty stricken in the city “confirmed my belief in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things”. On the other hand, it was the power of religious traditions to spur social change that drew him to faith. The African-American religious tradition, as he put it, “understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities”.

However, Obama, like other Christians involved in social and political change, emphasizes that bringing his faith into politics certainly does not mean losing respect for those with different beliefs. In fact, the Christian faith teaches that all life is sacred, and so faith should actually lead to more respect and reverence for the world around us – for the environment, for animals, and for all other people, whether they share our beliefs or not. In other words, yes, our faith should inform and inspire our political views, but these views should also be transformed into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.

By doing this, people of faith should echo the prophets of the Old Testament by being the first to speak out and protest against corrupt governments, greed-obsessed corporations, ethically-blind companies, and environmentally-damaging activities. A friend of mine, who is a Church of England vicar (and author of Seeking Justice: The Radical Compassion of Jesus), regards his tireless work for ethical and social justice as absolutely integral to his faith, and, as a result, he has even been arrested on numerous occasions while campaigning against drone warfare, nuclear weapons, and hate preaching. Other Christians, of course, work from the inside of the political systems to effect change, just as Daniel did in the Old Testament. Either way, the faith of each individual could contribute so much to the important issues of poverty, welfare cuts, economic debt (personal and national), the environment, asylum seekers, international aid, and so on.

For the Christian, God is connected to every single aspect of our lives and of the life of the world. Church does not start and finish on Sunday, but continues in whichever community God has placed us. I would argue that it is a duty for Christians, along with people of other faiths, to bring their faith into the political and social realm. If we do not, we run the danger of ending up with what Barack Obama calls “bad politics”, where the only people who bring their faith into the social and political sphere are those who want to misuse both politics and faith. By leaving our own faith out of our politics, we leave a vacuum in politics for those with insular and hateful beliefs, or for those who cynically use faith for their own means.

I once heard it said that religion is like water poured on our hearts. We all have either thorns or flowers growing in the garden of our hearts. If we pour water on thorns, they will grow. And so religion can make the thorns grow and choke the goodness in our hearts. This will then engender hatred, prejudice, and disunity. On the other hand, if we pour water on flowers, they will also grow. And so faith has the potential to make the flowers in our hearts flourish and thus bring so much love, joy, and peace to the world. Our aim should not be to stop faith being involved in politics. Rather, our aim should be to make sure that people have flowers, and not thorns, growing in their hearts, so that a loving, compassionate, and liberating faith can inspire politics and bring hope and new life to individuals, communities, and societies.

• The above was a talk I gave to over 100 sixth formers at the Sixth Form Faith Day on Faith and Politics at St Teilo’s High School, Cardiff. In an exciting project, the sixth form students are starting their own “faith blog”, dealing with issues surrounding faith and society. In due course, I will provide the link.

Rock of Ages: Pop music, faith, and the challenge to the Church today

Ten years ago, I taught a University module on pop music and the Christian faith, which was the first such course to be taught in the UK. One of the essays I would give the students was on Australian rock star Nick Cave’s perspective that pop music expresses our desire to reach out to the sacred. “Ultimately,” he writes, “the love song exists to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine”. This viewpoint inspired me to write a later article in Anvil: The Journal for Theology and Mission, which argued that a conversational approach to pop music should be an integral part of the Church’s outreach, especially in connecting with younger generations. The article is still available online: ‘Pop Music and the Church’s Mission’.

My thoughts on this subject have not changed. In fact, when I hear the lyrics of the music that my children play, I am more convinced than ever that pop music holds both a great challenge and a wonderful opportunity for Christians today. Our pop charts continue to be full of spiritual searching, with many songs suffused with direct religious imagery and references. “Baby, I’ve been, I’ve been praying hard… Seek it out and you shall find”, sing One Republic on ‘Counting Stars’, presently at number 3 in the UK charts (compare Matthew 7:7-8). Other recent songs have been even more direct with matters of faith. “When food is gone you are my daily meal; When friends are gone I know my saviour’s love is real”, sung Florence and the Machine on their 2009 hit single ‘You’ve got the Love’.

None of this is new, of course. Faith and spirituality have always had an intimate relationship with pop and rock music, from Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones (just listen to ‘Shine a Light’ and ‘I Just Want to See His Face’ on 1972’s seminal album ‘Exile on Main Street’), through to Madonna, Coldplay, Mumford and Sons, and U2 (whose songs are even used in some churches to form the structure of a communion service, cleverly entitled the ‘U2charist’).

For most songs, however, it is not their direct rooting in theology or Christian imagery that encourages those of faith to take note of them. Rather, it is the fact that they deal specifically, if often unwittingly, with key Christian themes such as sin, salvation, love, responsibility to one’s neighbours, hope, loss of innocence, compassion and redemption. In so many songs, there is an implicit, rather than an overt, sense of transcendence, which accompanies a real search for hope and meaning in a seemingly cold and uncaring world. “I don’t know who you are, but I’m, I’m with you”, sung Avril Lavigne on her 2003 award-winning song.

With such a deep spirituality within much of today’s popular music, engagement and dialogue is essential, especially if the Church is to understand generations that are largely lost to its fold. Christians are called to a dynamic relationship with popular culture, in the same way that St Paul considered, and engaged with, the cultural and social make-up of the people to whom he was preaching (Acts 14:1-20). After all, both music and poetry harbour, to use Karl Rahner’s phrase, ‘the eternal marvel and silent mystery of God’ and so it is absolutely imperative that the Church takes seriously their contemporary forms. As William Romanowski puts it: “We need a different kind of Christian approach – an engaged, critical, and productive involvement with the popular arts – grounded in a faith vision that encompasses all of life and culture”.