“Why Religion and Politics Matter To Tony Blair…In Ways That American Politicians Rarely Talk About”
Welcome back!
In the United States, politicians had better be overtly religious. They travel a razor’s edge of demonstrating their faith, while being careful not to offend those whose religious beliefs are different.
Consider the religious hurdles faced by various candidates for President during the primaries and caucuses. A candidate must be religious. Yet, Mitt Romney is religious, but he is a Mormon. This is a problem. Mike Huckabee is religious, but he is a former Southern Baptist minister. This is a problem. John McCain is religious, but many evangelicals don’t trust him to be sufficiently evangelical. This is a big problem for McCain.
Barack Obama has his own religious razor’s edge to walk. Obama–for those evangelicals who do not believe that he is really a Muslim–is also considered not evangelical enough.
Consider the now infamous statements by Dr. James Dobson about Barack Obama. Because Obama’s religious beliefs do not coincide with Dobson’s, Dobson has judged Obama as “distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible.”
(Dobson’s intemperate remarks produced a flood of responses, including this “James Dobson Doesn’t Speak For Me” website by Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, pastor of the Windsor Village United Methodist Church, a 14,000-member megachurch in Houston, Texas. )
Compare the religious challenges facing American politicians with the challenges facing Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of Great Britain. In secular Great Britain, a religious politician is as suspect as a non-religious politician would be in the United States.
Blair has enough old-fashioned British reserve to have his doubts about the way religion is used in the American public square. Whenever Blair was on a foreign trip, says a close aide, his staff had to find him a church in which to worship each Sunday-and then try to make sure that the press didn’t learn of it. By contrast, says this aide, “Bush and Clinton are always photographed coming out of church holding a Bible.” Time Magazine, “Tony Blair’s Leap Of Faith.”
Since American politicians have to prove they are sufficiently Christian, their comments about religion tend to dance around issues of dogma. In the process, they do not often address deeper religious and political issues. In contrast, Tony Blair offers a profoundly different insight into why religion matters, especially in a time of globalization. Consider these words from a fascinating article in Time Magazine, by Michael Elliott, “Tony Blair’s Leap of Faith.”
In two long conversations with Blair recently, I explored his conviction that religion matters–that it shapes what people believe and how they behave, that it is vital to understanding our world, that it can be used to improve the lot of humankind. But if not engaged seriously, Blair thinks, faith can be used to induce ignorance, fear and a withdrawal of communities into mutually antagonistic spheres at just the time that globalization is breaking down barriers between peoples and nations. “Faith is part of our future,” Blair says, “and faith and the values it brings with it are an essential part of making globalization work.” For Blair, the goal is to rescue faith from the twin challenges of irrelevance–the idea that religion is no more than an interesting aspect of history-and extremism. Blair and those working with him think religion is key to the global agenda.
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
