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The Gospel According to Dave

Adrian Hilton dissects David Cameron's "we do do God" speech.

By Adrian Hilton

24 Dec 2011, 17:43

 

 

In the beginning was the Authorised Version, and the Authorised Version was with the State, and the Authorised Version was the State. The same was in the beginning with the State. All things were made by it; and without it was not any thing made that was made.

 

It isn’t possible to understand the history of England or grasp the English spiritual psyche apart from the upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries. England was declared a sovereign Empire and her Church was governed by one Supreme Governor; and that Supreme Governor was King; and that King was confirmed by Parliament ‘Defender of the Faith’; and that faith was Christianity; and that Christianity was Protestant and Reformed. And so it remains to this day – on paper, at least.   

 

The reactions to David Cameron’ sermon in Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral to mark the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version have been largely predictable. The humanist-secularist lobby spluttered their tediously well-rehearsed objections (all of which were addressed in the speech, but there’s none so deaf as an atheist without ears). To the devout and more robust defenders of the Faith, the Prime Minister spouted watered-down milk. And to the lukewarm liberals (and so many CofE pulpits), he served up an excessive plate of red meat. Some compared him to Tony Blair, now spinning religion to suit his own ends; others to John Major with his ‘Back to Basics’ moralising agenda. The general consensus in the blogosphere was that he’s a hypocrite – not so much a true believer as a romantic in love with the idea of belief. And the twitterati tended to agree: any divisions were not along party lines.

 

It’s a shame, really, because this speech is perhaps the most significant prime-ministerial ‘doing of God’ since Margaret Thatcher addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (the ‘Sermon on the Mound’). And David Cameron wasn’t ashamed to quote the Great Lady: ‘We are a nation whose ideals are founded on the Bible,’ she declared. But that’s as far as he went, principally because their applied theologies and faith backgrounds are very different: he Anglican; she Methodist.

 

And so Cameron talks of his ‘fairly classic’ Church of England faith that ‘grows hotter and colder by moments’, while Thatcher’s Protestant Nonconformity led her to write in her biography of a ‘personal encounter with God’. His relationship with the Divine comes and goes ‘like Magic FM in the Chilterns’; she trod in the very footsteps of the Old Testament prophets, chiselling her inviolable policies on tablets of stone. Cameron seeks consensus in accordance with his church’s traditional via media, while Thatcher polarises (still) by setting one moral philosophy over another. While her soteriological emphasis was on the typically Protestant uniqueness and responsibility of the individual, he talks in terms of ‘community’, ‘society’, or ‘sticking together as a country’, and his appeal is to his party’s ‘One Nation’ tradition (often now termed ‘Compassionate Conservatism’).

 

Yet despite these denominational differences, both Cameron and Thatcher share a belief in the same Judæo-Christian moral code that has shaped our laws, customs, manners and institutions. Perhaps a Tory prime minister can do no other. But when Cameron talks of Britain being ‘a Christian country’, he is not talking about the statistics of church attendance or the depth of individual belief: he is referring to the moral foundation and ethical framework of the nation. Undermine that crucial bedrock, and the whole will edifice will come tumbling down. Pick away at the delicately-interwoven threads of the Constitution, and three centuries of political stability will unravel. That is David Cameron’s creed – at least the one he expounded in the pulpit of Christ Church.

 

Which isn’t to suggest that he was insincere. But we must remember that David Cameron is a politician; not a theologian. That might seem like an obvious point, but judging by much of the commentary his speech has attracted, it’s a point which evidently needs making. He was not expounding Scripture, explaining ecclesiology or outlining a systematic theology: he was speaking of his personal faith in terms with which many will find sympathy, and doing so in an Anglican cathedral with one eye on the readership of The Daily Mail. Having mildly displeased just about everyone in a benign kind of way, perhaps he captured perfectly the essence of Anglicanism.

 

When he said: ‘I am a committed – but I have to say vaguely practising – Church of England Christian...’, he articulated the very oxymoronic ‘tension’ of millions of Anglicans: those whose attachment is more cultural than confessional. It is what Grace Davie referred to as ‘believing without belonging’: the disassociation between the Christian values people profess (‘believing’), and those they confess through Christian practice (‘belonging’). Like the Prime Minister, those who believe ‘will stand up for the values and principles’ of their faith, even if they only manage to ‘belong’ on Christmas Eve or when they want to get their children into a half-decent school.

 

We have a Prime Minister who is ‘full of doubts and, like many, constantly grappling with the difficult questions when it comes to some of the big theological issues’. Except for one, it seems: he is absolute in his aversion to ‘secular neutrality’, which is a brave and forthright declaration to make when your coalition partner and deputy is an atheist; the social-moral context is relativist; and the only enlightened intelligence is positivist. We must rejoice that we have a prime minister who rejects the canard that secularism is in any sense ‘neutral’, not least because these secularist-humanists are anything but neutralists: any justification of secularism must be to the detriment of the Christian conception of the good. And secularism, when it adjudicates between competing conceptions, must favour itself.

 

Secularists are as fervent in their dogmatic anti-belief as religious fundamentalists are zealous in theistic belief: the ‘neutral’ demands on the state are themselves subject to a particular conception of the good – namely that government is neutral with regard to the justification of its actions. But to use neutrality as a comprehensive conception of the good is to violate its own principle. Society is plural, and that plurality inherently seeks to advance competing aims, conflicting interests, and mutually-exclusive conceptions of the good. It is not possible to govern by principles which do not themselves presuppose any particular conception of the good. In short, neutrality is about as attainable in secularism as it is in conservatism, liberalism or socialism. 

 

There must be a moral and ethical framework over and above the partisan fray of politics and self-interested conceptions of the good which permits legitimate conceptions of the good to be pursued. Cameron is of the opinion that ‘Christian values’ are the antidote to the moral collapse, City excess and Islamist extremism. These constitute a ‘higher code’ to which all should be subject. In liberal Western democracies, this has traditionally been identified with Christianity and the principles of the Enlightenment. These, in England, have historically been embodied and articulated by the Church of England. For historical reasons, as well as present sociological ones, it may be adduced that the Established Church and her Supreme Governor are well placed by experience to remain at the forefront of this pursuit.

 

There are manifest disagreements over issues of equality and sexual morality, but at least we have a prime minister who isn’t afraid of contention or public debate. The problem, in our Erastian Settlement, is that ultimately the authority of the Authorised Version is subject to parliamentary statute: when politicians legislate to distinguish right from wrong, they move to redefine good and evil and so force believers to tolerate what the inner gaze of the religious conscience might find intolerable. When we are summoned to worship in the temple of equality and human rights, the Prime Minister extends no tolerance to the heretic, recidivist or recusant.

 

Cameron’s God is evidently higher than he is, though perhaps not as elevated as some might wish: his favoured ethical and moralising Jesus also happens to be the Son of God – a status which confers an authority beyond mere parliamentary statute (which is perhaps why it wasn’t mentioned). All we need now is for the Prime Minister to widen his theological horizon to acknowledge that not everyone interprets the ‘moral code’ of the Bible as he does; not everyone accords with his view of Christian identity and the preeminent gospel of tolerance; and that ‘the agenda that speaks to the whole country’ is much nearer to orthodox Anglicanism than Cameroon conservatism. But at least we can now be sure that the Church of England will not be disestablished during his premiership.