John Lloyd on an intellectual in power
Iain McLean on other intellectual prime ministers throughout history
Daniel Johnson on Brown the unsophisticated bookworm
Geoff Mulgan on the American inspiration behind Brown's thinking
Kamran Nazeer on Brown's book Courage
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It is an oddity of British politics that at the same time as society is becoming, so most people think, more secular, our political leaders are becoming ever more religious. Britain has a new prime minister immersed in a religious idiom, following on from the deeply Christian Tony Blair, who, in turn, succeeded a member of the Church of Scotland, John Smith, as leader of the Labour party. These three have all been, more or less, Christian Socialists. And they reformed the Labour party in response to the pious Margaret Thatcher, daughter of a lay Methodist minister.
Yet the three Labour leaders have been largely silent about their faith, and none more so than Gordon Brown. After all, as Alastair Campbell once barked at a pack of inquisitive journalists after a rumoured prayer meeting between Blair and George W Bush, "We don't do God." Blair's handlers were afraid that in secular—and increasingly multicultural—Britain, religion is a divider, not a uniter.
But the fact that New Labour's leaders have felt unable to speak in public about what really motivates them is unfortunate. It has contributed to a crisis of understanding in British politics. With the politicians intimidated into silence, the electorate knows little, and understands less, about their politicians. This is especially true of the apparently dour Gordon Brown. It also invites those accusations of ideological rootlessness, of artifice and spin, that bedevilled Blair and New Labour. In fact, Blair has deep moral and intellectual roots—they were just the wrong ones for a largely secular-minded commentariat that does not acknowledge religion as a legitimate wellspring of political action.
Brown can be a wooden public performer—but put him in a church and the effect can be electrifying. One of his best performances, eloquent and uplifting, was in St Paul's Cathedral in 2005 on the eve of the Gleneagles summit, talking about the rich world's obligations to the poor. Here the biblical cadences of his vocabulary were allowed full range. Indeed, so far it has been mainly in this area of development aid that he has permitted himself the luxury of making explicit links between his faith and politics. In a speech given at the Church of Scotland general assembly in May 1999 in the midst of the Jubilee 2000 debt-cancellation campaign, Brown paid his due to the long tradition of the Scottish covenanters. He even quoted the prophet Isaiah, to "undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free."
He has been encouraged to explore the connection between his faith and politics by the American theologian Jim Wallis, to whom he was introduced by Blair. Wallis's book, God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it, has shifted hundreds of thousands in America and made him a spokesman for faith-based liberalism. Wallis accuses the religious right of deliberately distorting the Christian message for political ends, by focusing on a few issues such as abortion, at the expense of poverty and social justice. The left, on the other hand, has been so blinded by "secular fundamentalism" that it cannot comprehend that religion might have something to offer a leftist politics.
Brown wrote an endorsement of Wallis's book, describing it as "a powerful reading for anyone interested in social change." The two have met several times, although Wallis resists the tag of "Brown's guru." Nonetheless, he does say of Brown that "I think its in his DNA, Christian thinking. It really is very powerful in him… he knows the scripture, he knows what God requires."
Recently Brown has spoken of how his Church of Scotland upbringing gave him a "moral compass"—just as Blair has written about the "powerful compass" of his Christian faith—but on the harder moral issues of domestic politics, the public funding of faith-based schools or the church adoption agencies problem, he has been conspicuously silent. Perhaps the greatest mystery of a Brown premiership is whether he will allow his faith to leech into the other areas of his political life. If Brown can find a language, and the conviction, to articulate his faith in a way that bridges the divide between the secularists and the believers (of all parties), then he might yet become a more appealing, a more honest and certainly a more human figure.
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