BUT DO THEY BELIEVE IN GOD?

Damian Thompson tries to unearth

the religious beliefs of our political leaders, and finds a strange vacuum

'HE'S VERY reluctant to discuss these things in public,' says his colleague Chris.

'It wasn't the sort of thing we talked about much at home,' says his brother Terry.

'We tended to keep off the subject. I knew it wasn't one of his great interests,' says his best man, Clive.

'Funny thing, but the subject has never cropped up,' says his friend Jeffrey.

Religion is rarely, if ever, an issue in British politics. In America, no election is complete without the spectacle of hard-bit- ten candidates shamelessly invoking the deity at 'prayer breakfasts'. But in this country politicians, and particularly prime ministers, shy away from appealing to reli- gious morality to justify their policies, or from raising the subject of their own beliefs. If they go to church, it is for the photo-opportunity. One thinks of a Private Eye cover from the 1979 election, showing James Callaghan coming out of the Che- quers church with two angelic granddaugh- ters. 'I didn't know Grandad believed in God,' says one. 'He does once every five years,' says the other.

The secular tone of British politics is not a recent development. 'Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life,' said Lord Melbourne. Few of his recent successors would put it so boldly, but most of them have appeared to think that it should not invade the sphere of public life. The excep- tion, of course, was Margaret Thatcher.

More than any prime minister since Glad- stone, she wanted her policies to be legit- imised by religious leaders. If the Church of England would not do it, then the Church of Scotland might; if not the Kirk, then the Chief Rabbi. Indeed, her insis- tence that her ideology was rooted in bibli- cal morality goes a long way to explain the anger she aroused.

Mrs Thatcher demonstrated that a prime minister's religious outlook is not merely a matter of academic interest, but can have an interesting effect on the tone, if not the policies, of an administration. It is no coin- cidence that many of her policy advisers were evangelical Christians inspired by the Protestant work ethic; they are central to any understanding of Thatcherism. Indeed, their current absence from Downing Street may well turn out to be central to an understanding of the Major administration.

The contrast between the Thatcher and Major approaches to religion has attracted little comment in political circles, but it has not gone unnoticed in the Church of Eng- land. There has undoubtedly been an eas- ing of tension between the Church and Downing Street, though not necessarily because the two have reached a new under- standing. 'Frankly, he just doesn't seem interested in us,' a bishop told me at last week's Synod. 'None of us has a clue what he actually believes.'

The bishop's lament has a familiar ring to it. What does John Major believe? Friends who have known the Prime Min-

ister for years profess ignorance on the point. Major himself is strongly disinclined to talk about the subject. Gus O'Donnell, his press officer, told me he was unlikely to grant an interview on the subject because 'he likes to keep these things private'. Chris Patten was equally discouraging, explaining that Major was 'very reluctant to talk about these things in public'.

And in private, it seems. For the most part, the Prime Minister's friends and col- leagues have never heard the subject broached. His best man, Clive Jones, a close friend during the Sixties and early Seventies, says Major was 'more of a nomi- nal Anglican than a practising one at the time, though I've no doubt he believes in God'. Terry Major-Ball, his older brother, told me his parents were religious but not churchgoers: he wasn't sure whether John had been confirmed, but was 'pretty sure he believed in God'.

Major's past throws up few clues. He once told his biographer Bruce Anderson that he was 'high rather than low' and it is true that as a young man in Brixton he was friendly with the Revd J. Franklin Cheyne, Vicar of St James's, Knatchbull Road, a high churchman and active Tory. But there is no evidence of Major going out of his way to attend high-church services. On the contrary: in his early years in Huntingdon, he occasionally attended the family service at his local church in Hemingford Grey, an evangelical establishment verging on the happy-clappy.

On the one occasion when Major was asked about his religious beliefs, he ducked the question. During the leadership con- test, Radio 4's Sunday programme asked him about the importance of his religious faith. 'As I interpret faith it incorporates instincts and values,' he replied. 'If you lose faith in your own belief that you're living by the instincts and values that you think are important, then you should stop doing what you're doing, for you'll have no pleasure in it and I doubt you will do it well. So I think the answer to the question is that it is very important.'

But 'instincts and values' are not the same thing as faith, though they are often invoked by people who are unwilling to dis- cuss their belief, or lack of it, in the doc- trines of Christianity. It may be, of course, that Major has a strong faith which he regards as too private to expose to the pub- lic gaze, but even his friends doubt it. A devoutly Christian member of the Cabinet told me he thought the Prime Minister might qualify as an agnostic — 'though not in the sense that he doesn't care about these things'. The implication was that Major might be an agnostic, but he wasn't totally godless; not like Neil Kinnock.

Kinnock does not exactly advertise the fact, but if elected he would be the first British prime minister who is a professed agnostic. He has had 'difficulty' in believing in God since he was a teenager, he told Adam Raphael of the Observer. The more I thought about it the more I realised that you had to take a leap of faith ... In my case, I find the subjective evidence is against making it, so I have never been able to do it.'

Note the apologetic tone. Kinnock is not like Michael Foot, proudly trumpeting his freedom from superstition. In his Spectator diary last month, Ludovic Kennedy made the point that many unbelievers regard it as bad form to admit to being an atheist. In what is supposed to be a post-Christian age, in a country whose people have always found it embarrassing to talk openly about God, there is still an atavistic reluctance to deny the existence of God. But people can identify with a politician who talks regret- fully about his personal failure to make a 'leap of faith'. In'any case, Kinnock is too shrewd an operator to leave it at that. His values, he says, have been strongly influ- enced by the passage in St Matthew's Gospel in which Christ tells his disciples: I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was in prison and you visited me; in as much as you do it to the least of my brethren you do it to me.

'As an article of social faith,' concluded Kinnock, 'as an objective for the conduct of life, I think it is very difficult to better that.'

On the basis of this, Kinnock seems to be saying, like innumerable public figures put on the spot about their beliefs, that although he has difficulty with the super- natural elements in Christianity, he follows the ethical teachings of Christ. But on clos- er inspection, this isn't what he is saying. In another interview, Kinnock singled out 'the absolute requirement of forgiveness' as a Christian precept he could not accept. At other times, too, he has hinted that his own beliefs are far removed from the Christian ethic. Was he a good hater? Raphael asked him. No, he replied thoughtfully, he tried to keep his hate in check because 'hate, like love, is something to be applied in measured quantities, otherwise it starts to lose its purpose'. Whatever this is, it is not Christianity; but in the light of his other statements, it is not entirely incoherent.

The same cannot be said of Paddy Ash- down's ventures into this field. Asked whether he was religious, he said 'yes and no': he did believe in a Christian God, but not one who 'conformed to the rigidities of any particular portion of the Christian church'.

`To be precise,' he went on, 'I pray at nights and that's an important anchor in my life and it's very odd recently, particu- larly recently, when I've been in contact with George Carey — he was my bishop — and others, particularly a priest in my con- stituency, my own church, I felt a very strong pull of the formalised Christian church and I suppose rather like [Francis] Thompson's the Hound of Heaven chasing down the nights and down the days and down the avenues of the years and eventu- ally catch [sic] up.' It is extraordinary how questions about religion can turn the most confident performer into Dan Quayle.

But does it matter? Who cares if a party leader is a Calvinist, or a Scientologist, or

'When we first read your book, years ago, it was too explicit; now, I'm afraid, it's nothing like explicit enough.'

doesn't know what he believes? Potential bishops do for a start: although the Prime Minister's role in Church patronage is often over-estimated, it does extend to vetoing a particular candidate.

A party's supporters, too, can take a sur- prising interest in these things, as Mr Ash- down is in the process of finding out. He recently gave an interview to William Leith of the Independent in which he outlined 'the Ashdown theory in full'. This turned out to be surprisingly exotic. Mankind, explained Ashdown, was on the verge of a 'fundamental millennial shift' after which society would become 'flatter' and less hierarchical. In future, the most influential group in society would be the 'inner-direct- eds', people who valued co-operation rather than consensus. 'Sort of New Age?' asked Leith shrewdly. 'That's not a bad way of putting it,' mused Ashdown.

In fact, many of Ashdown's supporters thought it was a very bad way of putting it. For the evangelical Christians in the Liber- al Democrats — and they are a surprisingly important lobby, led by Clive Calver of the Evangelical Alliance — the New Age movement is evil, maybe even the false reli- gion that will herald the apocalypse. Ash- down's fluency in New Age jargon like 'inner-directed' has revived doubts raised by his attendance at a seance a few years ago. 'I don't know whether he knew what he was saying, but it gave us the creeps,' says one prominent Liberal Democrat. 'Clive was chewing the carpet.'

Arguably, Ashdown would be well advised to take this problem seriously. Calver's organisation now has a million members, and is increasingly concentrating on a political agenda. This election will be the first in which it has really flexed its muscles, relentlessly prodding candidates on a 'Christian' portfolio of issues including euthanasia, foreign aid, abortion and Sun- day trading.

The Movement for Christian Democracy, a Catholic/Evangelical pressure group whose founders include the Liberal Demo- crat MP David Alton, has given every can- didate an A, B, C or D rating based on their response to questions about these issues. None of the party leaders has responded, earning them an automatic D

— even if they had, none of them would

have rated higher than a C. This may not worry the established churches, some of whose representatives are as evasive and apologetic as any politician when asked precisely what they believe. But a new, more aggressive breed of Christian will have registered it with alarm.

This will be the first general election in British history in which none of the party leaders is a publicly committed Christian. It is only a footnote, perhaps, in the history of the decline of organised religion in this country, but worth noting all the same.

Damian Thompson is redgious affairs corre- spondent of the Daily Telegraph