Tony to the Rescue

The man who claimed to be making the world a safer place by following George W Bush into Iraq, and who used the Labour party to institute Thatcherite policies while reclaiming British democracy from Parliament, has given a sermon in Westminster Cathedral where, in better days, he used to attend mass while still a member of the Church of England. Tony's sermon, about how extremism and intolerance in religion (though, as one would expect, apparently not dishonesty) are perhaps rather Bad Things, is one of a series which has been organised by that paragon of tolerance and moderation, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor.

Tony observed that "For religion to be a force for good, it must be rescued ... from extremism, faith as a means of exclusion", though it is regrettably unclear how he imagines this rescue might be accomplished as long as the various religions disagree with each other. Just because Tony himself found no difficulty in attending Catholic services while belonging to a rival church, this hardly guarantees that others will practise their own faith in the same flexible fashion. Tony also observed that religion must be rescued "from irrelevance, an interesting part of our history but not of our future". The convert from the faith which is tearing itself apart over what consenting adults do in private to the faith of transubstantiation and papal infallibility complained that "faith is reduced to a system of strange convictions and actions that, to some, can appear far removed from the necessities and anxieties of ordinary life". It is this unfortunate misconception, rather than any question of whether the convictions are true or the actions justified, that "gives militant secularism an easy target".

There are apparently a number of reasons why politicians with less moral courage than Tony tend to sidestep questions of faith. One is that "You may be considered weird. Normal people aren't supposed to 'do God'"; a rather bizarre assertion, given that so many cardinals, archbishops and other clerics are not merely normal but positively mediocre. Secondly, "There is an assumption that before you take a decision you engage in some slightly cultish interaction with your religion"; obviously, given the complete and utter relevance of religion to the necessities and anxieties of ordinary life, no such interaction really happens. Thirdly, there is an assumption among militant secularists that the faithful "want to impose [their] religion on others", despite the exhortations to tolerance and moderation that fill so many religious texts and the pronouncements of people like Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor. Fourth, people assume that the faithful, despite their humble claims to eternal truth and moral absolutism, "are pretending to be better than the next person"; this is clearly outrageous. Finally, people assume "that you are somehow messianically trying to co-opt God to bestow a divine legitimacy on your politics", rather than co-opting something more tasteful, such as freedom, democracy or the hand of history. It really is too bad of us.