Tony Blair’s faith was long on zeal but light on self-awareness
As prime minister, Tony Blair had faith but not humility
By ERASMUS
AS TONY BLAIR faces the verdict of the Chilcot enquiry on his actions in the Iraq war, there will be many questions about the role played by his spiritual convictions in the way he made decisions and presented them. The ex-prime minister’s faith is also the subject of an essay published this week by Theos, a London-based religious think-tank; as part of a series of essays on heads of governments and their metaphysical beliefs.
Among world leaders of recent years, Mr Blair has a unique relationship with religion. His Christian faith is passionate, so much so that during his tenure as prime minister, from 1997 to 2007, his advisers had to restrain him from making overt references to God which would have sounded strange to many voters’ ears. Yet this was not the deep, unselfconscious faith of somebody who had emerged from a devout environment and therefore imbibed an intuitive feeling for the fixed meaning of sacraments and dogmas.
Rather, Mr Blair’s is an acquired religion. Mr Blair was strongly influenced by an Australian chaplain at Oxford University, Peter Thomson, and was confirmed in the Anglican church in his college chapel. Much later, after leaving office, he became a Catholic, adopting the lifelong religion of his wife, Cherie. But whenever he speaks on matters of faith and conscience, it is often in a liberal Protestant spirit: one that shows no deference to an inherited body of doctrine and assumes that people can pick and mix religious ideas as circumstances, and the climate of opinion, change.
The idea that religious doctrine is negotiable has been carried over into Mr Blair’s thinking about Islam. Both as prime minister and as founder of a think-tank called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, he has been very much open to the idea that the causes of global terrorism lie not in geopolitical grievance or nihilistic personalities but in bad Islamic theology, whose antidote is to be found in good Islamic theology and scholarship. This is not a wrong idea, but he sometimes overstates its importance.
As the Theos essay points out, Mr Blair came from a relatively unchurched household. His father Leo was a non-believer; his mother Hazel was “religious though not church-going” but apparently taught him the habit of prayer. He seems not to have been touched by the religious practices of the schools he attended. At university, though, his Australian mentor introduced him to a politically engaged form of faith, and in particular to a philosopher called John Macmurray. Macmurray stressed (as have many other contemporary thinkers, in critical reaction to an atomistic age) that individuals can only express their full humanity in relation to others. But as the essay acknowledges, there are questions about how deeply Mr Blair understood Macmurray’s thinking. Where the philosopher presented altruism as a path to a higher self, Mr Blair sometimes seemed to put more stress on enlightened self-interest.
In fact there were only a few occasions during his decade at Britain’s helm when he made an overt connection between his faith and the political decisions he took. It happened once in 2006 when he told an interviewer that he was ready to face divine judgment over his actions in Iraq:
I think that if you have faith about these things, then you realize that the judgment is made by other people...and if you believe in God, it’s made by God as well.
Much more often, Mr Blair used language that was subliminally rather than openly religious. The subtext was especially strong when he was justifying military action, whether in Sierra Leone, Kosovo or Iraq, or as a general principle. This was certainly a man who felt the need to convince himself, and the world, that to intervene in this or that global trouble-spot was not merely expedient, or the least bad option: it was morally imperative, and staying one’s hand would imply a kind of moral laziness or worse. He implied that the people against him—Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban—were so radically evil that to hold back from challenging them was downright sinful.
But certain religious virtues always seemed lacking in Mr Blair as prime minister. One of the aims of most forms of spiritual development is to cultivate an appropriate sense of humility and self-awareness: a sense of one’s own fallibility, and a sense of how one appears to others, an ability to empathise, at least momentarily, with onlookers in very different places. At the height of his internationalist fervour, Mr Blair had little feeling for how Britain and other European powers were viewed by those members of the United Nations (about two-thirds of them) with recent memories of colonisation. He therefore had little sense of how hard it would be to convince the world that Britain deployed its army in a spirit of disinterested concern for humanity.
And above all, he lacked the sense, which is deep-rooted in the great religions, that human overconfidence can have unintended consequences. In his Chicago speech in April 1999, Mr Blair laid out a set of guidelines for intervention: it must be militarily feasible, peaceful options must have been tried, some national interests must be at stake. To many a politician from the developing world, there was something insufferably arrogant about an arch-colonial power asserting the right to intervene at its own discretion in situations where wrongs need righting, and regimes need changing.
To make a huge generalisation, the practice of religion tends to make people either more proud or more humble. Mr Blair’s spiritual journey is still, of course, a work in progress. But there has never been much sign of religion making him more humble.
