Do do God

This election was won two days before it was announced, on Easter Sunday. Theresa May put out an Easter message in which she suggested that British values had a Christian basis. It was her version of David Cameron’s message two years before, in which he said that Britain is a Christian country. She was rather more convincing. I don’t know whether Cameron is sincerely religious, but he didn’t seem it. He didn’t even seem to try very hard to seem it, as if fearing that his metropolitan support might weaken, and perhaps that George Osborne would make a snarky jibe about it at cabinet. But it still did him good to make those pro-religious noises.

St Theresa should keep her piety out of politics, said a few pundits. Alastair Campbell adapted ‘We don’t do God’ into ‘she shouldn’t do God’: ‘I think even vicars’ daughters should be a little wary of allying their politics to their faith,’ he said, and accused the Prime Minister of suggesting that ‘if God had a vote he would have voted Leave’. A Guardian editorial warned that Mrs May’s message was part of a global move towards religious identity politics and ‘religious nationalism’. Do they say this every year about the Queen’s Christmas message?

Damian Thompson and Nick Spencer discuss whether politicians are allowed to ‘do God’:

Dangerous religious nationalism might be on the rise in other parts of the world, but that doesn’t discredit a British politician mildly affirming our main religious tradition. It’s Campbell and the Guardian who don’t get it. They don’t get that chippy secularism is a minority taste. Campbell ought to have noticed that Blair won three elections by doing a bit of God amid his politics, by making liberal Christian enthusiasm basic to his style.