The public sector at prayer

The government’s fiercely secularist agenda has turned very few Christians into Tory voters. Damian Thompson asks
why the Churches have kept faith in New Labour

Gordon Brown’s Cabinet is the least Christian in British history. Its members sneer at the Churches’ teachings about sexuality. They bully faith schools with relish, making them talk to primary schoolchildren about sexual intercourse. They are just about to force Catholic schools to advise teenage girls on where to procure an abortion. They want to compel religious institutions to employ people whose beliefs run entirely counter to the values of those institutions. They favour ‘assisted dying’ and are surreptitiously working to enshrine it as a legal right. This is hard-edged, doctrinaire secularism of a variety that even Tony Blair couldn’t stomach. Admittedly, his government didn’t ‘do’ God, but this lot want to do Him in.

Britain’s Christians, you might expect, would be deserting Labour in droves. Not so. According to an opinion poll last month commissioned by the think tank Theos, support for the Tories among Christians had crept up by only two points since the last general election. In contrast, ‘unbelievers’ — that is, people who say they have no religious faith and who probably agree with Harriet Harman on abortion, gay marriage and the delusional nature of faith — had moved 13 points in the Tory direction.

It’s true that, among the 62 per cent of respondents who identify as Christians, Cameron had 40 per cent of the vote, as opposed to Labour’s 30. He also scored higher among strongly committed Christians (42 per cent) — but then so did Labour (33 per cent). However you read them, these figures are broadly in line with the general electorate.

So, Dave, all those meetings with bishops, all that eager nodding while Rowan Williams groaned on about climate change, all that targeting of Britain’s fast-growing black-led congregations, has achieved very little.