"Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened"
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"We don't do God," Alistair Campbell, spin-doctor to Britain's then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, famously said in 2003, when a journalist asked his boss asked about Blair's faith.
Earlier that year, BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman asked Blair if he and then-President George Bush prayed together. "No, we don't pray together Jeremy, no!" Blair insisted, visibly embarrassed.
"Why do you smile?" Paxman shot back. "Because … why do you ask me the question?" Blair queried. "Because I'm trying to find out how you feel about it," Paxman probed. Blair, a convert to Catholicism, evasively ended the conversation, with a quintessentially English word: "Possibly."
POLITICS WITHOUT GOD
Today, Britain has the most non-religious parliament in history. Forty percent of parliamentarians made a secular affirmation instead of a religious oath after the national elections in July. The non-religious members of parliament include the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and 50% of the cabinet.
The former prime minister Rishi Sunak swore on the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. Sikh MP Preet Kaur Gill, her head covered by a red scarf, swore holding a cloth-covered Sundar Gutka prayer book. Labour MPs Shabana Mahmood and Naz Shah, both Muslims, asked to swear on the Quran.
Jewish Labour MP Matthew Patrick asked to swear on the Torah (the Pentateuch), but his fellow Jewish Labour MP Charlotte Nichols swore on the Tanakh (the entire Hebrew Bible).
The pope (Pius XII) is working six days a week for Germany, on the seventh he prays for the Allies.
Anglican MPs swore on the King James Bible, while Catholics chose the New Jerusalem Bible (with the exception of Labour's Sojan Joseph, a Catholic originally from India, who chose to swear on the New Testament only).
Americans shouldn't be fooled by the smorgasbord of religious texts and the new parliamentarians playing swearing-in bingo. In Britain, or for that matter in most of Europe, we simply don't do God when it comes to politics. A politician on the campaign trail who ends his speech with "God bless the United Kingdom!" would trigger a torrent of "palm in the face" emojis on Twitter.
Which is why a sizeable section of committed Christians in Europe can't get enough of the rhetoric of religion, the hymnody of "God bless America," and the sporadic bang of a Bible verse exploding from the podium of the likes of Donald Trump, who in his inaugural address in 2017 quoted Psalm 133:1, "How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity."
CIVIC RELIGION
When I served as an Anglican minister — as chaplain to the Old Royal Naval College, and later as canon theologian at Liverpool Cathedral (arguably the largest Anglican cathedral in the world) — it was a joy to preside over the full spectrum of "civic religion," welcoming secular folk with a residue of cultural Christianity to a Carol Service or a Remembrance Day service.
I never saw it as watering down Christianity. The liturgy was preserved intact and I never, ever lost an opportunity to preach the Gospel and turn the event into something of an evangelistic crusade. Secularism had pushed God out of the public square.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
I was determined to bring God back into the Agora as St. Paul did in Athens — evangelizing the Greeks using Paul's tactic of citing the Greek poet Epimenides and telling post-Christian Britons that this "unknown God" had revealed himself in Jesus Christ, who is both Lord and Savior.
Living now in Italy, I see how similar the barren secular landscape is, but with Catholicism, rather than Anglicanism, as the civic religion. However, it is lamentable that popes, prelates, and priests make little effort to use "civic religion" as a vehicle to preach the kerygma of Christianity.
EUROPE'S UNHOLY ALLIANCE OF STATE AND CHURCH
There is a reason Europeans are wary of alliances between religion and politics. The almost wholesale capitulation of popes, prelates, and priests in Italy and Germany to the totalitarian Nazi and Fascist regimes, especially in the shadow of the Shoah, is too terrible for our historical memory to contemplate.
Ernst von Weizsäcker, Hitler's ambassador to the Holy See from 1943 to 1945, put it in a message to Berlin on March 29, 1944 – "The pope (Pius XII) is working six days a week for Germany, on the seventh he prays for the Allies."
How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.
Fascism and Catholicism in Italy had become so inextricably intertwined – and the pagan religion of Fascism had become so overwhelmingly identified with Catholicism – that when Mussolini fell and Fascism collapsed, the credibility of the Catholic Church went down the drain with it, forcing many disillusioned Italians to abandon their faith.
And this was long before COVID-19 struck and Church and State once again collaborated in an unholy totalitarian alliance, reminding us of the commandment which warns us against hijacking God for a particular political agenda: "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain" (Exodus 20:7).
AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY IS UNIQUE
In his memorable book, Democracy in America, the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville narrates how "it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eyes" when he first visited the United States in 1831. "As I prolonged my journey, I noticed the great political consequences that flowed from these new facts," he writes.
Tocqueville describes how the American co-opting of God had resulted in liberty; in contrast to Europe, where a merger of religion and politics produced the opposite result. "I had seen among us the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty march almost always in opposite directions," he notes. "Here, I found them intimately joined the one to the other: they reigned together over the same soil."
The Catholic philosopher offered a penetrating analysis of why liberty was blossoming in religious America:
Most of English America was populated by men who, after escaping from the authority of the Pope, submitted to no religious supremacy; so they brought to the New World a Christianity that I cannot portray better than by calling it democratic and republican: this will singularly favor the establishment of the republic and of democracy in public affairs.
While not uncritical of the Puritans, Tocqueville argues that American democracy was born in the crucible of a specific form of Christianity: English Puritanism, which laid the essential groundwork for America's experiment in self-government.
Puritanism, Tocqueville explains, "was not only a religious doctrine; it also blended at several points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories." Puritan churches, not surprisingly, were governed democratically.
As for Catholicism, Tocqueville observed how he "realized with surprise" that American priests "fill no public position" and most of the clergy "seemed to remove themselves voluntarily from power, and to take a kind of professional pride in remaining apart from it."
Tocqueville's emphasis on the relationship between Church and State was a radical departure from the teaching of the Catholic magisterium of his day.
In an epic U-turn, contested today by traditionalists and integralists who seek to impose what Dr. John Zmirak calls a "Catholic shariah," Vatican II's declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae, would subtly reject its age-old European model for the new American model of the relationship between Church and State.
THE GOD OF MORALISTIC THERAPEUTIC DEISM
More recently, sociologists like Christian Smith have pointed out another danger of co-opting God in American politics. Prof. Smith observes that a religion without specific Christian content has degenerated into "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" — the default religion of the American masses.
Smith writes:
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) is also about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents. This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering… but …centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people.
MTD has a five-point creed: God created the world; God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions; the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself; God doesn't need to be particularly involved in one's life except when he is needed to resolve a problem; and, good people go to heaven when they die.
GOD AND GOSPEL
Committed Christians will be grateful that both Donald Trump and the Rev. Franklin Graham subverted MTD by giving specific content to the nameless and faceless "God" so frequently called upon in the Republican convention.
Trump's claim that God intervened directly to save him scandalized Christian deists, including several clergy, who wrote on social media that they didn't believe in a God who would save Trump but allow Corey Comperatore, the firefighter at the Trump rally, to be shot dead.
"I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God," Trump said.
I do know ... that God loves us and he wants us to be with him in heaven one day and that is through faith in his son Jesus Christ.
When Graham led the Republican Convention in prayer last Thursday he used this conundrum to preach the kerygma of Christ, putting flesh on the rather ambivalent "God" so frequently invoked by American politicians.
"I cannot explain why God would save one life and allow another one to be taken. I don't have the answer for that, but one thing I do know is that God loves us and he wants us to be with him in heaven one day and that is through faith in his son Jesus Christ," Graham preached.
The son of the world's best-known evangelist then quoted the New Testament’s quintessentially kerygmatic verse: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."
In Europe, we don't do God. And, we are witnessing the tragic consequences of removing God from the public square.
"If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous (Russian) Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened,'" Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his famous Templeton Address in 1983.
Our prayer for our American sisters and brothers is that you will continue to not only "do God," but you will preach and live the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And when we have repented of our hubris we, too, in Europe will learn to walk in the ways of the Lord.
God's promise is for both Europe and America: "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
I've never heard of a more dishonest cherry picking of Solzhenitsyn's writings than this by Jules Gomes.
""If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous (Russian) Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened,'" Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his famous Templeton Address in 1983.
In Solzhenitsyns Book " Two Hundred Years Together", he correctly pointed out that the Bolsheviks were Zioinist Jews bent on destroying Christianity.
"” … given the overwhelmingly Jewish composition of the top leadership during much of (the revolutionary) period, it is hardly surprising that “anti-Semitism” was…
It's considered hip to be anything, do anything, but Christian today in America among the merchant class. Christianity offends them. Christian art and symbols don't sell stuff these days for them. Go into a health food store, look at the ads for homes of the wealthy, visit Sedona or Roswell, for example, you will get my point. See all the symbols of pagan religiosity that require nothing from you but to maybe say a few mantras, hope in crystals and their magic powers, sit weirdly cross legged, consider elephant heads, hold your index fingers and thumbs together, wear a big smile while sporting a huge uncovered stomach and a big, fat, bald head, spread eagle while jumping mid air, c…
All true.