IN NOVEMBER 2022, David Lammy stood at the pulpit in St Martin-in-the-Fields, in central London, and spoke explicitly about how Jesus Christ was the inspiration for his politics as well as his lifelong faith (News, 25 November 2022). The then Shadow Foreign Secretary was delivering Christian Aid’s annual lecture on the need for a new, multilateral, and moral approach to international development.
What surprised some in the pews, however, was the opening of his speech, in which he described the example that he kept in his sights: Jesus, “a man willing to challenge power: not simply saying ‘This is sad,’ but ‘This is wrong.’”
Anyone present that night would have found it hard to imagine his two successive Conservative opposite numbers in 2022 — Liz Truss and James Cleverly — talking that way, nor, even, his more recent sparring partner, Lord Cameron, who once described faith as coming and going like “Magic FM in the Chilterns”. But to those who know Mr Lammy, it was expected.
The MP, who grew up in the Tottenham constituency that he has served since 2000, privately goes out of his way to help those he encounters who are most downtrodden, including those with addictions. Christianity is important not just to him, but also to his wife, the artist Nicola Green, and their children. The couple are friends with Lord Williams, and were regular visitors to Lambeth Palace when the latter was Archbishop of Canterbury.
Of course, Christian politicians, from the socialist Keir Hardie, one of Labour’s co-founders, to the architects of New Labour, the Anglican-turned-Roman Catholic Tony Blair and the Presbyterian Gordon Brown, have made at least as strong a mark on politics as their Conservative counterparts.
YET Hardie’s present-day successor and namesake, Sir Keir Starmer, is an atheist. He told The Sunday Times Magazine in 2021: “I am not of faith, I don’t believe in God — but I can see the power of faith and the way it brings people together.” Some Christians worry that this is a sign of a post-Christian society in which the undeniably secular world of Westminster is the vanguard.
These fears are apparently borne out by Starmer’s enthusiasm for assisted dying. In December, he said that there were “grounds for changing the law” after the broadcaster Dame Esther Rantzen announced, after a stage-four cancer diagnosis, that she had joined Dignitas and “might buzz off to Zurich” (News, 26 January).
In one of his first significant acts as an MP in 2015, Sir Keir had voted to legalise an assisted-dying Bill, which was defeated in the House of Commons. Now, he wants MPs to vote with their consciences, again. A new biography of Sir Keir does not delve into faith matters (Books, 10 May), but its author, Tom Baldwin, a friend of the Labour leader, told the Church Times: “Although neither Keir nor his wife have religious belief, they sometimes attend synagogue in a nod to her Jewish background. He says it’s one of the ways he has learnt to respect people of faith in all its different forms.”
MR LAMMY is far from the only committed Christian at the heart of the new Government (News, 12 July). Rachel Reeves, who made history this month by becoming the first female Chancellor, is a practising Anglican. Douglas Alexander — like Gordon Brown, a Scottish son of the manse — is a former International Development Secretary, who is back as a minister of state at the Department for Business and Trade. He told the Church Times: “I feel grateful to be the son of a manse, and the faith and outlook of my father and mother continue to be an influence on me to this day.”
The Secretary of State in Mr Alexander’s department, Jonathan Reynolds, chairs Christians on the Left. Sir Stephen Timms, an MP for 30 years and now minister of state at the Department for Work and Pensions, is an unapologetic Evangelical Christian who told the Church Times in July 2021: “Yes, I do think the Holy Spirit directs events . . . but that doesn’t excuse us from trying our hardest to bring about changes we believe to be right” (Interview, 30 July 2021).
And Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, is a Roman Catholic, who told The Guardian last year: “For me, being Catholic has always been about a wider sense of social justice, social action, the value and worth of every individual.” She also said, however: “I part company [with the Church] on issues around abortion, contraception . . . all that stuff.”
Labour has its fair share of RCs, and they are, no doubt, influenced by Catholic social teaching on the common good. Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Sue Gray, Sir Keir’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Labour’s Communications Director, are all RCs.
Then there is Wes Streeting. The 41-year-old Health Secretary, whom Labour modernisers see as a future Prime Minister, is a self-proclaimed “working-class” gay man and practising Anglican who loves the “smells and bells” of the High Church.
Late last month, he was questioned about how he reconciled his faith and his sexuality on the podcast The Rest is Politics: Leading by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, who famously told an American journalist interviewing the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that “We don’t do God.”. Mr Streeting spoke movingly of the hurt that he had experienced growing up as a gay Christian, and said: “I did not choose to be gay.”
Perhaps more revealingly, however, in May, just two months before the General Election, the then Shadow Health Hecretary defended the Archbishop of Canterbury for opposing a controversial Starmer policy commitment: the two-child benefits cap.
“You’re never going to find, if there’s a Labour government, politicians being sent out to attack the Archbishop of Canterbury for virtue-signalling, as Conservative MPs have done,” Mr Streeting said. “It is literally his job. He’s the one person in the country whose job it is to signal virtue. And if the mission of the Church is not to alleviate poverty and suffering, then I don’t know what is.”
Although there are no signs — yet — that Sir Keir will change his mind on the policy, Mr Streeting’s words offered a rare glimpse into how Christian faith might influence decision-making among certain ministers. The new Prime Minister has also come under public pressure from Gordon Brown over the benefits-cap issue. And, in November 2022, under the Conservatives, Mr Brown co-wrote the foreword with Lord Williams to a Theos report on the effect that the cost-of-living crisis has had on social and economic security: A Torn Safety Net: How the cost of living crisis threatens its own last line of defence (News, 11 November 2022).
They wrote: “For the first time not just in our lifetimes but since the welfare state was created, we have seen that it is the foodbank, not social security, that has become our safety net, and charity, not Universal Credit, that has been the last line of defence.”
Elsewhere, the Government’s early move to scrap the Conservatives’ Rwanda deportation scheme has been welcomed by the Church of England hierarchy, from the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, to Archbishop Welby himself. And the Labour administration’s position against Israel’s war on Gaza may, belatedly, be hardening, though it has yet to endorse the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
NONE of this is to pretend that new ministers with religious beliefs, let alone the Government generally, will pursue a Christian agenda, however that is defined. The temptation to leave religion at the gates of the Palace of Westminster may be too great, even for this unusually faithful crop. Plus, there is an important balance to strike.
As Mr Brown reflected on his time as Prime Minister, in his 2017 memoirs My Life: Our times (Books, 9 February 2018): “The distinction I should have made more clearly is between patently dogmatic attempts to impose your will on others — which are wrong — and focusing public attention on values we share.”
None the less, it is reassuring to know that there are confident Christians at the heart of the new Labour Government. Hannah Rich, director of Christians on the Left — which lists about 45 current Labour MPs as members, and says that a handful more identify as Christians but are not members — told the Church Times: “It’s fantastic to see a number of our members at the heart of the new Labour Government, in the Cabinet, and also as newly elected MPs across the country.
“They are all people whose faith is part of the reason they’re in politics, because of the conviction that politics and the Labour Party is somewhere Christians belong, and somewhere God can use them for good. This is crucial as we begin the much needed work of national renewal.”
And, as Mr Lammy’s friend Lord Williams told the Church Times, “Christians are bound to ask of any government whether it does at least two things. Does it open the door to the kind of generous mutuality that belongs to the life of the body of Christ as St Paul thinks about it? And does it behave in a way that helps citizens trust that everyone’s interest is in some way on its radar, so that no person or group simply feels consistently ignored or silenced?
“Fleshing this out in policy is complex, as hardly needs to be said, but any Christian in politics will surely have these motivations in mind if they get involved in the political process.”
James Macintyre is a co-author of Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader (BiteBack,2012), and the author of Gordon Brown: The inside story, due to be published by Bloomsbury next year.