WHEN his friend Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, Gordon Brown wrote in a telling tribute to the former US President that his “Second Act” — after leaving power — would prove more “momentous” than his time in the Oval Office. Carter’s presidency had been “engulfed with problems”, but he had gone on to devote decades to the promotion of democratic rights everywhere, and of his view “that wealth and power mattered less than the opportunity to serve”.
THE BROWN FAMILYGordon and Sarah Brown with their sons John (left) and Fraser in 2006
It was hard not to infer that Mr Brown saw Carter, whether consciously or not, as a role model. His own premiership had also been “engulfed with problems”. (In the past few days, yet another “problem” has come to light, in the form of what Mr Brown describes as Lord Mandelson’s shocking “betrayal” of his country.) Like Carter, he failed to win a General Election after one term. But, like Carter, Mr Brown, having lost office, and after an understandable period of introspection and even depression at his home, emerged determined to make the most of his authority and freedom as a former leader to pursue the causes that had animated his original attraction to politics.
They included international development and tackling child poverty, influenced, from when he was a child, respectively by his mother, Elizabeth, collecting door to door for Christian Aid, and his father, a Kirk minister, John, touring the poorer parts of Scotland. The Gordon Brown story, in other words, does not end in 2010 any more than Carter’s did in 1981.
Now, as he approaches his 75th birthday on 20 February, the surprisingly shy former Prime Minister is finding his voice when it comes to his quiet Christian faith. In recent months, for example, he has written for the Church Times (Comment, 12 September 2025) and given the newspaper a quote praising faith leaders for their part in the campaign against the two-child benefits cap (News, 28 November 2025).
Despite his reticence when it comes to talking about the subject, the effect of Mr Brown’s upbringing in the Church of Scotland as a son of the manse should not be overlooked. As with his tribal Labour politics, he has never strayed from his faith, but, up to now, he has hardly spoken publicly about it.
THE BROWN FAMILYGordon Brown’s parents outside outside St John’s Church Manse, Hamilton, c.1968
After his marriage to Sarah, and the births of their children, one of his proudest personal moments came at the Vatican, on 8 February 2007, when, as Chancellor, he met Pope Benedict XVI for the first time and invited him to the UK in the first papal visit since John Paul II’s in 1982. They would meet again in Rome when Mr Brown was Prime Minister, on 19 February 2009, and again when Benedict made his visit on 16-19 September 2010.
In the hour or so before that first encounter in 2007, Vatican diplomatic sources say that Mr Brown was nervous. He had brought with him his father’s book of sermons, A Time to Serve. The collection starts with a lament over the decline of “duty” and culminates in a final chapter, “Today’s Christian Duty”, which advocates doing good works as well as spreading the Good News. “All the sermons that spoke of social Christianity are what appealed to me,” Mr Brown says of his father’s book today.
He had previously given a copy to Queen Elizabeth II, but was it enough of a gift now, he asked one official as they made their way into the Vatican. He was reassured that it was, indeed, fitting, because it was personal and conveyed where he came from. “His hesitancy was from humility,” says a source present at the time.
GORDON BROWN is ecumenical, and not Evangelical, in his approach, having been born to a family of “dissenters” within his denomination. His paternal ancestors had been against the patronage system and on the side of the choosing of Church of Scotland ministers by the Church, not by local landowners, in the dispute that led to the “Great Disruption” of 1843, in which some 450 Evangelical ministers broke away and formed the Free Church of Scotland.
THE BROWN FAMILYGordon Brown with his father, the Revd Dr John Brown, in May 1990
In March 2009, a Downing Street spokesperson told Westminster reporters that Mr Brown was “not a regular churchgoer”, but that he did believe in God, after a speech on the G20 at St Paul’s Cathedral. His reticence of style should not be mistaken for neutrality in matters of conscience, however. The former Prime Minister has sometimes held back.
In February 2023, he was appalled by the way in which politicians and the media turned on Kate Forbes of the SNP, after her bid to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Nationalist Party leader and First Minister was damaged by her Evangelical — “Wee Free” — Christian outlook on traditional marriage (Quotes of the week, 24 February 2023). He drafted, but didn’t publish, an article about Forbes’s downfall, after consulting his old friend Lord Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.
The two men share a longstanding mutual admiration. It is worth quoting Lord Williams on him at some length: “Gordon is very unusual among contemporary politicians for all sorts of reasons, but not least in the way he approaches religious commitment in the public sphere. For some it’s an embarrassment or irrelevance, for some it’s a flag of convenience, for some it’s a matter of defending traditional values or a battlefield in culture wars. Gordon’s approach is very different. He is reticent about the details of his own convictions, though it is very clear that he sees the major moral problems of our world and society through the lens of Christian teaching and is not afraid to say so.
“But he also acknowledges that religious conviction has a really significant role in social debate — even when it does not follow the prevailing winds of social consensus. He genuinely believes in a society where diverse moral perspectives are free to contest issues in public — with patience and respect. Arguments are necessary for a healthy culture, and they need to draw in principles that are more than just pragmatic and utilitarian. One of his frustrations was the relative lack in our society of spaces where some of these fundamental arguments about the nature of human life and possibility might be exchanged and interrogated.
“He believes that it is important for political leadership to be held to account, and has spoken eloquently about the importance of religious communities’ keeping up the pressure on leaders and ‘giving them permission’ to act in morally courageous ways. I have vivid memories of talking with Gordon about the Jubilee 2000 campaign for international debt-relief, and how the mobilisation of many faith communities around this issue helped to make it possible for government to move on this. He believed that this was an ideal model for how religious ethics could move a public and political consensus forward in creative ways.
“So, he does not expect such communities to be either protected corners for licensed eccentrics (on condition they never open their mouths in public), or repositories of comforting traditions and cultural reassurance. So long as people of faith do not assume a right to dictate the outcome of an argument, they are welcome to join in robustly. When he addressed the assembled Anglican bishops at the 2008 Lambeth Conference on global poverty and our response to it, he made an enormous impression because of his clarity about this; several bishops said to me that they wished they had politicians like this at home.”
LIKE Lord Williams, Mr Brown firmly opposes assisted dying, unlike Sir Keir Starmer, an atheist, who has supported Kim Leadbeater’s Private Member’s Bill. Mr Brown was influenced by the quality of end-of-life care in the local hospice where he quietly volunteered during his premiership one summer holiday. He did intervene in that debate, in November 2024, and continues to argue against it. He followed up with an interview on Radio 4’s Sunday programme, confirming that he had avoided religious arguments to appeal primarily to an increasingly secular House of Commons. “I see life as a gift,” he said. “I do think that while religious views come into this for me and for other people, it is important to put the secular argument . . . and I think that is more likely to appeal to MPs.”
He is frequently charming and funny in private despite his shyness, and is unusually compassionate to those in need. This last quality may have been enhanced by the suffering and loss visited upon him over the decades, from his partial blindness to the death of his and Sarah’s baby daughter, Jennifer.
In an age of spin, he did appear, at least, unspun in office, despite his sometimes thuggish spin doctors. Like Sir John Major before him, he stood for stability against the more animated voices in his party. Like Theresa May and Angela Merkel, he was the faithful offspring of a Protestant minister.
As he has conceded, he was perhaps not of the modern media age. But, with his background in “social Christianity”, he has substance. As the inspired Saatchi & Saatchi Labour poster put it early in his premiership, amid the beginnings of a campaign for the snap General Election which he mistakenly declined to hold: “Not flash. Just Gordon”.
Adapted from Gordon Brown: Power with purpose by James Macintyre, published by Bloomsbury at £25 (Church Times Bookshop £22.50); 978-1-5266-7341-1.
Listen to an interview with James Macintyre on the Church Times Podcast here.