“HE’S not the Messiah,” one MP called out, as Andy Burnham — the former Mayor of Manchester, newly elected MP for Makerfield, purported saviour of the Labour Party from electoral oblivion at the hands of Reform UK, and deliverer of the UK from the nightmare of low growth, high debt, a rising cost of living, and mid-Atlantic isolation — took up his seat in Parliament last week. “[He’s a very] naughty boy,” Mr Burnham responded, with antiphonal correctness.
I do not know whether antiphony ever played a part in Mr Burnham’s childhood, but Roman Catholicism certainly did. And, boy, have we heard about that — or, more precisely, speculated about it — since it was confirmed that he would be riding into Westminster on an Avanti train to reclaim the citadel! As is so often the case, the speculation says more about us than it does about him.
The facts of Mr Burnham’s religious background are not hard to come by: RC mother and schooling, community marinated in church life, regular mass attendance, keen altar boy. The meaning of these facts, however, is, at least at first glance, a bit more obscure.
This is partly because Mr Burnham, a charismatic and instantly likeable man, is also a canny politician, able to tack deftly to the prevailing political wind. (As the now old joke goes: “A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a pub. The barman asks, ‘What are you drinking, Andy?’”)
AS WITH politics, so with faith. “I have been repeatedly at odds with the Catholic Church for all of my time as an MP,” Mr Burnham told Pink News in 2015. “I’ve always traced my politics back, back to that [Catholic] upbringing,” he told the audience during the Q&A after he delivered the annual Theos lecture last October (News, Analysis, 17 October 2025).
In reality, this is not so hard to square. Mr Burnham’s relationship with faith is not just understandable, but pretty familiar among British (especially RC) politicians: a serious Christian upbringing that was genuinely formative (Mr Burnham has repeatedly said that Everton FC, the Labour Party, and the Roman Catholic Church were the institutions that made him); a lasting warmth towards the Church (he is clearly at ease in Christian settings); a deep conviction that Christian social action is valuable (“Rather than making our faith-based organisations . . . constantly scrabble for funding, imagine if they had the feeling of core funding coming through to sustain [them],” he told the Theos audience); a sympathy with some Christian ideas (albeit not their specific formulation: he rarely uses the language of solidarity or subsidiarity, preferring, instead, that of cohesion, devolution, and localism); a clear rejection of other Christian ideas, most obviously any that clash with regnant social liberalism; a quiet drifting away from religious practice (he no longer attends mass regularly and does not pray); and an intentional vagueness about what he actually believes.
THIS is slap-bang in the middle of whatever the faith equivalent of the Overton Window is. Let us call it the Makerfield Window, in honour of the constituency that voted Mr Burnham into Westminster: “The range of religious views that it is deemed acceptable for a politician to hold” (acceptable, allegedly, to the voting population, but, in reality, to the political class), both politically — Mr Burnham will never be accused of following the edicts of Rome rather than those of his constituents — and socially: he is not going to elevate church teaching on issues such as same-sex marriage or abortion over the liberal consensus. His Catholicism is safe.
This is not a criticism of Mr Burnham. He clearly has far deeper religious roots than the last RC occupant of 10 Downing Street (Boris Johnson, in case you were wondering); nor does it mean that his position on faith and public life will prevent the former from influencing the latter. Paradoxically, you can do more for the influence of religion in politics when your personal position is safely within the Window. David Cameron’s relentless championing of faith groups in the Big Society is a good example: he got away with it precisely because no one thought that he personally took God very seriously.
In short, we would be right to expect something from Mr Burnham’s deep but tame RC sympathies, but nothing radical: a renewed warmth towards the part played by faith groups in public life; an ease with more obviously freighted moral language; and occasional references to the themes of Catholic social teaching, albeit plucked from context and carefully sanded down to be as frictionless as possible.
IF THIS sounds disappointing, it is worth recalling that we are talking about a political leader here. A genuine prime-ministerial understanding of and sympathy for the part played by Christianity in political and public life is to be welcomed. It is certainly better than the alternatives, whether they are feigned sympathy, outright hostility, or fanatical enthusiasm (not that the last two have ever really troubled democratic Britain).
Ultimately, it is unlikely to matter that much anyway. If the Makerfield Window can feel constrictive, the space in which a Prime Minister has to operate can feel even more so.
Whatever Mr Burnham wants to do, and however consonant it is with his inner RC sympathies, he will still face mounting debt repayments; an economy dogged by persistently sluggish growth and low productivity; a welfare bill that is, by common consent, too large; chronically unstable geopolitics; unreliable allies; volatile energy costs; resurgent nationalism; deep social fragmentation; and a whole host of other problems that are neither of his making nor in his gift to solve.
Perhaps he should start praying, after all.
Dr Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos, and the host of the podcast Reading our Times.
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