Has he shut himself away, quietly salving his conscience from his tempestuous tenure in No. 10? Oh no no no. One swift Act of Contrition and it’s back to business. After becoming Middle East Peace Envoy and his attempts to reform the Catholic Church in his own image, Tony Blair is now back in Britain, delivering his ‘Faith and Globalisation’ lecture to universities. This follows the success of the modestly named ‘Tony Blair Faith Foundation’ in the U.S.
I was curious about what the ‘Faith and Globalisation’ lecture held to be of paramount importance. The optimist in me said, “it’ll be akin to the view of Prince Charles, espousing the virtues and ethics we need to uphold against the indiscriminate and uncompromising tide of globalisation.” Erm, no actually. From what I could gather from the FF’s website, the whole course tries to ham-handedly mash ‘religion’ with modernism, helped along by some wishy-washy claptrap about getting faiths to ‘talk to each other’.
Now I wouldn’t mind as much if it wasn’t for Blair’s own ‘faith’ that he discovered after stepping down as PM. He certainly has no problems delving into the Catholic lexicon for new buzzwords such as ‘reconciliation’ and ‘faith’. However, several sentences from the site really made me wonder about the nature of his own beliefs. Here’s an example: “faiths appear to inspire both acts of violence and of altruism”. These sound like the words of an agnostic sociologist, not of a person with deep religious conviction. There’s a patronising negativity towards faith running through his whole approach. It is implied that religion must be ‘dealt with’, because the religious are too irrational to sort themselves out.
‘Faith’ as I have always understood the word, is the most personal thing in the world, to people that have it. But Blair seems determined to open this most sacrosanct part of our being, categorise us and then sort us accordingly. Here’s a selection of imperatives from his website:
“Survey…”
“Investigate…”
“Explore…”
“Examine…”
The course outline reads like a GCSE Sociology module. It is purely analytical, attempting to quantify something that most people have difficulty defining. Whereas Prince Charles talked about the inadequacy of empiricism in giving us moral direction, Blair wants to make religion itself empirical and thus dilute one of the most prominent bastions of moral instruction in the world. His global ambitions for this course and his Faith Foundation show that he simply wants religion to be assimilated into modernity.
Given the less than seismic impact he had as ‘Middle East Peace Envoy’ (especially after the surge in violence there), you can’t help but wonder what his true motives are. But it’s not for me to examine Blair’s conscience – that’s his prerogative (or it should be anyway, being a Catholic). Perhaps he’s too busy ‘doing the right thing’, taking his ‘Faith and Globalisation’ to the global market.
Nevertheless, Blair has been conspicuously muted about the finer points of Catholic doctrine. But if he does have a moment to spare, he would do well to learn the Christian virtue of humility. Genuine charity does not go hand-in-hand with self-promotion. I noticed at the bottom of the FF website that none of the external links direct you to the pages of any religious institutions; in fact, ALL of the external links are about Blair and his ‘mission’. I can’t help but wonder how he intends to get different faiths talking to each other, when he doesn’t even reference them on his own website.
So what’s the end result of Blair’s preaching? A rather ugly, watered-down, non-specific, faith-empirical hybrid sort of thing, of no use to anyone, religious or otherwise. But as David Blackburn said in The Spectator, “it’s all extremely good PR”.
Confessions of an anxious martial artist 