by Gordon Brown
I did not explain my proposal very well. Our religious leaders were understandably wary of being accused of entering the political arena. All that did emerge from our discussions was the book of essays also mentioned in the previous chapter, Being British, to which almost all our well-known church leaders contributed.
Not that I was by any means an uncritical supporter of the views of my own church or any of the churches. From the 1980s onwards, I came under sustained criticism from a small group of anti-abortion activists in my own constituency. I felt for the many women who were in agony about what to do when faced with a dangerous or unwanted pregnancy. While everyone had to work within an agreed set of laws, I had no right, I told them, to tell young women faced with the most difficult of choices and who, if abortion was illegal, might have to resort to a backstreet abortionist, what to do. We should respect their own judgements, and they should not be ostracised, repudiated or rejected, nor denied the right to make their own choices.
I disagreed too with the more traditional religious hostility to research into the human embryo. I accepted there were different views and religious traditions when it came to the moral status of the embryo and its stages of development. But genetic conditions like the cystic fibrosis my younger son suffered from could be prevented by modifying the genes: was it not unthinkable to deny ourselves the scientific and medical capacity to do so?
I took a different line too on organ donation. Although most church denominations support organ donation, there was resistance among some of them to proposed new laws that assumed you would donate unless you had opted out. Shocked by the numbers dying on waiting lists for transplants, I had also seen at first hand a friend come perilously close to death before organs became available, so I supported the legislation. Of course, Labour held to the tradition that on an issue like this MPs could not be mandated to vote a particular way by anyone, neither our party nor even our constituents. To them we owed, in Burke’s words, ‘our judgement not our slavish obedience’. While at that time I could not take all the denominations with me, there is fortunately growing support for this option.
Appalled by the blatant discrimination against homosexuality legalised by Section 28, I am proud that our government, against religious opposition, created civil partnerships. From the Treasury I insisted on creating an equal right of civil partners to inherit and to share pensions and social security payments, and as PM I extended these rights by removing ‘the need for a father’ clause when considering whether to allow in-vitro fertilisation. While there were few areas where my successor David Cameron and I found common ground, I salute him for pushing through marriage equality for same-sex couples despite the fierce opposition of some on his back benches. In my time at No. 10, I actively pressed countries like Uganda to revoke prejudicial laws against gay rights, and remembering the millions of gay men and women who had been traduced I apologised for the horrible mistreatment of the mathematician Alan Turing, who helped us win the Second World War and was then prosecuted and driven to suicide simply for being gay. The Queen was right to issue a royal pardon. But we have yet to do justice to all those whose lives were menaced by this discrimination.
One new issue forced itself to the forefront of debate in my years as prime minister: assisted suicide. Here I instinctively agreed with the weight of religious opinion that it should not be legalised. The real question was whether we could get beyond two encamped and embattled positions: that a God-given life must not be taken away and that a good life means the avoidance of unnecessary pain; once again, a predominantly religious view fighting a predominantly humanist one. I turned to my university friend for advice, Dr Colin Currie, a consultant geriatrician and clinical academic and researcher, who had taken up a part-time post in No. 10 as an adviser on the care of older people, as well as contributing to speech-writing. With his help I penned an article in The Times suggesting that assisted dying changed the very nature of the doctor–patient relationship. Of course, I could see the logic of allowing a dying person to end their life at a time of their choice, but could we avoid the charge that, even with checks and precautions built in, such provision could be abused and misused to permit assisted suicide on a whim or in a moment of desolation or during a prolonged period of depression? While public opinion has shifted almost overnight to favour assisted dying, I still believe there is a better way forward under which what we value – the avoidance of undignified suffering – can be upheld by the quality of end-of-life care. Thus, even when I agreed with the religious view, I did not couch my arguments in religious terms.
This was quite different from the way predecessors of mine put their case. In the 1930s Stanley Baldwin drafted most of his speeches by hand before sending them to his office staff, and would regularly inscribe on the margins of the page the phrase ‘refer to A.G.’. Upon seeing these notations, conscientious civil servants duly sought the advice of the Attorney General about the legal propriety of the relevant language. Invariably the Attorney General replied that he had nothing to add. Only after many months did the civil servants realise that Baldwin was leaving an aide-memoire for himself that, as he gave the speech, he should, with great regularity, invoke as inspiration and sustenance for his argument ‘A.G.’ – meaning Almighty God.
Baldwin assumed he could win support by calling Almighty God in aid. Today, far from Baldwin’s times, even the act of continually referring to God would be dismissed as smug, sanctimonious and out of place. When Alastair Campbell famously said ‘We don’t do God’, he was implicitly acknowledging the fact that Britain has become a predominantly secular nation.
Historians will look back at the period from the 1950s until the early twenty-first century and be astounded by the scale and speed of the collapse in religious adherence. When I was growing up the majority of Scots were church or faith-group members. Today the figure is less than 10 per cent, with attendance perhaps closer to 5 per cent. In his book A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor charts the story of how in 1500 it was ‘virtually impossible not to believe in God’, whereas 500 years later ‘faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others’. The majority of young children will now never attend a church, synagogue or mosque unless through school services.
I don’t think these new trends in churchgoing represent an angry or bitter rejection of religion. Indeed, all too often when religious arguments are introduced into a debate there is a refusal to take sides for fear of being accused of being judgemental. Rather, I would characterise it as more of a detached indifference. I have noticed that after a death or violent incident, TV cameras often still head for the nearest church and report ‘prayers were said’. It suggests a common view, that religion’s main role today is to provide comfort when things go wrong without any further explanation of why.
No one can any longer assume, like Baldwin did, that the public would warm to religious assertions as justifications for action. In a more secular West, finding and uniting around a shared language and ethic to talk about what we have in common – and indeed what matters most – is ever more difficult. Without such a national conversation it is difficult in turn to find a solid basis for national unity. As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has argued, our whole society is enfeebled without the motivation religion once inspired. I have often asked myself: in the absence of references to our religion and religious tradition – and the language we have inherited from it that infuses our debates – in what terms can a political leader or any public figure today make reference to shared moral values? Some who fear religious dogmatism would exclude all religious arguments from the public square, but might the better way forward not be, as Rowan Williams suggests, greater clarity about their proper place? For are we not impoverished as a society if the public square is emptied of such a discourse that insists on a generosity of spirit and our mutual obligations for each other’s welfare?
More personally, how can a public figure who holds convictions that are religious
in origin be authentic if we do not state what influences what we say and where we are coming from? A religious conviction cannot be equated with a private preference, such as a liking for sports or a taste in food or music: it is something that shapes your life, public as well as private. The public demands authenticity from our politicians – for us to reveal who we are and what makes us tick. No political leader can survive for long if people think of him or her as false, as a PR creation, as an invention of a focus group. To expect those of us with strong beliefs to leave them at the door of the House of Commons or No. 10 is to require us to bring an incomplete version of ourselves into the public arena. If the values that matter most to me are the values that I speak about least, then I am, at least in part, in denial of who I really am. This was, to my regret, a problem that I never really resolved. I suspect I was thought of as more like a technician lacking solid convictions. And despite my strong personal religious beliefs, I never really countered that impression. Instead of defining myself, I gave my opponents room to define me.
Of course, there are limits to the role of religious arguments in the public square. We should not forget the lessons of history: in the name of religion and out of a dogmatic insistence that a theocratic view must prevail, bombs have been dropped; wars have been waged; human beings have been despised, humiliated and tortured; blacks, women and LGBT people have been reviled, ostracised and persecuted – and still are. Today the greatest theocratic threat we face in the West is not that one faith group might dominate the organs of the state, but that anyone in a position of power might claim divine authorisation for their decisions, imply moral superiority, attempt to turn God into a party-political figure and circumvent rational deliberation in the name of an assertive faith. Being religious – or being from ‘our’ religious tradition – should not give any politician a privileged position or a get-out clause that allows them to ignore the accepted bases of authority: logic, scientific fact, experimental test, critical evaluation and an appeal to values we share in common. Indeed, people of faith have a duty to use the same tools of reasoning that a person of no faith would use, and to invoke reasons that can be understood and explained at the bar of public opinion, framing their arguments about values in such a way as to include rather than alienate those who do not share their position.
This is what the philosopher John Rawls meant when he said that in an argument it is right to weigh only those reasons that are part of ‘an overlapping consensus’ of ‘what reasonable people could be reasonably expected’ to endorse. In our public debates we should, he said, appeal not to comprehensive doctrines but to general principles around which there is a possibility of agreement. No matter how strongly felt your religious beliefs, you cannot justify your case for action purely on grounds of faith, and you have to accept that your views are more likely to command authority in the eyes of non-believers because they are supported by logic, evidence and an appeal to shared values, than because they have a religious basis. You have to argue your case in the public square, submit to scrutiny, acknowledge alternative points of view – and live with the outcome even if your point of view loses out. And that is in line with modern theological thinking: our faith obliges us to use reason, and it is an act of worship to use the brain you have.
Indeed, any public figure who introduces faith into debate must be sure they are not exploiting it for partisan reasons: deploying dogma to short-circuit democratic debate. To invoke God as if He favoured one side over the other, or to suggest your interpretation of faith must be the last word, or to play religion as some sort of trump card, to use religion cynically for political gain, is to make a mockery of the very idea of God and religion. So I would repudiate both those who say ‘Do this because my religion demands it’ and those who say ‘Vote for me because I’m a Christian’. We must never make God a partisan figure, never claim that theology is the beginning and end of any debate, never act as if any kind of theocracy overrules democracy, and have the humility that Abraham Lincoln had: not to claim that God is on our side but to hope, as he did, that we are on God’s side.
But while religious engagement within the public square must accommodate itself to public reason, public reason must also be willing to accommodate itself to religious engagement. A liberal state is not truly liberal unless it makes room for a conversation amongst believers and between them and non-believers. The question is: what are the shared terms and common ground that will allow for this?
In the wake of two of the bloodiest world wars in history, in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust and then Hiroshima, many of the world’s most famous thinkers and artists rejected the very idea of a moral compass. But while religion in Europe has seen a dramatic post-war decline, that kind of nihilism has not taken over. ‘Didn’t we get it all wrong when we said there were no such things as moral values?’ one of those thinkers, Albert Camus, is reported to have pleaded with his existentialist friends. If, he said, they were to acknowledge such things as moral values, ‘that would be the beginning of hope’.
And that is where I think most of us stand. It may be, as the eminent American philosopher Michael Sandel told me, that it is now almost impossible to persuade people to think of our society as ‘a moral community’; but most people would agree that in public debate moral views do matter and there can and must be a dimension to the public square that allows for ethical arguments to play their part. When in our everyday conversations we talk approvingly of decency, honour, duty and character, and value loyalty and compassion for others, we are talking about qualities that are indisputably moral.
The roots of our motivations are not exhausted in the sum total of what is called reasoning. As I understand it, morality – promoting and pursuing good human relationships – is the effort that flows from our reasoning, from what we sometimes call our moral sense and from advice we absorb that is tested in a never-ending public dialogue and confirmed in our day-to-day experiences.
Adam Smith has often been accused of saying there was no morality in markets, but as Professor Craig Calhoun, who has written widely and persuasively about the origins, role and impact of social movements, has pointed out, Smith was happy to emphasise the qualities, such as thrift, honesty and duty, that facilitated a good economy and underpinned a good society. As Craig remarks, Smith and his fellow Scottish Enlightenment writers who wrote approvingly of our ‘moral sentiments’ were not called the Scottish moralists for nothing.
Indeed, my reading of history suggests to me that all great social movements – from the anti-slavery crusades to the struggles for civil rights and for the renunciation of Third World debt – have been built from the ground up on the foundation of guiding ideals shared by countless, often unrecognised, men and women imbued with moral purpose.
And what is truly remarkable is that over the last fifty years the scope of what we call our ‘moral sense’ has expanded. When we talk disapprovingly of malice, selfishness, envy, hypocrisy and indifference, we are making moral judgements that are not now seen as specific to one culture, one religion or one continent but are universally applied and understood. It may be that centuries of civilisation have not made us, as individuals, any kinder, any more altruistic or any more dutiful, but over time the arena in which we exercise our moral sense has continued to expand. Millions have come to feel sympathy towards men and women outside their family or immediate circle and have been prepared to stand up against discrimination no matter where it is found.
In recent years, national constitutions that uphold human decency have been complemented by universal declarations of human rights that outlaw crimes against humanity, wherever they happen, and uphold the rights of women, children, the disabled, refugees and other minorities everywhere. And the main pressure to extend and update these conventions has come not from governments but from men and women with strong moral convictions.
The Iraq War that I discussed earlier raises important ethical questions about war and peace, and whether on occasions the vic
tory of might can be a violation and not a vindication of right. And whether abroad or at home, we cannot, in my view, deal with matters of poverty and social justice without at least considering the ethical basis of our actions. Budgets, as the Rev. Jim Wallis once told me, are statements which have an ethical dimension because they tell people what we value. We might claim, as Martin Luther King did, that the Good Samaritan could have done more by dealing with the causes of the poor man’s poverty, but most of us can identify with the Samaritan’s good intentions and agree with some version of the ‘golden rule’ on which all religions are ultimately based: that we have an obligation to look out for others as we would look out for ourselves and, more than that, to act with integrity, to treat people fairly and to always show them respect.
And I have come to the view that politicians do have a role in encouraging the cooperative and altruistic instincts that are part of our moral sense, in discouraging the competitive and appetitive parts when they can damage our communities, and in demonstrating that the rights we have and the responsibilities we owe each other go hand in hand.
This is not to say that politicians should moralise, hector or sanctimoniously lecture people. It is arrogant for politicians to presume some superior moral authority that allows them to tell people what their morality should be. However, there is a big difference between foisting your moral stance on others even when they do not agree with it and appealing to an agreed morality that underpins our society.
But perhaps I did not get it quite right in repeating as a politician a phrase that my father had often used as a church minister – the need for a ‘moral compass’. I was most definitely not seeking to claim a role for myself as an ethical arbiter: I was simply arguing the case for the role of ethics in politics. 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.
