How will Gordon Brown keep the faith?
The visit of new UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the White House raises a host of interesting geopolitical questions, not least concerning the whole issue of faith-based politics. Former Prime minister Tony Blair’s media fixer, Alastair Campbell, once dealt with a question about religion with the famous riposte, “We don’t do God”. Yet Mr Blair was still the most overtly ‘Christian’ British national leader this century. His faith, though private, was publicly known. He consorted widely with religious leaders. He had an intellectual dalliance with Catholic theologian Hans Kung’s ‘global ethics’ project. And he gave strong backing to the Establishment of the Church of England, the extension of faith schools, and a religious stake in public service provision. What’s more, the Blair-Bush alliance on Iraq and the influence the ex-PM exercised in relation to Democratic Unionist supremo Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland were not short on religious resonances. If all this, together with the pre
