a speech by Gordon Brown

Published in the tablet this week: a speech that Mr Brown made at Lambeth Palace at the behest of Rowan Williams. It is a very methodical and clearly argued analysis of the place of faith in politics. . . . .

quotes:
re: the danger of politicians taking a higher moral ground.
"we cannot claim that God is on our side: the most we can do is hope that we are on God's side."
"Faith doesn't mean that you are without sin, it means recognising you are loved in spite of your sin. Moreover this interpretation of faith - as a lived consciousness of your failings - should remind us of that simple biblical injunction, we should judge not, lest we be judged and found wanting."

re: not being able to speak about his faith 
"If the values that matters most are spoken least and you become what the great philosopher Michael Sandel calls ‘the unencumbered self', then you bring less than your truest, your fullest, your most human self into the space you share with other human beings."

and I particularly love this one:
"If I had made the caveat that it is wrong for my party to co-opt or claim God for partisan purposes, they'd have had fun with ‘Brown admits God's probably a Tory'. More likely we'd have seen it go the opposite way ‘PM rams Calvinism down England's throat' or - who am I kidding? - more likely it would have been ‘glum Gordon rams scotch Calvinism down England's throat'.  


. . . . . .so he really does have a sense of humour!

Joking aside, this passage is particularly impressive I think:
"Indeed when Christians say: ‘do to others what you would have them do to you'; when Muslims say: ‘no one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself'; when Jews say ‘what is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man'; when Hindus say ‘this is the sum of duty do naught unto other which would cause pain if done to you'; when Sikhs say ‘treat others as you would be treated yourself'; when Buddhists say ‘hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful'; there is a common ground of religious belief that that we not only cooperate out of need but that there is a human need to cooperate. . . . . .

. . . . . I admire Deitrich Bonheoffer not least for calling for ‘a non-religious language for the gospel not because the distinctive claims of the gospel must be muted and ultimately lost in the face of public secularism, but because the gospel makes so large a claim that it cannot be reduced to a 'tribal' speech, understood only by an inner circle.'"

That last sentence is really worth reading several times over.
I admire Deitrich Bonheoffer not least for calling for ‘a non-religious language for the gospel not because the distinctive claims of the gospel must be muted and ultimately lost in the face of public secularism, but because the gospel makes so large a claim that it cannot be reduced to a 'tribal' speech, understood only by an inner circle.'"