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Comment on this article God
and Tony Blair In March 2003, as the odds of averting war in Iraq dwindled, Tony Blair gave an interview to David Margolick for a lengthy profile in Vanity Fair. Despite the tension mounting in Britain and abroad over the possibility of war, Blair spoke freely to Margolick about many issues, including his friendship with President George W. Bush '68. But the one topic that seemed to ruffle the otherwise "unflappable" Blair, Margolick wrote, involved religion. When Margolick asked Blair about speculation that he and Bush had bonded over their Christian faith and even prayed together, Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, took control of the interview, asking Blair, "Is he on to God?” Then Campbell cut off his boss and told Margolick: "We don’t do God.” Britons generally consider faith a private matter, and public discussion of religious devotion by politicians unseemly. As Blair told the BBC last year, "You talk about it in our system, and frankly, people do think you're a nutter.” Though Blair seldom let on to constituents, his faith was the powerful, private compass to his life, from his student days at Oxford more than 30 years ago through his lengthy and controversial tenure as prime minister. Now, 18 months after shedding the constraints of high office and voter opinion, Tony Blair has openly made religion the lodestar of this new phase of his life. In the fall, Blair co-taught a course at Yale, with the eminent Christian theologian Miroslav Volf, on the intersecting forces of faith and globalization. The Yale seminar—the first of three Blair will teach—follows the unveiling last summer of his main project: the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which seeks to foster greater understanding among people of various religions by involving them in collaborative projects, such as development efforts and dialogue. The U.S. operations of the foundation will be headquartered at Yale. Blair's goal is one of those simply stated yet vast undertakings: to make religion a force for good as globalization mixes together people of different cultures and faiths. Some people of faith have welcomed Blair’s entrance into this arena; others have questioned whether, with his controversial past, he’s the right man for the job. But in his classes at Yale and in a recent interview, Blair has begun to give voice to a belief that faith can, and perhaps should, have a role in public decisions. Blair has entered the interfaith movement as it is building momentum. Interfaith efforts began in 1893 with the first meeting on the World’s Parliament of Religions. When the parliament closed, the movement "became considerably lower-profile for many decades," according to Gustav Niebuhr, director of the Religion and Society Program at Syracuse University. But the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the last few years of attacks made in the name of Islam, and the rise of fundamentalism across religions have jarred people into action. Some activists feel Blair’s involvement gives their efforts a heightened visibility. "I think this movement needed a world leader, and Tony Blair is a world leader," says Eboo Patel, executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a nonprofit based in Chicago. "He is one of the type of people who can take the interfaith movement to the next level." Patel has called Blair the Al Gore of the interfaith world. But Blair’s past threatens the future he wants to build. Many people, especially many Muslims, cannot forgive him for his role in supporting the Iraq War and for standing by Bush as the conflict worsened. Blair’s critics say they doubt his ability to heal rifts between religious communities when the war, they contend, worsened relations between the West and much of the Muslim world. “The word that will be synonymous with Tony Blair is going to be 'Iraq,'" says Sirajul Haq Khan, Secretary for Faith and Interaction with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association UK. "He needs to legitimize himself. Perhaps some kind of rectification, sort of, 'What I did in the past wasn’t entirely correct. I made some mistakes and they shouldn’t have happened.' But we haven’t heard that yet from him.” Given how often members of the public and media have unsuccessfully pressed Blair to repudiate his support of the Iraq War, such a statement is probably not coming any time soon. Asked what he made of the idea that some might see his interfaith efforts as an act of atonement, Blair’s eyes widened with surprise, and he laughed. "My basic view is that globalization is a good thing but we need to make it work," he said. "I am fascinated by religious faith but we have to change how the faiths interact with one another. All the work I do is around that notion: how do you make the modern world work?” Yet Blair’s interfaith project, if it proves at all successful, might offer the best chance of recasting his legacy in the eyes of his critics. "People with means and connections can get things going, and they can bury some controversial things in the past," says Niebuhr, author of Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America. "This is a testing time for him, when he has to move from one stage to another and show people he is sincere and committed and can achieve something real.” Despite his new mission, Blair still seems wary of looking like a nutter. His U.S. counterpart, George W. Bush, talks often about his personal faith; in an interview on ABC in December, Bush said, "God, I believe, came into my life, in this case in the form of Billy Graham. That was the beginning of a decision to quit drinking.” Blair doesn’t give interviews about his personal relationship with the divine. In public his approach is probing, analytical, and very much from the intellect. He decided to devote himself to faith and globalization, he explains, because "globalization obliterates borders and frontiers and pushes people together. Faith can become a reaction to it and pull people apart. I saw this during my time as prime minister, and I saw this before 9/11 and after 9/11. “Even if you are of no religious faith and don’t even like religion, you should be interested in this. But specifically, if you are a person of faith, the question is, what role does faith have in the future? My view is globalization needs strong values to guide it and make it equitable and just.” Blair unveiled his new Faith Foundation less than a year after leaving office. Its goal, he says, "is to educate and to have interfaith encounters through action." Among its projects are joint efforts with the nonprofit Malaria No More—one to provide insecticide-treated mosquito nets to people in sub-Saharan Africa, and another to select 30 men and women of various faiths, aged 18 to 25, from the United States, Canada, and Britain to work in African countries combating malaria and then return home to raise money for and awareness about the disease. The Faith Foundation has also asked Harry Stout, chair of Yale’s religious studies department, to develop a secondary school curriculum for the foundation’s use in fostering interfaith discussion among teenagers. For the most part, Blair still travels in the high orbit of celebrities and statesmen. The press conference at the Time Warner Center in New York City launching the foundation was the kind of star-studded event you would expect from a former world leader announcing his latest interest: Christiane Amanpour hosted the proceedings, and Bill Clinton '73JD gave opening remarks. The Reverend Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church in California and author of the best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life, serves on the group’s advisory council. The foundation has already raised "several million dollars" for its projects, largely thanks to Blair’s contacts and stature. (He declined to provide an exact total.) But during his talks in the Faith and Globalization class at Yale, Blair discards the air of seasoned authority. In the Law School classroom where the seminar meets, Blair appears to be exploring the truth, rather than delivering it. Volf, his co-teacher, says Blair "wrestles with these ideas in an unguarded way, not as a leader who makes pronouncements like a Delphic oracle." Blair is not tentative. But he gives the impression that he is moving toward something without being completely sure, yet, what it is. The 25 students in the class, undergraduates and graduates, chosen from about 270 who applied, are a microcosm of globalization. There is Garentina Kraja, a 30-year-old sophomore and former journalist whose father helped found the independence movement in Kosovo. Blair’s decision to intervene in that Balkan conflict, Kraja said, "saved my life, saved my family’s life." There is Chris Thomas '09MBA, an Iraq War veteran and recent convert to Catholicism, who wants to understand globalization and the forces shaping it with "the hope of guiding it to better ends." There is Levent Tuzun, from Turkey, who says faith and globalization are arguably the two dominant forces in his country right now. There is Yasir Qadhi, who spent much of his childhood in Texas, spent ten years studying in Saudi Arabia, and feels he can help dispel misunderstandings between Muslims and Christians. The night before his first class in late September, Blair told Jon Stewart on the Daily Show that he was nervous about teaching. (Stewart tried for 15 minutes to get Blair to renounce the war, or at least tweak George Bush a little. Blair wouldn’t do it.) The next day, Blair confided his worries to his students. But he added, "I am sure I shall learn a lot from you. Sometimes, as I’ve learned in my life, out of the very small things grow the very big things.” The course explores the extent and causes of religious resurgence, the situations in which religion has proven an oppressive force and when it has been positive, and, according to the syllabus, "the conditions under which robust religious allegiances can constructively be employed in the pluralistic environments of an increasingly interconnected world." Blair’s foundation developed the course in concert with the Divinity School, which has been working hard in recent years on Muslim-Christian reconciliation; and the School of Management, which brought a case-study approach that grounds the discussions in real events, such as the work religious groups did to bring about debt relief for African nations. (The course, offered jointly by the two schools, is open to their students and to graduate and college students.) Blair's approach to teaching is primarily to pose questions: why do people still have such strong religious faith? How do we remove ignorance that breeds the fear that in turn breeds conflict? How do we ensure that faiths act in pursuit of critical goals in the world today? In his first class, he wondered aloud whether faith can reshape the competition for resources that globalization brings. If globalization is value-free, he said, "the danger is that it is essentially a competitive process decided by power, so those people who have the power will get the resources. Is it possible for religious faith to be a part—not an exclusive part—of providing a value system that brings notions of equity and justice and fairness into this otherwise strong but often impersonal process of globalization?” Rather than pacing or orating, Blair tends to sit behind his desk, often looking down at the floor as he speaks. He’s routinely self-deprecating. Qadhi, who is working toward a PhD in Islamic studies, asked Blair his first question—one of the hardest questions in interfaith work: "How can we make people genuinely love and care about one another when they believe that [a] person who is outside their faith tradition is outside of God’s grace?” “That's a great question," Blair said. "Um, I wish I knew the answer.” Everyone laughed. Blair went on to say that the class should explore the nature of exclusionary faith. He suggested that he wants to use polling to study the degree to which such beliefs are truly exclusionary, as well as "whether there are areas in which you can start to see some way that people can come together. My own view is that people actually can find a way through that—if they want to.” Blair says he hopes the course will yield a template for similar courses at other institutions, and he has made a three-year teaching commitment to Yale. (Yale pays $200,000 per annum, through the Howland Fellowship, for Blair to teach 5 of the 13 sessions of the class; the money goes directly to the Faith Foundation, a Yale spokeswoman said.) For some, the arrangement begs the question, don’t discussions about good and evil come free at a place like Yale? “It seems like an incredible waste of Yale’s money to pay Blair to say something this anodyne," says Peter Mandler, a fellow in modern British history at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge. "Obviously, Yale thinks it’s very good publicity to attract great men. There is a level of celebrity culture at universities, too." (Many universities in fact pursued Blair after he resigned. Yale may have had an inside track because Blair’s son, Euan, completed a master’s in international relations here in 2008.) But some of Blair’s students say his earnestness and occasional fumbling have made him more approachable, and they seem to have few qualms about challenging him. "I think it’s important that he is teaching this way," says Kraja. "It makes us feel like we have something to contribute.” The son of a Tory who was a "militant atheist," Blair began to explore Christianity while at Oxford in the early 1970s, during late-night nicotine-fueled group talks led by a charismatic Australian Anglican priest and student in his 30s named Peter Thompson. Blair became an Anglican in 1974. In her memoir, his wife, Cherie Blair, writes that long discussions about God and the purpose of life brought her and Blair together, and that "religion was more important to him than anyone I had ever met outside the priesthood.” Blair reads the Koran regularly and the Bible every night. One of his favorite Bible passages is the parable of the faithful servant in the Gospel of Luke, the story of the man who works hard for his master—God—even while He is away. One verse reads: "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” For more than 20 years, including while prime minister, Blair attended Catholic Mass with his wife and children, who were being raised as Catholics. Last year, Blair himself converted to Roman Catholicism, because, he says, he finally wanted to receive Communion with his family. Some of his views, such as support of abortion rights, conflict with Catholic doctrine. Others, like his commitment to development in Africa, are very much in keeping with the Catholic Church’s teachings about working for the common good. He'd held off on conversion while in office, Blair says, not just because of some residual anti-Catholic feeling in the UK but also because he sensed that such a public act of faith might be widely misunderstood. “If you are a person of faith and you are publicly engaged, people seem to think that everything you do is because of some special relationship you are claiming with God," he told his class in a session in October. He went on: "But, for example, if you take a decision, as I took on several occasions, to engage in military conflict, to go to war—leave aside whether you agree or you disagree with individual decisions—there isn’t a transmission where your faith tells you that this is the right way to decide this issue. But in your assessing of whether you are going to do it or not going to do it, the issue of right or wrong is important, and actually in my view should outweigh the issue of constituency—or indeed, I would even say, constitution. I put that up as a question. "I had a discussion with another political leader whether this was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do"—to engage in military action—"and he said, 'I'm not really concerned about that. I'm sure it’s in the interests of my country to do it.' And we had this rather curious debate where I was saying, 'If that is the only reason you think it should be done, you shouldn’t be doing it.' “I think that faith in that sense can be progressive. Not—and you must understand what I am saying here—not because the decision is necessarily the right decision. But progressive in the sense that issues to do with right and wrong are part of the decision-making process.” Despite Blair’s own faith, "religious tensions have increased markedly" under him, says Tristram Hunt, a historian at Queen Mary University of London. Early in his tenure, Blair won over British Muslims by giving them the kind of public respect they had never seen from British politicians, according to Sirajul Haq Khan. Blair’s decision to intervene militarily in Kosovo also helped his standing with Muslims. But the Iraq War intensified feelings of isolation among second- and third-generation British Muslims, Hunt says, and also increased hostility toward Muslims from the larger society. American Muslims who interact with Blair, like Qadhi and Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core, disagree with his decision to go to war in Iraq (as does his co-teacher, Volf), but they are largely more pragmatic than their British counterparts. "There's a new category emerging of interfaith activist, along the lines of human rights or environmental activists," says Patel, who works in partnership with Blair and his foundation. "I'm now consistently speaking to several hundred or several thousand people, when just five years ago I was talking to seven people in a church basement. And Tony Blair is the first leader of this stature to take this issue this seriously.” Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, who manages faith-based projects for Malaria No More, also has serious misgivings about Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. But, she says, "my goal is to increase malaria control, and if he can push the needle on this issue, it is incumbent upon me to work with him." Blair has committed to raise money for 1 million of the 250 million bednets needed in sub-Saharan Africa. His foundation is also funding the 30 young men and women who will work in the field with Malaria No More and then take the issue back home with them. "They will help to spread this on the grassroots level," Abdul-Ghafur says. "It’s like planting 30 seeds.” Those 30 seeds; a class of 25 students at Yale; plans to develop curricula for secondary school students—all might seem like whispers against the daily din of rage and violence in God’s name. But not to Blair. “I don’t feel puny before this," Blair says. "I have a complete belief that what most people want is a sense of spirituality and a sense of purpose derived from spirituality in their lives, and they don’t want to exclude other people. “If you do have religious faith, it is incredibly important to rescue faith from becoming the property of those who see it as a means of shutting themselves off from others. There is a huge constituency for peaceful coexistence."
So Tony Blair has a goal of injecting religious faith into public policy, especially as related to globalization. His views, as related in your article, are strong on generalities and weak on specifics. While I have the greatest respect for the former prime minister, I feel strongly that his proposal deserves a response. Need one chronicle the millennia-long history of the horrors of religious strife, from the Jewish diaspora, the crusades, the persecution and execution of "heretics" to the counterreformation, the Holocaust, the partition of India, and jihadism? His intent to turn around such virulent antagonism, "to make religion a force for good as globalization mixes together people of different cultures and faith," flies in the face of the commonest cause of warfare and persecution in history. The Political Union sponsored a debate on November 11, 2008, on the topic "Resolved: Religion Should Have No Place in Government." Ms. Banerjee did not mention that discussion, so we don’t know whether Mr. Blair participated or even heard the arguments. If he had attended, he would have heard one of the debaters, humanist Ronald A. Lindsay, point out that participants in a democratic discourse "must be able to understand, evaluate, and debate reasons that others offer for their views. That is not possible if religious doctrine is offered as a justification for public policy positions.” To believe that the Tony Blair Faith Foundation can, relatively abruptly, alter that aspect of human nature must politely be characterized as tilting at windmills. More likely, the attempt to change how faiths interact will prod the march of folly to double-time. The most disturbing aspect of Mr. Blair’s approach is his implied disparagement of the secular conscience. He asks "what role does faith have in the future? My view is that globalization needs strong values to guide it and make it just." He asserts that faith can be "progressive in the sense that issues to do with right and wrong are part of the decision-making process." I doubt anyone would question the need for values, but what of their origin? There has recently been increasing interest in the origin of individual conscience and individual ethical values. Political scientist James Q. Wilson pointed out several decades ago that "there are certain universal moral guiding instincts." Columnist David Brooks observed that "people around the world have common moral intuitions." Philosopher Austin Dacey agrees: "All normal people naturally have capacities of reason and empathy … this is conscience.” Neurobiologist Michael Gazzaniga goes farther. In observing "the intrinsic moral reasoning capacity our species has always possessed," he found that "there is a brain-based account of moral reasoning." Other neuroscientists are finding similar evidence. Most would agree that these hard-wired values form the basis upon which the highly variable religious tenets are constructed, Indeed, the late scientist and science writer Arthur C. Clarke, CBE, lamented that "one of the greatest tragedies in human history was the hijacking of morality by religion.” The primarily secular conscience has led to the wide acceptance of such documents as the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mr. Blair should acknowledge the primacy of these intrinsic values and encourage their use in leading the full, frequent, and fearless discussions he advocates. Comments by various religious leaders would be welcomed, and perhaps compromise could then dampen the doctrinal disagreements.
Blair’s role in the Middle East The special envoy of the Middle East Quartet since leaving 10 Downing Street in June 2007, Tony Blair appears to have spent more time promoting himself in the U.S. with his Faith Foundation than traveling to the Middle East. That Yale should then employ him at a salary not commensurate with the number of his teaching hours seems surreal. The Quartet’s mission has been a complete failure, and the Israeli-Palestinian situation continues to worsen. Blair’s fawning relationship with George W. not only facilitated his Yale professorship, but also prevented him from standing up to the Bush administration as prime minister at the outset of the Iraq saga when British intelligence had uncovered no signs of WMDs in Iraq. It would appear that Blair’s God has helped to strengthen the hand of the Muslims rather than providing an interfaith bridge to all religions of the world.
Abortion rights and the Catholic church It is not true that Tony Blair’s support of abortion rights conflicts with Catholic doctrine, though it does conflict with the Vatican’s insistence that abortion should be punishable by law. Catholic doctrine does not teach that the pope’s word is necessarily infallible, but that it is infallible only when it is implied by scripture, i.e. when it is Catholic doctrine. Thus, popes can be wrong. Catholic doctrine teaches that Jesus established the church, not to punish sinners, but to bring sinners to repentence. Jesus repealed the Mosaic law calling for the punishment of sinners ("He who is without sin, cast the first stone," John 8:1-11). Thus, the Vatican’s insistence on punishment contradicts Jesus.
How callous! I suppose it is only appropriate that Yale honor Tony Blair after having done the same a while back for George W. Bush. Did Yale—its faculty, its students, its administration—care that two dishonest and hypocritical leaders caused so much death, pain and destruction in the world? How depressing, how disgusting, how callous! How to alienate so many!
Faith vs. facts It is curious that Tony Blair has become an apologist for religion. One wonders how he has come to this position. Perhaps it is some kind of atonement for the deaths (collateral damage, I guess he would call it) of all those innocent Iraqis. But it is, in the long run, a destructive effort. Religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hindus are dominated by their fundamentalist wings. The foot soldiers of fundamentalism kill, maim, and rape in defense of their truths. Christian fundamentalists in the United States believe in a God who tortures billions of people for eternity in hell. If you don’t believe that you are going to hell yourself. A byproduct of their faith is a denial of science. "Don’t bother me with the facts," they say, "I have faith." Belief trumps facts at every juncture. So our fundamentalists believe in hell, don’t believe in evolution, don’t accept global warming (it isn’t in the Bible), and provide a framework for rejecting all things intellectual. Intelligence becomes suspect and an unemployed plumber or an uneducated woman (Sarah Palin) who believes in demon possession has more credibility than a scientist. The anti-intellectual climate they created gave us George Bush (who talks to God directly). Whatever guilt Tony Blair feels for his role in the destruction of Iraq cannot be assuaged by his turning to religion. This silliness that we label religion has been a destructive force in human history for millennia. It is time we grow up. And it is time Tony Blair grew up too. This devotion to the fantasies of ancient holy men no longer has a role in society and attempts to justify or rationalize them merely perpetuate injustice, inequality, and inhumanity.
Begging the question I am not going to comment on the issues raised except to say that I thought that the discussion was balanced and thought-provoking. However, I was dismayed by the following sentence: "For some, the arrangement (with Blair) begs the question, don’t discussions about good and evil come free at a place like Yale?" It appears that the magazine has capitulated to the current usage of "beg the question" to mean "raise or bring up the question." However, as almost any elementary logic book will point out, the term has traditionally referred to a logical fallacy in which the truth of what one is trying to prove is presupposed as a reason to accept it. This form of circular reasoning, also known by the Latin name petitio principii, is unfortunately all too common. The recent widespread misuse of "beg the question" to refer to asking a question rather than evading a question obscures the term’s original and useful meaning.
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Taking Blair on faith In 1996, the year before he became prime minister, Tony Blair published a collection of his speeches and articles under the title New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. Chapter 7 is titled "Why I Am a Christian." Much of it was first published on Easter 1996 in the Sunday Telegraph. An excerpt: First a politician’s health warning: I can’t stand politicians who wear God on their sleeves; I do not pretend to be any better or less selfish than anyone else; I do not believe that Christians should only vote Labour; and I do not discuss my religious beliefs unless asked, and, when I do, I discuss them personally. Of course, they influence my politics, but I do not wish to force them on anyone … Easter, a time of rebirth and renewal, has a special significance for me and, in a sense, my politics. My vision of society reflects a faith in the human spirit and its capacity to renew itself. … I am often asked how my religious convictions have played a role in the emergence of my political thinking. First, my view of Christian values led me to oppose what I perceived to be the narrow view of self-interest that Conservatism—particularly its modern, more right-wing form—represents. But Tories, I think, have too selfish a definition of self-interest. They fail to look beyond, to the community and the individual’s relationship with the community. That is the essential reason why I am on the Left rather than the Right. … Christianity is more than a one-to-one relationship between the individual and God, important as that is. The relationship also has to be with the outside world. Second, Christianity helped to inspire my rejection of Marxism. … The problem with Marxist ideology was that, in the end, it suppressed the individual by starting with society. But it is from a sense of individual duty that we connect the greater good and the interests of the community—a principle the Church celebrates in the sacrament of communion. |
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