Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Wheatcroft, The Church in England: Downright Un-American, New York Times, November 25, 2007

The authoritative Catholic paper The Tablet of London now writes that, some time before Christmas, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair will at last be received into the Roman Catholic Church by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

The historical resonances and political overtones of this are as significant as the event itself — which also illustrates again the great trans-Atlantic gulf. Not only are the English now a notably irreligious people; in striking contrast to America, religion plays no part in British political life.

For years it has been rumored that Blair would one day convert, the culmination of a journey that began when he discovered religion at Oxford. An Australian clergymen named Peter Thomson introduced him to the work of another writer. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Mr. Blair has said. “It’s all there.”

Little read now, Macmurray was an academic theologian and proponent of “communitarianism” who died at 85 in 1976. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Mr. Blair. George Orwell, for one, was suspicious of Macmurray as a “decayed liberal” who was even susceptible to totalitarian rhetoric.

However that may be, Mr. Blair joined the High or “Anglo-Catholic” wing of the Church of England, whose adherents, from John Henry Newman on, have been inclined “to pope” (as they used to say) and go the whole way. His wife, Cherie Booth, is a Catholic, and for years he went to Mass with her and their children, even taking holy communion, irregularly and sacrilegiously in Catholic eyes.

All of which sets him far apart from his compatriots. When an interviewer once tried to raise the question of faith, Mr. Blair’s press officer, Alastair Campbell, snapped, “We don’t do God,” and on that occasion at least he was quite right.