What will the verdict of history be on David Cameron?
What, in particular, might the verdict be sub specie aeternitatis? It should be good. Cameron is a Christian and, while in office, spoke frequently about his faith. “I’m a typical ‘Church of Englander’,” he said in an interview with the Church Times in 2011, “and I believe that there is a power greater than us and the life of work of Jesus Christ is an important guide to morality and action.”
In an interesting article on the Theos website, Nick Spencer itemises the former prime minister’s professions of faith. Cameron was aware that Britain was now home to different religious communities – he held receptions for Eid and for Diwali, and gave a message each year during Ramadan – but nonetheless insisted Britain remains a Christian country.
However, Spencer quotes Anthony Seldon, Cameron’s biographer, to the effect that his subject was “institutionally, but not spiritually religious”. Hence the concept of the Big Society, which Cameron promoted in the early days, a wish to enlist churches and other voluntary institutions in communal benevolence. Some Catholics saw it as an expression of the Church’s social teaching; its detractors, as a means to save on the cost of welfare. Whatever its intent, the idea was dropped: it would seem that we could not break our addiction to a welfare state.
Spencer suggests that Cameron’s willingness to talk about Christianity and faith was not in spite of his non-doctrinal approach to religion, but because of it. What Cameron himself called “wishy-washy Christianity” enabled him to make his own conscience the arbiter of what was right or wrong. It did not seem to trouble him that the leaders of almost all Christian denominations, including the Archbishops of Canterbury and the Pope, condemned his initiative to legalise same-sex marriage – a proposal which, as Spencer puts it, “came out of the blue”. Clearly, Cameron thought that there was no need for a Christian country to conform to Christian norms.
Many will remember Cardinal Vincent Nichols writing at the time of the passing of the Act that it destroyed the meaning of marriage as it had been understood for millennia, and made “people of faith … in these regards, strangers in their own land”. So much for the Big Society.
Only time will tell what effect the redefinition of marriage and parenthood, and same-sex adoption, will have on the well-being of society. Or perhaps time will not tell, because facts and statistics that contradict the current orthodoxies are likely to be suppressed. But there is one other area where the facts cannot be hidden: the fate of Christian communities in the Middle East. To this persecution – at times,
genocidal – the “wishy-washy Christian” Cameron seemed almost indifferent. He intervened in the Arab Spring, grandstanding in Cairo after the overthrow of President Mubarak, and ordering the RAF to bomb the forces of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya; and he would have bombed those of President Assad in Syria had not the House of Commons voted against it.
Cameron, and his then foreign secretary, William Hague, continued to insist that the sine qua non of any settlement in Syria was the deposition of Assad: Sir John Sawers, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Sir David Richards, Chief of the Defence Staff, were instructed to draw up plans to train and equip a moderate Syrian rebel army of 100,000 men.
This project, like the Big Society, was stillborn. There was no moderate opposition. Perhaps Cameron imagined that the Islamic faith of the Sunni Muslims who opposed Assad was as wishy-washy as his own Christian faith. If so, he was to be disillusioned – a learning curve that has cost the Syrian people dear. He ignored the protestations of the Christians in Syria that Assad’s regime, for all its shortcomings, was the best hope for the survival of their ancient communities. Paradoxically, it was left to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to become their protector. Unlike Cameron, he has listened to the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church such as the Patriarch Kirill, Metropolitan Hilarion and the Archpriest Nikolai Balashov.
Russia’s role as the protector of Christians in the Middle East was central to the discussions between Pope Francis and President Putin when the latter visited the Pontiff in November 2013. For Cameron, this might have seemed baffling: isn’t Putin one of the bad guys? Alas, when it comes to Syria, what Cameron or any British leader thinks no longer matters. Russia will be an arbiter in any final settlement of the Syrian civil war. Britain’s influence will be zero.
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