Blair: the World’s Faith Healer · Issue 873, by Tim Hewish

Most former Prime Ministers retire gracefully, often preferring the green of a cricket pitch and a glass full of Pimm’s like that of John Major’s summer pursuits. However, Blair being Blair he has decided to knight himself as a 21st century Global Missionary.

He recently unveiled the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, in which its grandiose aim is to unite the world’s religions in addressing the most pressing social issues on the planet.

Blair was keen to stress that: “Faith is part of our future, the values it brings with it are an essential part of making globalisation work.”

The problem is try telling that to a Europe whose secular thought has been entrenched for almost 200 years, as the Enlightenment’s mind set has indeed become a belief in itself.

Blair’s utterances would be considered acceptable if he were a US politician – we regularly see Bush, Clinton, )(but perhaps Obama not so much) leaving church with a Bible under one arm.

Our press have sneered at his recent conversion to Catholicism, but now certain journalists are digging deeper to discover how important Blair’s faith has been to him throughout his life.

A quote from Cherie Blair says: “Religion is more important to Tony than anyone I had ever met outside the priesthood. Tony would spend hours talking about God and what we were here for. I don’t think it would be too strong to say it was this that brought us together.”

History has often been a cruel judge with regard to Religion, often highlighting its blood-lust nature, while skimming over its moralising force and, more importantly for Blair, its globalising force.

Long before we had TNC’s, NGO’s, the UN and digital communication, faith was the conduit through which markets, peoples and goods travelled through.

The major religions have had a global reach for centuries and it is this element that Blair wants to re-capture in a world that is uprooting people and bringing them together physically, but perhaps not so much spiritually.

The Foundation’s first active target is malaria prevention and Blair’s response is: “If you got churches and mosques working together to provide the bed nets that are necessary to eliminate malaria, what a fantastic thing that would be.”

His other major concern, on a more political front, is how there is a growing attitude of divergence between Americans and Europeans with regard to faith.

He states that it is Western Europe, not the US, who is out of step when it comes to religious observance.

But even in the most secular of nations, France’s Nickolas Sarkozy has recently called Europeans to view faith as an asset, not a danger.

The fundamentals Blair is trying to get across are that “in the rich world, without spiritual values, there is an emptiness that cannot be filled by material goods and wealth.”

He goes further by playing on this globalisation rhetoric “We must be global citizens as well as citizens of our country,” and perhaps co-operation between faiths, not nation states, is a way to galvanise this communitarian spirit.

In a somewhat hopeful zeal, Blair tries his hand at another ‘People’s Princess’ moment by exclaiming: “Idealism becomes the new realism.”

Such a philosophical transition will be tough for a world that has had its fair share of botched idealism, from Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and to some extent a faith like reverence for market forces to solve all our problems.

But perhaps we should give grass roots religion a try; despite probable retorts form Europeans, it is after all the fabled US notion of separation between Church and State which has been taken out of context.

What the deeply religious Founding Fathers objected to was having One Church gaining hegemony over all others, that is their meaning of religious freedom.

Where the State has been seen to have failed us in its demise in the 1980’s, the unfettered market principles put in place hasn’t been the Saviour we all expected it to be, as material progress hasn’t necessarily meant moral or social progress.

It is as if we now sit on a two legged stool, one being the State and other the Market, each has tried to support humanity’s full weight, but has been left wanting.

This is perhaps why both Brown and Cameron have had to move from their ideological moorings of Left and Right and drifted into the central ground, as neither arguments now seem strong enough; instead preferring a social capitalism over an economic one.

Maybe a counter-weight could well be the role grass roots religious and/or social groups playing a part in helping the global citizen deal with the dilemmas we face each day and Blair’s Foundation might just be that catalyst for change.