Comment: Beware the religious right red-herring
Do we need to worry about the rise of a divisive right-wing network?
By Paul Bickley
Last week's abortion debate was the latest in a long line of issues to prompt fears that Europe and the UK are growing their own 'religious right'.
For concerned liberal commentators, last week's attempted amendment to the health and social care bill was proof that some British politicians are "adopting the Christian-right's anti women attitudes" at the behest of a "small, vocal, venal group of Christian conservative lobbyists". The only sure safeguard is to ensure that we "keep 'faith' out of politics". Do we need to worry about the rise of a divisive right-wing network, setting itself up against hard won and cherished rights?
That this apparently modest amendment on counselling services should give occasion for such fierce debate is surprising. But having attempted previously to lower the 24-week limit for abortions, Nadine Dorries – sponsor of the amendment – was already a persona non grata amongst pro-choice campaigners. Although she claims to be pro-choice, she is also known to have a close relationship with Christian Concern, which is firmly pro-life. The same agency is thought to be one of the primary backers of the Right to Know campaign, which organised in support of the amendment.
Christian Concern has also taken up a series of religious freedom cases, some of which have been financial supported by the US based Alliance Defence Fund. In the United States, the ADF has supported a series of supreme court cases seeking to win promoting religious freedom, pro-life and pro-marriage perspectives.
So there we have it – a straight line drawn from the forces of religious conservatism in the US to their co-belligerents in the UK, from the toxic religious politics of the US to a counselling amendment to the health and social care bill. Does this mean we're heading for a US-style culture war, where evangelicalism and other socially conservative Christian groups seek to capture the public agenda – not just on abortion, but across a broad range of policy issues, from education (free schools), to public service provision, to constitutional reform?
Let's make no bones about it, there are people who hold all sorts of very conservative views on a range of social issues – often their views are informed by their religious commitments and experience. But it's their democratic privilege to hold them, and their democratic privilege to work with like-minded political representatives on changing relevant legislation. That is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the existence of a religious right, and their mere existence should cause no-one to call foul.
Reflecting on the religious politics of the US, there are a series of other criteria which would need to be fulfilled. The foremost amongst these would be an identifiable and influential block vote, such that it becomes possible for a political party to use divisive issues to leverage significant electoral support. There is no such block vote in the UK. Theos research, commissioned before the last election, found small biases here and there, but nothing that could compare to the US evangelicalism's support for the GOP. Even in the US, the picture is far more complicated than we often give credit – in the 2008 presidential election, there were a series of socially conservative religious communities (black Pentecostals, for instance) which backed Obama even more strongly than white evangelicals backed McCain. It doesn't take a psephological genius to see that even where religious belief seems to be a key driver, it can be a proxy of other demographic factors.
Evangelicalism is not numerically insignificant in the UK – there might be as many as two million – but they are geographically, politically and ideologically evenly distributed. Their votes are split fairly proportionately amongst political parties, and even on an issue like abortion only 37% agree that abortion can never be justified – much higher than the general public, to be sure, but much lower than the comparable US figure (recent estimates at 67%). Unlike the US, their broader opinions do not tend to package neatly into a right of centre whole – as well as being anti-abortion, they might be anti-capital punishment, anti-war or anti-capitalist.
As with the religious voters, so with the elected representatives. In the US the pro-choice platform is largely, though not exclusively, the preserve of the GOP, and thus an issue of the religious right. The parliamentary picture here is very different. There is a principle minority of parliamentarians from across political parties who are pro-life, and on a host of other policy issues they might take divergent views. The current chairman of the all-party parliamentary life group is a Labour MP, and for a long time the pro-life cause was led by David Alton – a canny Liberal and later Liberal Democrat politician.
There are plenty of religious people who want to influence a range of policy positions – and, if they can do so within the bounds of the democratic process, why shouldn't they?
But the oft-repeated claim that there is a coherent and organised network driven by a growing conservative religious base, machinating behind the scenes, waiting to lay hold of the levers of power in a way that is corrosive of public debate or the broader political culture, is either fearful misunderstanding, a deliberate misrepresentation or a mix of the two.
Given the unusual heat generated by debates around abortion, the latter is a more likely explanation. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed: "Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities." Her point was not that politicians were, in the sense of their own character, mendacious and habitual deceivers, but that politics and truth are antithetical. Politics is about creating convincing narratives – and facts are servants to that cause, not masters.
Paul Bickley is senior researcher at Theos, the public theology think tank.
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