Why is it that commentators can't resist drawing parallels between British and American politics? That habit is deeply rooted in our common heritage, surely, but in our time it can be traced to the advent of the "special relationship" between President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. That theme once established, journalists purported to hear like calling to like in the ineptitudes of John Major and George Bush, and are now remarking on the transatlantic symmetries of the Clinton-Blair era.

It is true that there are certain parallels between President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair. Both are young and charismatic, both have sought to move their parties to the center of their respective constituencies, and both have done so by appropriating the economic agenda of their opponents. But an emphasis on these similarities obscures important differences between the two leaders--differences that evangelical Christians would be wise to heed.

Tony Blair, unlike Bill Clinton, has succeeded in unifying and moving his party into the mainstream. Blair, unlike President Clinton in either term, has received a mandate from the British electorate, with a margin of more than 250 seats over the Conservatives in the 659-seat Parliament. Most important, Blair's governing philosophy is theologically grounded in a tradition that views civil society, instead of the state or the economy, as the foundation of public order. This is precisely why Blair has taken great pains to emphasize to the left wing of his party that "a strong society should not be confused with a strong state," while at the same time he disparages the Right for a narrow self-interest "that fails to look beyond to the community."

During his years as a student at Oxford University, Blair was exposed to the writings of a twentieth-century Christian philosopher from Scotland by the name of John Macmurray. Blair has cited two of Macmurray's works, Persons in Relation and Self as Agent, as seminal in his thinking on the intersection of church and society. In these texts, influenced by Reformed theological assumptions, Macmurray affirms that the message of the Christian gospel is central to the salvation of individual souls, but he warns against an excessive preoccupation with personal piety. Macmurray argues that the Christian life is not centered on the self. The church is not the domain of the individual or of any single group based upon kinship, ethnicity, or class. Instead, the church is Christ's agent that seeks to overcome such barriers, which are a direct result of the Fall. Macmurray underscores the fact that the gospel is primarily concerned with "the new community" that has not yet been fulfilled by the church.

Given that Macmurray's writings were published in the 1930s and '40s, one might think that his solution is to involve the state in the project of creating this "new community." But Macmurray rejects both the state and the economy as anything but limited actors in the construction of moral communities. To his way of thinking, the church bears the primary burden of the task of creating and sustaining society, and yet Macmurray was aware that the church had retreated from its mission of ordering the Creation here on earth. Macmurray laments that

[t]he Church has created the demand for the classless society of a universal brotherhood in the hearts of men, but has bidden men look to the secular power for the ordering of life on earth. The Church itself has decided that the effort to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth shall be purely a secular effort, and that so far as it distracts men's minds from the pursuit of spiritual aims it is an effort which she must condemn and oppose.

In the midst of the great air war over London in 1941, Macmurray published his "Challenge to the Churches," indicting both Catholics and Protestants for their complicity in the rise of fascism in Europe. But this document also urged that Christians "not be discouraged by the palpable inadequacy of the existing Christian institutions. . . . Christianity has in the past shown an incomparable capacity for transforming and regenerating itself in the face of just such crises; and it has in its profession, in its history, and in its underlying universality and humanity the starting point and standing ground for the task of recreating the inner unity of Christendom."

Macmurray's interpretation of the gospel as both spiritually and socially relevant informs Blair's vision for New Labor. Indeed, Blair has made no secret of his Christian faith (although in the course of his campaign he increasingly played down connections between Christian conviction and specific policy stances--in studied contrast, observers suggested, to the leaders of the American Religious Right). Unlike the United States, Great Britain is unequivocally secular. In 1990, only 18.2 percent of the British population showed high levels of religious commitment, in comparison to 49.5 percent of the U.S. population. Blair's faith, then, offers no great political leverage; if anything, it goes against the grain.

Blair's understanding of the gospel in society is the reason he can find common ground with many of Margaret Thatcher's ideas about the limited utility of the state in shaping the social order. At an address in Australia, Blair identified what he perceived to be at the core of Old Labor's blunders, which led to the Conservative ascendancy under Thatcher. In the sixties and seventies, the Left developed--almost in substitution for its economic prescriptions, which by then were conspicuously failing--a type of social individualism that confused liberation and prejudice with disregard for moral structures. It fought for racial and sexual equality, which was entirely right. It appeared indifferent to the family and individual responsibility, which was wrong.

Blair himself has been accused of being a "Marxist in Christian vestments," a Thatcherite, and Clintonesque. The wide variation in these characterizations indicates either that Blair is very confused, or that the pundits have not made a very careful study of the man and his ideas. Blair seems to have exposed what Mary Ann Glendon refers to as "the missing dimension of Sociality" in the Anglo-American political lexicon. Our political categories seem incapable of creating space for anything but free markets or coercive states. Time will tell if Blair is capable of translating his vision into meaningful policies amid the tangled alliances and inevitable compromises of government--and under the unforgiving strobe-lit scrutiny of the British media. (You think the Clintons have it tough? You should see the British papers.) From this side of the Atlantic, it should be a very interesting experiment to follow.

Michael LeRoy is assistant professor of political science at Wheaton College.

(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books and Culture Magazine. July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 6

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