For God and country: is religion in politics making a comeback?

The UK has elected "the most openly secular House of Commons in history", according to a new study.

Two in five MPs taking their seats in Parliament opted not to swear an oath to God, including the prime minister, said Humanists UK.

For some Christians, this signals a "post-Christian society in which the undeniably secular world of Westminster is the vanguard", said Church Times.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Dirty secret?

Although many UK politicians are Christian, it's long been argued that "talking about religion can only alienate and damage your prospects", said Fraser Nelson in The Telegraph, so faith needed to be kept as a "dirty secret" in Westminster.

But the old Alastair Campbell line when talking about Tony Blair's New Labour government – "we don't do God" – now "looks dated". In recent years there has been "a Muslim in London City Hall, a Hindu in No 10" and "a Buddhist in the Home Office", all voted in by an electorate who "couldn't care less about how any of them pray".

In the West the "barriers between politics and religion have been disappearing", said a leader article in the Financial Times, and a "traditionalist" reaction "can be seen in phenomena as superficially different" as the "nostalgia of Europe's populist right" or the "undermining of abortion rights in the US".

In fact, said Church Times, there is more religion in the new Labour government than the Humanist UK study suggested. Foreign Secretary David Lammy is a Christian and he is "far from the only" believer "at the heart" of the new administration. Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, Douglas Alexander, Jonathan Reynolds, Stephen Timms, Bridget Phillipson, Pat McFadden, Sue Gray and Matthew Doyle are among the key figures who believe in God. So Christian faith "might influence decision-making among certain ministers", it added.

Significant headwinds

But a recent study found that the public might not be ready to fully embrace more religion in politics. Researchers for the Theos think tank said that religion in politics is "deemed acceptable in the abstract", but "if practised a certain way opposition becomes much sharper".

So any religious politicians with socially conservative views "will face significant headwinds" and "won't just face pressure from party or media elites" but also from "voters in general".

Politicians who evoke God certainly still risk being mocked. Following the recent assassination attempt on him, Donald Trump said he was "not supposed to be here" at the Republican National Convention, adding: "I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God."

But Trump's "grasp of theology is bizarre", said Freddy Gray in The Spectator, because "if an all-powerful God wanted him to survive, surely he was meant to be there"?

The secular nature of the current House of Commons is "a good thing, in one respect", said Theo Hobson in The Spectator, because "it is, on the whole, good for democracy if MPs reflect the attitudes of the nation" and it now seems that "over half of the nation are non-religious".