Johann Hari: The tricky question of Gordon Brown's God

And now, congregation, let us turn to the tricky question of Gordon Brown's God.

All Western European politicians now blessedly follow Alastair Campbell's famous injunction - "We don't do God" - in public, knowing that even a hint of theism creeps out their secular electorates. So Brown's surreal hustings speeches across the country, in which he valiantly campaigns against nobody, are far more likely to talk jobs than Job, more likely to name-drop ISAs than Isaac.

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But we cannot grasp what drives our soon-to-be Prime Minister without talking about his religion. Even more so than Tony Blair, Christianity is at the centre of his world-view. In a largely irreligious country, this is an anomaly - and a big deal. So what kind of God does Brown believe in, and how will this shape his Britain?

Most Europeans associate religion-in-politics with the foaming televangelists of the Bible Belt, who believe Jesus Christ is always on the ballot paper next to the box marked "Republican". Theirs is a Jesus who blesses the rich and bitch-slaps gays with his crown of thorns.

They are epitomised by the late Jerry Falwell, who proclaimed before the last presidential election: "I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. The Lord has just blessed [Bush] ... It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad." This is the kind of religious figure we left-wing atheists like to argue against. I'm with Christopher Hitchens, who declared, "It's such a shame there isn't a Hell for him to burn in."

But there is another political tradition within Christianity - and it is the one Brown belongs to. In the 19th century, English-speaking world, Christianity was seen largely as a force of the left, bolstering pro-poor, emancipationist movements.

After a long hibernation, where it slept only in the emptying pews of the Church of England, this strain of Christianity has been stirring once again. For example, over the past few years, there has been a historical rehabilitation on both sides of the Atlantic of William Jennings Bryan.

For 80 years, Bryan has been remembered mainly as the blustering fool who defended creationism and damned Darwin at the Scopes Trial. But increasingly, Bryan is being recalled also as the man who ran as Democratic candidate for President on a radical left-wing ticket, offering the first vision of an American welfare state. He always presented these as evangelical Christian ideas, announcing that the poor were being "crucified on a cross of gold". The churches flocked to him.

Brown grew up in the British version of this tradition. His father, John Brown, was, famously, a minister in the Church of Scotland, radicalised during the Second World War by being sent to Glasgow and witnessing the sunken poverty of the children there. In the early 1990s, Brown Jnr explained his dad's faith: "My father was more a social Christian than a fundamentalist. There was always a constant stream of people passing through our front door. As a child growing up in a minister's family, you get to see all the hardships that are going on around you at first hand. All of them had been hit hard."

Our next Prime Minister also identified with the rebellious, privilege-hating grassroots of the Church of Scotland. In 1843, the Church split when ordinary churchgoers insisted on their right to pick their own ministers, rather than have the aristocracy hand-pick one for them. As Brown summarised it happily: "They refused to be bound by the Lords." This blunt egalitarian persisted into Brown's youth.

But how does this affect his practical politics? The best hint can be found in Brown's little-noticed endorsement in 2005 of a book called God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it by the theologian Jim Wallis. The author damns the right for focusing "on sexual and cultural issues while ignoring the weightier matters of justice." So the book is an attack on Falwellian poison - but also on what it calls "secular fundamentalism." Secularists, Wallis writes, "mistakenly dismiss spirituality as irrelevant to social change." Wallis believes religion should be a presence perpetually motivating people to pursue "justice" for the poor.

He argues for a revived "prophetic religion", adding quickly: "Prophecy is not about future telling, but articulating moral truth. The prophets diagnose the present and point the way to a just solution." He argues that when societies were fairly equal, as revealed by Biblical archaeology, the Prophets did not emerge, because "they had nothing to say." Brown is, he claims, "listening to the message of the Biblical prophets" when he brilliantly slashes Africa's debts, doubles aid, and increases tax credits for poor kids here at home. (He is presumably defying it when he permits the super-rich to continue jaunting about all-but-untaxed). Wallis's favourite Biblical tradition is the Jubilee Year, where periodically the debts of the poor were cancelled, slaves were set free, and land was redistributed more fairly.

All this puts left-wing atheists like me in a quandary. I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking - it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up. Where does that end?

Yet at the same time, when there are so many Murdochian pressures on a British Prime Minister dragging him to the right, pressing him to fellate the rich, isn't it good to have a countervailing pressure to help the poor - even a superstitious one? If religion drives Brown's best instincts and whittles down his worst, should we still condemn it?

Perhaps the more important question is - can we have this benign, pro-poor element of Jesus' teaching, without all the other abhorrent lessons his religion brings? (Remember: Jesus said to follow "every jot and tittle" of the psychotic Old Testament.) Jim Wallis is anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, and on and on. Worryingly, we have little information on where Brown stands on these issues. He has not voted on a single one of the 18 pro-gay measures brought by the current government (although he did vote for an equal age of consent in 1994). Is this an oversight, or ambivalence?

There is another political bog that Brown's faith may suck him into: the expansion of faith schools. The Government is now promoting the division of Britain's kids into religious and ethnic educational enclaves, where they will not mix. This is a recipe for racial division and hatred, but Brown's bias towards faith as a positive force will almost certainly stop him secularising our schools.

So Gordon Brown's God is cantankerous and ambiguous. At His best, He likes to help the poor and hates hereditary privilege. At His worst, He likes dividing His flock into schools where He will be worshiped fulsomely in His many different guises. This God is alternately encouraging and disturbing - but we cannot understand our next Prime Minister without Him.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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