Tony Blair’s faith was long on zeal but light on self-awareness

[rug]

Jul 6th 2016, 12:07
BY ERASMUS

AS TONY BLAIR faces the verdict of the Chilcot enquiry on his actions in the Iraq war, there will be many questions about the role played by his spiritual convictions in the way he made decisions and presented them. The ex-prime minister’s faith is also the subject of an essay published this week by Theos, a London-based religious think-tank; as part of a series of essays on heads of governments and their metaphysical beliefs.

Among world leaders of recent years, Mr Blair has a unique relationship with religion. His Christian faith is passionate, so much so that during his tenure as prime minister, from 1997 to 2007, his advisers had to restrain him from making overt references to God which would have sounded strange to many voters’ ears. Yet this was not the deep, unselfconscious faith of somebody who had emerged from a devout environment and therefore imbibed an intuitive feeling for the fixed meaning of sacraments and dogmas.

Rather, Mr Blair’s is an acquired religion. Mr Blair was strongly influenced by an Australian chaplain at Oxford University, Peter Thomson, and was confirmed in the Anglican church in his college chapel. Much later, after leaving office, he became a Catholic, adopting the lifelong religion of his wife, Cherie. But whenever he speaks on matters of faith and conscience, it is often in a liberal Protestant spirit: one that shows no deference to an inherited body of doctrine and assumes that people can pick and mix religious ideas as circumstances, and the climate of opinion, change.

The idea that religious doctrine is negotiable has been carried over into Mr Blair’s thinking about Islam. Both as prime minister and as founder of a think-tank called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, he has been very much open to the idea that the causes of global terrorism lie not in geopolitical grievance or nihilistic personalities but in bad Islamic theology, whose antidote is to be found in good Islamic theology and scholarship. This is not a wrong idea, but he sometimes overstates its importance.

As the Theos essay points out, Mr Blair came from a relatively unchurched household. His father Leo was a non-believer; his mother Hazel was “religious though not church-going” but apparently taught him the habit of prayer. He seems not to have been touched by the religious practices of the schools he attended. At university, though, his Australian mentor introduced him to a politically engaged form of faith, and in particular to a philosopher called John Macmurray. Macmurray stressed (as have many other contemporary thinkers, in critical reaction to an atomistic age) that individuals can only express their full humanity in relation to others. But as the essay acknowledges, there are questions about how deeply Mr Blair understood Macmurray’s thinking. Where the philosopher presented altruism as a path to a higher self, Mr Blair sometimes seemed to put more stress on enlightened self-interest.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/07/tony-blair-and-religion

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2016/07/04/the-mighty-and-the-almighty-tony-blair

[merrily]

1. Lack of self awareness. Is that what the kids are calling war crimes these days?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. He has been saying he acted in 'good faith' quite a lot

Whether it's just a convenient phrase he's settled on, or whether he wants us to think of religious faith and that this excuses him, I can't tell. But he's been saying it a lot:

The key feature of the long press conference, though, was Blair ruminating constantly on whether he had acted in good faith when taking the decision to go to war. He seems tortured by this question, and more specifically by the fear that people don’t believe that he meant well when he did what he did. It’s almost as though the criticisms about poor planning and lax Whitehall discipline mean very little next to the suggestion that in his heart of hearts, his motives are wrong.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/tony-blairs-rumination-good-faith/

The report should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit. Whether people agree or disagree with my decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein; I took it in good faith and in what I believed to be the best interests of the country.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/chilcot-report-published-read-tony-blairs-statement-in-full-a7122581.html

He said that "I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you may ever know, or can believe," for all the things that went wrong.

But, he added: "I did not mislead this country. I made the decision in good faith." And he said the world was a safer place without Saddam, whom he labelled "a wellspring of terror."

http://www.thespec.com/news-story/6756393-uk-report-slams-iraq-war-blair-says-he-acted-in-good-faith/

But Mr Blair told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he should not be accused of lying: 'I can regret the mistakes and I can regret many things about it but I genuinely believe, not just that we acted out of good motives, and I did what I did out of good faith, but I sincerely believe that we would be in a worse position if we hadn't acted that way. I may be completely wrong about that.

'I understand that people still disagree but at least do me the respect - as I respect your position - of reading my argument.

'If all of these debates are conducted around character and good faith, if you are not careful you end up a casualty of a debate that is all about that type of invective, you are then unable to have a proper debate about the difficulty of dealing with this issue.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3678498/Tony-Blair-demands-critics-respect-insists-150-000-lives-not-lost-vain-catastrophic-Iraq-adventure.html

"There were no lies, parliament and cabinet were not misled, there was no secret commitment to war. The intelligence was not falsified and the decision was made in good faith," said Blair, who was prime minister for Labour from 1997 to 2007.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-3676325/Blair-spotlight-UK-Iraq-inquiry-gives-verdict.html

[rug]

3. That sounds like the last defense of a man who knows he was lethally wrong.