Better a hypocrite than a man who fears God?
Michael Portillo, a former Conservative Party MP and Cabinet member, writing in the Sunday Times on the weekend, opened his article with this extraordinary, attention-grabbing paragraph:
When last week David Cameron [the current Conservative leader] revealed that he hopes his daughter will go to a Church of England school, his aides rushed to say that he attends Sunday worship in Kensington not as a ploy to help her chances but out of genuine religious conviction. I would be more reassured to hear that the Tory leader goes to church because that is what it takes to get a child into the best of state schools, not because he is a believer.
As Al Mohler points out in his blog, “Mr. Portillo clearly would prefer Mr. Cameron to be a hypocrite than a believer in God.”
Portillo makes the extraordinary claim that God-fearers (and he cites Blair and Bush as his examples) are dangerous, because they are concerned about God being their guide and their judge. He claims that “[t]hose who look for judgment not from the electorate or parliament or a free press but from God release themselves from the constraints of democracy.”
Such a release will come as something of a surprise to Blair and Bush, who no doubt continue to strongly feel the political consequences of their decision-making. Perhaps any lessening of their anxiety over being judged by the electorate springs more from their imminent retirements from politics.
Portillo shows the paucity of his understanding of religious differences when he says:
Britons should worry that religion and politics could again be bound together. If moderation and secularism have been overturned in parts of the Muslim world, why should not the same thing happen in Christian societies?
The answer is, of course, that Christianity is different at its very core to Islam, even if politicians and the media continue with the nonsense of suggesting that “fundamentalism” of any religion is the danger. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said, “the basic tenets of Islam and the basic tenets of Western liberal democracies are incompatible”. That is not the case with Christianity; rather, Christianity has a strong claim to being the source of many of the principles of Western liberal democracy, including the separation of church and state.
Portillo's views need to be challenged and questioned. He puts forward the proposition that “it is fundamental to our society's survival that most people should distinguish good from bad”, without giving any indication of how he proposes to assess what constitutes good and bad.
Portillo goes on to say: “My guess is that historians will look back on the early 21st century in puzzlement. How was it possible, they will ask, that man had such deep scientific understanding but clung so tenaciously to his gods?”
His problem, of course, is that by looking only to science, he will not find help in distinguishing between good and bad. Perhaps that provides a clue for him as to why people cling to their gods.
The Bible rings with the message that true wisdom begins with the “fear of the Lord”. But it doesn't end there. God-fearing politicians worth their salt know that. Such people do not need to be feared. Far more dangerous are the politicians who only fear the electorate and the parliament and the free press; they are the ones, who, given the right conditions, may well corrupt the elections, take a stranglehold on power, ban the free press, and then ravage their own people for their own selfish gain. Do I need to cite names from history?
To demonstrate the point, perhaps just go to see two new movies soon to hit our screens and contrast the one about William Wilberforce (Amazing Grace), with the other about Idi Amin (The Last King of Scotland).