Simon Barrow (London, Ekklesia): Amid dramatic scenes at the normally placid Westminster Cathedral, Tony Blair has declared his own "sense of mission" for making the world a better place and has said that religion, starting with his own newly minted Catholicism, can be instrument for achieving peace, world development and general niceness.
But what kind of religion, what kind of mission and what kind of peace is he really basing his aspirations on? Behind emollient words against extremism lies the chaos of Iraq, the ideology of "liberal interventionism" (which turns love of neighbour into bombing people to make them good) and a theology of superpower convenience.
Back in the early1980s, a group of distinguished South African theologians - mostly Christian, but with backing from some critical Muslim and Jewish voices - produced a powerful declaration called The Kairos Document. The Greek word 'kairos', used frequently in the New Testament, is often rendered to mean "the moment of choice or crisis". The purpose of the document was to call upon the churches to unite definitively against the evil of apartheid.
In seeking this end the authors distinguished between three types of theology, three varieties of religious rationale, caught up in the power politics of the moment. "State theology," they said, was Christian thought made subservient to the interests of the masters. "Church theology" was the well-meaning niceness of those who refused to recognise that cosy religious mingling was no antidote to oppression. And "prophetic theology" was the option of the minority, who recognised that the Gospel message was implacably opposed to greed and racism - the heart and foundation of the document's appeal.
These categories, sharply drawn in moments of decision, less obvious when calm appears to reign, are important today in understanding Tony Blair's religious agenda. His global political project seeks reconciliation in a time of violence and division, and does so through a theology which speaks peace but has rendered itself ineffective by becoming a tool of mass violence - the kind of superpower violence which, ironically, mirrors and reinforces the very asymmetric violence of terror (based on twisted religion) that it deploys itself against.
In pronouncing a message of "good will to us and our kind, or else" (which sounds similar to "peace on earth, goodwill to humankind" but is fatally different), Mr Blair's venture into the pulpit of a huge cathedral was met by two kinds of protests. Anti-war activists noisily denounced the theology of war (though they didn't call it that) while some of them would equivocate on its reciprocal ideology in the hands of their own allies. Meanwhile, Pax Christi, part of an international grassroots peace and justice movement in the Catholic Church, decided that critical moral silence was the best part - refusing to trade words when they are in danger of being so abused.
So Tony Blair's global corrective mission goes on, and in its face the famous Alastair Campbell retort ("we don't do God") will not suffice. Whether we like it or not, God continues to be "done" on a massive scale, and all the Dawkinseque denunciations in the world will not alter that fact. The key question, for those to whom religious conviction continues to matter, is "what kind of religion, to what ends and by what means?"
