The public sector at prayer

The government’s fiercely secularist agenda has turned very few Christians into Tory voters. Damian Thompson asks
why the Churches have kept faith in New Labour

Gordon Brown’s Cabinet is the least Christian in British history. Its members sneer at the Churches’ teachings about sexuality. They bully faith schools with relish, making them talk to primary schoolchildren about sexual intercourse. They are just about to force Catholic schools to advise teenage girls on where to procure an abortion. They want to compel religious institutions to employ people whose beliefs run entirely counter to the values of those institutions. They favour ‘assisted dying’ and are surreptitiously working to enshrine it as a legal right. This is hard-edged, doctrinaire secularism of a variety that even Tony Blair couldn’t stomach. Admittedly, his government didn’t ‘do’ God, but this lot want to do Him in.

Britain’s Christians, you might expect, would be deserting Labour in droves.