Tories and the new evangelical right

[LeftishBrit]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/may/10/evangelical-religion-tory-conservatives

'Sensible people like John Gray see a real danger of a powerful American-style evangelical party emerging in the Conservative party as a result of David Cameron's failure to win the election outright. At first sight the election results don't bear this out. The highest-profile Conservative evangelical candidate, Philippa Stroud, failed to win Sutton and Cheam; while explicitly Christian candidates who ran outside the Conservative party did very badly indeed. The Cameron clique itself is overwhelmingly socially liberal, and his entire election strategy was built around appearing metropolitan and tolerant, the two things that evangelicals are not supposed to be.

But Cameron lost, and unless he can pull a stable and successful government out of the hat, large regions of his party will continue to hate him; among them places where Christians are very influential. ConservativeHome, the grassroots' website, is run by Tim Montgomerie, who founded the Conservative Christian Fellowship in 1990, and, with Philippa Stroud and Iain Duncan Smith, the Centre for Social Justice in 2005. These are quietly influential organisations. They're not nearly as fixated on abortion and sexuality generally as the American Christian right. But they do have an agenda which will be very attractive to a Tory government that knows it must hack away at welfare spending without provoking riots.'

This is all pretty scary. The religious intrusions were not as well-publicized to outsiders as it could have been. No, they have not had anything like the impact that they do in America and some other places. But they have made an impact already, and should not be able to make any more. I'm sure you're all sick of my rants about the mess in my own constituency; and I also blame myself for not realizing much earlier what was going on; but there probably *were* just enough leaflets smearing the secular socially (and generally) progressive candidate, in just enough of the right places (and *not* distributed in the places likely to rise up in outrage!) to make the difference. If this was repeated elsewhere - well, only a very few seats going the other way MIGHT have made some difference to what sort of government we got. A move to greater proportional representation would hopefully reduce the furtive, secretive element in all this, but would have its own potential dangers of possibly bringing in religious parties, equivalent to those who have exerted such a baleful influence on Israeli politics, for example. An acquaintance has already said to me that PR would be good because 'it would be good to have more parties, such as a Christian Party'.

And even when religious-right candidates lose their elections, they can still retain political influence. Philippa Stroud, who belonged to a church that believed in curing gays by exorcizing their demons, failed to win the seat in Sutton and Cheam; but she has been appointed as an advisor to the Works and Pensions Secretary. VERY scary.

I hope that there will be co-ordinated efforts to resist these fundie intrusions into our politics, before they become more serious. If anyone know of any groups or campaigns already dealing seriously with this, I'd be interested to know.

[fedsron2us]

1. Too many sinners in the Tory party for evangelicals to prosper

so I could not see them even becoming Christian Democrats. It has always been a 'Christian' party in so far as it is wedded to the idea of monarchy and the established Anglican Church even when its leaders have been Jews or Catholics. Although the party appears to share much in common with the Republican right in the USA its roots are in a completely different place. Moreover all Tories will remember the untold electoral damage that Major's ill advised dabbling with family values did to the party. The British have a deep and profound historic distrust of all priests, bishops, popes, ministers, rabbis , imams and mullahs who would lecture them on their moral failings. This anti clerical tradition gives them the ability to smell out a religious hypocrite 200 miles away, something which our American cousins sadly lack.