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Doing God ? Religion & Public Policy in Brown?s Britain

Author:	Mark D Chapman
Published By:	Darton, Longman and Todd (London)
Pages:	150
Price:	£11.95
ISBN:	978 0 232 52744 5

Reviewed by Chris Skilton.

In the autumn of 2008 we have learned that half an hour is a long time in Britain’s economic and political life, which means that any book that aims to address an aspect of public life in Britain at the moment runs the risk of quickly being overtaken by events. Nevertheless Mark Chapman, Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon Theological College, has produced a book that asks some awkward questions of government and church. These will be pertinent whatever the turn of events, even if some of the key issues about local government funding take a different turn in a recession.

Chapman acknowledges that the first four chapters of his book arise from a  conference to mark Blair and New Labour’s ten years in government and the fifth  and sixth are a later piece of work seeking to engage with Rowan Williams now infamous ‘shariah law’ lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice in February 2008. While the subject matter is related, the join is discernible and the different origins of parts of the book need to be acknowledged.

The thesis of the book is that government policy about seeking to build community and the beloved mantra of ‘community cohesion’ is a nebulous and misguided attempt to address both the fragmentation of British society and a fundamental misunderstanding of the place that religion properly plays in the public sphere. Chapman addresses this by looking at some of the speeches made by both Blair and Brown on the subject and those of Hazel Blears (Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government). He identifies the dislocation between rhetoric which on the one hand seeks to see the truly local as the sphere of building cohesive life and that which seeks to affirm ‘Britishness’ and corporate identity.

It is in response to this that Chapman welcomes Rowan Williams’ concept of “interactive pluralism” which Williams has sought to promote in both the Anglican Communion and in British society. He uses Williams’ definition of this: “a situation in which difference is publicly acknowledged and given space, but not regarded as an excuse for ‘ghettoisation’ or exclusion from a serious degree of shared work, shared resources and mutual responsibility” (p.99).

Chapman recognises that, in the United Kingdom, both Islam and Christianity are minority religions in terms of active membership. However, contrary to the liberal, secular model of society, he argues that both should continue to uphold their place in the public and political realm. Chapman concludes that more effective power should be returned by central government to the local sphere in contrast to the present situation whereby local government is effectively simply engaged in the delivery of centrally set targets.

Readers of this book will get the impression that by Christian community Chapman seems to mean (whether he intends it or not) “the Church of England” and it would have been helpful to have had the perspective of both Free and especially black independent churches. That said, this is an important book - and packs a lot into its pages. There is a full and helpful bibliography, although it is strange to find a book on public religion with no mention of Newbigin, whose prophetic insights into the subject through the seventies and eighties are not far away.