The Political Samaritan: How power hijacked a parable

By Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer sets out to rescue an innocent parable, mugged for political ends, ignored by passers-by, and then left for half-dead at the edge of the English language.

The parable of the Good Samaritan has been used by almost every major British politician over recent years – from Theresa May and Tony Blair to Margaret Thatcher and Jeremy Corbyn. But they don't all use it to say the same thing.

Discussing the various figures who've politicised the Samaritan, Spencer – described by the Economist as 'like a prophet crying in the post-modern wilderness' – explains why and how Jesus' famous parable got mixed up in politics. From abolitionists to warmongers, prime ministers to activists such as Dr Martin Luther King, he uncovers the reasons for the parable's popularity – and then asks the killer question: who gets it right?

If the Good Samaritan has been dragged on to the political stage, whose side is he on?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781472942203

Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos, the Christian think tank. He is the author of a number of books and reports, including Magisteria (Oneworld, 2023), The Evolution of the West (SPCK, 2016), Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Darwin and God (SPCK, 2009). Outside of Theos, Nick is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion.

Book preview

THE POLITICAL

SAMARITAN

THE POLITICAL SAMARITAN

How power hijacked a parable

NICK SPENCER

Contents

The parable of the Good Samaritan

1 ‘He welcomed them and spoke to them’

Talking God

Talking politics

The words we live by

A divine register

2 ‘They did not understand what this meant’

Introducing the political Samaritan

The parliamentary Samaritan

The Thatcherite Samaritan

The Labour Samaritan

The contemporary Samaritan

Conclusion

3 ‘How do you read it?’

Arriving at the parable

Enter the lawyer

The parable

A priest and a Levite were walking along a road ...

Samaritans

The ‘Good’ Samaritan

So, you can see, the parable obviously means . . .

Church interpretations

Conclusion

4 ‘Go and do likewise’

Who’s right?

Christianity in the UK

Reasonable political language

Politics

Political rhetoric

Postscript: Picking up a half-dead metaphor

Acknowledgements

Notes

A Note on the Author

‘I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old.’

PSALM 78.2 (KJV)

‘It’s interesting that nowadays politicians want to talk about moral issues and bishops want to talk politics.’

SIR HUMPHREY APPLEBY, ‘THE BISHOP’S GAMBIT’ (YES, PRIME MINISTER)

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

²⁵ On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ²⁶ ‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’ ²⁷ He answered, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbour as yourself.’ ²⁸ ‘You have answered correctly,’ Jesus replied. ‘Do this and you will live.’

²⁹ But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ ³⁰ In reply Jesus said: ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half-dead. ³¹ A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³² So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³ But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴ He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵ The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. Look after him, he said, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have. ³⁶ Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ ³⁷ The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

Luke 10.25–37

ONE

‘He welcomed them and spoke to them’

TALKING GOD

The British should make up their minds: do we or don’t we?

Some points, at least, are clear. Britain is not America, a country in which any aspiring politician must, in theory, genuflect before Bible and altar, no matter how dissolute or godless a life they may have lived. The reality is slightly different. Bernie Sanders, for example, made it to within a whisper of the presidential campaign in 2016 despite not attending church or synagogue, rarely speaking about religion, and describing himself as ‘not particularly religious’.¹ Contemporary America is not the cultural theocracy its critics imagine. Bernie Sanders notwithstanding, however, it is clear that, as a rule, Americans do.

Nor, by contrast, is Britain France, with its fiercely policed laïcité, in which public expressions of religiosity are deemed not only inappropriate but somehow threatening to the values of the Republic. Again, this is in theory. Nicolas Sarkozy made Catholic noises during his presidency, and François Fillon looked to be heading to the Élysée Palace, partly on the strength of his own Catholicism and the traditional Catholic vote, before his campaign imploded.² Nevertheless, however much God may lurk in the shadowy corners of French politics, it is clear that, by and large, the French don’t.

The British, by contrast, drift somewhere between the two in the north Atlantic, quietly, culturally and constitutionally Christian and yet sensibly, shrewdly and soberly secular.

For a generation now, Alastair Campbell’s best-known aphorism – ‘We don’t do God’ – has served as shorthand for Britain’s theo-political mentality: Tony Blair, British politicians en masse, indeed even the entire British public don’t, in principle, like to mix religion and politics. The reality is, once again, somewhat murkier.

In the first instance, Campbell himself has often remarked that ‘We don’t do God’ is not only one of his ‘most reused’ soundbites but also one of his most ‘misunderstood’. He never intended the phrase to be a statement of principle, a pronouncement of secular orthodoxy made ex cathedra; rather, it was only ‘to stop a long interview with Tony Blair’.³ ‘We’re not getting on to God right now’ might be an accurate translation.

In the second instance, the evidence suggests that British political leaders do ‘do God’ and have, if anything, become more religious over the post-war period.⁴ Prime ministers offer a litmus test. Clement Attlee claimed he was ‘incapable of religious experience’ and memorably remarked that he ‘believed in the ethics of Christianity [but] can’t believe in the mumbo-jumbo’.⁵ Churchill passed through ‘a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase’⁶ in his youth but regained a faith in Providence, if not in God or eternal life.⁷ Anthony Eden was much closer to his father’s atheism than his mother’s Anglicanism.

Thereafter, however, there was Harold Macmillan, a lifelong and devout Anglo-Catholic, ‘who took the New Testament with him to the trenches’.⁸ And Alec Douglas-Home, a Scottish Episcopalian, whose faith was sincere if private. And Harold Wilson, who was brought up a nonconformist, joined the evangelical Oxford Group at university, and claimed that his ‘religious beliefs . . . very much affected my political views’, a claim, like many of Wilson’s, that was distrusted by his colleagues.⁹ And Edward Heath, who was briefly news editor of the Church Times,¹⁰ cited the influence of Archbishop William Temple, and wrote in his autobiography that ‘my Christian faith provided foundations for my political beliefs’.¹¹ And James Callaghan, who served as a Sunday school teacher, but drifted from his faith in later life only to reflect in his autobiography that he was never able to shake off a sense of guilt at having wandered from Christianity.¹²

Since Callaghan, British PMs have, if anything, become more religious still. Thatcher’s fierce late-Victorian Methodism was foundational to her politics. Major’s faith was rather more tepid and hesitant. Blair was an adult convert, his communitarian thinking of the 1990s grounded in the personalism of Christian philosopher John Macmurray, filtered through the Rev Peter Thompson at Oxford. Gordon Brown was a son of the manse, albeit one more comfortable talking about his father’s religion than his own, more cultural, Presbyterianism. David Cameron’s Anglicanism was similarly cultural and undogmatic, famously coming and going like Magic FM in the Chilterns. And Theresa May is a clergyman’s daughter, a practising Anglican and someone who claims Christianity as foundational to her political worldview. All in all, this is not a list of politicians unaware of or indifferent to God, or keen to exclude him from their political considerations. In this regard, British politics – or, at least, those who reach its summit – clearly do ‘do God’.

And yet, the popular understanding of Alastair Campbell’s maxim is also right. However pious they may be, British political leaders do seem to have difficulty talking about God. Unlike the people who God berates through the prophet Isaiah, British politicians fail to honour me with their lips, even if their hearts are close to me.

This is not uniformly the case: Thatcher delivered several theo-political lectures; Cameron said a surprising amount about his and his country’s Christianity; Brown was unashamed about the formative role faith played in his politics, and May adopts the same approach. Nevertheless, apart from such occasional rhetoric and personal asides, Tony Blair’s post-office remark that ‘it’s difficult [to] talk about religious faith in our political system . . . [because if you do] frankly, people do think you’re a nutter’ is pretty much on the mark. Talking God, Bible or religion sets people thinking that you are somehow subverting the proper processes of liberal democracy; in Blair’s words: that you like to ‘go off and sit in the corner . . . commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say right, I’ve been told the answer’.¹³ Worse still, it can sounds like ‘preaching’, in the more colloquial sense of that word, ‘imposing’ your ‘private’ views on the public, or ‘disrespecting’ other members of the electorate who don’t share your faith.

How far people really do think this is questionable. There are good reasons to believe that the British public is less nervous about ‘doing God’ than we imagine, not least as a majority of them still choose some form of Christian affiliation when asked. There are equally good reasons to think that the blockage in fact lies with a media-class that is woefully unrepresentative of the religious make-up and identity of the nation.¹⁴ Be that as it may, the British position seems to be that however much politicians might do God in their hearts and minds, they shouldn’t talk about him in public.

For all that, however, ‘God-talk’ and ‘Bible-bashing’, or at least Bible-tapping, remains. This book is about one particular Bible story that remains completely immune to the unwritten guidelines about doing God in public. It is a parable that, in spite of its extremely demanding ethical message – one might even say its preachy tone – remains astonishingly popular; a parable that, despite its rather disputed meaning, is seized – one might even say hijacked – by politicians across the spectrum for a bewildering range of purposes; and a parable that retains its power to inspire, in spite, or perhaps because, of the state of our public discourse today.

TALKING POLITICS

That state is not a happy one. Writing in the Telegraph in 2008, Andrew Roberts lamented the absence of electrifying parliamentarians.¹⁵ ‘Why is reading Hansard akin to ingesting a company’s report and accounts, when in earlier periods of our history it read like life-enhancing literature?’ he asked.

His impression, if rhetorically a bit rich, is not an isolated one, nor one that is isolated to parliament. By many accounts, the accuracy, tone, depth, intent and style of wider political, and public, language is worse still, even before we get to the nadir of ‘post-truth’ politics. Mark Thompson, former Director General of the BBC and currently Chief Executive of the New York Times, wrote a whole book in 2016, sub-titled What’s Gone Wrong With the Language of Politics. The book bears the hallmarks of its year of publication. Political language – not just the language of politicians but language about our shared social and political goods – Thompson argues, is scarred by rage, incomprehension, exaggeration and aggression, an arms race of lurid claims and counter-claims, a powerful rhetoric of anti-rhetoric, a much-thinned-out common vocabulary, a much-ignored set of rules for communication, and an endemic lack of trust in one another, indeed a presupposition of untruth. Even if one demurs from Thompson’s slightly apocalyptic register, his picture of the public language-scape is a recognisable one. Political speeches weren’t necessarily better in the past, but political speech is surely more difficult today.

There are lots of possible reasons for this, but Thompson (among others) highlights the particular impact of public distrust and fragmentation. True communication is ultimately dependent on trust, and trust is predicated on the sense that the other is for me or with me, rather than indifferent to or against me. Good communication needs the faith of the audience. For reasons that go to the heart of national, indeed Western, unease today, trust has been at something of a premium for decades, and trust in institutions or in those in positions of power even lower. In a self-consciously liberal society, where the only proper authority resides with the sovereign, individual agency, any exercise of power over said individual is questionable, and all structures designed to legitimise that exercise of power, thereby rendering it as authoritative rather than simply powerful, are highly questionable. If public speech merits suspicion, political speech deserves cynicism. The Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren’s famous advice to journalists interviewing politicians – ‘Ask yourself Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ – was, in fact, specific to those journalists talking to politicians who were deliberately speaking to them off the record. But the fact that this detail is not widely known, and not missed, is indicative. ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ describes well the omni-scepticism that pervades our public speech today.

This is not necessarily a disaster. No one (sane) hankers after the obsequiousness of, say, the BBC’s Leslie Mitchell’s 1951 grilling of Anthony Eden, which began, ‘I would just like to say that, as an interviewer, and as what I hope you will believe to be an unbiased member of the electorate, I’m most grateful to [my interviewee] for inviting me to