There was an amusing little moment in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. It happened during an interview with Vanity Fair around May 2003, when the UK’s Prime Minister of the time was asked point-blank whether he would define himself as a ‘committed Christian’.
With hindsight, we all know the answer to that question. But Tony Blair didn’t answer it directly at the time. Not so much because he didn’t want to; only because he was suddenly cut short by a visibly panicked Alistair Campbell.
“I’m sorry”, was his head of communications’ soon-to-be immortalised interjection. “We don’t do God.”
Allow me to repeat that last part, with all the necessary emphasis, as it is plain as daylight that this simple concept never quite filtered as far south as Malta.
“We don’t do God.” Oh, and in case there’s any confusion regarding the ‘we’ part in that sentence, please note that:
a) Alistair used it to refer to the British government;
b) I am now using it to refer to governments in general (or at least, those which aspire to this thing called ‘Democracy’);
c) The concept does not apply to ordinary, everyday citizens like you or I (until such time as you or I become the elected representatives of great masses of people we will never get to personally know), and;
d) Sadly, it has nothing to do with the latest electronic game console from Nintendo.
If you need a clear example of this concept in practice, I can think of none better than Tony Blair himself... whose situation has changed somewhat in the intervening seven years.
Today, he is (almost) a completely private citizen, residing (almost) entirely outside the media spotlight; and as such he is (almost) entitled to say whatsoever he pleases, regardless of what the Alistair Campbells of this world might think.
Much more beside: Tony Blair is now perfectly free to ‘do God’ to his heart’s content... and ‘God he does’, by Jove, as often and assiduously as a jackrabbit does Jack.
First he was seen doing God in the Vatican, together with Pope Benedict XVI (I believe it’s called a ‘meditation a trois’). Then he did Him in Jerusalem by the Weeping Wall. At one point he even ‘did God’ in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton in front of the Obamas... and given the chance, I imagine he would probably do Him in the back entrance of Paris Hilton, too (where I am told that even entities of Infinite Dimensions can somehow be made to fit).
By the looks of things, Tony Blair is compensating for almost a decade of self-imposed spiritual abstinence, by ‘doing God’ as energetically and unstoppably as a certain Debbie once did Dallas.
And good for him, I say! At least someone’s getting a little action for a change. But what the above story actually illustrates – other than around a million things I don’t have space to go into here – is the supreme distinction between Church and State that was made... and is still made... and will continue to be made in any country where there is a tradition of democracy lasting longer than 45 minutes.
It works like this. Political leaders are as a rule entitled to their own personal beliefs – provided these beliefs do not extend to include cannibalism, human sacrifice, or watching Edward Spiteri live on Smash TV (all of which may prove harmful to other people’s health). But unless they have chosen to model their careers on that of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, you will find that their responsibility as democratic leaders is ultimately towards the interest of the nation as a whole.
And Britain, like most European countries, does not consist in just one category of person. There are Christians like Tony Blair – not very many, by the looks of things – but there are also Jews and Jainists, Sikhs and Shintoists, Parsees, Moonies and Mormons... not to mention Hindus, like 90% of the English cricket team... Muslims, like the remaining 10%... and even atheists like Polly Toynbee, Richard Dawkins and millions more beside.
In Europe as a whole, there are around another billion sub-categories of opinion, both in and outside the sphere of what you and I would recognise as ‘religious belief’. And the wider you cast your net, the more continents and countries you rope in, the more the spectrum of world faith comes to resemble a impossible blur of conflicting (and sometimes contiguous) superstitions... all claiming, with identical conviction, to be the ‘one True Faith’.
But back to the political side of the equation, and from this perspective it is easy to understand Campbell’s extreme discomfort with the Vanity Fair interviewer’s question in 2003.
“We don’t do God” may be a dismissive way of putting it, but the point is nonetheless clear. In any pluralistic society, a government can hardly operate on the basis that any one of the above, quasi-infinite panoply of religions is of greater value than any of the others. Nor that it is more ‘true’ than any of the others. Nor that it is more desirable, congenial, attractive, natural, etc. Otherwise, they would be condemning as pariahs the adherents of all other ‘lesser’ religions, or those who have no religion at all... which is hardly a democratic achievement, when you consider that the cornerstone of democracy is the equal treatment of all citizens, regardless of conviction or creed.
Is this so difficult a concept to understand? Well, judging by recent events, the answer in Malta is evidently a resounding “yes”.
OK, I won’t bore you with a complete list of all the symptoms of our national nosedive into religious regression in the past five years. Suffice it to say that, somewhere in between the police clamp-down of Nadur Carnival, the absurd triumph of moral censorship in practically every sphere of the arts, the mindless hysteria characterising the anti-divorce lobby, and above all our MPs’ continued insistence on glorifying the Unborn Child like some kind of latter-day Golden Calf, I think all but the entirely myopic can now see for themselves that Malta has become infinitely more obsessed with religion than it has been since Independence.
But the facts on the ground should really be informing us differently. This week, the local Curia’s ‘Institute for Research on the Signs of the Times’ published the results of its latest census – which revealed that in 2005, just under 51% of the Maltese public actually attended Sunday mass on census day.
Not exactly a terribly impressive statistic, I am sure you will agree. More people voted for the Nationalist Party in 1992 – when the population of Malta was around 20,000 less – than heard Mass on census weekend. And already the wheels have been set in motion to try and soften the impact this statistic is likely to have on local perceptions of national identity.
But the writing is fairly legible for all to read. If 50.6% can be described as ‘practising Catholics’ - and if allowances are made for those who may have intended to hear mass that day, but didn’t for any number of reasons – the implication is that the population of Maltese who are NOT practising Catholics now stands at anywhere between 35 and 40%.
Who are these people, and what do they think? Well, that would be a fine sociological study in its own right. Going only on my own friends and acquaintances, I think you’ll find a mixture of Buddhism, non-Catholic denominations of Christianity; beliefs (or smatterings thereof) combining astrology, reincarnation, meditation, etc, under the label of ‘New Age’... and of course, a growing swathe of people who quite frankly (and quite literally) don’t give a damn about any of the untold billions of belief systems to have been excogitated since the dawn of Man.
And yet, our politicians still talk of ‘Catholicism’ as if it were some kind of universally shared faith: a form of indelible identity tag, with which we are all branded at birth, and from which no true escape is even possible.
It has evidently not yet occurred to them that there could be as many as 150,000 people, possibly more, who are as Maltese as they are... but do not actually consider themselves Catholics at all.
Still less has it occurred to them that a few of us out here – admittedly a lot less than the 49% who do not attend Sunday mass – no longer feel comfortable being represented by people whose allegiance is very clearly to another country (the Vatican City in Rome, to be precise) and who routinely insult and disparage nearly half the country, each time they take our Catholicism for granted.
As one of the more annoyed among their number, I feel compelled to point this out now, well, well ahead of the next general elections. You never know: some bright spark in one of the parties somewhere might even identify an as yet untapped political niche... which is already almost as wide as a church door, and growing wider with each passing day.
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