{"id":3944,"date":"2014-05-06T22:49:39","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T22:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/?p=3944"},"modified":"2014-05-06T22:49:39","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T22:49:39","slug":"pm-should-do-god-tory-party-survey-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/2014\/05\/06\/pm-should-do-god-tory-party-survey-suggests\/","title":{"rendered":"PM &#8216;should do God&#8217;, Tory party survey suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-politics-27278592\">reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" alt=\"David Cameron in Bethlehem in March 2014\" src=\"http:\/\/news.bbcimg.co.uk\/media\/images\/74348000\/jpg\/_74348809_74348737.jpg\" width=\"624\" height=\"351\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"story_continues_1\">Plenty of brain-sapping journals clutter the desks of Westminster, offering the patient reader an intellectual transfusion of information, analysis, insight and yes, just occasionally, complete guff.<\/p>\n<p>But until the last few weeks I had never read the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.churchtimes.co.uk\/\">Church Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Not, at least, until the prime minister wrote an article for the newspaper just before Easter.<\/p>\n<p>In it, he said that people in the UK should be &#8220;more confident about our status as a Christian country&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He added that he saw himself as a pretty typical member of the Church of England, an admirer of its values but an infrequent visitor to its pews.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Cameron&#8217;s article prompted a group of 50 public figures to write a<a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/comment\/letters\/10777417\/David-Cameron-fosters-division-by-calling-Britain-a-Christian-country.html\">letter to the Daily Telegraph<\/a>\u00a0insisting that the UK was &#8220;a non-religious&#8221; and &#8220;plural&#8221; society and that to claim otherwise &#8220;fosters alienation and division&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The prime minister&#8217;s intervention was seen as a way of reassuring Conservatives, some of whom may be contemplating a flirtation with UKIP, that he is the genuine custodian of the Conservative flame that values Britain&#8217;s Christian heritage, history and mores.<\/p>\n<p>So what do Conservative activists make of it?<\/p>\n<p>The Conservative Home website\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.conservativehome.com\/thetorydiary\/2014\/05\/party-members-yes-cameron-should-do-god.html\">has carried out a survey to try to find out<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Almost 800 party members took part, and the results were tested against a control group which was supplied by the polling company YouGov.<\/p>\n<p>Rural Conservative<\/p>\n<p>The results suggest that three in five party members believe that Mr Cameron should &#8220;do God&#8221; &#8211; 61% against 29%.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>85% said Britain was a Christian country; 12% said it was not<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>86% said Britain should be a Christian country; 11% disagreed<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But respondents were more equally divided on whether the role of &#8220;faith-based organisations&#8221; should be expanded or not.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>48% agreed with the idea; 42% did not<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Paul Goodman, the former Tory MP who is now\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/conservativehome.blogs.com\/resources\/2010\/06\/introducing-paul-goodman.html\">executive editor of Conservative Home<\/a>, believes &#8220;it is reasonable to suppose that by a Christian country, party members meant it&#8230; in historical, constitutional and cultural terms&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, in keeping with the prime minister&#8217;s own interpretation.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They may not go to church,&#8221; Mr Goodman concludes, &#8220;but want churches to stand and the country&#8217;s inheritance to endure.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The prime minister is, by background, a rural, county Conservative, brought up in Berkshire.<\/p>\n<p>It has instilled a longstanding reverence for and understanding of non-metropolitan, country-dwelling folk with instincts that tend to be conservative &#8211; whether supporters of his party or not.<\/p>\n<p>It is a background strikingly different from, for instance, Chancellor George Osborne, a Conservative for sure, but a metropolitan liberal by background.<\/p>\n<p>David Cameron&#8217;s article, spelling out his respect for the Church of England, is politically distinctive.<\/p>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg\" src=\"http:\/\/news.bbcimg.co.uk\/media\/images\/74638000\/jpg\/_74638788_leadercomp.jpg\" width=\"464\" height=\"261\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Both the Labour leader Ed Miliband and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg are atheists.<\/p>\n<p>And with UKIP&#8217;s Nigel Farage sniffing around Mr Cameron&#8217;s core supporters, this may serve to remind people about who the prime minister is, what makes him tick and the prism through which he views the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plenty of brain-sapping journals clutter the desks of Westminster, offering the patient reader an intellectual transfusion of information, analysis, insight and yes, just occasionally, complete guff.<\/p>\n<p>But until the last few weeks I had never read the Church Times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,362,1072],"tags":[724,1301,660,118],"class_list":["post-3944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion-and-society","category-secularism-2","tag-conservatives","tag-david-cameron","tag-tories","tag-uk-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}