Margaret Thatcher

Of all British Prime Ministers from Harold Macmillan to Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher was by far the most vocal about her faith whilst in office, and the only one to draw direct and explicit parallels between her personal beliefs and her political ones. Macmillan believed that ‘a nation can[not] live without religion’, and, more personally in his official biography, he claimed that ‘I go to Communion as long as I can…I reach for the Bible whenever I can…I still find religion a great help’. For Douglas-Home, ‘Christianity was of the heart, not of the pew, a matter of private witness and personal conduct’. Wilson was brought up very much in the Nonconformist manner as a Baptist, joined the evangelical Oxford Group at university and told an interviewer in 1963 that ‘I have religious beliefs and they very much affected my political views’. Heath’s attitude to religion was more similar to Home’s, in that he did not speak openly about it – as he told James Margach in 1965: ‘It’s not a thing one talks about very much but it has a secure hold’, but when reminiscing in his memoirs, he did also claim that: ‘My Christian faith also provided foundations for my political beliefs … I was influenced by the teaching of William Temple (former Archbishop of Canterbury)’. Callaghan’s mother was ‘deeply religious and fundamentalist’. He became a Sunday school teacher in the late 1920s and although he claimed to turn away from his Baptist upbringing when his activities in the Labour Party increasingly had the ‘first charge on my energies’, he also stated in his memoirs that he owed an ‘immense debt’ to his Christian upbringing and that he had never ‘escaped its influence’. Major, on the other hand, whilst professing belief in God – ‘I do believe. I don’t pretend to understand all the complex parts of Christian theology, but I simply accept it…[I pray] in all circumstances’ – seemed to be uncomfortable with the whole issue: ‘I was mortally embarrassed to be interviewed about my religious faith on Radio 4’s Sunday programme’. And of course Tony Blair famously admitted to praying to God for guidance when preparing for the Iraq war of 2003.

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Some further reading, including the sources quoted above:

Cranmer, Margaret Thatcher has died and passed into Glory

Cranmer, Margaret Thatcher renewed the relationship between Christianity and Conservatism

The Economist, High office, low church

Damian Thompson, Margaret Thatcher’s Christianity: if only the Churches had reached out to her

Telegraph, Margaret Thatcher: her unswerving faith shaped by her father

Catholic Herald, Some think it ironic that pugnacious Mrs Thatcher should pray for harmony. But she was closer to St Francis than you may think

Margaret Thatcher: Christianity and Wealth, Speech to the Church of Scotland General Assembly, May 21,1988

Of related interest:

Slavoj Zizek, The simple courage of decision: a leftist tribute to Thatcher

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It would be interesting to see a similar set of quotations and readings for recent US Presidents…

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