Theresa May’s Easter message marked another step towards the return of religion as part of identity politics. There’s nothing new in substance: hers is unnervingly similar to David Cameron’s Easter message last year. He claimed that: “Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion and pride in working for the common good … are Christian values and they should give us the confidence to say yes, we are a Christian country and we are proud of it … But they are also values that speak to everyone in Britain – to people of every faith and none.”
She said: “This Easter I think of those values that we share – values that I learned in my own childhood, growing up in a vicarage. Values of compassion, community, citizenship. The sense of obligation we have to one another. These are values we all hold in common, and values that are visibly lived out everyday by Christians, as well as by people of other faiths or none.”
The difference is that she might possibly believe it. In such emotional shifts are great political changes born.
It does not matter in this context that neither Mr Cameron nor Mrs May could live up to the values they proclaimed. Between the platitude and the policy falls the shadow. What is remarkable is that these values, though generally shared, are presented as Christian even if not specifically Christian: both politicians hasten to add that compassion and community are in fact the values of everyone in the country, whatever their religious beliefs or lack of them. This would undermine the original suggestion if it were a matter of logic, but it is not. It is really a matter of nationalism and identity.
This kind of religious nationalism is an international trend today. It is at work in the French elections; in Germany, Martin Schulz, the SPD candidate, has sent out a remarkably pious Easter message. Populists all over Europe claim to be defending its Christian heritage against a rising Muslim threat. In America, the white evangelical vote swung overwhelmingly to Donald Trump in ways that revealed that a rich religious heritage has been reduced to an unlovely aspect of cultural or ethno-nationalist identity. All this looks like a retreat from the internationalist, rationalist, and secular values which had appeared triumphant before the financial crisis. To the extent that it really is a retreat from such values, it may be because they had come to appear hollow to a great many people who might have believed in them: a society notionally based on the free and informed choices of equals in a fair marketplace turned out to deliver astonishing levels of inequality. But it is also possible that these values were never as widely shared as they seemed to be. There were identity politics all through the 20th century, even if those were usually class-based or arranged around political philosophies. It is only with the retreat of traditional class identities and the dissolution of the old coherences of right and left that religious identities have come once more into prominence.
Mrs May’s appeal to Christianity resonates with the overwhelming majority of self-identifying Anglicans who seldom, if ever, go to church. Analysis by Professor Linda Woodhead shows that people who give their religious identity as Church of England were about 20% more likely to vote to leave the EU than “nones” of the same age. This was not an effect seen in other religions or denominations, and it seems to have reflected a belief in the specialness of being English rather than any theological conviction. Mrs May’s dog whistling will be heard.
There cannot be an “us” without a “them”. Identity politics are by their nature divisive and exclusive. That is why they are attractive to politicians who need to make themselves distinctive. Appeals to religious identities, or even anti-religious ones, such as the French laïcité, reach deep into the roots of nationalism. Politicians who make use of this rhetoric (and even Jeremy Corbyn issued an Easter message this year) have a responsibility to use it carefully.
