Defender of Faiths

Since it's Friday, Tony Blair must be doing God. The peripatetic former prime minister, ricocheting intercontinentally between missions - each of which is a sub-division of his overarching ambition to rescue the world - is today launching his Faith Foundation. This is to be based in New York, maybe because it is the charitable giving capital of the world, or because it would be so dull to base it nearer home.

The foundation's objectives are typically Blairite: promoting interfaith understanding, defending faith as a force for good and demonstrating its usefulness through interfaith projects, starting with defeating malaria.

Well, you have to start somewhere.

Blair became a Catholic as soon as he decently could on leaving office. For years the has-he-hasn't-he-converted speculation had been allowed to run, usefully keeping the idea of Blair as a man of God in people's minds without him having to address the challenging business either of taking on the constitutional tradition that the prime minister is not a Roman Catholic or the even more challenging business of the Vatican's condemnation of the war in Iraq, let alone the enduring difficulty of its approach to, say, contraception or embryo research. It would be invidious to question the sincerity of his faith, but it seems irrational to suppose he has much respect for the teachings of the institution.

The Catholic Church is more than capable of looking after itself. But l do wonder if Blair's attitude to it might not be a little like his attitude to the labor party - more a handy vehicle for a personality than a commitment to an organization.

The Catholic Church is the original global faith, with a reach and membership and coherence born of centralized control that makes Blair's former Anglican Church look puny. It also has a US profile that is indispensable to anyone wanting to make a global religious noise and sustain a global profile.

Perhaps that's too cynical (a reaction that Mike Ion has already predicted elsewhere on Cif). In fact Blair has decided that faith needs rescuing, and he is the man to lead the attempt, the commanding officer of a great movement that will defeat fundamentalism and militant atheism and restore the relevance of God to the 21st century. This, of course, is a God of good and peace, a New Testament-plus God, quite different from the extreme ideologue who ran Heaven and Hell in the Old Testament, and rather as New labor was to restore the relevance of progressive politics after the depredations of extreme Thatcherism, this kind gentle God is going to drive out the bad God of extremism.

History is pitted with the scars left by politicians, motivated like Tony Blair by an overwhelming determination to do good and a terrifying certainty that they know what good is. At some point in the last century the Liberal party was fleetingly led by Sir Herbert Samuel. By one of those curious parallels after 10 years in cabinet, he was dispatched as an early High Commissioner to Palestine. Here he failed to persuade the Arabs that the Balfour Declaration's promise of a national home for the Jews meant merely parity of esteem. After five years he concluded the only solution was to merge all faiths into one great universal creed. Perhaps fortunately, before he had got beyond the introduction he was called back to national politics.

Blair modestly denies he has any such ambition. Instead he wants to build on the idea of social justice that he (perplexingly, I'd imagine, to any student of comparative religion) detects in all faiths and from a basis of mutual respect entice them to work together. It's going to be another big tent, big enough for the whole world's religions. We could all just snigger at his delusions and move on. But the world is littered with efforts to make it a better place, to make a difference, that reduce to an expression of individual personality. They compete for scarce resources and most damagingly when they fail in their vaulting optimism, they contribute to the damaging impression that nothing can be done.

The really worthwhile challenge would be to turn the public gaze on to making the institutions that already exist work better. As Blair knows, people all over the world are failed rather less by God than by government.