Eminentoes: Tony Blair: He's No Clinton Clone
Aikman, David
EMINENTOES by David Aikman He's No Clinton Clone The verdict is already in: Tony Blair is a sort of Limey clone of Bill Clinton, a fellow who intuitively seeks the political center, is...
...No Labour leader before him has ever linked his rejection of Marxism explicitly to his Christian faith, and no British politician this century has explained his political convictions in terms of a decisive religious experience...
...But Blair has admitted that Christianity is a "tough" religion, has laid his philosophical head on the block in espousing it, and has dared to be genuinely original in the context of British politics...
...In this respect, he and Clinton may be equally telegenic —they may even get on DAVID AIKMAN iS a former Time magazine correspondent...
...He was even more unfashionable in another area: at a time when hedonistic agnosticism was absolutely de rigueur among undergraduates, Blair publicly converted to Christianity...
...Man-gun and family members have stayed overnight in the White House and played golf with the First Golfer...
...Tony Blair is certainly not perfect, either...
...As an adult Blair was confirmed in the Church of England...
...At Oxford, where he studied three years after Clinton, he had plenty of girlfriends and gave popular parties...
...He will have to account, for example, as Clinton will, for his broad tolerance of legalized abortion in virtually all circumstances, even though he claims to be "personally" opposed to the procedure...
...Clinton no doubt wishes the same could be said about him...
...But this missed the point...
...Tony attended an exclusive but austere preparatory school in Scotland that reinforced the personal discipline he's maintained to this day...
...It's the sort of inconsistency that most Brits these days couldn't care less about...
...So is Bill Hybels, pastor of Chicago's gargantuan (22,900) Willow Creek Church...
...I The American Spectator • July 1997 49...
...EMINENTOES by David Aikman He's No Clinton Clone The verdict is already in: Tony Blair is a sort of Limey clone of Bill Clinton, a fellow who intuitively seeks the political center, is relentlessly telegenic, doesn't commit himself to huge promises, and can turn on a dime when necessary...
...There is an integrity in this enterprise, even if we disagree with him...
...As with every British prime minister before him, Blair will soon enough have made his share of mistakes and been side-swiped by unanticipated events...
...So, the thinking goes, given Blair's stunning success, the Clinton model of politician really could be the wave of the future...
...On occasion, Clinton has appeared to be genuinely touched by Christian spirituality...
...So is "possibility thinker" Robert Schuller, of California's Crystal Cathedral and the TV program "Hour of Power...
...His whiny remarks at the Washington presidential prayer breakfast last February ("We are in a world of hurt...
...Blair has returned the Labour Party to its pre-Marxist roots in British evangelicalism...
...famously—but in the place where ideas of heart and head usually come together, on their knees, they're more than an ocean apart...
...They do, however, seem intrigued by something not seen in a British government for more than four decades: Regular church-goers comprise at least half of Blair's cabinet, and two members, Home Secretary Jack Straw and junior Health Minister Paul Boateng, went through faith-reawakening experiences themselves in the past two years...
...An engaging, very funny evangelical, Campolo has spent hours with Clinton...
...As governor, he happened (while campaigning) on a Pentecostal camp meeting...
...A veritable galaxy of preaching visitors has come down against partial birth abortions, for instance, with no apparent impact on White House policy...
...He is publicly willing to be known as a Christian at a time when it is not fashionable to be one," says Roy McCloughrey, who interviewed Blair three years ago for his book Belief in Politics and who is convinced of Blair's sincerity...
...Does Clinton pray, either in the breezy "all circumstances" of John Major or the anguished multiple times a day of Jimmy Carter when he was president...
...What's more, he and Clinton are both lawyers married to lawyers possibly a lot smarter than they are...
...He and his Roman Catholic wife Cherie attend a Catholic church in North London, where Blair as a non-Catholic does not take communion...
...At a time when less than five percent of the British population attends church of any kind (compared with 40 percent in the U.S...
...All of that said, Blair does mark something entirely new in Labour and British politics...
...Hillary, by contrast, though better-versed in the Bible than her husband, has some distinctly unorthodox ideas...
...When Tony Blair prays, he does so on his knees...
...Clinton has also reached out to liberals like Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and Rabbi Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People...
...Blair told the Telegraph that concern for the greater good and the interests of the community derived from "a sense of individual duty," which was "a principle the church celebrates in the sacrament of communion...
...What we do know is that Clinton sees himself as a spiritual near-martyr in the cross-hairs of a relentlessly hostile Washington media and political establishment...
...He did so at least in part under the influence of Peter Thomson, a left-leaning Australian clergyman in his college who combined a staunch belief in traditional Christian doctrines with an underdog's view of social justice...
...What effect this theological chumminess has had on Clinton's religious beliefs remains an open question...
...The Conservative Party is founded on principles flowing from the Christian faith," he insisted, adding that he prayed "in all circumstances...
...According to one intimate, she believes that the Jesus who died on the cross can come to her through adherents of other religions, Native American shamans, for example...
...We need help...
...He even has a personal spiritual gum of sorts, Tony Campolo, an American Baptist professor at Pennsylvania's Eastern College...
...Before Blair, Labour Party leaders paid public lip-service to Christianity, but privately often wise-cracked that the Church of England was "the Tory Party at prayer...
...The rousing worship and music clearly moved him, so he went back several times even when he wasn't campaigning...
...Keir Hardie, who founded the Independent Labour Party in 1893, and in 1906 became the first leader of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, was an ardent Christian Socialist...
...On the contrary, his father, Leo Blair, was a distinguished academic whom Blair admired and respected and who for a while was a leading light at the county level in the Conservative Party in the north of England...
...It was Georgetown University, however, that proved an ideal spot for his Christianity: culturally, religion there was visible enough to provide some intellectual stimulus in his Jesuit-run courses, flexible enough to embrace any political turn that seemed useful, and distant enough not to interfere at all with his personal behavior...
...On two occasions Clinton has tracked down a traveling Campolo to ask him questions about the Bible...
...Kinnock was the first to be open about his unbelief Now Blair has changed the debate...
...It was William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, who in the 188o's initiated the practice of providing unemployment insurance and legal aid for the poor...
...But for a debilitating stroke that left him without speech for three years, Leo Blair might well have become a Tory MP...
...He is what the British press has called him: Tony Blur...
...Friendship aside, what is one to make of the veritable procession of Christian clergy and mildly New Age gurus who have overnighted at 1690 Pennsylvania Avenue or visited with the president...
...Clinton's religious beginnings were promising enough...
...Once the president took him up to Lincoln's second-floor White House office and reflected on how Lincoln, not particularly spiritual before entering office, had been driven to his knees by the burden of presidential responsibility...
...Clinton knows how to perform the expected White House rituals of American civic religion: inviting in Billy Graham, attending major funerals, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast each winter...
...One participant at such a session says that Clinton agreed with everything that was said, and then did exactly the opposite on policy...
...Blair's election campaign even borrowed some techniques from the Democrats...
...An eager Sunday School pupil at the Park Place Baptist Church in Hot Springs, he later attended a Billy Graham crusade, went through water baptism, and even sent money to Graham headquarters...
...Thoughvery much "a bleeding heart" at that time, according to one contemporary, he was also absorbing the socialist ideas of Archbishop William Temple who supported the British Labour movement in the 192o's, and the anti-Marxist communitarian, John Macmurray, whom he visited in Scotland...
...Party squabbling will likely break out, and how he deals with it and with the Tory opposition will speak volumes about his untested leadership skills...
...We are in the breach") merely reinforced the impression that his faith is often purely sentimental, empty of philosophy and consistency, and, above all, self-serving...
...But his own faith too often seems like just another display of the chameleon president: sincere at the time of expression, pleasing to many, but neither more nor less rooted in his soul than playing golf, smoking cigars, and being late...
...That confessional comment appeared in a surprisingly candid article for the London Daily Telegraph during Easter 1996, entitled "Why I am a Christian...
...48 July 19 9 7 • The American Spectator Understandably, before the recent election Prime Minister John Major tried to take issue with Blair's left-leaning interpretation of Christian ethics...
...The jury is still out on Blair's Labour government...
...But he never even went near a joint, much less inhaled one, a form of parentally imposed self-denial that made him seem almost eccentric among his university peers...
...We don't know...
...Blair, unlike Clinton, did not come from a dysfunctional, lower middle-class background with parental alcoholism hanging over his head...
...The reformist zeal betrayed in his promise to be "a lot more radical in governing than many people think" could provoke a backlash against his government...
...Clinton, not surprisingly, called him in for an intimate conversation...
...He has framed the argument, moreover, in a way that is both modest ("I do not discuss my religious beliefs unless asked, and when I do I discuss them personally") and intelligent ("Christianity is optimistic about the human condition, but not naive...
...So is Paul Cain, a modem Pentecostal "prophet" who surprised many evangelical and charismatic Christians early on in Clinton's tenure by predicting that Clinton would be a great president and perform great things for the Lord...
...The piece raised eyebrows everywhere, not least in the Labour Party, which for decades was the proud keeper of militant British secularism, and one of whose recent leaders, Neil Kinnock, had himself been an avowed atheist...
...Not so fast...
...He loves our music, he loves connecting with Spirit-filled people," Anthony Mangun, the Oneness Pentecostal pastor who befriended Clinton, recently told Charisma magazine...
...He was no utopian, and would have disdained the facile anti-capitalism of Carl Oglesby and Saul Alinsky that Hillary Clinton embraced...
...Rex Home, Clinton's Southern Baptist pastor from Little Rock, is in frequent contact...
...W hat a contrast to Bill Clinton's do-it-yourself ethics, in which his Southern Baptist faith has seemed little more than a label of convenience, a point of emotional and cultural contact with the world of his childhood and his South, but having no discernible impact on any of his ideas or behavior...
...More than anything else, Blair later wrote, "Christianity helped inspire my rejection of Marxism...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
