David Lammy and J D Vance "Doing God"
The Guardian newspaper in England reported recently on the Christian bonds between British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Vice-President J D Vance and mentioned a plan for them to worship together at the Anglican church near Chevening, the official taxpayer-funded country residence which Lammy successfully wrested from Angela Rayner, the British Deputy Prime Minister.
There have been no reports of such an event and there are any number of reasons why the plan might have miscarried.
First, the church in question is named for St Botolph. He is the patron saint of travellers and wayfarers. The administration for which Mr Vance sits on the substitute’s bench is striving mightily to keep such people outside America’s borders and remove those who have managed to cross them already. I understand that there is now to be a thorough background check on the saint by ICE officials, and if they determine him to be an inciter, abetter or simply protector of illegal travellers and wayfarers he faces an unlimited ban on any patronage within the United States. It will become criminal to venerate him and seek his intercession on his feast day of June 17. Another saint who shares that day may also excite the suspicion of the Trump administration: St Albert Chmeilowski, the Polish saint renowned for his work with the poor and homeless.
This fantasy is not as outlandish as it may seem. During the early Fifties J Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to scour every reference to Jesus’s life and teaching in the New Testament after falling into a doctrinal dispute with President Harry Truman. Hoover inevitably had to admit that he was in the wrong. Truman was an autodidact who had read the entire Bible many times over. He also borrowed more books from the Library of Congress than any other President, and big books with writing, not just from the colouring section.
It was also difficult to find a preacher for the Vance-Lammy service willing to take the text from the Gospel according to St Donald. That is part of the Bible which Trump himself has marketed, and it cuts out all the fake news passages about Jesus inserted by radicals, especially the one suggesting that he assaulted those fine enterprising money changers (and likely campaign donors) at the Temple.
The chosen text was “I was saved by God to make America great again”, which also lent such inspiration to Trump’s Inauguration Speech.
As all of us know who went to compulsory chapel in English schools, God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform [apologies but in Hymns Ancient And Modern God was invariably masculine] but in this case the mystery has been too deep for even the most qualified casuists. No preacher has yet been found who can explain to waverers and doubters why God’s wondrous plan to save Mr Trump required the death of his bystanding supporter, Mr Comperatore.
Mr Vance is always a busy man. At home, rivers rise at his command to allow his family better boating, and overseas, unhindered by the constitutional limits of his office, he has much more authority to dish out orders, injunctions and threats. Mr Lammy had his work cut out at Chevening to get them all down. Both men are known to have requested a short sermon. The preacher would have been instructed to cut any long passages about rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God those that are God’s, or worse still, the duty of world leaders to observe the Third Commandment. Had the preacher come from the stable of P G Wodehouse he might have been permitted a short exordium on a safe subject, such as Brotherly Love among the Hivites and Hittites.
Mr Vance is a Roman Catholic and Mr Lammy by report a High Anglican. So a final problem was the incense to be used. In spite of intense effort, none could be found with the required Fight! Fight! Fight! fragrance created by Donald Trump (along with designer sneakers) to enable his disciples to celebrate his deliverance.
Although the service might have been abandoned, there is no reason for Mr Vance and Mr Lammy not to have a private discussion about the issues concerned and to explore Mr Trump’s adherence to and application of any form of Christian faith. I have seen no evidence of this at any point in his career except for commercial or political purposes. But I am not qualified to judge this as a secular atheist and it would be fascinating to overhear the expert views of Mr Vance and Mr Lammy.
However, for the sake of the fragile special relationship, it is better that they stay off the subject of Christianity altogether and follow Alastair Campbell’s sage advice to Tony Blair not to “do God.”
In spite of his much-lauded realism, it still seems that David Lammy’s religious faith has led him to fundamentally different political conclusions to those induced by religion in J D Vance. Within the sphere of religion there is no means of reconciling such differences. Ultimately each party must determine that his politics conform to the will of God and that the other’s are either ignorant or malign. Consensus becomes impossible since it entails the betrayal of God. There are many modern states which bear such a scourge from faith-based politics. The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they sought to separate Church and State.