Tanked up is delighted to welcome a new religious thinktank to the hallowed halls of wonkery. November saw the launch of Theos, a ‘public theology thinktank’, with the publication of its inaugural report, Doing God: Finding Faith in the Public Square by Nick Spencer. Featuring a foreword by the respective leaders of the Catholic Church and Church of England, the report pits itself against what it describes as the predominant political culture of ‘public atheism’. ‘Faith is not just important for human flourishing and the renewal of society,’ it argues, ‘but that society can only flourish if faith is given the space to do so’.
To mark the launch, an event was held on the place of faith in modern society, with Labour’s own Frank Field, the Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting, and the Lib Dem peer, Shirley Williams. Field’s comments that Islam would take ‘1,000 years’ to become English even earned the thinktank a mention in a Guardian editorial.
But just who are the wonks behind the new faith-based outfit? Theos’ director is Paul Woolley, a one-time director of the Conservative Christian Fellowship. And it appears he has a morality to match his right-wing sympathies. In an online briefing for the Fellowship in 2000, he rails against our ‘post-modern’ world, complaining in euphemistic terms: ‘it is no longer “right” to question the morality of a particular lifestyle.’
Woolley, along with Theos’ researcher, Paul Bickley, was also formerly employed at the Westminster-based lobbying organisation CARE, or Christian Action Research and Education. CARE is anti-abortion (although disturbingly it offers ‘pregnancy and post-abortion advice, counselling and support’ on its website) and against gay marriage, and is currently leading the campaign to water down the government’s plans to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in the provision of goods and services.
All of which, going back to the original Theos report, rather goes to prove the secularists’ point: we would be happy for faith groups to have ‘space’ in the ‘public square’ (although, with 12 unelected sitting bishops in the House of Lords, to argue they don’t already is rather absurd), providing we could have the confidence they would keep out of our own ‘private’ lives.
Stern words
The publication of Nicholas Stern’s report in October on the economic impact if climate change has set UK and US wonks at loggerheads. Shortly after its publication, the ippr rushed out its own report arguing that Lord Stern’s analysis was too conservative, and that the government needed to move much further and faster on reducing carbon emissions if it was to stave off potentially disastrous consequences.
‘It is the timetable for action, above all, that our research shows we urgently need to rethink,’ says the head of the ippr’s climate change team, Simon Retallack. ‘We do not have decades in which to bend the CO2 curve: we have less than 10 years. The gap between what is necessary and what seems feasible clearly looms large. But if we want to avoid significant risks of appalling global harm we will need to re-examine what is feasible.’
But Stern’s findings met with a rather more laid back response from wonks on the other side of the Atlantic. Under the headline, Bad Climate Science Yields Worse Economics, Stephen Milloy, a scholar at the right-wing US thinktank, the Cato Institute, wrote on his ‘junkscience’ blog: ‘The British government is preparing to fire a new round of global warming alarmism at the US next week.’
Similarly, in a piece for the Washington Post, fellow Cato scholar Alan Reynolds dismisses Stern’s assertion that global warming poses a significant threat to biodiversity: ‘Plants thrive in greenhouses, particularly fruits and vegetables,’ he notes. Which, for many African and Asian countries facing the prospect of environmental catastrophe, we can’t help feeling rather misses the point.