Dare to be a Daniel : a note on Benn and religion

A striking aspect of Tony Benn that has escaped much attention (outside the religious press at least) in the past 24 hours is his debt to religious, specifically Christian, ideas and images. This is entirely unsurprising in the present climate, where admission of an interest in, let enough attachment to, religion is, in many left-wing circles, the social equivalent of coming out as the unique possessor of a paraphilia involving Jeremy Clarkson and yoghurt.

It is worth pausing to think about Benn's roots in Christianity. His own attachment to the creed was ambiguous, the son of a congregationalist minister and himself a confirmed Anglican, he described himself as a 'student of the teaching of Jesus'. Again and again throughout his speeches and writings, the incompatibility of this or that social injustice with (Benn's interpretation of) that teaching is asserted. Much more often, biblical images are deployed: a recurrent idea for Benn is that the Old Testament presents us with an opposition between 'the kings', who want order and hierarchy, and 'the prophets', who demand justice. We, says Tony, should be on the side of the prophets. Elsewhere, he describes the name of the right-wing Tory pressure group No Turning Back as "the motto of the Gerasene swine". Famously, he takes as a motto, and names a memoir after a Sunday school chorus:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone!
Dare to have a purpose firm!
Dare to make it known.

He once delivered the Tawney lecture to (what was in happier days known as) the Christian Socialist Movement on Christianity and socialism, but Benn was no systematic theologian or original Christian socialist thinker. In fact, he often seemed not to get theological or ecclesial distinctions. He would describe devout Anglo-Catholic Eric Heffer as standing in "the tradition of nonconformist dissent". And whilst his parliamentary and other interventions on the ordination of women in the CofE are powerful testaments to a commitment to equality, he doesn't really ever give the impression of understanding what was at issue.

But none of this really matters. What is interesting about Benn is his acknowledgement of, and use of, a religious tradition. Drawing in an eclectic fashion on Christian tropes, and displaying an openness to working with religious groups and individuals, Benn's approach to religion is different from those common on the Left. Many, in recent years, have displayed an enthusiasm for the dimwitted philistinism of the new atheists. Others, including the ancestor of the present blog, have attempted more systematic engagements with religion. In contrast to both, Benn's approach echoes that advocated by Marxist biblical critic Roland Boer. In his Rescuing the Bible, Boer champions a `worldly left', comprised of secular and religious leftists alike, that recognises the importance of the biblical text and promotes emancipatory interpretations. It seems to me that this worldly left has just lost its most significant proponent.