Tony Blair's Leap of Faith

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Coming Together

Blair says his foundation will try to ensure that faiths encounter one another "through action as much as dialogue." But the dialogue is important. In our conversations, Blair kept harking back to the idea that people of different faiths need to learn more about one another and understand where they can work in common. The alternative, he thinks, is that religious people will be tempted to define themselves in exclusion to others rather than in cooperation with them—with potentially disastrous results. Says Bono: "I think he wants to dedicate the rest of his life to decrying the concept of a clash of civilizations." Bono told me that Blair once gave him a copy of the Koran, at a time when Blair was reading a passage from the holy book every night to try to understand Islam better. Eboo Patel, a young Muslim from Chicago who is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, hopes Blair will bring a new dynamism to an interfaith movement that can sometimes seem to consist of the same people meeting endlessly to discuss the same issues.

One senses, however, that it is not just relations among faiths that Blair wants to influence. It is also the relationship between those who rejoice in their faith and those who think religion is something quaint, the stuff of history books. And here Blair's religious agenda intersects another of his concerns: the growing distance between U.S. and European attitudes toward the world.

Blair has enough old-fashioned British reserve to have his doubts about the way religion is used in the American public square. Whenever Blair was on a foreign trip, says a close aide, his staff had to find him a church in which to worship each Sunday—and then try to make sure that the press didn't learn of it. By contrast, says this aide, "Bush and Clinton are always photographed coming out of church holding a Bible." But at the same time, Blair insists that Europeans need to understand the importance faith has in American life—and recognize that in its all-pervasive secularism, it is Western Europe, not the U.S., that is out of step with much of the rest of the world. "Europe," says Blair, "is more exceptional than sometimes it likes to think of itself."

That is true. But it is also true that if Blair's foundation is to take off, it will need support from Europe—and especially from his home country—as much as from the U.S. That is by no means assured. By the time he left office, Blair was deeply unpopular in Britain, and not just because of Iraq; Britons were tired of what they saw as a government of constant spin, tinged, toward the end, with sleaze. Though Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, has seen his own popularity plummet, there is no sign yet that Blair's reputation in the U.K. has been rehabilitated.

Blair is always careful to downplay the role his faith played in complex matters of life and death, such as the invasion of Iraq. "You don't put a hotline up to God and get the answers," he says. At the same time, he plainly thinks his faith has helped him make tough decisions. "The worst thing in politics," he says, "is when you're so scared of losing support that you don't do what you think is the right thing. What faith can do is not tell you what is right but give you the strength to do it." But in a nation like Britain, where cynicism is a way of life, that distinction—between faith as a guide to action and faith as an aid to decision—is almost bound to be lost. Blair, the chattering classes of London will say, is the same smug, self-satisfied politician, immune to criticism, that he always was.

In nearly 25 years of watching Blair, I've never thought that was a fair judgment, and having spent time with him in the past few weeks, I'm more persuaded than ever that it's wrong. Blair is not without faults. In the Middle East, where he has so far achieved little concrete success as the Quartet's envoy, it is uncomfortably common to hear the claim that he spreads himself too thin. He can, no question, come across as a bit cocksure in the rightness of his judgments. But he swims in deep waters. He is convinced, he told me, that in the rich world, "without spiritual values, there is an emptiness that cannot be filled by material goods and wealth." He understands that faith is what gives meaning to the lives of billions, and he passionately believes that the world would be a better place if people of faith harnessed their talents together in aid of the common good.

Perhaps most important, his faith is not exclusive. Blair has a generosity of spirit that enables him to see that beliefs other than his can contribute to mutual goals. "I think he knows he has a steep incline ahead on a long journey," says Bono. "And I don't think it will be his considerable powers of persuasion or his winning smile that will have him seated at a table breaking bread, or taboos. It will be the true respect in which he holds the other pilgrims."