Amid the blither and trump of last night’s debate, something interesting got said…

[Image: David Spender under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic]

It was fine political theatre. Plucky young Clegg between the rock of Gordon Brown’s tedious minutiae and ponderously rehearsed spontaneous quips and the hard place of David Cameron’s entitled anger, both at Brown’s perceived mendacity and Clegg’s effrontery in derailing the Tories’ smooth run to number 10. For what it’s worth, I thought they all did well, though Clegg waffled a little on immigration – and the Sun poll apparently punished him for not going with the straightforward ‘send ‘em back’ – Brown seemed determined to re-interpret everyone’s questions so that he could pontificate, and Cameron allowed himself to slip into the warm waters of nasty from time to time.

But a real difference did emerge, and I haven’t seen it much mentioned today, so I thought I’d point it up: when the wildcard ‘Pope’ question came up, Gordon Brown and David Cameron both referred to their own faith. Clegg did not. He said, baldly, that he wasn’t religious. “I’m not a person of faith,” I think was the exact line. His wife’s a Catholic, his children are being raised “in her faith”. In other words, he accepts the importance of belief for others, but has none himself.

I can only feel a degree of relief. I respect faith. Many of my friends possess it in some measure. I really don’t. I have occasional moments of appreciation for the Universe in which I give a sort of random thank you to anyone who was responsible, but in general – even in the occasional foxhole – my faith is MIA. Never seen it, never had it, always slightly envied and at the same time been alarmed by those who do.

In politics, though, faith scares the bejeesus out of me. Faith propelled George W (check out his mate Boykin, too) and anchors Sarah Palin in whatever freakish reality she calls home. Tony Blair’s faith facilitated his decision to go to war in Iraq, because God was his judge and not the electorate. Faith among rulers has a special flavour. Power brings its own psychological problems; the scale of decisions we ask our leaders to make and the inevitable disconnection from others which they suffer sends them rapidly off the deep end. Even good people can become warped. Villains, perhaps, last longer, because self-interest is a clearer path than idealism.

But faith can – not always, but sometimes – add a particularly messy icing to the cake of cockup. To err is human, to forgive divine, to persist is diabolical. In the human political realm, faith lends persistence to errors: God guides me. I am in His keeping, and His people are in mine, and He would not allow me to go so far wrong. Tosh. God, if he’s watching at all, is quite content to allow the most ghastly events imaginable. Ego speaks in the heart, not God. Yes, go to war, it’s just, your perception is accurate, and you can say I said so. And there we are: it’s God’s work, so off we go.

Worse yet, the existence of the afterlife skews priorities on Earth. Deaths are less tragic if you believe in a better place afterwards. You probably won’t grieve less for someone you love, but you might feel less bad about sending a few hundred soldiers to their deaths – or a few hundred thousand of the enemy, but who’s counting? Let God sort them out.

And then there’s science. There’s always someone saying that science is intruding on God’s turf. Science, if we’re honest, is the business of becoming more and more like God. It’s about understanding and being able to alter the universe. It’s about learning to form matter and energy, shape biology, understand time, stone, and water. It’s about healing the sick and, yes, raising the dead. The medical definition of death has changed over the years, and is changing still. We’re pushing back what it means to be dead and retrieving people who a few decades ago would have been gone for good. A religious perception of the world requires that you consider the health of the soul as well as the body – so some treatments which might imperil that probably shouldn’t be on the NHS… and at the ultimate edge: what if you bring someone back from death and they then commit a terrible sin? Will they go to Hell rather than Heaven because you saved them from an appointment with judgement? And then it gets really messy around embryology, inevitably, and stem cells… Theologically sophisticated thinkers, of course, may have interesting answers to these questions. But politicians rarely seem to be theologically sophisticated. They tend to be soundbite believers.

Let’s not even talk about clashes between God’s law and Caesar’s, with the stink of priestly sex abuse in the air.

So Nick Clegg’s statement is not small beer. He may just have encapsulated the profound difference between him and Cameron and Brown. And as far as I can tell, no one cares. Or at least, no one cares yet.