26th July 2024

To keep abreast of recent developments in politics and public life, I watch daily TV programmes like Politics Live and Newsnight, and weekly listen to radio programmes like Thinking Allowed, Beyond Belief and the Moral Maze. Time and again, those partaking are political or social commentators from a bewildering array of policy institutes, think tanks, research groups, charitable institutions and the like. Mostly it impossible to guess from their title whether they lean to the Left or Right, or are fiercely independent. Some may have some kind of religious motivation for their existence; many will not.

So many analysts must increase the talking no end, much of it speculative; quite a lot, when all is said and done, a waste of time. That is reinforced by the way in which many of these matters come to be resolved in the long term.

It could be said of this that ‘when all is said and done, more is said than done’. Lately, many in Britain think this particularly true of politics. And before we, as Christians, begin to feel ‘holier than thou’, we need to be sure that this is not true of our faith, individually or as churches. Scripture encourages us to stop being spectators, and get involved in the games. In that wonderful little book of James in the New Testament, there’s a strong theme of looking after someone’s physical needs before their spiritual ones; food then faith.

I wonder how many of these analysts might be more use to society by getting into the thick of it, rather than sitting commenting on it?

Dave Bell