Tony Blair: Faith-Based Politics

Tony Blair, Britain's -longest-serving Labour prime minister, left office in 2007 as a relatively young man of 54. He's kept busy: making speeches (at roughly $150,000 a pop); serving as Middle East envoy for the Quartet of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia; and setting up several charities, including the Faith Foundation. At his office in London, Blair spoke to NEWSWEEK's Stryker McGuire. Excerpts:

You've said religious faith will be at least as significant in the 21st century as political ideology was in the 20th. why is that?
Left-versus-right issues still -matter—you can see that in the economic crisis—but they matter less today than the issue of what I would call open versus closed. There are two competing dimensions in most faiths. One is exclusionary: "my faith as opposed to yours." The other, which is inclusionary, sees faith as reaching out to others. Religion motivates and galvanizes very large numbers of people. Indeed the theory that religious faith would die out in a process of "enlightenment" has turned out to be a completely false prophecy.

There's so much evidence that religious beliefs have been a force for evil in the world. How do you persuade people to put faith in faith?
Many people do see faith as a source of division and conflict. There is another side that the world of faith isn't often good enough at putting forward—which is about compassion, solidarity, social justice.

How do you think president Barack Obama is doing as a leader and healer on theworld scene?
He's created a situation [where] there is a possibility of a completely different form of engagement with the world of Islam and with the outside world. The single most important thing for him is that his decision to reach out is answered by the rest of the world by a decision to reach back. As I keep saying to people, he doesn't want cheerleaders; he wants partners. You know, he doesn't want people to tell him how great he is; he's perfectly well aware of the transient nature of all that fluff, as it were, around the new president and the first hundred days. He's trying to change the world in partnership, and he needs partners to do it.

King Abdullah of Jordan warned last week that failure to reach an agreement for peace in the Middle East will result in a new conflict within 12 to 18 months.
I share completely the sense of urgency. I think that this really is a moment of opportunity, decision and truth for the region, and for our engagement with it.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is meeting with Obama this week, has sent out mixed signals on whether the new Israeli government supports a two-state solution. Do you expect him in the end to come over to the quartet's view on this?
He obviously has to speak for himself, but my view is that he and others like him will accept the Palestinian state as the right solution to this issue, provided they can be sure of the nature of that state—that it is secure, properly governed, that it will be a stable and secure neighbor for Israel. You know, this thing can only be resolved if people get the reality-on-the-ground issue for both sides. And the reality-on-the-ground issue for the Israelis is security. The reality-on-the-ground issue for the Palestinians is occupation.

You became seriously interested in faith and politics at about the same time—when you were at Oxford. As a public figure, you put your religious beliefs aside and pursued politics. Would you have preferred to be more open about your faith?
It's just that, in our political culture, you don't end your speech with "God bless Britain." Now personally I quite like that, but I don't think it's a very big deal that I couldn't [say it as prime minister]. People in Britain don't expect a set of religious sermons from their political leaders. I'm not a religious leader, you know; the pope is my religious leader.