May 21, 2008

PM Brown tells Presbyterians of 'irrepressible revolution of our time'

When the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher delivered a speech at the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly on May 22, 1988, she stunned church-going Scots by equating Christianity with free enterprise.

The speech became known as the "Sermon on the Mound" because it was made on The Mound, a hill just below Edinburgh Castle, where the Church of Scotland, a Presbyterian denomination, has its general assembly hall. In her address, Thatcher recalled a sentence from St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians: "If a man will not work he shall not eat."

Twenty years later, almost to the day, the current prime minister, Scottish-born Gordon Brown, told the assembly that international co-operation, not rampant individualism, was the key to humanity's future on a threatened planet. "Brown reveals global moral vision," said a headline on the BBC's Web site following the prime minister's May 15 speech.

The British leader called on people everywhere to concentrate not on individual ambition but on the common good. He called on Christians and members of every other religion on earth to join hands, and work as one to create what he called, "a single moral universe".

Brown told almost 1000 Church of Scotland members, "This is the irrepressible revolution of our time: a billion voices for change, and I'd like to think that acting together we can become the generation to address climate change … (and) the first generation to eradicate tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, and malaria on the way to eradicating HIV/AIDS."

The prime minister said there was "a consistent ethical core" in all the world's great religions from which billions of people derived inspiration, with this "showing that we are not moral strangers but there is a shared moral sense common to us all".

The often unsmiling, deeply serious British prime minister made no reference to Christianity per se, or free market economics. Instead, he devoted a large part of his speech to recalling his early days in Kirkaldy, Fife, where his father the Rev. John Ebenezer Brown was a minister of the Church of Scotland.

"He brought us up to believe that the size of your wealth mattered less than the strength of your character, that a life of joy and fulfilment could be lived in the service of others," said the prime minister.

Brown is known as a "son of the manse" (a manse, the place where a non-conformist minister lives, is the equivalent of a vicarage in the Anglican Church).

Subdued applause greeted Brown's low key address but delegates who were present for both speeches said that compared to the reaction Scotland's leading Presbyterian Christians gave Mrs Thatcher, when she finished addressing them almost 20 years ago, the applause today's British prime minister received was resounding.

Still, some British media said that Brown, who faces rock bottom ratings from voters, might have fluffed it when he was photographed looking sleepy with a group of grim-looking people around him.