You know, this is something I appreciate. There’s a difference between European and American politicians; European politicians can be guided by their faith, but they don’t show it off. They’re guided by their religion, but they’re not using their faith in the hopes of winning elections. In America the situation is somewhat different. Well, entirely different.

So I respect Tony Blair and appreciate it that he decided to wait until he was out of office, before he would share with Brits (and others) what role his faith plays in his life, and in his politics:

Speaking one recent evening under the lofty Byzantine vaults of Westminster Cathedral, Tony Blair ended his self-imposed silence on the subject, declaring that his faith has formed the essential backdrop to much of his political life.

Blair had begun to pick at the subject haltingly over the last year, announcing his conversion to Catholicism (after years of secretly attending Mass as prime minister) in December. But only now is he discussing it fully and openly, and acknowledging the degree to which his religious faith informed his years leading America’s closest ally.

“Today, precisely because all the fixed points of reference seem unfixed and constantly in flux, today is more than ever when we need to discover and rediscover our essential humility before God,” Blair told an audience of 1,600 invited guests at the chief Roman Catholic cathedral in England and Wales.

“I can’t prove that religious faith offers something more than humanism,” he said. “But I believe profoundly that it does.”

Well said Tony. And that’s something you can indeed point out after you stepped down as Prime Minister.

in secular Europe, where religiosity tends to be viewed with suspicion, Blair said he kept his belief long under wraps for fear of being dismissed as “a nutter.”

“One of the oddest questions I get asked in interviews, and I get asked a lot of questions, is: Is faith important to your politics? It’s like asking someone whether their health is important to them or their family. If you are someone ‘of faith,’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics,” Blair said.

“But there is a reason why my former press secretary Alastair Campbell once famously said, ‘We don’t do God.’ In our culture, here in Britain and in many other parts of Europe, to admit to having faith leads to a whole series of suppositions, none of which are very helpful to the practicing politician.”

Blair’s aides have long said that his policies on intervention in Iraq, Kosovo and Sierra Leone were motivated not by practicalities or even, in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, fear of weapons of mass destruction so much as a profound sense that they were the “right” thing to do.

Yet it has become clear over the last year or so that religion permeated many aspects of Blair’s work in government. Last year, Blair told ITV1 that he had prayed while making his decision on committing British forces to Iraq.

And that’s the main downside of the European system. In the United States, voters would at the very least know that religion, that faith, is important to a politician. But in Europe we often don’t. Why not? Because we don’t talk about it. This can result in policies that are not grounded in pragmatical considerations, but purely in faith. And those policies are seldom best.

Conclusion: both approaches have their strengths… and weaknesses.