doing god. seriously.

Boris Johnson, the new mayor of London, gets religion.

Johnson was baptised a Catholic but admits he has a fluctuating faith. “I suppose my own [faith] is a bit like trying to get Virgin Radio when you’re driving through the Chilterns. It sort of comes and goes.”

He added: “Sometimes the signal is strong and then sometimes, I’m afraid, it just vanishes. And then it comes back again. That’s where I am.”

I'm not just talking Boris getting religous again, but Boris gets religion, and the important role it plays in public life:

BORIS JOHNSON, the new mayor of London, has claimed that evangelical faith communities are being shunned in modern society.

In an interview with ReligiousIntelligence.com, he said that the good work done by many Christian and evangelical groups is often just ignored and derided. “I think there is a culture now in our society where if something is even vaguely Christian, if there is a whiff of evangelical fervour about it then it’s almost somehow verboten to fund it,” he told the paper at a hustings event in the lead-up to the election.

He continued: “I think that’s quite wrong because if you look at the good that these groups do and you look at the way we’re going to transform society and undo the breakdown that we’ve seen in family life, the growing-up of kids without boundaries and all the rest of the things we’ve been talking about in this campaign, the Christian groups are essential.”

He also told us that he wanted to be a “mayor who campaigns for all Londoners and Londoners of all faiths”.

He added that he would not be campaigning for a “narrow Christian agenda” but did believe that his message was “appealing to Christians”. He also noted the good works done by the growing faith-based voluntary sector. “Everywhere I go in London -- and I go to boxing clubs, reading groups, Ray Lewis’ Eastside young leaders -- I see people who have faith who are transforming kids, steering them away from crime.”

Sometimes, even an atheist writing in The Guardian can get it too, even in the face of an anaemic church, and even if, oh so dimly. 

Against this must be set the example of St Martin's, repeated in microcosm across Britain. Whenever I have visited poor places - such as Salford, St Paul's in Bristol, or London's Poplar - and wondered to whom the desperate turn in time of need, the finger points to the church. Of all voluntary institutions those based on religion are the most present and the most committed. One reason is that the parish priest is the last profession that still rates it essential to live among its clients. All the others have fled.

At the rear of most churches you will find old Georgian charity boards recording bequests of pounds, shillings and pence "in perpetuity for the relief of the poor of the parish". Most of these bequests were converted in the 19th century into vestry funds, and then subsumed in the coffers of local councils. They vanished in the mass nationalisation of the voluntary sector that is the rarely told story of the welfare state.

I remain unconvinced that the shift from local to central in the delivery of social services was either necessary or beneficial to a welfare state. Fairness could be achieved (as elsewhere in Europe) through redistributing taxes, without dismantling the historic institutions of local charity. This dismantling removed the link between giver and receiver and knocked the stuffing out of local leadership and charitable giving. In much of Britain it reduced welfare to an alien and bureaucratic wasteland.

I am told that the Church of England reckons it saves the taxpayer some £5bn in unpaid social work. The same presumably goes for other denominations. By being parochial and personal, this must also be the most efficiently distributed welfare in the country. The fact that churches are so heavily involved in social work indicates how many people still fall through the net of the welfare state.

There is no reason why voluntary social service need be motivated by religion. There is a myriad of other organisations helping to relieve the suffering of their fellow citizens. They too deserve thanks - and might well take possession of those failing churches whose dismal features litter urban Britain.

But St Martin's is emphatically a church, and its revival is a salutary tale of our times. It has raised its own money to beautify the city as well as to assist the homeless. We may choose to leave the faith out of it, but we can yet marvel at the mission.

Given Boris' own journalistic background, he also gets how the media gets religion.  Writing in 2005, Boris said:

Among the disasters of my early journalistic career was the time I was sent by the newsdesk to Walsingham in Norfolk, to report on what was promised to be a major religious bust-up. There were these Anglo-Catholics, the news editor explained, and they wanted to march with an image of the Virgin towards a shrine; and then there were these evangelical Protestants. It was gonna be a real ding-dong, said the news editor. He wanted action, colour, quotes, personality. He wanted ecclesiastical fisticuffs with lashings of sectarian abuse. He wanted the Gaza Strip comes to Norfolk.

Answer? Not every well:

As far as I can remember, the clash of denominations was a bit disappointing. It was steaming hot, and the evangelicals obliged by shouting a few anti-papist slogans, while the Anglo-Catholics psalmed away sweetly. And then God caused the whole lot of us - just and unjust alike - to be drenched in a summer downpour, and I fled to a café to phone over my account; and no sooner did it hit the apathetic streets of Britain than the protests began.

Boris also got, the religious public reaction:

In thrashing my brains to think of a way of describing the image of Our Lady of Walsingham, I had come up with the phrase "bobbing doll". This seemed fair, because the statuette had lovely rosy porcelain cheeks, and she did indeed bob as she was carried on the shoulders of the celebrants.

But according to the many people who rang and wrote in, these were very far from the mots justes. I was told that I was crass, idiotic, grossly insensitive and mortally offensive. One man managed to find me in the phone book late at night and gave me such an ear-wigging that I almost felt like making my own pilgrimage to the shrine, on my knees, and scourging myself with a copy of the offending piece.

Which served him well, with all sorts of religious members of the public:

And yet when I look back now, the remarkable thing is not how much fuss they made, but how little, especially if you think what we have come to expect from some Muslims. I have in mind not just the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, but the trembling refusal of a noted Koranic scholar to write an article for The Spectator. "You don't understand," he said. "These people will kill me if I say what I really think. I mean kill me."

He gets what being British and religious means:

That is why we need to begin the re-Britannification I mentioned last week; and part of being British is recognising that this is a free country, in which people can have frank views about religion. Militant Islam has been shielded from proper discussion by cowardice, political correctness and a racist assumption that we should privilege the beliefs of a minority, even when they appear to be mediaeval. It is time the discussion was opened up not just to reason, but to reason's greatest ally, humour. Instead of banning the discussion of the 72 virgins of paradise, the alleged meed of the suicide bomber, would it not be much more efficient to make fun of this ludicrous claim?

When is Little Britain going to do a sketch, starring Matt Lucas as one of the virgins? Islam will only be truly acculturated to our way of life when you could expect a Bradford audience to roll in the aisles at Monty Python's Life of Mohammed; and when an unintentionally offensive newspaper article about Islam is requited not with death threats but with the exasperated but essentially kindly letters one might expect from Christians.

We have a long way to go, but the first step is to stop treating this subject as so terrifying that it cannot be satirised. Some things may be sacred, but they are no less sacred for being made the object of good-natured humour; and if that is frivolity, it is frivolity with a deeply serious intent.

Meaning, the mayor of Londoners of all faiths is going to have to have some seriously less than frivolous intents for his all-inclusive vision.

There's hope. More recently, he showed his own razor wit about matters religious, isn't frivolous, but seriously informed:

Poor old Boris Johnson made a couple of jokes after his election as mayor of London that were mistaken by commentators for learned showing-off. "I am just totally fed up with this artificial distinction … this sort of Arian controversy about the old Boris and the new," he had declared. "There is no distinction between the old Boris and the new Boris. They are indivisible, co-eternal … consubstantial."

Boris Johnson does the Trinity.  That sent the press into a spin:

The Evening Standard was still quoting him on Tuesday as talking about an "Aryan" controversy, as if it were about racial theory. It was certainly "Arian", for all he meant was that such distinctions were, as the cliché puts it, "theological". Mr Johnson prefers avoiding clichés by making them concrete. So he jokingly pretended that his interlocutors were familiar with the Arian controversies of the fourth century.

But for once, someone in the press, who may just still be presuming too little of Boris,  finally got religion:

I suspect that he [Boris] himself is more familiar with Edward Gibbon's account of the heresy promoted by the Egyptian bishop Arius, rather than with recent theological studies of Arianism. "The post-war period has been astonishingly fertile in Arius scholarship," writes Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his controversial book Arius: Heresy and Tradition. I say "controversial", but the book was published by Dr Williams before homosexuality and sharia distracted the world's attention from almost anything else he said.

Gibbon's endeavour in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been to show that the whole controversy was ludicrous. His motive was hatred for the Christianity against which he had turned after a youthful period of devotion.

In recounting the fortunes of the Arians, Gibbon mocked the terminology in which theologians of the time were entangled. "I cannot forbear reminding the reader," he remarks in a mischievous footnote, "that the difference between the homoousion and homoiousion, is almost invisible to the nicest theological eye."

That can hardly be a very honest judgment. There is only one letter's difference between the two Greek words, but so there is between the English food and wood, though the latter would be a disappointing dinner. All the marvels of computer science depend on the simple distinction between the two figures 0 and 1.

I don't want to spoil Boris Johnson's joke, but the question of whether Arius's followers had got it right is no trifling matter. On those obscure Greek words depends the answer as to who Jesus Christ is. That is the central point of the Christian religion.

One often hears people saying things like, "Jesus wasn't God. It says in the Bible he was only the Son of God." Yet to the Christians of the first centuries, it was vital to recognise the Son of God as fully God and fully man. That is why the framers of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 included the Athanasian Creed in it.

In the 19th century there was a hot argument about whether this creed should be recited in church. (That is another story.) The Prayer Book directs that its should be recited on solemn days, such as Whitsun, which falls tomorrow. After some difficult-sounding statements about God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Creed says: "He therefore that will be saved must think thus of the Trinity."

It is no longer the style to claim that a specified faith is necessary to salvation (that is, going to heaven). Yet believers feel that they can pray more coherently if they have some idea of whom they are praying to when they say "Our Father", or when they hear a Collect in the Prayer Book end: "Through Jesus Christ our Lord".

The difficulty of saying anything true about God in limited human language is nothing new. St Augustine, the great north African bishop, wrote 1,600 years ago about the three-in-oneness of the God the Holy Trinity: "Three whats?" in God he asks. Human language can hardly express any answer. "One can reply, 'Three persons'," says Augustine, "less in order to say what is there than in order not to be reduced to silence."

Still, we do know a little about what a person is. We know something of the relationship that distinguishes Son from Father, and of the relationship between lover and beloved (which distinguishes the Holy Ghost).

If Boris Johnson can say of himself that he is the same person as he ever was, it is partly because theologians have sharpened the concept of what being a person means.

And got that Christianity at least, contributes more to the world than one giant inclusive soup kitchen, in lots of nice buildings with a few bits of Sufi-inspired installation art, as a multicultural paeon to the socialist vision of a welfare state.

And God knows, Britain really, really needs to get that.