Benn's mother,
Margaret Wedgwood Benn (
née Holmes, 1897–1991), was a theologian, feminist and the founder President of the
Congregational Federation. She was a member of the
League of the Church Militant, which was the predecessor of the
Movement for the Ordination of Women; in 1925, she was rebuked by
Randall Davidson, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the
ordination of women. His mother's theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were based around the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught
righteousness.
[8]
Benn was for over 30 years a committed Christian.
[9] He asserted that the teachings of
Jesus Christ had a "radical political importance" on his life, and made a distinction between the
historical Jesus as "a carpenter of Nazareth" who advocated social justice and egalitarianism and "the way in which he's presented by some religious authorities; by popes, archbishops and bishops who present Jesus as justification for their power", believing this to be a gross misunderstanding of the role of Jesus.
[10] He believed that it was a "great mistake" to assume that the teachings of Christianity are outdated in modern Britain,
[10] and Higgins wrote in
The Benn Inheritance that Benn was "a socialist whose political commitment owes much more to the teaching of Jesus than the writing of Marx".
[11] (Indeed, he did not read
The Communist Manifesto until he was in his 50s.
[12]) "The driving force of his life was
Christian socialism," according to
Peter Wilby, linking Benn to the "high-minded" founding roots of Labour.
[12]
Later in his life, Benn emphasised issues regarding morality and righteousness, as well as various ethical principles of
Nonconformism. On
Desert Island Discs he said that he had been powerfully influenced by "what I would call the Dissenting tradition" (that is, the
English Dissenters who left or
were ejected from the
established church, one of whom was his ancestor
Rev. William Benn).
[13] "I've never thought we can understand the world we lived in unless we understood the history of the church", Benn said to the
Catholic Herald. "All political freedoms were won, first of all, through religious freedom. Some of the arguments about the control of the media today, which are very big arguments, are the arguments that would have been fought in the religious wars. You have the satellites coming in now—well, it is the multinational church all over again. That's why
Mrs Thatcher pulled Britain out of
UNESCO: she was not prepared, any more than
Ronald Reagan was, to be part of an organisation that talked about a
New World Information Order, people speaking to each other without the help of
Murdoch or
Maxwell."
[14]
According to Wilby in the
New Statesman, Benn "decided to do without the paraphernalia and doctrine of organised religion but not without the teachings of Jesus".
[15] Although Benn became more agnostic as he became older, he was intrigued by the interconnections between Christianity, radicalism and socialism.
[16] Wilby also wrote in
The Guardian that although former Chancellor
Stafford Cripps described Benn as "as keen a Christian as I am myself", Benn wrote in 2005 that he was "a Christian agnostic" who believed "in Jesus the prophet, not Christ the king", specifically rejecting the label of "
humanist".
[17]