Iron Lady had Faith

Whatever you say, Margaret Thatcher had her faith and it was rooted. I didn’t know this much about it.

God and Mrs. Thatcher: The Battle for Britain’s Soul

National Review

“Economics is the method; the object is to change the soul.” So said Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady always believed that democratic capitalism involved the transformation of values as much as it did the improvement of Britain’s ailing GDP. Yet few people are aware that Thatcher was a woman of profound faith. She had been a lay Methodist preacher while a student at Oxford University. Later, she would transfer this missionary energy from the pulpit to the political podium. The solid Christian base for Margaret Thatcher’s politics goes back to her strict Methodist upbringing and, more specifically, to her father — greengrocer, councilor, and Wesleyan lay-preacher, Alf Roberts. As a child, Margaret Roberts would sit in the pews of Finkin Street Methodist Church in Grantham, listening to her father hammer home sermons on the individualized nature of faith, God-given free will, moral and fiscal restraint, and the Protestant work ethic. If one were sourcing the origins of Thatcher’s free-market ideology, one should not look to the pages of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom or Milton Friedman’s monetarist theory, but in the sermons of her father.

As one of her chief aides Alfred Sherman correctly noted, Margaret Thatcher “was a woman of beliefs, not ideas.” In this, Sherman above all recognized that Christian values and convictions were central to Mrs. Thatcher’s DNA.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426379/margaret-thatcher-christian-methodism

Well, that’s just an extra reason for the Left to despise her, as if they need any more reason than politics. I ran into a liberal Christian woman not long after Thatcher’s funeral. We were having small talk on current events and I just mentioned Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. Just the mention her name almost caused her jaw to get dislodged. I watched her boil up just like a tea pot. “Oooh, I couldn’t stand her” she said. So much for not speaking ill of the dead. All I did was mention her name. The facial expressions said it all. “What about her,” she asked? I said “just the treatment she got in passing with a boycott and protests, kind of sad.” That look was still on her face as if she deserved it. I dropped it but it told me all I needed to know. I wondered what was so evil about her? Where was the respect for her as a woman achiever? That didn’t count for anything.