In this election, Christians should deploy the power of the cross
by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:
ConservativeHome sheds no tears for the martyrdom of St Tim of Westmorland, not least because it didn’t, in the final event, actually take place. Farron yesterday said that he doesn’t believe gay sex is a sin, after all – thereby offering his pinch of incense to the gods of aggressive secularism, and avoiding being chewed up by the media lions. It was the only way, as the first Christians didn’t quite put it, of “closing the story down”.
Some say that the Liberal Democrat leader is being hounded for this faith, but this claim misses some of the subtleties of the tale. As Graeme Archer argued on this site on Monday, Farron raised his Christian beliefs himself, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable, once he had done so, for him to be questioned about them. Furthermore, the significance of his political beliefs, rather than his religious ones, has been missed. To date, Conservative politicians who might believe homosexual relations to be sinful have not usually been quizzed about the matter. This is because many others believe, rightly or wrongly, that this is exactly what they can be expected to think. For a prominent Liberal Democrat to do so, let alone one who leads his party, is unusual, and thus invites the question he was asked.
Finally, voters seem to admire Christian politicians who have a deep faith, but tend to keep it private. No-one mocked Gordon Brown, a clergyman’s son, for his Christian convictions; but lorryloads of satire have been dumped on the halo-burnished head of Tony Blair. Theresa May deploys her faith from time to time, as she did in her Easter message, but otherwise keeps her head down – as she does on so much else. Farron is more of the Blair school, which helps to explain what happened.
None the less, all is not quite as simple as that. Many Christians feel that the space they have in modern Britain to live their faith is becoming increasingly cramped – perhaps especially (since the subject has been raised) when the traditional Christian take on sexuality meets our present norm of letting it all hang out. The clashes under the equalities laws charged with the most voltage are those in which faith and sexuality meet, one of the most recent being the courtroom farrago over a pro-gay marriage wedding cake. Not all Christians believe homosexual relations to be a sin: liberal Anglicans, for example, do not. And most clergy would not quite put it that way. None the less, that view is, when push comes to shove, what most Christians throughout the world believe.
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