The place of Christians in public life

Thursday, March 16th, 2023

The past week has seen the nascent leadership contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister of Scotland turn nasty.

The Scottish National Party is a broad church, it turns out, but some of its members seem to be finding difficulty in accepting that its breadth of opinion extends to traditional forms of Christianity.

The flashpoint has been the beliefs of Kate Forbes, (pictured) current finance minister and putative successor to Sturgeon, about gay marriage.

Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, admitted that, had she been a member of the Scottish Parliament, she would have voted against it when the bill to legalise it was passed in 2014.

She says that she respects the outcome of that vote and wrote on Facebook that she “will defend to the hilt the right of everybody in Scotland, particularly minorities, to live and to live without fear or harassment in a pluralistic and tolerant society”.

She will, moreover, “uphold the laws that have been won, as a servant of democracy, and seek to enhance the rights of everybody to live in a way which enables them to flourish”.

Nevertheless, even a further statement that “I firmly believe in the inherent dignity of each human being — that underpins all ethical and political decisions I make” has not been enough for her growing band of critics and enemies.

They see her brand of evangelical Presbyterianism as outdated, outrageous, and bigoted.

Forbes has lost considerable support in the race to succeed Sturgeon and, like former British Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, may well now find the path to future acts of public service narrow and unforgiving.

I am no supporter of the Scottish Nationalists (or Liberal Democrats), but it is easy to see why the hounding out of such people from public life is a bad thing.

I sincerely hope it does not happen in Australia. In the case of Tony Abbott, perhaps it already did.

The right to offend

The case against Forbes is riddled with hypocrisy and cant, of course.

Her main rival, Humza Yousaf, missed the gay marriage vote himself because of an “unavoidable meeting on a very important topic in relation to a prisoner on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy.”

Less charitable minds than mine have wondered why the presence of a then junior Scottish minister was so essential to that dialogue.

Nevertheless, the intensity of the opprobrium heaped on Forbes raises a profound question about the role that professing Christians can play in public life in post-Christian democracies.

Currently this still seems more a British problem than an Australian one, although we all know that Britain’s ill winds have had a general tendency to blow our way ever since the First Fleet.

The case for Forbes seems to go something like this: she has a right to her personal moral convictions and her statements have made plain her commitment to separating them from her public duty to uphold the law.

We cannot expect our politicians to hold a majoritarian view on every proposition — and the right to personal opinions about questions of morality and ethics, even unfashionable ones that offend many people, is fundamental to liberal democracy.

The philosopher Kathleen Stock – herself no stranger to controversies surrounding toleration of dissenting views — has suggested that the whole affair, above all, is the product of a new religious investment in victimhood among activists of all stripes which makes them unable to resist a good old search for baddies to shame and shun:

what we have here is a clash of two religions. One of them is full of sanctimonious, swivel-eyed moral scolds, rooting out heresy and trying to indoctrinate everybody into their fantastic way of thinking. The other is a branch of Calvinism.

Stock’s article is, at root, an impassioned plea to recognise the ubiquity of differences of opinion and moral frameworks. We all need to grow up so that we are not policing every minor matter of conscience in the manner of a latter-day Holy Office.

Ironically, even the Catholic Church has come out in favour of this position. As its spokesman in Scotland told The Herald newspaper:

There is absolutely an intolerance of certain types of difference. We are less tolerant of people’s religious orientations. Some of the things that have been said about religious opinions leave a lot of Catholics and a lot of Christians feeling marginalized.

A political culture which cannot tolerate dissent is a brittle one that can hardly be expected to remain liberal for long.

A clash of cultures

There may be much wisdom in Kathleen Stock’s and the Catholic Church’s observations and their recasting of Forbes as victim.

Yet, I wonder if such a response is truly adequate, for it plays down reasons why Forbes’s detractors might see her — and her particular brand of evangelical Christianity — rather negatively.

For Stock, evangelical Protestants get caught up in these contemporary inquisitions not because they are any better or worse than the rest of us, but because they are easy targets.

Forbes, for instance, “is white, Cambridge-educated, and Christian, and for bonus points a follower of an obscure Calvinist denomination historically associated with such killjoy practices as tying up children’s swings on a Sunday.”

The fact, moreover, that Forbes is a woman also makes her even easier to vilify: “so much easier to project intolerance and unkindness upon her, relative to the presumed baseline for her sex”.

There is irony here too in this particular defence of Forbes by the feminist philosopher, for Forbes herself came out against women’s ordination in 2014, criticising “feminist-power arguments”.

Nevertheless, the relevance of a politician’s religious or philosophical beliefs to their suitability for office is what matters, as Stock identifies.

Should others be expected to respect their beliefs simply because those beliefs are grounded in religious traditions?

A critical thought experiment for many gay people who object to politicians who see homosexuality as sinful is this.

Imagine that Forbes was commenting not on gay marriage but on the legality of gay sex itself. Would anyone find it acceptable if she declared that she respects fellow lawmakers’ decisions to have legalised gay sex but that she nevertheless personally believes gay men should still be prosecuted for buggery and be sent to prison if convicted?

To many of Forbes’s critics, no categorical difference exists between these two examples.

She, in effect, asks to be allowed to hold a private view that other people’s consensual acts are wrong, or that they should be denied rights the state accords everyone else in society, while also implying that her willingness not to try to impose her view on everyone is based only on a current consensus.

Even if the above is not quite Forbes’s position — and, no doubt, it is easy to mischaracterise it — one can see readily enough why those she deems sinful might worry that she could favour using the state to enact any number of other social and moral restrictions which her brand of Calvinist Christianity endorses.

Where would the human rights be in that?

Politicians who allow themselves to be caught up in such a nexus at the very least reap what they sow.

They can hardly expect those whom they judge negatively to trust them or respect their judgment in the specific matter or in general.

Why evangelical Christians get a harder time

In fact, the basic issue in the Forbes case is not then simply a clash of religions — Christian versus post-Christian — as Stock would have it, but also a problem which Karl Popper identified long ago in The Open Society and its Enemies.

A tolerant, liberal society simply has to guard vigilantly, endlessly against potential threats to its liberal order: it cannot tolerate “intolerance”.

Practising Christians may not seem like the likeliest or even gravest threat at present, but “intolerance” is notoriously hard to identify or even define.

The thought experiment presented above sets out how those whose rights have only recently been recognised might still see Christian demands to be privately excluded from aspects of the liberal settlement as posing a threat to them.

As an historian of Christianity I note, however, a certain irony about the way this discourse has developed in recent years.

Evangelical Protestantisms are now bearing much of the brunt of criticism, which seems odd because, traditionally, such Protestantisms were much less eager to impose their moral strictures on wider society than more expansive, proselytising forms of Christianity such as Roman Catholicism.

The original Calvinists believed themselves an “elect” who would be saved when the rest of us are damned.

Their performance of moral purity and righteousness was not so much to show others what to do by example but a sign that they had been chosen. They did not believe that all of us will be saved, nor that human agency can change what God has predestined.

This element to evangelical Protestant thinking may nevertheless partially explain why members of such churches are currently being caught up in these controversies more intensely than even the Catholic Church.

Catholic hypocrisy on sexual ethics is widely acknowledged. And a recent case from the United States, where a priest may have refused communion to an 81-year-old woman because she wore a rainbow facemask, reminds us that examples of intolerance and tensions over sexual ethics are everywhere.

One might also point to the threats to withhold communion from President Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi over their stances on abortion.

But then, as Pope Francis recently reiterated, Catholic teaching remains that homosexual acts are sinful but also that sins are ubiquitous and can be redeemed.

It is precisely because we are all sinning all the time that we all must atone for our sins as part of building our relationship with God.

Many gay people still find such philosophical-theological formulations objectionable because they do not accept that homosexual acts are in any way wrong, and because the Catholic discourse is stigmatising and propagates gay shame.

Nevertheless, psychologically they can be easier to compute in a post-Christian society which demands unbounded kindness to those it sees as victims than encounters with Protestants who imply that the rest of us are destined for Hell.

Such worldviews upset at a highly visceral level and this may go some way to explaining the strength of reaction against so apparently mild-mannered and good-natured a person as Kate Forbes.

Miles Pattenden is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University and a Visiting Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
First published by ABC. Republished with permission of the author.