Cross-check what matters when voting

Three perspectives to inform how we vote wisely.

Sam Rylands

Sam recently completed a doctorate in political theology and is the Vicar of St Andrew's, Fulham Fields.

A pen draws a cross in a box on a ballot form.

What principles will shape your vote this Thursday? What or who will primarily guide your decision in the ballot booth? Podcaster and former political advisor Alastair Campbell’s old adage “we don’t do God” suggests that religion and politics don’t mix. Yet some of the most important movements for social and political justice in modern history had Christians at their heart. Think Wilberforce, Fry, Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, or the lesser-known but worth-a-google, Melanesian Brotherhood.

What wisdom might the Christian faith have to offer when thinking, not just about this election, but how to approach politics in general? Like lions on the England football shirt, all good things come in threes– so, here are three Christian perspectives that can inform political engagement.

First, earthly kingdoms are penultimate. God’s kingdom is ultimate.

Perhaps the moment that Jesus is drawn most explicitly to comment on the politics of his day, was when he was asked about paying taxes. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Given how frustrating it can be watching politicians avoid responding directly to any question posed, we might sympathise with those who wanted a direct answer here. But for Jesus, to say yes would position him as a traitor to the Jewish people who wanted to resist and subvert the authority of the Roman Empire. To say no, however, would be to signal revolutionary intentions to lead a rebellion against the occupying Roman force.

Set within this political trap, Jesus responds by asking for a coin and turns the tables by asking, “whose face is on this coin?” “Caesar’s,” comes the reply. “Then give to the emperor what belongs to him,” says Jesus. Yet, before we allow this response to justify opting out of political practice or hallow every existing ruling power, Jesus continues: “But give to God what belongs to God.” And what belongs to God, we ask? Well, as the writer of the ancient Psalms poetry put it, “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” Nothing short of the whole universe and beyond belongs to God, the creator of heaven and earth. So, in taking the coin, Jesus is not giving a blanket affirmation of Caesar’s rule, but challenges each and every earthly kingdom by relativising it in the light of God’s eternal kingdom. What has sustained so many Christians in challenging and renewing the political context of their day is the trust that before, behind, and beyond the rising and falling of each earthly authority stands God’s eternal kingdom. This kingdom is not in competition with the kingdoms of earth, vying to secure its own territory, but is a kingdom inaugurated by a king who wears a crown of thorns, forgives his executioners, and is raised from the dead to proclaim, “peace be with you!” The call to follow Christ within the political is to retain the perspective of this eternal life.

Second, politics needs a perspective beyond personal interest.

Holding an eternal perspective, however, is not to say this world or politics does not matter. In contrast, justice, compassion, and seeking a world as God intends it to be matters precisely because of eternity. How we live here and now has eternal significance. How we treat one another and care for all of creation has eternal significance. What belongs to God? We all do. Each person is made in God’s image. As a coin bears the image of its ruler, so we are marked by the image of God. When we consider our political responsibility, therefore, we must do so not with our own cares or concerns alone, or even primarily. Rather, we should ask what political responsibility we have towards others? How do my political decisions or actions impact my neighbour, both local and global– particularly those on the underside of the political power of the day? As the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterill, recently shared, “as a Christian, I’m hoping and I’m praying, that when I vote, when you vote, we won’t be placing our vote according to what’s best for us, but for what’s going to be best for God’s world.” If God’s power is displayed most fully in Christ who came, not to be served, but to serve, giving his life for the sake of the world, then political power cannot be a means for securing our own advantage over and against others. A Christian approach to politics recognises that my flourishing is bound up and inseparable from the flourishing of all others.

Third, let’s disagree well.

However, even if we could agree on the importance of politics beyond personal interest, we won’t all agree on what this looks like in practice. For instance, whilst two people might agree on the need to ensure a welfare safety net for the most deprived in society, their perspectives on how best to achieve this might differ greatly. Christians are not immune from such disagreements and (not that you would know it from the promises of each political party) no political system can deliver heaven on earth. How then are we to reconcile our political differences?

Returning to the theme of belonging and image bearing, the church bears the image of Christ. The church is the Body of Christ, comprised of many different members yet united, as one body. One of Jesus’ final acts on earth was to pray that the church would be one in the same way that God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one. Unity in difference. This image offers a counterweight to how political differences are played out across the news and social media platforms. Here, to vote or think differently is often to become an enemy, or even to forfeit one’s belonging as a bearer of God’s image, another person worthy of inestimable dignity and value.

Belonging to Christ, however, is to know that belonging together runs deeper than divisions of race, gender, societal status, and political tribalism. It is to trust that my sister or brother in Christ, with whom I might strongly disagree politically, is a gift to me, a showing of Christ, that I would otherwise fail to see on my own. If Christ really is the way, the truth, and the life, then the truth is beyond my final possession of it. This does not mean indifference or relativism. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes, “unity is Christ-shaped, or it is empty.” But if we can recognise one another placing our penultimate political judgements under the same scrutiny of Christ’s coming kingdom, then even in our disagreements, the church, bearing together in costly communion, reveals a belonging together that anticipates the ultimate: a world where things can only get better.

Article

Creed

Politics

Suffering

Trauma

11 August 2025

6 min read

Dear Kemi, about that lost faith

Who stands with us when we suffer?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Kemi Badenoch.

ARC.

Dear Kemi (if I may)

Lost faith is usually a sad tale. And you have told us how you lost yours. I hear your grandfather was a Methodist minister, and so as a young girl, you would pray, seeing answers from time to time for longer hair, good grades and the like. But when you heard the story of Elizabeth Fritzl, whose father Josef kept her captive underground for 24 years, repeatedly raping her, you began to ask why God did not answer Elizabeth’s prayers for release. And so you gave up on God.

Now I have real sympathy for you. I have struggled with this too. The Josef Fritzl story and the suffering he inflicted on his daughter is truly horrific. None of us find the problem of evil easy. In fact, I have never yet met a Christian who thinks they have solved it. Yet the remarkable fact is that many of us believe in God anyway. And it’s not because we haven’t thought deeply about it. Many people start with a simple faith in a God who answers prayers, and yet one day, they come across what seems like an anomaly – that some prayers don’t seem to find an answer.

Of course, you’re not the first to have stumbled upon the problem of unanswered prayer. For centuries, Christians have pondered deeply the strange persistence of evil in the world, from St Irenaeus to St Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, to any number of modern theologians.

They all knew that not all prayers get answered – yet even more, they knew that this is not a marginal thing for Christians, it actually lies at the very heart of our faith.

On the top of every spire, on every altar of a church, around many Christian necks, is a cross. It recalls the excruciating death of an executed innocent man. It is the universally recognised symbol of Christianity, as recognisable as the Islamic crescent or the Jewish Star of David.

Christianity centres on this remarkable claim: that God allowed his Son Jesus to die a cruel and tortured death, and did not respond to his agonised prayer: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” All he got was silence. Nothing.

So unanswered prayer is not something that lurks at the margins of Christian faith as a guilty secret. It lies at the very heart of it.

And yet I still believe. Why?

Why does God not intervene to stop the suffering of the world? Why did not God not stop the holocaust? Why does he not stop the suffering of the people of Gaza? Or the Israeli hostages? Or people who suffer from debilitating depression? Or long-term mental illness?

The answer is I don’t know. And why should I? For all I know, God might stop all kinds of things from happening – by definition I don’t know about thing that don’t come to pass. Yet I have to assume that God does not intervene to stop the vast majority of the suffering we inflict on each other. The best I can say is that he seems to allow us to have our own way, giving us the courtesy of accountability for our own actions. As a conservative politician, keen to stress personal responsibility, you should know that more than anyone.

Josef Fritzl was the cause of his daughter’s suffering, not God. Fritzl was himself the child of an alcoholic father who abandoned him when he was four-year-old and a manipulative and abusive mother who brought him up thereafter. Not that this excuses his crimes for a moment, but he was part of a chain of sin and suffering handed on from one generation to another that stretched back through his parents, their parents, back to the very beginning of human history and beyond. Evil and suffering are part of our world. Christianity knows about evil all too well.

All this might hint at an answer, yet it still doesn’t satisfy. It still doesn’t reduce the suffering. Trying to explain it doesn’t make it any easier to endure it. In fact, if what we Christians say about evil is true, we cannot explain it because evil literally makes no sense. It is the absence of sense, the absence of meaning. It has no point, because it is literally pointless.

The real reason we Christians continue to believe is not that we have a neat answer to it, nor because we haven’t thought about it, but because we know that, paradoxical as it may sound, God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, knows what it is to pray for something and not get an answer. He has been there too. Somehow, mysteriously, he stands with Elizabeth Fritzl, with Israeli hostages, with Palestinians hungry for peace and food, and with us when we cry out and apparently get no answer. In those moments, we are not, in the end, alone.

And yet, there is more. Despite that fact that we cannot explain the tangled, dark mysteries of evil in the human heart, we have been captivated by a story that tells us it has been overcome. Yes, Jesus died. Yes, he felt abandoned by God his Father. Yet the way the story turned out, the evil done to him was not the last word. God overturned the worst that the human race could do, when the most remarkable thing happened - his cold, abused, bloodied and battered body stirred once more into life. Yet this was not a return to this weary life all over again, back into the maelstrom of suffering and pain that we know it to be, but through the other side into a form of life beyond the grave that cannot be destroyed. Jesus was not ultimately abandoned, even if he, like us, like Elizabeth Fritzl, felt like it at the time.

This is what we get – not a neat answer – for that we will have to wait – but the gift of hope that it will not always be like this, that the Resurrection of Jesus is a foretaste of the Resurrection of all things one day.

And what about what you called your ‘stupid’ little prayers about hair and boyfriends? Why did they get answered and others didn’t? Again, I have no idea. It does seem that from time to time, God does something weird, brings some unexpected healing, things turning out miraculously better than expected, an unforeseen delight. Yet these are just hints, small signs of the great miracle, the Resurrection and the defeat of death. They are hints that even though God will not unravel the moral fabric of the world by intervening every time we do something wrong, occasionally we are given a small sign that he has not given up on the world and will one day flood it with his presence. They are signs to remind you, me, that all the good things we receive each day - food, sunshine, rain, air to breathe – are not accidents but come from a God who gave them to us out of love, and that evil is the anomaly, not goodness. We are left with a question – would we rather a world where that kind of surprising & delightful event never happened? Or one where it occasionally did?

The Resurrection is the ultimate reason we believe. Not because we can explain evil. But because it tells us we are not alone in our suffering. Because it tells us that evil is real, but in the end, will be banished to the pit from which it came. And because the alternative, when we think about that deeply enough – a world where monsters like Josef Fritzl get the last word – where hope is whistling in the dark and evil wins - is intolerable.

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