Article

Creed

General Election 24

Politics

3 July 2024

5 min read

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.

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Comment

Community

Migration

Politics

16 July 2025

5 min read

Our problem with immigration is not open or closed borders but the decline of Christianity

Christianity doesn’t provide immigration policy, but it could still unite our communities

Graham Tomlin

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

Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron in front of flags.

Starmer and Macron announce their deal.

10 Downing Street.

So Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have done a deal on migrants. One in, one out. The EU might yet block the plan, and it may fail as many have before it. The Conservatives’ Rwanda idea never got off the ground. Will this one? Labour hail it as a breakthrough with the French agreeing to take back some migrants for the first time. The right-wing media complain this is a drop in the ocean and will make precious little difference.

What interests me is the role Christianity plays in this debate, invoked as it is on both sides of the argument.

On the right, the argument runs like this: Britain is (or used to be) a Christian country. It is now in danger of being overrun by people who do not share that faith, or the values that are rooted in Christianity. Therefore, we must put a rapid halt to excessive immigration, especially migrants from conservative Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia or Pakistan. If we don’t, we will see the UK change dramatically and lose its distinct Christian identity.

So, in a speech last year, Reform leader Nigel Farage claimed that “Judeo-Christian values” are at the root of “everything” in Britain. These values, he said, were that “the family matters, the community matters, working with each other matters, the country matters.”

I’m sure they do. Christianity has shaped the character of the UK over centuries. And there is undoubtedly a sense in many places, especially more deprived ones, that communities have changed and are becoming unrecognisable from what they were. The chattering classes in Hampstead and Chipping Norton are hardly likely to feel the pinch, yet Bradford or Burnley can feel very different now than they did 50 years ago.

Yet it’s hard to identify Farage’s values as distinctly Christian. Many Muslims would claim much the same, and it would be difficult to describe his list as an adequate summary of the message of Jesus. ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are often identified on the right as being the same as ‘British values’, which are defined by the UK government as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” It’s hard to imagine anyone getting crucified for preaching that.

Yet Christianity is also used on the left. While he was Labour Leader in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn invoked Jesus in a call to welcome migrants: “The refugee crisis is a moral test. Jesus taught us to respect refugees. He himself said 'welcome the stranger…’ And the Bible says, 'the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born'.

He had done his homework. It’s a better account of the teaching of Jesus. Yet on the left, the welcome of the refugee is often part of a wider and deeper value of ‘diversity’ as a good in itself. Multiculturalism, the kaleidoscope of cultures found on many high streets with Indian, Thai, Italian, Moroccan restaurants, or the image of kids from different countries and religions happily running around a school playground is a beloved trope of secular progressive liberals.

The trouble is that it is not how it feels to many in parts of Luton or Leicester. The residents of Hampstead and Chipping Norton can embrace multiculturalism because it does not fundamentally threaten their way of life.

“The ebbing away of the faith is greeted with barely a fraction of the passion which accompanied Brexit.”

Bijan Omrani

Embracing strangers is easier if you have a settled place to welcome them into. A home where the family gets on well, where the parents are united, the kids are content, is much more likely to be able to welcome in unknown guests with a proper curiosity to learn from them. A family full of tension and bickering is unlikely to welcome the stranger at all, as the newcomer will strain existing tensions even further.

As theologian Oleg Dik writes: “A society which loses a sense of shared broad and strong identity is unable to welcome a stranger…. What makes us different is enriching only as long as we are all aware that we have something uniting us. In the absence of a uniting bond, difference turns out to be threatening.”

The vision of the left – of diversity as an end in itself, held together only by a loose idea of tolerance or secularity which no-one thinks is worth dying for, threatens to erode the ties that bind us, as it gives no clear centrifugal core that can hold us together.

Christianity doesn’t give you an immigration policy. Both left and right can claim some legitimacy in the Christian narrative. However, what Christianity does provide is a community that offers a moral schooling centred on the worship of Jesus, as the one who shows us the true shape of human life, the necessity of self-sacrifice, not self-indulgence as the key to a functioning communal life, and the sacred value of each person - beliefs which, in turn, can welcome the stranger into a secure and confident home.

These things have, over centuries, seeped out from their intense core in the Christian Church into wider society. Arguably today, they are being eroded ironically more by secularism than by Islam.

The real problem of our time is not mass immigration (as the right would have it) or the failure to fully open borders (for the left). It is the widespread erosion of Christian faith.

As historian Bijan Omrani puts it: “Christianity’s disappearance is being accepted with little consideration or debate. The ebbing away of the faith is greeted with barely a fraction of the passion which accompanied Brexit.” Now this may largely be the fault of the church itself, a failure of courage about its own message, and appearing like another social lobbying group for various causes rather than a community centred on the worship of Jesus. But it's also down to the swathes of middle class, educated Britons – like Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn - who like to claim the name of Jesus when it suits, and who live off the cultural heritage of Christianity without investing into its future by going anywhere near a church.

A good immigration policy needs the compassion that welcomes the vulnerable stranger. Yet it also needs a strong united community with a shared set of values, to welcome them into. Left and right may use Christianity in their rhetoric. But both miss something vital - that Christianity has to be practiced not just argued over.

A renewed Christianity might be the saving of both right and left - or at least offer a deeper and richer narrative than either can offer on their own, one that provides a strong core that can holds a society together, yet also welcome the stranger as a gift and not a threat.

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