The moral sugar high of the protest vote

We shouldn’t give politicians bloody noses over insurmountable single issues.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A winning candidate at an election address the audience from a lectern while the loosing candidates look on

The victorious candidate at the Rochdale by-election.

A cat was elected as a Member of Parliament. A cat. George Galloway - former Labour party MP and Rula Lenska’s former cat - has been elected as Member of Parliament for Rochdale. The unique circumstances of the by-election make this a less surprising result than one might think. The Labour Party disowned their candidate, the Tory Party hardly contested the seat, and the sheer number of inappropriate independents meant that a split-vote victory for Galloway was entirely foreseeable. One must also note Galloway’s many skills: as a campaigner, an orator, and a dirty-tactic by-election gadfly.

So…Rula Lenska’s cat did the unimaginable and won a seat in Parliament. How did the cat do this? He convinced people that they could vote for him to protest the current Parliamentary position on the Israel-Gaza War. In his victory speech, Galloway gave an ominous warning: “Keir Starmer…this is for Gaza.” He went on to intimate that his victory was due to the high proportion of Muslim voters in Rochdale; their disgust at the Labour Party’s response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza morphing into a wish to give Keir Starmer (‘one cheek of the same backside’ - Rishi Sunak being the other cheek) a bloody-nose. He warned that Starmer “…will pay a high price for…enabling, encouraging, and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza strip.”

My fellow voters are intelligent enough to recognise that the single addition of George Galloway to the green benches will do almost nothing to affect change. They have voted so, the general consensus goes, simply to register their fury at the plight of ‘fellow Muslims’. I simply want to respond with a question. Is this moral?

People vote for all sorts of reasons. If we believe political scientists and pollsters, voters might care about many things, but will end up voting on the basis of one thing. Normally the economy. One’s own economic interest is a perfectly rational reason to vote for one party’s promises than another. There is a potential immediate impact on our lives and those of our family and friends. But Gaza?

Sociologists have spilt a tremendous amount of ink describing how human communities tend towards ‘tribal’ affection. We tend to feel more connected to those who are like us - in terms of geographic location, in terms of obvious racial characteristics, in terms of language and culture, of course religion. The notion that the Gazan War is a war on Muslims would be a natural driver for the Muslim community of Rochdale to vote ‘for’ their fellow Muslims.

On the other hand, in the world of modern ethics there has been a move to recognise that such tribal allegiance is ultimately meaningless - a call to see all human beings as equally worthy of our care and attention, especially irrespective of geography. Peter Singer famously presented the thought experiment of a drowning child - if we are willing to get our shoes wet and muddy to save a drowning child we walk by a shallow pond, why aren’t we willing to give up some of our wealth to alleviate the war-stricken poverty of a Gazan child many miles away?

The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain.

The words of Jesus seem to support such an ethic, which is always global in its vision. We are not only to love our neighbour as ourselves, we are to go out into all the world, evangelising the nations. From its beginning the Christian faith has preached that loving our neighbour means loving everyone. Everyone is a beloved child of God. Everyone is our neighbour. Surely a vote for Galloway, a vote of rage against the occupation of Gaza, is fundamentally moral - either on grounds of tribe, or rejection of tribe. Surely its Christian!

I’m not so sure.

I’m not so sure we fallen humans actually have the capacity to ‘care’ about the horrors that go on many, many miles away. Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves, but we barely have the emotional energy to love ourselves. We live in a society of such activity and distraction - with a seemingly concomitant rise in the incidence of hopelessness and depression - that I don’t think we can really give our moral and emotional energy to an event as distant and overwhelming as the plight of Gazan civilians. We can barely give it to our families. We can barely give it to ourselves. C S Lewis once wrote that the best way of eradicating suffering was people working away quietly at limited objectives: “I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

Jesus was the ultimate localist - God became incarnate as a unique individual, of a particular tribe, of a particular nation, in a particular time and place. Jesus taught an ethic of universal love and dignity and respect, but lived out in specific acts of service. He didn’t wash the feet of all Jerusalem - just his disciples. He didn’t heal all disease everywhere and forever - but he did restore sight to the few blind people he met. St Paul wrote individual letters to individual communities. Yes, he asked them to pray for him and each other, but otherwise told them to focus on their immediate needs and charity and holiness. The popularity of Jordan Peterson is largely based on the achievability of his slightly nebulous self-help worldview: make YOUR bed, keep YOUR back straight, look after YOUR family. Improve yourself first if you want to even begin improving the world. You’ll probably never manage to improve more than your village…maybe only your own household. That might be enough.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. A new campaign, ‘The Muslim Vote’, has emerged to persuade Muslim voters to lend their support to candidates who commit to ‘Peace in Palestine’ – ceasefire, sanction Israel, and a state for the Palestinians. It is becoming clear that what appears to have happened in Rochdale may well happen in constituencies up and down the country. The idea of the ‘Muslim vote’, which Galloway was able to turn into electoral victory, is being given form and force. It is emotive and persuasive, and may well convince people who have no link to Gaza other than their Muslim faith. It is entirely possible that some of the voters have family and friends trapped in the siege. I empathise with their vote and weep for their sorrow.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. I do, however, worry that many have taken upon themselves a fundamentally unwieldy ethic. Galloway is not a one-man parliamentary wrecking ball - whatever he says. The position of the Government will not be changed by his election. The resolve of the Israeli military is unlikely to be dinted by the UK Government, no matter what resolutions the House of Commons passes. The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain. Perhaps they would be more fulfilled and more effective if they cast their vote on the basis of what could be achieved for them in their community, in the immediate future.

We must pray for the people of Gaza, and we must not cease praying; but I would suggest that we must vote in the interests of the people of our own place, our own constituency. Giving the Labour Party a bloody nose over Gaza might be an immediate moral-sugar-high. Electing an MP who will actually work for the needs of the community in their particularity will certainly be less instantaneously thrilling - but maybe it is more moral.

Article

Belief

Church and state

Comment

Nationalism

Politics

3 September 2025

5 min read

Sorry, Danny Kruger, a Christian nation is a bad idea

Quite simply you cannot build a nation-state on the teaching of Jesus

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

An English flag flies on a church tower.

Different Resonance on Unsplash.

Danny Kruger has become one of my favourite politicians in recent months. His contributions in parliamentary debates on assisted suicide and abortion have endeared him to many Christians including myself as he has led the charge (along with other notable parliamentarians and thought leaders) against what has been dubbed the ‘parliament of death,’ exposing the shaky ethical foundations on which they lie.

He entrenched this reputation with many Christians with a recent speech on the ‘Christian foundations’ of England (‘out of which the United Kingdom grew’) and a passionate plea to recover such foundations. This speech went viral in Christian circles as it articulated the aspirations of many to re-establish Christianity as a national force, specifically in the physical representation of power, the House of Commons. The speech ticked all of the ‘Christian nationalist’ boxes: Christianity should be the ‘common creed’ of the country; England was founded ‘uniquely among the nations’ on ‘the basis of the Bible’; it is the ‘oldest Christian country’; ‘the story of England is the story of Christianity operating on a people.’ A remarkable set of claims to make the butterflies flutter in any Christian’s stomach, surely?

This vision of a ‘Christian nation,’ however, typically represented by Kruger is based on an understanding of Christianity which bears little resemblance to its central character: Jesus. There is much talk of ‘nationhood’ and ‘biblical values’ in such thinking, but tellingly little about Jesus himself (Kruger’s speech makes one passing reference to him). The reason is not complicated. Quite simply you cannot build a nation-state on the teaching of Jesus.

Every nation-state (including England, the ‘prototype’ of such a concept, according to Kruger) was formed though violent subjugation of rival tribes and narratives, establishing a monopoly on the means of legitimate violence to centralise power for princes to wage war and protect private property. Jesus’ commands to love one’s enemies, pray for those who persecute you, not resist evildoers and give away possessions are not simply an inconvenience to such a programme, but are profoundly impractical. Like an embarrassing and awkward family member turning up uninvited to a wedding, they stand opposed to a ‘civilisational Christianity’ which seeks to be the ‘chaplain of nations’ as Kruger suggests, resisting any attempt at baptising and polishing a version of what remains Machiavellian statecraft.

These two forms of Christianity are in fact little more than two sides of the same coin and there is a more fundamental distinction to be made.

Like a cricketer putting on extra padding to face a fast bowler, Christian ethics softens the blow of such radical expectations by suggesting that Jesus can’t really have meant what he said, especially for modern, enlightened folk today. Perhaps Jesus expected the Kingdom of God to arrive more quickly than it did and as time progressed, we needed a more practical ethic. Not wanting to abandon Jesus, his teaching is reduced to general ‘values’ like ‘love’ or ‘justice,’ the content of which in fact become the precise opposite of what Jesus taught. ‘Jesus may have said to love enemies, but we will be less safe if we do, so we had better kill them.’ ‘Jesus may have said not to love money, but our economic systems which seem quite good at alleviating poverty rely on this, so greed isn’t so bad.’

It may sound as if I am opposing Kruger’s vison for the alternative option in the culture wars. It is often suggested that there are two ‘Christianities’ at work in the West: one represented by Kruger might be called the ‘Christian right,’ which emphasises family values, patriotism and the importance of place, the other (at which Kruger takes aim in his speech), a left-wing or ‘woke’ Christianity which stresses welcoming the stranger, economic justice and identity politics.

This is a red herring, however. These two forms of Christianity are in fact little more than two sides of the same coin and there is a more fundamental distinction to be made. For while they might disagree on content, the method is remarkably similar. Left-leaning Christians may disagree with Kruger on his definition of a Christian nation but would uphold the desire for the nation-state to be founded on values they consider Christian. The common assumption is that Christianity is a ‘civilisational’ force, ideally enacted by Christians and their narrative taking hold of the levers of power and influence and dominating the ‘public square.’

If Jesus’ teaching is not supposed to be embodied by the nation-state, however, what is its purpose and does this not leave the public square to malevolent forces, as Kruger suggests? Jesus’ teaching is indeed directed at a particular body of people who are supposed to embody it publicly, and that is the community explicitly committed to follow and structure social life around the living presence of Jesus; this is the church. The New Testament even suggests the language of nationhood is appropriate for this body as a new nation is being formed around the person of Jesus who commands the allegiance that modern nation-states claim for themselves.

Kruger’s vision of the Church of England’s parish system is where ‘we are all members, we all belong, even if you never set foot in your church from one year to the next, even if you don’t believe in its teachings, it is your church, and you are its member.’ This is a million miles away from the vision of the New Testament where entry into this newly formed community implies active repentance and a collision with the ways of the world represented by mere ‘values.’ If that makes me part of ‘another eccentric denomination’ according to Kruger, then so be it.

To suggest that this alternative vision cedes the ‘public square’ to malevolent forces also betrays a lack of imagination around the public nature of the church. It is assumed that if Christians retreat from the ambition to explicitly and directly make our nation-state Christian then we relegate our religion to the realm of the ‘private’ and succumb to the worst elements of Enlightenment fears about religion in the public square. The earliest Christians had no explicit desire to ‘transform the Roman empire and make it Christian’ but simply took Jesus at his word on wealth, forgiveness, welcome of the stranger and proclamation of salvation and the life made possible by Jesus’ death and resurrection. This was their public witness and it just so happened that it utterly transformed the communities in which these followers of Jesus were situated at the same time. This vision certainly has a place for Christians engaging in politics as Kruger has in debates on assisted suicide for instance, exposing the shaky foundations of any form of life not founded on the life made possible in Jesus. This is most appropriately done, however, without reaching for language that implied the state has salvific qualities, language Christian teaching rightly reserves only for God himself.

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