Interview

Change

Faith

S&U interviews

22 June 2023

6 min read

"Nobody is neutral": Kate Forbes on her Christian faith and political future

Politician Kate Forbes knows how it feels when public life misunderstands a faith-led life. Robert Wright interviews her as she reflects on that experience and what next.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A women stands beside in a corridor beside a large window through which a wing of a building and a distant hillside can be see,

Kate Forbes at Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament.

When Scotland’s then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, unexpectedly announced her resignation in February, Kate Forbes was on maternity leave from her job as Scotland’s finance secretary. As such, Forbes, a committed Christian, had not made any public statements about politics in six months.

Yet, reflecting on the campaign earlier this month, Forbes recalled how social and mainstream media were immediately “awash” with comments about why her religious convictions made her unfit to succeed Sturgeon. The controversy, much of it centred on Forbes’ membership of the small, theologically conservative Free Church of Scotland, continued throughout the subsequent election campaign. Most involved her stance on gay marriage and Scotland’s gender recognition legislation.

Forbes discussed the campaign in an interview in her small office in the Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh – one of her first since the often fractious campaign. Forbes secured an unexpectedly strong 47.9 per cent of the vote after the elimination of the third-placed candidate, Ash Regan, and the redistribution of her second-preference votes. She now sits as a backbench Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch. Forbes rejected an offer from Humza Yousaf, the victor, the clear choice of the party establishment, of a cabinet job far more junior than her previous role.

She started the discussion by challenging the idea – which she thought motivated some criticisms she faced - that atheists, agnostics and other non-believers were neutrals on questions of religious conviction. It was one of many points where Forbes used her experience to paint a picture of a public life where issues of faith and faithful people were increasingly marginalised and misunderstood.

“Nobody is neutral. There’s this perception, which is flawed, that there are some people who are neutral and some people who have faith.”

Everyone viewed the world through a philosophical framework, Forbes went on. It was critical to ensure people were not shut out of public debate on the basis of their philosophies, she said – just as it was important to avoid excluding people for their race, sex, sexual orientation or any of the other characteristics protected in law.

Her comments explain the unusually frank approach that she took to matters of faith when asked during the campaign about her convictions – which she insists represent a “mainstream” Christian perspective on issues of personal morality.

“I think that people of faith are under immense pressure to compromise or to change their views in the public spotlight. I think we have to logically and rationally walk through how we can both believe in a personal faith which calls us to be public witnesses to that faith and at the same time serve those with other faiths or no faith.”

Forbes, now 33 and first elected in 2016, has said that she would have voted against gay marriage if she had been a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) in 2014 when the Scottish parliament voted to introduce the measure. However, she has insisted that, with the provision now on the statute books, she will defend it.

“By and large, I absolutely believe in… freedom of choice, freedom of belief and of expression. I don’t believe my views should be imposed on other people.”

Forbes nevertheless argued that there were issues of conscience where politicians should be allowed to make choices free from the normal party-political considerations. Forbes was on maternity leave in December when the gender recognition legislation came before parliament. The SNP denied its MSPs a free vote on the measure – a decision with which Forbes disagreed. The vote split all the main parties in the parliament.

Little of the commentary during the leadership election captured the nuances of her positions.

“The vote on marriage in 2014 was deemed to be a vote of conscience. My party has always held that issues around abortion should be votes of conscience. So, I think it’s possible to both believe that you legislate on behalf of everyone and treat everyone equally and make space for some votes of conscience, which are a consequence of strongly held views and convictions.”

Forbes added that “without a shadow of a doubt” MSPs should be given a free vote on one forthcoming piece of legislation - the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill. The bill, likely to come before parliament in the next few months, would allow terminally ill people over the age of 16 to ask for help in dying.

“Matters of life and death are hugely important, hugely personal but have big public implications. You might think that’s a tension. But I have always been able to accommodate that tension.”

There had never been any suggestion that Forbes’ faith led her to exclude any group from receiving funds when she was finance secretary, she added.

“Of course, it did inform my care and concern for those in poverty, for those who are under-represented in society, for those who need more help than others,” she said.

As her office filled with the noise of children enjoying their lunch break at the neighbouring Royal Mile Primary School, Forbes mostly sounded relaxed when talking about the leadership campaign. But she insisted she had felt subject to disproportionate scrutiny, particularly pointing to a leadership debate staged by Channel 4 which included a segment on “faith in politics”.

“If you watch that clip, it’s basically the interrogation of Kate Forbes. There are very few questions put to the other candidates.”

The imbalance, she said, rested on the false assumption that Yousaf, a practising Muslim, and Regan, who has no religion, took essentially neutral positions on faith questions. She said, however, that she had won support from many people of faith because of her willingness to speak openly.

“I can remember one imam saying to me, ‘It’s given us hope to see you being true and authentic to your faith even when it’s difficult’,” Forbes recalled.

Forbes, who grew up partly in India where her parents were missionaries, recalled how living through the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, when she was 10, helped to bring her to her own faith. The earthquake is estimated to have killed between around 14,000 and 20,000 people.

“It was coming face to face with the realities of life and the realities of death that I started my own faith journey,”

Forbes became noticeably more animated when talking about the nature of her personal faith than at other times, when she sounded far more guarded.

Her faith was not “a hobby like knitting or playing the guitar”, she added.

“It’s a truth that compels me to be loving and caring and be willing to sacrifice my own life.”

For the moment, however, the questions facing Forbes are more humdrum. Forbes gave her interview before Yousaf warned MSPs to back Sturgeon, the former first minister, following her arrest in June on suspicion of fraud in an inquiry over the SNP’s finances. Sturgeon, who was released without charge, has vigorously denied any wrongdoing.

Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband, the former SNP chief executive, the first person arrested, and Colin Beattie, the party’s former treasurer, have also been released without charge. Both also deny any wrongdoing.

Forbes accepted the arrests had been a “huge shock”.

“I said after the second arrest… that integrity should characterise everything we do – and not just the substance of integrity but the perception.”

She also accepted there were limits to the areas where faith could guide her thinking.

She declined to say whether Jesus would prefer Scotland to be independent or remain part of the union.

“There’s no 11th commandment that decrees whether or not Scotland should in the union. I think what [God] cares about really is the values by which we live. So, you’re going to get no answer from me on that.”

She sounded still less certain, meanwhile, about where her future career path would lead.

She would continue as an MSP “for the foreseeable future”, she said.

But she went on: “The honest answer is that I don’t know what to do next.”

She had previously said it was “highly, highly unlikely” she would ever stand to be leader again, she added.

“I still hold to that position,” she said, adding that she had family and constituency commitments.

She added, nevertheless, that a sense of sacrificial calling was “ingrained” in her by her parents’ decision to leave Scotland in their 20s to serve a marginalised, impoverished community in India.

“I wait to see, really, what I can and should do next.”

Article

Change

Community

Eating

Friendship

18 November 2025

6 min read

It’s in Third Places we can be our most human

Gathering in-person fights against the fragmentation

Alex Noel

Alex Noel is a writer and digital marketer.

A group of friends sit arouns a large table eating together.

Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

In my favourite local cafe, I pause mid-step to take a sip of the coffee I’ve just ordered. Setting it down on a table, I slide into my seat and turn my attention to the music playing over the speakers. It’s always good in here. It’s one of the reasons I like this place; they sell records and coffee here. Music is their ‘thing’, and it’s been my ‘thing’ too, ever since I was a young teenager. I’ll often chat about it with the baristas. And in the time it takes them to make me a flat white, we have exchanged news of recent and upcoming gigs, favourite artists, plus recommendations for new (and old) music we’re listening to. I don’t just enjoy coming here, I somehow feel that I belong.

Today though, the young barista on duty is engaged in a conversation about football with an older customer seated across the counter. The former is in his early 20s, and the latter - I guess - is in his late forties. They animatedly discuss their favourite soccer team. This includes the ins-and-outs of ownership and management, the players’ highs and lows this season, and reliving moments of impressive skill. I tune in and out, much like I do with the music in the background.

And so it is that this West London cafe is a Third Place. Of the three Places in society (identified by urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place), it is Third Places that hold unique potential for finding connection, and even belonging. Removed from the first and second places of Home and Work; Third Places relieve us of the agendas that come with domestic and professional responsibilities. They separate us - for a while at least - from the concerns of daily life. In local parks, theatres, cafes, gyms, comedy clubs, music venues, book bars, volunteer groups, churches, pubs and more, we can find common ground with one another. A corner of our city or town where we can forge social connections, meet people and have meaningful conversations which cut across generations and other demographies. Here we can often find the connection and belonging that might otherwise elude us.

The internet, and social media, held out this promise too - of being a genuine Third Place. But despite our reliance on it, it hasn’t delivered. A Financial Times report published in early October revealed that social media use peaked in 2022, and has since declined globally by 10%. In an instagram video, Jordan Schwartzenberger, a 27-year-old business influencer and Forbes 30 Under 30, commented that: “it tracks with what we’re all feeling”. He lamented that social media was always meant to be about social connection, but instead it has shifted towards hyper-personalisation and content. We are subject to its algorithms which not only silo us but confine us to our individual feeds. Platforms are now geared to keeping us blinkered and scrolling, as they monetise our attention through advertising. Add to that their ‘enshittification’ thanks to the ubiquity of AI, and you have a recipe which has “nuked the authenticity of the internet”.

Nowhere more has this lack of authenticity been felt than by Generation Z. For those aged 13-28, our digital world is the only world they know, and they’re already tiring of it. As a result, more and more are logging off - craving in-person experiences instead of digital ones. And choosing to swap the dopamine hit of endless scrolling for the oxytocin of real social connection.

The rising cost of living, general retreat into online spaces and COVID closures means that there are fewer Third Places to go. But Gen Z is re-pioneering them. As a result, Third Places are evolving - there’s been a proliferation of in-person experiences as Gen Z head offline to seek out meaningful interactions ‘IRL’. The barrier to entry might not be as low as traditional Third Places, but the principle is the same, to foster socially organic connections in real life.

For example, twenty-somethings in London can take credit for the rebirth of supper clubs as communal dining takes on new meaning, and Sunday mornings are now for curated coffee meet-ups where groups are ‘matched’ according to their interests. Both of these are providing a welcome alternative to dating apps too. Specific offline events favour crafting, book-reading and conversation with attendees putting away their devices for the duration. Meanwhile run-clubs and street-skating groups take to the roads - Third Places in motion. Social media is still used to advertise and bring people together, but the emphasis is on logging off and being present. This search for social connection might explain too, beyond the spiritual enquiry cited by ‘The Quiet Revival’, why so many from Gen Z have been turning up to church. Because we cannot ignore the importance of Place, nor of Presence (whether our own or others’) in creating the meaningful experiences we are seeking. And without this sense of incarnation there is no Christian faith.

The internet, however, is not a place. Something observed by American artist Eleanor Antin, who likened it to “a great void, a black hole”. Since the 1960s, her work has explored history, contemporary culture and identity. Through her multiple ‘selves’ realised in mixed media, she has challenged the idea of having a single, unified ‘self’. For its part - the internet, and especially social media, all too easily enables a fracturing of ‘selfhood’. We are split, divided between our (sometimes multiple) online, and offline selves; both in our attention, and in how we show up. It compromises both our Presence, and the Places we’re in. Who hasn’t sat in a cafe surrounded by people, but been completely absent from it? With fields of vision as narrow as our screens, our loneliness and isolation just increases. This fracturing of self ripples out, into our relationships and society. Our polarisation amplified by what promised to connect us, translating into real world consequences. The death of Charlie Kirk was a case in point. Amongst the diatribe that followed was Utah Governor, Spencer Cox's plea to “log off, turn off, touch grass…”. ‘Touch Grass’ is now, somewhat ironically, an internet meme.

So, if the internet isn’t a place, what is it? Definitions are of a system of interconnected computer networks; endless pathways for the data conjured up and configured onto our screens. But a better definition, existentially at least, is that of being a ‘Non-Place’. French anthropologist Marc Augé invented this idea to explain the systems and conduits which mediate our lives - indivisible from what he termed ‘super-modernity’, part and parcel of our late-stage capitalism. These Non-places - motorways, shopping malls, faceless hotels, force us to conform to their overriding function and purpose. Like products on conveyor belts, we comply. Any interactions we have are mere contractual exchanges. We’re dehumanised. They are everything that Third Places are not.

Third Places, by contrast, are where we can be our most human. Here, we can put our fractured selves back together and be wholly present in them - incarnate - once more. Relating without digital interfaces means we can fully perceive each other and our environments too - using all five of our senses. We were always better at connecting in-person. That is what Gen Z is realising. While Third Places old and new, facilitate this, they really boil down to ‘wherever two or three are gathered’. Any place can become a Third Place if we will be present, turn towards each other, and spark up a conversation. And so it is that our first ever generation of digital natives, might well be the ones to lead us back to places of connection, and belonging, and ultimately back to ourselves.

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