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

Hospitality

7 October 2025

6 min read

In an age of disconnection, I want to belong

Old rituals offer reasons to stay linked together even when the world is trying to pull us apart

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Wassailers emerge from a shed beside a wood

Wassailing at Bourne Woods, Lincolnshire.

Bob Harvey, CCL, Geograph.

Once, I went to a ‘wassail’ on the edge of the city I lived in. A Wassail, from the Old English phrase meaning "be in good health", is a ceremony that involves toasting apple trees and scaring away evil spirits to ensure a good harvest, and it dates back to Anglo Saxon times. A man dressed in green and brown layers and leaves led the ceremony, passing around cups and cider for us to offer to the trees. We listened to stories, shared food. The event was ticketed. I was curious. But I felt out of place; a fraud stepping into this old ritual with no prior connection to these particular apple trees or this bit of land they were on, or to the people who surrounded them – trying to convince myself and others that I belonged. To what? To who? At the end, we all went back to our separate homes across the city, no more responsibility for those trees, nothing to link us to each other anymore.

I’ve been advertised many events like this. Places to be celebrated through feasting, music and dance, entering into “ancient traditions connecting us to nature” – beating the bounds, toasting the land, enjoying seasonal feasts, listening to old stories. Photos advertising these events are like something styled for Country Living magazine, placing heritage rituals in high-end consumer settings; signalling intentionally or not that they are curated lifestyle experiences available to those who can afford them. They are part of the growing ‘return to the land’ movement that I often come across online, mediated through brands and influencers, curated retreats, Instagrammable countryside.

I look outside the window towards our rural Devon village. It is grey and drizzly, and it will probably be grey and drizzly at harvest time. There will be no Instagrammable moments, but there will be deep roots that have grown slowly and are tended all year round.

Perhaps these events signify an ache for a particular kind of rootedness. I have this ache. I am envious of friends who farm in landscapes their ancestors have inhabited for hundreds of years, of people who feel a clear sense of home and belonging. In the past, these feelings were often linked to community and to the faith and work traditions that bind community together: harvest home, Lammas, Rogation, saints’ days, midsummer. They weren’t boutique experiences open to anyone who could pay for them; they were communal and local, woven into survival, farming, faith, community. I am trying to carve out these feelings too.

I have been wondering what we lose when old celebrations and rituals are curated, commodified, or disconnected from the deeper soil of faith and tradition that once sustained them. How do we celebrate the longing for rootedness without flattening it into a lifestyle accessory, stripping it of faith, memory, obligation, and mystery? How might old rituals help us to feel deeply hopeful and rooted in an environmentally and socially fragmented age?

I think it can help to place these rituals in the context of place; of community; of faith. These contexts offer reasons to stay linked together even when the world is trying to pull us apart, even when I’d rather walk away. Without some kind of infrastructure of belonging, I think old rituals can become about consumption and lifestyle rather than connection to people and place. They become weekend events, or expressions of self, or a nice vibe – not a life’s ordering. Real ritual, I am coming to realise, requires weight; a tie to story, belief, and responsibility — not just aesthetic revival. A harvest festival in a rural, overlooked parish like mine may be small, strange and inefficient. It will not be photogenic, but it will connect me and others to a stream of 2,000 years of worship here, and before that to millennia of agricultural rhythm-marking. It introduces me to people and farms, to old stories that have lain dormant like relics in the soil, to possibilities for my own faith and belonging.

I have been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine. By ‘machine’ he means the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged; a project of modernity “that is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfil the most ancient human dream: to become gods.” I suspect Kingsnorth would see the commercialisation of ancient rituals as a consequence of machine culture. Disconnecting the rituals from their origins and landscapes and relational ecosystems is to render them floating experiences, available to be purchased and claimed and bent to anyone’s will. A machine-friendly spirituality that strips mystery and, importantly, the cost of that spirituality – commitment, belonging, sacrifice, inconvenience.

Kingsnorth shows that the razing of old stories, communities, and traditions created a blank canvas that allowed for the success of the industrial revolution, and so today’s materialistic and economically-driven culture. And so I see hope in the interest and resurgence of old traditions, in our hunger for roots, in the reclaiming of stories that were once trampled and forgotten. But I think it matters whether they are resurrected as machine-friendly buyable experiences, or as ways of being that seek continuity with something older and truer, something outside of today’s dominant paradigms.

Anthropologist Victor Turner explored the ideas of liminality and communitas. Liminality refers to an ambiguous ‘between’ state where individuals are stripped of their usual social roles and statuses. Communitas is the unstructured social bond that emerges among people in this liminal state, creating a sense of equality, directness, and shared humanity that challenges formal social structures. Perhaps – in this time of climate change and AI and an increasingly unknowable future – we are all in a liminal space. Perhaps the revival of old rituals allows for direct human connection. Perhaps the wassail event, and others like it, encourages human connection in a fractured time. Perhaps they make the countryside into a sanctuary in unknowable times, and perhaps that is enough.

The Christian story does these things too, but I think it goes deeper still – it sanctifies time itself, embedding the rituals and seasons in liturgy, creating a steady rhythm that can hold community together without being dependent on trends or tickets. It is a story grown from a sacred supper, shared feasts, prayer, fasting, seeds, and rituals of death and new life. It is a story that binds together its hearers into relation and rhythm-making.

Christianity is not a neat ‘answer’ to the rootlessness and unbelonging of our time. But it offers old and tested examples of depth, continuity, and gratitude in ritual. It has of course long absorbed and re-shaped older rituals, born of older communities – like the Celts, who knew that place and time and land and people, animated by something beyond, could combine to create particular patterns and poetry which, when taken seriously, could deepen identity and togetherness with each other and the Earth. Christianity recognised this and built on it (and squashed it in places, but that is another story). I think that picking and choosing and bending old traditions, detaching them from time and place and cultural significance, even if just to remove religious baggage, reduces that old poetry to prose. It is no longer sustained by its original social and spiritual infrastructure.

Such an infrastructure, built over generations, connects us to a through-line of celebration, gratitude, lament, and renewal. Following this through line – which whether I’ve liked it or not has linked me to new and old expressions of the Christian faith – is what is helping me to find belonging and participation. The wassail I joined signified to me that I’m still on the search for belonging. I want to go to a Wassail event again, but I want to do it outside of the ‘machine’, in a place I am putting roots into, with trees that I help tend, lifting bread around a harvest table with others I am working to know. I still feel a tug to these old rituals, as if assessing their ability to provide orienting infrastructure to my life and to the life of community. But in this age of disconnection – of industrial food, global supply chains, loneliness – what I want is less curated experience and more real belonging. I hope to find a bit more of that at harvest time.

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