Article

Comment

Economics

Generosity

19 November 2025

5 min read

This year’s Budget won’t define your future

Dare to be generous in a time of constraint

Annika Greco Thompson

Annika is Growth and Relationships Manager at Stewardship UK.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves preps.

There’s been much speculation about what Chancellor Reeves will announce on November 26, and it seems the country is holding its collective breath, fearing the worst. As a nation we’ve been privy to the disorganised to-ing and fro-ing of our politicians for a while now (but to be fair to the current government, waffling and backtracking aren’t unique to them).

For many weeks, the political news reporting hinted strongly at Reeves breaking her election promise and raising income tax. With less than two weeks to go, Reeves decided to scrap the idea of raising income tax, which I’m sure is a relief to many. But the fact that she was steadfastly planning to go back on her word before retreating at the last minute does little to nurture public confidence.

So, we’re left in a fog of uncertainty and confusion, with very little good economic news to look forward to. Do I paint a bleak picture?

The real question is, how should I respond as a Christian?

Living in tension

So much of the Christian faith is about holding two seemingly contradictory truths in tension. We live in the natural world with all of its limitations, but we also live in a supernatural reality (what Christians call the Kingdom of God) where naturally impossible things become possible.

One of the tensions surrounding this Autumn Budget – and our present moment – is that despite the government clearly not being able to offer viable solutions, the public’s dependence and expectation on the government to offer such solutions seems to be increasing. The result is perpetual disappointment in our politicians.

But this shouldn’t surprise us. Democracy’s biggest weakness is that elected politicians are incentivised to say they are making decisions for our benefit, all the while making decisions that are in their own best interest in order to stay in power, offering the public the occasional short-term win at the expense of long-term gain.

God operates in a different way entirely. He genuinely plays the long game for humanity’s benefit. Though at times it may appear that he is slacking on his promises (i.e. why is there so much sickness and abuse in the world if he is our healer and protector?), but he holds the big picture in mind. We might ask for something and not get it, but he will give us something better because he knows what we really need. He might allow us to fall flat on our faces, but he has a bigger redemption plan waiting for us. Our earthly government does not.

In that light, we can trust God when his arm appears to be too short, because we know that he will work all things together for our good. His character does not change and His principles aren’t sacrificed on the altar of survival. He’s seen the end from the beginning, and he is committed to his purposes and plans. Unlike our earthly government, God is able to provide above and beyond what we can ask or think. He is able to supernaturally multiply meagre resources. He is able to make a way where there seems to be no way.

The hard part is, he does require of us to walk in trust and obedience. But this is what true freedom is.

Dominion

For Christians, this bleak economic environment presents a great opportunity to be encouraging personal agency and creativity. This is a time to be leaning into entrepreneurship and collaboration, a time to challenge the pervasive narrative of scarcity. In other words, it’s a great time to exercise dominion to a greater degree than we ever have before.

Considering how badly various parts of the Church have handled this mandate throughout history, it’s understandable that the word dominion might raise a few eyebrows. I want to be clear that dominion is not another word for imperialism or colonialism or any other ‘ism’ that seeks to exercise control over people. Biblically, exercising dominion means to make all of creation flourish, to create order out of chaos, and to bring all things under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It’s what God commanded human beings to do at the very beginning of our existence, and it’s what Jesus reaffirmed in the Great Commission.

We do this by modelling a Kingdom way of doing things that brings about righteous results. We do this by thinking differently, by being transformed by the renewing of our minds. We do this by moving in the opposite spirit to the one that is driving the rest of the world.

Generosity

We cannot exercise Godly dominion without pressing into generosity. This one is hard, because as so many of us can attest to, budgets are tight, our pay checks aren’t reaching as far as they used to, and it’s incredibly tempting to give in to fear and worry that we won’t have enough. I certainly struggle with this.

The tension is: when we believe that our God is generous beyond measure, we confidently take a step of faith to continue giving. With the complete understanding that how much we give may need to vary depending on what kind of season we’re in, the truth is that we have resources to share, monetary or otherwise.

I want to emphasise that generosity isn’t just about giving money. It’s a much fuller picture that furthers the ministry of reconciliation. By giving of all that we have and are, including our time, our hospitality, our attention, our emotions, and our power, we are inviting people into a reconciled relationship with God and man. Our generosity should ultimately be about reflecting the profoundly generous nature of God and the way He consistently brings hope and restoration where things have been badly broken.

Our response

It’s crucial to remember that we cannot reflect God’s generous nature without the Holy Spirit. He is present to help us discern how to make God’s Kingdom known in this fog of uncertainty and confusion. He is with us and will lead us.

We don’t know what’s ahead; the Autumn Budget may or may not have a significant impact on your situation. But if you’re feeling worried about how your finances are going to stretch to the end of the month, God is with you in your lack. And if you’re feeling secure in your ability to remain financially comfortable and weather the storms, God is with you in your abundance.

Regardless of which category we find ourselves in, our best response is to hold things lightly before the Lord, knowing that everything we have is from him, and everything we have is to be stewarded for his glory.

Ultimately, our freedom isn’t determined by government policy or the Autumn Budget. Neither is our freedom determined by how much or how little financial security we have. Our freedom is found in maintaining a posture of trust and obedience, and a heart that dares to be generous in a time of constraint.

Stewardship UK sponsors series 8 of the Re-Enchanting podcast. Find out more.

Stewardship UK

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Freedom of Belief

Politics

16 June 2025

5 min read

Holding an opposing view is not 'imposing' belief on the assisted dying debate

Opposing interventions from believers on dishonesty grounds is a sinister development in public debate

Nick Spencer

Nick is an author and Senior Fellow at Theos,a think tank.

A graphic shows a gallery of people with religious symbols on their clothing.

“There are some who oppose this crucial reform,” Esther Rantzen wrote recently of MPs who dared to opposed Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life private member’s bill. “Many of them have undeclared personal religious beliefs… [do] they have the right to impose them on patients like me, who do not share them?”

This is a peculiarly common argument for those who support the right to Assisted Dying, which is surprising as it would be hard to come up with a less coherent case against religion in public life. The idea that elected MPs engaged in parliamentary debate are “imposing” their will on other people is odd. The idea that MPs have undeclared personal religious beliefs is strange too. I think it’s fair to say that most people know that Shabana Mahmood is a Muslim or Tim Farron is a Christian, and for those that don’t know that but do have access to Google, it takes less than five seconds to find out the religious beliefs of an MP.

Perhaps most tellingly, however, why is it that we should be alert to – read wary of – MPs religious beliefs? Do the non-religious not have beliefs of which we should be cognizant? If my MP is motivated by a philosophy of relentless, Peter Singer-like utilitarianism or vague, incoherent secular humanism I’d like to know.

In truth, Rantzen’s intervention in this debate, like that of a number of others – Lord Falconer, Simon Jenkins, Humanists UK, etc. – is part of a recent and rather dispiriting attempt to de facto exclude religious contribution to public debates by accusing them of being dishonest.

To be clear, secular voices have long tried to exclude religious ones, but the tactics change. Back in the New Atheist heyday of the early twenty first century, all you needed to do was splutter something about sky fairies or Bronze Age beliefs or mind viruses to close down any sort of religious intervention. If, as Richard Dawkins famously put it, faith was one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate, no sensible parliament could possibly want to heed what faith had to say.

Even back then, however, there were subtler arguments against faith, which usually came in the form of semi-digested Rawslian political liberalism, and demanded the religious participation in public debate had to obey the strictures of “public reasoning”, using logic and language that “all reasonable people” will understand.

There are quite a few holes in this particular away of thinking (who are “reasonable people” anyway?) but as a rule of thumb, it’s not a bad one to follow. It is quite right and proper, if only as a matter of pragmatism, to speak in terms that your opponents will get, just as it is right and proper, as a matter of courtesy, to be open about what ultimately motivates you.

And so that is what religious figures – MPs, leaders, institutions – do. Having read through pretty much all their contributions to the assisted dying debate, in parliament and beyond, I can testify that not many people, on either side of the debate, quote scripture or invoke papal teaching as a way of persuading, let alone commanding, others. (As it happens, parliamentarians haven’t really done that since the 1650s, but that’s another story).

Rather, they argue in terms of policy and principles. They talk about the risk of legislative slippage, of changing attitudes to the vulnerable, of the need for better palliative care, of existing pressures on the NHS, etc. This is quite right and proper. As James Cleverly remarked in the Common debate in November, “We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill”. And so that is what they did.

Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak?

In effect, religious public figures, whether or not their beliefs are “declared”, do what they have (rightly) been asked to do by those who have appointed themselves as gatekeepers for our public debate. And so this has forced the usual suspects to pivot in their argument. No longer able to dismiss religious contributions for what they say (“don’t quote the Bible at me!”) they are now compelled to dismiss them for what they don’t say. Hence, the trope that has become popular among such campaigners – “you are not being honest about your real motivations”.

A new report from the think tank Theos, entitled, How much have your religious views influenced your decision?”: religion and the assisted dying debate, unpacks the various objections that have been levelled at the religious contribution to the debate, and then systematically dismantles them.

Some of these objections are old school in the extreme.

Religious belief is too intellectually inadequate or disfiguring for debates of this nature.

Religion is insufficiently willing to adapt and compromise for politics.

Faith is ill-fitted or even inadmissible in a secular polity or culture.

But the report majors on the newer objection, so clearly displayed by Esther Rantzen, what we might call “dishonesty” objection, that religious contributors are fundamentally dishonest about their motivations and objectives.

In truth, this is no stronger than the more tried and tested objections, and it displays a serious, possibly intentional, misunderstanding of what a religious argument actually is. To quote the political philosopher Jeremy Waldron, such secular campaigners “present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation, and they contrast it with the elegant simplicity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin [and] with this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life.”

Contemporary arguments against religion in public life are slightly more sophisticated than Waldron’s caricature here, but not much. The idea that religio should be “declared” as a competing interest, so as to stop religious participants in debate from being “dishonest” is every bit as sinister, against both the letter and the spirit of plural, liberal democracy. Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak?

As the assisted dying debate returns to parliament for the final push, there will be much animated debate. That is quite right and proper. A democracy needs vigorous and honest argument. But part of that honesty involves opening the doors of debate to everyone, and not subtly trying to exclude those with whom you disagree on the spurious grounds that they are being dishonest.

Read the report

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