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.

Article

Belief

Creed

15 April 2025

6 min read

This pub chat brought us to tears

In the debris of the Enlightenment there’s a rising warmth to the mystical.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Four people sit round a pub table, some look animated, others pensive.

gaspar zaldo on Unsplash

I recently found myself sitting in an Oxford pub, crying with a man I barely know. And I wanted to tell you about it.

How did we, two almost-strangers, find ourselves crying opposite each other?

Well…

Oh, gosh. How do I say this? We were crying because we were talking about Jesus.

We’d both been spending the week at a gathering of academics in Oxford and one sunny afternoon, we, along with the other attendees, had wandered to one of Oxford’s effortlessly enchanting pubs. We ordered a couple of their finest IPAs and found ourselves perched next to each other. I quickly gauged that this guy doesn’t dabble in small talk, so, right there - sat in battered leather armchairs and surrounded by people - we spoke to each other about Jesus. Not in any kind of academic or philosophic manner; we just sort of shared what we think of him, what we feel about him, what we wonder about him.

Ten minutes later, we had demonstrably leaky eyes.

You see, my comrade in tears and I, we’re both Christians. Over the past two-thousand-ish years, that term has come to mean a number of things – it’s become a weighted word. But what I mean when I say that we’re both Christians, is that we love Jesus.

That’s so weird to say, isn’t it? I’m resisting the urge to polish that definition up, to mop up the whimsy and make it more palatable for you. My instinct is to reach for an academic reasoning, a profound way to make what I just said sound less weird. But I’m going to resist. I’m just going to let that seemingly absurd truth blow in the wind.

Can I let you in on something, though? Something a little vulnerable? I love Jesus, but I find him hard to talk to you about. One of two things tends to happen when I try, I get emotional, or I get embarrassed. Neither feels helpful.

Let’s start with the embarrassment, because it’s easier to explain.

We live in the debris of the Enlightenment. We’re materialists, rationalists, all that we see is all that there is-ists. We want certainty, we want prove-ability, we want to stand upon the solid ground of reason. We’ve spent the last century or two valuing cold, hard, facts – not warm, soft, inklings. We’ve repeatedly traded mystery for mastery. And, because of all those things, we’ve ushered in secularism. That’s what we call ourselves, isn’t it? Secular? Those who have outgrown their need of a cosmic saviour, those who have finally burst free of the God delusion.

This story, this event, it teaches me that everything can be mended, including me.

This is my context as much as it is yours, and so, with all of that swirling around me – with secularism acting as the societal stage upon which I stand - my belief in Jesus is odd. I have spent my life feeling deeply unintelligent for believing that Jesus was all that he said he was, I can’t deny that. Secular culture has often had me feeling as though I’ve pulled up a chair, ready and excited to play the game of life, only to find that I hold an old set of instructions. Secularism screams at me, points at me, makes me feel as though I’m wearing an outfit that went out of fashion two seasons ago. And so, much to my shame, I get embarrassed. I play its game, a game I wasn’t designed to play, and I lose.

And then there’s the specificity of Jesus, right?

Even in the corners of culture where secularism is losing its grip and there’s a rising warmth to the transcendent, mystical, unexplainable things – there’s still a guard up when it comes to religion. In many cases, rightly so. People tend to feel more comfortable in the ‘spiritual, not religious’ camp. There’s something self-preserving about allusivity, isn’t there? Saying that I believe in Jesus strips me of that luxury – my association with him means that I’m also associated with two billion other people, and that can be disconcerting. It means I have little control over how I’m perceived by you, nor how I’m represented by them. It also means that my experiential spirituality is housed within a specific story, a framework, a tradition – I don’t get to pick and choose. It’s an all-in kind of thing.

So, every time someone who doesn’t know Jesus wants to talk to me about him – someone like you, perhaps - all of the above does its best to shut me up. It mostly wins and I mostly fail you. If – on occasion – I am able to rip the tape of self-consciousness from my mouth, I get frustratingly emotional. And that reaction is slightly harder to explain.

I don’t interact with Jesus as a metaphor, an archetype, or a symbol. You may think me delusional, but I’ve decided to take him at his word, to live as if he was everything that he said he was – fully God, fully human, the whole she-bang. And I take the same approach to Easter – the festival that celebrates the thing I believe to be the truest – Jesus’ resurrection. His death and subsequent un-death, what T.S. Eliot calls: ‘the still point of the turning world’. What Dr Martin Shaw regards as ‘the most extraordinary act of love, so catastrophic in its beauty, we’re still in shock two thousand years later’.

The realness of it all moves me. It, just as Martin has diagnosed, shocks me. This story, this event, it teaches me that everything can be mended, including me. It brushes against my deepest longings, it silences my loudest fears. And Jesus, the God-Man at the centre of it all? I feel the truth of him in my bones, his love courses through my veins, his friendship makes my eyes sting.

I feel silly saying all of that – knowing how such sentiments have no home in the secular world we’ve built up around ourselves. And so, I feel paralysed by the need to boil it all down to ‘five facts that prove the resurrection happened’. But I just can’t seem to master it.

Instead, I wonder if it’s alright that the truth of the event is found in two near strangers inexplicably crying in a pub. Two near strangers being unspeakably moved by the real-ness, the here-ness of a man who was executed two-thousand years ago. Two near-strangers who – despite it going against their (or, at least, my) self-aware sensibilities - were forced to accept that their tears picked up where their words had left off.

Is that kind of proof acceptable to you? After-all, I’ve never known of someone to weep over a good metaphor, an intelligent myth, or a profound philosophy.

I’m not opposed to placing the claims of Christianity under the microscope, indeed, I do it myself (when you’re not around, obviously). I’m simply opposed to it being the only means by which we can assess its truth. Afterall, I’m never more certain of its truth than when the only thing I have to show for it is an embarrassing display of tears.

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