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.

Column

Creed

Monsters

23 June 2025

5 min read

The short road from normality to evil

The Liverpool’s parade ramming reveals society’s watermark

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Aerial view of a yellow-jacketed police forming a cordon within a crowd.

Aftermath of the Liverpool parade incident.

ITN.

Sometimes football is interrupted by real life, and you remember how trivial it ultimately is.

On 26 May, the city of Liverpool was gearing up to do what it does best: celebrating. Specifically, celebrating the parade for Liverpool’s lifting of the Premier League trophy the day before. I’ve written before about the day it was confirmed that Liverpool would win the league. The joy, the relief, the tears; the community of it all. Cody Gakpo with his top off.

Here the whole city would be involved, and many more besides who had travelled just to be there. Not even torrential rain can dampen scouse joie de vivre. The city alive in red, joined in adulation of its team as the Premier League Champions’ bus paraded across the city. What a day.

And then, an interruption. Reports begin to emerge that someone had driven a car into people on the parade route. You fear the worst. And then it’s confirmed, and you fear even more.

Suddenly the parade feels trivial; football feels trivial. You’re just waiting for news that everyone is okay. 109 people are injured and it’s a miracle that no-one is killed, although you imagine many more will live with the trauma of the day for years to come.

The immediate and (quite literally) uninformed commentary and misinformation spread by many on the far right was as predictable as it was racist. The same people seemed genuinely disappointed when the perpetrator turned out to be, not an immigrant or an asylum seeker driven by ‘non-British’ values, but a 53-year-old white British man from the city. As ever, the far right demonstrating once again that the first reaction is very rarely the right reaction.

We still don’t know the full details of what happened and why, but the man’s neighbours described him as “normal” and expressed their surprise at him being caught up in something like this.

I was surprised by how surprised everyone was at this.

The Christian Bible is full – full – of ‘normal’ people committing abnormally evil acts. David, Israel’s most beloved and highly praised king, rapes a woman called Bathsheba resulting in her getting pregnant. He then tries to convince the woman’s husband to sleep with her so people will think the baby is his. He doesn’t, so David has him killed. Israel’s most beloved and highly praised king.

David may be one of the starkest examples from the Christian Bible, but he’s certainly not the only instance of a normal, or even seemingly ‘good’ person performing unspeakable acts of violence and evil. Time would fail me if I tried to recount them all here.

People are fundamentally good. I will die on this hill. People are fundamentally good. But the road from normality to evil is shorter than we often care to admit.

The Slovenian philosopher and professional eccentric Slavoj Žižek tells a joke in his helpful little book Violence. Workers are suspected of stealing from a factory and so have their wheelbarrows checked every day at their shift’s end. Only when it’s too late do the factory owners realise they’re stealing wheelbarrows.

We have so many frameworks and watermarks for identifying what constitutes ‘violence’ in society. And yet Žižek’s point is that these frameworks and watermarks are themselves upheld by violence. There’s violence inherent in the system.

This is one of the central points in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, too. In one memorable scene, the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent while strapped to a hospital bed. He says:

“Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan’, even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that a gangbanger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, no one panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old Mayor will die? Well then everyone loses their minds!”

But the Joker’s point is that none of this is normal. Not really.

This is the true crime of the world we live in today, that it has convinced us of the normality of evil while undermining the normality of loving one another.

But they are all symptoms of the same sickness. The repulsion we feel towards the ‘normalcy’ of the driver at the Liverpool parade is the repulsion we ought to feel towards any act of violence, be it the violent persecution of immigrants and asylum seekers, the enforced annexation of sovereign territories, or the attempted genocide of unwanted people groups (to conjure up some obviously hypothetical situations …).

To be surprised at the violence seen in Liverpool on 26 May at the hands of a ‘normal’ man is to miss the fact that society’s very norms and standards are, themselves, deeply violent. Fashion business built on modern slavery and child labour; banking corporations paying their bosses obscene bonus wrung from the pockets of people barely able to make ends meet; at least 354,000 people homeless in England alone by the end of 2024.

All these things are acts of violence. All these things are normal. They are the norms and standards against which we look for violence in our world today. But they themselves are deeply violent evils. They are the violence inherent in the system. They are the workers’ wheelbarrows. They are the Joker’s truckload of soldiers.

We live in a society that functions precisely because of deeply unjust and violent systems and structures. The violence is necessary for the functioning of the system.

But while Liverpool’s Champions League parade demonstrates this, it also shows us the correct response to the normality of evil: love.

In the aftermath of the incident, people took to social media to offer beds for the night, lifts home, food, drink. Anything and everything that anyone might need. And do you know what the most remarkable thing about this was? It was all so … normal.

Of course this is what you do in situations like this. You love, and you care, and then you love, and then you care. What else is there to do? It’s the most normal things in the world. People are fundamentally good. I will die on this hill.

And this is the true crime of the world we live in today, that it has convinced us of the normality of evil while undermining the normality of loving one another. In such a world, to love one another, to care deeply and meaningfully for those around, is nothing short of an act of resistance to the violent established order.

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