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

Politics

20 January 2025

7 min read

Hope is a choice, insist on it

Amid loveless politics, remember hope cannot exist in isolation.

Elizabeth Wainwright

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

A crowd of people stand in the side steps of the Lincoln Memorial

Easter services, Lincoln Memorial.

The other day – a cold grey day, the kind of day that makes summer seem as distant as a star – I encountered a woman who stood out. She was cheerful despite everyone else’s winter gloom, and she was wearing a home-made tabard. The tabard was covered in a layer that seemed to be made of tape and clingfilm, and underneath it were little Ukrainian flags, images, facts, and small everyday items like soap. I have seen her before dressed the same way. She stood out, I think, because of her attire but also because of the defiance she radiated – a defiant joy, but also belief that it is worth hoping and acting in the ways we can, even when all the evidence seems to tell us those actions make no difference. The news of Russian’s invasion on Ukraine in 2022 has lost its initial shock power. We are creatures who like stories, and so we like news that has a clear beginning or end. The messy middle can be hard to stick with, precisely because we do not know what comes next or how long it lasts. And so our attention moves on. This, coupled with our felt powerlessness in something so big and distant, can mean it is easy to lose hope, to stop taking action.

But the woman who raises awareness most days in this creative way, with suggestions for what items to donate or how to send funds or how to host refugees, has been making me re-look at hope. Her posture – her insistence on hope as choice – feels life-affirming and countercultural. For a moment, she snaps me out of despair for the world. She faces looks of bemusement and seems to say, if not this, then what?

What keeps us moving forward when the world seems heavy? Where does hope spring from, even in the face of overwhelming odds? Hope, I have learned, has been tangled with humans for as long as we’ve walked the earth. It ensured the survival of our ancestors because it drew them towards a future that might be better than today. It kept them going.

In Greek mythology, Pandora opened a box out of curiosity despite being told not to. All kind of curses contained in the box spilled out into the earth. She wrestled the lid back on but not until it was almost too late. Almost, but not entirely. One thing remained in the box: hope. This myth always brings to my mind memories of visiting a slave fort that still stands on the coast in Ghana. The walls were oppressive, the words above the gate that led to the slave ships were haunting: ‘door of no return’. And yet I learned that there were songs. Spirituals and other songs that passed the time, helped members of different tribes feel connected when they were all shoved together, and conjured hope despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Optimism asks us to sit back and hope for the best; hope knows that we have work to do to bring forth a better future.

Ideas of hope have been with us always. And yet I find that hope can feel hard to conjure now, staring into the face of an increasingly unknowable and uncertain future: authoritarian leadership that seems to be on the ascendancy, impacts of the climate crisis that are coming into startling clarity, and loneliness that has been declared a global health concern by the World Health Organisation. It is easy to feel that things are falling apart. Faced with these things and more, hope can seem naive, wishful, hard to get hold of.

Perhaps one reason for this is that hope, in the age of the individual, is harder to come by because hope is relational, it cannot exist in isolation. It is transmitted through community, story, and care for others. Those old slave songs sang of hope because, I imagine, people had the reality or memory of each other. Hope said: people have been good, and they will be good again. Hope is insistently communal. It asks us not to bear the weight of the world on our own, but to face each other and distribute that weight via a web of relationship. Perhaps now, accessing a hope that can carry our burdens and our fears means first re-finding each other.

Hope and blind optimism are, of course, different things. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said that “Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better.” Optimism asks us to sit back and hope for the best; hope knows that we have work to do to bring forth a better future. And so perhaps that’s why lately, hope has felt exhausting. I’ve worked with communities internationally and locally for two decades on all kinds of projects, always asking, is this how things have to be? How might we imagine and build better? And yet still the climate worsens, inequality persists, bad leaders get into positions of terrifying power. It is easy to stand back and despair, to question, to wonder if all the hard work has been in vain.

Jesus knew this exhaustion. He knew what it was to work, encourage, and love hard, often to face rejection, mockery, and ultimately death. But still Jesus chose to enter into the persistent mess of the world. He chose the day in, day out work of becoming flesh. He affirmed the dignity of the marginalised, calling them into action, knowing that action would keep that dignity alive. He knew that new life would come through suffering, not by denying it.

Strongman authoritarian leaders aren’t the problem, they are a symptom of a society who are divided and not encountering each other well

Perhaps hope is hard too because though it is a posture which faces the future, it also asks that we live with integrity, love, and care right now, in this fractured world. Hope is not writing off the present in favour of some distant time or place. It is not wishing this world away so that we hasten to another one. It says, we can work for a better future, but we should not put off good work until then. That better future will only come if we invite it into our present, whatever the outcome might be. Hope is in living deep and timeless and world building values, even if there are no obvious or immediate results. Czech playwright and former dissident Vaclav Havel who led his nation after the collapse of communism said that

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

If a principle is right for the future, it is right for now, even if that requires work. If I espouse values of kindness, love, community, and imagine a future where these things rule, and yet ignore the marginalised, or distrust people not like me, or cut off people I don’t agree with, then my hope for the future is no more than optimism, because I am not willing to do the difficult work of living as if that future were here now.

Hope is turning outwards and living these values with others, even when honestly sometimes it seems easier and more appealing to turn inwards and single-handedly try and fix things — a myth that has grown in our age of individualism, celebrity, and our self-referential rhythms of life.

Hope has lately been asking me to take a Beatitudes perspective on things. In his Beatitudes, Jesus flipped the logic of the world on its head. The last will be first, the poor will inherit the kingdom, the weeping will find joy. Like the Beatitudes, hope asks me to take a different approach. When I look at the world through this lens I find new ways to think. Perhaps, for example, things aren’t getting worse but instead are becoming clear, truths are being unveiled – and so climate change is not the problem, rather, it is a symptom of a greedy economic system in which we are all complicit; Strongman authoritarian leaders aren’t the problem, they are a symptom of a society who are divided and not encountering each other well, and of money and distrust having too big a say in how we govern ourselves. This doesn’t mean we should stop addressing the symptoms, but that we have new possibilities in our scope for action.

Now, as we enter another cycle of — at best — strange politics that is steeped in lovelessness and will have unknowable outcomes near and far, the thing I search for alongside wise voices is hope. And searching for hope means living a good future now, and finding others who can carry both despair and beauty with me. Novelist and critic John Berger said that

“Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”

So let us call on that energy, that light in the dark today. It is how we build the future.

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