It seems to me that Tom Harris has the better of Cranmer. Cranmer tries to claim Christians ought to vote Tory. (Cranmer is very erratic in the quality of his posts, from the quite sane to offering a haven for the barking mad.) Tom says:
There’s nothing wrong in promoting your own party to those of your own faith, of course. In 1988 I made an impassioned plea to my own church members that the poll tax should be resisted on the basis that a flat tax, with everyone paying the same amount regardless of income, was incompatible with the Biblical principle of tithing. Most members agreed, but it didn’t mean they voted Labour afterwards; I suspect most of them continued to vote Tory.
Tory-voting Christians all too often try to make this specious argument, that a single party (theirs, of course) most accurately represents “Christian values”. Labour-voting Christians, in my experience, tend not to, or at least, they do it less often. Perhaps that’s because they look across at the American political system and are repulsed by the stranglehold that the Christian Right have over Republican policy and don’t want to see the same thing happen here.
I’d add that it’s equally natural to want to promote your faith to people in your own party. If you’re sincere about both, presumably you have a coherent set of convictions in which your religious and political convictions are profoundly interrelated.
I’m not entirely persuaded by Tom’s argument for why left and right are different here, however. There has been a long history when Christian ethics focussed primarily on the personal. As society moved away from many of those particular personal ethics in the second half of the twentieth century, there was considerable overlap with the conservative and Christian sense that atheist Communism was the enemy of both the religious and political establishment of the West. Hence those on the left are often at best ambivalent about whether faith and the politics of the left are truly compatible, and those on the right have a history of trying to co-opt faith for their political positions.
{ 2 comments }
Doug, we have that mentality in the states as well. The Republicans, (although I pick undertones that God’s covenant with the GOP may be breaking in favor of the Libertarians) are the ones with Christian values. As a Not-Republican, people accused me of being ‘unChristian’ many times.
I’m not sure that Tom Harris ‘has the better’ of Cramner. While agreeing with Tom that there is more to a reflective Christian politics than single issues, his claims about what Cramner was trying to do in constructing a right-wing, Bushist hegemony for Christian politics seemed off the mark. Also, if abortion were likely to be seriously affected by a Tory government then it would become a compelling reason for Christians to vote for them. My thoughts are more fully fleshed out here here. Joe
Comments on this entry are closed.