Our Communications Manager, Paul Huxley, discusses the platforming of an MP at the National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast who voted for decriminalising abortion up to birth and the legalising of assisted suicide, calling for a return to moral seriousness within the church.
I’ve never seen more moral clarity from Christian leaders than in the recent week when MPs voted to decriminalise abortion and then to legalise assisted suicide.
It wasn’t just the usual voices. I saw numerous church leaders and other Christian voices speak with clarity and conviction. They were saying that our representatives in Parliament had voted for two deeply immoral changes to our law.
Yet something happened the following week that stunned me and many others.
Christians in Parliament held its annual National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast. In many ways it was positive, featuring worship led by Keith and Kristyn Getty and an address by the mathematician and apologist John Lennox.
But these strong contributions were spoiled by what happened at 22 minutes in.
Zöe Franklin, a Lib Dem MP, who had just voted for abortion decriminalisation and assisted suicide led prayers. A professing Christian, she also supports the LGBQT+ agenda, promoting her local Pride in Surrey, whose founder Stephen Ireland was recently jailed for 24 years.
When you put people on the platform at an event like this, they are inevitably held up as examples. They are literally leading, and everyone joining in is following.
How did the many faithful Christians in attendance feel about her leadership?
There’s no space here to rehearse how far from Christianity Franklin’s recent votes are. I’ll just say that all the historic Church, the present-day Roman Catholic Church and even the Church of England (officially speaking) are united in disagreeing with her positions on these moral issues.
Yet here she was, implicitly held up as a model for Christian influence in Parliament.
She prayed that those there would “seek to treat all people with the dignity and worth that they have as individuals made in [God’s] image”.
Amen to that. But why do we allow someone to say this from the front who has so clearly contradicted it in her voting?
No discipline
Zöe Franklin has been given a high calling as an MP who claims to be a Christian. She needs to do better.
But my frustration is not mainly with her, or others who name Christ, but voted the same way. It’s with those who should know better, but are platforming her anyway.
And it’s not just Christians in Parliament. The Evangelical media organisation Premier recently published a news article giving her pro-assisted suicide views with very little counterpoint. I understand that Premier was active elsewhere in opposing assisted suicide but I fear that an article like this can quickly make it look like both sides of the argument are equally plausible.
This is a broader issue than just assisted suicide. There appears to be too little discipline within many Christian institutions in understanding what it means, morally, to be a Christian. The Christian faith has moral content. “Repent and be baptised”. We don’t simply say that God is abstractly compassionate and build our morality based on whatever we think is compassionate in <insert year here>.
God’s law is an expression of his love. It is full of specifics. It is crystal clear about protecting human life and the legitimate expression of our sexuality. The Church’s universal witness for centuries has worked through these issues and taught just as clearly. These are not complicated “both sides have their points” debates. Franklin’s votes are not recognisably Christian.
But it’s little surprise that Christians in Parliament are failing to challenge her. The Church in our country has long been unwilling to teach moral issues clearly or to exercise discipline. Not just the Church of England but many other Evangelical and Pentecostal denominations too.
There has been a failure of training, with many church leaders ill-equipped for moral theology. There has been a failure to see that these are not unimportant secondary issues, but part of the repentance that is necessary to receiving the gospel. And there has been a failure, most of all, of courage. We have sought quiet lives, avoided controversy and allowed the World to define good and evil for us.
This does no one any good. Christians are not properly discipled. They are led to believe that Christianity doesn’t have answers for the practical and moral issues that we face in our daily lives. Sheep are left to fend for themselves, relying on Google and ChatGPT to form their moral compasses.
And occasionally, some of these Christians become MPs.
Banned from Mass
This lack of discipline is not true of all churches.
Chris Coghlan, another MP who voted for assisted suicide, has complained that his local Catholic priest has banned him from participating in Communion:
“My Catholic Priest publicly announced at every mass he was denying me Holy Communion following the assisted dying vote. Children who are friends of my children were there. This followed a direct threat in writing to do this four days before the vote.
It is a matter of grave public interest the extent to which religious MPs came under pressure to represent their religion and not necessarily their constituents in the assisted dying vote.
This was utterly disrespectful to my family, my constituents including the congregation, and the democratic process. My private religion will continue to have zero direct relevance to my work as an MP representing all my constituents without fear or favour.”
I’m a Protestant, so I don’t wholly align with the Roman Catholic Church. But Father Ian Vane at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Dorking was doing exactly what pastors are supposed to do.
Ministers of the cloth do not wield the sword of the state. They teach their church members what it is to follow God, including in political matters where God has spoken clearly.
And they are in charge of the discipline of the Church, including the sacraments.
Vane clearly taught his congregant. What Coghlan calls a “direct threat” is simply being taught the serious immorality of voting for assisted suicide. He was told what would happen. When Coghlan ignored this warning, Vane followed through with appropriate discipline.
No one wants to see priests, vicars and bishops opining about every last political topic without knowledge. Christian politicians and rulers are expected to apply their faith to the issues of governance. But there is nothing complicated about these issues; Vane was speaking and exercising discipline exactly in line with scripture.
He is not the first to do so.
Ambrose of Milan is famously said to have refused communion to no less a figure than Emperor Theodosius the Great after the Massacre of Thessalonica. The Roman emperor seems to have responded with more humility than Coghlan, repenting and being readmitted to Communion.
However, another Christian has come to Coghlan’s defence. Fellow Liberal Democrat Tim Farron spoke on his Premier podcast that Vane’s actions were “deeply counterproductive” and lacking in grace.
Farron was right to challenge some of his colleague’s views, saying that faith cannot be kept out of politics. But there is far more danger of politics coercing religion than vice versa. It is politicians who voted for and implemented no-prayer-zones near abortion clinics. Politicians implemented bans on public worship during Covid. Politicians seek to ban Christians from engaging in consensual conversations and prayer about sexuality and gender. These are basic assaults on God-given freedoms to act as Christians.
Politicians don’t get to control the sacraments. King Uzziah didn’t get to bypass the priests to offer incense in the Temple.
Jesus said “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17 ESV). Pastors aren’t called to run the government or make law. But they are called to teach and discipline Christians, even if those Christians are also MPs.
Bring back this moral seriousness
I am not calling for every pastor up and down the land to cut people out from Communion over any kind of moral imperfection. And it’s hard for interdenominational organisations to enforce standards that the Church is so rarely willing to enforce.
But Christians need to grow a moral seriousness.
Is any-reason, any-stage abortion as bad as we say it is? Do we really think vulnerable people are going to feel pressure to end their lives via assisted suicide? Or are we playing games, debating our ethics like student debating societies, having good disagreements and changing nothing?
Is there anything that a self-identifying Christian politician could vote for that would get them deplatformed from Christians in Parliament? What’s non-negotiable?
Lives have literally been at stake in recent weeks. It is an enormous failure of compassion to the vulnerable – at the beginning and end of life – to vote for abortion and assisted suicide.
It is likewise a failure to love MPs like Franklin (and Jeremy Hunt and David Burton-Sampson – the list goes on) to pretend nothing serious has happened.
God will hold them – and us all – to justice.
Let’s be sure to repent before we receive it.
