Our Chief Executive Andrea Williams explains that as we approach the 2024 general election, the answers our society needs are different from what it thinks
Election season is underway and what issues are dominating the news?
Scroll through most news websites and you’ll see the same topics, again and again: the economy, healthcare, immigration, the environment.
But you probably won’t see any obvious coverage of the four areas we are focusing on at Christian Concern: our Christian foundations, the value of life, the goodness of family and the importance of freedom.
Why should Christians focus on these issues? Why should we vote, campaign and pray on these points?
Some people label them as Christian interest issues – things that only Christians really care about. They suggest that they are peripheral areas of debate, conscience issues that are not particularly urgent or important.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I want to say that the challenges our society faces today stem from our wholesale rejection of Jesus Christ and his pattern for our society.
Jesus is Lord over everything. We should be seeking his wisdom and will in every area of life, including those that politicians focus on. But our neglect for our country’s Christian foundations – for life, family and freedom – is itself the cause of many other problems.
These areas are built into God’s design for humanity and can be traced all the way back to Genesis 1. They are at the heart of who we are. By paying attention to these areas we will find beautiful and surprising solutions to our crumbling society.
Over the weeks heading into the election, Christian Concern will be unpacking these crucial themes.
Foundations
We’ll be sharing how Christ alone is the Rock on which our nation can be built.
Liberal secular humanism has failed. A society built on sand cannot stand. ‘Human rights’ mean nothing if they are not granted and maintained by an all-wise, all-loving God. Laws that enshrine and celebrate evil are lawless. A society that claims all ideas are equal will dissolve into postmodern chaos.
None of its rivals will fare better. Islam, libertarianism, communism, fascism – each of these is another form of slavery, a different flavour of rebellion and oppression.
Only under Jesus can we flourish.
Life
We will be making the case that our failure to value human life is at the root of many of our problems
We are taking more than 250,000 innocent human lives every year through abortion alone. We ignore that they are made in God’s image, worthy of protection and then act surprised when everyone else feels valueless and purposeless. If they are just blobs of human tissue, what are we?
When campaigners and politicians push for euthanasia, they make this even worse. They compare humans to other animals. They claim that some people are better off dead, as if we have the right to take people’s lives; put people down.
If we are meaningless, highly evolved bits of matter, rather than treasured God’s-image-bearers, we are all disposable. Everything becomes a power struggle. Trust and respect for others breaks down and crime rises.
How will that affect our mental health? How many other areas are made worse simply because we don’t cherish the gift of life?
Family
Families are God’s designed communities for raising children. He made mankind in his image, male and female. But through the sexual revolution, widespread divorce and same-sex ‘marriage’ we have abandoned the relationships God designed us to thrive in.
Worse still, we’ve even lost the understanding of what men and women are.
Local communities that look out for each other are built around stable families – not just mum dad and children but grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins. But we treat everyone like disconnected individuals, as if their contribution to GDP is all that matters.
We don’t value children or recognise their importance to our future. Many of our economic policies penalise rather than encourage parents who sacrificially seek their children’s good.
Sadly, so many broken adults are the product of broken families. What difference could it make across the board if we committed ourselves to strengthening and honouring loving families?
Freedom
Why did God make us? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.
Why did God save his people out of slavery in Egypt? So they could worship him.
That is true freedom.
In the West, particularly thanks to the Christian foundations of the United Kingdom, we’ve enjoyed hundreds of years of civil liberties not yet seen in some parts of the world. Because every one of us bears God’s image, we’ve recognised that kings and queens, governments and bureaucrats may not trample on our God-given freedoms.
During the Covid pandemic, we forgot what our freedom was for.
I remember corporate Christian worship being labelled non-essential and banned, while bike shops remained open.. Each time new lockdown rules or guidance were issued, we would hurriedly search through documentation for any clues as to what the government was saying churches were allowed to do. How topsy turvy the world had become when government was giving permission to the church in this way?! That’s simply not how it should be.
The government kept threatening to ban ‘conversion therapy’ or ‘conversion practices’ – which in reality meant banning consensual conversations like prayer and Christian counselling.
Parliament banned peaceful prayers and offers of help to women outside abortion centres.
But the answer isn’t just campaigns for civil liberties or libertarianism.
We don’t just need to be free from government interference but to be free from all that enslaves us.
People are slaves to debt, pornography, unhealthy food, alcohol, drugs, gambling and smartphones.
So while the government must recommit itself to supporting Christian freedoms, we all need to remember the purpose of our freedom: to glorify and enjoy God.
People of courage
It isn’t hard to see that a change in attitude towards our country’s foundations, life, family and freedom would transform our country. We wouldn’t be perfect of course – we’ll have to wait for Jesus’ return for that. But we’d be seeing part of the answer to the prayer: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
It would be good news for everyone.
But we are a long way away from this happening.
Foundations, life, family and freedom probably won’t appear in many party’s manifestos. Maybe they will be in a footnote somewhere.
This only goes to show how far we need to go. We need to proclaim and activate Christ’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
It shows us that although voting is important, what we do day in, day out, year after year is so much more significant.
We need to become people of prayer. People of love, justice, truth, freedom and hope. People of courage.
We need God to work in and through us. We need the Holy Spirit to transform us into the kinds of Christians who will follow Jesus Christ wherever he calls us.
Will you join me this election season to cry out to God?
