SOMETIMES, it’s hard to know which boxer to back. Take this recent fight, for example. Do you put your support behind the Roman Catholic MP who tweets, in all seriousness, “My private religion will continue to have zero direct relevance to my work as an MP”? Or do you throw your weight behind the Catholic newspaper that, in response to this MP and others, publicly “Named and shamed [the] Thirteen Catholic MPs who voted for killing.”
Trapped between the Scylla of a sacred-secular divide so absolute that it brooks no commerce at all, and the Charybdis of an ungracious, hectoring public humiliation, where do you go?
Here is the outline of the case. Chris Coghlan is the Roman Catholic Liberal Democrat MP for Dorking and Horley. He was told by his parish priest that, as a Catholic, he had to vote against Kim Leadbeater’s assisted-dying Bill. He did not. The priest then denounced him to the congregation the following Sunday, despite the fact that he wasn’t there, and said that he would deny him the sacrament. Clearly incensed, the MP took to the press and social media to complain (News, 4 July).
The story spiralled. It was bound to; it had something for everyone. The muscularly religious could get indignant about the spinelessness and hypocrisy of CINO — Catholic In Name Only — MPs. And they did. “Well done that priest. More of this, please!” wrote the Catholic commentator Tim Stanley on X. Coghlan might be the most spineless MP in Britain, wrote Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph, adding that there was no room in the RC Church for “for those who don’t subscribe to all of it”.
The muscularly irreligious could get indignant about manipulative priestcraft and religious intolerance. And they did, although weirdly (or perhaps not) the loudest complaints came from the MP at the heart of the matter, who complained to The Observer, The Times, and The House that there this was “a clear attempt to meddle with the political process by the Church”.
In truth, neither party covered himself in glory, and the whole affair could have been handled far better had the priest chosen to talk privately to the MP rather than denounce him in public, and had the MP chosen to explain his motives to the priest rather than run off in a huff to the media. But, if you can peer through the shrouding clouds of pride and spite which obscure it, this is an interesting and important story, and one that I was (perversely) pleased to see.
I HAVE been watching the debate about the debate — the debate about what part religion should play in highly contested moral debates, such as the one about assisted dying — with keenness, and have recently published a long essay on religion and the assisted-dying debate. It struck me that a lot of baloney was talked on this issue by people who should know better. This whole saga seems to have proved me right.
Politics, after all, is not simply a matter of representing your constituents (“Follow your faith or act for your constituents?” as The Times asked) because . . . drumroll . . . your constituents do not all believe the same thing.
We do not live in a simple, majoritarian, winner-takes-all polity (the last time we tried to — Brexit — didn’t work out so well). MPs stand on their party manifestos, which tens of thousands (usually the majority) of their constituents do not vote for. MPs are also human beings, shaped and informed by their personal histories, commitments, and philosophies. Everyone has such a philosophy — it’s just that some are more conscious of it than others. The fact that some are theologically flavoured while others are more secular is irrelevant.
Ultimately, deep down, they are all faith-based (or “underdetermined by the available evidence”, if you want to get technical). To imagine that it is acceptable (let alone feasible) to excise only religious commitments and philosophies from public debate, especially from those debates that we have, by common consent, come to recognise as conscience issues, is naïve and/or illiberal.
In short, Mr Coghlan’s assertion that his religion was private and should have no relevance to his parliamentary activity rather suggests that he had not thought much about what being a Catholic entails. Religion is in the room for these debates, like it or not.
BUT — and here we move from politics to religion — being “in the room” means behaving accordingly. It means talking the kind of language and using the kind of logic that most people in the room will understand, even if they do not necessarily agree with your conclusions. (As it happens, having been through Hansard and many other sources, I can testify that religious politicians, leaders, and institutions usually do do this, but it’s worth underlining, none the less.) It means playing by the rules of engagement, being willing to listen, negotiate, and compromise when necessary. (Again, they usually do). It also means being accountable for your decision, which is where this particular incident trips up.
This is because, however justified the priest may have been to withhold the eucharist from his wayward sheep, the alleged manner in which the MP was instructed to vote, publicly denounced for failing to do so, and then shamed, alongside other wayward parliamentarians, by the priest and some other eager Catholics, looks, for all the world, like coercion. Conscience works both ways. If religious believers can (rightly) claim it in such votes, so can those believers who differ from the rest of their flock.
Ultimately, this story is a depressing one. The MP comes out of it looking naïve at best, and unthinking and hypocritical at worst. The priest comes out of it looking inflexible at best, and vindictive at worst. And those of us who have taken on themselves the task of trying to convince a sceptical public that religious faith has something valuable, reasonable, and even attractive to contribute to public debates have found their job just a little bit harder.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos.
Read his review of Christianity and Democracy Today: International perspectives here