This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

You may have missed this as the general election campaign veered between waves of tragedy and farce but the Church of England’s Diocese of Salisbury decided to issue a formal “briefing” on the issues of the election which, while being neither lachrymose nor funny, was certainly depressing.

It tries to be a briefing document for anyone in the diocese wanting “to Pray your Part” and it explores many of the issues being discussed in the election. It does not explore them in a neutral way. 

Questions it encourages people to ask of their candidates include: “Will you eliminate the concept of illegality of those who enter the UK by other non-traditional means?”; “Will you consider abolishing short-term sentences, those of one year and under?”; and “What is your policy on fossil fuel exploration? Will your party pledge not to issue new licences for new gas and oil fields?”

We could spend a while discussing the relative merits or demerits of these particular proposals but the basic reality is that there was not a single question that was right-coded. 

No question (for example) explored whether migration should be reduced from its record highs or whether low growth could be attributed to having the highest proportion of GDP taken in tax since the Attlee government. 

This is not to get into the actual questions. The briefing concerns me because there is not the hint of a suggestion that it’s worth considering what questions a person on the right might care about. 

Actually, it’s worse: there’s not the hint of a suggestion that a person on the right is worth caring about.

And this is a problem for the church. The old adage of “Guardian readers preaching to Telegraph readers” is probably still true, certainly if all the polling on the political leanings of the laity can be trusted. But the real, underlying, problem is that clergy feel that we have a particular insight into politics.

I realise that the ice I am walking on right now is so thin you can hear it cracking. I write a column that has been known, from time to time, to be quite overtly political. I am a clergyman in an Established Church with bishops sitting, by right, in the House of Lords, and this is a constitutional settlement which I applaud. How then can I be condemning clergy for feeling that we have any particular insight into politics?

Let me explain. The problem with the political sermon — into which category I place Salisbury Diocese’s briefing — is that it attempts to suggest that in the ordering of our political nation there is a particular Christian answer to the questions that ordering raises. 

People of all political stripes have done this throughout history. For every devotee of Liberation Theology selling snake oil now, there was a disciple of Archbishop Laud pushing his vision of our earthly Kingdom three centuries ago.

The trouble is, there is no reason why studying theology gives you any especially brilliant insight into the best way to bring down inflation, or how best to encourage housebuilding, or how successful a tax cut will be at attracting people to invest in industry, or how many newly arrived people a country’s infrastructure can absorb. “Theology teaches us what ends are desirable and what means are lawful, while Politics teaches what means are effective,” says C.S. Lewis in his 1945 essay “Christian Apologetics”. “Most political sermons teach the congregation nothing except what newspapers are taken at the Rectory.”

Salisbury’s briefing falls into that category. It has already prejudged what side a good Christian should be on and approaches the questions of the election exclusively from that angle. Christians, however, are all sorts of people, whose experiences and understandings of the world give us insights which lead us to take very different positions from one another over almost every issue. This is good. 

And it is particularly good when Christians do get involved in politics — and do so for all sides. Wonderful Christians are found in all parties. Our faith undergirds and frames the political solutions we may posit for our nation, just as any faith or philosophy will do. 

The key thing is to recognise that our political opinions are the product of much more than our theological perspective and that we might very well be wrong and our policies might end in disaster.

And that’s another reason to avoid associating religion too closely with our own political positions: we risk associating God with them too. And when they fall apart, as the workings of man inevitably will, we risk God being caught up in the mess. 

So this is why the authors of the Salisbury briefing are so unwise. In their arrogance they ignore every Christian whose politics differ from theirs, they fail to recognise the limits of their own political insights, and they risk tarnishing God with the humdrum of here-today-gone-tomorrow political scrapping.