"I used to vote for [insert name of political party], but not anymore. They're all as bad as each other." Such sentiments are increasingly being voiced. Politicians and their parties are seen as promising whatever it takes to get into power — and then failing to follow through once they do. As someone who has never voted for any politician — and so has no dog in this particular fight — I'm finding that my position is not as unusual as it once was.
I'm not so cynical as to argue that everyone who gets in to politics does it for self-centred reasons. It's surely right to acknowledge the hard and selfless work of some politicians across the political spectrum. Yet many are agreed that something needs to change. And I would argue for that being far more structural than cosmetic.
The foundational question that must be asked is about which values will shape our politics. It would seem today that we have three main options. Is society best served by secular values, Islamic values, or Christian ones? To many, the answer is self-evidently the first one. Those who are religious shouldn't seek to impose their values on society. Yet that is to talk as if there could be a government in power which wouldn't seek to impose its views on society. Such a mythical creature doesn't exist.
Can a government leave the decision whether to steal or kill up to the individual? Surely not! The question then becomes, not whether those in power have a right to impose their views — but what their views are, and what philosophical commitments shape them.
We live in societies which have been shaped by Christian values. What happens when these values are abandoned? We find ourselves in the midst of an experiment to find out. The signs are not promising. Within the last year — in the biggest change to abortion laws in 60 years — the House of Commons voted to decriminalise abortion up to birth. In the same week, it voted to amend the Suicide Act of 1961 to permit what was euphemistically described as "assisted dying". Only thanks to the House of Lords (and, I would add, Almighty God) is the bill itself dead in the water — for now.
At root is the question: "Who are human beings?" Are we created in the image of God with intrinsic worth, dignity and purpose? Or are we cosmic accidents, and ultimately expendable?
Yet many of the things that politicians value and promote still spring from our Christian foundations. As Matthew Roberts has put it, "values like self-sacrifice, community spirit, philanthropy and much else that our society values fit like a glove with a universe made by a triune God of love but can only wither like a flower left in a vase in the cold, arid universe of secularism." Politicians, and many others, assume that we can remove the Christian foundations of society — and still hold on to these values. They are tragically wrong.
In a speech to the House of Commons in July, MP Danny Kruger put it like this. After almost a millennium of assuming that we worshipped the Christian God: "In the 20th century, another idea arose, that it is possible for a country to be neutral about God, that the public square was empty of any metaphysics, that the route to freedom lay through the desert of materialism and individual reason, no hell below us, above us only sky, That idea was wrong, and the horrors of the 20th century attest to that, not least in the West, where we escaped totalitarianism but have suffered our own catastrophes of social breakdown, social injustice, loneliness and emptiness on a chronic scale. Now new threats, ugly and aggressive, are arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God we do not have pluralism and tolerance, everyone being nice to each other in a godless world."
Many detect that something is badly wrong with society — and look to politics to save it. In the words of Peter Juul, they "put far more weight on politics than it can possibly bear and invest it with far more significance that it can possibly give anyone". Indeed, Juul points out that as religious commitment has declined, a new, progressive politics has arisen with its own version of original sin (white privilege), end times theology (climate apocalypticism), and separation of soul from body (gender identity).
Important as some of those issues may be, give me the theology of the Heidelberg Catechism any day. "What is your only comfort in life and death?" "That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood [and] watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven".
And so, politicians: Thank you for your work — but if you want my vote, I want to hear less about what you say you’ll do when you get in power, and more about who you believe we are as human beings.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 7th May 2026
