Georgia L Gilholy is a freelance journalist.
Mockery of Christianity, England’s supposed national faith, long ago became a political rite of passage. Despite the more marked religiosity of our Scottish cousins, and their propensity to scorn our trends, Holyrood has fallen into the same well-decorated trap.
Kate Forbes, who was once again touted as a future Scottish First Minister in the wake of Humza Yousaf’s welcome resignation, has faced numerous attacks for her Christian beliefs. The approach to Forbes reveals a troubling shift in British politics, but it is hardly a new one. Increasingly, there seems to be little tolerance for the Christian faith, especially when it’s expressed openly by public figures and they appears to actually believe what they say.
Meanwhile, lack of faith is regarded as neutral, when progressive zealotry- which rears its head on both the Left and Right of politics- shows precisely the opposite to be the case. While Forbes has for now stood aside, and with John Swinney set to take Scotland’s top role, her situation should worry anyone with respect for freedom of faith.
There seems to be some confusion on the Right as to why Yousaf’s Muslim faith was not regarded with the same suspicion. Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, has never tried to hide her faith, calling it “essential to my being”, and argued that it does not affect her ability to serve all her constituents. She says she has “a duty to represent them”. Forbes should not only not be ashamed of her faith, but proud of it, even on purely secular terms. Christianity is the single most important idea to ever reach Britain’s shores.
The modern consensus is that post-war “human rights” promises invented any political stakes worth fighting for, which the Biblical vision kept us from reaching for centuries. In reality, ‘human rights’ merely refers to the recent phenomenon of secular doctrines of universal entitlements and freedoms codified by international and national institutions, not to historical philosophies of natural and legal rights claims from which it developed, and which have undoubtedly formed a weighty cornerstone of Western exceptionalism.
The foundation of universal natural and legal rights far predated the modern ‘human rights’ dogma and is unquestionably the legacy of the dialogue between philosophy and biblical theology, specific to European Christendom. The society-wide alienation from such crucial aspects of the past is unsurprising in such a regressed educational climate as exists in Britain today, even concerning relatively recent history. A 2012 poll, for example, revealed that two-thirds of young people did not know when the First World War ended. Thus, ignorance of the relation between Europe’s historic Christianity and universal rights is even less surprising.
The idea of an ordered universe comes from Genesis, as does the Western concept of universal laws that can operate only within an ordered creation. It was Christendom that developed the tradition of universal truths that underpin universal laws for man, his surroundings and his morality. According to the Bible, humans are created with equal and immortal souls and are subject to divine justice. This teaching provided a basis for compatibility with the idea of natural law that had its cruder beginnings in classical Greece and Rome. When paired with Christian ideas of man’s God-given distinctiveness, this tradition developed the idea that all men are owed certain unconditional respects due to their possession of equal dignity with the rest of the created species.
Magna Carta embodies precisely this rich tradition of rights discourses and controversies. Signed in 1215 and incorporated into English law at the end of the thirteenth century, this compact between King John and his disgruntled barons affirmed various rights of British subjects that had been compromised. English kings thereafter felt bound by it: a powerful example of how pre-modern Christendom set law and justice above even the King. This convention permitted the flourishing of an intellectual tradition of inalienable rights that no earthly authority could revoke or enhance.
This sophisticated legal framework would have been impossible without the Christian idea that infused medieval discourse of an ordered universe in which men are metaphysically equal. Modern ‘human rights’ philosophy denies its basis in the synthesis of Christian metaphysics and natural law. It leaves itself with a long list of claims that, without agreed-upon absolute justifications, are subject to change based on political activism rather than philosophical truth.
Unlike in medieval and classical philosophies of man and his rights, there is no ‘Why?’ to modern ‘human rights’ philosophies, beyond that it simply is. This metaphysical vacantness is a characteristic that infuses all manner of modern moralities and is just one symptom of the intellectual affliction of relativism — the idea that all actions and opinions are ‘equal’. In the case of human rights, this fact is understandable when one considers that the post-war ‘human rights’ declarations drafted by international bodies were little more than a diplomatic compromise, seeking aspirational agreements on fundamental rights between a multiplicity of governments. It was never their purpose to attempt a consensus on the philosophical basis for right.
However, this means that in the absence of Christian morality, the recent ‘human rights’ project has trickled down from the international stage to fill the vacuum in our courts and classrooms. Predictably so, the ‘human rights’ lobby, has since gone further than merely omitting the inconvenient fact of its religious parentage, and denies and attacks it.
Article 14 of the 1998 Human Rights Act states that ‘There ought to be no discrimination on grounds such as sex, race, religion, birth, marital status, national or social origin, political opinion.’ However, the Act also enshrines the right to freedom of opinion and expression and private life. Yet merely to exist and possess opinions is to be discriminatory. Even the gentlest and most tolerant among us must always be destined to unravel the alleged coexistence of freedom and non-discrimination proposed by progressives.
If I am a devout Christian or Muslim who believes homosexuality is a grave sin, I will probably choose not to attend a homosexual wedding. Similarly, if I am an Orthodox Jew, I will likely discriminate against both non-Jews and irreligious Jews in my choice of marriage partner. If I am a non-white person, it is unlikely that I will befriend someone whose ‘political opinion’ includes hatred of my ethnicity. Discrimination in the case of these decisions does not constitute an irrational hatred that ought to be punished by law, but shapes decisions that may be judged as right or wrong, but that individuals have the freedom to make regarding their private lifestyle.
There is a contradiction at the heart of our new political and cultural life. It ultimately allows activist lawyers to use their power to arbitrarily decide which ‘rights’ matter more than others, and religious freedoms that are perceived to conflict with secular modernity have often been the convenient casualty. Deborah Orr wrote in 2013 that ‘for human rights to flourish, religious rights have to come second to them’, undoubtedly summarising not just her personal views, but those of her progressive, metropolitan habitat.
For example, in 2011, a Christian couple was barred from acting as foster parents due to their religious beliefs, namely that they would not tell the children in their care that they approved of homosexuality. However, the judge ruled that their view on sexual lifestyles did not flow from their Christianity and thus did not qualify for legal protection granted to ‘minorities’.
Even though Christianity was demonstrably fundamental to the blossoming of the theory and practice of universal rights, modern ‘human rights’ zealots seek to use their apparatus to humiliate and fill its vacuum with the secularist agenda of state-enforced equality and diversity. As Melanie Phillips detailed, we should gather that this agenda “does not seek to extend tolerance to marginalised groups, but instead to transfer power to such groups to destroy the very idea of a normative majority culture rooted in the morality of Christianity and the Hebrew Bible”.
Is it the strength of this moral legacy that leads so many to despise Forbes and her co-religionists, who they are keen to overthrow?