What is God and Politics in the UK?
God and Politics in the UK is on a mission to get Christians talking about and engaging proactively with current issues relating to faith and society in order to be an effective witness beyond the church walls.
Jesus constantly engaged with the society around him during his ministry. Sometimes he’d be teaching, sometimes demonstrating compassion and healing and sometimes he’d be meeting with those in political and religious leadership. He didn’t shy away from the issues of the day and he definitely wasn’t afraid to speak his mind highlighting hypocrisy, abuse of power and oppression.
Can the same be said of the church today? There are plenty of Christian individuals and organisations doing just this, but Christians face a constant battle to make their voice heard message amongst all the others in the public arena. God’s agenda for society is the best one. Those in positions of power need to be reminded of it and the church needs to lead and live by example.
The United Kingdom has a rich Christian heritage. Most of our laws and values are based on biblical principles. As our society continues to become increasingly secular, moral values inevitably erode to the detriment of everyone who lives in this country. At this time in our history it is crucial that the Church stands up and delivers God’s message even when it is counter cultural and likely to cause offence.
Who runs this blog?
This blog is run by Gillan Scott. Most importantly, I’m a Christian who wants to live a life for God that makes a difference. I have a keen interest in politics, which I always try to view from a non-partisan angle. When considering my views on political issues, I’m constantly asking the questions, “What does God think about this? What is in the best interest for society as a whole? How could/should Christians be engaging with this issue? What should I be doing about it?”
I live in Suffolk and am currently a teacher, a husband and a father. In the past I’ve been a youth worker, set up a charity, worked for RBS and trained as an architect. I’m actively involved in my local church, St John’s Woodbridge, and am passionate about worship and music.
As well as running this blog I have also written for the Premier New Media Centre of Excellence.
If you want to know more about me, you can read my Twenty Questions to a Fellow Blogger at Paul Burgin’s Mars Hill.
God and Politics in the UK 
Gillan this is very good indeed thank you.
thank you…
http://www.soran.edu.iq
Well done Gillan i worship at all saints wickham market and have felt for some time that we need to engage at the political level in the face of an increasingly aggressive secularisation. I follow the work of christian concern very closely. I visit the on line forums of many national newspapers and get very concerned about the attitudes i see there. We need to be loving prayerful and compassionate in our approach and not get involved in slanging matches with Atheists humanists secularists. I will pray for your work and support it in any way i can. Best wishes Graham
Graham, thank you for your support! I am trying to run this blog in an objective way without making inflammitory posts. God is perfectly capable of defending himself, but we are responsible for getting his message across. God’s influence in politics is not going to bring our nation to its knees, as some may think, but rather give it direction and hope.
Fully agree with you Gillan – very well said.
What a silly comment ! To claim your invisible (non-existent) god is “perfectly capable of defending himself” and then going on to say that ‘you’ are responsible for getting his ‘message’ across is really taking the biscuit.
My immediate response is to say “Spoken like a well heeled slave”
But let us look at the bigger picture, we all know in our hearts that the ‘bible’ was construed and put together by man … parts of it with good intentions, other parts for the purposes of controlling people, and quite a lot as an excuse for genocide (by claiming this ‘god’ ordered it)
Any balanced human being would immediately come to the conclusion that there never was a god and certainly no son of god, so therefore the original purpose for the bible was to cover up mankind’s atrocities, including the slaughter of women and children.
By believing the bible is your god’s word, then you must accept it in its entirety, and that includes the nasty bits where this god orders the killing of children – is this really the sort of god you are happy to be a slave for ?
(And yes, I know the Islamic ‘god’ is even worse, but for now I am just referring to your version)
@Neil,
You sound as upset as unemployment and as arrogant as uneducatedness. There is surely GOD mate. You’ve clearly not read through the Holy Bible and you need faith to believe it anyway.
The chaos in the world today is all as a result of the nations of the world trying to push GOD outside their politics and national affairs.
Everything happening in the world today was written in the Holy Bible and therefore cannot be mere coincidence.
For instance (John 16:2) – “…Yes, a time is coming when the one who kills you will think he’s serving God.”
Is this not happening today?
The Holy Bible is real mate, so real!!! It has always worked for me and will keep working for me.
IT IS THE WORD OF GOD.
Advice: Don’t even read it, STUDY IT. It is Spirit and it is LIFE!!
Delighted to have discovered your blog – I’ll be following it. Some Christians seem to forget what the word ‘politics’ actually means i.e. it is about people. I think God cares about people, don’t you?
Thanks Nancy. I’m glad you like it. Politics covers so much of what life is about as a society. Why wouldn’t God want to be involved in it?
Your blog has plenty worth reading too. I’ve added Seeker to my Blog Links and recommend others go take a look.
Hi Gillan,
Glad to find another British blogger who’s talking about God and politics. I do just this over at greenchristian.co.uk – blogging as both a Christian and an active member of the Green Party.
God bless,
Steve
Glad that you’ve found us! Your site has some great content. I’ve now added a link to it on the front page under the Blog category.
Ditto all of above – at UN Human Rights Council for CSW where our staff are advocating for persecuted Christians and those of other faiths. Great to read of your blogs on CSW’s work in the field of faith and politics. Keep up the good work! Andrew Johnston Advocacy Director CSW
Thanks Andrew, I appreciate your support. Thank you too for all the work you are doing on behalf of CSW and the job you do defending persecuted Christians around the world.
I agree: Christians should be salt and light in a dark world and this, surely means, that we engage not only in prayer, gospelling and preaching but also in the public forum, the ‘City of Man’ as Augustine of Hippo referred to it in his great treatise, The City of God.
What kind of politics you will be involved in will be a matter of some dispute.
But it is not always essential to get party political, though we will have to be members of some political party, forum, interest group or so on.
Although and dyed in the wool member of a political party I have been musing on the prospect of setting up some sort of training programme for Christians who want to be local councillors (as that’s where a lot of the real work for communities is done) but feel unable to commit to any party. Its much more important for Christians to have input into their societies that can influence how those communities are built than it is to tie them to be in a party. What say you?
Harriet, this sounds like a very good idea. Have you got in contact with Christians in Politics or CCF, LDCF or CSM? They may be able to offer advice or support.
Good idea. Some have misunderstood what christian and politics are all about.
Love this blog. Thought provoking and challenging. Thanks so much!
Thanks for the encouragement!
I like this site – please continue to stay out of party politics, so many Christians who say they care about real issues only have a VERY left-wing bias. In my humble opinion there are good people on both sides and party politics only divide when concensus is surely what we want – isn’t it?
Thank you Lily I am glad you have found it. There are good Christians across the political spectrum and no one party has all the answers, so it is important to be both positive and critical towards both sides when it is needed. Some see Jesus as a socialist, but if you read the gospels, thoroughly it really isn’t that simple.
I thought the christian god had his hands full with the US. Nice to see he has some time for the UK, too.
Indeed He does!!! The Christian GOD is the only real GOD.
No bias, it is just the truth.
He was the GOD of the UK before He became the GOD of the USA too. He owns the Earth and (Psalm 24:1) tells us that – “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it”.
Cheers.
God bless you Gillan. Keep up the good work.
I started to write in English so I’m learning from you also how to make a difference for Christ online and here in UK.
Take care
Thank you Marius. I’m glad you’ve found this site so helpful. I’m praying that God will bless you.
Amen
Hi Gillian,
Lovely to find another Christian Uk blogger. Looking forward to following your posts 🙂
So sorry Gillan, I didn’t spot that my mobile autocorrect changed the spelling of your name, before I replied.
Don’t worry, it’s a common problem! Thanks for visiting.
EUDEMONIA
The effects of religion are many and various;
some are benign, others are nefarious.
Indoctrination with religions, across national borders,
enables the elites to rule the lower orders.
And faith in ideas that are, in part, anachronistic,
deals death and destruction through sectarian conflict.
But now a new era beckons, where Humanity could be,
as reason infers, one great family.
The Christian’s Jehovah, the Almighty Lord God,
lords it over Heaven, though he’s an amoral clod.
A minor god, called Satan, runs the show in Hell,
where God sends sinners to be tortured, & atheists as well!
Confused by Christian dogma, no god-fearing fogey
can fathom the nature of that Bible Bogey.
Jehovah’s his own father, and son, and an apotropaic ghost;
a priest’s magic spell can conjure him from wine and toast.
Christians claim that their god, in its Empyrean lair,
is omniscient, omnipotent, beneficent and fair.
But with the problem of theodicy remaining unresolved,
their god, from its moral turpitude, can’t be absolved.
The Jew’s Yahweh is a meshuggeneh and jerk;
he set Jews strict rules on when to work,
and how to dress, and what to sup or sip,
and giving baby boys the snip.
That Yahweh’s a nudnik; so, what else is new?
Is a shikse kosher, is the Pope a Jew?
A Bronze Age, Hebrew tribe of mythopoeic nomads,
got observant Jews by the gonads.
The Moslem’s Allah is a fierce great djinn;
he demands under ‘Islam’, literally, ‘Submission’.
Apostasy is treated just like a crime;
they’ll threaten to kill you, to keep you in line.
And if you dare to draw Mohammad in a comic cartoon,
there’ll be riots and killings from here to Khartoum.
So, face Mecca at the mosque, five times a day at least,
and stick your ass up in the air, for the Religion of Peace.
Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist,
Zoroastrian, Baha’i, Mormon, and Scientologist,
Spiritualist, Wiccan, the New Ager into woo,
Confucianist, Shintoist, and Taoist too.
Yea, verily, those of each and every religion,
are mired in the miasma of superstition.
The gods from the Bronze Age up to modern times,
and from the Arctic down to tropical climes,
have begotten theology that’s unsubstantiated twaddle,
on what an invisible and silent god’ll
devise as its inscrutable, eschatological plan,
but all the gods were made in the image of man.
Gods and Incubi and Succubi too,
might you like at night the one that’s right for you?
Religion should have no say in the politics of a nation,
its revelations and dogmata lack a rational foundation.
Aristotle’s eudemonia, (human flourishing), conflicts
with the social engineering that religion inflicts
on societies that could democratically endorse
rationality-based ethics, mores, and laws.
It’s evident we have just this one life,
with all its pleasures, challenges, toil, and strife.
As social beings we evolved our moral sensibility,
combating selfishness, lust, and venality.
Religion misunderstands, and so invokes the supernatural,
while Humanism strives to promote the good and rational.
Why should yours be the “One True Faith”,
in a magic, phantasmagorical wraith?
Belief, without evidence, is symptomatic of being lazy,
or ineffably mystical, or doctrinaire, or even clinically crazy.
When evolution happens, it’s due to Natural Selection,
so life derives no purpose at a theistic god’s direction.
Eternal punishment isn’t ethical in any conceivable reality;
Plato proved gods can’t create morality.
The least religious countries are the most egalitarian,
while the most religious are the most barbarian.
The varieties of religious experiences reveal
a sense of a god’s immanence can feel quite real,
but feelings of the numinous are merely psychological,
so belief in a god is really quite illogical.
But there’s no need for you to blame your genes;
your faith’s the fault of socio-religious memes.
They corrupted your mind with their contagious infection
of superstitious ideas that can’t stand close inspection.
So cast them out, and then, you’ll be free
to revel in your HUMANITY!
Gods and spirits belong with myth and supernaturalism,
whereas Humanism’s based on science and rationalism.
Well Richard Harris,evolution to this day is not proved and never will be, but you go ahead and have faith in that “fairy story”.
Oh dear Linda, you seem to be using the argument normal people use to explain why there cannot be any god, except normal people have the back up of science, you don’t.
And talking of fairies … as a bird watcher, I’m interested to know how many pairs of angels managed to successfully breed this year ?
Christianity is NOT a religion.
Christianity is LIFE and that life is in JESUS CHRIST.
Is poetry scientific or rational.?
If you are referring to Richard’s poem above I would describe it as extremely rational and helped by scientific knowledge.
Getting back to politics … surely if there was a god, we wouldn’t need politics – I mean, ‘he’s’ so almighty, we would not need a Prime Minister, President or even a silly pope, in fact, we wouldn’t even need country’s.
We would all be one, led by one – wouldn’t it be great if only this god thing could talk to us.
I’m sure I am at a complete loss as to why it doesn’t … could it be that there just ain’t no god ?!
But hang on a minute, dear unhinged Tony Blair heard voices in his head telling him to kill – I suppose they must have come from somewhere (within his mind)