Should you vote for a party or for God?

By Tom Harris MP

Cranmer reckons there are many reasons why Christians should vote Conservative. Well, of course he does: he’s a Christian, he’s a Tory, ergo, all Christians should be Tories.

I’ve come across this nonsense before, of course, many times, within the church. Shortly after the 1987 general election, I was visiting a friend who had been a member of the same “house church” as me back in our Ayshire days. She had now settled in Sale, Cheshire, with her husband. A Christian friend came round in the evening (with his guitar, natch; wouldn’t want to avoid any evangelical Christian clichés, now, would we?). “Did you vote for our man?” he asked my friend. “Our man”, it turned out, had been the local SDP/Liberal Alliance candidate a few weeks previously, who was also a member of my friend’s local church. Never mind the policies – so long as the person voting for them in the Commons shares your faith. Apparently.

Cranmer’s argument, naturally, is slightly more sophisticated, and it centres on abortion. If you’re a Christian, you’ll oppose abortion, and since David Cameron has apparently offered a free vote on reducing the upper limit, then Christians should vote for a Conservative government. Now, I don’t deny that this argument has a certain logic: more Tory MPs and candidates than Labour tend to be pro-life, so if that’s the most important issue for you, you’ll be tempted to vote accordingly.

But as I’ve argued before, abortion has always been decided on a free vote, and I assume always will be. My biggest problem with Cranmer’s argument (apart from the fact that he refers to himself in the third person; Tom has never been comfortable with that style of writing, which is why he gave up on Facebook) is that he’s trying to accomplish what others -such as Nadine – have tried to do before: make abortion a party political issue along the same lines as in the US.

This would be very bad for British politics and even worse, in the long term, for the Conservative Party. Yes, there was a time when the Republican Party successfully exploited the prejudices and intolerance of the Christian Right for electoral gain. But they paid the price for their 4G strategy (God, guns, gays and gynecology) at the last election and look as if they’ll ditch their fundamentalist allies in order to gain a foothold in the mid-terms next year.

There’s nothing wrong in promoting your own party to those of your own faith, of course. In 1988 I made an impassioned plea to my own church members that the poll tax should be resisted on the basis that a flat tax, with everyone paying the same amount regardless of income, was incompatible with the Biblical principle of tithing. Most members agreed, but it didn’t mean they voted Labour afterwards; I suspect most of them continued to vote Tory.

Tory-voting Christians all too often try to make this specious argument, that a single party (theirs, of course) most accurately represents “Christian values”. Labour-voting Christians, in my experience, tend not to, or at least, they do it less often. Perhaps that’s because they look across at the American political system and are repulsed by the stranglehold that the Christian Right have over Republican policy and don’t want to see the same thing happen here.

More likely, however, they simply recognise that it’s far too simplistic to claim any one party for God, that individuals should be trusted to make their own choice, and those choices respected.

The problem is that there are some vocal Tories out there who look across the Atlantic and actually like what they see. They see the intolerance and ignorance of the likes of Sarah Palin and think: “Yes, let’s have some of that over here!”

Very worrying indeed.

Tom Harris is MP for Glasgow South. He blogs regularly at And another thing…