 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to St. Mary's University. I am delighted this evening to welcome Professor James Crossley to deliver his inaugural lecture. James, as you know, is a professor in the Bible, society and politics at St. Mary's in the Centre for the Social Scientific Study of the Bible. As one of our most active research centres, the Centre has frequently published important research, holds thought-provoking conferences and welcomes doctoral candidates from around the world who are drawn to the reputation of the Centre here at St. Mary's. Professor Crossley joined us here at St. Mary's in 2015 after 10 years at the University of Sheffield. His research covers two broad categories. Christian origins and Judaism in the first century, and the Bible in political discourse in the 20th and 21st centuries, of which we will hear more from James shortly and also in a very interesting week. Last year, Professor Crossley hosted a launch for his new book, Harnessing Chaos, again quite interesting for this week, which explores the changes in dominant politicised assumptions about what the Bible really means in English culture since the 1960s. This is getting really very topical. In 2015, Professor Crossley also published Jesus and the Chaos of History, which looks at the way the earliest traditions about Jesus interacted with the context of social upheaval. Away from St. Mary's, Professor Crossley has been very active in contributing to numerous Biblical studies institutions, having been a member or actively involved in the Society of Biblical Literature and the European Association of Biblical Studies to name but a few. Professor Crossley has also been editor and are on the editorial boards for a number of journals and monograph series, including the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Postscripts, Biblical Reception, Religious Studies and Theology, amongst many others. James, we're looking forward to hearing you this evening, but can I formally welcome you on behalf of all the students and staff in the wider community here at St. Mary's? It's a delight to have you, it's always a delight to talk to you about the Bible and politics and I can think of no better time than the current. Very welcome. I'm going to follow my colleague, Steve Walton, in trying to do this on Facebook Live, so it could go wrong but not for you. That's a good or bad thing. Okay, well thank you very much, Francis, and thank you more and thank you to my colleagues here. We've made me feel very welcome over what's nearly two years now, I guess, at St. Mary's. I said to some people before, there are many people here who are experts, Steve listened to me at least, that's good. Who are worldly experts in biblical studies, worldly experts in theology, and I ask you humbly to forget everything you've learned over the past however many decades, clear your minds and prepare yourselves for how politicians sometimes use religion and the Bible. Throughout this, it's worth remembering that anything too problematic, and too extreme is very unlikely to make it into mainstream political discourse, whether it's too secular or whether it's deemed too religious and it will often be a kind of banal, vague construction of the Bible as something to do with tolerance, rights and freedom and things like this. And occasionally these things get stretched, and I think we're actually in a situation where this is happening right now. Okay, now I will be talking about the current makeup of politics and it's the ways it constructs religion and the Bible in due course, but I want to just go back into the not too distant past to show how we got to where we are today. And that's my picture, I've just had my picture taken with me. Now, there's a whole story here, so I'm going to summarize quite a lot. And thatcherism in many ways grew out of the upheavals of the 60s, whether it's a real conservatism or nostalgia for a lost Britain, or whether it's some of the radicalism on the left. And I think 1968 and the leftist 1960s is actually at least as important for the emergence of thatcherism as it is for the left. And I think perhaps sometimes consciously thatcher and the group around her took up the language of liberty, freedom and so on, and then reapplied it to economics particularly. And so thatcher built on a lot of these tensions and contradictions of the 1960s and grounded what would become thatcherism in the Bible quite explicitly really and more so, I think, than early politicians since. And rediscovered, you might say cynically, I'm an object of historians so I might back off here, her methodism. As a Tory MP of the 50s, she can have to be an Anglican at this point, but challenging the Tory establishment, methodism, rediscovering this methodism became important. And she grounded issues of entrepreneurialism, freedom, economic freedom, criticism of the welfare state, and the emphasis on charitable giving as in the Bible. The Bible is the source of what would become known as thatcherism. And she really set the template for politicians since in many ways. Now there's many examples you could give from thatcher, but of course probably the most famous is a use of the good Samaritan who she famously argued wouldn't have been able to help the man if he didn't have the independent means of wealth to do so. And she said this on a number of occasions including on Walden. But there was also, it wasn't just the Bible, it was religion itself. She had a very interesting construction of religion. Religion for thatcher no matter how bad it may seem in the present has always got this core of good, freedom, individualism and so on. And she strongly contrasted this and the Bible with Marxism in the Soviet Union. So no matter what religious group made claim to be terrorists they're not really religious she would say. Whereas any terrorist group claiming to be Marxist really is Marxist. And she made it very clear. And she thought the Soviet Union was beyond redemption really. It would just take the great individualism of someone to wake up like Gorbachev and turn things around. So this was very significant in her construction of what she thought religion was and what she thought Marxism leftism was with one eye on labour uses of the welfare state. She was very often blurring the lines between the Soviet Union and the Labour Party on this. Now again to cut the very long story short the Labour Party of the 1990s attempts to come to terms with this including in a couple of publications that would eventually feed into what we call new labour. And despite some of the rhetoric, despite some of the polemic thatcherism was basically or economic thatcherism was basically accepted and this understanding of what the Bible is compatible or indeed the source of such economic liberalism. There was nuances of course. But what was different was what Blair I think added to this and that was a kind of socially liberal qualification to thatcher's understanding of the Bible. So the Bible now is the source of things like gender equality equality of sexuality and really this came to the fore under Cameron and the same-sex marriage debate where when the Bible was used, when Jesus was invoked in parliamentary debates it was always in favour of same-sex marriage, interestingly. None of the kind of American-style debates here. What Blair all, I mean there was a bit of Islam with thatcher but not very much, but Blair really brought Islam to the fore of English political discourse. Thatcher did, I mean there were issues to deal with Salmon Rushdie and so on and Thatcher did reflect on September the 11th obviously sometime after she was Prime Minister. But Blair was intensely interested I think at least if any of the reportings are true. In Islam, unencouples of the Quran and reading the Quran every day according to one interview. But he also brought Islam into the idea that Islam is also, true Islam in his terms is about democracy, freedom, capitalism even. Whereas distortions of Islam would be things like then al-Qaeda, terrorism, totalitarian regimes and so on. So this was one of Blair's distinctive contributions. The other important contribution by Blair was dealing with the left-wing tradition in the Labour Party and the left-wing tradition again to put it crudely was equating the Bible with socialism and Tony Ben was probably at this time the last great example of this tradition and it was often cast in apocalyptic language by which I mean New Jerusalem would be the historic way of describing I guess in the Labour tradition but in the 1945 Labour manifesto it's all the language really kind of very much based on revelation about we've had the war, it's flattened everything and out of this rubble we will get rid of disease once squalor and so on and create the NHS, develop the welfare state and so on and Blair develops this and instead of applying it to that kind of welfareism in the UK it's now with one eye on the Middle East and Afghanistan and really the press didn't pick up on this but at the Labour Party conference in 2001 he was really fairly directly alluding to the 1945 manifesto to justify intervention or the upcoming intervention in Afghanistan and that's and I think probably to keep a fairly wobbly Labour Party on side and those with ears to hear and it's very interesting that the press barely picked up on this because the press barely do pick up on anything to do with religion unless it's a little weird from their perspective now this template, this sort of Blair Thatcher template seemed to be victorious in many ways and Cameron picked up on it and if anything intensified this he pushed further on things like gay marriage for instance being obvious one but also intensified some of the Thatcherite rhetoric so for instance when he talks about big society Jesus founded big society 2,000 years ago he said and from this perspective things like food banks aren't necessarily a bad thing this is groups filling in where the state might previously have done so so this actually should be applauded Cameron strongly implied in a couple of speeches or when there were floods and the vickers canoeing to help people out this is big society in action this is what Jesus would have done be detached now the crash though I think has changed everything on this everything relatively speaking of it and we've seen some very high profile terms of socialist readings of the Bible to English political discourse and religion now it didn't go away of course it was just pushed outside parliamentary debate and some of the first signs of this were with Occupy the picture here being one of many instances of Jesus in the temple being used in Occupy this seemed to be a favoured image both in London and elsewhere Russell Brand was also another interesting example invoking Jesus Christianity but he also invoked things that were deemed kind of too eastern and this didn't go down well at all and he wasn't deemed authentic in any serious way as a representative of Jesus and socialism or anything like this but Corbin did interestingly there's been a lot of ironic uses of Corbin as Christ and all this kind of thing but there's not been it's been one area that he's had some protection from the press interestingly because I think even the Daily Mail because there's been, because rightly or wrongly he's been tied in with a brand of kind of English radical Christianity which the Mail for instance has defended for years and Corbin was deemed again rightly or wrongly as kind of an authentic representation of that tradition and his colleague Kat Smith I used Kat Smith I could have used others but Kat Smith is from Barrow so I've got a certain bias here and Kat Smith said something I think was quite publicly almost unthinkable maybe ten years before maybe less and she said Jesus was a radical socialist quite openly and she said he inspires my politics that's why I'm here which I thought was quite striking but it's also the crash has brought reactions on the right of course now I put Brexit it's much more complicated I think than it's presented it's not simply a reaction on the right there's in various working class communities it cuts across left and right in many ways but it's certainly presented as a reaction on the right and that's not entirely inaccurate either of course and a number of tropes and ideas associated with the far right at least if any of the studies are accurate on this and I think they must be given what happened with Brexit and so on there are a number of issues with EU immigration that have become very popular vote winningly popular in a way that was toyed with ten years before and worried about ten years before but now at the fore and Islam throughout all this and this is tied in with this Islam in the media in particular has been a big problem one study showed that Islam over about a ten year period is mentioned on average 33 times a day in the British press I went through the press looking for the Bible and found virtually none in a week's material but you'll find Islam absolutely no problem and another study related I think it was the same study when you type in Islam and related terms over the past ten years and you look at the articles the term terrorism and violence comes up more times in the articles than Islam so this is there in the background constantly okay now so that's kind of where we are again I've summarised a great deal of work here I'm going to use one example now from Theresa May and she's repeated this on a couple of occasions in different contexts whether in relation to Christmas or perhaps you've seen her comments more recently on Easter same kind of thing and in September 2016 in a discussion of British laws, culture, values and traditions such as Christmas Theresa May stated in Parliament that what we want to see in our society is tolerance and understanding we want minority communities to be able to recognise and stand up for their traditions but we also want to be able to stand up for our traditions generally and that includes Christmas so where is this distinctive well a year earlier Cameron certainly made his typical nostalgic claims that Britain is a Christian country and singled out values surrounding Jesus' birth saying that it represents peace mercy goodwill and above all hope but it's because of these and this is a quote from Cameron important religious roots and Christian values that Britain has been such a successful home to people of all faiths and non okay all faiths and non was a very favorite phrase of Cameron now the idea of the Bible and Christianity representing English or British values and also representing all faiths and non was used by Cameron on a number of occasions when summarizing Christian values in relation to liberal British or English values elsewhere these British values of all faiths and non were thought to be found in the Bible and Christianity and Cameron said for instance on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible that they include human rights equality monarchy parliamentary democracy protest freedom abolition of slavery emancipation of women responsibility hard work charity compassion humility self sacrifice love pride in working for the common good honoring social obligations to one another and the first forms of welfare provision which is an interesting addition actually now we might say that Cameron's paternalistic rhetoric belongs to the pre-trump pre-Brexit liberal embrace of others without inclusion or at least mention of any problematic or illiberal otherness for liberal multicultural discourse but in a world of Brexit and Trump May's rhetoric was blunt in identifying the other and its difference but seemingly left open without explicit judgment and you'll note in May's response the strong distinction between minorities their traditions and the assumption of normative British identity which well what is it it's not entirely clear but our traditions Christmas are infactically not Diwali or Eid which is the context here actually of the discussion and the point of comparison Christmas is ours Eid is theirs and this Brexit inspired othering of those deemed I guess Asian minorities ought to be clear enough perhaps this flirting with a kind of ethno-nationalist construction of Christmas is unsurprising in her then half-year premiership of I'm moved to Christmas now, the actual Christmas not September half-year premiership of a red, white and blue Brexit a desire to deal with the electoral threat of UKIP an influential cohort of leave MPs on the back benches and most tellingly the conservative government floating the idea of companies identifying non-British workers but Cameron had two further distinctive aspects which are either downplayed or replaced in May's Christmas messages first, Cameron's Christmas was part of his intensification of the inherited liberal economic assumptions about Christianity and the Bible that he received from Thatcher onwards Cameron placed a strong emphasis on providing these services to be deemed beyond those provided by the state which may seem innocuous enough but he did mention as I said before food banks and the floods for which his government received much criticism and it's in this context that Cameron was claiming that it's a good thing that we get canoeing vickers or food banks because this is British values in action Cameron also mentioned homelessness but he followed this immediately by praising those who help the homeless at Christmas now this emphasis is significantly muted in May's Christmas and this is repeated in Cameron's Christmas messages now this is not to say that she is necessarily plotting the downfall of capitalism but rather represents a kind of post-Brexit political expediency of appealing to the elusive Brexit voter and as the cliche of pro-NHS, pro-decent wage priority for British vulnerable types, anxieties about immigration dislike of liberal elite and so on and this was an early emphasis and I'm going I think emphasis of May's rhetoric now there's plenty more that could be said about May's understanding of minorities particularly her understanding of Muslims and Islam and her use of the perversion of Islam trope so common amongst English based politicians and the way I think she plays to the far right while simultaneously distancing herself from them you can read that in a forthcoming book but for now this snippet should give some indication of an overall post-Brexit electoral strategy designed to colonize the right and gain even more enthusiastic support from the right wing press and satisfy conservative Brexiteers and traditional voters while not being too blunt enough to isolate the more liberal conservatives and sympathizers some of whom were happy enough to hold their nose and vote accordingly though maybe of course not in red Kensington but it was a strategy partly designed to pick up an often older working class vote in a post-industrial era of precarious employment and poverty disillusioned with their economic lot and abandoned by mainstream politics where anti-immigration anti-EU and anti-Muslim rhetoric has some support and where the far right particularly the English Defence League in UKIP have had some popularity and in this respect it's striking that the 2017 conservative party manifesto attacked what the conservatives and the great icon Margaret Thatcher were typically deemed to represent so they attacked the manifesto attacked untrammeled free markets with a somewhat vague offer of protection to people working in the gig economy but it's also couched in language typically assumed to be a deviation from a purer construction of religion in English political discourse this is a common term of phrase the rejection of the cult of selfish individualism now I think there is an assumption here that religion or a broad church is better and more communal but the language here I think is also broadly speaking now taking Christmas the manifesto and everything into consideration is a kind of soft ethno-nationalism a promise of economic protectionism whilst isolating certain minorities and I don't think this is too unfamiliar to the admittedly more abrasive rhetoric coming from American political discourse and this looked from the perspective of hard electoral scheming to be a winning ploy before may as somewhat problematic election campaign again, keeping distance professionalism according to the YouGov polling published in March 2017 the overwhelming majority would still have voted the same way in the EU referendum however it was also revealed that there are a significant majority of people 69% who thought that the government should now accept that Brexit should just go ahead only 21% against 49% were confident in maze negotiation skills 52% thought her proposals were positive for Britain and we might contrast this with only 15% of people who thought parliament should vote on whether to accept a deal only 15% my Facebook timeline is full of people who wanted another referendum on the EU and you would have thought looking at that that this somehow represents a huge chunk of the population, evidently not similarly, a cluster of anti-immigration anti-EU anti-political establishment views appear to have been consistently popular among a section of the older working class voters while anti-Islam, anti-Muslim feeling has been prominent in polling for years, particularly among older voters 45 and up which means I'm a younger voter of course and as well of course being pervasive in the press these qualified pro-Brexit and anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tendencies appear to be reflected in the May 2017 local elections where the conservatives performed strongly seemingly absorbing the anti-EU UKIP voters on the right and as the slim 52-48 referendum split was becoming a distant memory based on such statistics some analysts were confident in their predictions of a made landslide however such statistics are complicated people may respond to such questions in the way that they did of course but may not prioritise for instance a disdain for Islam when voting or they may not have even had much interest in Brexit other than having an opinion on the matter such predictions were also based on the assumption that an older generation would dominate voting at the election and this was hardly unreasonable but such predictions also missed the flip side and that's to such statistics that there was a younger generation less likely to be hostile to Islam immigration and so on but while also being affected by cuts in education and precarious working patterns and in this sense Corbinism offered some sort of alternative as appears as far as we know so far to be reflected in what seems to be the return to two party politics at least in this election now the development of Corbinism also foregrounded the findings of religion and the Bible indeed on his victory as leader of the Labour Party Corbin almost immediately began reference in the Bible his first major television interview on the eve of the 2015 Labour party conference Andrew Maher began explaining who John the Baptist was but Corbin immediately interjected claiming he knew perfectly well who John the Baptist was and said I am very familiar with the Bible now I also think Corbin is fully aware of the importance of this source of cultural and political authority and capital indeed Corbin has been making regular reference or allusion to rather the parable of the Good Samaritan including in his victory speech now here's a picture for you we were talking before about John MacDonald and the Stalin thing this is what's not been noticed on a lot of election analysis that there is a whole load of memes had taken place on Facebook and different groups and they're hugely popular and they're very ironic, very playful but we'll use Maoist tradition and Andrew Maher noticed this though on election night in fairness this is the source of what's going on beneath the surface now Corbin has used his illusions to the Good Samaritan to promote his distinctive stance on welfare we don't pass by on the other side of those people rejected by an unfair welfare system we we don't pass by on the other side while the poor lie in the gutter almost certainly an allusion to Thatcher here as well of course but the Good Samaritan and the illusions to it were also used to connect Corbin with a specifically British or English socialism a connection that was typical of his mentor Tony Ben and it's not without reason that the biblical illusions in his conference speech and in interviews came shortly after the outrage leveled at Corbin for not singing the National Anthem at the Battle of Britain Memorial and this is what he said shortly afterwards solidarity and not walking by on the other side of the street when people are in trouble these shared majority British values that are the fundamental reason why I love this country and its people he also went on to invoke the British socialist Christian socialist tradition and interestingly the rallies you'll see in the Corbin rallies he keeps bringing up this we will not walk by on the other side almost every rally apparently but it's also significant about this is what it doesn't represent the Good Samaritan is probably the most common biblical illusion in English party politics today for those with ears to hear it's a parable present for the battle of the soul of the Labour Party and cross parliamentary views on militarism David Cameron likewise alluded to the example of the Good Samaritan to justify any future military intervention against ISIS in his promotion of British values and the state's monopoly on violence we cannot just walk by if we had to keep this country safe we have to confront this menace we will do so in a calm deliberate way but with an iron determination in his speech supporting the bombing of Syria Hilary Ben perhaps the most high profile Labour Front Bencher critical of the Corbin agenda justified intervention with the claim that we have never have and we never should walk by on the other side of the road very same parable with the very same sentiment within the parable then can be read to come to the exact opposite position of military intervention which of course no doubt shows how interpretation is driven by a given political ideology while the biblical texts simultaneously provides the authority but this use of the Bible also involves how Islam is understood and in mainstream English political discourse since Blair and perhaps even since Thatcher Islam as I said is assumed to be compatible with and supportive of the liberal democratic state and the perversion of Islam is required is to be associated with groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda and worthy of military attack and the root of political violence in North Africa the Middle East and on the streets of London, Paris, Nice and Brussels oh sorry I had the quotes there there you go now the way that this perversion of Islam trope is used is very important it's very significant relentlessly used a politician will never criticise Islam not a mainstream one you know you'll get someone on the back benches or you'll get a UK people go for it and things like this but not mainstream labour or conservative or Lib Dem but this is the way that you can target then military intervention by saying it's a perversion that needs to be rectified or you can do it domestically whether to say the prevent strategy or something we are targeting perversions of Islam and it's interesting certain awards have been given for the right interpretation of the Quran but it's also yeah here we go but it's also been used on the left in a way that is not that common and Karbin has also employed this phrase the perversion of Islam and related phrases and what he's used it for is to say because ISIS are a perversion of Islam we should stop funding them or Saudi Arabia you know and stop the chain of money going through to ISIS because it's such a distortion of Islam there is no negotiating with ISIS interestingly now this you may or may not seen another this is something I think whilst I think lots has been open on the right of English political discourse a lot's been open on the left of English political discourse and you may have seen in the press over the past year English, Scottish and Irish fighters in northern Syria who are fighting for kind of social change and fighting ISIS on the behalf of kind of feminist uprising in many ways in northern Syria and they have supported Karbin quite strongly now this didn't make the press very often but this did and you've got here smash ISIS vote Karbin and their logic is that well tourism is support Saudi Arabia Karbin doesn't he thinks that ISIS is such a perversion that it shouldn't be funded and they've taken that line even further and said we should just get rid of the language of whether it's Islam or extremist Islam and just talk about Saudi Arabia there's no need to talk about Islam almost this is the Bob Crow Brigade and they are named after the late Union leader Bob Crow of the RMT and they came to media prominence just about a year ago in the Labour leadership election when Owen Smith of course implied that there should be negotiations with ISIS and was kind of largely ridiculed for this and Karbin denied it and so they started tweeting Owen Smith and you can see here want to talk to ISIS tell that to the martyrs of Manbij with a quote from Bob Crow and they attacked Hillary Ben as well and you can see this has made the times made the independent Morning Star but that wasn't a tremendous surprise in this context but it did make the media and this is the line that Karbin has been implying but those on the Karbin supporting further left have been pushing fairly hard actually now there's another aspect of religion here relating to Karbin that's really really come to the fore since he became leader and that's Karbin in relation to the national media now I'm probably not telling anyone anything new when I point out that Karbin got a fairly bad press from the national media and here's some of the wilder allegations, allegations leveled him there is one I didn't put up on here that Karbin was prepared to ban Christmas but thankfully Wontori MP saved us from that okay so you know revealed how Jeremy Karbin welcomed the prospect of an asteroid wiping out humanity, attacked prison prejudice and demanded a ban of action man toys abolished the army, new leaders potty planned for world peace planned to turn Britons into Zimbabwe etc etc and this is all I guess fairly well known but there's been a number of studies done on the representation of Karbin in the English based media in particular and again no surprise but it's fairly overwhelming clear that there was a great deal of hostility but for me one of the interesting things was the hostility that came from the left, from the Guardian the Guardian were very strong in the condemnation of Karbin and did some interesting things I think in relation to the way religious language is being used just to give one example in the first week when Karbin looked like he was going to win the leadership contest there was something like 20 something articles in one week denouncing Karbin but the language here has been used of him as being given a list of them here pharisaical, puritan, sect, cult like Charles Manson or according to one Guardian article not quite, you didn't quite go that far but you know there is a sect so it's something similar zealot, he's bleeding higher cause an apocalyptic tendency all against the notion of a broad church so you get the idea that anything too enthusiastically deviating from an assumed broad church a broad parliamentary agreement centrism or whatever has to be deemed in this sort of language puritan, sect, cult others very similarly related terms, fundamentalism like ISIS was won like Stalinism which may not be 100% inaccurately we've found out before now the function of this is, and it comes to in a number of them, is that this is rational, and a rational deviation from rational thought and as it turns out this is huge in the Guardian over the past, it's been huge until recently when there seems to be a bit of a shift I think in the Guardian over the past few days I've given one example and this is from Polly Toynbee I envy their certainty the way you can envy the religious their delusions now that's quite unusual actually because the newspapers including the Guardian will largely be more respectful of religion, it's only people like known atheists, Polly Toynbee Richard Dawkins, who will openly criticise religion per se it always has to be some kind of distortion of religion that's criticised but it's the same logic it's irrational to believe in this kind of thing and as it turns out there's actually a very long history of this in the West which contrasts whatever the agreed centre of politics is, is the rational liberal centre with anything outside, anything challenging that deemed to be anti-liberal anti-capitalist, sometimes far right and so on but interestingly, over the past week, there's oddly been, and this is surprised to me, a kind of embrace of this sort of language of enthusiasm by some on the Guardian people who were once critical of Corbyn and I think this is probably indicative of the way that the political consensus has started to shift at the moment, that it is opening up more on the left as it has for some time I think on the right so I think we're in interesting times in that respect and we should have of course mentioned Tim Farron you can google him if you don't know who he is now Tim Farron is an interesting figure in this he represents a third strand of what's going on not simply because he's a Lib Dem actually, but for other reasons I hope will become clear now, Farron has certainly stressed the importance of things like welcoming refugees in relation to Christmas and I think in many ways did catch the tone of remainers but as we know, there was no remainer boost that went to the Lib Dems and it seems that Corbyn was the beneficiary of that for whatever reason nevertheless, there is one aspect associated with Farron which does tell us something about English political discourse and its construction of religion as his 2016 Christmas address showed, Tim Farron is I think for a post thatcher politician unusually forthright in his Christian beliefs open the evangelical though he doesn't ultimately stray too far actually from general liberal constructions of Christianity in the Bible, Tim Farron really doesn't want to talk about the details of this so, one quote from Farron in one of his infamous interviews on his faith but do you know what, as a Christian I think Christmas this is from his Christmas speech do you know what, as a Christian I think Christmas is about God who gave himself up for us and came to Earth in order to do that, who urges us to follow him and to believe that we should do to others what we have done to ourselves now, there are good reasons why Farron wants to keep certain controls when he opens his Bible because he's had to deal with questions about whether he thinks homosexuality or more precisely homoerotic sex is a sin now, it's quite possible that he did indeed think this and it's quite possible he still perhaps does think this but it's not the sort of thing a political leader of a party can readily admit of a mainstream political party, UKIP or DUP perhaps society Farron therefore made the classic liberal distinction and noted favourably by some activists and cross-party MPs I interviewed between his personal Christian morality and his public political liberalism which tolerates other groups and individuals irrespective of whether they are personally agreeable so Farron or let's say an MP could be hostile to homosexual sex but still vote for gay marriage because that's a personal belief in relation to tolerating other views there's a view I think Farron probably did hold and this for Farron has been crucial for being both a Christian and a liberal, big L, little L liberal in addition to claiming that we are all sinners to get around the problem of a potential media condemnation as seen in the particularly difficult Channel 4 news interview on this topic shortly after he became leader Farron's approach was actually typical enough in political discourse and he did something very similar to what Tony Blair and Barrack Obama did and Russell Brand interestingly and that would be to focus on a more liberal and inverted commerce part of the Bible to over against or stressed over a more illiberal again inverted commerce part in the case of Farron when he was confronted by the interviewer with the illiberal Leviticus 1822 you shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female it's an abomination the solution was to point to Jesus instead and the favoured biblical passage more amenable to contemporary liberalism Matthew 7 verse 3 you don't pick the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye when there is a plank in your own paraphrase now interestingly one liberal democrat activist I spoke to said that there was much support from within the party for Farron on this and by making the familiar move to a more palatable aspect of the Bible that Farron was instead deemed to be strong on social justice for instance and they were very pleased with this nevertheless the presence of liberal constraints on Farron's public presentation of Christianity was effectively confirmed by a number of politicians I interviewed and notably ones from different parties and perspectives one MP from a different party told me that Farron handled the situation well while another wished Farron could have been more explicit in his views but claimed that well there's a problem keeping the party on side and secularism makes it difficult for him and presumably here secularism is being constructed as pro gay sex and religion constructed as anti gay sex I think by way of contrast a senior politician from another party thought that Farron should simply oppose homophobia and support gay sex or else he must be deemed to be in a relevance to political debate and there is a likely allusion to this sort of thinking when it was reported from the Labour Party conference in 2015 that Angela Eagle criticised Farron for being an evangelical Christian who believes in the literal truth of the Bible at a time of a huge fundamentalist revival in religious belief interestingly she said and added he just doesn't want to talk about it a lot because he knows how much it will embarrass his own party now these are all different views of course on the situation but significantly there's the assumption that if you're open in opposing homosexual sex it's not an option for a leader of one of the main parties and not an option for a public presentation of religion or the Bible despite such pressures Farron's dealing with this issue early in his leadership by effectively refusing to comment on the problematic biblical verses seem to have worked for him in that the issue didn't haunt the party until the general election by this time the pressure on Farron to come clean about his compatibility with a more acceptable liberalism presumably weighed heavy as he first said that being in a gay relationship was not a sin which is a very interesting move because that wasn't the issue at hand and then he got asked in the next interview and really dealing with the theological technicality director he said homosexual sex is not a sin issue forgotten well not with all voters so there you have it there are three and no doubt more but three major tendencies at play in English political discourse since the 2008 crash a kind of soft ethno nationalism whilst trying to down trying to spot those on the gig economy or something like this something like carbonism and that construction of religion and this vague liberalism remains dominant as well apart from this liberalism though this liberalism cuts right across party politics none of this has yet crystallized with carbonism seemingly in the ascendancy the socially liberal Tories emboldened after May's defeat and the emergence of the dup in English political discourse the potential for more to happen before the ideological dust settles ought to be clear thank you