On Tim Farron

Posted on by kathleenjowitt

I’m Christian. I’m bisexual. I’m a member of the Labour party. And I am finding the tone of the commentary surrounding Tim Farron’s resignation somewhat upsetting.

I am not qualified to make pronouncements on Tim Farron’s beliefs. (Not that this seems to be stopping anyone else.) And so I’m just going to make a couple of observations, in what’s probably a pointless effort to introduce some nuance to the debate. One:

  • In Church language, ‘We’re all sinners’ is usually code for ‘I wish to describe some other group of people as sinful, but know that this will be frowned upon.’ Usually, but not always. However, even if one is inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt, this was at best a massive error of judgement.

Two, and I fear I’m going to be saying this for the rest of my life:

  • The assumption that LGBTQ and religious identities are mutually exclusive does not make life easier for those who happen to have both.

That’s it. Carry on.

Published by kathleenjowitt

2 thoughts on “On Tim Farron”

  1. My problem with Farron (in this instance) formulation of his problem was that he said this “To be a political leader – especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 – and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.

    I’m a liberal to my finger tips, and that liberalism means that I am passionate about defending the rights and liberties of people who believe different things to me.

    There are Christians in politics who take the view that they should impose the tenets of faith on society, but I have not taken that approach because I disagree with it – it’s not liberal and it is counterproductive when it comes to advancing the gospel.

    Even so, I seem to be the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in.

    In which case we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society.”

    He expressly said “the Bible’s teachings” and I presume he must be referring to Paul because it always is Paul. But my problem with that is that Paul is even more definite on the subject of women not being in management roles and being in subjection to their husbands than he is about homosexuality. Indeed, to the extent that CofE had a theological position on SSM, to the extent it wasn’t comprised of a combination of “Ooh, icky!” and “For God’s sake let’s not upset the Ugandans” it was expressly based in complementarism, and I regard complementarism as a very real threat. Farron is basically saying his version of tolerant liberalism means provided he doesn’t overtly discriminate against or use pressure to conform against people his version of the Bible tells him are going to hell, then they are being mean, illiberal poopy-heads when they get upset about the views themselves.

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