What I wrote to Maria Miller MP during the 'equal marriage' consultation

I thought it might be helpful to share with you the email that I wrote to my Member of Parliament during the UK government's 'consultation' about their 'equal marriage' proposals. For those who don't know, Maria Miller, is coincidentally not only the MP representing the constituency in which I live, but she is also Culture Secretary in David Cameron's government. It is her department that is responsible for the consultation and the resulting legislation.

On re-reading I recognise I may have been a tad aggressive. I tend to be overly blunt when up against opposition and feeling the need to be both clear and forceful. Not everyone, even those who agree with my reasoning, will agree with my conclusions. Let me know - particularly fellow believers - what you think. Should this change the way we vote? I am open to correction and guidance from those wiser than myself, especially on such an important issue.

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Dear Mrs Miller,

I write as a registered voter in the Basingstoke constituency which you represent. I have lived here 20 years, and live in Rooksdown with my wife and four children.

I have normally voted Conservative since I turned 18. Fundamentally, however, I am a Christian, and my political views are shaped by and subject to God's revelation in the Bible, including the foundations of justice and morality. The Conservative party always seemed to me to align best with Christian foundations.

Unfortunately, having been uneasy for years over the state of British politics from a Christian point of view, I now find myself at a turning point. The government seems hellbent on redefining marriage to include same sex marriage. The consultation is a sham, with the conclusion having been decided in advance. I hope that you have seen the open letter addressed to you by the Christian blogger 'Archbishop Cranmer'. If not, the link is below. It sums up much of what I think about the issue, and aligns with the views of many Christians in Basingstoke, certainly at least at the church I belong to (St Mary's, Eastrop). I have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition, along with hundreds of thousands of others, and sent my views into the consultation.

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-maria-miller-mp.html

For David Cameron, yourself and others this seems more than just the normal boring political wrangling over who is best at running health and education. This is about fundamental philosophical beliefs. I heard that David Cameron once said that the church would have to change like the Conservative party, and realise that equality is the absolute bottom line. This is the thing that really perturbs me. Politicians seem to see the church and religious groups as exactly the same as political parties, and seem to think that everyone buys into the same pluralistic philosophical presuppositions. We don't! For Christians the bottom line is not equality. The bottom line is the worship of the real God. And that is something unchangeable, non-negotiable and utterly fundamental. All Christian views on equality and justice and morality stem from the view that God sets the rules, not us, and true freedom comes from following those rules.

Christianity, it has to be said, is a religion of grace and good news. That's because none of us is capable of keeping God's rules, and the world is in the bad state it's in because of the sin of rejecting God's commands. Jesus Christ came to offer eternal life to those who will repent of that sin and trust in His death and resurrection. And Christian love, forgiveness and 'acts of mercy' are fundamentally based on the belief that no human being is beyond forgiveness, no matter what their sin, because God accepts all who come to Him through faith in Jesus Christ.

However, in democratic political terms, I don't believe that any Christian could in good conscience use their electoral vote for someone who directly defies God. And that is what you, Mr Cameron, Mr Clegg and others are doing. You believe that you know better than the real God, the one who created everything - including you - and made things to function in particular ways. In fact, you probably don't even believe there is a god. And therefore all you are left with is your own intellectual authority. Who says equality is the philosophical bottom line? You do!

Anyway, I could go on. I have never written to an MP before. But at this point in my life I have finally reached the point where I can no longer justify voting Conservative. After his stand against Christian morality, and after making it clear that he will push ahead with these changes no matter who objects, I do not want Mr Cameron to remain Prime Minister, and I do not want any equal marriage supporter to be in parliament. Therefore, you have lost my vote.

Of course, that wouldn't bother you… because who else can I vote for? Not any of the main parties, who are all infected by the same anti-Christian philosophical bias. Hence I will vote for any sensible looking independent candidate. This, I know, is unlikely to have any tangible effect on the political landscape, even if lots of Christians decided to do the same. But I have to go with my conscience.

The thing, however, that I hoped may bother the political powers, like yourself and the Prime Minister, is that being a matter of conscience and deeply held belief means that Christians will refuse to obey any new laws based on the redefinition of marriage. What our God tells us is more important than what you and Mr Cameron tell us, and God's laws are more important that the laws of the UK. It is true that one of our most peaceable principles as Christians is that we must obey the law of the land, because God has set the government in place for our good. However, when the law of the land tells us we must disobey God, then we can't do that.

Why is this such a watershed? For Christians this is a step too far. We have tolerated homosexuality as practiced by individuals. We believe it is sinful, and we call for repentance, but we tolerate the presence of such sin, because we live in a sinful world. We have tolerated civil partnership arrangements, which endorse immorality, because we do not have to recognise them as anything more than two individuals committing to an immoral relationship. They should still repent, but we tolerate the presence of civil partnerships because we live in a sinful world. However, when the legal definition of marriage is changed that will mean that churches (which are legally obliged to offer marriage to everyone in England) will be legally bound to offer marriage to homosexual couples. Christian ministers will not do this (unless they are very liberal). It means that schools will have to teach that marriage is not about one man and one woman, but about two people. Christian teachers, and church schools, will not teach this. And there are a whole host of other implications which have been pointed out by the Coalition for Marriage.

The sad thing is that you will be forcing the most benign, law-abiding, minority group in the country into law-breaking, and forcing Christians to be outsiders and outcasts in a society that was founded on Christian belief, morality and justice.

After this, my view of British politics is changed for ever.

Regards,


Andrew Burrows

How I came to faith

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I thought this time I might share with you the story of how I came to faith in Jesus. It’s a bit self indulgent, but then again that’s what this blog is all about – my reflections on experiences and stuff! And anyway, I do sometimes get asked.

I don’t call it ‘how I became a Christian’, because I think I would have always called myself a Christian. My mum and dad are Christians, so I would never have considered myself anything else. So in that sense I wasn’t ‘converted’. I didn’t ‘convert’ from atheism or Hinduism or Judaism to Christianity.

However, as kids do, when I was small I used to believe everything Mum and Dad told me, just because they said so. And there’s nothing wrong with that. What else can you do as a child? You learn everything from your Mum and Dad, so if they say that Jesus saves us from our sins then why would you question that?

But there does come a time when you do start to ask whether what your mum and dad believe is true. You start to need persuading, even about what clothes to wear, how to behave at school and what time to go to bed. So you start to ask whether God is real, and whether Jesus really is the Saviour of the world.

So I was sat in church one Sunday morning, listening to the vicar give his talk about the Bible. I was about twelve years old. I don’t even remember what he was talking about. But I remember suddenly realizing that what he was talking about was real. It wasn’t a made up story or a myth. It was stuff that actually happened. God was real. Jesus was real. And if they were real then Heaven and Hell were real. What I’d been taught about the world, God, Jesus, sin, being saved all made sense to me in my head. But suddenly I knew that if all this was real and true, then I could not go on in life without it affecting the way I lived my life.

I suppose I realized that Jesus was calling me not just to believe in him, but to follow him. This wasn’t just something that I could keep for Sundays only. I had a real Heavenly Father, and a real Saviour, who had saved me from a real Hell, and given me the hope of a real eternal life in a real Heaven - just as real as everything I could see, hear, smell and touch. And that meant it affected every day and everything, not just Sundays at church.

So I prayed that God would help me to live as a Christian every day and learn to follow him.

I don’t think at that age I really realized everything that meant, and I still have lots to learn even thirty years later, but for me that was the start of the journey.

Was I a changed person after that point? Well, yes, but not in a dramatic way that anyone would have really noticed. And I don’t remember being really committed to prayer and reading my Bible until I was seventeen. In between I was a normal teenager with normal interests – I played cricket, and I learned the guitar and started a rock band and started writing songs. But what I do remember is that when I did read the Bible or hear a talk at church, I heard it like it was something that would apply to me. And when I prayed at church or with Mum and Dad I knew that I was really speaking to my heavenly Father, and so I used to pray more and more on my own. It was a bit like waking up from a dreamy sleep.

Of course, life is the only test of whether faith is real. We live out what we really believe. Self-deception is possible and indeed common. So I am constantly aware of the need to fight off the influences of an apathetic world that is constantly trying to kill my faith with a thousand hours of TV-banality, atheistic smugness and shoulder-shrugging peer pressure. We have to persevere to the end to be saved, and only perseverance to the end will prove our faith to be real.

Of course, the hardships and the bad things that happen in our lives should be seen as trials to prove our faith genuine. “…now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:6-7)

And I can certainly identify a few times of hardship in my own life – 4 redundancies and 4 significant periods of unemployment, 2 bouts of cancer. This blog is testimony to the way I have searched for that “proven genuineness” of faith. I have sought to apply what I have learned from the Bible, and believe in my head and in my heart, to the situations I find myself in. I have wrestled and learned even more in the process. And I hope that this will result in “praise, glory and honour” for Christ.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that the purpose of life – yes, I believe that life does have a purpose – is God-centred and not me-centred or even man-centred.

But even when life is easier, our faith is being tried and tested. In the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-20) Jesus talks about four types of soil representing four types of people who hear the Word of God. Only one rejects the Word outright. Two produce seedlings that did not last and become fruitful – one because of hardship, the other because “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things” choked the life out of them (v19). So even the successes, the good things, family, friends, possessions, wealth, happiness, fun, enjoyment – all these things can try our faith.

They are things that can suck the life out of our faith simply by getting in front of God. We become too busy to pray, to go to church, to read the Bible. Before we know it we are doing things and saying things we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before. Then we feel guilty. Then we forget that God’s grace is to sinners, and we perversely tell ourselves that God won’t have us back… and then we don’t look back. It happens time and time again.

If you are one of those people that has reached the end of that progression, please remember that God welcomes us like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. None of us deserve His love and forgiveness, but He is merciful to all who come to Him through the Lord Jesus in faith and repentance.

For my own part, I have also had more than my fair share of smooth times too, and have experienced complacency and regretted it. Paul said, “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.” (1 Corinthians 10:12) I knew that verse like the back of my hand and still didn’t see the fall coming. Perhaps this is why Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians (5:15-16), “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.”

Anyway, so that’s my story. I hope that you have found it helpful. It’s not earthshattering or miraculous, quite undramatic. But it’s me, and it’s real. So I’d encourage you to ponder the real God, who in different ways is doing real things in the lives of real people day after day. And if you are a Christian, please keep striving for that “proven genuineness” of your faith in good times and in bad – because both will come. If you’re not a Christian, wake up and stop living in a dream world where meaning is elusory, purpose is meaningless and actions have no real consequences. Repent and start living in the real world, with the real God, with real purpose and meaning, and where there really is an eternal life through Jesus Chris after this one.