They have thrown everything at Kate Forbes. She has been subjected to a secular inquisition marked by triviality and partiality. Journalism is a trade neither teeming with religious believers nor one well-equipped for Biblical exegesis, and it shows.
‘Gotcha’ interrogation has focused on scriptural provisions offensive to progressive attitudes pervasive among journalists (e.g. on homosexuality and fornication) and not other teachings with as much potential bearing on policymaking, such as the iniquities of the rich and powerful or the superior virtue of the poor and meek.
Contemporary norms against judging a professional woman by her husband’s views or actions have been suspended to weaponise the attendance of Alasdair MacLennan, Forbes’s spouse, at a Conservative Party event. One newspaper splashed her photograph with the headline ‘Love not Kate’ and editorialised that she was ‘not fit’ to lead the SNP because of her faith-based views.
A gay Labour MSP accused her of having ‘devalued my marriage’ while the head of the SNP’s LGBTQ+ wing filed a formal complaint against her for stating the medical fact that ‘a transwoman is a biological male’. An SNP MP said during a discussion on Forbes and her church: ‘The thing I don’t get about these religious fundamentalists is why are they so obsessed with sex.’
I don’t doubt that many of Forbes’s critics are sincere, in particular those who object to religious judgement of their identities or lifestyles. Cherished progress has been made over the past generation or two and its beneficiaries naturally want to guard against backsliding. But while much effort has been put into trying to stop Forbes, almost none has gone into trying to understand her.
Many political actors, and those who write and broadcast about them, regard Christianity as an embarrassing relic of pre-modernity, superstition bound up in repression, fear and hypocrisy, happily irrelevant in our age of science, education and legal equality. Maybe that’s all Christianity is but Forbes believes otherwise.
For her, to follow Christ means to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed, take up the cause of the fatherless and plead the case of the widow. Forbes accepts that she is her brother’s keeper because, while many, men are made one body in Christ, every one members of one another. But Christianity is not supernatural socialism. Justice does not roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream because the Equality Act requires it. The Christian must do what is just and what is righteous because God commands it and Christianity is a life of obedient love.
This will offend secular ears because it is supposed to. Christianity, at least the Bible-believing Christianity Forbes espouses, teaches adherents not to be conformed to these times and their mores, to place the Word above the world. That is why Forbes answered honestly when asked about same-sex marriage. That is why she couldn’t, as so much head-scratching secular commentary has suggested, give a more ‘inclusive’ answer reflective of ‘modern Scotland’. Scripture is not a series of poll-tested lines to take; it is the inerrant Truth.
Some consider this worldview incompatible with holding elected office in a largely secular country but Forbes is an exemplar of how faith and liberal democracy accommodate and even complement one another.
She is a faithful Christian but she is also a procedural liberal, committed to upholding the legal framework of rights and liberties that guarantees her freedom to worship as firmly as it does the freedom of gay people like me to marry. While many, men are made one under the law, every one relying on the others to uphold their common rights. This is not bigotry or theocracy but the essence of liberal democracy.
Yet for believing these things, this bright and capable young woman has been ridiculed, calumnied and demonised. The Book of John will have prepared her for this: ‘If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.’ But the gleeful vilification to which she has been treated has been illuminating, as has the strength and constancy of character with which she has responded, holding fast to her faith while striving to reassure people in love and humility. Forbes has shown more tolerance than the professionally tolerant, more compassion than those who preach the Gospel of Be Kind.
What is the appeal of Forbes to people like me who are not nationalists? In part, it’s that she doesn’t sound like other nationalists. She respects those who disagree with her and is eager to listen. She knows that wealth can only be redistributed if it is first created. She understands that a first minister owes her primary duty to the good governance of the country, not the political passions of her party. Despite standing to be leader of the SNP, she has put not independence but the struggle against poverty at the heart of her campaign.
For Forbes, this is a moral imperative heightened by personal experience. She grew up in India, where her parents took the family to live among the poor and help give them access to free healthcare. It was not virtue tourism: her parents earned no salary and the family lived in a tied house, dependant on charitable donations.
Forbes spent her formative years ‘walking past slums that would last for miles’, communities of ‘tarpaulin shacks where people are living in beside the road’, and where it was routine to see children ‘maimed and begging’ or ‘part of some form of ring and being exploited’. Standing in the schoolyard, aged ten, she watched as younger children carried bricks on their heads to finish building the school.
‘Nobody needed to ever give me a briefing on poverty or social injustice,’ she once remarked. There are a lot of people in Scotland who make a living fighting poverty. Most are diligent and well-intentioned but too many know poverty from jargon-encrusted policy briefings, cited in slick PowerPoint presentations, clicked through in air-conditioned meeting rooms by well-salaried graduates who would struggle to hold a conversation longer than five minutes with an actual poor person.
Here Forbes holds another appeal: despite her cut-glass accent, Cambridge education, and five years in government, she is an outsider to Scotland’s political and civic elite. In a small country where the governing class is nevertheless snugly insulated from those they govern, a First Minister uninterested in finding favour among the bureaucracy aristocracy might be no bad thing.
I do have concerns about Forbes. She went to Edinburgh (post-grad) rather than the best Scottish university (Glasgow). She’s a middle-class Gaelic speaker, and those people are always insufferable. Her favourite band is Runrig — Celtic fringe rock cringe — and she knows every one of their songs off by heart. If she should be driven out of public life for anything, it’s her horrific taste in music.
She also supports Scottish independence and, worst of all, might be able to persuade soft No voters to join her in that view. It’s a thought that’s been haunting me since this leadership contest began: not so much that she might win, but that I might end up voting for her if she does. The election results will be announced on Monday. Maybe it’s better all round that Humza Yousaf is still the favourite.
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