What should party leaders be allowed to believe?

‘If he can’t be in politics,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted last week after Tim Farron resigned the leadership of his party, ‘media & politicians have questions.’

So prelates now think complex theological concerns can be despatched within the Twitter limit of 140 characters. They cannot. Let me now unpack Dr Welby’s abbreviated consideration of this subject and examine what’s behind it, because the subject is of profound importance —and not only for Christians.

Nobody has said Mr Farron can’t be in politics. He has been returned as MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale with the support of 26,686 voters. Farron himself, however, has doubted he should be leader of a party with a long and prominent tradition of supporting homosexual equality and the rights of women to terminate a pregnancy, while continuing to believe that these are sins in the eyes of God.

His doubts are understandable. It’s just a pity that he — and, by implication, the Archbishop of Canterbury — should have couched them in the suggestion that he has been victimised for his faith. After millennia of persecuting other people for their lack of faith, wrong kind of faith, or apostasy, the Church has recently taken to complaining that because some of its teachings are now widely regarded as silly or wrong, Christians themselves are being persecuted. They are not. They’re being judged silly and wrong. They are getting the electorate’s cold shoulder. They remain free to test their beliefs in any election they choose. The rest of us remain free not to vote for them. Nobody is victimising anybody.

But Mr Farron was also raising a more interesting question. An amused Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, and a Whig as it happens, put it in his characteristic cheeky style when he observed that ‘things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade public life’.