06/02/2021 United Kingdom (International Christian Concern) – Scottish Cabinet Minister for Finance Kate Forbes has come under fire recently for comments made concerning her faith. In a recent interview with the BBC on May 21, she said, “I believe in the person of Jesus Christ. I believe that he died for me, he saved me and that my calling is to serve and to love him and to serve and love my neighbors with all my heart and soul and mind and strength…. I am a person before I was a politician and that person will continue to believe that I am made in the image of God.”
Forbes had a remarkable career in Scottish politics at only 31 years old. The daughter of Scottish missionaries to India, she returned back home to the UK and studied history and migration before becoming an accountant. It wasn’t long before she was chosen by one of Scotland’s political parties to become one of their candidates, winning a seat in the Scottish Parliament in 2016. And in 2020, she made history as the first woman ever in the UK to deliver the Scottish Budget to Parliament as Scotland’s Cabinet Minister for Finance.
However, Ms. Forbes admits that she’s “as guilty as anybody of tiptoeing around” her faith in the often-hostile British political climate. Back in 2018, when she was still a member of the Scottish Parliament, she said in her public prayer at an Edinburgh prayer breakfast, “May our politicians recognize that the way we treat the most vulnerable — whether the unborn or the terminally ill — is a measure of true progress.”
This simple pro-life affirmation was enough to earn her the ire of those in the left-wing British press. And when the matter of her appointment to finance minister became discussed, her fitness for the role was questioned by pro-LGBT advocates due to the fact she holds to a traditional definition of marriage.
She said, “Those who disagree with me call out my side [for prejudice], but I look at my Twitter timeline and the levels of vitriol, abuse and creative insults are such that I cannot read it. So, I think the problem is not by any means monopolized by one side, and my job and other’s job is to try and break that mold.”
For Forbes, it’s not enough to simply call out the growing hostility in modern British society, but to openly combat it.
“I would like to think if you asked a single politician on the opposite benches in the Scottish parliament whether they respect me, whether they disagree with me, and whether I can build relationships with them, all of them to a person would say yes. So, it starts with us, not just calling vitriol, but with doing things differently.”
Religion has always been a sensitive topic in British politics. Around the turn of the millennium, aid to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair famously said, “We don’t do God.” Yet in 2014, then-Prime Minister David Cameron went the opposite direction by publicly calling England a Christian nation. England, like many Western nations, has been embattled for decades in a culture war driven by LGBT and gender identity issues conflicting with traditional Judeo-Christian norms.
For interviews, please contact Addison Parker: press@persecution.org.
