The Terminally Ill Adults Bill has its second reading in the House of Lords today. I was devastated when it was passed by the House of Commons earlier this year. I’m not ashamed to say that my reaction is rooted in both my Christianity and my liberalism.
Modern, John Stuart Mill liberals believe in individual freedom. We also recognise that people are not free if they do not have the agency or resources to exercise those freedoms. And we acknowledge that my freedoms are restricted if they nullify yours.
Assisted dying is potentially terrifying for vulnerable people, disabled people, people with learning difficulties, poorer people, people from marginalised ethnic minorities, people who feel they are a burden, people subject to insidious invisible coercive control – it means these people lose their liberty and protections. In some cases they will become the ‘collateral damage’ of this bill and will lose their lives. I don’t think liberals should overlook such concerns.
So, on a surface level, I’m against assisted dying because I’m a liberal.
But on a deeper level I’m against assisted dying because I’m a Christian.
There is a lazy caricature that Christians are the cowering pawns of church leaders or some imaginary chief whip in the sky. We are accused of being empty-headed God-botherers wanting to impose our weird religion on everyone else.
This caricature has been peddled by supporters of the assisted dying bill, from Lord Falconer to Esther Rantzen. Respectfully, it represents a lamentable religious illiteracy and a stunning lack of intellectual curiosity.
Everyone has a worldview by which they reach conclusions and make decisions. Your worldview might be secular humanist, free market, atheistic, agnostic, theistic, nationalist or internationalist. But it is not neutral. No world view is neutral. Those who urge Christians to disclose our outrageous beliefs and stop imposing them on others have – and I do say this with respect – rather poor levels of self-awareness, and should perhaps seek to understand why others hold a different worldview.
So here’s why being a Christian leads me to oppose assisted dying. My Christian faith tells me that each of us matter far more than we realise. The creation account tells us that God created everything. And I mean everything. Every galaxy, black hole, asteroid, planet, mountain and ocean, every cat, dog, crocodile, snake, turnip, tree and amoeba, every atom, every cell, and every human being.
And yet humans stand out. Only humans are made in God’s image. This doesn’t mean we physically look like him, but it does mean that we are the apex of creation. We have a lofty, massive dignity. Each of us. Including the people we don’t like, don’t notice or even think about.
Of course most non-Christians I know also sincerely believe in equality, but for Christians our belief in equality is founded on a conviction that every human is bestowed with this awesome lofty dignity, value and worth. We look at the impossibly distant, unimaginably massive and beautiful ancient galaxies glimpsed through the James Webb telescope and we know that you, personally, are infinitely more precious and important than those galaxies.
So, if every human is that special, I absolutely will insist that you are not discarded as collateral damage in a rush to worship the god of unfettered autonomy for an articulate few.
And when it comes to dignity in dying, I will insist that you have dignity in every moment of your life. Age, frailty, mental incapacity, incontinence – none of these can ever diminish your dignity. You are still more awesome than galaxies. Your value is not affected by your physical or mental state. The challenge for society is to treat you in accordance with that dignity. MPs at third reading voted to say that your dignity is contingent. But it isn’t.
Throughout the Bible, God reveals his heart for the voiceless, the powerless, the downtrodden, the weak, “the widow and the orphan and the stranger in your midst”. So the most jarring thing to me about the assisted dying debate is the reality of a bunch of middle-class politicians, celebrities and lobbyists – people who are articulate and have ‘agency’ – assuming that everyone else is equally powerful and articulate. But that is obviously not the case. People with disabilities, with learning difficulties, those from ethnic minority groups, those who are poorer, those who are systematically and shamefully at the bottom of the pile. This law will apply to them too. To dismiss their concerns as imaginary or irrelevant is appallingly patronising.
For Christians who oppose assisted dying, it is not because we think we will go to hell if we support it. That’s not how it works! We know that all who cry out to Jesus will be saved. We oppose assisted dying because following Jesus means believing that every human matters, at every stage of their lives. I hope that the Lords will reject this bill because if a single one of the most vulnerable and marginalised loses their lives due to its unintended but utterly predictable consequences, that is absolutely not a price worth paying.
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The post Tim Farron: ‘My opposition to assisted dying is rooted in liberalism and Christianity’ appeared first on Politics.co.uk.
