麻豆社

Good morning.

Following a frantic weekend, Brexit negotiations between Britain and the European Union may yet provide further twists and turns, today. Meanwhile, in a similarly convoluted political process, the members of the US Electoral College will shortly be casting their votes in the ongoing drama that is the process to formally elect Joe Biden as 46th President. The popular election took place almost 6 weeks ago, yet the intervening period has witnessed repeated attempts to pick at details of the voting and counting systems, in an increasingly bizarre effort to find legal loopholes through which to declare the result invalid. None has come anywhere close. Electoral fraud, where it exists, must always be countered, but the overarching truth - that this was a fair election, won fairly, and by a considerable margin by the Democrat candidate, has prevailed.

Long before anyone invented income tax, the community in which Jesus Christ lived had developed a system of tithing, a ten percent levy that extended across agricultural products. The most pious would make a show of including even the tiniest of crops - the mint and cumin that add flavour to food - in what they handed over. Jesus contrasted this attention to detail with their conspicuous neglect of the big themes of the law - care for the needy and justice for the poor. Famously, he declared that law is humanity鈥檚 servant, not its master. For his pains, he and his early followers were accused of being lawbreakers, in language eerily echoed by some Texan politicians last week.

Whilst, as a good citizen, I seek to obey the law, I draw on my religious faith to furnish me with clear core values that allow distinction to be drawn between what are the fundamentals the law must uphold, and other, lesser matters. Generations ago, many Christians, black and white, stood side by side on the front line in the battle to ban slavery. Today, we applaud Prisoners of Conscience, men and women who suffer under regimes where injustice is lawful but protest is not. Many of them are sustained in their campaigns both by their faith and the prayers of others. Elsewhere we see legally sanctioned persecution, and the abuse of blasphemy laws, against those exercising that freedom, to believe and to practice their religion, which remains a fundamental of international Human Rights law.

The core values embedded in my faith help me define the world of difference that lies between the conscientious disobedience of those peaceably practising their faith, or campaigning bravely for free and fair elections in authoritarian states, from the violence surrounding last ditch attempts to subvert the democratic process, witnessed in parts of the US this weekend.

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