The Christian Party does not campaign for morality but for Christian principles and values being articulated in public life.

Secular conversion

Many secular campaigning groups, ever since homosexuality was legalised in Britain in the 1960s, complain that they do not want to be merely tolerated but to be positively affirmed. They consider toleration to be supercilious and condescending. They want to force conformity, to control our thinking and they want the rest of us to endorse their opinions. This secular conversion therapy is more draconian than Christian conversion. The latter persuades the will with the Word of God, while secularism uses the power of the state through education, media, employment law, fines or even imprisonment, without necessarily changing opinions but creating resentment.

Secularists also complain that Christians don’t have a monopoly on morality.  We never said that we did.  We have a different morality – Christian morality. 

Christian morality contrasted with secular morality

Secularists don’t accept the first four of the Ten Commandments and they have a variable attitude to the other ones, recently changing like shifting sands. Secularism has a different morality and it needs to be exposed for its short-comings.

This is why we need Christian politicians who know how to apply Christianity in public life, who know how to expose secular morality in its different forms.

Moral campaigns

Moral campaigns have had only limited and temporary success. In the 1960s Britain openly manifested that it was abandoning God and Christian principles by the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion. Television became more influential in public life and began to change the nation’s morals by desensitizing people to sex and violence in the interests of ‘the Arts’ portraying ‘life as it actually is’, whereas it was developing and promoting its own secular morality. Mary Whitehouse began a Clean-Up TV Campaign which developed into a national campaign (NVALA) against the permissive society.

UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s “Section 28” was a moral crusade to prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. It lasted so long as she and the Conservative Party supported this Christian morality, from 1988 till 2003.

It was curtailed in Scotland in 2000 by the newly formed Scottish executive, against which Scottish businessman Brian Souter organised a national but private petition that failed to prevent this wind of change in national politics, ever since homosexuality was legalised in the 1960s.

Moral campaigning failed. We need to change hearts and minds.

In America in the 1980s there was the Moral Majority.

These campaigns failed to stop the rot.

We are a Christian political party aiming to bring Christian principles to bear upon public life, not simply ‘morality’. People need to know much more than ‘morality’ and it begins by contrasting the failures of secular morality with the successes of Christian morality.