Former Deputy First Minister of Scotland Kate Forbes says she feels like the real winner after refusing to compromise on her Christian convictions during the SNP’s 2023 leadership contest, despite huge personal cost.
Speaking on the final day of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference - a global gathering of conservatives in London - Forbes reflected on the immense pressure she came under to “lie” about her beliefs during the leadership race. Choosing instead to follow the advice of her father that “it’s never worth the compromise”, a media frenzy ensued and she eventually lost the top spot to her Muslim rival, Humza Yousaf.
Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland, expressed no regrets about putting her faith before her career.
“The end result felt like a victory because during that period I thought: I have not given in when I could have," she said.
"Therefore, I did lose the contest but I absolutely won the public support … and that feels good."
Forbes said “courage” was needed to stay true to convictions and that instead of caving in under pressure, people should make efforts to ground their conscience in the "external truths that will outlast every single one of you across the grand sweep of history - the biblical concepts of freedom, liberty, human dignity, the worth of life, and flourishing for all”.
“The question for us is not whether conflict will come,” she said.
“The question is whether men and women will rise up like they did of old, standing firm on conviction, shaped by confidence, with the courage to defend truth or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, daring to do what is right, not what fancy may tell you.”
Forbes said such courage was needed in the public square and especially in Parliament where she warned that Christian points of view are being sidelined.
“There was a day in British politics when the Right and the Left made space for conscience. [That is] no longer,” she said.
Pointing to the debate over assisted suicide in the UK Parliament as an example, she said that “proponents repeatedly and regularly de-legitimize any contributions from people of Christian faith as being automatically biased and therefore irrelevant”.
“One prominent campaigner railed against undeclared personal religious beliefs … in the debate and dismissed arguments from those who were guided by faith. But nobody demands that of anybody subscribing to the new faith, the new ideologies and the new philosophies of our day.
“Their moral framework, their basis of decision-making, is accepted without question, as though anybody who is free of the burden of an inner conscience grounded in historical truths is unbiased and unprejudiced.
“Those who hold to those truths - those truths that have birthed such great freedoms and liberties across the ages - are excluded by default.”
Elsewhere she warned that the West will pay a heavy price if it chooses to completely jettison its Judeo-Christian foundations.
“It can be hard to understand that when you live in a society that is still largely shaped by biblical concepts and norms, but consider many of the authoritarian, regressive, oppressive regimes of death around the world - that's the alternative, because our freedoms are not inevitable or guaranteed.
“There is an umbilical cord between them and the Bible. Separate that, and I invite you to consider the alternative.”
