It is not news that Forbes is a believer. She has spoken before about growing up in India where her parents were missionaries of the Free Church of Scotland, which is like the Church of Scotland but with Christianity. However, this profession of faith and the unapologetic way in which it is delivered is entirely at odds with the aggressively secular, and increasingly anti-religious worldview that dominates Scottish public life, from politics and civil society, to news media and academia.

Politics tends to attract people who consider themselves and their every mundane word and deed an example of great bravery. Like journalism and entertainment, it is an industry constructed around the pleasing myth that, whatever level you’re working at, you are engaged in the business of saving the world. Yet few politicians say much today that is courageous, or even all that original. When every dissenting view, colourful remark, or provocative thought brings with it the threat of cancellation, you have to console yourself with the fiction that saying the same thing as everyone around you is a courageous feat.

So when I say that Kate Forbes has done something courageous, I say it because she has done something no one around her is doing. The SNP politician serves as finance minister of the devolved government in Edinburgh but is out of step with many in her party — and the other parties — in that she is a Christian. And not one of those occasional hymn-mouthers on a zero-hours contract with the Almighty: she actually believes in it.

In an interview on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast, Forbes tells Nick Robinson:

“To be straight, 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 neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength. So that for me is essential to my being. Politics will pass. 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.

It is not news that Forbes is a believer. She has spoken before about growing up in India where her parents were missionaries of the Free Church of Scotland, which is like the Church of Scotland but with Christianity.

However, this profession of faith and the unapologetic way in which it is delivered is entirely at odds with the aggressively secular, and increasingly anti-religious worldview that dominates Scottish public life, from politics and civil society, to news media and academia.

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