This post was going to be a look at why the argument “The EU keeps us safe from another World War” did not decide my vote in favour of Remain.  However, an exchange last night on Facebook, in response to my first post, has resulted in this actually being about a deliberate, yet vital, omission from that post:  faith.

I rarely talk about my identity as a Christian.  I have not hidden it from people around me but I have lacked the faith to attempt to express to myself and others what it means.  In my first post I described the difficulty I had in deciding how to vote and in particular how I had planned to vote at lunchtime but was unable to commit to doing so until a moment of clarity came to me later on in the day during the children’s swimming lessons.  In writing that first post I was afraid that if I identified as a Christian then it would put up barriers:  An identity can be used as a label; labels can lead to assumptions being made; assumptions can make it hard to hear.  I was afraid that people might think that I was claiming divine justification for my vote.  I was afraid that I was claiming divine justification for my vote.

The conflict in my attempts to decide how to vote was that whilst I wanted to vote Leave, I felt that as a Christian I ought to vote Remain.  Although I now know that there was prior evidence to the contrary, I had assumed all along that most Christians would vote Remain.  I wanted to vote Leave because of things like waste and poor decision making and lack of accountability.  Things that seemed earthly.  I felt that as a Christian I ought to vote Remain because of things like building peace and loving your neighbour.  Things that seemed heavenly.  It shouldn’t have been a conflict, but it was.

The advice during the referendum campaign from many church leaders was that people should inform themselves and pray.  Although I felt that my attempts at both were inadequate, I did try to inform myself and I did try to pray.  However, the question in my prayers was “”Which is the right choice to make?”  I was asking for divine justification.  This was a prayer that God could never answer.  For God, there may not have been a right or a wrong choice.  But if there was, and he had showed me which was the right choice then he would also have revealed to me that everyone who had made the other choice was wrong.  That level of knowledge would come with a level of responsibility that I could not bear.

I had planned to vote at lunchtime but was not ready to commit.  At that point my prayer changed in a way in which I’ve only just realised.  Despairing of ever knowing which was the right choice, I prayed “OK then, just tell me what you want me to do”.  The moment of clarity came during the children’s swimming lesson, in a still, small voice of calm.  This was the answer to my prayer.  It was simply “You know what I want you to do.”  And I did.  In that moment I had faith.  Faith did not take the pain away from voting, but it did give me the strength to vote.

I anticipated many consequences of the EU referendum and feared most of them.  That I would write a blog about my faith is something that I did not anticipate.  That moment of clarity is still with me.  It will probably fade, but although I ask myself the question “How long will it last?”, I am  not worried about the answer.  I am a sceptic (“a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions”).  If I go on, as I had intended, to look in more detail about issues surrounding the EU, then this will become apparent.  I question all of my experiences:  everything that I hear, read, see or do.  Until now this has seemed fruitless.  It has just broken those experiences down into fragments.  But, however hard I have tried, I could never put the fragments back together in any way that truly made sense of anything.  I looked, but I could not see.  That I can now argue my case for voting Leave is but one effect of all this.  I now think of many problems that previously seemed intractable in new and surprising ways.  I have no original thoughts, but now those fragments of my experiences coalesce in new and surprising ways.  Today I see more clearly.

What is God’s purpose in all this?  People who I trust, people who I expect to agree with because of our similar identities, made a choice difference to mine in the referendum.  Maybe God’s purpose in all our choices is that as the shock slowly subsides we can reach back out to those people that we thought we knew and trusted.  The choices we made are perhaps not as important as what we can learn about each other by listening to our stories about how we made those choices.  As we learn about each other the wounds we now feel keenly may start to heal.  And as we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves.  Perhaps in surprising ways.