An Evangelical in Court (part 1)

Reflections on My Employment Tribunal and Christian Justice

It’s an odd thing to be an evangelical Christian in court. But there are all sorts of things one can learn from it.

Unless they’ve been on jury duty, there’s a good chance that most evangelicals have never set foot inside a court room. This can mean there’s a strange mystique about the whole thing. We’re used to reading about such events in the news or watching movies about it from afar, but rarely imagine being involved first hand.

Even the very phrase “legal action” carries a certain kind of connotation, summoning fears of intimidating, hard-nosed solicitors, stress, paperwork, and ever-escalating costs. The entire world of legality seems entirely alien to the general relational harmony by which most people (not least evangelicals) aspire to live their lives. It’s probably fair to say that most people are understandably allergic to the pursuit of legal justice, and would prefer to pretend it’s not really an option.

It’s not that evangelicals don’t believe in legal justice in general, nor even that we are not happy for such justice to occur for others in all sorts of cases. We’re glad it’s happening somewhere to someone, but we’re especially glad it doesn’t need to involve us! I expect most of us think of court as a necessary evil - you should really only be there if you’ve done something wrong. Yet for many Christians, being there because you’ve been wronged tends to imply you’re probably doing something wrong!

This is because we understandably value principles like grace and love over principles like vengeance or punishment. This is not an accident. Not for nothing does Paul begin a good deal of his letters with some variation of ‘Grace and peace to you’. The pursuit of grace, love, and peace is indeed paramount. But how is this best brought about?

Some invoke ‘the golden rule’, thinking, “if we wouldn’t want people to take legal action against us, why would we do it to others?” But we often interpret this only in the short term, and with little reference to wider consequences. If you have done something wrong which—for whatever reason—necessitated legal action against you, would it not be right that truth and justice is served, even if the outcome may not feel pleasant at the time? As the writer to the Hebrews says of discipline in general:

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”

— Hebrews 12:11

Paul, of course, reminds us not to avenge wrongdoing personally: “vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rom. 12:9). He also tells Christians specifically not to take one another to court as it will be a bad witness to the world (cf. 1Cor. 6:1-11). In an article for The Critic last year, I responded to some public critiques of my decision to take Cliff College to court (with particular reference to what Paul says in 1Corinthians 6). It was subtitled, “Why My College Fired Me and Why I am Suing”).

Whilst seeking legal action may not have come naturally to me, the process of doing so opened up various avenues of reflection on why the legal system matters, and why Christians ought to think more about its importance in future years. Experiencing the proceedings of court on a personal level, in real time, yields all kinds of insights that would probably never have occurred to me had I not been in the situation. Over the next two articles I’ll unpack some of these reflections.

1. Formality and Consequence

Upon arriving at the courthouse on the first day, there was a fairly long queue to get in. This is because even entering the building requires airport-like security, with each person emptying their pockets, walking through scanners, emptying their bags, opening their laptops, and needing to take a visible bite/sip of any food/drink they had with them, in view of the security officers.

My first reaction to this process was to think, “yes, this makes sense, of course, because courtrooms are serious places and you can’t allow people to smuggle things in”. But haven’t courts always been serious places? And was this level of security always necessary? Did you always need to wait 40 minutes to get in (meaning most cases start at a delayed time)? How much does that end up costing? Sometimes we just get used to certain security measures simply because we can’t imagine anything different.

But one person with a career in the legal system made the observation to me, in no uncertain terms, that this was not always necessary, and is the direct result of Islamism. This itself was sobering to think about. It is also precisely why the issue of Christians pushing back against the anti-Christian advances in society, being able to speak and live the truth, for the good of all in our society—and even within our legal system—is so important.