Empty Voices

Tim Farron was the leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2015 to 2017. Farron resigned as leader after a general election campaign which saw him come under continuous pressure over the compatibility between his socially conservative theological views – in particular, his belief that gay sex is a sin – and his self-classification as a liberal. In his book, A Better Ambition: Confessions of a Faithful Liberal , Farron (2019) suggests that his experience as Liberal Democrat leader gave him a unique insight not only into the interaction between religious and political discourses in Britain but the state of liberalism also. For Farron, his experience has led him to believe that the latter is under threat – in particular, liberalism is ‘…under threat from the inside, from itself and from mistaken understanding of what liberalism is among people who think they are liberals’ (223).   In chapter 10 of his book, ‘Redeeming Liberalism’, Farron argues that ‘…liberalism does not seem terribly libe

It is not uncommon for prominent critical religion academics to question the suitability of scholarship which makes normative statements and value judgements – scholarship which has an explicit political agenda, and which uses its research to promote particular constructions of ‘religion’. For instance, Russell T. McCutcheon (2018), in his book Fabricating Religion , critiques examples of scholarship that make normative judgements to suggest specific constructions of ‘religion’ are more progressive or just than others. McCutcheon argues that as every category and metric system is merely part of a local lexicon and worldview, any application of them in the service of evaluation can only produce subjective results. That is, what is progressive and just to one person is regressive and unjust to another. Consequently, value judgements tell us more about the scholar making them than they do about the phenomenon they attempt to classify (98). For McCutcheon, scholars of religion should be