Christian churches are shamelessly leaving Catholics to fight alone against UK’s assisted suicide Bill

If it were possible to go back to October 1967, knowing what we do now, and oppose the legalisation of abortion, I strongly suspect that many conservative Christians would like to think that they would.

If we could go back in time and give evidence that, as warned, abortion would escalate and not just be restricted to extreme cases, resulting in 251,377 babies being killed a year (2022 data), again, I imagine many Christians think they would do so.

But, given what is happening right now, I’m not at all sure that many actually would. Because a similar game-changing moment could occur this week, and the vast majority of British churches and Christians are silent – apart from Catholics.

On Wednesday 16 October, MPs will begin discussing a potentially landmark Bill that the Labour government wants to pass through the UK Parliament.

The pleasantly titled “assisted dying” Bill is a proposal to allow euthanasia to become legal in the UK for those suffering the painful effects of terminal illness.

Over the past 60 years, abortion has shown us how quickly the slippery slope can cause an issue to go from being “safe, legal and rare” – as Bill Clinton once famously declared – to, instead, becoming very frequent, accounting for all those abortion-related deaths in 2022.

Cardinal Nichols, the head of Catholics in England and Wales, in a recent pastoral letter on the proposed assisted suicide Bill, has warned how quickly a rare procedure can become a more frequent one; how a last resort for those in terminal pain can then, incrementally, become accessible to a wider population for a whole host of other reasons.

Nichols writes: “No doubt the bill put before Parliament will be carefully framed, providing clear and very limited circumstances in which it would become lawful to assist…in the ending of a person’s life. But please remember, the evidence from every single country in which such a law has been passed is clear: that the circumstances in which the taking of a life is permitted are widened and widened, making assisted suicide and medical killing, or euthanasia, more and more available and accepted.

“In this country, assurances will be given that the proposed safeguards are firm and reliable. Rarely has this been the case.”

For some recent examples of Cardinal Nichols’s concerns and of this slippery slope in action, we need only to look to Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium.

In Canada, euthanasia was introduced in 2016 for use in extreme cases where death was “reasonably foreseeable”. Since then, in 2021, Bill C-7 has expanded its application to those with severe illness, even if their death isn’t foreseeable. And a newly proposed bill in Canada aims to allow euthanasia for mental illnesses.

These laws in Canada have so far killed 44,958 people between 2016 and 2022. Bill C-7 saw the number of people euthanised increase by 31.2 per cent, accounting for 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada in 2022. I suspect the data for 2023/24 will show an even more worrying and grim state of affairs.

In the Netherlands, euthanasia was legalised in 2001 and began in 2002. By 2016 it was accounting for 4 per cent of all deaths with 6,091 people euthanised, rising to 8,720 in 2022.

Belgium has some of the most liberal euthanasia laws in Europe. For example, in 2022 a 23-year-old woman opted, and was allowed, to be euthanised due to suffering PTSD following an ISIS terror attack in Brussels airport in 2016. Does that sound like care for a terminally ill individual with a physical condition that is causing chronic pain?

Belgium also extended euthanasia to children in 2013, just 4 years after its legalisation, and in 2023, euthanasia accounted for 3,423 related deaths.

So where are the voices from the British churches on what our country now faces?

It’s been left to Catholics to be vocal on this issue.

Cardinal Nichols’s pastoral letter outlines clearly the political, biological and religious reasons why we should oppose the proposed law. It is an excellent letter and well worth reading and sharing with others.

Several Catholic charities have also been vocal in getting people to write to their local MPs, as has the charity Right to Life – and I would encourage you to write to your own MP which can be done here.

However, other groups of Christians have been remarkably silent on the issue.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s social media feeds, filled with posts about racism, women vicars and climate change, has yet to see, as far as I can tell, a post opposing the proposed law.

It is a similar story with the Archbishop of York too, another outspoken senior member of the “Lords Spiritual” on many issues, and who will put up a post about a beer festival, but nothing on the impending proposed law.

The Church of England website has a series of posts about peace in Gaza and Black History Month, but again, comments about the proposed euthanasia law are noticeably lacking.

I highlight the CofE because many of its bishops sit in the House of Lords as the spiritual advisors to the UK Parliament, and it is still the biggest Church in England, as well as serving as the state religion.

But it is not just the CofE: the Methodist UK website, again, has pieces on Gaza, social justice and their acceptance of LGBTQ, but is absent advice for Methodists regarding euthanasia.

The Baptist Union of Great Britain follows in a similar vein. Their social media has plenty condemning the so-called “far right”, colonialism and even “whiteness”, but is yet to raise its voice against the proposed new law from Labour.

Even the more conservative wings of British Christianity have been, so far, silent. Groups which ardently hold sola scriptura, who know that the Bible is against euthanasia, continue to not speak.

Pentecostal denominations such as Assemblies of God and Elim Pentecostal Church have nothing on their websites or social media feeds. The Salvation Army, United Reformed Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church in the UK, the Greek Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain – all have yet to plainly speak out on the matter.

By contrast, the Catholic Church’s main website for England and Wales has a statement on the front page.

Why are the non-Catholic denominations silent?

Having spent time trawling through the websites and social media of Britain’s major denominations, the answer is clear: They have become obsessed with social justice issues.

They are focused on the trendy, newsy topics such as race, Gaza, sexuality, the environment and feminism, but have forgotten the major social justice issues that also/really matter – abortion and euthanasia.

Through “loving God and loving people”, as the front page of many trendy church-related websites tell us, too many Christian denominations in Britain have focused on not upsetting those people, and not having to tell them harsh truths such as that the murder of the vulnerable and innocent, whether before birth or near death, is wrong.

What adds to the perverse nature of the proposed law is that, as with abortion, our taxes will fund it. The downside of a national health system is that we do not get a choice in how our taxes are spent on healthcare – even is that procedure isn’t healthy or caring.

Will concerned citizens be able to receive tax cuts if they do not want their money to be used to kill the vulnerable and the elderly? Judging by the fact that this has not been the case for abortion, I am extremely doubtful.

I do not want to be complicit in funding the murder of the vulnerable. Christians, regardless of denomination, should not wish for their taxes to be used in this way either.

Maybe the Christian churches of this nation will comment in time. Perhaps they are waiting until Wednesday and the subsequent parliamentary conversations. Perhaps we will see the churches of Britain unite in opposition if a proposed euthanasia law looks like it really is going to happen.

I remain doubtful.

As always it seems these days, on issues of life and death, Catholics are –and need to be evermore so, given the silence of others –at the forefront of the opposition to our country’s culture of death.

Whether the proposed law will get through parliament and be passed into law remains to be seen. The latest data show that less than half of Labour MPs support it.

However, even if it doesn’t pass this time, it has been disappointingly telling how quiet Christians have been in the run up to the first consideration of a proposal that, in the words of one Catholic bishop, “once this line is crossed, our society will never be the same again”.

Again, maybe Christians are waiting to speak, but, if so, I fear it will be too little too late.

Even if the Bill does not succeed, this will not be last time that it will be proposed, and hence, like much of the rest of Western Europe, we will very likely eventually see euthanasia being legalised in Britain – unless something changes and people speak out.

Will Christians stand up against it next time? Will British churches suddenly start mobilising on this in the next few months?

This all remains to be seen. But given the current responses of Christians, I, for one, will continue to be doubtful and concerned, while also, as a Catholic – vocal.

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Photo: Campaigners against assisted dying outside the Houses of Parliament ahead of a previous House of Commons vote on the issue and which ultimately was rejected at the time, London, England, 11 September 2015. Members of Parliament voted 330 to 118 against the bill that would have enabled doctors to assist terminally ill people to end their lives. It was the first House of Commons vote on ‘assisted dying’ for 20 years. (Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty Images.)

Thomas Casemore teaches RS and is pursuing a master’s degree in divinity, researching St Bede and early British ecclesiastical history and spirituality.

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