Chris Coghlan is a Catholic and liberal member of Parliament in the United Kingdom. He recently voted in favor of state-approved and -administered euthanasia, which is when doctors kill their sick patients for any variety of reasons.
Now his parish priest, after plenty of private and public warnings, has informed Coghlan that he is out of communion with the church, which teaches very clearly that killing someone to end his or her suffering “constitutes a murder” and thus “must always be forbidden.”
Coghlan is angry at his pastor and taking the spat to the broader public.
My Catholic Priest publicly announced at every mass he was denying me Holy Communion following the assisted dying vote. Children who are friends of my children were there. This followed a direct threat in writing to do this four days before the vote. 1/3 https://t.co/oK45gG7dsa
— Chris Coghlan MP
(@_Chris_Coghlan) June 29, 2025
In this dispute, Coghlan has made some claims about the nature of religion that deserve some scrutiny, which is a nice way of saying they make no sense:
“My private religion will continue to have zero direct relevance to my work as an MP,” he wrote on X. “I believed (believe) in keeping religion and politics separate and that we should be a secular country.”
Underlying Coghlan’s utterances here are some good and common ideas: Lawmakers shouldn’t legislate all of their beliefs, faith is fundamentally an interior act, and religious pluralism and the free exercise of religion are foundational principles of the modern West.
But Coghlan’s statements go much further. It is absurd for a lawmaker to say his religion should have “zero direct relevance” to his votes.
Coghlan’s job is to make the laws of the U.K. Laws always reflect moral views. The U.K. outlaws theft because stealing is wrong. One’s moral views are informed by one’s religious beliefs.
We ought to generally let people live their own lives. It’s not the job of the government to tell people to go to church or pray. It’s not the job of the government to tell people to honor their father and mother. It would be too intrusive for the government to try to stop people from having premarital sex.
But outside of a state of anarchy, this laissez-faire attitude has its limits.
One of the most fundamental jobs of a legislature is to decide who’s allowed to kill whom and for what reasons. The U.K. doesn’t allow a father to kill his baby after he’s born and doesn’t allow a son to kill his mother for her pocket change. It does allow a soldier to kill enemy combatants or a victim to kill his assailant in self-defense.
There’s no escaping moral judgments on this question of who may kill whom. Coghlan has made a moral judgment. Coghlan’s private morality tells him that it’s OK to kill a woman because her anorexia has caused serious health problems and now she wants to die.
In the U.K., the laissez-faire argument for euthanasia is even weaker because the government, through the National Health Service, will be the one killing sick patients instead of caring for them. Coghlan, in supporting assisted suicide, isn’t voting to let people make their own decisions. He’s voting that the government should kill people for being very sick.
Coghlan is imposing his morality on others. That his morality involves publicly rejecting his religion’s morality is obviously the concern of his pastor. And since it reflects on his character, it should also matter to his voters.