This Act will pervade through all of Scottish society. Even children are to be targeted. School handbooks now explain that all hate crimes should be reported to the police. Journalist Jim Spence wrote in the Courier that Scotland is about to become a “two-tier society” where “some folk are given protection by the law from some kinds of hate crimes, while others will simply have to suck up abuse.” For example, “while it will be an offence to stir up hate against trans folk”, it “won’t break the law to stir up hate against women”, because astonishingly under this Act sex is not a protected characteristic.

Most people and hopefully all Christians would agree that hate is bad. So, at a superficial level, it would seem that we should all be rejoicing at a Scottish government bill which bans hate. But as is so often the case in the world, things are not quite what they seem and words have different meanings.
None more so than in The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, passed three years ago. It was the brainchild of the then justice secretary for the Scottish government, Humza Yousaf. Yousaf is now the Scottish First Minister and his bill is about to become law on April 1st. Sadly it is no joke – other than to make Scotland a laughing stock throughout the world. It is one of the most draconian, authoritarian measures passed by a democratic government in recent times – and it has profound implications for the Church.
The bill will firstly turn any crime into an ‘aggravated offence’ if it is deemed to be motivated by hatred or prejudice. But the controversial part is that it will create a new criminal offence of behaving in an abusive manner ‘designed to stir up hatred’ against groups with certain protected characteristics.
Stirring Up Hatred
The problem with the bill is that it does not clearly define what ‘stirring up hatred’ means. There are already considerable problems in Scotland with this. The main one is with the definition of hate crimes. Police Scotland have a working definition that if the ‘victim’ perceives it to be a hate crime, then it is. An additional problem with the lack of clarity about ‘stirring up’ offences is that Police Scotland define a hate crime as ‘any crime which is understood by the victim or any other person as being motivated, wholly or partly, by malice or ill will towards a social group’.
This means that the subjective feeling of a perceived victim, or of a policeman, could be enough to have you accused of a hate crime – one which carries a sentence of up to seven years. Take for example JK Rowling. If she tweets that a man cannot become a woman, she could be arrested for hate crime. Same for a Christian preacher who says that he does not believe that Muhammad is a prophet or a teacher who says they believe marriage is between a man and a woman.
There’s Been a Misgender!
The police in Scotland have said they will investigate every report of hate crime, despite having recently announced that they would not be investigating every case of ‘low level’ crime, including apparently some cases of theft! If the TV series, Taggart, were being made today, instead of Taggart saying, “There’s been a murder,” he would be crying out, “There’s been a misgender.”
Police Scotland have also gone into full swing with their anti-hate propaganda, putting out a cartoon of the ‘hate monster’ and explaining that, “The Hate Monster represents that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.”
White Working Class Men Are Hateful
In an astonishing statement they give an example of the kind of people who commit hate crimes as those with “deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement”.
By targeting white working-class men as being more likely to commit hate crime, Police Scotland are breaking their own law. At least they would be if they were to be consistent. But therein lies the danger of this law. It has nothing to do with consistency or justice.
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Essential Doctrines are doctrines that put you outside of the faith if you deny them. To reject these teachings means you are not a Christian, and the word “Heresy” is usually invoked for this category of error. Examples of essential doctrines are the deity of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Some Christian doctrines are weightier than others. When discussing Christian theology, many of us have heard the helpful quote attributed to Augustine, “In the essentials, unity, in the non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity.” There is much to be learned from this quote, but did you know that many Bible teachers identify four different categories of doctrinal weight?
Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel (Matthew 23:23-24)! In this passage, Jesus says that some teachings of Scripture have more theological impact than others.
One way to describe a doctrine’s weight is by understanding the consequences of being wrong about it. Believing the wrong thing about some doctrines could send us to hell, while being wrong about others has little impact on our spiritual life.
The categories have different names depending on who you ask, but they are essentially the same regardless of what we call them. Graham Cole names the four categories this way.

Level 1 Convictions
Level 2 Convictions
Opinions
Speculations

Those are valuable categories and might be what you have heard. My professor, Craig Hawkins, taught me the following: these are more descriptive.

Essential Doctrines
Cardinal Doctrines
Non-Essentials
Tertiary and Peripheral

Essential Doctrines are doctrines that put you outside of the faith if you deny them. To reject these teachings means you are not a Christian, and the word “Heresy” is usually invoked for this category of error. Examples of essential doctrines are the deity of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
Cardinal Doctrines Are extremely Important and have significant ramifications in our lives, but Christians can disagree and still be Christians.
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The gospel of Christ might be summarized like this: “He was bound, so that we might be loosed from our sins.” And this salvation profoundly affects our calling. “You were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13). Part of our service of others is recognizing God’s lordship over our sense of right and wrong.

It is a sad fact: liberated Christians aren’t always good at practicing Christian liberty. We struggle to break free from the hold of besetting sins. Sometimes we even justify sin on the basis of our freedom in Christ. And we are tempted to hold others to the same standards as us even on matters in which they are not bound by Scripture.  This has always been so. But the last several years have made this weakness painfully obvious. Perhaps we don’t even consider Christian liberty to be very important. If you were writing a thirty-three point summary of the faith would you devote a chapter to the topic?
Our failure to practice Christian liberty is a tragic irony since in Scripture freedom is nearly synonymous with salvation—“For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). Believers have been delivered from sin in order to freely obey God. So we may not allow ourselves to become enslaved again. We need to treasure our freedom in Christ and respect his sovereignty over the conscience.
Treasure Your Freedom in Christ
Christian freedom means at least three important things.
Christ Frees Believers from Sin and Condemnation
Sin advertises freedom but always enslaves. Like how human traffickers often entice their victims with promises of greater opportunities, sin promises life but leads to death (Rom. 6:23). Apart from God’s grace sin reigns in our bodies, making us obey its passions. Jesus said that “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34; cf. Rom. 6:12, 14, 17, 20; Gal. 4:3).
But Christ has set believers free from sin’s guilt, God’s wrath, and the law’s curse. We live in this “present evil world” but it does not define us. Satan can trouble us but does not own us. Sin tempts us but does not dominates us. Afflictions plague us but only for a little longer. Death and the grave grieve us but Jesus has removed their sting and cancelled their victory. No longer condemned by sin (Rom. 8:1) and barred from God’s presence believers are accepted in Christ and have “free access to God.”
Christ Enabled Believers to Obey God Freely
From the beginning God promised his people that he would deliver us from our enemies that we “might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:74–75). Apart from Christ you can’t do that. Slaves obey only under compulsion out of fear of punishment. God doesn’t want us to serve him like that. The gospel of free grace in Christ says to every believer: “You are no longer a slave, but a son” (Gal. 4:7). Only God’s love for us and our love for him can make our service for him a delight (see Gen. 29:20).
Christ Frees Believers from the Yoke of the Ceremonial Law
Remember that the ceremonial laws were given to “a church under age” (19.3). So “there was a childish and slavish aspect to the tutelage of the law” (see Gal. 4:1–3).[i]
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