In the months leading up to an election last year, I joined the candidate I was working for, Tim Farron, on a farm visit. A National Farmer’s Union rep had arranged for five local farmers to meet their Member of Parliament (MP) in the front room of a farmhouse in Ormside, Cumbria.

It felt like a council of elders from days of old. These men were used to living and working largely on their own, far from the nearest town, far from easy convenience. I had the sense they only converged in a room like this in the prime hours of a working morning for matters of great importance.

When one walked in with “apologies for lateness,” you knew it was not for having slept in. They had the dirt of their own land spattered up their mackintoshes and dirtying the knees of their corduroy trousers and gathering under their nails. The farmhouse was like them: well-built, solid, old fashioned. Even the youngest of them seemed old.

These were big men – big from a lifetime of hard work, not the gym – and I felt almost embarrassed in their presence; I’d never been so aware of my soft hands. There was likely no tougher room of voters to win over.

But as each farmer shared his financial woes, his difficulty with impenetrable government grant schemes, the stresses on the land, and the uncertain future facing his family, something in his posture changed. Wary suspicion became animated passion.

One explained that for some months now he had been working essentially for free. He stopped and pointed at me. “Would any of you lads get up at four in the morning every day to work for free? Didn’t think so.”

These men looked secure with their broad shoulders, but they were tired. They felt unappreciated by new government incentives toward biodiversity and rewilding rather than toward food production. As James Rebanks, another Cumbrian hill farmer, writes: “The field is the base layer on which our entire civilization is built.” Farmers know this and take pride in it. Governments undermine that identity at their peril.

There is still, in some urban circles, an image of the British farmer as a wealthy, tweed-jacketed aristocrat. A few are, but most are not. They are reliant on subsidized payments that barely keep their businesses from being driven into the ground. Financial desperation is common, as evidenced in the high suicide rate among farmers.

The family whose house we were in had three generations present. The youngest spoke with resignation about the future of their family farm. Granddad, dad, and son – farming was all they had known. How much fight did they have left in them? The kitchen door opened and a little girl ran in with a plate of great bricks of Christmas cake. She jumped onto the youngest man’s lap. I was wrong – four generations.

Last May, just days after the prime minister called a general election, I packed a rucksack and left home in East London for the Lake District, where I would join the campaign to re-elect my boss as MP in his South Cumbria constituency. I looked forward to six weeks in cleaner air and a calmer atmosphere. In London, it seemed every lamppost was stickered with slogans about class struggle: EAT THE RICH, or SMASH CAPITALISM. Recent months had felt hot with tension.

The constituency of Westmorland and Lonsdale takes roughly two hours to drive across. (My home constituency in London, Stratford and Bow, takes less time to cross by foot.) It contains ninety-five parishes, and is so geographically vast that even the regional accents change from one end to the other. In the west are lakes of global fame – Windermere, Coniston, and Grasmere. This is the land of Beatrix Potter stories and William Wordsworth poetry, and millions of tourists visit every year. The bigger towns are here, and the population skews older, though trendy coffee shops and vegan cafes can be found if you know where to look. In the east are the more traditional farming communities of the Eden Valley, bordered by the Pennine mountain range. Between the two regions are sweeping, bleak stretches of high ground, such as the Shap Fells.

It is huge and beautiful, but even here, in the idyllic heart of Wordsworth country, communities are riven by class tensions. The hollowing out of village life was exacerbated by the Covid “staycation” boom of wealthy urbanites purchasing second homes. Hospitality and social care employers struggle to find workers – not for lack of people looking for work but for a lack of anywhere affordable for them to live.

An MP’s campaign has the feel of a community project, with a shambling cast of characters you might at other times find involved with the local scout troop or running a church fair. For six weeks the office was full and loud with activity. All available space was crammed with the latest batch of leaflets, the windows blocked up with boxes, desks piled with literature or deliveries to be processed. Volunteers piled in to stuff envelopes, expecting to be paid only in cups of tea.

My job was to help arrange the candidate’s schedule and prep him for awkward and difficult questions he could get thrown – anything from his thoughts on China invading Taiwan, to single gender spaces, to unpopular plans for a new housing estate. And, of course, all those of us who could were expected to hit the streets to canvas voters. As someone who had urged other Christians to engage with politics, here was a chance for me to put it into practice. What better way than by canvassing!

Canvassing is simple. An app has the registered voters of an area logged. You knock on a door, tell them you are campaigning for so-and-so, and ask if they have thought yet about how they might be voting. You log their response in the app and move to the next door.

It is exhausting work. Each door is an unknown. One door could be friendly, chatty, open to questions. The next could be utterly uninterested. The next could chew your ear off about proportional representation and the need for voting reform. The next could be coming off the back of a terrible day at work, with the kids acting up and the dinner burnt, before you knock on the door asking for a vote. I had the demoralizing record of waking up sleeping babies two doors in a row.

Canvassing requires good walking stamina and a thick skin. Don’t take a sharp word or a slammed door to heart. Always beware of the dog.

Once you knock on enough doors in communities like these, you start make connections. I visited a church one Sunday. The woman greeting me at the door looked for a moment. “Oh, hello!” she said, though I didn’t recognize her at first. “You knocked on my door yesterday!” Many times I would see someone from the doorstep later on at a pub or in the market.

In this age of algorithmic systems that can track voting intention and electorate psychology, there is still no better way than old-fashioned canvassing to find out what people are thinking, and to secure their vote. I didn’t understand my boss’s insistence on canvassing so much at first. It seemed an inefficient way to get him out and seen across the constituency. But as the weeks went on, I saw it differently. To take the hours to go by foot to as much of this vast place as possible, to knock on as many doors as possible, to listen to as many complaints as necessary, to sympathize and push back gently and to have doors slammed and to shake hands in disagreement, is all an act of love. A slow, difficult, and bruising act of love.

I had it exceptionally easy compared to most canvassers across the country. There are few more beautiful places to be walking around. I walked picturesque villages with names as strange and brilliant as Shap, Knock, Ousby, Kaber, Yanmath, Threlkeld, Kirkby Thore, and Wet Sleddale (my favorite). Many evenings out on the doors I could stop and take in a breathtaking view for a minute.

We tried to conduct a campaign where the attitude was that the more people that voted at all, the better. Where disagreements were had frankly but respectfully. Where the candidate and the strategist were treated with no more honor than Charlie and Veronica of the volunteer table crew. Where differences and division were not leveraged for votes. I had heard people speak of being motivated by the dignity of every human being, but to me it was a lofty idea and not much else until I started knocking on doors. I had to remind myself that every door led to someone made in the image of God. They had a worth to God that could not be quantified in polling data or electoral charts. This gave each conversation worth, regardless of how it might benefit the campaign.

From this it follows that each voter should be able to exercise their individual right to vote. A habit of campaigners is to keep door-knocking (sometimes obnoxiously) until polls close at 10 p.m. I have known MPs to drive constituents in their pajamas to polling stations to vote. Of course, this is not out of high-minded idealism; it is how to win in the game of democratic politics and I don’t mean to dress that up. But behind an active democracy is a politically engaged electorate given the dignity to each have their individual say.

The Bible says, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7). As a Christian, I have felt the temptation to withdraw from the world and its brokenness and chaos. Considering the demoralizing churn of our political climate, wouldn’t it be nice to shut ourselves away? But this command to seek the peace and prosperity of the city does not allow us the option of withdrawal. Political theologian Kaitlyn Scheiss situates this command within a “larger story of scripture where God’s people are always oriented outward. … God’s concern has always been for all of creation.” That surely means more than voting for the best local representative, or campaigning for one we are really convinced of, or even running for office oneself. Our involvement in politics isn’t the only means for us as individuals to change the world. But it can be a good way to fight for your community.

Canvassing was where this theological theory was brought back down to earth for me – where the plodding reality of the real stuff of politics happens, where you hear about the many mundane ways your patch of the world is broken, especially for children, those with disabilities, the sick, the elderly, the unemployed, and indeed, farmers working fifteen-hour days earning less than minimum wage.

Democracy is a basic good, and surely it is worth keeping. To keep it we must work for it. As I knocked on doors on wet evenings in small places in England’s rural north, I was participating in something big and worthy. But I was also learning to love my neighbor.