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It's the Christians who practise intolerance

Friday, March 27 2009 @ 08:43 AM CDT

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RUTH WISHART

The voices are becoming more shrill. Bishops and commentators and some parliamentarians have got themselves the same hymn sheet from which they are singing very loudly. The refrain, in essence, is that a monstrous regiment of British secularists is denying Christians the right to practice their faith freely while poisoning the well of social policy with immoral initiatives.


The outgoing leader of UK Catholics, Cormac Murphy O'Connor, recently spoke of "the new intolerance directed against those who maintain pro-life and pro-family views". They fret about Godless Britain across the pond, too.

This week, Peter Glover, in the online journal First Things, wrote of "an anti-Christian bias in Britain". And he felt moved to add that "by making Christian practice difficult, if not outright illegal in British public life, the British courts and public authorities have contributed to an increasing awareness that a vacuum exists where the nation's Judaeo-Christian spine used to be".

advertisementAnd then there is the gospel according to Christine Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald and a still trenchant commentator on all matters theological. She rails against what she characterises "God-bashers", suggesting "for them it is not enough to exclude those who do not subscribe to their soulless scientism, or one-dimensional rationalism. Pariah status is only the first step in the punishment they mete out to those who refuse to follow their lead".

At which point I want to say: hang on - just who is practising intolerance here? Within the past couple of weeks the papal visit to Africa has been dominated by the pontiff's criticism of condom promotion in the campaign against HIV/Aids, and of countries where abortion has been made legal.

Where are the legal and moral rights of those who take a different view? Why should it be acceptable to suggest that those who do not embrace a particular world view are bound for the big bad fire? It seems to me you could make an entirely coherent case that the people under threat in Britain are the secularists. It is extremely irritating, to put it no higher, to be labelled extremist for holding the view that contextualised sex education is important, and that it is not for any church to condemn contraception use within communities who do not subscribe to the same beliefs.

To describe yourself as pro-life or pro-family suggests that the rest of us are somehow anti-life and anti-family, a clearly absurd proposition. Nor are some church leaders notably tolerant of other faiths. The self-same American critic of British secularism also fulminated against Muslims who had protested about supposedly multi-faith assemblies being predominantly Christian. And within the Anglican faith in England, synods with their cassocks endlessly in a twist about female ordination or homosexual priesthood hardly seem much of an advert for loving your neighbour as yourself.

Meanwhile, people in genuine search for spiritual nourishment, who are looking for values among various denominations (or none) which might meet their needs, are derided as "pick'n'mix" dilettantes who lack the moral rigour to adhere to a "proper" faith. Those who claim Christianity is threatened cite various incidents such as the nurse suspended for praying with a patient, or the airport worker asked to remove her cross. These events, usually the result of a shotgun marriage between a petty mind and petty regulations, can hardly be used as building blocks for an argument that the entire country is on some kind of vigilante march against worship.

As the product of devoutly Congregationalist parents, I readily acknowledge the part played by that upbringing in shaping my own values. But the corollary is not that people given no religious education are somehow inferior or destined to lead a values-free life. In a world where plays are boycotted for insulting religion, and cartoonists vilified for mockery of religious leaders, daring to be a non-believer seems to be an increasingly hazardous business.

This week Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, lectured that our society was not necessarily hostile to faith or deeply divided just "uncomfortably haunted by the memory of religion it doesn't quite know what to do with". Let's hope enough of his flock turned up to listen.

http://www.theherald.co.uk

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