Am I persecuted? Am I heck.

George Carey, ex-archbishop for somewhere in outer space, has been at  it again. He claims that Christians are being and feel persecuted. Speaking as an Anglican, I would like to reassure all of my friends, religious and non-religious, that I do not feel persecuted in any way. Occasionally, I have to mind my manners. Gosh, what a burden that is.

Carey speaks from a position of enormous privilege. He is a member of the House of Lords, and speaks there on behalf of all those Christians who he says feel persecuted - no other religion has that privilege. If he wants to think about persecution, he might reflect on the fact that he, as a man, gets to wear a dress without being insulted or assaulted for it.

He speaks from the delusion that this country is a majority Christian country. The BBC,  reporting David Cameron's Easter message, has a statistic that 72% of the country self-identify as Christian. The BBC, as well as the ex-archbishop, really need to learn that using Christian as a cultural label is a very different thing from being a Christian. Tomorrow is Easter Day, the biggest feast in the Christian year. That means that around 4% of the population will go to church, instead of the usual 3%. For the rest of the 72%, Easter means a roast dinner, time with the family, and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. Easter, for the 68 or 69% who aren't in church, is a retail festival, a festival of consumption, precisely the opposite of what the Bible is about. Don't get me wrong, real Christians are not going round with long faces looking for the sackcloth and ashes on Easter Day. We are celebrating good and proper. But we do it without adding to the waistline, and without adding to the mountain of refuse left over after all the eggs have been opened.

Perhaps church going as such is a bad descriptor of real Christianity.many people practise the Christian virtues without going to church regularly or at all. But to be a Christian does mean to have some kind of relationship with Jesus. There are many good people about who do not have that relationship. They are no less good for it. They are probably better than me. But they do not count as Christians. Jesus calls us to do something. I can't help thinking that if Carey were being a proper Christian, he would stop trying to retain privilege for the privileged, and would start doing something about these people, or these people, or  this man, or this man, or these people. Plenty to choose from, as you can see. And I think Jesus might actually approve.

There is a curious issue about Carey's evidence. He cites a Comres poll carried out apparently for the Coalition for Marriage, which purports to show that two thirds of Christians think they are part of a persecuted minority. There is no trace of this poll on either the Comres site, or Coalition for Marriage. If it appears, I shall update. In the meantime, I wonder if he is slightly confused and has mistaken it for a survey, also carried out by Comres, which suggested that two thirds of Christians think the church needs a new image. We could do without Carey's  unique brand of publicising for a start.

Update
As Paul Walter has pointed out, the survey is available on the Comres site. Having had a look through it, it strikes me as one of the less convincing and rigorous surveys I have ever read. The sample of 535 people is heavily weighted towards older people and towards Conservative voters. The questions are also the kind that effectively tell the respondent what to think. Most of them are about Christianity as such, not about religions in general. One of the questions, for instance, is to agree or disagree with the statement "I feel the Government gives sufficient protection to the rights of Christians to exercise their freedom of religious expression". There is an implicit invitation to compare the position of Christians with other religions, rather than asking the question "I feel the Government gives sufficient protection to the rights of religious people to exercise their freedom of religious expression".

And there is a question about feeling like a persecuted minority. It is this - to agree or disagree with the statement "I sometimes or often feel a member of a persecuted minority because of the constraints on religious expression in this country". It is inviting the answer yes. if this was a level one student's attempt at writing a survey, it would fail. I have no doubt that there are 359 people who feel like that. I doubt that you can safely extrapolate that figure to the entire country. I also pray to God to open their eyes to the real truth of their power vis a vis other religions.

An Easter message to everyone, but primarily to fundamentalists...

... of all persuasions. I do not know what will happen when I get to heaven. I am fairly sure that I will meet my maker. What will happen next? I will suffer an extraordinary pang of monumental guilt for the things that I have done and not done. It will not last a moment. My knowledge of physics makes me sure of that; the chief ingredient of time is limit, and God is beyond limit, so I am sure that when I meet him, it will be outside time. So my pang of guilt will probably take no time at all, though it will equally probably encompass the whole universe. The guilt is there because he knows all that I have done and not done, and I can no longer hide from it. And then, I think, he will welcome me. He will say, "You have let me down, but you can still stay".

So I think. There are quite a few million fundamentalists, Christian, Islamic and of other kinds around the world who are certain that this will not be my fate. They intend to meet their maker, and I will apparently not be there, because I do not share their particular version of certainty. That applies to all sorts, not just to Islamic ones who blow people up because they do not agree with them, but also to Christian ones who murder doctors whose practices they disagree with, and think they have the right to beat their wives, to Jewish ones who flatten other people in their tanks, to Hindu ones who think it is justified to murder Christians, and so on, and so wearily on. So this message is addressed to them. I do not flatter myself that this blog is the first stopping place of those of the fundamentalist persuasion here there and everywhere, but perhaps it will get noticed somewhere by someone, and if I sow a tiny seed of doubt in the mind of even one person of fundamentalist persuasion, then this post will have done its work. Because one thing I am sure of is a lack of certainty in this life and about the next, and those who think they have certainty do not in fact have it. What they have is tunnel vision.

So if anyone of a fundamentalist mindset is reading this post I ask them to think of what will happen when they enter heaven. Virgins to right and left, pots of honey, mango dip, nectar.... Let me just suggest a different possibility. Read on, don't be scared. After all, you know you're right, so what harm can I do?

You will get to heaven. You will probably experience the same monumental pang of guilt as me (after all, even fundamentalists aren't perfect.) And then God will welcome you. But what he will say to you will be different to what he says to me. To you he will say, "What on EARTH did you think you were doing in my name?" Then, I think, you will feel a cataclysmic pang of guilt. He will say, "You can stay", just as he says it to me. He will say, "The virgins are over there". (Fundamentalist heaven seems to be primarily male and therefore one assumes that the virgins are female. But I think the fundamentalists will be surprised to find that the virgins are of both sexes.) "But first", God will say, "I want you to come over here and meet all the people who you killed, and maimed, and executed, and slaughtered, and beat, and tortured, and crippled, and disfigured, and scarred, and made miserable, and blocked in their life, and passed by on the other side, and mocked and belittled, and enslaved all because you did not read my beloved [insert here Bible, Koran, Torah, Veda, text of your choice] properly.

"You tried to trap me in the words. Me. I who exist beyond time and space, beyond language. You were determined to see me in the words. Did you never think to look through the words rather than at them?"

And then, it is my profound hope, you will feel ever so slightly foolish.

God will say, "Go and meet those people now. It will take you a long time. It will take you forever. And ask them, humbly, to share my heaven with you."

Still certain?