I
had a good Easter, thank you very much. I am a Christian of the
Anglican variety – squashy, middle of the road, (I know that makes
me sound like a hedgehog with a short life expectancy) and with a
high tolerance for ambiguity. You don't hear much about me in the
media though. You do hear lots about other kinds of Christianity.
This Easter was a time of joy for me, as Easter always is. Jesus
rose. Everything was renewed. Suffering did not go away, but my sense
of purpose and my sense of life were reborn. At the same time,
though, this Easter summed up for me a lot of what is wrong with both
my religion and my country.
The
headlines:
These
are fairly typical. They come round over and over again. There are
many Christians who are not like me. Unfortunately they are the ones
who tend to get in the headlines. The rest of us, myself included I'm
afraid to say, tend to keep quiet and hope they will go away. But
they never go away because they have axes to grind. And this meme of
Britain's poor suffering persecuted Christians gets an outing in the
papers whenever they feel like it. I don't know what George Carey was
on when he gave that interview, but he should stop taking it. Or if
he wasn't on anything, maybe he should start taking something. The
subheading “Christians are being “persecuted” by courts and
“driven underground” in the same way that homosexuals once were”
was particularly ironic, given the amount of gay bashing that
Christians still do. I would like to make clear that my world,
including my God, does not fall apart if I see a couple of men
holding hands or a couple of women snogging. If they want to get
married, that's fine by me. And, as far as I know, it's fine with God
too.
Carey
talks about a religious bar to employment if wearing crosses is
banned. (The actual banning of crosses is itself a highly exaggerated
story, but that's just the media for you.) Last time I looked the
Bible didn't command us to wear crosses. Some people choose to. Fine.
They can still wear them under their clothes or they can wear them
when they're not at work. My faith does not need a cross on a pin on
my uniform to prop it up. Neither should anyone else's. If they
choose to wear a cross, that's fine, but they have no right to insist
on different treatment to anybody else. Like too many Christians
today, Carey is trying to maintain a position of superiority by
claiming to want only freedom of expression.
And
then there is money. This “whatever it is costs umpteen billion
pounds” trots out over and over again. We are told the cost of
everything and the value of nothing. Somebody somewhere made less
money than usual at Easter. Oh dear. Somebody somewhere else made
more money than usual. A lot of people got a break. The weather was
fairly nice for once, and millions of people got a day off, got to be
with their family and friends for a little bit longer than usual, and
got happier. In my opinion, that's worth a couple of billion. We'd be
a lot better off if our media celebrated the fact that we got a
couple of days off rather than moaning about the cost.
Our
churches ought to be saying that, but they don't. Many of my
co-religionists are too worried about homosexuality, as already
adumbrated, or too worried about women actually having control over
their own reproductive organs (heaven forfend!), or too worried about
hiding the facts about child abuse, to say something sensible like
that. They are also too bothered about money. When Occupy was at St
Pauls, I was angered, but sadly not surprised, that my church should
have taken the action it did to try to get rid of the protesters
rather than welcoming them. At the time they were doing that, they
were also accepting a grant of £40 million to get their stonework
cleaned. £40 million. Think how many houses could have been built
with that money, how many teachers, doctors or nurses paid. I want to
say it made my blood boil, but it didn't. I'm used to it. I just
thought, “That's typical”. It's the church I'm in. It's not the
church I want to be in. But every journey starts with a single step.
This week's step is to start the organisation of Christian Aid Week
for the village. Without that money people will die who would
otherwise be alive to support their partners and raise their
children. I'd rather be talking about that than who has their hands
in who else's pants. I think Jesus would too.
No comments:
Post a Comment