The Christian conscience
In a startling warning to the Government, senior church and political figures have backed a report advocating force to protest against policies that are “unbiblical” and “inimical to the Christian faith”.
The Telegraph cites the ‘menacing language’ of the report and says ‘Lord Mawhinney, the Tory peer, Andy Reed, the Labour MP, and the Rt Rev Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester, helped to produce’ it.
The report from the Evangelical Alliance says “violent revolution” should be regarded as a viable response if government legislation encroaches further on basic religious rights. The church is urged to come to a consensus that “at some point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state”…Proposals to ban proselytising in publicly-funded Christian projects could ultimately lead to Christians being prevented from teaching others about the Bible. This would “be unambiguously recognised by Christians as perpetrating evil that has to be resisted by deliberate acts of defiance”, the report says.
Interesting, the idea that a ban on proselytizing in publicly-funded Christian projects would be unambiguously recognized by Christians as perpetrating evil. Christians unambiguously recognize it as evil for governments to refuse to fund Christian proselytizing? So Christians think governments are absolutely obliged to fund Christian proselytizing? That’s intriguing, isn’t it? It’s almost American in its presumptuous aggressiveness.
Significantly, it comes from the Evangelical Alliance – a mainstream organisation representing 1.2 million Christians…”If, as most Christians accept, they should be politically involved in democratic processes, many believe this may, where necessary, take the form of active resistance to the state. This may encompass disobedience to law, civil disobedience, involving selective, non-violent resistance or, ultimately, violent revolution.” Mike Morris, the executive director of the Evangelical Alliance, said that the report reflected the breadth of submissions they had received. “It is not as if Christians are going to take to the streets, but we need to be able to stand up to things that are challenging the Christian conscience, regardless of the consequences.”
And the things that are challenging ‘the Christian conscience’ are things like…oh, civil rights for gays, and legal abortion, and female equality. So if people who want those things don’t submit to people in the Evangelical Alliance, well, maybe they’ll start to kill us. Jolly good; something to look forward to. And then people wonder why some of us think secularism is a good idea!
And this wasn’t a problem when the Anglican arch said civil disobedience was appropriate to fight against the Blair government joining the Coalition of the willing?
Man, what a beat-up. Some days it might be appropriate to just kick back with a coffee and a good book.
Well Mawhinney is a known bully, for a start.
He was one of the fromt-men for the disatrous railway privatisation.
This is just a case of christians learning from the muslims that we can get away with it.
The question is, will creeping little ho;y Tony take any notice?
And, remember, the Gordon BB. is a child of the manse, and also a known worshipper of Yeshua ben Joseph.
but NOT transubstantiation? DIE heretic!
Shame about Mahwinney – he presided over some of the first integrated schools in NI when he was Minister of State there in the late 1980s.
I’ve just read the relevant section of the “Faith and Nation” report (it’s at http://www.eauk.org/faithandnation/ and the relevant pages are 121-125), and I really don’t see any way that it can fairly be characterized as saying that Christians should engage in violent protest against gay rights or legal abortion. Nor does it say or imply that forbidding publicly-funded proselytism would be “unambiguously recognized … as perpetrating evil that has to be resisted”.
There are clear signs in the report of the sort of silly poor-victimized-us siege mentality that’s absurdly common among evangelical Christians; but whatever the “Daily Telegraph” may say, the report doesn’t say that the government is obliged to fund proselytizing or that Christians should engage in violent protest against gay rights or anything of the sort.
g,
No, I didn’t mean to say that the report (or the Telegraph article) said that Christians should engage in violent protest against gay rights or legal abortion – the last para of the Comment was my gloss, based on what evangelical Christians generally do get worked up about.
The part about funding came from the Telegraph though. Did it just get that wrong?
‘All secularists really have in common is that they believe that belief in supernatural agents is crap.’
Not really. They just believe such beliefs should not intrude on the public sphere. Secularism does not rule out a belief in the supernatural, although I’d agree it requires some mental gymnastics to reconcile the two.
Not really and not even close; there are plenty of religious secularists. Just for one thing there are plenty of religious people who really don’t want the state tangled up with their religion.
‘Partial birth’ abortion is a tendentious term, not a neutral one.
OB,
(a) I wasn’t aware that PBA is a tendentious term, but according to Google, you are correct (the term was coined by anti-abortionists). Thanks for filling me in.
(b) A ‘religious secularist’ sounds like a contradiction in terms, though I suppose one could be ‘secularist’ (say) in the field of nuclear physics and ‘religious’ when it comes to nuking or not nuking your enemy (God says it a sin to nuke, God says it’s a sin not to nuke …). Your scientific beliefs might be evidence-based, and your moral beliefs faith-based (often the case with Popists). Still, I don’t see how you can be a ‘devout’ or ‘dyed in the wool’ secularist and subscribe to a morality enshrined by supernatural agents at the same time.
Yep, coined by anti-abortionists. Glad to oblige, Cathal!
No, really, relgious secularist isn’t a contradiction in terms. Secularism can simply refer to the separation. There are religious people who are strong advocates of secularism. It doesn’t mean or entail atheism.
What would happen to a Muslim leader who advocated violent “protest” against unkoranic practices and laws?
Angelo, it seems he would be ‘heeded’.
OB: What the report says is that banning proselytism in publicly-funded projects *could lead to* things that Christians would unambiguously regard as evil, such as “a blanket refusal to allow the Christian gospel to be made known” (by which it seems clear that they mean a total ban on proselytism, not merely on publicly-funded proselytism), and it’s that blanket refusal that they say would be regarded as unambiguously evil and justifying defiance. (Rightly so, I think.)
And they don’t advocate *violent* responses in such an event. (What the report says about violent action is a bit weaselly, but I think the intended meaning is just that in really extreme cases it couldn’t be ruled out, which seems reasonable to me.)
The report absolutely doesn’t say that it would make sense to engage in violent protest about a ban on publicly-funded proselytism. The “Telegraph” article doesn’t say the report says that, either, but it’s clearly written to give that impression. Shoddy, misleading stuff, I’m afraid.
The report is available at http://www.eauk.org/faithandnation/upload/faith%20and%20nation%20finalrevised.pdf and the relevant bit is the pages numbered 121-124.
Ah. Thanks, g. I tried to read that piece of the report but the file kept getting stuck, and I gave up.
Mind you, it still sounds somewhat threatening. Saying “law X could lead to law Y in which case we would have to resist, with force if necessary” is 1) an inherently sweeping and flexible formula and 2) especially tricksy if law Y is wildly unlikely, as it is in this case. It’s paranoiac; it’s slippery slope stuff.