CT: You said you believe this is a “tricky moment” for Christians in the UK. Is there anything we can be hopeful about?
WB: I think sadly the politicians have adopted and promulgated a kind of multi-faith inclusivism as a sort of political correctness. If you talk to leaders of other faiths they don’t want Christians to lose their rights because they know that if Christians lose their rights in this country, they will lose their rights as well.
What we should have done is while maintaining our commitment as a Christian nation should have offered Christian hospitality to people of other faiths and secured their religious freedom here without actually abandoning the faith that has shaped our nation and made us who we are. Instead we’ve ended up with a politeness to everybody else but a nothingness of our own. So we really need to get back to our moorings as a nation.
Not a shrill, frantic cry of alarm, but a very reasonable plea for Christians in the UK to wake up that [i]”we are being dangerously marginalised.”[/i] Well, that’s true even in America, which is significantly less secularized than Great Britain.
I think +Benn’s choice of terms is apt, not persecution (as in Jos, Nigeria or Sudan etc) but [b]marginalization[/b] fittingly describes the status of Christ followers in the relativistic, postmodern, post-Christendom global north. The Constantinian marriage of church and state, or more broadly, Christianity and western civilization has broken down. We’ve gone from the American “separation” of church and state to the complete DIVORCE of Christianity in any form and public life, with biblical Christianity being increasingly shunned and relegated to the private sphere as a matter of personal values and preferences instead of objective, public truth.
However, I would tend to see this dangerous situation as offering us a golden opportunity as well as the more obvious threat it poses. For the demise of the old Christendom model of church life at the start of the third Christian millenium allows us to rediscover and recapture the kind of bravely counter-cultural, pre-Christendom style Christianity characteristic of the first few centuries of the first millenium. And that well prove to be a very great blessing in disguise. After all, we Christians believe in a God who resurrects us, and brings new life out of death.
David Handy+
Passionate advocate of ardently, joyfully post-Christendom style Anglicanism for the 3rd millenium
Hmmm, I don’t know who conducted or wrote up this brief interview for CT, but I’m amused that the writer chose to use the British spelling for the key word: [i]”marginalisation,”[/i] that most of us Americans would instinctively spell [b]”marginalization.”[/b] But that typical difference between s and z is one of those classic ways that British usage differs from American. What did Churchill say? Wasn’t it something like that we’re two people separated by a common language?
And that trivial alphabetic difference may symbolize the much more important difference between English and American culture when it comes to the role of the CoE, as it’s at least technically a still established church.
David Handy+
David, you forgot your post-nominal epithets:
“Pazzionate advocate of ardently, joyfully pozt-Chriztendom ztyle Anglicanizm for the 3rd millenium”
“Two nations [b]divided[/b] by a common language,” was the phrase, I believe. 🙂
azusa (or is it asuza?), #3,
LOL. Thanks.
Jeremy (#4),
You’re right. Thanks for setting the record straight.
David Handy+
This story may be apocryphal, but it ought to be true:
While visiting America one year, Winston Churchill attended a buffet luncheon at which cold fried chicken was among the dishes served. Churchill, delighted, returned for a second helping. “May I have some breast?” he politely asked. “Mr. Churchill,” his hostess replied, “in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat.”
Churchill apologized profusely and, the following morning, sent the woman a magnificent orchid with an accompanying note. “I would be most obliged,” it read, “if you would pin this on your white meat.”