The BBC’s head of religion has warned that Britain needs to address its “chronic lack of religious literacy” if it is to accommodate the rise through new immigration of “more assertive” forms of Christianity with “conflicting views” on same-sex marriage and other human rights issues.
Aaqil Ahmed, writing for The Independent, identifies a “more muscular Pentecostalism” emerging among African immigrants and an “upsurge in Catholic numbers” from Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. “Christianity may have been pronounced to be at death’s door in the last century but now it’s firmly back in the public space and how we deal with that is the real battle for Christianity here in the UK.”
Mr Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, talks of a “changing of the guard” in the Church and says: “Christianity is not in terminal decline as many would have us believe, it is just different now and it’s growing.” He asks: “If among this growth is a more assertive Christianity with conflicting views with society on homosexuality, for example, then how do we deal with this?”
Charles Dickens in David Copperfield has a character who keeps on talking about King Charles’s Head ie the fate of the head of the monarch (which was lopped off by an executioner). The reference is now a literary one to something that intrudes in every discourse. And so it is with gay marriage: the media can interview a Church leader about let’s say, economics, racial justice, ecumenism, the fate of seminaries, astrology, whatever … and you can be sure that they will work gay marriage into the conversation. Then in the write-up they will say that the Church is obsessed with sex …