It’s ironic. Missionaries from Britain and other Western nations once struck out into the largely unknown, uncivilized world to spread Christianity.
Now, says a Scottish-born writer, Christians are “the most despised minority in Britain.”
Moreover, this Christophobia permeates the entire Western world — including the United States.
It’s also attended, though, by a very interesting double standard (more on that later).
Illustrating the situation in the U.K., The Telegraph’s Tom Harris tells us that his nation’s “Liberal Democrats, for example, have tied themselves in knots, and even provoked a formal complaint to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, over local activists’ decision to remove David Campanale as its parliamentary candidate in Sutton and Cheam.” The hapless chap’s trespass?
He’s not only a Christian, but he subscribes to biblical teaching. This, Harris informs, is like being a Nazi in “LibDem” world.
Yet “Campanale is not the first to have suffered at the hands of illiberal members of his party,” Harris explains. “In 2019, former Labour MP, Rob Flello, was chosen as the LibDem … parliamentary candidate for Stoke-on-Trent South, which he had represented as a Labour MP between 2005 and 2017. Within 36 hours he was deselected, his socially conservative views as a committed Roman Catholic having come to light.”
Then there was Tim Farron, a politician compelled to resign from LibDem leadership because he’s an evangelical. Another evangelical, Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes in Scotland, has also been subject to anti-Christian bigotry.
The issue, Harris observes, is not that these people are “Christian,” but that they’re Christian; that is, the leftist thought police will (for now) tolerate nominal Christians. But dare you actually believe — and, in particular, if you subscribe to biblical or catechetical teaching (perish the thought!) — then you have a problem.
Oh, this isn’t just driven by a desire to keep “religion” out of politics, either (and that motivation, too, is justified with a fallacy). This brings us to the aforementioned double standard. As Harris also writes:
Religious intolerance is not equally applied across the Left. When Mothin Ali won a council seat in Leeds as a Green Party candidate, he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”, proclaimed his victory a “win for the people of Gaza”, then described critics of this outburst as Islamophobic. It later emerged that he had claimed Israel had “control” of the mainstream media and had recorded himself chanting “from the river to the sea” at a pro-Gaza rally.
No one doubts that Councillor Ali sincerely believes in the teachings of Islam, yet no one has suggested that that faith’s condemnation of homosexuality should prevent him from representing the most Left wing — indeed, most “progressive” — party in the country.
… [In fact,] Muslim candidates and elected representatives … need make no excuses for their personal faith. To criticise a Muslim, or any other minority, for the illiberal tenets of their faith would be prejudicial. But Christians? They’re fair game.
That this is happening in Britain is perhaps not surprising. After all, great Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton noted in the early 1900s already that few people in England still truly had faith. Yet, again, this is a West-wide phenomenon.
Here in the U.S., for example, Christian bakers (and other faithful businessmen) have been targeted by activists and even state governments for refusing to service same-sex “weddings.” Yet as comedian-cum-commentator Steven Crowder illustrated years ago (video below), there also are Muslim bakeries that will refuse to create cakes for these same-sex affairs. They, however, are subject to neither agitation nor legal action.
Then there’s how leftists have insisted that authentically Christian colleges should be denied accreditation; more recently, the Biden administration slapped record fines ($37-plus million) on Christian universities in what critics say is an effort to destroy the institutions.
This Christophobia has manifested itself in Sweden, Canada, and the rest of erstwhile Christendom as well.
Returning to Harris, he characterizes this phenomenon as a failure to live up to multiculturalism’s tenets (of which he himself doesn’t appear fond). The reality, though, is that multiculturalism is a lie because, since there’s no such thing as a “value neutral” nation (or anything else), there’s no such thing as a culturally neutral nation; some conception of virtue will always come to dominate.
As the aforementioned G.K. Chesterton put it, “In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.” It’s mere prejudice, too, assuming that this applies only to what we, often tendentiously, label “religion.”
Just consider what’s called “wokeness,” which is just an intensification of political correctness (which itself is “the suppression of Truth for the purposes of promoting a left-wing agenda”). It encompasses a series of social codes — e.g., “No questioning of ‘white privilege’” — enforced via extreme social pressure and even government coercion, when possible. Put differently, it’s akin to a religion, complete with dogmas dictating what’s sacrosanct and what constitutes sacrilege, with punishment used to enforce its doctrines. One might say it’s little different from the Amish and their “shunning,” except that the Amish are governed by unchanging principles they believe reflect divine enjoinment. The wokesters, being relativists and rooted to nothing permanent, make it up as they go along. This doesn’t stop them, though, from destroying you based on an agenda that originated last Thursday.
Organizing a civilization is all about determining what is true, what should be the stuff of social codes and laws, and what is false and should thus be stigmatized. There is no multicultural “equality” because there is no equality of “values.” There is only triumph and defeat, and the victors and the vanquished, in cultural wars.
