Updated Maundy Thursday
This weekend’s Sunday Telegraph carried a letter from Lord Carey and five other bishops which the paper headlined The religious rights of Christians are treated with disrespect.
Jonathan Wynne-Jones reported this in the Telegraph as Senior bishops call for end to persecution of Christians in Britain.
Maev Kennedy reported this in The Guardian as Bishops claim lack of respect for Christians.
The BBC has Christians discriminated against, bishops warn.
Jonathan Bartley at Ekklesia writes that Bishops should substantiate or desist over ‘persecution’.
George Pitcher in the Telegraph argues that British Christians aren’t persecuted, but they are held in contempt.
Colin Coward of Changing Attitude writes Bishops who complain about crucifix ban maintain prejudice against LGBT people.
Mary Kenny in the Irish Independent writes that Christians are at their best when persecuted, marginalised, disrespected and denied their rights.
Update
Ed Beavan reports this in the Church Times as Christians are discriminated against in UK, say bishops.
I generally think it’s ludicrous when people on my side of the pond claim that Christians are being persecuted here…the facts are so obviously otherwise (anyone think it’s likely that Ramadan or Passover will be declared federal holidays?) that an unbiased observer can only shake his head ruefully.
But for Christians in a nation where a Christian church is not only the established church, but where the head of state is the supreme head of that church and its spiritual leaders sit in the legislature to claim persecution, well….
In the immortal words of Daffy Duck, “It is to laugh.”
‘It makes bishops and the churches look stupid.’
Thus J Bartley. How right he is. All this persecution stuff is silly, self-indulgent, self-obsessed nonsense. Some of my work colleagues (agnostic/atheist academics) sometimes tease me for going to church. When told: ‘they’re laughing at you, Diogenes’, Diogenes the Cynic replied: ‘But I am not laughed at’. Dignity, self-respect, inner calm: these things are woefully absent from these Christians’ armoury. Then they wonder why so many of their fellow-Christians decline to follow their dictates.
When is Lord Carey going to retire from public life? Even the noble Baroness Thatcher has not haunted her political successors to the extent that My Lord Carey feels impelled to do to his long-suffering ecclesiastical one. Lord Carey, the Bishop of Winchester and the other Lords Spiritual who signed the Telegraph letter criticise modern Britain from their perspective as exclusively male elderly unelected legislators. They may well represent a certain strand of disaffected BNP-voting types, but any claims to hold a brief for British Christians in the broader sense should, and I hope will be, taken with a pinch… Read more »
A nurse was asked to remove her cross, and suddenly Christians everywhere are being systematically persecuted in Great Britain? I don’t think so. Ask Christians in China, or Baha’is in Iran, or Jews in Syria, and they’ll be glad to tell you what real persecution is. If the ONLY persecution Chinese Christians had to put up with was being forbidden to wear crosses in public, they’d be dancing for joy. None of the articles I clicked on stated the specific reason this nurse was asked to remove her cross. Like one commentary said, it may be a ban on jewellery… Read more »
I wonder if the Lord Carey wants cheese with his whine. Claims of special privilege are always demeaning and insulting in a pluralistic society, especially coming from one who is draped in all the privilege that the title “Lord” caries with it.
I have not read all of the articles above, but I have a question about the ban on jewelry. When I did my summer quarter of CPE [summer hospital chaplaincy]as part of the ordination process, our supervisor told the two young men in our group not to wear neckties as a safety measure. An agitated patient might grab a tie and cause discomfort if not injury. I suspect she would have said the same about a necklace for the women in the group. My question is, did the hospital object to the cross on grounds of a general ban on… Read more »
Oh Please! Give us all a break Lord Carey. Isn’t it time you open your mind and your heart to INCLUDE those glbt Christians which you so much wish to EXCLUDE and disinvite to Christ’s table? How about giving some of these people rights too? The former Archbishop of Canterbury reminds me so much of the Roman Catholic Archbishops here in America (as in: Dolan of New York City) trying to get their Red Hats by maintaining that there is a plot to discredit “orthodox” Christians and deny them of their rights. Sound familiar dear Anglican sisters and brothers? Carey… Read more »
Many Christians, British and otherwise, have spent lifetimes, indeed, thousands of years persecuting, demoralizing, purifying (themselves and others/less-pure through bloodshed)…the busiest of bodies have spent zillions of hours examining, blaming, shaming, ridiculing, burning/murdering and jailing/nailing the others (that would be the heathens wherever it was decided that heathenhood was running rampant…mostly in Africa these days/daze)…suddenly the TRUE light is going on and humanity has NEARLY had enough of the darkly vicious and self-righteous (to the extreme) nonsense at CHURCH! Most spiritually and emotionally healthy folk aren´t much attracted to the absense of GENUINE LOVE and nurturing of the ¨least¨…guess, what?… Read more »
“The former Archbishop of Canterbury – the leader of Anglicans world-wide – George Carey, with six other senior Church of England bishops, has accused Gordon Brown’s government of ‘persecuting’ Christians in Britain.” – Mary Kenny in The Irish Independent – One only has to read the names of the other six bishops to understand where all the hand-wringing is coming from. Each of these prelates of the Church of England is quaking in their pants lest they have to leave the comfort-zone of their establishment status in the C.of E. If that meant that Bishops in the House of Lords… Read more »
You know, I feel sorry for all those poor flashers and public-urinaters whose rights are denied them, who are discriminated against in this secular society!
Mercifully, the process has begun of appointing Prelates to the Lords on merit, not merely on retirement. Soon there will be none who simply can’t recognize that their greatest gift to their Office was to have retired from it.
Is anyone else besides me reading ++Rowan Williams’s Ecumenical Letter as an oblique rebuke to Lord Carey and the other bishop signatories?
Yes Charlotte, somebody is reading the letter in the way you suggest. See my latest posting here.
http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/004309.html
[And please make any more comments on the letter there and not here.]
Concerning the nurse-with(out)-the-cross issue, the Guardian says she was asked to remove the cross for safety reasons (and it was actually the necklace that the cross was on that was the problem) ( http://www.guardian.co.uk./world/2010/mar/29/crucifix-violate-christian-faith-nurse ):
“The hospital says she was asked to remove the necklace after a risk assessment showed it could be pulled by one of the elderly and sometimes confused patients in her care.
“It insists it is a health and safety issue and that the problem is not with the crucifix but the necklace it was attached to.”
I do sense a degree of ambivalence in myself in regard to this topic. On the one hand, I agree with, say, Brendan McCarthy over at the Tablet: http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/14477 He seems to be saying the Catholic Church is suffering the blow it is, because this scandal comes atop the attritional devastation caused rather by a longer-term second-rate doctrinal regime coupled with the slow death of many aspects of Church life. Therefore, I find all this talk of ‘persecution’ merely the foam over the deeps, as they sluice away in the CofE: these deep waters meaning: any incisiveness of thought, confident… Read more »
“Institutionally, the Church has a way of speaking about sexuality refracted through centuries of celibacy and asceticism that does not capture the lived experience of it. In Ireland, the Church tried to impose sexual ethics by strict legislative coercion. When coercion was no longer possible, there was no persuasive power to take its place; the Church’s radical inarticulateness about sex was the fatal context for scandals that brought it low. – Brendan McCarthy in The Tablet – Thanks, Achilles, for pointing us to this article. When reading most of Brendan’s article in The Tablet, I couldn’t help thinking that, in… Read more »
I generally think it’s ludicrous when people on my side of the pond claim that Christians are being persecuted here…the facts are so obviously otherwise (anyone think it’s likely that Ramadan or Passover will be declared federal holidays?) that an unbiased observer can only shake his head ruefully.
But for Christians in a nation where a Christian church is not only the established church, but where the head of state is the supreme head of that church and its spiritual leaders sit in the legislature to claim persecution, well….
In the immortal words of Daffy Duck, “It is to laugh.”