UK Christians and a Forthcoming Difficult Choice

6 March 2010

The Daily Telegraph has run another interesting comment today on the Lords' ammendment to the Equalities Bill. It seems the changes which will likely force Anglican clerics, and indeed rabbis, Free Church ministers, and even imams (somehow I doubt the latter) to carry out same-sex union ceremonies or blessings in a place of worship, contrary to the will of either the church or minister in question, is an embarassment for the government. How so? After all, Gordon Brown's cabinet is the most secular ever. The embarassment, it seems, is nothing to do with substance but rather timing. A clash with the Church and unpalatable headlines is not what the government wants as we head into a general election in the next eight weeks.

So much for Gordon Brown's "moral compass" and his claim, as a son of the manse, to be driven by the morality imputed to him by his cleric father. I thought Tony Blair's administration did a real hatchet job on people and institutions and of faith and didn't see how it could get much worse. But of course I'd forgotten the old Stalinist days in Soviet Russia, where the state even managed to shape the way you thought and spoke. It's time to get rid of Brown now, for the sake of the country in general, but also because if reelected he and the people around him can and will do so yet more damage in terms of Christian values and freedom. The problem, of course, is who to vote for. Certainly the lesser of two evils, David Cameron is nonetheless some way down this ditching of Christian values route himself, though it is hard to see how he could be quite as antagonistic towards Christians as Brown has been. Perhaps some of it is rhetoric to win votes, but if so I suspect he will lose many others. The Libs' Calamity (self-confessed atheist) Clegg would likely seek to rival Brown's secularising agenda. Of the minor parties, the Greens are hardly Christian-friendly and UKIP is unlikely to make much headway. Pity we can't vote for the best among the main parties, all rolled-up into a Christian bloc, and I, for one, will be looking carefully at the alternatives to my sitting MP, who in correspondence between us nailed his colours pretty firmly to the mast.