Peter Glover claims at First Things that "the government and media of Great Britain have put in place over the last few decades a determined program to abolish the influence of Christianity" in that nation. Lest you think Mr. Glover exaggerates you should read some of the examples he cites:
How else to read the story, in November 2008, of a foster mother struck off the register by her local council for "allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity"? The woman had looked after as many as eighty children over the previous decade. Although she was a practicing Anglican, everyone agrees that she put no pressure on the girl. The woman testified, "I did initially try to discourage her. I offered her alternatives," including "finding places for her to practice her own religion."
Eventually though, at her own insistence, the girl was allowed to attend church with her foster mother. Within months she asked to be baptized (under Shari'a Law, an act of apostasy for which the death sentence is prescribed). Local officials ruled that the foster mother had "failed in her duty to preserve the girl's religion and should have tried to stop the baptism." Council officers subsequently barred the woman from foster parenting, her sole source of income.
This case was matched by that of Caroline Petrie, who was suspended from her post as a community nurse when she offered to pray for an elderly patient. (The public furor eventually led to Petrie's reinstatement.) In another case late last year, a registrar of marriages asked to be relieved of the duty of officiating at "gay marriages." She was refused and threatened with dismissal.
Jeremy Vine is a highly visible BBC broadcaster and a practicing Anglican. In a recent interview, Vine explained how difficult it had become to speak of his faith on air. It is, he claimed, now "socially unacceptable" to mention one's Christian faith in public. Society in Britain has become intolerant of the freedom to express the religious views that were "common currency thirty or forty years ago," Vine added. "The parameters of what you might call 'right thinking" are closing. Sadly, it is almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God." All of which is unsurprising, given that last year Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC and a practicing Catholic, issued an edict stating that the BBC should treat Islam "more sensitively" than Christianity.
This is truly disturbing stuff. As we wrote the other day, history shows that nations which self-consciously jettison the Judeo-Christian heritage upon which they were built not infrequently collapse into moral anarchy and thence into oppression and tyranny.
Another unsettling aspect of this trend is that so many Americans think it would be just great if we followed Europe's example.
RLC