Picking on Christians

We Christians have sensed for some time that our beliefs and practices are treated with disdain and even hostility by the powerful people in this country. Edwin Poots, for example, new leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, has been pillaried and ridiculed for daring to hold Christian beliefs. Now even the secular media are noticing this prejudice. This month, James Gillies, writing for Spiked Online, cites the examples of a Scottish politician being lampooned for his beliefs about traditional marriage (which he has since abandoned, incidentally), the Robertson Trust’s appalling behaviour toward Stirling Free Church, and the arrest and detention of John Sherwood, a street preacher who was dragged off by the police for unspecified ‘hate crimes’.

Gillies writes:

In a nation famous for non-establishment, 18th-century preachers like Charles Wesley and George Whitefield – men who drew crowds big enough to fill modern football stadiums – Sherwood’s treatment seems dystopian. It is hard to imagine a Muslim imam or a Jewish rabbi being met with the same illiberal treatment, merely for quoting from the Koran or the Torah. What is it about Christian preachers that so offends the sensibilities of police officers?

Never mind vaccines. There has been a mass immunisation against irony and truth in this country which has been rolled out over the last couple of decades. Politicians who love nothing more than preaching tolerance and bragging about their liberal credentials are the very worst offenders. There are people in the Scottish and Westminster parliaments whose quests to enforce state-sponsored ideology would not be out of place in North Korea.

Stop Picking on Christians  

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay