Monday 28 December, 2009

Arts
World
UK

David Suchet: The Poirot actor’s high-profile comments have helped draw attention to Government bias against Christians.

The year intolerance of faith turned into persecution

By Andrew Halloway

Looking back on 2009, I’m sure there will be many memories of the changes in our nation and culture. But one that stands out for me is the increasing discrimination against Christians that is occurring in our country.

Newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips hit the nail on the head in her Daily Mail article (December 14) entitled ‘Sleepwalking Off the Cultural Cliff’. Praising the Archbishop of Canterbury for criticising the Government’s attitude towards Christianity, she said that there is a “war of attrition being waged against Christian beliefs.”

She continued: “In recent times, there has been a string of cases in which it is no exaggeration to say that British Christians have been persecuted for expressing their faith.

“In July, Duke Amachree, a Christian who for 18 years had been a Homelessness Prevention Officer for Wandsworth Council, encouraged a client with an incurable medical condition to believe in God. As a result, Mr Amachree was marched off the premises, suspended and then dismissed from his job. It was a similar case to the Christian nurse who was suspended after offering to pray for a patient’s recovery.

“Christians are being removed from adoption panels if they refuse to endorse placing children for adoption with same-sex couples.

“Similarly, a Christian counsellor was sacked by the national counselling service Relate because he refused to give sex therapy sessions to gays.

“What this amounts to is that for Christians, the freedom to live according to their religious beliefs — one of the most fundamental precepts of a liberal society — is fast becoming impossible. Indeed, merely professing traditional Christian beliefs can cause such offence that it is treated as a crime.

“Take, for example, the case of Harry Hammond, an elderly and eccentric evangelical who was prosecuted for a public order offence after parading with a placard denouncing immorality and homosexuality — even though he was assaulted by the hostile crowd he was held to have offended.

“Or look at the case of the Vogelenzangs, a hotelier couple from Merseyside, who last week were cleared of a ‘religiously aggravated’ public order offence after being prosecuted for insulting a Muslim guest… for the police, ‘hate crime’ doesn’t seem to occur whenever Christianity is pilloried, mocked and insulted — as happens routinely — but only when a minority faith is in the frame.

“Indeed, the Archbishop’s complaint echoed an earlier Church-backed report that accused the Government of merely paying lip service to Christianity while focusing support on Muslims.”

‘Poirot’ actor David Suchet made national headlines in November when he joined in the criticism. David, who has now played the Agatha Christie sleuth for 21 years, believes that officials are so careful not to offend other faiths that they are discriminating against Christianity.

The award-winning actor said: “I do feel that Christianity is being marginalised by other religions in Britain.

“I won’t tell you the name of it, but a charity I work for got turned down for Government funding recently because it was a Christian charity, even though it had been funded by the Government for several years.

“Don’t misunderstand me. We should embrace all religions and marginalise none. But we seem more concerned with marginalising Christianity, and not offending other faiths.”

The 63-year-old star, who came to faith through reading the Bible, adds: “We are in danger of losing the importance of the Christian faith in our own country.”

In the latest case, a Christian teacher has been sacked from her job simply for offering to pray for a sick girl.

Olive Jones, a 54-year-old mother of two from Weston-super-Mare who teaches maths to children who are too ill to attend school, spoke to a pupil about a miracle she believed happened in her life, and asked whether she could say a prayer.

Olive, who has more than 20 years’ experience in teaching, was merely showing compassion because of the girl’s illness. And in any case, when the girl’s mother said they were not believers, Olive didn’t say anymore.

However, the girl’s mother made a complaint to the tuition service, without telling Olive. And the service didn’t tell Olive of the complaint.

Consequently, when Olive had another lesson with the pupil, she again offered to pray for her and her mother, not aware that anything was wrong. The mother said: “We come from a family who do not believe”, so again Olive did not pray. And when Olive asked the mother if she wanted to cancel the next lesson because her daughter had not been feeling well enough to study, the mother was happy for the next lesson to go ahead.

So Olive left the lesson, so she thought, on good terms with the girl’s mother, but within a few hours she was asked by the head of the Oak Hill Short Stay School and Tuition Service in Nailsea, North Somerset, to go to her office.

The head of the service told Mrs Jones that sharing her faith with a child could be considered as bullying! Shortly after the conversation at the office, she was dismissed from the job. Now the parents have accused Olive of “constant preaching” that “traumatised” their daughter.

Olive says she was “devastated” by the decision to sack her and added that it was “completely disproportionate”.

“It is like a black mark against my name and character when it comes to getting a reference for another job, just because I shared my testimony – as if I committed a criminal act,” she says. “I am amazed that a country with such a strong Christian tradition has become a country where it is hard to speak about your faith.

“I am not angry with my bosses, as they are trying to interpret new equality and diversity policies. But I am angry with the politically-correct system and about the fact that you can’t mention anything to do with faith to people who might find it of use.

“It is as if my freedom of speech is being restricted. I feel I am being persecuted for speaking about my faith in a country that is supposed to be Christian.

“I feel if I had spoken about almost any other topic I would have been fine but Christianity is seen as a no-go area. It felt as if I was being treated as a criminal. It is like a bad dream that had come true.”

Meanwhile North Somerset Council is only saying that a complaint was made by a parent, and that it is being investigated. Let’s hope they decide to give Olive her job back.

But in so many of these instances, it is not without a fight – often a legal one supported by the Christian Legal Centre, which is doing a valiant job. Their spokesperson says: “The story of Olive Jones is sadly becoming all too familiar in this country… It is time for a common sense approach to be restored in all these matters.”

It is to be hoped that 2010 offers a restoration of such common sense but, even if we have a change of Government, this descent into anti-Christian discrimination is likely to continue since the politically-correct mindset seems to have overtaken virtually every authority in society. Added to which, the EU seems bent on making Britain even less tolerant of free speech, and since the Lisbon Treaty, we have even less power to oppose EU rulings.

For those who are atheist or anti-religion, perhaps this trend seems welcome. But if so, that’s a naïve position. The Nazis first attacked the Jews, but after that their jackboots stamped on anyone and everyone who would not go along with their own politically-correct views.

But if Christians think they have it bad in Britain, it’s nothing compared to the Muslim world where a believer is being tortured every three minutes. In 2009 more than 165,000 Christians will have been killed because of their faith, most of them in Muslim countries, according to a human rights organisation currently visiting Israel.

And the president of One Free World International, Rev Majed El Shafie, told the Jerusalem Post: “Hamas (the terrorist group dedicated to destroying Israel) digs up the bodies of Christians from Christian burial sites in the Gaza Strip claiming that they pollute the earth,” adding that between 200-300 million Christians are being persecuted in the world, 80 per cent of whom live in Muslim countries, with the rest in communist or other lands.

Photo: Phil Chambers/Wikimedia