Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

… could it?

Are we getting closer to the horror of the American redneck warehouse-style "Charismatic" Christian movement here in our beloved "Live and let live" UK?

Here's a fascinating documentary on the threat of Christian fundamentalism in the UK. It's on Youtube, so it's broken up into five parts. 

There was all the usual stuff you'd expect with any documentary about religious fundamentalism:

• Children getting indoctrinated and being educated off the National Curriculum: One child in particular sitting a "Science" test where the questions included, "How long did God take to create the Earth?" and "When did God create the Sun?"
• Hatred of homosexuality and equating it with paedophilia and murder.
• A victim complex, presumably for the purpose of galvanising the group to work harder against the perceived injustices of other people in the world living differently to them.
• A vicious loathing of the big rival – Islam.

I really think that we should give our children the best possible start in life. That includes teaching them the facts of the world they live in and allowing them to explore knowledge with open minds. What I saw on this programme was tantamount to child abuse.

A load of beardy loons with placards and prayer is one thing, but warehouses full of thousands of evangelicals ready to support whatever they're told to support by their minister is quite another. The stated aim of these groups is to "Radically transform this nation for Christ's purposes". And they're getting advice and money from fundamentalists in the USA. Worse still, one scene in the documentary shows a fundamentalist lawyer handing an amendment to the recently-tabled abortion bill to Norman Tebbit, which he appears to have used verbatim in the process of lawmaking. This is the same lawyer who states her belief that the earth is 4,000 years old and that Islam is evil.

And it seems that these people have the foot in the door of the Conservative Party too. Nadine Dorries MP, who tabled the recent attempt to reduce a woman's right to choose, is backed by these groups. I suspect that if a Conservative Party revival takes place and they get in power, the fundamentalist Christian groups will enter Downing Street with them. I vote for my MP to represent my interests and their manifesto. I don't vote for my MP so that he or she can fall under the spell of a religious pressure group.

I really want to live and let live. I don't see these fundamentalists doing the same. In the end, it doesn't matter how rational and well-argued the reasonable voicce of atheism is. Against this sort of mass indoctrination, I fear we don't stand a chance unless we unify and agree that our country should be secular.

National Secular Society Website