An Apology To All LGBT People

There are times when being a Christian makes me struggle to my core and today has been one of those times.

In what would have seemed the answer to many prayers a generation ago, representatives of the Catholic Church and the Democratic Unionist Party met in Stormont, the seat of ‘Power’ in Northern Ireland and, amidst a plethora of smiles, came to an agreement. This would have been dismissed as the stuff of fantasy a few years ago, but there they were and united they stood.

So, why am I not dusting down my tambourine and rejoicing? They were united in wishing to see a ‘conscience clause’ inserted into Northern Ireland’s equality legislation, effectively allowing an ‘out’ for those with ‘strongly held’ religious views. The catalyst was the on-going battle over a ‘Christian’ bakery being taken to court for refusing to provide a cake with a pro-gay marriage message. On the back of this, these Christians who agree on very little else (do most DUP supporters even believe that Catholics are Christians?) want religious opinion to trump equality. Such, it seems, is the danger lurking in gay pastry that equality can go out the window even if that means that some visionary can subsequently refuse to provide services to a disability charity because he genuinely believes on ‘strongly held’ religious grounds that disability is a punishment from God, or bad karma, or a failure to say the Lord’s Prayer seventy five times a day or whatever other nonsense might be covered by the expansive skirts of ‘religion’. This is only a mild exaggeration: the author of the conscience clause has stated that it will protect Christian photographers from having to take photos at a civil partnership ceremony.

I believe in God, but I am certain that refusing to provide ‘certain services’ to people because of their sexuality (or their desire to celebrate it) has little to do with God.  I am as committed as my fickle human nature will allow to following (rather badly) the example and teaching of Jesus, but I can’t equate that with the belief that refusing to bake a ‘gay cake’ is more godly than treating everyone with generous degrees of love, respect and equality.

….and don’t give me the ‘It’s not the people; it’s what they do that we object to’ line. That’s the same as saying it’s alright to be a Christian as long as you don’t pray!

‘God is love’ is not a woolly, fuzzy, feel-good, twenty-first century advertising slogan; believing it is a demanding, costly invitation to being misunderstood, mistrusted and marginalised. Believing it leads genuinely to empathising with others, to refusing to condemn or discriminate, to seeing the image of God equally in everyone else. It leads to the cross.

So, for what it’s worth, I apologise to every LGBT person….and to everyone else hurt and abused by narrow, bitter, sanctimonious religion. It’s enough to make God wish there wasn’t a God!

'We're Racist And That's The Way We Like It!'

This was the chant on the lips of a small group of Chelsea football fans as they abused a black resident of Paris in the city’s Metro after their team had drawn with Paris Saint-Germain. Condemnation from politicians, football administrators, supporters’ groups and Chelsea Football Club has been swift and united; rightly so.

This odious behaviour was perpetrated by a tiny fraction of the many thousands of fans who (strangely) choose to support Chelsea, but it is symptomatic of an emerging problem: groups and individuals who not only fail to ‘live by the rules’, but who glory in their perversity.

I am not talking here of benign individual preference or healthy freedom of expression, which I should like to think I champion, but of destructive unethical, tribal behaviour.

What is to be done when people simply reject the principle that racism is evil and refuse to believe that there is anything wrong with this stance? What is to be done when humanitarian principles are cast to one side and prisoners of war are burned to death? What is to be done when tanks, artillery and troops are supplied by a sovereign state to rebel forces within another sovereign state and then the entire enterprise denied as if such weaponry could be bought on e-bay?

My questions are aimed not so much at what might be done by way of immediate practical remedy. We can ban the racist football fans from attending other matches, we can attempt to supplant ISIS from its strongholds and we can employ diplomacy and economic pressure to curtail further Russian involvement in Ukraine. My questions are aimed at the underlying malaise that enables people to believe that racism, torture and aggression are all OK. How do we counter this type of mentality?

I hate to talk of ‘moral compasses’ that have been lost, but I can’t ignore the fact that many of the ethical and social mores that have contributed much to civilising human behaviour over the last half-century or so are under attack; not by reasoned argument, but by dismissive, populist groups who simply act out of tribal loyalty and self-interest.

At the core of the problem is a significant rejection of the maxims that all people are of equal worth, that our shared humanity is important and precious; a rejection that there is anything wrong with naked self-interest and narrow group-identity. Religious underpinning of morality has been largely rejected, humanism has shown itself to be as effective as whistling in the dark; where and how do we find grounds for opposing this dangerously growing trend? Anyone seen a moral compass anywhere?

Stephen Fry, Russell Brand and ISIS

The recent emotionally charged and challenging comments of Stephen Fry on the possible existence and nature of God might seem far removed from the horrific actions of ISIS in burning alive its Jordanian captive and then issuing a sickeningly professional video of the atrocity, but a worrying thread runs between them: acceptance of a simplistic understanding of God and a literalist interpretation of ‘sacred texts’.

The attempts of ISIS to justify its barbarity through a fundamentalist understanding of ‘an eye for an eye’ is utterly unconvincing. The concept was originally introduced to stop disproportionate punishment, but it has been twisted into a call for bloody revenge. Equally disconcerting has been the criticism of ISIS by some Muslim scholars who have claimed that Islamic law teaches that the perpetrators of the barbaric act ought to be crucified or ‘have their limbs chopped off’ by way of punishment. Others have argued that burning by fire is a punishment only God can apply.

It is this approach to God and religion that Stephen Fry has embraced as being authentic when he criticised God for acting like a despot, causing the suffering of innocent children while demanding cringing obedience and sycophantic worship from his hapless creation. Stephen Fry is an intelligent man, capable of wrestling with the intricacies of philosophy and theology; that he should vent his spleen on a fundamentalist, Sunday-School cardboard cut-out version of God is beneath him. It is precisely this that Russell Brand identified in his much more expansive attempt to wrestle with the nature of ultimate reality.

People are, of course, free to believe whatever they want, but there is real danger in otherwise thoughtful people, used to taking nuanced views on serious issues, buying into fundamentalist rhetoric. Some scientists, philosophers, teachers, footballers and bus-drivers believe in the existence of God; some don’t, but it is essential that everyone explores concepts of God and ultimate reality that do justice to the full range of possibilities that exist.

To fail to do this is to play into the hands of fundamentalists, be they Muslim, Christian or atheist. An ‘all or nothing’, black or white analysis of reality feeds extremism, fuels conflict and can even give a spurious veneer of credibility to crusading maniacs who see themselves as upholding the truth against a sea of error. Stephen Fry, I am certain, is the last person who would want to give any succour to those joining the ranks of ISIS, but in adopting a monochrome, simplistic understanding of God, he is, paradoxically and unintentionally, in danger of doing precisely that.