The danger with pretending to be persecuted, misunderstood and all alone is that you might wake up and find that it is true. Something like this seems to have happened over the weekend to Anglican Mainstream, an organisation devoted to keeping gay people out of the Church of England. Only 30 people turned up for an Anglican Mainstream conference on gay people in Westminster this weekend, and to make the fiasco worse, four of these happy few were gay Christians come to see what was being said about them.
One of them put up a long blogpost afterwards describing the occasion. This, in turn, was picked up by Peter Ould, a sexually conservative vicar whose blog attempts to be a place where Christians can disagree constructively about the matter.
Ould, who, remember, is on the organisers' side, thinks that Anglican Mainstream has become repulsive even to its natural allies: "There are tens of thousands of Christians in the UK longing to be able to witness effectively in this field … but if all they are presented with is out-of-date and blinkered dogmatism, they simply won't be interested."
Two more small straws in this wind came in the form of letters: Lord "Hallelujah" Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, signed along with Michael Nazir Ali, the former bishop of Rochester and Wallace Benn, the suffragan bishop of Lewes, a letter defending a psychotherapist who tries to "cure" gay men. That's two has-beens and a never-was lining up on the anti side. Meanwhile 100 serving clergy in the diocese of London signed a letter asking to bless civil partnerships in their churches. Which represents the future?
Anglican Mainstream is a thoroughly mean-spirited grouping that deserves this humiliation. But that doesn't mean that Christianity has no real and mean-spirited enemies in Britain today. Sometimes the paranoid really are being persecuted – but in ways which have nothing to do with gay sex.
For example, the Advertising Standards Authority has just censured a small Evangelical Christian group in Bath for claiming that God can heal any sickness and they would be happy to pray for this outcome. Obviously the claim about God is unprovable. But should people not be allowed make it at all?
The answer is surely that this depends on the context and the profit to be made. There are some pentecostal preachers whose shows and claims are obviously dishonest, and the give-away newspapers in London are full of fraudulent ads from "healers" who claim to work magic on behalf of their clients. At the far end of the business there are some truly evil things happening, especially where a belief in "child witches" is involved.
But there's no evidence that I have seen to suggest the Bath group are anything like that. They don't ask for money and they made no claims to supplant traditional medicine. Their volunteers were instructed to give a letter to prayer recipients telling them to keep taking medication, and to keep following doctors' advice. They may be wrong about prayer, but they are doing no harm. That is a point of vital importance, because the quacks who do harm are those who discourage conventional treatment.
So it is absurd of the ASA to blame the Bath group for "encouraging false hope", as if this were not what all advertisements do, especially when they are in the placebo business.
The homeopathic Bach Rescue Remedies website claims that "the remedy can be taken as often as required until you feel emotionally in control. If emotional imbalance is persistent, one of the individual Bach Original Flower Remedies might be more relevant." and then adds: "Remember if the stress you are feeling is more than you can handle consult your doctor immediately."
We can and should laugh at this kind of claim, but I don't think it should be banned. And picking on the Christians while leaving the New Agers alone is a form of completely unjustifiable discrimination.
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