Why is it so hard for Christian ‘moderates’ to defend their views with passion?
At the beginning of this week I was telephoned by the Stephen Nolan programme which runs from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Sunday nights on BBC Radio Five Live, and asked if I would join the show that evening. From my house in Derbyshire I would contribute for an hour or so to a debate (in which listeners could take part by telephone) about Elton John’s outburst against religion. The singer had suggested that all religions ought to be banned because they promoted the hatred of homosexuals.
I agreed to take part. Obviously I do not think religion — any religion — should be banned, and it’s doubtful Elton John really does either; but one could see the point he was trying to make. So at 10 p.m. I was ready by my home-microphone to mount a limited defence of his anger, if not his proposal. On an envelope I had jotted down plenty of arguments. Also on the line was a pleasant-sounding Anglican vicar who believed Christian teaching could be reconciled with his homosexuality. He, too, had arguments at the ready.
We need hardly have bothered. Within minutes of the discussion starting we went over to a woman called Shirley, a Southern Baptist in America and a leading member of her local church. She sounded stark raving bonkers. She screamed imprecations about how ‘God hates fags’, about how the West was doomed because of our sinfulness, and how we were all damned.
Shirley may have been nuts but she was sharp-minded and well-grounded. She had a quite extraordinary command of the Testaments Old and New. Whenever anyone tried to chip in with a point of view she would fire off Biblical quotations, word-perfect, with chapter and verse. No other participant in the programme, and no caller-in, succeeded in starting any citation from the Bible without Shirley finishing off the verse — or indeed chapter on those occasions when poor Mr Nolan proved unable to stem her flow. When someone mentioned Leviticus she yelled out whole paragraphs. When someone mentioned Romans I, she was quick to point out that the words came from Romans II. It was, in its way, scarily impressive to observe how a strong mind and a powerful memory had been bent so effectively to a narrow and heartless cause.
I say ‘heartless’ confident that any reader who heard her would think so too. Spectator readers include some of a less than progres sive cast of mind, and some with very uncompromising views indeed, but few who lack any idea of good manners. Fierce though you may suppose your own moral conservatism to be, you would have curled up with embarrassment to hear this woman put so hateful a face on reactionary views. When a distraught woman from Northern Ireland called in, in tears, to explain that her 19-year-old daughter had just told her she was lesbian and she was at a loss to know how to react, Shirley screamed at her that she was the mother of a damned and wicked girl, and she should know of God’s anger.
And so it went on. Numerous callers telephoned in to take a crack at Shirley but she shouted them all down, confounding them with scripture. Only once was she herself confounded, when a caller asked if she obeyed the Biblical injunction to abjure usury, and she began to hedge.
How, then, did British Christians respond? One West Indian evangelical (I guessed) did call in to add his voice to a Muslim’s who supported Shirley, but (apart from our gay vicar, who sounded frankly dumbfounded) the other Christian callers put in a pitiful show. One after another they called to say that Shirley was unChristian either because she was taking the Bible too literally, or because she had forgotten that her religion should teach her to hate the sin, not the sinner.
Shirley demolished most of them. In answer to her scriptural quotations all they seemed able to offer were opposing scriptural quotations. As to their insistence that it was only the sin they hated, I was moved to exclaim that I’d rather someone just spat it out and called me a wicked pervert. For someone to tell me that what I may feel or do is sick, disordered and morally rotten but they still love me, pity me and mourn my sinfulness — is no less odious to me for being offered with a smile and a handshake. I’d rather they just called me an evil faggot, as Shirley did.
Towards the end, someone called in to say that Five Live should be ashamed of itself for giving this woman airtime; and I have no doubt there will have been complaints, especially (one would imagine) from British churchgoers who will have felt that a warped picture of their religion had been projected.
I disagreed. Something about this woman illustrated, with terrible clarity, a mentality which does drive much Christian, Judaic and Muslim doctrine on sexuality. Shirley was a caricature, of course, but caricatures encapsulate. If there is an answering ‘liberal’ Anglican or Catholic doctrine, I doubt the BBC would have found it easy to secure a bishop prepared to put his head over the parapet for an hour on the radio and defend it with anything like Shirley’s vigour. On this issue the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be all over the place.
And before you shake a sorrowful head and sigh with Yeats that such is the fate of decency and moderation — ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity’ — ask yourself whether that’s necessarily true. In politics, for instance, moderates can be passionately so. Are Liberal Democrats any less keen than Ukip? New Labour and Cameron Conservatism are both essentially moderate, centre-spectrum doctrines, but capable of being embraced with missionary zeal. The Society of Friends (Quakers) are on all but a handful of issues moderate in their theology, yet tremendous enthusiasts.
But it seems to be the fate of much modern Christianity (and Islam and Judaism too) to have arranged itself with a preponderance of the most devout in faith and observance to be found at the extremes of doctrine. Thus has the word ‘fundamentalist’ arisen carrying connotations of doctrinal extremism. It does just seem, though I see no logical reason why it must, that it is those who do not want their religion to interfere excessively with their everyday lives who describe themselves as adhering to a ‘moderate’ branch of Christianity, Judaism or Islam. ‘Moderate’ has come to be associated with ‘weak’.
So if Radio Five Live had proved unable to find any Christian to attach themselves to a tolerant view of homosexuality with anything like the ferocity of Shirley’s intolerance, maybe that’s because firebrands of Christian toleration are thin on the ground. There is only one way to answer Shirley: it is time for Peter Tatchell to take holy orders.
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