Personal faith
Sir: I have to confess to some surprise that the Spectator invited Nicolas Walter; the radical editor of the New Humanist and hardly typical, I would have thought, of the readership of your magazine, to review Whitehouse by Tracey and Morrison (17 surprised rb). y However, the November). result! There not the least There are things in this book with which I disagree —for instance, the conclusion that I work for the establishment of a theocracy. In my dictionary such a state is defined as one ruled by the Church. Nothing could be further from my thoughts.
However, I put pen to paper to challenge Walter's motivations for his super-critical review — I could do with that what he has done with the book, tear it apart point by point! However, I have something better to do. I write only to say that I cannot avoid the conclusion that Walter's real motivation is so to discredit the book that your readers will be discouraged from buying it and will not read the expressions of personal faith which lie at the heart of my work.
Tracey and Morrison are the victims of Walter's own bitter antagonism to Christianity and all that means — this antagonism of his manifests itself at every possible opportunity. The fact that he can begin a paragraph by saying: The religious dimension, the most obvious, is lacking', says it all. He misinterprets the whole book in order to grind his own axiom!
Mary Whitehouse National Viewers' and Listeners Association, Ardleigh, Colchester, Essex
Previous page
