Bad Religion and the Great Egg Hunt
Every Easter and Christmas along come the same people trundling out the same weird Christian victimhood. Right on queue here’s Robert Jenrick:
This is, of course, performative outrage from people who are far happier waging culture wars than looking at the state of British society. It’s making great (and desperate) claims about ‘Britain’ that don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. ‘We’ are not a ‘Christian country’ we are a secular one, ‘we’ do not operate by ‘Christian values’ – we are complicit in genocide.
Remember this was the Robert Jenrick who, during his disastrous leadership campaign suggested all British citizens should be forced to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel or face deportation and that the Star of David should be displayed at every point of entry to the UK (see Bad Enoch and the Vampires)
He’s not alone. Imbibing the contagion of bad religion from across the pond, Liz Truss posted on X gushing: “There is hope” while sharing a graph showing that attendance at the UK’s Christian churches has increased among 18- to 24-year-olds.
Far-right loose canon Alex Phillips also gushed on X: “My church is so full this Easter Sunday. Every inch, every outbuilding, the cafe, the overflow rooms – and still more come. We are squeezing up to try to accommodate every last worshipper. Something powerful is happening as the world turns back to The Lord. Hallelujah!”
Halleluah indeed Alex. These people have not an iota of genuine interest in religion, Christian or otherwise. They are deflecting from the moral failings of their own government’s and weaponising Christian faith events against a multiculturalism they hate.
There’s a lot of talk of the failure of the Left to create engaging and inspiring visions and narratives, and that’s a fair criticism. But what we have here the far-right as cheerleader to Israeli murder and mayhem, while Russell Brand poses baptising people in his underpants. Mixed in with this pseudo-religious fervour is the desperate traces of a British Nationalism which sees itself as exclusively Christian and Anglo-centric: “the result is the unifying and over-arching national identity that generates belonging frays…”
Happy Easter!
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The collosal damage that Christianity has done to children can hardly be reckoned with, but some modern historians are bringing to light the histories of indigenous residential schools and so forth. Christian indoctrination drove the excesses of the British Empire in often peculiar ways. A case study is provided by Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey in their Bad Gays podcast on Gordon of Khartoum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_George_Gordon
Whether Israel’s Orthodox-or-othewise Jews were as keen for Christians to celebrate Easter as the UK government seems to have escaped Robert Jenrick’s magisterial gaze.