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!
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.
Why pick on the Israelis? Their murders as you call them are minimal compared to other deaths. Obviously anti- Semitic.
UK may be secular but we retain background Christian moral inheritance
Do yourself a favour: look up “antisemitic”, then come back and apologise.
Israel is a nation state, no reference to Jews or Judaism was made, therefore anti- Semitic [sic] does not apply. No need to take my word for it though, just put “antisemitic meaning” through a search engine..
Might it be because the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians? Many Jews oppose this.
The term Semitic encompasses a constellation of peoples in the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. Bandying about the term ‘antisemitic’ in relation to the condemnation of the attrocities being perpetrated in Gaza is therefore wildly inappropriate.
If you include Hamas as semites, maybe not though.
I’m not sure which Christian values form the basis of English society. Detachment from earthly things? Sorrow for sin? Care for the stranger? Charity to those in need? Or perhaps punishing the unmarried mother, preaching eternal damnation, burning witches or celebrating militarism. I suppose we can take our pick.
This piece doesn’t go far enough–.
I watched an interview with Naomi Klein the other day about her new book “End Time Fascism”.
She goes into the truly whacko religious beliefs of the circle around Trump…
These people believe in “the rapture”, that is, the moment in the future when the virtuous are called up to heaven, in a way not dissimilar to the transporter operates in Star Trek, and we sinners are left on earth to battle it out…
With the difference that they kind of FLY upwards, with arms outstretched…
Klein’s point is that this deep investment in echatological scenarios of life on earth are a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy… They are killing the planet, and hunkering down in what she described as “Nation State bunkerism” as they wait for the world to burn… or else preparing to fly off to Mars and leave the rest of us to deal with the great emerging disaster of climate change…
Paranoid, delusional, selfish and callous, Klein rightly describes them as “traitors to life itself”
Thanks Douglas, yes I’ve seen reference to the Mars nonsense as seen as a sort of Ark by the broligarchy and techlords and the relationship between the politics of the far right and the 1% and omnicide is very clear. Klein is a beacon of common sense amongst the madness and delirium.
Aye, agreed totally bonkers, Mike, the ark to Mars….
Here’s the Klein interview if anyone is interested…
https://youtu.be/Pw7nMKN7Bfc?si=Jtzp4rFgyF1O1c1N
Naomi Klein is brilliant…