What should we tolerate? (From The Northern Echo)

What should we tolerate?

9:47am Tuesday 25th November 2008

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HERE are three current examples of the sorts of things we will tolerate in Britain today and the things we won’t.

Perhaps you remember the exhibition earlier this year in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead which included a statue of Jesus Christ with his penis erect? Emily Mapfuwa, who was represented by the Christian Legal Centre, brought a private prosecution against the gallery on the grounds that the statue “outraged public decency”. But now the Crown Prosecution Service has dropped the case. Ms Mapfuwa has accused the CPS of “pandering to a secularist agenda”.

In the days before our society had lost its corporate wits, we used to call this sort of atrocity by the name “blasphemy”. Isn’t it obvious to anyone with eyes to see that such a representation of Christ is tasteless and vile?

You don’t have to be a Christian to take offence.

The point is that Christianity has shaped the history and culture of our nation for more than a thousand years. Its images and literature are what for all that time we regarded as sacred. The lewd statue is an act of desecration. Imagine the outcry if the Baltic Centre had displayed an indecent picture of Mahomet – but they wouldn’t dare. The fact is there is an aggressive secularist agenda in Britain and its supporters pick on Christianity as an easy target. Outraged Christians are not likely to threaten to come round and burn down your art gallery.

Now look at the leaked list of names of members of the British National Party. It is being suggested that members of the BNP who are also teachers, nurses or other public servants should be sacked on the grounds that membership of the party is unacceptable. I wouldn’t knowingly go within five miles of the BNP who are a very nasty lot. But the BNP is a legal party in this country and it is not a crime to be a member of it. If being a member of the BNP is grounds for losing your job, where do we stop? By the same criterion of nastiness, shouldn’t communists get the sack as well? After all it’s a matter of fact that over the last century communist regimes have perpetrated greater genocides than fascist parties such as the Nazis, with whom the BNP is regularly compared.

My third example of extreme oddity is the service to be held on Wednesday at St James’ Church, Piccadilly called Alternative Nine Lessons and Carols for Palestine. The organisers explain: “Bethlehem desperately needs its share of peace and goodwill. Its economy is destroyed and its population confined behind a ten metres high concrete wall built by the Israeli government.” The carols have been written by someone with the job description of “Jewish parody writer”. They include lines such as: “Once in Royal David’s City stood a big apartheid wall.”

But that wall is there to prevent suicide bombers from murdering Jewish civilians. Israel is a democratic state surrounded by enemy states who have declared many times that their aim is Israel’s destruction. Are the Israelis supposed to take no notice of this threat? Four times since 1948 Israel has fought defensive wars for its survival. Israel has frequently tried to make peace with its enemies, offering peaceful co-existence with the Palestinian Arabs under various “land for peace” schemes. All rejected.

As I said at the start, it’s odd what we’ll tolerate and what we won’t.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

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