The Criminalizing of Christianity in Great Britain

The case of Stephen Green, a Christian arrested for passing out pamphlets featuring Bible verses at a homosexual rally, prompts influential columnist Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail to wonder if Christianity is fast becoming a crime in Great Britain. She asks:
How long will it be before Christianity becomes illegal in Britain? This is no longer the utterly absurd and offensive question that on first blush it would appear to be.
An evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green was arrested and charged last weekend with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour.

So what was this behaviour? Merely trying peacefully to hand out leaflets at a gay rally in Cardiff.

So what was printed on those leaflets that was so threatening, abusive or insulting that it attracted the full force of the law?

Why, none other than the majestic words of the 1611 King James Bible.

The problem was that they were those bits of the Bible which forbid homosexuality. The leaflets also urged homosexuals to “turn from your sins and you will be saved”.

But to the secular priests of the human rights culture, the only sin is to say that homosexuality is a sin.
As Melanie Phillips understands, the British police have now arrested a man for distributing the words of the Bible — nothing more and nothing less. “The Bible is the moral code that underpins our civilisation. Yet the logic of the police action against Mr Green surely leads ultimately to the inescapable conclusion that the Bible itself is ‘hate speech’ and must be banned,” she explains.
Phillips concludes:
Christianity has been dethroned as this country’s governing creed on the basis that equality demands equal status for minority faiths and secularism. As a result, it is being marginalised as no more than a quaint cultural curiosity.

It is a process before which the Church of England has long been on its knees, going with the flow of moral and cultural collapse in accordance with the doctrine of multiculturalism — and then wondering why its churches are so empty, while those of uncompromising evangelicals such as Stephen Green are packed to the rafters.

As a result, Christianity is being steadily removed from the public sphere.

Various councils have banned Christmas on the grounds that it is “too Christian” and therefore “offensive” to people of other faiths, and are replacing it with meaningless “winter festivals”.

This attack on Christianity is not merely something that seems straight out of Alice In Wonderland.

It is not merely a threat to freedom of speech and religious expression. It is a fundamental onslaught on the national identity and bedrock values of this country — and as such will destroy those freedoms which Christianity itself first created.
Melanie Phillips was one of my guests on Thursday’s edition of The Albert Mohler Program [listen here]. She is also the author of Londonistan, just released in the United States by Encounter Books.  Her Daily Mail column is found here.