A few choice words for Lord Carey.

In March 2013, in the thick of his campaign to oppose equal marriage, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, was reported in the Times as saying that there was an “aggressive secularist and relativist approach” behind the Government’s plans to legalise equal marriage marriage, and that, according to a recent poll, “more than two thirds of Christians feel that they are part of a persecuted minority.” (The Times, 30.3.13, "Christians feel persecuted under Tories, warns Carey")

He says of these poor Christian souls who feel they are being persecuted:

“Their fears may be exaggerated because few in the UK are actually persecuted, but the Prime Minister has done more than any other recent political leader to feed these anxieties.”

In other words, Lord Carey claimed that a large number of Christians felt persecuted when, in fact, they were not being persecuted.

So what I don't understand is why he bothered the media, the general public, and the Prime Minister, with a non-existent right of socially conservative UK Christians to be protected from their own tendency to form delusional beliefs about persecution. Surely he should have been reassuring these people, or telling them to get a grip, instead of expecting everyone to mollycoddle them so they didn't have false persecutory beliefs any more.

I am not at all convinced that Lord Carey is in any position to speak for UK Christians. He may speak for those Evangelicals and orthodox Catholics, and some others, who implacably oppose lesbian and gay people being able to enter a civil marriage. But there are many Christians who support LGBT equality wholeheartedly, or else are pretty indifferent to the whole issue, and who do not report such feelings of persecution that seem to me to be based simply on the frustration of a selfish sense of entitlement.

It is people like Lord Carey who give thoughtful and inclusive Christians a bad name. The same thing has been done to the Conservative Party by some of its less enlightened members, leading to a very harmful toxification of its reputation that is taking years to undo. Lord Carey is behaving like the Norman Tebbit of the Church of England, and is creating a great deal of resentment and animosity towards the Church that will similarly toxify it in the public mind, as well as creating divisions within it, where there are many Christians with a much greater generosity of spirit and openness of mind than he and his acolytes seem to have.

When Lord Carey complains about socially conservative Christians feeling they are being persecuted by socially progressive people who want to accord equal rights to fellow LGBT citizens, I can't help wondering whether he realises that the Pharisees probably felt the same about Jesus and the early Christians.

After all, Jesus came along trying to change things and shake up those for whom the letter of the law, tradition and preserving their own power and influence, weighed more heavily than insight, compassion and justice. The Pharisees were very shocked at having their beliefs and behaviours challenged, and their rules broken, by this upstart iconoclast.

I thought the Christian message was that, where love and wisdom conflict with legalism, tradition, and hierarchical rules - whether they be secular or religious - then it was love and wisdom that should prevail.

I'm a Buddhist, and this is one of the few areas where there seems to be an intersection between my own beliefs and those that Christianity is presumably meant to be about.

People will come to their own conclusions with regard to the kind of "Christianity" that Lord Carey represents, with his relentless campaign against equal rights for lesbian and gay people in British society.

Perhaps he could have better used his influence as Archbishop of Canterbury, and the authority he wields now in the Church of England, to challenge the vitriolic and sometimes murderous attitude of large sections of the African Anglican Church towards lesbian and gay people, which is an appalling stain on the reputation of the church. Instead, he and his successors have made every effort to appease the bigoted homophobic African bishops whose campaigns and teachings make life for many lesbian and gay people in Africa a living hell.

Instead of expressing concern about the violent persecution of gay and lesbian people in Africa in the name of fundamentalist Christianity, Lord Carey complains about so-called Christians who feel "persecuted" because the government is extending marriage to people of the same sex.

Whatever God you and your ilk believe in, Lord Carey, it does not seem to be a compassionate God, or one who manages to get his moral priorities right.

But as Thomas Paine said: belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. 


© Gary Powell, 2013