Dialogue: A fair go for all - except Christians

I received an intriguing e-mail this week from a bloke I've known for years. He wrote: "I watched a taped cop show last night. The new deputy chief constable arrived, declared himself a Christian and then (surprise, surprise) turned out to be a bigoted, hypocritical, gay-basher.

"Now, as a non-believer I'm not offended by this but I did wonder about a little equity. Nobody would dare to portray a Muslim believer in this way or automatically categorise Hindus as superstitious clots. And heaven preserve anyone who does not pay honour to Maori spiritual beliefs in tapu and blessings and so on.

"It's not an original thought but it did strike me again that it is accepted that we are expected to respect all religions - apart from Christians and the fringe sects.

"As I say, I'm an unbeliever quite happy to mock the godly, but why would it be unacceptable for me to poke the borax at Buddhists?"

What I found intriguing is that this question came from a non-Christian. It brings me great comfort to know that others are beginning to see what we Christians have been aware of for years: that it's okay to be, believe in and do pretty much anything you like - except be a Christian and practise Christianity.

Star-gazing, crystal-gazing, navel-gazing and all sorts of other pseudo-spiritual practices have achieved popularity among us since the 1960s and have gained uncritical acceptance from society at large, even if only as harmless eccentricities.

Astrology, New Age superstition and any number of self-centred self-improvement courses and activities are acceptable. But anyone who dares to put forward the Christian view of things is immediately labelled reactionary, conservative, bigoted, old-fashioned, judgmental or any number of other contemptuous epithets.

Why should that be? The spiritual answer is easy. Jesus himself told his followers - those who were with him and those to come - that they would be hated and persecuted. He said: "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before it hated you ... If they persecuted me, they [non-believers] will also persecute you ... "

So Christians should know right from the start that they're not going to be popular, which is one of the reasons we have so many silent believers among us. Not everyone is equipped to deal with criticism, condemnation and ridicule. Another reason is that the bigger and more popular come-to-Jesus churches these days have a lot to say about power and wealth and health and happiness, and little, if anything, to say about hatred and persecution.

Jesus himself was crucified, St Peter was crucified upside down, St Paul was beheaded and since then tens of thousands, if not millions, of Christians have died for their beliefs, many of them at the hands of other so-called Christians.

In these more enlightened times, society doesn't kill Christians or drive them out of the community. What it has done and is still doing is its damndest to degrade Christians and Christianity, to make us and our beliefs disreputable, objects of scorn and derision.

It has always been so, but in recent decades the caterwauling against Christianity has reached a new shrillness. And no wonder. It would not have been possible to unravel the fabric of society so successfully if most of that society still believed in Christian ethics, virtues and values.

With the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount standing in the way, how could society decriminalise adultery and liberalise divorce? How could we engineer it so that the nuclear family, the foundation of any civilised society since time began, could be so weakened that social problems - from poverty to paedophilia - are running out of control?

How could we decriminalise abortion in such a way as to make it available on demand? How could we decriminalise homosexuality and permit its practitioners to proselytize unhindered?

How could we let legislation such as the Human Rights Act, the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act, the Race Relations Act and the Privacy Act rule our lives? How could we organise it so that politicians and bureaucrats are able to ignore the wishes of the moderate and largely silent majority and pander to the tastes and appetites of a vociferous minority?

Only by a concerted campaign to discredit Christianity and to consign all its ethics, virtues and values to the scrapheap.

And so bad have things become that this newspaper has to sponsor a debate on what it has called The Common Core, in an attempt to get New Zealanders to recognise the appalling state of our society and to think about what can be done to remedy it.

I have a few ideas about that. Watch this space.

* garth_ george@herald.co.nz