Closing Down the Stations of the Cross

2,150 words

Bloody religion. It’s our only real problem in this house, but it’s insuperable. — Peter Shaffer, Equus

But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another. — Matthew 10:23

It has become increasingly obvious in Britain that Christianity is being decommissioned as the national religion. Whether it is to be replaced with Islam is yet to be decided, but if it comes down to strength and guile — both attributes native to and linked within the Islamic mind — Christianity doesn’t stand much of a chance. In Britain at present, the Anglican Church is more interested in inclusivity, diversity, and all the other fortune-cookie mottoes of the woke world than it is in what are still rather archaically called “Christian values.” The Anglican Church is weak, and Islamists like nothing more than weakness. Christianity is like a lame gazelle being watched by hungry lions. They know that they are not going to have to run too fast when it is time to eat. And can Christianity defend itself? Unlikely. Sometimes you just don’t know where your next church militant is coming from.

Perhaps the old dowager deserves to be laid to rest. She had a good run, after all. But, as with all things modern, the way that she is being smothered — like some old woman in a nursing home whose nurse decides there may be money to be made in applying the pillow to the airways — is tawdry. It is more a matter of cultural bullying via the delivery system of the media than any theological refutation. British department store Marks & Spencer recently released a Christmas TV ad — always a seasonal staple in the United Kingdom — which is best described as genuinely unpleasant. I recommend watching it. It has the bitter taste of the modern, like sucking on an old coin.

The gradual erosion of Christianity, not simply as a belief system but also as a social framework within which people can coexist with shared values (for which a table of laws is a prerequisite) has been gaining impetus throughout my lifetime and has now had an accelerant. It’s like the first time you fly, and the plane is trundling down the runway and you are thinking, I don’t understand how this will even get off the ground. Then the pilot puts the pedal to the metal, the engines bite, and you understand. The war on Christianity has gone up through the gears. How do I feel about this new passover?

Religion was just there in the background when I was a kid, like trees or traffic noise. We were not a religious family and only attended church en famille at the occasional wedding. My parents had views on the subject of religion which strike me as interesting after all these years of metaphysical study. My mother was of the “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in a higher power” school, and my father dismissive of the Bible — which he had read in its entirety — and thus of religion, which was then more denominational than determinedly theological.

When I was 18 and had left college and — so I thought — education, I signed on the dole, which is what the English called unemployment or welfare benefits in the 1970s. I filled out the required form under the gimlet eye of a starchy martinet, and when she reviewed the paper, she noted that under “Religion” I had written “none,” being as I was a rebellious teenager who had read too many Camus novels. She crossed out this statement of snotty religious defiance and wrote imperiously: “C of E.”

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This meant “Church of England,” then the name of what is now known as the Anglican Church. This was the default position at that time in England. I went to a “C of E school,” as did most other children. You couldn’t opt out, even if you were an impertinent upstart who wanted a month off before getting a job, and intended that the state should pay for it, and wrote “none” as his religion. Things would change. Take 30 years down the line.

I have made many serious mistakes in my life, but my marriage at the age of 50 takes its spot bang in the middle, like a hunting trophy in pride of place on the wall. At the ceremony itself — at a hotel, not even in a church — the woman presiding said something that only struck me much later, after I had literally been struck several times by the psychotic half-caste I married in error. The woman, who seemed to be there in lieu of a vicar, said that if there was any hint of Christianity in any of the speeches made, then the service would be halted and the marriage would not take place. Had I known what lay in store for me, I would have proclaimed myself as the visible incarnation of the second coming to halt proceedings, but there we are. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But her comment seemed to me like abuse. My imminent father-in-law was a very religious man, and he was paying for the wedding (as fathers do, at least in the UK). This meant he was paying this woman’s wages. How dare she tell him that he couldn’t mention his god?

Christianity was prominent during my schooling. The church my primary school attended (primary school was for children from 5 to 11) was very small, very beautiful, and very old. It appears in The Domesday Book, the huge audit of Britain undertaken by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century. The Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, in Chaldon, Surrey, can be seen here, along with the extraordinary judgment mural discovered by workmen in the 1950s while they were re-rendering the wall. I was always fascinated as a small boy that one of the devils was upstairs in heaven — and having a pretty bad time of it. He crashed the wrong party. It would only be many years later, when I revisited the church and noticed the croix pattée in the corner of the mural, when I realized that it meant that the knight who had owned the area was a Knight Templar who had fought in one of the Crusades.

I sang in the church for the first time when I was four years old, in 1965, and I still recall my verse in the Nativity play. Nineteenth-century religious lyricist John H. Hopkins wrote the libretto — if you can use that term in church — for the Christmas hymn “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” and they are quite beautiful, albeit tinged with the Gothic dolorosa that attends much Christian verse. I sang the part of one of the three wise men — miscast, some would say — and I can still hear, in my mind’s ear, my soprano voice echoing in the ancient vault:

Myrrh is mine.
Its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom.
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying.
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

This is an aspect of the Christian religion which is oddly fascinating in hindsight: its imagistic violence. At the same time in the 1970s that Christian campaigners such as the then-famous Mary Whitehouse — who looked like a character that British comedians such as Benny Hill or Harry Enfield might have created and played — was trying to force the BBC to ban not just the mildest pornography and violence in adult dramas, but children’s cartoons such as my own favorite Tom & Jerry (whose wonderful orgy of savage violence is compiled here), graphic statues of the crucified Christ suspended for all to see were ten a penny round my way. Two of the major churches in my hometown had Christ crucified right opposite one another on either side of the road, like some divine Mexican stand-off. The Christ crucified in the Catholic church here in Costa Rica has torn and bloody knees, which seem to draw the eye more uncomfortably than the thorns piercing Christ’s scalp. Visually, Christ on the cross is a violent visual experience, particularly for a child. Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, quoted at the head of this piece, is an examination of the effects of this on the young.

After my C of E primary school, I attended one of what were then called grammar schools. Once a week the whole school would troop through the graveyard, which rather amusingly adjoined the grounds of Reigate Grammar School, to the beautiful St. Mary’s Church, where I would have sung hymns along with the other boys, one of whom would have been Sir Keir Starmer, a year below me and probably the UK’s next Prime Minister, given that he can control his Muslim bloc vote after his backing of Israel in the current thing.

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I have always enjoyed being inside a church, and always seek them out first when travelling. I like the architecture, I like the symbolism, I like the acoustics. I like the iconography and stained glass and wooden pews. I also like the fact that there is no crass advertising, and people seem to act normally, unlike the chimp-like behavior so common on English streets. Churches in Malta feature two clocks, one showing the right time, the other the wrong time. The first is for the good people, the second to confuse the Devil. This is all part of the beauty of religion, even to an observer from outside.

Here in Catholic Central America, where taxi drivers cross themselves as they pass the church and the religious street parades are both somber and happy — a combination in which Latin America excels — religious imagery and iconography crop up in sometimes amusing ways. The local taxi service has a registration system which is separate from the national six-digit standard. There are the familiar bright red cabs here whose number-plates are two or three digits, and there is one in town whose number is 666. The driver does not, disappointingly, have horns and a tail, which I would absolutely have made happen if I had the job. And could drive. There is also a tourism business called “Dante’s Tours,” which always makes me smile when I see their minibus. The driver really should be called Virgil.

Whether or not you believe in what Johnny in the film Naked (reviewed by me at Counter-Currents here) calls “the monkey with the big white beard” depended largely on your personal fundamental beliefs — aka your parents, biological, adoptive, or random — when I was young. Now, post-Internet, choice is wider, like shopping. All is explained in the Evil Vicar sketch by Mitchell and Webb, whose resultant meme I am sure you will have seen. “Hans? Are we the baddies?”

I am sure Monty Python’s Life of Brian will be familiar to readers, and its moments of brilliance have passed into common parlance. One line has been voted many times as the funniest ever, and I am sure you know that he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy. I saw a T-shirt with that as the caption to a photo of Charles Manson, which made me laugh almost as heartily as another T-shirt which read: “665. Neighbor of the beast.” Religion has always made folk laugh, albeit a little uneasily.

My own religious beliefs don’t particularly detain me and can, if required, be both expressed in theological terms and reduced to 10 words: God created the world and left the Devil in charge. Of course I have thought about deity, as anyone with an enquiring mind and a metaphysical bent will, and although I am not particularly concerned with my own belief, neither am I exercised by the beliefs of others, which many are. Those who sneer about Christians “believing in sky-pixies” and other juvenile commentary are those I would dearly like to see split in two by a bolt of lightning, like a dead tree. I find it difficult to disapprove of what Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic, calls “the happy optimism of believing souls.”

It will be sad to see Christianity pass away, but perhaps it is for the best. English author G. K. Chesterton famously wrote that “[w]hen men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

It is a curious thing. A belief which a person is not prepared to alter is often known as bigotry, which I suppose means that religion is the flip side of the same coin. Perhaps divine providence is just like working at a factory, and God has clocked out and Allah is clocking in for a shift of a few millennia. It is instructive to see the deep states from the UK to Canada working to dethrone Christianity. A large part of me wishes to see the old wrathful God of the Old Testament come out of retirement for one more fight.