I am a member of a small minority grouping: Christians. We are well aware that many of our beliefs are not shared by the considerable majority of society, and that a number of our beliefs and practices offend, shock, even disgust many right-thinking people.
Perhaps most obviously, we completely over-value sex, with the result that we deny ourselves and our children much harmless pleasure – exalting self-discipline and self-denial for our teenagers to a degree that almost amounts to child abuse and is unnatural, running against basic ordinate human instinct. We deny adults expression of their love for those we say are forbidden (such as the spouses of others) and insist that people make vows they cannot keep and then are trapped for all their lives in loveless unhappiness.
We understand that the rest of you will never really accept our twisted, unnatural beliefs and practices – that would be too much to ask. We seek only toleration.
Now, up until recently, many of you have been prepared to tolerate us in your own way. You may have quailed at really granting us full freedom to hit our children or deny abortions or contraception to our youths, but by and large, provided we kept our beliefs and practices personal, in the privacy of our homes, churches, and consciences, up to a point you were content to leave us alone. What you couldn’t really tolerate, though, was our shoving our beliefs and practices in your faces. We shouldn’t bring our religion onto the streets or into the workplace or insist on boasting to ordinary people of our delusions and disgraces.
Unfortunately, that was never really toleration as far as we were concerned. For being Christian is not merely something that we do. It is who we are, all week long, not just on Sundays and not just at home. Our religion is essentially predatory. We try to turn others to make them like us. You cannot really tolerate us without granting us freedom to be those predators.
It has been ten or fifteen years since Christians had true workplace freedom. Few businesses now would tolerate a staff member telling an ethnic minority Muslim that her doom was hell if she continued in her beliefs, or telling a colleague that it would be wrong for him to move in with his girlfriend. Matters have moved so far that many of you reading this will consider the possibility of any colleague wanting to do such a thing plain ridiculous. You would regard it as common courtesy not to say such things. And yet to deny a Christian freedom to share her beliefs and to try to persuade others of them is to oppose a fundamental command of God to all Christians.
Many workplaces would already fear that granting Christians freedom to behave in such a way would violate equalities legislation. But equalities legislation is now extending much further, violating even the old compact with those inclined to tolerate private Christianity. For Christians are now not to be tolerated acting as Christians even in their Christian-to-Christian dealings and in their explicitly Christian institutions. Christian schools are not to be permitted to insist on having Christian pupils, Christians teachers, Christian cleaners and Christian cooks. Even in Christian churches, only those for which specifically religious duties are most of the job have any material exemptions from equalities legislation.
I know that many of you reading this will think: Well, so what? Why should we tolerate you with your unpleasant habits, your foolish views and your stubborn insistence on inflicting yourselves on everyone else? And maybe you have a point. But one day you may find that the majority does not side with you on some matter and that it is you that is considered the deviant one. And we will be gone and you will not be able to call upon us as your allies in the search for tolerance. And that is something you may find you regret...
