I was strolling through Bristol’s tired and fading Broadmead shopping centre yesterday afternoon when I was offered a free copy of Qur’an by a friendly gentleman wearing what I can only describe as religious clothing. Politely, I asked: “Why would I want that?” The friendly gentleman started to explain that it was a revelation direct from God. Again politely, I declined his kind offer. “I don’t do God, but thank you anyway“, as I went to the pub for a refreshing pint of foaming ale. At the same time in London, around 150,000 people had gathered for what the media curiously described as a “protest”, led by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, amid chants of “Christ is king”, a public recital of The Lord’s Prayer and people carrying wooden crucifixes. Is God making a comeback?
Recent polls suggest HE is on the comeback trail, picking up followers from the young who seek answers about life, not least the meaning of it. And the numbers are being swollen by a form of Christian Nationalism, which was very much on display in London yesterday.
Yaxley-Lennon and his followers say that the Qur’an contains many violent passages and links them with myriad acts of violence. I have no doubt that is a correct assertion, certainly in some instances (9/11, 7/7 etc etc), but this is a two-way street. The God of the Old Testament was a seriously unpleasant character, a mass murderer who killed at least 25 million people, maybe more. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins described him as follows: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Some say that the bible is allegorical and that you should not take it literally, but for Heaven’s sake (see what I did there?) why would you write something that essentially isn’t true and just some kind of guide book from which you could take your own meaning?
In the interest of fairness, it is worth pointing out that although the Qur’an is, in terms of percentages, twice as violent and cruel as the bible. What we are talking about here is two books of worship which carry a considerable amount of disturbing material. Is it any wonder that the Mad Mullahs of the world and the so-called Christian Nationalists are comfortable with the violence attached to their holy writings?
Religion, it appears, certainly in large parts of the Middle East, the USA and increasingly in the UK is playing a bigger role in society. Once again, I find myself arguing for a secular society in which those of faith can freely practice their religion of choice, which means equal treatment and freedom for all and the separation of the church and the state, the complete opposite of what is demanded by the devout.
Perhaps the likes of Donald Trump, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Nigel Farage et al have genuinely found God and that they have based their political beliefs on the more extreme elements of the bible? I wonder what so called faith leaders and their congregations think of that? When I come across the faithful in my little world, including at our food bank which is held in a church, I normally see kindly, if not (in my view) misguided people using their “faith” to do good for people. I certainly do not come across the hatred we see in America, at yesterday’s massive far right rally in London and from Nigel Farage’s private company Reform UK Ltd. In which case, isn’t it time for them to speak up?
If the Big Religions genuinely believe in the good of their Gods, then don’t they have a duty to say so and to distance themselves from the purveyors of hatred? While I am deeply suspicious about the motives and intentions of the deeply religious from the mainstream, I find it hard to believe they will have been comfortable with a sizeable crowd saying the Lord’s Prayer before a number of them moved off to attack police officers, seriously injuring four of them.
I do not know whether the Godwhackers patrolling Bristol’s shopping area made any progress in attempting to proselytising passers-by and given what happened in London yesterday, I rather hope they didn’t. I found the sight of bullet-headed middle-aged men carting round wooden crosses as repulsive as it was ridiculous, at a so-called protest about immigration. Goodness knows what the protestors would have made of it had the dark-skinned supposed Jesus of Nazareth turned-up on a small boat at Dover?
I rather fear that God is back in one way or another, whether as part of a sincere spiritual conversion or as I suspect more of a political tool. I can only go back to the late, great Christopher Hitchens’ book God Is Not Great (How Religion Poisons Everything). He isn’t great and it does poison everything, intentionally or not.
If God really is all about love and peace, his followers in many places around the world have a strange way of showing it.
