06.25
This is a sort of followup to my most recent post about church decentralization. A friend of mine sent me a link to this story coming out of England:
London, England, Jun 14, 2009 / 07:01 pm (CNA) – Catholic bishops in Britain have voiced “significant concerns” about a proposed Equality Bill, saying it treats the rights of religious believers as secondary and could force Catholic schools and care homes to remove crucifixes and holy pictures if someone finds them “offensive.”
It has also been suggested the bill could force churches to hire youth ministers who do not support Christian ethics. The bill, supported by Equality Minister Harriet Harman, penalizes “harassment.” The newspaper The Catholic Herald says this is defined as “unwanted conduct … with the purpose or effect of violating a person’s dignity, or of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading or offensive environment.”
However, the way this plays out in the legal system is more sinister.
The bishops of England, Wales and Scotland said that the bill’s burden of proof is reversed and would excessively burden Catholics if people complained about any manifestation of religious belief, even on church property.
…
The Equality Bill is reportedly designed to collect into one package the different aspects of discrimination laws created in recent decades. According to the Catholic Herald, employers’ equality and diversity guidelines have already been used against Christians who have expressed their faith at work.
The government has also said that certain provisions in the Equality Bill are intended to ensure churches can no longer insist that employees live in agreement with churches’ sexual ethics.
…
Fr. Tim Finigan, a south-east London priest who writes on his blog the Hermeneutic of Continuity, said the demands of transsexual activists who support the bill could mean that if a Catholic school teacher decides to cross-dress, action against his or her behavior will be considered “harassment.”
I made the point in the last post that decentralizing the church into small groups would have the beneficial effect of making it much harder for our opponents to target a single organization or group. A loosely organized collection of small groups that band together and pay a preacher to minister to them on a circuit basis is basically immune from this sort of legal harassment. There is no central group to target. The Alinsky rules don’t work very well when the group your agitating against is built the same way as the group doing the agitating. I’m not saying the church needs to go “underground” or anything like that, but if you don’t think that laws like this one are coming to the U.S. then wake up. Stop kidding yourself and let’s get ourselves prepared for the inevitable. Small group churches have always existed and thrived, even in the most extreme conditions like Communist China and Russia. Persecuation has a unique way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
