RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earlier this month, the Church of England issued new ‘guidance’ for teachers at Anglican schools – all 4,630 of them, attended by around one million children. It asserted the modish nonsense that biological sex is secondary to identity and that a ‘transgender man’ is someone ‘who was assigned female at birth but identifies and lives as a man’. The same goes for a ‘transgender woman’, but in reverse.

The schools practise what they preach, too. Earlier this year, one mother told the Telegraph that her four-year-old daughter, who attends a Church of England school, was having to share a toilet with another little ‘girl’ who apparently has a penis. The child’s sex was hidden from classmates and the kids were, naturally, distraught when they found out. According to parents, the ‘transgender’ child ‘flashed their willy’ at the girls.

I guess we were almost expecting it. You could practically see Justin Welby replacing his rainbow Pride badge with an updated pink-blue-and-white ‘Trans Pride’ one. He likely spends his mornings in front of the mirror, practising telling teachers to challenge ‘outdated terms’ and making sure he gets that moving-with-the-times face just right.

As an Anglican, I am well-accustomed to what passes for the ‘thinkers’ of my church acting like embarrassing parents trying to get down ‘wit’ da kidz’. No indignity seems too great to comprehend now. So what if in Genesis 1:27 it says, ‘So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them’? Get with the programme. Apparently, He created they / them.

Christians in the West are so used to being disappointed by their own alleged spiritual leaders that being picked on has come to seem par for the course. Which is why the robust reaction – though not, of course, from our man in Canterbury – to the Last Supper tableaux at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last week came as something of a surprise.

Anyone who watched even part of the roughly four-hour omnishambles on Friday will have been struck by the theme of extraordinary silliness-on-steroids. It was, as one user on X described it, ‘the longest, wettest episode of Eurotrash ever’.

At times, though, the whole farce did – as silliness often does these days – shade into something sinister. There was the grotesque presence of drag queens, blackface for misogynists, forever seeking to remind us how ridiculous women are. Then there was the beheaded queen – not a king, one notes, dead men not being ‘sexy’ in the way dead women are. She was used as a prop to a dreary heavy-metal band, who talked straight-faced of their desire ‘to give hope to people’. But it was the apparent parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s mural that pushed the opening ceremony from silliness into truly sinister. It was yet another symptom of one of the great cowardly crusades of our age – the war on Christianity.

While ordinary Christians across the world expressed their outrage, the spiritual leader of my faith had nothing to say about the ordeal. This says a lot about how dangerously out of touch the CofE – what my husband amusingly dubbed ‘the BBC of E’ – is with its own congregation. As Anglican Ink pointed out over the weekend, the Bishop of Worcester was quick to call the ceremony ‘unnecessary and highly offensive… the secular elite would not dream of mocking other faiths in this dreadful manner’. Meanwhile, ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke of his anticipation of viewing the opening ceremony, has been silent about the deliberate affront to Christians by the organisers’.

It’s all very well preaching that people turn the other cheek when your faith is ascendant. But when Christianity is already the most-persecuted religion on Earth, what might once have been admired as bravery is increasingly easy to mock as masochism. Welby and Co, in a weirdly Alice in Wonderland-ish way, swan around in the garments of the Christian faith while virtually being part of the secular elite. It’s clear they regard the little people who still believe there’s more to life than following philosophical fashions as poor, gullible fools.

As people don’t generally care to belong to a club that marks them out as individuals with no self-respect and is led by hollow men, it’s hardly surprising that Christianity is on the decline in the UK. Last year, two-thirds of Anglican priests opined that Britain can be called Christian ‘only historically, not currently’. What they don’t seem half as keen to admit is that many of them – including their boss, Welby – have brought about their own demise by refusing to stand up for Christianity. This is true both abroad, where Christians are persecuted savagely, and at home, where we are routinely ridiculed.

And what a rag-bag of the silly and the sinister our tormentors are! Abroad, Christians are generally kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered by Islamists. Here, they are mocked by a weird coalition of quislings and ‘queers’ who, with the logic of the lunatic asylum, paradoxically extend their group empathy to Islam itself. That is, despite it being without doubt the most misogynistic and homophobic of the world religions.

One thinks back to the playground, when it wasn’t so much the bully who was the problematic one. He was out there unashamedly being a bully, like a dog has to bark, and could often be faced down. What kept the bully in power was his clique of weaselly little mates, who shamelessly sucked up to him and revelled in vicariously experiencing the sadistic thrill of seeing someone other than their runty selves being given a good kicking.

I think of them whenever I see the banners of ‘Queers for Palestine’ or the trans allies of Islam. Or those clowns at the Washington Women’s March in 2017, who voluntarily hijab’d up to protest against the sexism of the newly inaugurated Donald Trump. Over here we have freaks like Laurie Penny, an alleged feminist who squeals about Western sexism while giving Islamism a hall pass. She once even wore a hijab and gushed about how great it felt. Her opinion on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre was: ‘Racist trolling is not heroism. Je ne suis pas Charlie.’

The establishment has been similarly captured. The BBC’s now-defunct religion section of its website reveals a very different attitude to comparative religions:

‘Islam began in Arabia and was revealed to humanity by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Those who follow Islam are called Muslims. Muslims believe that there is only one God (Allah).’

Compared with: ‘Christianity is the world’s biggest religion, with about 2.1 billion followers worldwide. It is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ who lived in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago.’

As the New Criterion put it:

‘Notice anything different in the tone, in the approach? For starters, Islam “was revealed to humanity”, whereas Christianity is a statistic. And what’s this “peace be upon him” stuff? Why the confessional language in the very secular setting of a BBC history lesson?’

Similarly, the police will enthusiastically protect crowds of angry men yelling for ‘jihad’. Who can forget the Met’s lesson in language last October, when they primly informed us on X that ‘jihad’ has several meanings? Presumably, one of them means ‘Let us all love each other and pet kittens’. At the same time, they are more than happy to persecute peaceful Christian street preachers. In the most grotesque example of this double standard, a Met volunteer cop wrongly told young gospel singer Harmonie London earlier this year that it was illegal to sing hymns outside of church grounds.

Politically, the odds are stacked against Christians, too. Remember last year when the faith of SNP leadership candidate Kate Forbes was used to argue that she wasn’t fit for office? Meanwhile, Humza Yousaf skipped merrily around mosques during his election campaign – presumably not hanging about for long enough to hear the elders’ views on gay marriage. No wonder that a survey last week by think-tank Logos Scotland warned that there is a ‘palpable feeling of exclusion among Scotland’s Christian community’. Almost 70 per cent of Scottish Christians experience prejudice ‘through negative comments or attitudes towards them’.

To top it all off, many expect Labour to embed the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) definition of Islamophobia into UK law – which everyone knows will end up being used to criminalise virtually all criticism of Islam. We Christians are a stoic lot. We’re certainly not quick to fly into a tizzy over a few cartoons. I’d get rid of blasphemy laws altogether and let all religions take their chances. If our faith is as strong as we say, how can a few words or pictures hurt us? But there must be one law for all. We cannot continue to favour Islam above all other religions when it comes to grievance, real or imagined.

To return to the Olympics opening ceremony, it was typical of such a shambolic spectacle that the left hand didn’t appear to know what the right hand was doing. Some seemed perfectly happy to frame the drag-queen tableaux as a dig at Christians. ‘Barbara Butch’ – the self-identified ‘fat, Jewish, queer lesbian’, who appeared to be cosplaying Jesus in the Last Supper parody – admitted as much. She posted a photo of herself on Instagram as the centre of the tableau with the words ‘The New Gay Testament’. The Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps, however, denied it: ‘Clearly there was never any intention to show disrespect to any religious group. If people have taken any offence then we are sorry.’

I don’t care about apologies from mercantile morons. But I would like one from Justin Welby. The archbishop has, yet again, proved to be a woefully inadequate spiritual leader of my church – fit to take the seat of Judas at the next inevitable mock-up of the Last Supper.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.